with foreign governments. yeah, who knew? right? who knew? no one ever told them that. you know, they were novices. i want to thank jennifer rubin and joyce vance. have you been on fallback friday? could it happen today? thanks to each of you for being part of our top of the news coverage here. coming up, new reporting on how trump s legal team says they might, quote, bury michael cohen. michael avenue avenatti is here live. plus, we re debuting a new series today with tony schwartz, author of the art of the deal, and talking about the pressure facing trump. all that, plus, of course, fallback friday and our most awkward moments of the year. you re watching a special edition of the beat on msnbc.
a more powerful way to stay connected. it gives you super fast speeds for all your devices, provides the most wifi coverage for your home, and lets you control your network with the xfi app. it s the ultimate wifi experience. xfinity xfi, simple, easy, awesome. there s news tonight that shows donald trump is genuinely nervous about the risk michael cohen poses. shocked that cohen would put this on trump. his aides are telling reporters they ll bury cohen. the daily beast reports trump s furious and swearing about cohen. the attack on cohen is weak was
previewed earlier this week by the man who served as trump s lawyer before cohen, jay goldberg on the beat. if you spend five minutes with michael cohen, you know that he s not strong. he s weak. it s odd to say this, but when he said that he would stand up for the president, i knew from talking with him for less than five minutes that he was sufficiently weak, that he would cave in with respect to any wrongdoing. meanwhile, trump s current lawyer is reversing his past praise of cohen. he doesn t have any incriminating evidence about the president or himself. the man is an honest, honorable lawyer. i expected something like this from cohen. he s been lying all week. or for he s been lying for years. there s nobody that i know that knows him that hasn t warned me that if his back is up against the wall, he ll lie like crazy. he s lied all his life. in a moment i m joined live
this meeting, it means he was told that russia wanted to help him secretly. and here he is now publicly communicating with russia say, hey, this is how i want you to help. i mean, collusion, conspiracy, obstruction, coverup, all these narratives which intertwine are bolstered by michael cohen s account if true. and so jennifer when david lays it out like that, it s chilling because the more benign earlier interpretations that were available were lower-level people did this, or everyone s an idiot, and they didn t really understand all the meetings they were going to. by the way, idiot defenses can work in the law. it s not a crime to be stupid and go to the wrong meeting. what david lays out when you put these pieces together, according to cohen s theory of the case. we always can report there will be denials, there will be other perspectives. but according to cohen s theory of the case, you re adding testimonial evidence that suggests, no, they weren t idiots. at a very high level t
said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do. as i say, that s not true and it comes from the lies at the top from donald trump, joyce. when you look at that part of it, without presupposing anyone s guilt, but just knowing they were lying about that, and then you add michael cohen here potentially alleging to mueller that donald trump had all this advance notice, what does that do to the investigation in your view as a prosecutor? you know, the president s coverup here, the statement that he dictated on air force one has never made any sense. on the one hand if the meeting was unimportant, and as someone said at the time a nothing burger, then why does the president go to the trouble of lying about it? that statement that the president drafted for don jr. has only ever made sense if this meeting was critically important, and equally important to cover up. so now what we see, if cohen s statement is true, and david corn is correct, we need to understand whether