The days biggest political and news stories, with interviews and reporting from around the nation. Ricochetting across the political universe tonight which are the ones that involve appear to involve the president of the United States. That he was directed to make payments in coordination with the candidate and with the campaign of President Donald Trump to two women. One was in one involved a payment to a woman 150,000, believed to be Karen Mcdougal. The second to a payment believed to be Stormy Daniels in october of 2016, rather, for 130,000. And for that payment Michael Cohen told the court that he received restitution for that payment or he received the money back for that payment from the candidate who is believed to be donald trump. Throughout this investigation, this particular investigation which stemmed from the Special Counsels office, from robert mueller, has been done in coordination with that office and prosecuted by career and seasoned Public Corruption Public Corruption
to start considering that as a possibility. like democrats, for example, should start vocalizing that more. but no, republicans by and large are saying that the manafort trial, for example, does not have anything to do with russian election interference, that neither does cohen and of course that s just not true with regard to the manafort trial. against the backdrop, just like seth said, is all of the work that manafort did for pro-russian oligarchs in ukraine and his attempts to cover that up while he was working on the trump campaign and over the course of the decade, of course, that he was working for the pro-russian government and ukraine. it s more about reading between the lines here, but i think it s safe to say republicans are not going to abandon the president any time soon. megan, there is a little bit of an achilles heel here for the president. in july when we started to hear that michael cohen might talk about knowing that donald trump knew about the trump tower meeting,
just been convicted of very serious crimes is what it looks like he s doing. seth, talk to me about the mistrials versus the convictions. there were no acquittals. what does this mean in the context of this trial and its success? yeah, i mean, you can t look at this as anything but a sweeping victory for the prosecution. to get someone on serious bank fraud, tax evasion charges, mr. manafort will be facing essentially a life sentence given his age. whether that s 11 years or 15 years, the judge will have a decision whether to stack those crimes in sentencing. the key point to all of this may be when the smoke clears, is paul manafort going to cooperate? is he going to walk into mueller s office, say, you got me, i need a deal now. then of course the x factor that s very difficult for all of us to answer is the president going to issue a pardon. ty, i m just looking at e-mails tweets from lindsey graham that came out a little while ago where he said the american legal system is
this has nothing to do with russian collusion. ty is a federal prosecutor and justice lawyer where she worked for rod rosenstein. seth wax man is a former federal prosecutor. ty, let me just ask you, at this point what s the signal that you read into donald trump saying what he said about what a great guy manafort is and how he worked for reagan and bob dole and it s terrific and it s awful what s happening to him? is that a signal to manafort, his legal team, don t fold? well, i mean, it could be looked at that way, but i think that president trump is doing what he s always been doing, which is to distance himself entirely from whatever he can. this is a significant conviction for paul manafort. even though there s a number of mistrials, the significance of the criminal convictions are large, and so just to distance himself from someone who has
is that second trial going to be easier for the government? does paul manafort get to think, all right, if they got me on eight charges here, i m in trouble in the next one? i think what paul manafort s team is looking at right now and noticing is that the jury didn t convict on any of the conspiracy to commit bank fraud charges. so out of all the bank fraud charges, the jury only came to a guilty verdict on two of them and had a mistrial on all the conspiracy to commit bank fraud. that could be something that the mueller team needs to focus on which is, can we rely on gates? the jury could have been signalling, we re not going to convict on something we need to believe gates on, so you may see mueller s team shuffling to figure out which of their counts, which of their evidence they can sure up without needing gates. right. so, seth, when you think about this from the perspective nick gave us, the real prize is going to be russia, not the payoff to