point, succinctly. i mean, we know what michael says. it no. jeff, were you going to say something? what makes this complicated legally is there s this sort of paradox of silence. right. i understood what trump wanted me to do, but that s how we communicated. he didn t have to tell me to lie. i knew to lie. that may be true, and that s certainly the way certain crime organizations work. and testimony about that kind of relationship has been very successful in mafia prosecutions. but whether people will believe that that s how the person who is now the president of the united states interacted with his staff, that s a question i don t know the answer to, but it is certainly raised by the evidence here. although, it s interesting, jeff, it you listen to that tape that michael cohen made of his client, donald trump when they were talking about david pecker, setting up a fund, the language they were both using was very kind of elliptical. i mean, michael cohen, you know, i m para
vote for president. you know, not only is that a big deal in and of itself, but simply doing it is a violation of the law and doing it from the white house, remember, bill clinton was impeached in the mid 90s for lying about an affair, but bill clinton didn t, you know, write hush money checks while he was in the white house. so, yes, of course, we re in a tough spot here because there is now very clear evidence that the president may have committed a serious crime while president of the united states. and just lastly, i ve been thinking about something you said last week on the program after cohen testified in front of your committee. you said the republicans on your committee didn t do the sort of castigating of cohen we saw republicans in the house oversight committee doing which was an open hearing. i wondered, did that did that apply today? did the treatment of cohen apply to devin nunes as well? yeah, again, without getting into the details of the hearing, of course. the
no comment now from the white house on this, not to us or the can the times. the paper also got no comment from jay sekulow, one of the president s tv lawyers. as for the president, himself, you ll recall he initially denied he knew anything about the payment to stormy daniels. mr. president, did you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? no. no. why did michael cohen make it if there were you d have to ask michael cohen. michael s my attorney. and you ll have to ask michael cohen. do you know where he got the money to make that payment? i don t know. no. well, that wasn t true. eventually, the president s other tv lawyer, rudy giuliani, admitted that the daniels hush money had, in fact, been funneled to cohen through a law firm and repaid by the president. so the takeaway tonight, the president of the united states was not telling the truth while saying he didn t know about the payments to a porn star. we now know he was working as the president of the uni
with us. sure. we re with goigoing to come you shortly. first, congressman jim himes joins us, member of the house intelligence committee. he was in today s michael cohen hearing. congressman himes, lanny davis says cohen, himself, authored the false line about the trump tower moscow timeline. is that your understanding as well that it was cohen and not, in fact, the president s attorneys? well, anderson, i can t get into the specifics of what has been discussed in now the two days in which michael cohen has testified before my committee, but remember, that statement that is in question here, the statement that was used by the special counsel to ultimately get michael cohen to plead guilty to lying to my committee was a deep and rich statement with all sorts of dates and people and mentions and, of course, at the time, as you know, michael cohen was part of a joint kedefense agreement. right. so it s not crazy to infer that a lot of people would have looked at that statement.
the president have to stay away from whatever his lawyers were doing with michael cohen s testimony? well, you know, he would have the incentive, if he were another president, to kind of stay away because it was sensitive, but if the president knew that the trump tower moscow, in fact, the discussions went on through june, which i presume he did, i think the question is, did he, as michael cohen, himself, has said, you know, did he sort of wink and nod to michael and say, you know, you know what you got to do, and then the testimony reflected that. i mean, we know the way donald trump operates. we ve heard it from michael cohen in his congressional testimony. and that that is what michael cohen says occurs. i think that the committee now has the job to kind of put all these pieces together and figure out whether, in fact, the president was involved, and, you know, that s the question we don t know the answer to at this