make one of these agreements with you, you better abide by it. exactly. and tim, michael hoe kcohen, know him, you ve covered trump world for a long time, trump nation as your book calls it. donald trump loves thugs. he loved roy cohn, he leaves steve bannon, he likes michael cohen. he likes bravado and people who take it to the street. cohen has always rolled that way. one of the interesting things in his statement that he provided to the intelligence committee is what he didn t say. he said i wasn t involved with targeting ads to destabilize the clinton campaign and i wasn t involved with russian hackers. but no one ever specifically said that s what investigators were interested in him about. i think what they re interested in are financial quid pro quos and deals he tried to engineer as tradeoffs for policy benefits
message to anyone else, if we make one of these agreements with you, you better abide by it. exactly. and tim, michael cohen, you know him, you ve covered trump world for a long time, trump nation as your book calls it. donald trump loves thugs. he loved roy cohn, he leaves steve bannon, he likes michael cohen. he likes bravado and people who take it to the street. cohen has always rolled that way. one of the interesting things in his statement that he provided to the intelligence committee is what he didn t say. he said i wasn t involved with targeting ads to destabilize the clinton campaign and i wasn t involved with russian hackers. but no one ever specifically said that s what investigators were interested in him about. i think what they re interested in are financial quid pro quos and deals he tried to engineer as tradeoffs for policy benefits
particulars other than his own involvement with certain people being investigated. i think the key things here and ann gestured towards this in the times story, they noted that mueller s tacticings are i to an organized crime investigation. i think where this starts for trump and his family, collusion is an issue, but the stuff that really looms is potential obstruction of justice or any financial quid pro quos. did trump or his relatives jared kushner in particular negotiate favors like lifting trade sanctions or economic sanctions on russia in exchange for either business deals or loans? i think coming up behind them is manafort. and whatever manafort talked with them about over last 18 months. and clearly he was under surveillance. i think that s an issue that s going to come home to roost. i think they have a lot to be afraid of here. surveillance doesn t mean it
republicans past and present how these folks can bring the pain and how donald trump exploited that before. now he will be on the receiving end of it for a little bit. shannon: i want to play a little bit of what a democrat out of vermont had to say about what they discussed this moderate group of house republicans and democrats with the president. he didn t make specific quid pro quos. it s clear he he made it clear he has a view on immigration, on the wall and security on wanting to go to a merit-based system. he did not make it quid pro quo. in fact, i advocated that we not make it quid pro quo. shannon: it seems with all the statements having come out and everybody agrees there was no tie of the wall to daca. a lot of people are asking why the president is not using that leverage. i would say this, because the president seems to have lit upon the most popular solution
here. and what s interesting about the e-mails today, lawrence, is that file ix seder has had a relationship with donald trump going back to about 2002. he wasn t just a broker for the trump organization. he was a principal at bay rock. they developed the trump soho hotel together. felix seder is a career criminal with organized crime ties and the president maintained a relationship with him for over a decade and routinely said in public, i don t know him well. i m distancing myself from him. now with these e-mails, you see the president is not distant from felix seder, and in fact felix seder is the point person on a deal the trump organization is trying to do in moscow. it raises this quid pro quo issue that i think is going to be central to the mueller investigation, going beyond just collusion in the election. it s were there favors sought from the kremlin in return for certain quid pro quos? and people ix seder kept an office in trump tower during some of this period where donal