calling a deal disaster for the president. you only get a deal from up the chain. who is up the chain from paul manafort who was the chair of the campaign? roger stone, the campaign itself, and perhaps ultimately the president. i think there is a substantial possibility that this evidence that manafort is offering will.i.wil will implicate someone up the chain. i believe not the end for donald trump, but the beginning of the end for donald trump. he is not going to survive manafort s testimony. joining us now, barbara mcquaid. good to see you, barbara. do you agree with eisen? is this the beginning of the end for the president? i don t know how to frame it in terms of the beginning of the end, but no doubt paul manafort has information of value, because robert mueller gave him something in exchange for that information.
work, rather than counterspinning it this way, purely politically. so, that s certainly unusual, as is the case with most of their statements on this. it s a very detailed indictment. i think it s a tremendous wake-up call for the vulnerability of our elections system, and it really puts to a lie the president s repeated points that this is a witch hunt and there s no basis. granted, there may not be evidence at this point of collusion with the campaign itself, but it can no longer be any debate that the russians were attempting to interfere with the election. all right, shan wu, as always, thank you, sir. good to see you. joining me now, cnn political analyst joesh rogen. good morning. good morning. first, listen to what the president said about this investigation yesterday at checkers. watch. i think that we re being hurt very badly by the, i would call it the witch hunt, i would called it the rigged witch hunt
because now once you have two or three, there s also the payment to trump s doorman from ami, and you have multiple payments right on the precipice of the election. now that starts to look like a conspiracy to violate the campaign finance laws, and it s a stronger case when you have multiple examples of that than just the one that we ve known about with stormy daniels. and for the folks wondering how that could be illegal, isn t the point that it s at some point the allegation is it s a de facto donation meant to change the course of an election? right. the term is in kind. if michael cohen actually did pay $130,000, that would be an in-kind contribution to the campaign if the government can connect that payment to the campaign itself, and that the reason for the hush agreement is to avoid the negative publicity in advance of the election. ami as a corporation has different rules, but it would be further evidence that that was the purpose for the stormy
de facto donation meant to change the course of an election? right. the term is in kind. if michael cohen actually did pay $130,000, that would be an in-kind contribution to the campaign if the government can connect that payment to the campaign itself, and that the reason for the hush agreement is to avoid the negative publicity in advance of the election. ami as a corporation has different rules, but it would be further evidence that that was the purpose for the stormy daniels payment, and michael cohen could be on the hook for campaign finance violations if that s the case. there s also cooperation and there s cooperation. apparently the latter case is turning over documents and materials. hey, vivian, last night the view was who among the republicans in the house perhaps thought the comey memos were going to be exculpatory for the president because at first blush, they did not read like that.
4/20. thank you, chuck todd. tonight we begin with a twist in the russia probe. democrats have just filed a new lawsuit and they allege that the russians conspired with the trump campaign for the hacking that so defined the 2016 election. this is brand-new. it s a civil suit. it names in intelligence services that are run, of course, by putin. it also explicitly names wikileaks wikileaks founder julian assange and the trump campaign itself, as well as explicitly naming senior figures in it, including suing those two members of the president s family you see right there, jared kushner and donald trump jr. the trump campaign now is punching back. they say this is a sham lawsuit about bogus collusion. all of this coming, of course, as james comey has exposed many things about donald trump in those new memos, including he was allegedly upset he didn t know about a phone call from putin right after the inauguration. trump then confronting michael flynn about it and flynn said the return c