face and the prospect that he might try to get a break from the government in exchange for his cooperation. cooperation doesn t mean he agrees to be nice. cooperation means he agrees that he will give him some information, information that would be of greater value to those prosecutors than whatever value they might see. if they have the goods on you and you re facing serious charges you to have something really good to give them in order to persuade the pr prosecutors to accept that information in exchange for not nailing you to the wall. all right. the worst trouble you re in the better story you have to give prosecutors about something else that really matters. if one of the things that michael cohen had was a recording of the president two months before the election discussing a secret payment to avoid it right before the election after he publicly
conversations are at this stage, mimi? hi, andrea. so well, they re back channel for a reason, so it s hard to speculating, you know, what they re doing in terms of the cooperation process. but as many of us have said over the last couple of weeks, as katy just said, it s clear michael cohen now wants to cooperate. and the ball, i m sure, is in his court. i mean, the government is going to i m sure has already said to him and his lawyer that the door is open for you to come in and talk. and he can do that before he s charged. i think he s said something in his interview that he wanted to wait until he saw the charges against him, that s his right to do that, but he can also start talking to them now. the process of cooperation doesn t happen overnight. it s a process, it s exactly that. and it takes some time. you know, i don t think the fact of this recording coming out
in both cases, american interests are undermined. from the point of view of governance, a one-on-one meeting is a problem in itself. the translator doesn t have a record of what was said on both sides, she s busy trying to translate in real time. no one has a complete record. michael mcfaul has talked about this, jeremy has, you do a quick, comprehensive debrief as you can get. you were the vice president s chief of staff in the white house. you dictate a memorandum of the conversation and it goes out to the government so the secretary of state, secretary of defense, intelligence directors, will know about it. i don t believe secretary of state pompeo has had much of a debrief. calling the translator is not a
invited the russian president to come to the white house. so, again, we should be very wary around the former kgb leader who is leading their nation? i think anybody who thinks that vladimir putin doesn t have his stamp on everything that happens in russia is misinformed. it is very clear that virtually nothing happens there of any kind of consequence that vladimir putin doesn t know about or hasn t ordered. joining me now, jeremy bash, msnbc national security analyst, former chief of staff at the pentagon and cia, and bill kristol, editor at large for the weekly standard. welcome, both. jeremy, dan coats is really putting a lot on the line right now. there s a report in the washington post that the president was angry. but coats, very well-allied with republicans in the senate and democrats who respect his work. he seems to, as juan was saying
prioritize their endeavor to seek political solutions within the framework of the un to put an end to the suffering of the civilian population. yet while others are talking the russian president is taking swift action in syria to put it bluntly bombing us back into power isn t that the sad reality of this is to call it is the sound reality in syria and many mistakes have been made by various parties in the past but when the course pressure has to be exerted on russia they are the one political power which is able to stop. by talking congress . when you re in the security council however we see that president putin is impervious to this instead of dialogue and cooperation doesn t his rule apply the more i use ruthless violence the more i win politically and on the ground. as