have you still been unable to get in touch with your son? reporter: yeah, unfortunately. the phone lines are still down. my son, of course, has his cell phone, and i haven t been able to get to him by cell phone. i haven t been able to get to anybody at his school. i have his teacher s phone number. she doesn t answer. it s not that she doesn t answer. it s just the phones are not working. it s very upsetting situation. as can you imagine. is there any information coming from the government? is there any place you have been able to find any information at all? you just heard our correspondent making her way up there. she s seeing damage still 200 kilometers from there. the silence has to have you in a bit of a state. reporter: well, you know, the suspense is killing me, as they say. i just got on the phone to the police station in part of sendai city, which is where my son s school is. since the quake hit in 3:00 in the afternoon, he probably was still at school, and i just talke
an on-going investigation, on-going criminal investigation which the fbi lawyer instructs him not to answer. if he doesn t answer, they threaten to hold him in contempt. if he does answer, that will hurt the integrity of the investigation, it may help give information directly to the president s defense team as rudy guiliani has already suggested, but the point is the investigation, they re trying to use this to discredit the investigation, to poison the jury pool, the american people, against whatever the investigation comes up with. the point of the investigation is although the president is calling it a witch hunt and republicans are doing everything to discredit it, no one is defending it, because all we know about the investigation is there have been no leaks from it which is proper. they haven t been saying we re doing a good job because, or the court filings, there have been 20 indictments, mostly of people close to the president or his campaign. we know there have been five gui
questions for cohen who s already fld criminal investigation related to his business dealings, but we re not getting any answers tonight. any from the white house. don t you think the public has a right to get some answers about these questions, that their opinions coming from russian connected entities or russian individuals connect today the kremlin through a shell company that is controlled by mr. cohen to pay off whoever? i mean doesn t the american people have a right to have some information about that? and i think there are appropriate venues and channels in which to do that, and i ve encouraged you to reach out to them to do exactly what you ve just outlined. i want to bring in now cnn contributor frank bruiny of the new york times, and april ryan and brian. you guys get the same answer every day no matter how you ask that question. i will refer you to had president s outside council. she was sort of smiling when jim was asking the question because
she knew the answer. before i get to you guys at the white house, we have this new cnn reporting now that michael cohen aggressively allegedly pitched himself to companies including the pharmaceutical giant saying he had access to the president and possibly granting them access to the white house. is that problematic? is this how the swamp works? it is problematic. because usually this stuff is done in a slightly more subtle fashion. there is selling of access in washington. that goes back a long time. but as with so many things in the trump administration this is at an extreme and with an intensity and with a shamelessness that i think takes it to a whole other level. in this role michael cohen, which is the role of personal attorney, that a personal attorney has never been.
when these briefings weren t televised. it is about the questions. it is always about the questions. the answers, you re going to get the run around, lied to. but our job, april s job, my job, everybody s in that room is to find out what s going on with this president, any president. that s a very simple job we have. so you have to have the briefings, you have to go to the briefings, you have to ask the questions. and i understand they re not always going to tell me the truth, but that doesn t mean i m not going to ask the questions. april respond. really fast. it s about the transparency piece. for the american public to see the back and forth, to understand the lay of the land and what s going on. this is the president of the united states in an historic time, a time such as this. they need to see and hear what s going onto judge for themselves as well as us lobbing the questions and getting back and getting an answer and sometimes not getting an answer. we are built into the acc