that s coming up. also, i have a break you how, with everything we have been through and everything we ve learned should deal with a proven liar and now someone liable for defamation and sexual abuse, donald trump. how do we deal with him? how do we cover interviews and town halls? we re not against interviews. i have a breakdown on that later. what donald trump said on his live and lengthy appearance on cnn last night is our top story. we ll get to that later. the top story tonight is the tapes. george santos back in washington voting on an unemployment fraud bill, which is wild considering that is part of what he s been indicted for. santos arraigned on 13 separate federal charges wire fraud, money laundering, abusing public funds. doj claiming santos spent money he claimed was for his campaign but he basically grifted, pocketing it according to the filing for personal expenses, luxury designer clothing, credit card payments for his own personal use. these charges come
george, why was your income $55,000 in 2020 and why is your income drastically higher? here s the answer to that. i reached a deal with the company to nobody went unemployed and got reduced to, like, a very basic salary so we could didn t get fired. long story short i went from 2019 to making $400,000 some dollars to 2020 my income was 55k. couldn t be more legitimate. i actually qualify for unemployment. that s how he was discussing it on tape. the feds disagree. we are joined now by the documentarian behind the santos tapes, the man on the other end of those conversations for hours, blake zeff. big scoop last night, and we wanted to have you back.
on the question of ukraine. it looks like there were a pair of autocrats tagteaming him and doing some of the poisoning. take us through what amounted to a big scoop last night. that s exactly right. as speaker pelosi said to the president in that very controversialmeeting, with you, all roads lead to putin, in this case, they lead to putin and the prime minister of hungary. what we found was that it wasn t either putin or orbin told the president that there s this conspiracy theory is true, that ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential elections or urged him to have ukraine investigate biden, a 2020 political rival, but what they did do in a meeting in one case, in phone conversations in the other, is they basically, i believe described it they soured the president on ukraine. you have this new president zelensky come in, he campaigned on being a reformer, on taking control of corruption in his country and by all accounts, that s what he wanted to do.
deal at the same time in moscow. trump wanted money. erdogan wants to be able to walk willy-nilly into northern syria and isolate and wipe out the kurds. what does trump want in return? well, he already has a building in istanbul with his name on it. two i think, right? yeah. more money. so i think in all of this, the reason that trump is putting himself in these situations where he s getting manipulated is there s something on the other end for him and it s a big sack with a dollar sign on it. right. real quick, last word. and i would point out when he is doing those deals, there s always an enabler around ready to make his sick twisted, corrupt vision a reality and in the testimony today from ambassador taylor, sure looks like one of those people was ambassador sondland. right. all right. ashley parker, we had a teleprompter malfunction, so thank you for taking us through that stunning reporting last night. stopped everything to read it. after the break, a shocking co
andrew wiseman first, he s a money laundering guy. their path to bleeping trump goes rite through paul manafort, don jr. and jared kushner. it s as plain as a hair on your face. maybe on your face, mr. bannon. michael schmidt, you had the big scoop last night. this is something i have to say, i ve heard from chris christie i think on this show, other people, nobody thinks it s a good idea for the president to talk to the special counsel. what did you learn? as you sort of saw it today, there are concerns about the president s discipline, not only that he will tell the truth what? the understatement of the century. there are concerns he s going to end up giving them the obstruction of justice case on a platter. isn t that one of the concerns? but the other concern is that he likes to talk and that he would go on and on and try and explain himself and in the process of that, open up all sorts of avenues to mueller and allow them to probe into areas