On Morning Joe this morning, Tom Brokaw said what needed to be said about Manafort and the Trump White House.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Tom Brokaw, another example of, again, more smoke, if not fire, around the Donald Trump/Russia connection. You've had days, the Trump administration pretending that Paul Manafort was a minor player when he ran it in Donald Trump's campaign.

TOM BROKAW: Anyone who was around the Trump campaign during the important summer last year at the convention was around the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort was the go-to guy. I remember seeing him just before Trump's speech at the convention in Cleveland, and he said 'I think we are going to be okay.' It was pretty much, as you know, go to the bunkers, and a 'here I stand and I will defend all of you' kind of a speech that the president gave at that time, saying 'I alone will be your voice', and when I saw Manafort on the way out, he said 'this is what we had in mind.' And so you cannot discount the important role he played, and he did give the campaign a sense of organization, and he worked with Jerry Ford after he took that office. So it's impossible for the White House to now say that he had a minor role.

We are just two months into the Trump presidency and there are burning fuses everywhere.

I have been in presidential politics for a long time, and I have never seen anything like this, and they are not small and we are talking about Russia, and the tax returns we have not yet seen, and we are talking about what is going to happen on the Hill with health care, and the president saying 'you will pay a price if you don't pass this', and we don't know what the health care bill is like because they are making compromises, and the Obamacare totality, you had to go through it piece by piece.

And if this was being done by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, the Republican Party would be on fire at this point and they would be speaking out, so I am waiting to see what senior members of the Republican Party and the Senate and the House have to say about what's going on. I have talked to a couple very prominent businessmen in the last couple of days, and they are appalled by what's going on.