The latest Political Developments of the day and interviews with top newsmakers are featured. Its not like somebody former president got to report, somebody gave a little more than the minimum, some pac didnt follow a small regulation. This is a fundamental thing. The nominee at the closing days of the campaign, when he thought his campaign was on the line and a story or two stories potentially threatened his nomination went be and said, i have to make this story go away, according to Michael Cohen and said, go make this go away and pay for it. I think that goes not in a resistance way at all. A much more dramatic and more accurate way of stating what happened there. And, yes, it implicates the president in the commission of a felony, but it also implicates the president in what is now a growing sense that a lot of people have and not just resistance people, that this is one more way in which the 2016 election was facacta. Harry litman, were in dangerous territory here. Two nonlawyers
work in atlantic city that he s had these kind of, shall we say, shady connections. and it seems, given the all-star team mueller has pull together, they ve approached donald trump in this way. so there s concrete evidence, the analogy orients us perfectly. i think there is something real about how donald trump is being treated and how donald trump operates. and so it s not farfetched at all. there s a lot of attempts to draw parallels, the mueller probe is like the enron probe. the mueller probe is the mueller probe is like the gotty prosecution. a lot of people make that comparison to the prosecution. he acts that way in plain sight. just take the tweet about manafort this morning and what the president is basically saying. paul is a good boy, pauly didn t flip. that s what he s saying. his view of the law is incredibly selective. we talk about him going on the campaign trail. what does he say on the campaign trail, what does he want to emphasize? immigration. what did he say a
yeah. that will forever the evolution of a response that s at the center of pretty serious prosecution out of the southern district. how is the legal team managing the fact patterns? they thought the new york part of this was the more troubling one because they didn t understand it. they claim to under the four corners of the mueller investigation and thought the president was in an okay spot. but all along they never thought they got straight answers from the president about this, and they never thought that they understood the full extent of the president s lee lags ship with michael cohen. so as this has gone forward, they ve really, really been in the dark. this is not like the investigation where they read through the questions the investigators wanted to and have an understanding of what s there. this is going on with knowing very little. it s not been smeared the way the mueller investigation has been smeared. you talked about they feel
like yourself about the mueller investigation and that it s not collusion, collusion in and of itself wouldn t be the crime. it s the conspiracy to impact the election. do you think that is what the southern district is investigating when it comes to the hush money payments? do you think that s what they went in looking for? we know from the day of the raid that s one of the things they were looking for when they seized items from michael cohen s homes and offices. well, look, they were probably looking for the whole mother load of financial miss deeds that they found. but they also found this point and i can t say strongly enough, john is so dead-on here. the second defense of team trump now is, oh, a technical campaign finance violation. that makes it seem ministerial. it s the exact opposite. it gives rise to the watergate comparisons. what cohen says in court by the way, it s not in the information. he made a point of saying it. not only was it at the direction of trump, but it
you more enthusiasm. you probably have some college educated public leaning women who would be annoyed by this because it makes trump look guilty. the politics, if all you care about the house, the politics net-net, this is not a winner for trump. on top of that as you said, he loses his ability to plead the 5th. he might have to get called in front of congressional committee if he has anything to say. i think on just in a purely self-interested way, it would be a bad dumb move for him to do this. barbara, let me give you the last word. if you were the president s lawyer, would you be advising him to pardon manafort if he wanted to, or steer clear from making a decision like that at this point? re: it it s really difficult. if you re trump you have to think about the legal implications as well as political implications. he can pardon later.