ray liota and the table in the front of the restaurant. and that moment when ray says, from the time i was a young boy, i wanted to be a gangster. and this kind of cult of gangsterism and the kind of glamour of it in the city and desuctions of it and the things michael cohen is talking about. the cult of trump and criminal enterprise in new york city is veriy y y iseductive thing. none of it forgives the crime. trump is seduced by that. he s a low-rent, two-bit version of that. it s seductive. none of it excuses the behavior. it s all illegal and immoral. he should go to jail. but it s happened to more than one person who started out as a decent human being in new york city. we re only hitting pause. when we come back, the cohen connection. we ll take you through the many,
his biggest crime was still going to work for trump. he s a good man that did some bad things. i say this knowing him personally, knowing his children and people at home can say, shut up, he s a criminal. he s still, in my mind, a decent man who got caught up in this, and he s going to pay for it now. let me ask you because donny called it a cult. jim comey called it a mob family. what do you see? well, there s close similarities between a coult an a mob family. if you studied cults you understand the focus is on one person. his beliefs that he issues from his value system and that you look at the ability to get out of that cult unscathed and we re seeing that you don t get out of the trump cult unscathed. and the other thing is you put aside your own values and value system and supplant that with the leader s system. and we re seeing that with everyone that surrounds trump, whether you call him a copo or
cult leader, there are aspects of both in those who follow him and those around him. they ll pay dearly for it. the question is, eventually in all cults, the leader himself takes a hit and goes down and i think we re watching that happen in increasingly faster motion. i think the point it s really true. there s a similarity between a cult and a gang and you know, especially inning this city. i was at a restaurant in manhattan, a nice restaurant, where cults and gangs? not a chuck e. cheese? i know you re familiar with food you can eat with your fingers. this is where you use utensils. and the guy said jokingly, do you want the michael cohen table? that was the table he used to eat at for years and years until the raid. and he s not been back since then. and at that moment i had this image of goodfellas.
emotional testimony. i m going to just go through all of this. i ve been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the fateful day that i accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen i truly admired. in fact, i know now that there is little to be admired. i want to be clear. i blame myself for the conduct which has brought me tehere tod and it was my own weakness and blind loyalty that led me to choose a path of darkness over light. he said it s like a cult. you get in there and wherever you pull up, there s people waiting and they re cheering. you get out of your car. and he goes, i got caught up in a cult. i m not deferring my blame for what i did for myself, but how it was an interesting way he said it different today in the way he was blinded. i want to say one thing on a personal note to michael. look, michael was guilty of these things. he s going to pay for his crimes.