dardenel, a former contestant on the apprentice and a democratic operative. you ve lived many lives. yes. and there you are. there i am. when you look at this and cohen s involvement in the trump organization, what do you see as key in this fight. i think what s going to be key in this fight for trump is all about the pr, all about the spin, all about the deny, deflect, attack. as far as cohen is concerned he s going to have to be very careful, because i m not a lawyer like you, but i think we all know when you are under a criminal investigation yourself and you re seeking to be a cooperating witness, the last thing you want to be doing is talking. any good lawyer will tell you to keep your mouth shut. what cohen clearly wants to do is he wants to go head on at donald trump. he is a man, i ve said this before, and some people doubted me on this, he s a man that s been sending smoke signals to donald trump for the past several weeks. those smoke signals went unrequited.
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 it can be authenticated, and also precisely what cohen will have to say when he makes it. but if it turns out to be true, a lot of these pieces, puzzle pieces that are scattered across the table start to click into place. we ll put up, while you re
charge of an investigation and a guy who is the subject of an investigation that just got more profound. we have to preface everything, ari, with if the account from michael cohen is true, blah, blah, blah. so if the account is true, it is a tremendous change in the landscape. what it does is show us two things. one, that donald trump, from the very beginning, was in on an attempt at collusion, an attempt to conspire with a plot that was described to donald trump jr. as a secret operation by the kremlin to help trump. so if trump knows about that from the very beginning, and is in on it, i think that has a lot of legal, but even more so, political implications. plus if he s told about this, and even if nothing came out of the meeting, remember throughout the whole campaign and up to now he keeps denying or dismissing the russian operation. could have been a 400-pound guy in a basement. the russians didn t do this. we don t know the russians did this. they kept doing that.
i think he is now a man scorned. i think he wants to settle scores. trump has betrayed him multiple times, this was the last straw. you re not a lawyer, but you are an apprentice, or you played an apprentice on a reality show. when you look at this situation, something that many of us have grappled to understand, and you were closer to it at an earlier phase of trump s life. certainly michael cohen has seen donald trump screw other people. do you know what it is about some of these people around trump that they see that happen to other people and they don t think it will happen to them? it is actually a mind boggling thing. literally on the apprentice, people were threatening to sue donald trump at that time. those people then went back to basically work on his campaign after threatening to sue him and/or initiating the process of suing him. it is actually mind boggling. what it is is that trump attracts people like trump. a lot of people that choose to be in his orbit are people w
okay the trump tower meeting, was that news to you when that news broke last night? no, it was not news to me. nor was it news to me today when they immediately went after or last night and today immediately went after michael cohen and now claim that he s a liar. this is going to be quite a show, ari, that s going to play out in the coming weeks and months. i think on your show it was the first instance back in early may that i said they had put too much faith in michael cohen. anybody could see that. what s so ironic to me is, and you played the clip earlier from the president s former attorney, you know, everyone that knew michael cohen or had anything to do with him knew he wasn t that tough and wasn t that smart. it s amazing this president would trust him with his innermost secrets. it goes to show what a complete lack of judgment the president has in so many aspects of his life. that s an interesting point. it s your opinion, it s somewhat grounded in the risks we re seeing.