to build trump tower moscow. maybe it had to do with the fact a trump tower meeting occurred with the russian delegation asking for dirt on hillary clinton. may it hard to do with the fact a russia oligarch employed paul manafort to have him doing lobbying. what did trump do? he not only benefited but rewarded it. tom winter, if you want to go back to see how dangerous the so-called russian hoax was, you don t have to listen to msnbc primetime hosts. you don t have to read the new york times editorial page. just read the republican senate intel committee report. that s a very good point. when marco rubio was running that committee, talking about the danger to america s national security that donald trump s contacts, his campaign s contacts with russia posed. and they actually advanced mueller s report understanding of that.
deflated the price of properties, or does it mean someone further down the line doctored the documents and changed the numbers? it is the right question and probably too soon to say. accountants will tell you they re only as good as the information they re provided. so if they were provided with the wrong types of information, they were not provided with the underlying documentation or somebody instructed them to make material changes to it, those are all the types of things we will have to see what comes out in the course of these various investigations that you referenced. john, what s your take on it? well, the document that they released last night, if i read that document right, suggests that the accounting firm has already provided over 500,000 pieces of documentation. right. there s a bates number in the lower corner. which means there s 525,000 at minimum, which is a very large number. the second thing is that and this i ll ask you, tom. i saw some speculation from
about this allegation going back to december of 2017 because he s the one who asked michael sussman about it. michael sussman was honest about it back in december 2017 and cash patel when he was homeland the intelligence committee staffer, when he was working in the white house, when he was the chief of staff for dod, he did nothing about this because he knew that all rodney joffe was doing was trying to keep the white house safe from hackers. that s what this is about. john heilemann. well, i m just curious, mary. where do you think to the extent you can kind of discern, a, what the motivations are of some of these players, of durham, for instance, and where does this go from here in the aftermath of this pseudo scandal that we are seeing? well, the durham investigation is in real trouble. one of the things that and tom mentioned this briefly, but one of the things that sussman revealed overnight is that durham didn t interview like
i think when you look at the totality of this, you know, time will tell whether or not payments were made and what those payments were for and whether or not it had to do with research into alfa bank, which is something that most news organizations didn t even touch. you will never find a story with my name on, pete williams name on it, i will throw the whole kitchen sink of reporters in here on the alfa bank allegations. you know why? because it is so confounding and so hard to follow, which is kind of interesting, john heilemann. this pleading, which is indecipherable unless you have an agenda and you want to shoot first and ask questions later, which is what they did legally. this is confusing as the initial story. i remember when the initial story came out and i read through it an i was like, what? everybody did. that s why nobody paid attention to it the first time because it was so convoluted looking about dns lookups. let s pause for a second and, tom, i ll ask you.
starts. that s an information warfare campaign. i think the biden administration has done a phenomenal job of declassifying information, calling putin s bluff, saying any predicate he might concoct to invade is fabricated. in that way they maintained alliance unity, deterred putin, allowed us to close our embassy, move 5,000 troops to poland and send a clear signal if putin invades the west will be ready. i think the biden administration has handled this stage, stage zero, absolutely perfectly. jeremy bash and tom winter, stay with us because we will dig into the story that donald trump and his allies are claiming is bigger than watergate. bigger than watergate. lots of luck with that. we ll talk about the facts behind this story. by the way, there s so many things wrong on this cover, it is going to be it is going to be an interesting few weeks ahead. i hope you didn t watch fox news at all last night. oh, no. no, no, no, i actually spent