people like michael cohen. you cannot take them to their word. he s an admitted and convicted liar. in order to use him to help build a case you ll do it with all this other stuff. that s how you build cases by corroborating them. when you looked at the filing tot today, chuck, what stood out at you? let me break it down in two ways. practically, not all that much as changed. he had been convicted or plead guilty to eight felony counts. this is the nineth. it won t really affect his sentencing very much. strategically the world did shift a bit. here s why. the reason prosecutors would want this nineth count of conviction is because it is cohen under oath admitting he lied to congress about the trump organizations efforts to build a project in moscow.
to fruition. i think as jake laid out with house democrats getting control here, i think you ll see a different dynamic where republicans might stone wall or block some of these transcripts from becoming public or may not aggressively pursue witnesses who they know mueller is interested in or the senate committees are interested in, they can kick those things across the complex to the house side and those same folks will find themselves in open nationally tell vnationa nationally televised hearings. it s an set of unpleasant circumstances coming for folks lying who knows mueller will pursue charges and a house committee that s willing to bring people in front of cameras and grill them publicly. to say these are low level crimes, it s just lying do congress, doesn t that raise the
children. we know that don junior testified in front of congress. i believe ivanka has as well. what sort of legal exposure could they have and are they breathing easily today and would you imagine there could be some concern? i would imagine they should be very stressed now. here s the thing. michael cohen, he plead guilty but as i m going to quote chuck now from earlier in the show, prosecutors do not just take michael cohen word for it. the reason he pleads guilty to these charges and you see some of it in the documents but we also know this because we know how prosecutors work and how robert mueller works. he has evidence. he has hard evidence that shows that michael cohen was lying. they would not have put this in charging document and allow him to plead guilty if they didn t have evidence that they could have proved in court. what does that mean?
investigations. given that, jake remind us who has testified so far. reporter: a whole lot of people. it s more people than not involving this incident. i want to lay out the politics here because this is what we have been talking about among reporters and sources up here all day. with daemocrats taking control f the house, open hearings will be the norm. it won t just be behind closed doors. democrats will use their power to put a lot of this in the open. republicans were a lot more accommodating. we reached a new phase in people, at least many cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to congress. congress will know who else might have lied to congress and probably in open setting and not giving them the benefit of a closed door hearing. house incoming judiciary chair released a statement saying the special counsel has secured guilty pleas from president trump s person attorney, campaign manager,
would need a lot of political support. this is not the kind of thing that a businessman would just go in and decide to issue a tender and see a building go up. you need massive political connections and many people have written before how building a trump tower in moscow was something that the trump organization has long been interested in doing. and now, according to this latest confession, we know that the trump organization, through michael cohen, was still trying to do it during the campaign and felt that it was important to cover up this fact and lie to congress. i just spoke to a senior member of the senate intel committee and he basically said that follow the money and this shows that cohen lied to the senate intel committee about matters of money. and he said that the way you try to corrupt or influence politicians is through financial inducements. so that s it is not an easy thing, to answer your question, to just go and open a massive