or not they ll retry, and the d.c. case. the president has that power. he hasn t exercised that power yet, and these cases have been pending for some time. it looks to me, feels to me that, and this may be completely the opposite of the way the president would think, but it feels to me that the more the cases get tried and the more that it gets public, that manafort essentially didn t pay taxes, and benefitted in this extravagant way financially, and remember, the september case is going to be all about the political side as well. so it is the heat is going to continue to turn up. i think personally i think it gets harder and harder for the president to pardon him. jeff, do you agree with that, that it gets harder? again, this is a president who often, that may be the conventional wisdom, and a sensible way of looking at it. it doesn t mean it s the way the president views it. you know, conventionally, you know, no president would even consider pardoning someone who was so close
talking about the payments to the two women, donald trump s story keeps changing about it. at any trial that would occur in the house or somewhere else or in the senate or somewhere else, you explain to the people who are the deciders of fact, if there was nothing to hide here and you weren t involved, why do you keep lying about it? this is as swampy as it gets. thanks very much. jeff is going to stay with us because i want to explore more of the political angles preet was talking about. joining us is jen psaki, and former senator rick santorum. senator santorum, is there any scenario where this isn t a big problem for the president, whether it s political or, you know, well political, let s say? no, you focused, i think rightfully so, on the cohen plea bargain. i don t think the manafort guilty plea guilty conviction is problematic for the president. but michael cohen s admission or pleading guilty to, quote, cooperating with the president
to give a factual basis for why you re guilty. so one could argue, i don t think this is right, and i m sure giuliani and others have been arguing this. that it was a gratuitous slap by someone who has been left behind and now has an ax to grind with the president, to throw this in in open court under oath. it still is the case, he said it. would prosecutors have accepted this agreement if they didn t believe michael cohen? i think if prosecutors thought he was lying about that aspect of why he did what he did, i think they would have a problem accepting his plea agreement. they would have to say something in court. so i think it s enormously significant. it s not clear to me, though, not knowing what other evidence there is to back up michael cohen, who is, by the way, a criminal and a liar and now a convicted one, you need something else to back that up. you pointed out that this president go ahead, jeff. if i could just add, preet is exactly right that this allegation by c
hypocrite. what would you call it? look, he made a mistake. i mean, i think a victim of karma? no, look. a hypocrite is someone who is out there deliberately doing something that he himself actually agrees with. i don t think general flynn would tell you he was representing turkey without acknowledging it and writing op-eds about it, and pretending not to say it. he s a hypocrite. yeah, all i would say is i think it s a little more complex than that. having said all that i saw the video. having said all that, you have to look at the president and the people he hired at the time he hired them were not other than michael cohen, who i will concede to you is one of those, you know, smarmy characters. manafort has been a smarmy character for, it seems like, if not decades, at least years. given what he has now been convicted of. in fact, the president will tell you he was a smarmy character long before i ever got involved
very troublesome for the president here. the fact is if president trump were president right now, he could be indicted for these campaign finance violations, couldn t he? absolutely. when you look at the way the prosecutors have described it, when you look at the way michael cohen described it in court, these documents, it s criminal information, so it s essentially laying everything out. if this was an indictment and trump, donald trump was not the president, we could be looking at an indictment against the president. we could also, you know, if this was an indictment, look at this as the president being an unindicted co-conspirator. think of that, and certainly, the ramifications of that. it s really serious here. we ll see what happens from here. the other thing in these documents that the prosecutors have talked about was that michael cohen, and we don t know who these people are, was working with other people on the campaign as well. on some of this influence. and that certain