thank you for being here, emily. much appreciated. thank you. that does it for us tonight. see you again i don t know in five minutes. now it s time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. good evening, rachel. and it s fascinating to see these two different cohens in these two different cases, the two different pleadings. and if you read all the documents, they actually make sense. i mean, when i was just hearing the first reports of this across the television this afternoon, i said, wow, it was such a different interpretation of this guy from the two different sets of prosecutors but he behaved very differently with each set of prosecutors. and the expectations were different in the two different offices. what dan goldman was saying about sdny versus mueller and what they count for meaningful cooperation, it s very different. and we shouldn t lose sight of the fact that six of the eight things that the sdny prosecutors got them to plead guilty to didn t have anything t
crimes. that s what this means, and there could be much more because you have a lot of redacted information in both the manafort part of it and some things that are not redacted by being blacked out but are redacted because of being so vague as to what other information cohen has provided to mueller. it also is interesting because there are really three cohens. there s the cohen that the southern district saw. there s the cohen that the special counsel saw. but there s also the cohen that his lawyer presented in his earlier filing in his request that there be no jail time except for time served. and i have to say i fell for that. i felt sympathy for cohen as portrayed in his lawyers document. and it s a good thing you always wait until you hear the full evidence before you jump to conclusions, a lesson that i hope whitaker is paying attention to since he already
directed a crime. what they say is, michael: cohen s that person s donald trump and that means that donald trump also committed to felonies. laura: to felonies? is that with the statute says? i think joe has a pretty thin read for the president to hang his hat on. i think there was an intention and if that money was paid, that is a huge problem. and senator edwards was prosecuted. he was acquitted, but he was prosecuted by the obama justice department, as you recall, and you could argue personal. yes he was found not guilty but certainly the the presidents dm is not to go to a jury trial and be found not guilty. but he wouldn t want to head this off long before that and i don t think that argument really works.
the bottom line, the purpose of this document in terms of the cohen case is for mueller and his prosecutors to advocate to the judge in cohen s case that cohen not do any additional prison time for the one felony that they persuaded him to plead guilty to, but in the course of making that case we learn a lot from mueller and from how cohen s about how cohen s case fits into the overall scandal. so remember here what happened is that cohen initially plead guilty to eight felonies in federal district court in new york. that was a deal he worked out with prosecutors in the southern district of new york. we know from today s other filing in the cohen case that they ended up subsequently not that happy with the cooperation they got from him as a witness, and they think that the judge should put him in jail for a long time. thereafter, cohen plead guilty to another explain based on his work with prosecutors from the special counsel s office. they got him to plead guilty to
be. thank you for being here, emily. much appreciated. thank you. that does it for us tonight. see you again i don t know in five minutes. now it s time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. good evening, rachel. and it s fascinating to see these two different cohens in these two different cases, the two different pleadings. and if you read all the documents, they actually make sense. i mean, when i was just hearing the first reports of this across the television this afternoon, i said, wow, it was such a different interpretation of this guy from the two different sets of prosecutors but he behaved very differently with each set of prosecutors. and the expectations were different in the two different offices. what dan goldman was saying about sdny versus mueller and what they count for meaningful cooperation, it s very different. and we shouldn t lose sight of the fact that six of the eight things that the sdny prosecutors got them to plead guilty to didn t have anythi