lies, or whether he was acting at the direction of others. and as to whether he s to be believed now. today, the only tool cohen has at his disposal to lessen his sentence is telling the truth, and it s worth noting that federal prosecutors now agree with and have somehow corroborated cohen s assertion that it was donald trump who directed that illegal hush money operation. and we don t know what we don t know in terms of what else they ve been able to corroborate on the other threads of the multiple investigations into the president that cohen has assisted with. and that is where we start today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. at the table, donny deutsch, washington post columnist and msnbc political analyst. eugene robinson, axios political reporter. alexi is back. and former federal prosecutor glen kushner rounds out our table in washington for the hour. aaron blake, steen your political reporter for the washington post is here.
this goes, i think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel s office is investigating. and joining us now, glen kushner, former assistant u.s. attorney and tim o bryan is with us, the author of the book trump nation. he is also an msnbc contributor and glen, we really need you know because we re taking, we re taking a little piece of a transcript, people are kind of running with this that this is a huge little bomb that s in the middle of this thing. what do you make of it? sometimes you accidently blurt something out and it s like, you know, i didn t mean to say it but i meant what i said. they have the ability to kind of restrict our access to some of the information in here. they can rerefact redact things. it tells us for whatever
about a series of meetings manafort had with the russian political consultant with ties to russian intelligence. those meeting ing began when manafort was trump s campaign manager in 2016 and continued through 2018, the second year of the trump presidency. during those conversations, prosecutors say manafort and kilimnik repeatedly communicated about a so-called peace plan for ukraine starting in early august 2016. why manafort was misleading them, misleading the properties c prosecutors, why that was so important he said this goes to the larger view of what we think is going on and what we think the motive here is. this goes, i think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel s office is investigating. and joining us now, glen
found out that wasn t what this was going to be about. there are votes on the floor. there are 11 minutes left. they re going to strictly enforce the rule. we ll not risk it. the committee will stand in recess until after immediately after the last in this series of votes. we are back after what was an incredibly contentious opening to this hearing with the acting attorney general. it only took really a couple minutes for there to be a heated exchange between the chairman of the committee jerry nad ler and the witness. i am chris jansing. with me now glen kushner here onset chuck rosenberg, nick confessore, grace raw.
communications so that they can be made fully and without fear of them being made public. however, i think we re getting into a built of a dicey area when acting attorney general whitaker starts to sort of raise willie nilly the possibility of executive privilege expect to communications that involve yes, the president of the united states, chris, but also the subject and perhaps target of a criminal probe. i mean, i don t want to say one person s executive privilege is another person s obstruction of justice, but when these things get intertwined, it s not just a simple question of applying the law of executive privilege. so let me ask you then, chuck. executive privilege. how do you see this playing out and what would apply? where would this in your opinion, will applicable in this q and a? right. glen laid it out perfectly with the raw recognizes privileges to protect certain communications.