high stakes legal and political fights like this. of course it s a message to president trump that cohen is no longer on the team, that he is clearly signalling he knows lots of significant, potentially damaging revelations that he can make against the president. i guess one question i have is why now, why are they releasing the tape right now. is this a message that is aimed at the prosecutors? is it about cohen trying to get a plea bargain or deal of some sort with the prosecutors? or is it fundamentally a message for donald trump and his legal team or perhaps to both? but clearly that seems to be the intent. it is a fragmentary tape. we don t have the full context surrounding it. it s hard to draw hard and fast substantive judgments about what s in there. clearly it s revelatory. it is we have to remember too this michael cohen case is in
just sign anything put in front of him. if they can t put things in front of him, they re going to be under attack, and trump is going to go after them as well. the most remarkable thing, and the most revelatory came down to the moment in which a bunch of republican senators said the bill before us is a disaster and a fraud. i m quoting directly. we re going to vote for it as long as you promise the bill we re voting for doesn t become law. i thought to myself. you know what that is, they miss barack obama because what they all miss they all miss voting for stuff that the president can sign, could veto. they miss essentially playing legislator as opposed to actually being one, and this is them attempting to role play their way back in time. that s not how it works anymore, and you saw last night they re not ready to actually legislate. last night was a humiliating
number one, if there was nothing wrong with any of this and it had been disclosed up front, there would be a whole loss less steam and momentum behind this. second is, there s been this sort of consistent question a among aides inside the white house about, do they know what they need to know in order to address these questions? yes. and this suggests another example of, no. more information coming out that is, you know, revelatory to a lot of people trying to help put the president s communications strategy forward, policy strategy forward, foreign policy approach forward. it you re h.r. mcmaster learning about this, if you re the defense secretary or the secretary of state and you re learning about it, it necessarily effects all of your next moves, the way you communicate them. a terrible thing to find out at this point. reince priebus sitting on live national television. saying it s a nothing burger. five minutes later, everything he said was undermined. i was going to s
misspoke. again, i think this is typical staff work trying to figure out how to deal with the situation at hand. i don t think it s revelatory. if you look at the e-mail s of donald trump s staff i m sure there s a ton of this stuff going on about positioning and the like. the clinton team is not verifying any of this. we have seen there were doctored e-mails coming out of the russian espionage. i can t verify that it is but even if it is authentic i can t see these internal machinations provide new information. steve, go ahead. i disagree. i think there is a bombshell in there and the bombshell is the president, apparently, according to those staffers did not tell him the truth. he needs to be confronted. he claimed he learned from the media like the rest of us about this hidden e-mail server and in fact it looks like that s not true so they need to answer that but here s what s more important for americans is donald trump has never been a politician, he s never had the reins of p