outmanufactured by sophisticated legal and lobbying campaigns. certainly has happened in washington before when you re dealing with rich people. right. what does it tell you here that we re learning more about the way the trump administration is letting off this putin oligarch and congress, to be clear, has a majority in both houses that wants to stop this. it s only that there are enough republicans to filibuster it that it wasn t stopped yet. right. well, the larger question that we have here now, ari, we can no longer say there is no connection between the president of the united states and russia there are too many people involved. you have his son meeting in trump tower with russian representatives. you have this sort of deal with an oligarch. you have manafort handling polling information. you have rudy giuliani saying he was still conducting deals at this point. so the question for congress certainly on the democratic side in the house is not whether or not trump is connec
kgb too the head of the government. soviet union and this will be like having a document by the current head of the russian fssb or gru directly are to putin to say here s an offer that is being made by senators so and so on behalf of your donald trump or whoever. and a all laid out right there and instead professor we re left with there was a meeting with donald jr. and some others and nothing actually took place. or now we read in newspaper that perhaps manafort shared polling information with somebody or something like that. we have caused for impeachment with calls for indictment we have all kinds of calls this is the same media the same media that had completely ignored what you ve discoveredia what you ve written about. what others have discovered original documentation and if we had a prosecutor at that time a special prosecutor at that time who was of a mindset, with to
governments, non-friendly governments? anyone else? i thought it was the outside polling data that was the wrong data. i m making light of this because of the absurdity of what rudy giuliani said. we cannot connect these dots. the special counsel is trying to see if they can be connected. if you have polling data that say, here are our strengths, here are our weaknesses. why they have this inactive polling information, that s gold. sirens kind of went off across the board. okay, this is actual substantive documentation of something trading hands that could have a tangible effect on how someone would operate if they wanted to mess around with the election. i think the difficulty with rudy giuliani right now, and i think a lot of us heard it last night and thought, does he know something is coming? we ve seen this before, where he looks like he steps in something, when in fact he is laying the groundwork for sgc t
to go to. and really it s in some ways not surprising at all. first of all he changes his story a lot. but the evidence at that point, in my opinion, technically it s already established there s collusion. you have manafort s meeting and giving the polling information. you have other folks who have lied about contacts. that case has already been established. what s not established is did somebody in the campaign authorize that? who else knew about it? d does it go to the president? but at this point it s closed book on the fact that there was contact between trump s campaign and the russians. david gregory, let s just parse what rudy giuliani said again, because, you know, there s one school of thought which is, wow, he really sort of shoots from the hip and he accidentally says things on camera. and then if you look at what he has said over the past year, sometimes it previews that a
campaign manager is slipping polling information to the russians? how could the president not know when his own son orchestrated a meeting in the trump tower with russian representatives to get dirt on hillary clinton? it all looks like the president knew a lot. but the defense here is he didn t know. we ll have to see what mueller has. i m assuming there may be other things because the mueller investigation has been thorough and detailed in every case when an indictment is filed. i think eventually we ll see more of the connection. thank you for your expertise this morning. let s dive deeper. spectrum news political anchor errol lewis and sun ming kim. errol, giuliani makes statements intentionally. he didn t back away afterwards. he insisted to chris that he never said it which wasn t true.