arizona house speaker rusty bowers. bowers didn t just refuse to participate in trump s campaign to, i don t know, end democracy. he testified about it publicly before the january 6th select committee laying out exactly how team trump pressured him to throw out the legitimate arizona election results even if they admitted they didn t have a scrap of evidence to back up their vote fraud claims. after saying back in june after that dramatic public testimony that he would support trump in a rematch against biden, bowers had a change of heart and is now saying that he will never, ever vote for trump again. here s what he told abc news jon karl after being the subject of attacks from donald trump. i have thought at times someone born how he was and raised how he was and he has no idea what a hard life is, and what people have to go through in the real world. he has no idea what courage is. how do you explain the hold that he has, though, on republicans including a lot of repub
your understanding that the pardon discussion was designed to make michael cohen feel more comfortable about lying to congress? that it was designed to get him to continue to lie either to congress or to other investigators? that it was designed to preclude his potential plea deal and cooperation deal with prosecutors? what s your understanding about the importance of these pardon discussions as spelled out by cohen and as you understand from the rest of your investigation? well, one of the reasons we wanted the full transcripts out there is so that the public could see them, interpret them for themselves. but i think what comes off the page is that the lawyers around the president and cohen says that they were in touch with their client, the president, as they were having these conversations about pardons. they wanted michael cohen to toe the line, and the line was we have no business deals with russia. and so they show sekolow, this prewritten statement that he s
you can imagine how damaging that would be if the president was lying about his business interests with a foreign adversary. they also thought it was important to do it after the fact. what is so damaging to our national security in all of this is the russians were on the other ending of this transaction. the russians knew the president was lying about this. you have the weird prospect of the kremlin, through dimitri peskov, someone close to putin, issuing a statement last year basically helping the president cover up and say we never followed up on these overtures when in fact the kremlin did follow up. when michael cohen talks about pardons and the discussion of a potential presidential pardon for crimes associated with this whole cover-up, is it your understanding that the pardon discussion was designed to make michael cohen feel more comfortable about lying to congress? that it was designed to get him to continue to lie either to congress or to other
implications, care lamb, and ian baasen. carol, there seems to be sort of consensus among the maximalists that despite what article 2 powers are to pardon you can t exchange fem for favors as part of a conspiracy to cover up a crime. that we re agreed on pretty much? i think we are agreed on that, chris. the problem is we re in completely unchartered waters. the pardon authority has typically been used after somebody has been convicted of a crime when all the facts are known. and here we have the opposite. we have the pardon discussion getting mixed into investigative work going on while hints are being thrown around about, on the one side, people dangling
to help understand the implications of all this pardon talk, i m joined by former u.s. acerny for the southern district and former white house counsel for president barack obama a and there seems to be a consensus that despite whatever article powers, can t exchange them for favors to cover opcrime. that we re agreed on, pretty much? i think we re all agreed on. the problem is we re in completely unchartered waters. the pardon authority has typically been used after is someone has been convicted of a crime when all the facts are known and here we have the opposite. we have the pardon discussion getting mixed in to investigative work going on while hints are being thrown