crooked and porn stars who created the 45th president quite a title there. but you have been you were on the team that broke this story working at the wall street journal. i think it s important to walk back through it. it is something we have been talking about since 2016. a lot of investigations into trump. so kind of tell us how all of this got started, how we found out about the entire stormy daniels moment. absolutely. this is it is a long story and starts 17 years ago in 2006 at a golf tournament in lake tahoe in nevada donald trump was playing in this celebrity golf tournament and meets stormy daniels. he see a picture at the golf tournament. he invited her to dinner at his hotel suite after the tournament and they slept together. then he promised her that he would put her on the apprentice. he never did that. then flash to 2011, trump is sort of waging a kind of run for president, you know. he tried several times.
this morning we ll start with police ramping up security in new york city and washington, d.c. as former president trump calls on his supporters to protest and take our nation back. so here we go. it can be a tale of two cities. today is a day trump claimed that he might be arrested and police set up security fencing around the u.s. capitol and manhattan district attorney s office. to be clear, the manhattan d.a. hasn t actually said if or when criminal charges might be coming in the stormy daniels hush money investigation. cnn has learned the nypd has told all of its officers to be in uniform and ready to deploy today in the event that something does happen. so let s hope it does not. we want to bring in now our senior legal affairs correspondent paula reid here with us covering the twists and turns. i don t know how you keep it all together as to what case you re covering here, because there s tl have been so many. a lot of caffeine. listen, it s not really tongue in cheek, it s
used to represent trump and stormy daniels. that s right. of course then the election happens. trump wins. and trump reimburses cohen, as we later learn, once he s in office. exactly. trump agrees to pay michael cohen monthly installments and calls them legal fees, which they were not because michael cohen did not have a legal retainer. he actually didn t do any legal work for trump while he was president during this period of time. so that s what alvin bragg the manhattan d.a. is going to say were false business filings at the trump organization, saying that they were legal fees when, in fact, they were just a repayment for hush money. now we have robert costello used to be adviser to michael cohen that paula was talking about there who is the one who is now actively rebutting what michael cohen is saying. that s right. robert costello after cohen basically is under investigation, he hires costello who is a friend of giuliani, trump s lawyer at the time, to try to help him g
i know you have some new details here. so what arguments are trump s lawyers trying to make exactly? reporter: well, look, they re trying to throw out all of the work that this special grand jury did over months and movnth. they re saying the district attorney is biased and that she should be disqualified from any potential prosecution. they re saying the judge, who oversaw the grand jury, made a number of bad calls in how he was overseeing this panel. they also took issue with media interviews the judge did including one with cnn. and, of course, they took issue with the foreperson for the special grand jury going on a media blitz, insisting she had tainted the jury pool. let s take a listen back to some of the things she was saying about the special grand jury s work and the potential indictments they may have recommended. take a listen. we definitely heard a lot about former president trump. and we definitely discussed him a lot in the room. and i will say that when this list co
is just in terms of personality, just in materials of maybe drama but staying away from the ideological fight because he does not want to come off as fully anti-trump. you know trump is not going to like that, though. no. touched a nerve. so now what? yeah. we have seen trump lash out immediately as you said on truth social and trump allies will try to seize on this. but i think that the problem for desantis isn t just donald trump s campaign. it s that the other contenders are also looking at him. you ve seen folks like nikki haley, you have seen other prospective 2024 nominees point their view at desantis recently. it hazmatered. you have seen desantis do a slip in early polling. now that could be just people after the midterms when he was getting really rave reviews for those re-election, coming back to earth. we know that polling is super early at this point. but we have seen desantis increasingly on the defensive and that has shown up in the evidence quantitatively. he h