the russians could blackmail flynn, and now trump with the truth. yeah, just a reminder to folks that sally yates went and warned folks at the white house about flynn because they knew that flynn was telling a public lie about private communications he had with the russians, and that that was the that provided a possibility for blackmail and compromise. what you re saying is that s precisely the same situation with the president of the united states, the commander in chief. in this case trump lied to the american people that there were no business dealings during early 2016 when, in fact, michael cohen was out there doing a deal, or at least trying to do them, and they didn t succeed, but not for lack of trying. and not only donald trump, but his family also potentially are at risk here of legal prosecution. it s also striking that the that the russians were covering up for trump. they were holding his secret and keeping his lie. here s peskov, a sort of
staffer, natasha bertrand. we already know there s compromising material the russians had on donald trump. the compromising material is that he was lying to the american people, a lie they could reveal that they chose not to. what are the implications of that? a lie that they continued to conceal until they had to admit it when the new york times reported on it last year. when the new york times reported on these e-mails between michael cohen and felix sater. we did not know about this until over a year after trump was naug rated. he was not being as transparent with the american people as he is saying now. now he s saying everyone knew about it, it wasn t that big of a deal. well, the lie itself, as you and the senator were laying out earlier, is extremely damaging. just going back to the sally yates example, sally yates went to the white house and said that the lie to the people were blackmailable. the russians look for any point of entry. this is what intelligence experts i ve
skyscraper there as early as 1987. so it is possible that the aguilera deal was totally separate from the cohen deal. there are little bits of indication of that in the fact that cohep and sater were running main point on the 2015-2016 deal whereas don jr. and ivanka were running the show on the other situation. when you step back and you re looking at this from the russian side, you ve got a guy who he and his family are desperate to break into your market and you re the one who holds the keys or the green light to let him do it. yeah. i mean, i don t like to get over my skis. i like to work with the facts i have and the information i m receiving. the one thing we know for sure is that for the better part of three decades, donald trump, members of his family, had multiple lines in the water to pursue this building. it was very, very important to them. another thing that i think is quite key, these communications between cohen and sater revealed
washington post attributed it to russia and two days later michael cohen got cold feet and he decided not to do it. it may have been the situation where they decided, look, what russia is giving us in terms of political help here and undermining hillary clinton s candidacy may be way bigger than any deal we could ever get in russia. interesting. natasha bertrand, thank you for your time tonight. and now nick akerman, assistant special prosecutor in watergate, and michelle goldberg, columnist in the new york times. there s such an irony here, when you talk about america first, the whole shtick is like finally someone s going to come and put american interests first. what we are learning, what we now know is he literally was putting russia s interests and his own first. i ve been thinking about this. is trump capable of treason because that requires a sort of preexisting loyalty? right?
and don jr. s pursuit of the tower, which included trips to russia. there s now this question about don jr. just specifically on the narrow grounds of his testimony because, of course, michael cohen pleading guilty to lying to congress, that s not something that s very often charged, we should note. but this is it should be noted that in the transcript of the judiciary senate testimony he says we ve discussed the aguile aguilera family. do you know if they were also discussing a trump tower in moscow? certainly not 16. there s never a definitive end to it. it just died of deal fatigue. trump jr. s testimony according to his lawyer was for it to do different proposals, and that was a different deal than at a michael cohen deal. does that stand? that actually might be true. i mean, the one thing we know for sure is that donald trump really, really wanted to see his name on the moscow skyline. he was pursuing various different plans to build a