it was an informal relationship. what do you think about this defense that the president has, that sean hannity s backing him up on? well, apparently, he forgot that there s a tape of him discussing the payment before the payments were made. did he just forget that? and i think what makes sense is, two things. one, when s testifying further, he needs to go into more details about the making of that tape, exactly when it happened, who if anybody else was in the room, the complete conversation, everything that he had talked about with weisselberg before. every conversation they had after, and really get into details about trump s involvement in the payment, and not just the generalized, you know, he directed me to do it, but every nitty-gritty detail. the other thing is that sean hannity is going to need to come in and testify about what those conversations were. now, recognize that sean hannity s comment is in keeping with what the president told cohen to do. you say you re responsi
he s the one who decides how to structure the payment in the stormy daniels case. he s the classic understated, keep your head down, accountant. but he knows where everything is, and trump has kept him close, and he doesn t figure, at 71, to be a guy who s going to lie when forced to it. the immediate thing, stephanie, is there s probably going to be an immunity battle. he s going to demand it. and if he gets it, that will have complications for the mueller probe. but in terms of chapter and verse of all the financial transactions that cohen detailed on wednesday, thhe is the guy. yikes. cynthia, let s talk felix sater. this is the russian-born, one-time business associate of the president. he s the guy who worked on that plan, the moscow trump tower project with michael cohen. he s going to be testifying publicly on march 14th, before the house intel committee. what could this thing what could he really bring to the table? i mean, we ve seen him do tv
interviews before. he brings to the table yeah, he brings to the table the corroboration of cohen about the manner in which the deal was negotiated. he may be able to shed some light on conversations with the children. for example, don junior apparently said something in his senate testimony, that he knew, tangentially, that sater was aware. so it will be interesting to see whether he corroborates don junior or contradicts don junior and where that meets. we know that adam schiff thinks that don junior lied when it came to this specific area. he could provide prior consistent statements about what cohen was telling them about the briefing. he could provide us information about the russians we re seeing, about the deal. there s just a lot of information. and if i could just highlight one thing harry just said that i think is really important, it has to do with this immunity issue and weisselberg. because, remember oliver north and admiral poindexter had their convictions overturned
all of these strands as i said a moment ago are coming together. they are really inseparable, i think. what cohen also did is he gave us a picture, a believable picture of the man that s consistent with what others have said who know and have worked with trump. if you talked, as i have, to real estate people in new york they wouldn t do business with him. they have always regarded him as a grifter, a conman, a fraud. that s what cohen was telling us. now we have the chief financial officer of the trump organization. he s now in the crosshairs, if you want to put it that way of the investigator s sights in terms of testimony that can be compelled from him. it is significant, i think that we haven t seen anything of don,
consistently denied by all parties since 2011, this is what michael cohen sounded like yesterday. play this. is there any other wrongdoing or illegal act that you are aware of regarding donald trump that we haven t yet discussed today? yes. again, those are part of the investigation that s currently being looked at by the southern district of new york. we re talking about two different men there, michael. what did you make of his testimony yesterday? he s reversed himself for some months. it s true, as you said, when we initially were reporting on that, he the things you read were referring to whether or not trump had a sexual encounter with stormy daniels. cohen denied that. he actually at the time didn t address the hush money payment. it happened. he knew it did happen. he was defending president trump a long time after we reported it in january of 2018 until he came