white house for donald trump are donald trump and jared kushner. joining us now, david frum, senior editor for the atlantic, professor samuel bule. and mike isikoff, chief investigative reporter for yahoo news. professor, i want to go to you and get as many legal opinions as i can on that meeting in trump tower and what the legal liabilities are for the people involved. the jared kushner liability obviously includes the one i just described, the fact that he left it off his disclosure form and that carries serious criminal possible penalties. but what about donald trump jr. and paul manafort in that room? the statute is pretty clear that it s a federal crime to solicit a campaign contribution from a foreign source. it s pretty clear that anything of value can count as a campaign
and mike isikoff, chief investigative reporter for yahoo news. professor, i want to go to you and get as many legal opinions as i can on that meeting in trump tower and what the legal liabilities are for the people involved. the jared kushner liability obviously includes the one i just described, the fact that he left it off his disclosure form and that carries serious criminal possible penalties. but what about donald trump jr. and paul manafort in that room? the statute is pretty clear that it s a federal crime to solicit a campaign contribution from a foreign source. it s pretty clear that anything of value can count as a campaign contribution and certainly opposition research is something that s routinely paid for in the political world, and this could be something of value. certainly the e-mail suggests they thought it might be quite valuable. so the question really is was there a solicitation of such a contribution in that meeting?
it is kind of terrifying probably for them to try to speak out. malcolm, to your point on that, you have said, you ve called this the greatest one of the greatest intelligence ops ever. ever. but to michael s point, here an interesting situation. to the extent they want the sanctions lifted, it also strikes me that the political heat is so high, lifting sanctions would be so incriminating amidst this that that s almost a no go. right? well, i don t see any evidence of that. certainly coming out of this white house. i mean, vladimir putin says for trump to have a meeting with lavrov and kislyak and the next day he does it right after he fires his fbi director. vladimir putin, you know, works through michael flynn to get, you know, his intelligence collection facilities in the united states reopened. voila. that s occurring. sanctions being lifted is just a matter of course. i don t think that donald trump has any intention of crossing vladimir putin on that point. do you thi
there is still an ongoing policy review about sanctions. right. these options are still on the table. all right. michael isikoff, thanks for your time tonight. appreciate it. still to come, did vladimir putin just admit something president trump spent months deny something i ll explain ahead. plus tonight s thing 1, thing 2 starts after the break.
exactly. it could have been in his capacity as a transition official. but sergey gorkov was appointed by putin. he s the ceo of a sanctioned russian bank. there was really no legitimate reason kushner would have been meeting with him. thanks for your time tonight. still to come, exclusive new reporting from yahoo! investigative reporter mike isikoff on the trump administration s secret efforts to lift russian sanctions as soon as they took office. this is a really important report. and does leaving the paris climate akwoccord really put america first? in two minutes. .it starts a chain reaction. .that s heard throughout the connected business world. at&t network security helps protect business, from the largest financial markets to the smallest transactions, by sensing cyber-attacks in near real time and automatically deploying countermeasures. keeping the world of business connected and protected. that s the power of and.