this week also from mielk cohen s case, ami we ve learned now cooperating with investigators. we re learned trump was in the room when they discussed the hush money payments to karen mcdougall and stormy daniels. if the president did not tell the truth about knowledge of hush money payments ahead of the election, does this prohibit any increased as it let s to whether he has told the truth about want having knowledge of russian election interference? ail of these are ultimately, this is a question of did he act with willfulness and knowledge? i think if he is in the room, it becomes more and more implausible for him to suggest that he did not, a, know these payments or, b, was not making them with the intent of influencing the election. it s important to remember that that does not have to be the only motive that he had.
lawyers that flynn lied to the fbi because he was caught off guard when approached by fbi agen agents. also this week, the president s former fixer, mielk cohen, speaking out after being sentenced to three years in prison. cohen saying trump absolutely directed him to pay off a porn star and a former playmate so they would keep quiet about their sexual history with then candidate trump before he was electriced. he directed me, skps as i said as well in the plea, he directed me to make the
lying, in part, about his contacts to i arussian national. sarah murray, thank you. let s stick with cohen s case for now and discuss the impact of it. federal prosecutor jennifer rogers and former federal prosecutor kim waily. he worked on the white house investigation. federal prosecutors are now directly implicating donald trump in a federal crime. how big of a deal is this? it s a huge deal. i mean, we knew from the plea of mielk cohen that he was saying that the president directed him in doing this, but this is different because prosecutors are very careful with their words. had they wanted to, they could have just said mielk cohen says that the president directed him, but instead they use different language. they said as mielk cohen has admitted, the president directed it. that means to me that they have other evidence independent of cohen s say-so that shows that the president is the one who directed this crime.
that s supper a risk such a ris. the other issue is the pardon issue, right? is he in communications with people in the trump administration hoping to kind of lay this ground work that at the end of the day what he really wants is a pardon? those are the two big things. we know what was revealed in the documents. what we don t know and what is probably even worse for the white house in the long run is what was redacted, right? the purpose of the memos is to charge both of these guys. it doesn t go into the things that they re keeping under wraps, and to me what they were saying when they were actually trying to cooperate before this all fell apart before cohen decided not to become a real cooperator, that is the information that mueller and his team is taking and that they re going to use. that, we really know nothing about yet at all.
it s clear that the trump tower deal in moscow was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the president, and that the russian president would have been looped into that as well. then we have a moesh for why people are lying. the third is that we know that people within the current trump administration has been have been communicating with manafort, with cohen since they have been talking to prosecutors. that creates some questions about obstruction and other issues. also, we saw on the manafort filing we saw there are other unindicted people. on so many levels this is a blockbust irseries of filings. i just think the american public is a little tired and it s hard to make sense of why all of this matters, but in the cohen filing, in particular, the southern district actually filed. they do a really great job, i think, of laying out why