or do you think he s been basically too careful for that? well, kasie, the truth is we don t know the answer to that question as it relates to this specific circumstance, but i can talk about what donald trump was like as a private businessman. he was a micromanager in the trump organization. nothing happened in that company without his approval and without him knowing about it. remember, it was a family operation. his children worked there. he had a couple of very close deputies including allen weisselberg who has been charged and it all ran through donald trump, and he sat in that 26th floor office at trump tower and controlled everything. so to the degree to which there were financial shenanigans going on at the trump organization it certainly is very likely given the behavior that we know about from donald trump, the businessman, very likely that trump was involved or knew about it or condoned it in some way, so the real question now for prosecutors is to figure out
was like any other. new reaction from a former trump insider to allen weisselberg, the long-time chief financial officer of the trump organization, accused of a 15-year scheme to evade taxes on both executive and employee compensation. in spite of all of that, donald trump will appear at a rally in sarasota later today. msnbc s adam reece and ali vitali have more on this one. we will start with you, adam. what is the latest on the indictment? reporter: alison, all eyes on the 26th floor here at trump tower. will allen weisselberg flip or will he remain loyal to his boss, donald trump, or will he listen to his ex daughter-in-law who says he should do the right thing and remain loyal to his wife, his two sons and his grandkids? he can either cooperate, he can plead guilty, or you can go to
giuliani to describe his part on fox news, there s an argument they opened the door. and also when rudy says i wasn t going in the capacity as the president s attorney wrars going because the state department asked me to go. that s right. he ways ives that concern clt privilege. he s a president that operates totally sioutside the chain of command. this is a man from the business world to the presidency who operates on his own, not through the usual officials every other president has used. and this is someone who used to sit in the 26th floor of trump tower and run his business by phone person by person. that s how he s governing. and republicans feel like they re disyooriented about howo proceed if he s not keeping anyone in the loop on these issues about ukraine except giuliani. but he wants rudy out there.
call? what have they given us? what do we want to give them? and he gets an in-person briefing. i talked to four current and former administration officials who said, you know, he doesn t actually read that briefing book. they keep doing it anyway. these calls like end up sounding more like the way he used to sunday on business calls from the 26th floor of trump tower. it s just trump being trump. we all have some sense of what that s like at this point. but the process is an nfc process that hasn t really changed. what has changed is after a few of these calls were leaked at the beginning of the administration, his call with the mexican leader and the australian prime minister leaked and were pretty embarrassing to him, the effort to really shrink the circle of people who have access to this transcript that s released afterwards or who listen in on the call, they ve tried to limit the number of people on these calls. for instance, the this transcript of the call will be sent over to t
attack politics. yeah. that s who he always was. that s who he was in business in new york. when i interviewed him on the 26th floor of the trump tower during the campaign, he was fascinated by nixon. we talked a lot about nixon. and he wasn t interested in nixon the architect of the peace with china. linkage. he was interested in i think looking back on it figuring out how to do publicly and nakedly and openly what nixon, even nixon for the most part wanted to do in private. you know, i ve been thinking of that image in the untouchables where robert de niro goes around with a baseball bat and whacks one of the guys to teach a lesson to the other cabinet members. is trump wants everyone to know how nasty he can be? is it a message? i agree. the difference between nixon and lbj is he thrives on doing it publicly. he wants to do it publicly. did you see the white house this week said no, no, he didn t talk to prime minister he didn t