you know, cohen is connecting the dots. no matter the fact that he has lied in the past and he is considered a liar by the u.s. attorney s office, but cohen has tapes. he s got proof that is nailing this down. you know, the president just talked about no collusion. well, cohen is maybe brinkiging something else to the table saying that may not be true, mr. president, and also the fact that obstruction of justice is on the table as well. cohen is someone who said he would fall on the sword for the president. take a bullet. those were the words. direct quote. yeah, take the bullet. fall on the sword. but take the bullet for this president because he was loyal to him and there was a payoff at that time. the payoff is over. now he s fighting for his own life. he is giving up all the information that could really connect the dots to the oval office, 1600 pennsylvania avenue, if indeed it s true, 2017 and 2018 are in play as well. so, greg, you know, in the
and to get no jail time, that is their goal, clearly, erin, sdny does not agree. clearly not. mj lee, thank you very much. as they are requesting three and a half years of prison time for michael cohen. outfront now, john dean, nixon white house counsel during watergate, harry sandick, the former u.s. assistant district attorney for the southern district of new york, april ryan, and greg bauer, former fbi assistant director. thanks very much to all of you. so much to talk about. i want to talk, specifically, first about cohen and the mueller filing from the special counsel. john dean, cohen provided useful information on multiple russia matters, we learn here, right, including information about contacts with white house officials that were going on as recently as 2018. which, you know, as evan and i are emphasizing, could be a significant change here or new look that we re talking about a very different timetable. this could mean the investigation is bigger than we thought, john
district asking for a long sentence, more than three and a half years here. greg, let me ask you, though, in this filing from mueller, it is very clear, from what they are saying in here, that cohen is playing a role in the russia investigation, which is beyond, above and beyond the moscow tower. right? we re talking about russia related matters, plural, core to the investigation, contacts with persons connected to the white house from 2017 and 2018. right. all of these recent filings, the manafort filing, the cohen filings, and the flynn filing all are stunning in that they come as close as we ve seen so far at pointing directly to the president in terms of implicating him in this russia connection to the campaign. and so, the fact that cohen and flynn in particular are cooperating with the special counsel to the extent they apparently are, can t mean anything good for the president and i assume that we re going to see a lot more detailed
something different. and of course, they ve tried to play this rudy giuliani, especially, has tried to play this in the court of public opinion, to try to sway the public towards the president s side. but now, as we see, what s happening tonight and what we expect to come, it doesn t look good and it looks like it could be totally different from what rudy giuliani and the president has said. greg, what do you make of the fact that paul manafort says he s going to cooperate? he s been convicted. not of all counts but of some counts. he s been convicted, says i m going to cooperate, meets with them nine times after that, continues to lie about things that they have text messages to prove are untrue. what do you make, greg, of a witness who would so brazenly lie at a point at which he would know for sure that they would know he was lying? it seems to be classic manafort, you know? this is the ultimate too clever by half move by someone who just thinks he can outsmart the government. a
under the circumstances he found himself, i m sure his lawyers braced him and told him, but i also think the fact that his lawyers did also meet with the white house raises a question that implicates them, and before this is over, i suspect they ll be called to testify somewhere about their ongoing meetings with the white house. right, we do understand that there was some sort of, i guess, communication i don t want to use the word coordination but communication between manafort s legal team and the white house s legal team, which as we ve reported would be unusual if not unprecedented once you ve already reached a point where you re in a plea agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. these two areas here, information pertinent to another department of justice investigation and manafort s contact with the administration officials, that he lied about both of these things, what is the significance of that, greg? when you look at contact with