Between the two leaders. Was kim nice to imprison them in the first place . Well have full analysis of that. Also this morning, more questions around whether President Trumps personal Attorney Michael Cohen was peddling access to and cashing in on his association with donald trump. The Washington Post reports that cohen told an associate in the summer of 2017, quote, im crushing it. Well dig in to the implications for cohen and the trump white house. Welcome to morning joe. Its thursday, may 10th. With us we have msnbc contributor, Mike Barnicle. Washington anchor for bbc world news america, katty kay, and in washington, columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post, David Ignatius and nbc news capitol hill correspondent and host of kasie d. C. On msnbc kasie hunt. Let me turn right back. Joe, you tweeted last night, bloodthirsty tyrants get no credit for kidnapping americans, using them as bait and releasing them for cheap headlines. North korea is a terrorist state. That has lied to the United States for decades. And we know that 22yearold Otto Warmbier, was sent home in june of last year and later died because he was in such bad shape. Joe, you tweeted that late last night. Yeah i tweeted that late last night. I wont tell you what i was doing. What were you doing late last night . Were you up watching dont, dont. Lets, let lets just say our bull pen did not perform the eighth and ninth inning as it should have performed. But i dont want to talk about it. Congratulations, willie. A couple of great games and last night, red sox, it was back and forth affair. Red sox, 65, until the eighth inning and then the yankees just stepped on the gas. The playoff atmosphere, the stadium was rocking, Mike Barnicle was there. The yankee lineup, 19 is brutal. Yup. Exactly. Where were we . Where were we . Let me just say congratulations you guys are in first place. On may 10th. Thats awesome. Ive got to tell you, it felt really good being in first place, april 22nd. But its a long, as weve all said, both sides have said, its a long, long season. But i think as long as david price decides to show up this year and earn at least 15 of his multimilliondollar salary, well have a very good pennant race, mike, right . Absolutely. Its not even memorial day. We hang in there, the yankees have a very, very good team. 19 is brutal. Pitching to them. Look on the bright side, the celtics beat the 76ers last night. You there. Go. We wont wont ask you any questions about the red sox yankees game. Were not going to be talking about that game any more. But when you hear, when i hear donald trump talking about kim jong un, in terms of nice, saying hes nice its just, first of all, who do you call nice, who has kidnapped three americans . Who beat up and murdered a kid from cincinnati. Who visited there the last year or two. It just leads me to worry, what we were saying yesterday. As you know, one of my chief complaints during the iran deal. Was that america seemed to be overeager for a deal and we didnt get the terms that i personally thought at the time we could have gotten. It seems like were doing the same thing with donald trump. He rushes in to west wing offices when hes not supposed to be in meetings, saying hey, lets get together and have a summit. None of the groundwork has been laid. This seems like hes making the classic, classic diplomatic mistake of thinking that he can charm his way into a win, on diplomatic stage. Joy, i think its certainly true that you could fall in love with your own deal. And that you can begin to read your own clippings, as we say in our business. I think on the question of this is this deal being adequately prepared, the visits of mike pompeo to pyongyang to get these three detainees and bring them back have clearly been pretty substantial. Pompeo began to make his first real remarks while he was in pyongyang saying that kim jong un was setting appropriate conditions for the summit. That they were preparing and laying out the nature of the deal that President Trump will offer. He said north Korean People deserve all of the benefits of entering the modern world in exchange for the concessions that theyre going to be making. So i do think that process is Going Forward. You have to say looking at last night, footage. This is what president s get to do when people are released, hostages, prisoners are released. President s go to Andrews Air Base and they walk them home and thats a moment where all americans should take pride. At these people coming back. Yes, there is the danger of getting overly wrapped up and my friend kim, kim, the generous, release for these prisoners. My sense is we arent there yet. Trump does still want to have surprises up his sleeve. But middle of last night was his night. Were going to dig deeper into this. Bring in katty as well. As the private business dealings of President Trumps personal attorney come to light, the white house is facing questions of access peddling by Michael Cohen. Who was locked out of a west wing job and cashed in on his association with donald trump. The Washington Post reporting that cohen told an associate in the summer of 2017, im crushing it. Reported payments to cohen, his company in the first year of the Trump Administration nearly 3 million so far. Including 1. 2 million from drug maker novartis. Up to 600,000, at t. Half a Million Dollars each from squire patent boggs and Columbus Nova and another 150,000 from Korea Aerospace in january of 2017 cohen announced he would continue to serve as the president s personal attorney in office. And said he would resign from the Trump Organization quote, to avoid a perceived conflict. Cohens partnership with lobbying firm squire patent boggs was publicly announced in april of of 2017, but was separate from his Shell Company, essential consultants. At least one Company Claims that cohen initiated discussions about offering insight into trumps white house. Yesterday, the white house would not say what the president thinks about his personal lawyers clients. Hes the president concerned about any aspect of what weve learned in the last 24 hours . As you know, due to the complications of the different components of this investigation, i would refer you to the president s outside counsel to address those concerns. Do you know whether mr. Cohen ever approached the white house as a representative of any of those companies . Whether the president was aware of the payments . Or whether he was aware that mr. Cohen was marking himself i would refer to you the outside counsel. Michael cohen received millions of dollars apparently peddling the insights that he said he could provide into this administration to americas largest corporations. Is the president in any way embarrassed or ashamed of that . Because it seems to be the definition of swampy behavior. I think that would be up to those individuals who make the decision to hire someone. Just the same way that the companies that you work for make the decision to determine whether or not they think that youre qualified to serve in a position. Thats the decision of an independent company and has nothing to do with the white house. The president promised to drain the swamp. Does he feel its appropriate that Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, was selling access to him . Im not going to weigh in to this. Thats a determination that individual companies have to make and i havent spoken with the president. Has the president taken any action during his administration to benefit novartis, at t, Korea Aerospace. Not that im aware of. You wonder is she getting the news, or just answering the questionsing taking in the news. Last night Rudy Giuliani told nbc news that President Trump was not involved in cohens business dealings before or after the election. You know, rudy has been knighted by the queen of england. He was very angry, he said hes smarter than you. He said hes been knighted by the queen of england. No, he says he saved new york and he did all of these things and you said nothing. But he was knighted by the queen of england. Which i think willie and i, i think we were knighted by the queen of england. We cant remember, 1987 was a haze. So willie, a couple of things beyond our knighting, we can talk about our own knighting later on and how intelligent you are. Lets be humble, though. People know all that about us. Can i just say this about rudy . Theres something about him and trump, the president , excuse me, they go around talking about how intelligent they are. And how smart they are. Its like a big sports car. Have you ever had, like have you ever known people so desperate to go around and talk about how smart they are . Ive never met anybody if i heard ssh and they told me how intelligent they were, i would probably fire them right there on the spot. Who does that . I carry around a copy of my s. A. T. Scores, but other than that, i dont mention it its implied, i think, for me. Its really strange behavior. But anyway its, youve got, youve got like, you get it framed . Yeah, it still has the dot matrix perforations on the side. I carry it with me. I almost forgot about what i was going to talk about, but of course i didnt. Proving once again how intelligent Rudy Giuliani is. And how just how im just a dumb country lawyer, willie, sometimes i wonder how i get through three hours every day, you know. It was because youre so smart with your s. A. T. Scores. So anyway, Michael Cohen, him trading access for money, that is the swamp. But thats what the obama people, a lot of them are doing after you know, people that knew barack obama, or people thought they had an in with barack obama, or george w. Bush. Nothing its face illegal about that. The problem here is we had the money with the Stormy Daniels slush fund before that may have been up to 400,000. You also have the problem, did all this money go to Michael Cohen or was it like his other businesses, was it a Shell Corporation . Did money pass through that, did some get back to donald trump or the Trump Organization. Finally what sticks out to me with all of these corporations that gave money, is at t. They have been struggling to get a merger with time warner now for quite some time. We heard it was dead. The president didnt want it. Now weve heard that everything is okay, its probably going to go through in june, most likely. I wonder what this massive payment to Michael Cohen does actually to the regulators, who are trying to figure out if that payment may have made a difference in how the Trump Administration is treating the at t time warner merger. Weve got new information on that, joe. A source tells cnbc, that at t paid cohen up to 600,000 last year, saying it was for actual work done and not for access. Including an understanding of the inner workings of trump. In an email to employees, the company wrote in 2017, we hired several consultants to help us understand how the president and his administration might approach a wide range of policy issues important to the company. Including Regulatory Reform at the fcc, Corporate Tax reform and antitrust enforcement. Cohen was one of those consultants. He did no legal or lobbying work for us and our contract with cohen expired at the end of its term in december of 2017. It wasnt until january 2018 that the media first reported and at t first became aware of the current controversy surrounding cohen. However, in a statement late yesterday, at t acknowledged it was contacted by special counsel Robert Muellers office about cohen, in november of 2017. So katty kay, this story about Michael Cohen and essential consultants llc is fascinating about Michael Cohen and about the president and selling access. But its also fascinating about a lot of these companies that are now outed and on this list, about what exactly they were trying to get out of it. And what in many cases they didnt get out of it. They thought Michael Cohen would have the ear of the president in many of these cases, they dropped the contracts, because it turned out he didnt quite have the access they thought they were going to get. To some extent you have to dial back to election day of 2016 when everybody had assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win all of these companies presumably had big invamts in getting to know people on the clinton campaign, had spoken to her advisers around issues of trade and regulation. Bam theyre hit by the fak that theyve backed the wrong horse, donald trump comes in, nobody knows him. Remember this, nobody knew donald trump when he came in he didnt have contacts in washington, he didnt have necessarily contacts in all of these companies, so theyre scrambling to get any in they can. And here comes Michael Cohen who says i can get you access to the president. And when theyre facing a at t merger deal, dropping 500,000 was not an incredible amount of money. And the anomaly here is i think the two interesting things is one obviously donald trump came in saying he was going to end all of this. Bringing no swampy activity under his presidency and two, were starting to find out that bob mueller has known about this for a while. How much more does bob mueller know that we dont know, because hes already on to all of this. Theres another interesting element to this story that gets to joes issue of their iqs, how dumb are these corporations . Novartis paid this guy 1. 2 million. At t pays 600,000. They could pay us, in the end. What do their boards think about this . They paid Michael Cohen. Whos Michael Cohen . Hes trumps lawyer. Is he just trumps lawyer . No, he owns a bunch of taxi cab medallions in new york city. Hes a real mover and shaker. Joe, its anybody in the world of business. Knows how trump does business. And you can watch tv to get into the mind of donald trump. You can watch us. You get it for free. It isnt that hard. What are you paying for . Its very painful and ive got to say, one of the reasons these Companies May not watch us is that none of us have been knighted by the queen of england. To a larger point, it listen, donald trump got elected unlike anybody else in modern history. If you look at everybody that ran before donald trump, the one thing you can say about him that we said during the campaign, that anybody is being truthful said during the campaign was, was that hishistoric, there had anything like it before. There will never be anything like it again. In future where one guy with a small ragtag operation, gets himself elected president of the United States. Now, usually, if you do that, you have layers upon layers upon layers of people that worked for you when you were in congress, when were you a governor. When you were running the Republican National committee. When you were an ambassador, when you were whatever, secretary of state. So there are scores of people that at t can purchase. And lets just call it what it is, that they can buy off to say hey, tell us how your boss works. And by the way, your boss is going to know that weve hired you. So its like peeky blinders. You know what side at t is on. Because they picked one of your men or one of your women. With donald trump, it was a very, very frightening world to these corporations in january of 2017. Because there was no way to work donald trump. You could talk to Michael Cohen. You could talk to cory lewandoski. You could hire well, anybody else who had not been indicted by Robert Mueller. And there are very few people there. You certainly couldnt talk to manafort. Because i think he had two or three ankle bracelets on. But there were very few people you could go to to figure out who the inner, how the inner workings of the Trump Administration may be. Michael cohen just happened to be one of them. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Only difference here is, unlike everybody else thats ever done this, trump had an historic run and he didnt have insiders around him that these companies could buy off. Yeah. There isnt some amazing revelation that is still to come. Its more just a drip drip drip of how stupid and how bumbling and how crooked a lot of Donald Trumps business dealings are. And shallow. And kasie hunt, he is draining the swamp in a way that we could never imagine and that is, on capitol hill, revealing those who would still stand by a president who has lied thousands of times to the American People, about the obvious. A president who has been racist at times. And a president whose team is being plucked out one by one by the special counsel and potentially flipping on him. If you stand by this, if you run on this, you are part of quite a swamp. I think you just outlined are why there are republicans who are still clinging to the special counsel and saying look, this guy has to finish doing what hes doing. Its the only way that theyre