enquirer, american media, they went through a company, a shell organization essentially to make this happen and they doctored the accounting after the fact. people have said, well, trump s defense has vacillated from i didn t know to i did know but it was totally normal and fine. why the shell companies and why is everyone lying about this? why is trump lying about this? because it comes from the top. the litany of lies from this administration and president on this subject all falls apart. we see it over and over again and the entire story of the russia investigation, denials fall apart in the face of facts and them they try to normalize it. i think the orrin hatch moment is really helpful, actually. i appreciate his candor. i think it s helpful because when so many democrats who are wringing their hands, now republicans will see the light, finally republicans when they have this hard evidence, where it shows that donald trump directed this to try to sway the campaign, now th
so it was a bogus case, but even after that whitaker was like, yeah, i still you know, i m okay with what i just did, which was a clear politicization of the prosecutorial process. good point. that was an acquittal of the most high profile case. marcy, there was an obviously obvious conflict, both the fbi investigation but the question of what exactly was funding this bizarre shell organization he was running. right. so this organization and the other thing that happened is he first started making $60,000 a year there. by the end he was making like $600,000. he gets hired and doing poe dunk stuff and starts going after hillary and gets a huge raise, he starts advising trump via cnn appearances, how to deep six the mueller inquiry and he gets another big raise. you re right, we have no idea who was paying him. it was laundered through a bunch
that was an acquittal of the most high profile case. marcy, there was an obviously obvious conflict, both the fbi investigation but the question of what exactly was funding this bizarre shell organization he was running. right. so this organization and the other thing that happened is he first started making $60,000 a year there. by the end he was making like $600,000. he gets hired and doing poe dunk stuff and starts going after hillary and gets a huge raise, he starts advising trump via cnn appearances, how to deep six the mueller inquiry and he gets another big raise. you re right, we have no idea who was paying him. it was laundered through a bunch of dark money and the name kept changing too. so it s this kind of quintessential suspicious group. and so we don t know what kind of conflict or who exactly was paying for him to you know, and he was supposed to be
it was inactive since he arrived. it s paid him well over a million dollars. in the past we know he was making $79,000 with a modest law practice he had in iowa. what is the suspicioissuesuspic? what is going on? it s a fascinating thing. we re pulling on this and it will take a while to get to the root of it. effectively it was a shell organization according to specialist we spoke with. it had no funding and when they changed its name and its purpose, an anonymous donor gave 600,000 to jump start it in 2014. since then has given a total of $3.4 million. they haven t clarified what the new mission was despite some inquiries to find out more detail about it. there are a lot of conservative groups like this that exist and
in miller s team that they are following the money a little bit there has been a lot of investment in condos through shell organization since trump became a candidate and there is questions of how that ties back to countries like russia so there are a lot of different strands that could be pursued and you know steve benen has bear witness to a lot of the conversations that have taken place around those dealings and it s not just about the money right because i mean there s multiple directions that this investigation could take right right just walk us through some of the possible scenarios because on the one side there is this to ties potentially to russia. chucks and of justice as well. yeah so i mean we have on tape a lester holt interview you know the basically what was the the the big bang point of this investigation was the firing of james komi and after the that occurred president trump went on television and said he didn t like where the the russian investigation was headed basi