the conservative and republican reaction to this has been a kind of shoulder shrug and i think that makes me sadder than anything. and that s impactful to hear. and, julia, a few moments to repeat a point you made for folks watching. this is not the mueller case. there are u.s. attorneys throughout the united states. the justice department is a big place. could this turnout to be fundamental, elemental to our problems in the 2016 election? it could be a component of that, but it s not designed that way, correct? it could be. i ll pull from something tom said. this is sort of a low-level campaign. they re throwing anybody at this. this might not be the level that robert mueller is investigating, but it definitely trickles from the same vein. she had the same goals as the people robert mueller is investigating now. she talks about trying to set up back channels of communication. uh-huh. she talks about the fact of going through unofficial channels to reach these people is an easi
i think, look, the president and his lawyers have spent the last few months focused on discrediting the russia probe. he says again and again there s no collusion. this is all a witch-hunt. they go after bob mueller. they say he s conflicted. they offer attacks on his staff. then out of the left flank comes the michael cohen case not run by robert mueller, not run by any of the people he s been attacking, but run by the career professional prosecutors in the southern district of new york who answer, by the way, to donald trump s justice department in washington. and they hadn t basically prepared the public for this. now, we don t know that it s necessarily going to change the political dynamics. you have not yet seen a lot of republicans, you know, reacting with great alarm to this. we talk about, you know, the consequences of this. we re talking about whether or not it changes republican minds, not democratic minds. the democrats have made up their minds about president trump. for
shell corporation payments, any citizen would be looking at a felony indictment. the only thing protecting the president now is this constitutional card he s got that a sitting president can t be indicted. i heard someone say yesterday, if this is the only thing they ever have on him, this could be big enough to be ball game, as this person put it. do you concur with that? and as a general rule, do you think there is too much talk at this stage of impeachment in the media every day? well, look, i think the president is right to be worried and your reporting suggests that he is about impeachment. i think he s got both indictment concerns and impeachment concerns. these are really serious things. i mean, and if the president is going to say what he keeps saying, which is a sitting president can t be indicted, every scholar who takes that view, including the two justice department memos that say that, also say if you can t indict, then you have to launch the
consequential stories and consequential nights when you and i speak at this hour, where, in your view, does this one rank? where does this story rank? where are we on the temperature scale? well, that s a great question. i think, look, the president and his lawyers are spent the last few months focused on discrediting the russia probe. he says again and again there s no collusion. this is all a witch-hunt. they go after bob mueller. they say he s conflicted. they offer attacks on his staff. then out of the left flank comes the michael cohen case not run by robert mueller, not run by any of the people he s been attacking, but run by the career professional prosecutors in the southern district of new york who answer, by the way, to donald trump s justice department in washington. and they hadn t basically prepared the public for this. now, we don t know that it s necessarily going to change the political dynamics. you have not yet seen a lot of republicans, you know, reacting with gr
connections to him. and so a lot of these foreign governments were sort of scrambling to find lobbyists or other people were just like setting up lobbying shops who had some connection to president trump. and this fits into that you know, this is very early reporting from the new york times matching the wall street journal . this is the beginning of us knowing about this. but it fits with what we knew about that time, which was that all of these countries were just trying to figure out how to even reach out to the new president or the incoming president of the united states. jim, tamara just had the quote. this is the beginning of us knowing about this. but you know the financial crime experts who work the career prosecutors who work for the department of justice. if there is a lot here, we ll be hearing a lot about this. although variation on the theme, if you think of all the influence peddling we ve been