me or your own eyes and ears? lanny davis looked into the camera tonight and said to trump bred america don t believe me, believe your ears. i hope believe their ears. and whatever they think about this tape, just believe what you hear and don t believe that what you hear is not true just because donald trump says he doesn t want you to think it s true. it is weird that we are in this position where we have to defend the very idea of objective reality. but it is under attack, and it is specific attack by the president of the united states in a relentless way. we can laugh at the tweets and we can, oh, just another tweet. it s not just another tweet. these have a cumulative effect of eroding i think the sort of
recordings so i think there was a little bit of a throwing their hands up today where they were like this is becoming the actual narrative. it s not the actual narrative in our reading or listening to the recording, so they wanted to set the record straight. i think that is the defining reason why this tape came out. let s talk atmospheric for just five seconds. i ve heard this already kind of erroneously referred to as a phone conversation. this by all accounts is an in person meeting. you can hear room tone as if it was recorded by say a device on cohen s lap sitting across from donald trump at trump tower. that s exactly right. this is meeting that took place in person in their day to day interaction. you can hear him basically running through a checklist of all the things he had to tell the president. what s interesting to me, and this is point actually rudy giuliani brought up to me on friday, the fact they had these kinds of conversations that michael cohen was allowed to do
you have a lot of problems and you don t have very good arguments for, muddy the waters. at the end of the day we have good attorneys talking about what they would do if they were prosecutors or criminal defense attorneys, but president trump s is not going to be prosecuted in court while he s a president. so it all becomes for trump muddying the waters enough so he has a solid number of senators and maybe members of the house to stop impeachment. i think it s all about muddying the waters, so it s not clear. the fisa thing is problematic and don t believe what you say and this tape s confusing and let s have a debate about who said the word cash for the next day or two. so i think he s given they have a weak hand to play because i suspect the facts aren t on their side, i think they re trying it muddy the waters. pay attention to the fact the president is attempting to create his own reality. who are you going to believe?
my head the last time, and i don t think it s happened before, we have a senior member of an important west coast publication from the safe distance of washington reacting to news that broke in new york. that being our set of rules, what do you make early on now of the potential blow back on the president come morning? well, you ve just addresses the potential legal aspects of this. i think as a political matter there s not a lot that i see changing because people have so baked in the cake of donald trump that he s had these relationships with women, that he doesn t tell the truth, as he didn t tell the truth about karen mcdougal and his knowledge of the payment, et cetera. when i first heard this tape initially i thought it was completely ambiguous and that each side, pro-trump, anti-trump, people in the middle would just hear what they wanted to. and i still believe that to some
some good reporters was convinced friday that there was but unsuch recording. some reporters were convinced by rudy guiliani, it s cohen who initiates the idea we should pay this off in cash. that s right. we have to listen to the tape. there s going to be a fight over the tape. both legal camps are fighting over it. how does it play out? how does president trump react? if he s not considering a pardon, what s the mood like? is he enraged? guiliani said he s disappointing. we ve seen the president fuming on twitter about michael coen. you can see this es lating more. jackie, i m reminded, we heard from the president himself today. there were a lot of stories we were going to cover before the audio tape came out tonight. let me show you what he said speaking to the vfw about his