somebody might flip, but instead he gives this implicit instruction hoping that they can get away with doing it like that. i think that s why this is mentioned so carefully in the documents we see today. jeremy bash, if we fast forward and look at this a certain way and someone comes up to you and says wait a minute, all of this was about hotels and money and hotel rooms that had the trump brand name on them? will you be confident saying yes it appears that was the motivation here? no, i d put it differently. i think this was about leverage. it was about financial leverage over donald trump to make him indebted to the russian federation in the way they lent him money and did business deals with him so when he came into office he would owe them big time. it was also about political leverage. their interference in the campaign set up a situation in which they were able to demand during the transition that the incoming trump administration do certain things for them and guess what, th
he s almost hanging his family members out to dry here. we know from cohen and from the filing that he was briefing family members on the moscow tower project and so is our president ready to distance himself from his family members and say i didn t know what they were doing, that s on them. i think we re coming close to seeing someone with the last name of trump or kushner in criminal indictments and we need to determine whether the president is going to stand up and say i knew about this or whether he will let them hang out to dry. and jeremy, you know this because you ve been around a while. it s a big distinction to journalists first of all but also a lot of washington-based lawyers. when something goes into the white house, when something reaches into the white house you hear people opt inside say just keep it out of the white house. these documents today reaped into the white house this year,
we have a better-than-average white house correspondent on this panel. the president responded to today s court filings related to his former personal lawyer michael cohen by saying, quote, totally clears the president. thank you. we should take pains to note that no serious person who read these court documents tonight came away with that same take away. and earlier tonight we got this summation of what it all means from the government s former lawyer before the supreme court, this is neal katyal and he said this about today s filing from the feds here in new york. this is southern district prosecutors, his own justice department, trump s own appointees saying that you, mr. president, are directly implicated in federal felonies and they have to do with campaign finance violations. that s another thing trump has been gambling on, i can say no collusion, no collusion with russia, and whether this document says there s a whole separate thing going on here. if i m the president tonigh
troubles end tonight. frank, what neal katyal said that we just ran is devastating for donald trump. well, and let s go to the other clip you played where trump was actually saying to the best of my knowledge no one around me is talking to russians. he s almost hanging his family members out to dry here. we know from cohen and from the filing that he was briefing family members on the moscow tower project and so is our president ready to distance himself from his family members and say i didn t know what they were doing, that s on them. i think we re coming close to seeing someone with the last name of trump or kushner in criminal indictments and we need to determine whether the president is going to stand up and say i knew about this or whether he will let them hang out to dry. and jeremy, you know this because you ve been around a while. it s a big distinction to journalists first of all but
trump was securing the republican nomination for the presidency, vladimir putin was authorizing a direct payment to him and his business of hundreds of millions of dollars. if that doesn t establish a very troubling pattern of financial impropriety and potentially outright bribery, i m not sure what does. peter baker, put it that way and it sounds serious. in your early reporting, is there any accounting yet from inside this white house that anyone there views this as the deathly serious moment that it clearly is? well, it is deathly serious. it s a big moment in this investigation. we re starting to connect the dots. what we ve had up until now is a series of desperate factual scenarios that didn t necessarily tell us the whole picture and the one person who does is robert mueller. he s showing his hand one card at a time and it reminds us, one