versus donald j. trump. we re getting live updates from inside of the courtroom. we re going to do our best to watch them together and bring out and interrupt our conversations and bring you any and all significant moments as they re happening. over the last few hours the prosecutor has been going through the claims made by trump s lawyers in their closing argument this morning. steinglass, the prosecutor, pushed back against trump s lawyers claim from this morning that porn star stormy daniels was extorting donald trump. prosecutors saying this, quote, extortion is not a defense to falsifying business records. and if you have any questions about that, you can ask the judge. after putting on the stand, just two witnesses, one of whose credibility completely crumbled during cross-examination, donald trump s defense team today closed by arguing essentially that there was never any criminal conspiracy to conceal the hush money payments. trump s attorney todd blanche also went af
has a network, he has an infrastructure. he has to think of himself in a different way and in a sense carry himself in a different way. if he allows himself to get kind of pulled down into that old 2016, you know, back and forth with the clintonites, it s not going to help him at all in his real goal. there is a particular feeling among clinton aides, and dan is absolutely right, there is nothing new here under the sun in terms of staff fighting about nothing in particular. the difference is there is the intensity of it, the degree around the wikileaks e-mail dumps, around the comey press conference, the e-mail investigation. there are a lot of scars that those folks still point to, and that they, i think, don t want to let people forget in part because i think they legitima legitimately are concerned about how 2020 will go, both in terms of outside influence and media coverage. i think all of that adds to
charge. comey press conference on hillary clinton. a example was not following that. chris: you have last two years house republicans were pressing the fbi to turnover a lot of information. this didn t like the fisa warrant. will it be hard to turn off the spigot now? that will be the big battle, what made public and not public. it was promulgate bijan janet reno. i would make argument, i thought it was dreadful, comey blasting hillary clinton after him declining to indict her, he had no authority to make that decision, that decision should made at doj, but taking on himself the power to do that, then not indicting her then trashing her was bad for
around the firing of james comey. also the trump tower meeting happen when don junior they think they know what robert mueller has.based on conversations with lawyers that represent people having conversations but remains a bit of a black box. chris: i want to pick up with one of the first points which is after mueller gives up the report, he gives it to william barr, the new attorney general and according to the regulations, that is a confidential report. which he then has to decide how much a turn over to the congress and the public. this is what he said to the confirmation hearing. i m going to try and get the information out there. consistent with regulations and the extent i have discretion i will exercise that discretion to do that. chris: karl, the justice department generally does not same thing about people it doesn t decide to charge. the comey press conference on
and, of course, during the whole whitewater thing, there was a grand jury report that went to the house committee that was looking at possible impeachment. so there are precedents that give congress hope they can get more than the spar legislation the special counsel set out. so let me get this straight, having covered the comey press conference and clinton conference at the time i find this to be rather delicious. democrats were so unhappy about what jim comey did putting all of that out tlxt you re telling us it might be that very precedent that ultimately leads people to get more information about what mueller has to say about donald trump? yes, i don t know how much it s a legal precedent for the courts to lean on but as a political matter, it does seem and you re already starting to hear some of this you didn t prosecute hillary clinton but you had a news conference about that and look at all of the stuff you sent to congress. we want the same kind of thing here. susan d