buzzfeed s reporting, just wreet brand new op-ed calling for impeachment proceedings to begin. first as someone who wrote the special counsel regulations. and i want to refer you back to what chris murphy said today. there is an increasing sense i think of urgency and democratic tension building about the nature of an inquiry being conducted in secret for in the midst of what is fundamentally a public matter of the utmost import that all of ous need to know about. yeah. that s obviously a problem with any criminal investigation. it s really important to have a criminal investigation because crimes were committed as mueller has himself shown by getting criminal convictions of michael flynn, the president s national security advisor, the numero uno
longer than it nilinitially had been said. he was charged for lying about that to congress and there were other details. there was higher level communications about the nature of the deal than had been revealed by the president. what do you think importance of those connections are to the overall story? i did some reporting early on in the cycle of the drama about why donald trump in 30 years of trying to build something in moscow and no one took him sooriously and they thought he was too sketchy and when the russians think you re too sketchy, you have a problem. suddenly things took a sudden shift and people on the russian side suddenly started taking them seriously. when did that happen? around the summer of 2015.
special counsel s office and character zagsz of documents and testimony obtained by this office regarding michael cohen s congressional testimony are not accurate. we should note other reporting on this exact topic went uncorroborated for months until it showed up almost word for word in mueller s court filings. so it s hard to know what s true this time. there is already public evidence supporting the latest report. michael cohen s own lawyers claim that in the case of his false statements, the conduct was intended to benefit client one and in accordance with client one s directive. that central allegation that the president of the united states told cohen to live, maybe the clear cut of all the crimes this president has been accused. so much so that came up earlier this week in the conformation hearing for his nominee of attorney general as an example of an obvious crime.
yeah, yeah it was. and what else they were lying about is also interesting. it turns out not only was donald trump lying, donald trump jr.ent with to russia many times trying to get a deal and said this place is kind of scary and corrupt and i don t really understand it. and the new york times did corroborate this part of the buzzfeed story that donald trump jr. was briefed on this ongoing deal and he sounds like he lied to congress about this as well. when he said that he was only pu periferally involved. ivanka has denied she knew anything when a lot of the reporting suggestests she knew a lot more than a little. one of the key things he i find clarifying when you re thinking about the campaign the motivations of candidate trump in say his refusal to ever say a single bad thing about vladimir
they declined to comment on it. and what do you make of that time frame? i dont know. year still reporting and i think obviously the special counsel prefers to control the timeline and for reasonable reasons wants to operate on his own timeline and without revealing a lot of details. i think he s made these statements and we d really like to know what he s talking about. ben editor and chief of buzzfeed news. jouning me is a correspondent for gq and has been reporting on the trump/russia relationship for a long time. putting aside for a moment the facts in dispute, the buzzfeed story. what we do know is the trump tower moscow program went on way