committee. now we also know of course if the senate intelligence committee it s still going on. they have a bipartisan investigation unlike what we ve seen in the house. and what we ve heard, new reporting that we re posting very shortly on nbcnews.com is that multiple staff members on the judiciary and the intelligence committee on the senate side are going to be combing through all the transcripts of the interviews they did to try to look for examples of where they think witnesses may have lied to the committee. and that might be the grounds for criminal referrals to the special counsel and his team. stay tuned to nbc news.com for that. mike, thank you so much. we re lucky to have you on this story. thanks. after all this, i want to bring it back to why this is all so crucial to the mueller investigation. we re going to bring in our all-star panel. jill wine banks, legal analyst danny cevallos, and greg bauer, previously served as assistant director at the fbi s office of
congressional affairs. greg, i ll start with you on this because we were talking to mike about what this means to terms of the congress. this is a crime lying to congress that is pretty rarely prosecuted what do you read into mueller s decision to choose this as how he s going to go forward with this plea deal? is he setting the stage for other things? i think he s doing two things. he s signaling to other witnesses that lying to whether it s kr it s congress or the special counsel team is a serious matter and those that lie will be prosecuted and he can gain some leverage over them in that way. and secondly, with michael cohen bob mueller has a pretty serious and significant cooperator, a person who knows a lot, perhaps more than anyone else, about the president s business history for the last ten plus years, and also a lot about the campaign and specifically a lot about the trump businesses efforts in moscow. so this i think is a significant
wab post and greg bauer who also worked for the fbi s office of congressional affairs. he s been gracious enough to hang out with us for this hour and give us his sharp i sights. gr insights. i know this prague meeting with ken is something that interests you. why do you think this is a fulcrum of this investigation? it will be interesting as michael cohen now has apparently decided to open the kimono and share everything he knows with robert mueller. if he goes back to just denials about visitsing prag sitting pr don t know. we ll find out as the facts on the mueller team come to light. but the steele dossier became such a punching bag, a political punching bag for the president and his defenders in a way that i think was inaccurate. i mean, much of the dossier apparently has been corroborated, not all of it, and so it it may yet be subject
loir lawyer in that case to be admired. he s been looking for his own roy cohen, why would he demean the hearings in that way? danny, it looks like this may sort of give us some clues into where this goes next, but let s just underscore again, and greg touched on this, but the importance of having michael cohen cooperating specifically with the mueller probe as opposed to we know he was working with the southern district of new york. over the last few days we ve talked about wikileaks and jerome corsi and roger stone, but all of those crimes require inferences and connecting dots. from the beginning, michael cohen time and time again provided direct links to criminali criminality. in the southern district of new york several months ago he stood newspaper kwo up in court and said i committed a crime in terms of finance law and i did it with the president. moving forward here we are again
the same months when he is talking so warmly about putin, his right hand man, his top lawyer was continuing to very a add individual pursue a trump tower in moscow. greg, what is your take on this? i think we re going to see a much more robust effort on the part of chairman schiff to get to the bottom of these facts. and that trump tower meeting is a key fact that hasn t been fully developed, at least publicly. we ll be interested to see what the mueller team knows about that. it seems to be a linchpin of much of this investigation. we were talking a little bit earlier in the show with mike about the fact that many of these interview transcripts that were done in the house against committee were never sent to the special counsel. while we reported that a while ago, i think many of our viewers might be surprised to learn that republicans were withholding