reporter you know where i m going with this. that matters a lot because the source of the funds and their accounting could spell the difference between whether this was a private legal payment which means then the voters can hear about it and care or not care, fine, or a me tension violation of federal election law, jim. right, that harkins back to the john edwards scandal. if this were about ari melber or jim moret, we would be brought up on charges. my concern is that this is just the saga, the scandal of the week, right? i m curious why trump s own lawyer says he wants to clarify this unfortunate saga. he s bringing it up again. it s not unfortunate. either there was a relationship or there wasn t. he paid her off or he didn t. it s straightforward. this could be federal election commission violation. that s another interesting part. jim and liz plank who covered the story with us before, thank you both. i have something else special on
immediately is does the president today regret not taking president obama s advice about mike fwlin? if he had taken the advice and not made michael flynn his national security adviser, we would be talking about something else today. that also harkins back to the president s decision to fire james comey from the fbi. there s widespread believe had the president not fired james comey, there would not be a special council investigation into his campaign s dealings with russia. shannon, all these reports out there tonight including our own about how this was a thunder clap, this was a surprise in that west wing, devils advocate side of that question, how could it have been? a lot of news organizations have been preparing their mike flynn packages of coverage in anticipation. absolutely. everyone knew not everyone. a lot of people close to the president certainly knew flynn
some lenses as other crimes. domestic violence has always been treated at least before the modern era as a family matter or personal matter. not something and maybe something that the victim has a right to complain about, but what, wroyou know, i hope peopl are starting to see that domestic violence is not just a crime against the victim. it s a crime against society just like bank robberies, just like murder. it was interesting during the hearing we did hear o.j. simpson s side of the robbery, for the first time, what happened in vegas. he didn t take the stand during the trial nine years ago. i mean, it was so convoluted, at a certain point it was almost impossible to follow. but, again, he just seemed to be kind of saying, yeah, it was all these other people, they re the ones who had guns and i was just there and i could have sorted it out but it got out of hand because f theof these other peo that harkins back to what i was saying about not owning it.
so if you re intending to certainly hoodwink people and pull the wool over their eyes and suggest i m going to just kind of teeter around the issue, that doesn t really mean recusal, let s parse some words here, it doesn t do much to restore the credibility or the faith people should have in an independent objective investigation into what could have been the collusion between a foreign entity and a campaign. and so i m frustrated by like most people are. it also harkins back to the frustration people had with respect to jeff sessions who said he recused himself with respect to the russia investigation and then had particularly a part in the firing of fbi director comey. this sort of waffling between two terms and hoping that people decide not to look into the definition and hope to have the parsing of the words replace credibility and ethical standards is very dangerous and it does not bode well. who s trying to get in? it s dana. i just want to add one more thing. this is even mo
have been the collusion between a foreign entity and a campaign. and so i m frustrated by like most people are. it also harkins back to the frustration people had with respect to jeff sessions who said he recused himself with respect to the russia investigation and then had particularly a part in the firing of fbi director comey. this sort of waffling between two terms and hoping that people decide not to look into the definition and hope to have the parsing of the words replace credibility and ethical standards is very dangerous and it does not bode well. who s trying to get in? it s dana. i just want to add one more thing. this is even more reason why the focus has rightly been when it comes to congressional investigations on the senate because the rules are different there and, frankly, just the nature of the relationship between the republican chairman, richard burr, and the democratic head, the ranking democrat, mark warner, at least for the past month or so, they have been wo