what i mean by this, he has to the story has to be that there was a conspiracy to, you know, have help have russia help throw the election to trump. and collusion s not a crime. conspiracy is a crime. so if paige says this stupid thing, papadopoulos is caught making false statements, sessions says something bad, none of it adds up to a specific effort, and manafort and gates have their hands dirty with russia and ukraine. none of that adds up to a conspiracy that involves the actual effort to win the presidency. it involves people lying about meetings. so it s very important to separate these two out. because people are getting over their skis here. but, john, just to be really clear, if the president in some way is found to have tried to stop the investigation into people lying about meetings, as you say, that s big trouble for
for more, i m joined by alexander nazarian, senior writer for newsweek, john poddores, editor of commentary magazine and contributing editor of the weekly standard and betsy woodrow from the daily beast. totally in passing, he said, he got together with a deputy prime minister while in russia. how significant is carter paige going to be to the bob mueller investigation? everybody keeps having casual meeting with ambassador kislyak, with deputy prime minister you might see one on the way out of here for all you know. i may have even met kislyak myself. you know, they box themselves in when they say we had no contact with russians during the campaign. and sessions, you re speaking of, i would imagine? sessions, right. and trump had a press conference in february where he doubled down, he had that long press conference, he said, we just had
immediate legal risks for people in the white house isn t just potential allegations of collusion with russia, but rather the possibility that they could say something in interviews with mueller s investigators and fbi agents that could cause huge trouble for them. the reason papadopoulos was indicted, as your viewers know was not because of anything that happened during the campaign, it was because he lied to the fbi. we know that mueller has been interviewing numerous senior white house officials, methodically going through the folks at the highest level of the trump campaign and are now in the white house. those people seem to have mostly lawyered up, but if any of them lied in any of those interviews, they could end up with the same fate that papadopoulos is now facing or potentially worse. yeah, it s a really good point. and to paraphrase my colleague, chris hayes, who had carter paige on the show, he said, i hope you re innocent, because you re sure doing a lot of talking. john
mandate, either rosenstein could tell him he could prosecute it or it could be handed off to any of the number a federal law enforcement agencies. it could be handed off to a different u.s. attorney s office. that doesn t matter. my point is that s a distinction without a difference. i m sorry. the problem here, there is jigsaw pieces and they re not yet assembling into a puzzle. you cannot assume that the things that we have seen suggest that there s a relentless forward march direction into something i didn t say that. i m going to put a pin in it for here. john, i think a lot of people would disagree with you that the pieces of the puzzle are not coming together. before we go, because the president is traveling to asia, and this is something i wanted to talk about, if you ve ever traveled to asia, you know how physically demanding that can be. imagine traveling to five countries in less than two weeks, while holding meetings that could help decide the fate of millions
you ll remember the last president to embark on a trip this arduous. president george bush h.w. bush in 1992, a trip that gave us this memorable moment. the president getting sick on the japanese prime minister s lap. i want to ask all three of you, start with alexander before we go. do you think in all seriousness, the president has the stamina to pull this trip off? they must think he does, given how they re scheduled it. and he went to hawaii today, obviously to acclimate to the time change. i think it might be good for him to hopefully it will wean him off twitter. we ll see about that. john, let me ask you. he couldn t stay off twitter on several of his other international trips. is he going to do it now? elder bush had a vaseo vagual incident that ended up on tv. i can relate. i ve had one myself.