associates that rudy giuliani has failed to shut down the stormy daniels hush money saga. that s according to white house aides. the report adds that the president, quote, has expressed frustration that giuliani s media appearances are raise mortgage questions than they re answering. aides, quote, expect the president to fire giuliani if his behavior doesn t change. for more i m joined by sam stein, politics editor at the daily beast and mimi rocah who is a former federal prosecutor. i m going to go mimi on this. what is rudy up to? is he up to something? is he clever like a fox? why did he say there may have been other cases where there is cover-up money paid, hush money paid to women to cover up relations they had with this president? why would they do that? i think the strategy is this. he is trying to say there is a slush fund of money that trump gave to cohen or authorized to cohen, and cohen used it to deal with problems as they came up, including women problems. and that would
evan mcmullen, former cia operative who ran for president in 2016 as an independent candidate. and never would have had us talking about porn. and david johnson, politics editor for the root and msnbc contributor. i have to say what i said in the break. we said is this too you know, do we really want to embarrass the rev and talk about porn? he s the only one that knows donald trump. let s start with you. this is not, in this instance with stormy daniels, this is not sexual harassment or sexual misconduct story. if you accept her account in in touch, they had a seemingly pleasant encounter, they met at a celebrity golf tournament. she had some interesting color about his fear of sharks. i don t know if that s something you knew about. this is something different. this is about hush money paid to cover up an affair that took place after he was married to melania trump. i think the issue here is exactly that. whether or not he was paying cover-up money and whether or not michael cohe
break. we said is this too you know, do we really want to embarrass the rev and talk about porn? he s the only one that knows donald trump. let s start with you. this is not, in this instance with stormy daniels, this is not sexual harassment or sexual misconduct story. if you accept her account in in touch, they had a seemingly pleasant encounter, they met at a celebrity golf tournament. she had some interesting color about his fear of sharks. i don t know if that s something you knew about. this is something different. this is about hush money paid to cover up an affair that took place after he was married to melania trump. i think the issue here is exactly that. whether or not he was paying cover-up money and whether or not michael cohen, his lawyer, did a contribution in kind to the campaign that he covered up. and that would violate campaign finance laws. two problems with that. if, in fact, he did, that is
in-kind donation, hush money, really, cover-up money, a lot of embarrassing stuff came out about him and his relationship and personal life and whether or not that would get the president in legal trouble, it would certainly be embarrassing and a major turnoff to these white college voters whom we re seeing slip away from the gop in the recent polls. the fact that it is independent groups pursuing this, there is not public evidence that the president s democratic opponents are digging into this that much. republicans have definitely been vocal when they ve had these kind of stories against democratic presidents. that s interesting. it s something that they obviously don t want to draw attention to. the fact that he may or may not have had this relationship with a porn star back in 2006. but this is something that whether or not his opponents look into it, it s definitely going to be something that investigators want to know more about. because it creates more of a likelihood that t
suggested it would drop a story if edwards signed a sworn affidavit denying the affair and paternity of hunter s child. edwards refused. as a lawyer he knew that signing this affidavit would be a crime. he was unwilling to do that. reporter: but there was potentially damaging testimony, too. davis recalled a conversation with edwards and donor fred barron in late 2007 when the media was looking for hunter. davis testified that barron said, the press wasn t going to find miss hunter because of the way he was moving her around. davis said i asked him to stop talking. i didn t want to be aware of this. edwards, he testified, said nothing. it s damaging to john edwards because it shows he knew what was going on. reporter: back on the stand today, the decorator for heiress bunny mellon, brian huffman who served as middleman for $725,000 of the cover-up money provided by mellon.