bill clinton committed a i m, he committed perjury. those same americans were asked, okay, he committed a crime, should he be impeached? and the vast majority there, 57, 38, the margin said no. they needed democrats to go along to convict, and democrats looked at those numbers, the election and said no, there s no need for us to bolt on this president. and bill clinton survived. steve when we come back from a break will be joined by a guy who was there for it and witnessed it. that and more when we come back. cancer . it s very personal. each of us is different. and each cancer is different. how it reacts, how it evades and adapts. and how we attack it. that s why at cancer treatment centers of america, we use diagnostic tools that help us better understand what drives each person s cancer. this is what we mean by outsmarting cancer. and for some, it may uncover more effective
early, the red and the blue, the 1990s and the birth of political tribalism, is coming out october 22nd. i know this is your thing. thank you for that, brian. the parallels between what we re talking about right now and what happened in 1998 are abysmal. michael cohen implicating donald trump in a crime. the crime would be a conspiracy to break campaign financial law to cover up a politically damaging affair. and the accusation 20 years ago about bill clinton was he committed a crime, the crime of perjury, the crime of suborning perjury, encouraging others to commit perjury to do what? to cover up an extramarital affair that could be politically
got impeached i think the market would crash. i think everybody would be very poor because without this thinking, you would see numbers you wouldn t believe in reverse. congressional democrats are way wary about even a mention of the i word particularly ahead of the mid-terms and yet you heard the president just use it there. current circumstances, the presidential cover-up of alleged extra marital affairs, hush money payments, the president being implicated in a crime in open federal court just this week, let s not forget, the ongoing russia investigation. it s all happening during this consequential run-up to the mid-term election. and it harkens back to another, there he is, presidential scandal 20 years ago. our national political correspondent steve kornacki is with us at the big board tonight. here s why this is important. steve s new book, and we re thrilled to be able to say this, you can never sell these too
damaging. of course that kicked off the impeachment drama with clinton. clinton survived. how did he survive, why did he survive and what does that tell us about trump s situation now? number one, there s this, when the lewinsky story broke he was very popular, already at 60% in the polls. and the numbers didn t crash. they kept going up. clinton was forced in the summer of 98 to admit to the affair. his popularity got higher. september 98, almost exactly 20 years ago ken starr came out with a report that formally accused the president of the a imcro crime, committing perjury. the white house party, we tell you every time we re on this doing election previews this year, the white house party always loses seats. they gained seats. that told folks there was a backlash against the idea of impeaching clinton. this is the bottom line story of 1998. by the end of that year when impeachment was being pushed by republicans the question was asked, did the president of the united states commit
and the company s chief content officer, dylan howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before trump s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events. more on all of this later. the president has been telling his side of the story concerning the two cohen-related payments. here s how he explained them to fox news. did you direct him to make the payments? he made the deals. and by the way he pled to two counts that aren t a crime, which nobody understands. i watched a number of shows. sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows. those two counts aren t even a crime. they weren t campaign finance. later on i knew. later on. they didn t come out of the campaign. they came from me. remember we heard the president on audiotape talk about one of the payments, and with that answer there the president could just have admitted to possibly violating another campaign finance law. because if that money came from him, trump would have had t