and in a footnote on the trump russia meeting, you know, that we ve had a lot of discussion about should trump go to russia, michael cohen admitted that he had lied about it and that, in fact, he had conferred with individual one, who is the president, about who was a candidate at the time about contacting the russian government before reaching out to gauge russia s interest in such a meeting. the meeting did not take place, but you will recall there was a discussion among his foreign policy team about whether in fact trump should meet with putin, and there was some interest in it. could it have been that he wanted to raise this with him? all right. jim sciutto has been going through this third document that has just been released by the special counsel involving paul manafort, the former trump campaign chairman. it is, what, ten pages. a big chunk of it is redacted but there s a lot of significant information that is not redacted, jim. well, he lied a lot. as you said, i think
few moments. first, more on the russia investigation. let s bring in our crime and justice reporter, shimon. what happens now that the president s written responses have gone to the special counsel? what do they do? yeah, it s clearly the biggest question right now, what is mueller up to? what s next? and time and time again, any time there is some development, we always ask, what does this mean, what s next? we really don t know. look, i think from rudy guiliani s comments, they do perhaps expect that mueller will come back to them for followup. they have the questions now, the mueller team was in today. so they have been reviewing them. they probably started reviewing them the minute they got the questions. and, you know, there could likely be some followup. i think one of the or two important points in this is the two questions that mueller has asked, has sought answers for from the president in these written responses was about don jr., the russia meeting, obviously, with that
ami and he was interested in bringing them in. he says on the tape, what happens if david pecker gets hit by a truck. i ve heard plausible arguments about the cohen side put the stuff out and the trump side put the stuff out. there are good arguments on both sides about the game theories of what you re trying to do. in the end i don t think it has anything to do with the evidence. the evidence is the evidence. it will end up in front of a court or not. the evidence will speak to something provably true or not. i think you re right in terms of the narrative, like who cares about michael cohen on some level? in the end the question is what did donald trump know, when did he know it, how involved was he, any claims that he s he was somehow distant from this, you pointed out a couple times today, distant from the dirty business of the women in the payments, the june 2016 russia meeting. all of these things are now collapsing on themselves and we re getting new characters, like his pe
about what you re trying to do. in the end i don t think it has anything to do with the evidence. the evidence is the evidence. it will end up in front of a court or not. the evidence will speak to something true or not. i think you re right in terms of the narrative, like who cares about michael cohen on some level? in the end the question is what did donald trump know, when did he know it, how involved was he, any claims that he s he was somehow distant from this, you pointed out a couple times today, distant from the dirty business of the payment to the women, the june 2016 russia meeting. all of these things are now collapsing on themselves and we re getting new characters, like his personal accountant who now is in this picture, who i keep hearing the same cliches, knows where the bodies are buried. we used to say that about michael cohen. now we re saying it about the accountant. soon we ll be saying it about other people. more and more drexel burnham lambert the overall pictur
investigating this in the case of cohen, southern district of new york, russia meeting, the mueller investigation. they have one interesting piece of information. that is don jr. spoke to congress and said something. that would make it a crime to have lied. that s true. there are other potential crimes that cohen s information, if true, would bring everybody in the circle closer to criminal activity. i mean forget even for the moment, the stormy daniel es and other payoffs. there is any aid or assistance are conspiracy to aid a foreign government and interfering with an election, which is also a potential crime, so there are a number of potential crimes. but, when it goes to the michael cohen credibility issue, where rudy giuliani and trump are being a little disingenuous, giuliani s suggestion that a government would never use a