agent, explained in a text that justice department officials would find it too tasty to resist sharing. i m not worried about our side he wrote. kept secret that agents were on the trail of george papadopoulos and went to london to interview the australian ambassador about his claims, that michael flynn s foreign payments were under scrutiny. as were campaign chairman s paul manaforts. that agents suspected carter page told moscow about the fbi s 2013 warning to him about espionage targeting. to quote the times, the facts, had they surfaced, might have devastated the trump campaign. mr. trump s future national security adviser was under investigation as was his campaign chairman. one adviser appeared to have russian intelligence contacts, another was suspected of being a russian agent himself. so matt apuzo, thank you to you and your colleagues for this reporting. secondly, the investigation itself, according to your
we ll trump s defenders saying fine, you re running against somebody and the russians and the kgb come to you and give you information, that s fine. which is totally a total danger to american democracy. i don t understand what s going on. we re going move to matt apuzo and his reporting in just a second and i ll toss that to you, willie. the thing i know about donald trump is that he thinks that if he says something, no matter how untrue it is, he can get a wave of headlines and make it his truth. that s how he worked on the new york media, that s how he worked when he called imitating himself to reporters. he had a lot of fun with that. that was the game he played as a real estate mogul who declared bankruptcy and you re not sure where his money is. that was the trump game. what i don t get is the rudy giuliani giulianis of the world and the others around him who play it as well, who think this is going to end well. they live down to his
courtroom and said michael cohen is not really a lawyer is because they want to say those aren t really privileged lawyer tapes. well, if there are tapes or whatever the communications are, but ari, i want to set the stage for your viewers. this is important. imagine you are communicating with an individual that you believe is your lawyer and that you have privilege with. so you re free-wheeling in your communications with him because you think they re protected under the attorney/client privilege and you do this for a number of years as it relates to a number of hairy issues. one day the fbi kicks in the door, actually doesn t kick in the door. they knock. you re kucourteous. they raid his office in his home and obtain these communications. and you find out that s what terrifies him? matt apuzo who broke the story in the last ten minutes is joining me by phone. matt, michael was just walking through why donald trump s most candid conversations ever might
said i want you to see your way through to clearing mike flynn. he did things that are totally outside of the president s powers. merely removing someone from office, you could argue the president could do it. but if somebody tried to bring charges against the president or it was a basis for impeachment, the president could try to fight and say, hey, this is within my powers as president to do. matt, you wrote about what the raid in michael cohen s office was all about. you developed some new information overnight that we didn t have at this hour yesterday. they were looking for information about karen mcdougal, an ex playboy model who claims to have had a yearlong relationship with the president. i m reminded of the passage in
been in to formally testify but as an fbi agent and someone involved in the russia investigation before it was the mueller investigation, any notes that we had, anything that he wrote down, anything that would have corroborated fbi director comey s allegations that would would have belonged to the fbi and mueller would have had access to that. whether he s interviewed andy yet, i don t know, we do know he has access to all of the work product. matt, without going near editorialization, which i know is not a danger for you, what else as we try to let you enjoy what s left of a friday night in your life after having written this piece for the new york times, what else in your experience should we know about andrew mccabe? i ve known andy for a long time, he was a rising star of the bureau.