conspiracy, for how the tabloid could help suppress and cover up salacious stories about donald trump and women. joining us now from the washington post, the white house bureau chief phil rucker, joan winebanks, msnbc legal analyst and sporter of brilliant pins and with me at this table, katy tur plus, not quite one but close to another one who, of course, covered the trump campaign and reverend al sharpton, the host of politics nation and president of the national action network and emily jane fox, senior reporter with vanity fair and the person to whom michael cohen once said he d take a bullet for donald trump. phil rucker, you say along with your colleague that trump s falsehoods on the hush money payments are coming home to roost. and that people around the president are basically freaking out over what might come next. please tell us more. yeah, john, so there s a lot of concern within the
presidential transition team. katy, the rev are back at the table along with frank and joyce. i go to the lawyers really quickly here. this is big important stuff today frank figliuzzi, or is this just kind of like an incremental development that doesn t move this story along very far which is what i sense at this moment? here s the importance of this, in my opinion. first, mueller has skillfully and very articulately called bs on michael flynn. michael flynn should be embarrassed by this defense that the fbi made me do it. i was tricked into lying. and secondly, i actually think it s significant because this is going to backfire on michael flynn. i predict a judge will look at this nonsense and say you really are not on board, are you? you want to have it both ways. you want to keep holding out the possibility of a pardon so you re going with trump s narrative that the fbi is a bad group of people, tricky, tricky people and hope for a pardon by
we don t know what other information will come out. and once you start a criminal investigation, you follow the leads where they take you. so it could lead to maybe saudi arabia. it could lead to who knows what. but i d like to add one thing to what katy said which is, yes, it certainly is true at this point. we can say there s a group of loyal supporters who will accept anything that donald trump says and who wouldn t have cared if he had two more affairs that they didn t know about. but let s remember that in watergate, the same thing was true. in that case, richard nixon won 49 states. he had a landslide victory. nothing that he did was necessary to win the election, but it was still a crime. and it s so exactly here. donald trump committed a crime, whether or not it actually had an impact is irrelevant. he thought it might. he wanted to make sure to increase his chances so he committed a crime. it s like what chuck rosenberg says. because you try to rob a bank but you re not succ
and here s the truth. the people of the united states of america, the people of the world don t believe what he is saying. the man doesn t tell the truth and he should take responsibility for his dirty deeds. the people of the world know that donald trump is a liar. michael cohen is right about that. it s also the case that donald trump doesn t lie about everything all the time. he lies about almost everything all the time but occasionally donald trump says something that has the ring of truth to it. do you think, katy tur, that donald trump may actually be suggesting something here that is part of what is motivating michael cohen and the kind of of curious choices he made in particular not doing a full-scale cooperation with the sdny? is he trying to protect someone in his family? you know, i think you have to ask michael cohen that, and i think that s something you have
edwards case. it s nothing like that. the john edwards affair was an ongoing one. there was a child being born, and money was being paid to help pay for the baby. this is an affair that happened years before the election and the payments were right before the election to make sure that it didn t interfere with the election. the american people have been fooled and deprived of a fair amount of information and their vote was affected by that. so it s a much more serious case. i really feel this is a big week for justice. katy tur, as you know, i covered the 2008 election. the timing thing is so different. the reality is john edwards after the iowa caucuses was never going to be the democratic nominee, let alone become the future president of the united states. so just to talk about the comparison but also particularly because of your experience covering this campaign, just remind everybody of where donald