himself is helping pay or is mr. cohen on the hook for that whole bill. josh gerstein and christina wilky, thank you both. i mned by legal analyst nick akerman and jil wine-banks. nick, i ll start with you. it s worth noting that gates a similarly orturous situation in which he was there was interest from investigators and then was he or was he not going to cooperate. he hired new lawyers right before he pled guilty. right, but that doesn t necessarily mean that because cohen is gettingrs s cooperating. you have to look what s been going on the last month or so. he has been coopeng with trump s lawyers to go through all of those documents and all of those tapes that were seized in the search warrants. they re getting prediscovery, discovery that they normally wouldn t get. exactly what people saw trump trying to get with respect to
firms. so once hopefully in the next week he ll decide on his council. i think that s the next step we re looking at. josh, do you know if there s a financial problem here for cohen in terms of paying for these legal bills which have to mountg up very quickly? i ve heard from people close to the case there is concern about the financial cost. rming over the l task they ve few weeks involved maybe dozens of lawyers involved in going through all the millions and millions of pages of doc mailsages and voice gs that you mentioned as part of this search warr relateded process. that s a lot of legal hours being billed at a pretty significant law firm. must have run up a really large tab for mr. cohen. is that a tab that the trump organization or president trump himself is helping pay or is mr. cohen on the hook for that whole bill. josh gerstein and christina wilky, thank you both. i m joined byal analyst
man. he represents me like with this crazy stormy daniels deal. he represented me and you know, from what i see he did absolutely nothing wrong. we know that cohen used the same slush fund he set up to pay off stormy daniels to take hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations seeking access to the trump administration and we know he may have key information related to the russia probe. one of the companies that paid cohen is linked to victorer vekselberg who reportedly met with cen during the transition and during the inauguration. before he was he was pursuing efforts to build a trump tower in moscow throughout the campaign in 2016 and identified by name in the steele dossier as an intermediary from trump world to kremlin agents. christina, what do we make of
named aly what thekins who now works for the times, she previously worked for buzzfeed, she previously worked for politico. again, now she works for the times. and she did not know i guess until recently that the justice department had seized her records, her phone and e-mail records. that s a big deal for anybody. it s a really big deal, and it has really big first amendment implications if they do this to a reporter. continuing from the times, shortly before she began working at the times, fbi agents approached the reporter, aly watkins, seeking information about a previous three-year romantic relationship she had had with james a. wolf, the senate intelligence committee s former director of security. the fbi agents said they were investigating unauthorized leaks. ms. watkins did not answer the agents questions. mr. wolf stopped performing committee work in december. he retired from the committee in may, meaning last month. mr. wolf was not a source of information for ms.
you described, there would have to be some sort of accommodation, there would have to be some sort of negotiation with a media outlet or a reporter before a reporter was surveilled in this way as part of a leak investigation, i ve got my control room needs to stop talking in my ear for a second. thank you very much. sorry, matt. i had two people talking to me at the same time i was trying to talk to you. at the same time as holder if holder put in those rules, obviously we have a different attorney general now. if this was done in violation of d.o.j. policies, if this new york times reporter was surveilled inappropriately, how was that policed within the justice department? it would have to be policed by the inperspective general. there is a loophole the attorney general can use if they determine i think negotiations say if negotiations with the media outlet would pose a substantial threat to the investigation, if it would harm national security. the attorney general can