in on the watergate hearings, voted for impeachment and helped draft the rules, the guidelines for what was then a special prosecutor. former deputy assistant attorney general harry litman, also joins us, and nick akerman is staying with us. nick was a former watergate prosecutor and is an msnbc legal analyst. thanks to all three of you, liz, let s start with you. you have written a book called the case for impeachment, i believe it s called. this is as close as it s gotten. it s not new information in that we knew from michael cohen s earlier testimony and the information against him that he said he was directed by individual one, but now the sdny seems to be saying they believe that to be the case. right. i mean, i think you see something very serious. the real question that comes out is what is the implication of the prosecution, the conviction of michael cohen for president trump? right, that s the question. during watergate the grand jury secretly indicted richard
a number of other guilty pleas, a bunch of them are cooperating with the prosecutors. president trump fired the director of the fbi, james comey, in order to stop this investigation. he s repeatedly tried to fire robert mueller. he fired jeff sessions because jeff sessions wouldn t shut down the investigation. there s just no way that william barr can come into this job and oversee the investigation. he has to recuse. he s been appointed by the president at this juncture. if he thinks he s going to shut it down or control it in any way, it s not going to happen. if william barr does not recuse, he s going to be spending almost all of his time sitting in front of the united states house of representatives judiciary committee explaining himself. and that s no way to be the attorney general of the united states. let me ask you this. because when attorney general jeff sessions recused himself, rod rosenstein took over the russia part of the
i m joined by kim waleigh, elliott williams, deputy attorney general in the united states under president obama, and msnbc legal analyst and former assistant special prosecutor special watergate prosecutor, in fact, nick akerman. let me start with you, nick. you and i have been talking about this for a long time. i went in close to the ground on this one in my conversation with those two guys. now let s pull this back, take it in its entirety and tell me where you think we are. we ve got a very powerful legal juggernaut that mueller has put together that is going straight at donald trump. it s not just that cohen is providing information about russia and the conspiracy between the campaign and russia, but you ve also got flynn, michael flynn, the former national security adviser who is also providing information and according to mueller has been cooperating fully. which means that he s been providing information about the sanctions and the lifting of sanctions, which was the quid
both manafort s documents and both cohen s documents, it s all about honesty and it does not pay to lie to the federal government. and michael cohen is going to see that. they tweaked him a bit by saying he was asking for a sentence that was 99.5% lower than the federal guidelines would have contemplated because he was asking for just the couple days of time served. and it s just they re just night and day in different places with respect to what he s done. these are considered very, very serious crimes. you re talking about lying under oath, or to federal investigators. that s what this is about. kim, the president cease it differently than you do. he tweeted out not too long ago, i want to put that back on the screen because it s kind of about the most remarkable tweet i ve seen all week. it says totally clears the president. thank you. okay. just file that thought for a second. in the southern district of new york sentencing report it says as cohen himself has now admitted with
finance? yes, this is important. it s really important. while many americans who desired a particular outcome in the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows. a lot of people are overwhelmed with all this information. why should we care? we should care because we do want free and fair elections in our democratic process. this document is speaking potentially on what should come or what could come, either the criminal justice system or through impeachment process, why we should care. i m glad you brought that up, kim. because in this very long document that part can be understood by a guy like me who s not a lawyer. where you finished off, it went on to say it is this type of harm that congress sought to prevent when it imposed limits on candidates. very direct line to the offense to democracy, not just under the law that michael cohen in his words, o