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reporter: this time sessions surprisingly jabbed back saying in a statement while i m attorney general the actions of the department of justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. this is a little bit of a celebration meeting. reporter: earlier in the day the president tried to turn away from the russia probe to celebrate his record until he could hear the questions about the criminal records about his former advisers. president didn t say whether he would pardon his now convicted former campaign chairman paul manafort. mr. trump focussed his fury on his former attorney michael cohen. the president tried to say cohen s crimes weren t actually crimes. he pled to two counts that aren t a crime. i watched a number of shows. sometimes you get pretty good information by watching shows. those counts aren t a crime. they weren t campaign finance. reporter: here is the ....
President trump, as he feels fewer and fewer options. and as his spin about these very damaging facts becomes more and more unbelievable. he s asking us, essentially, to believe that a crime is not a crime, because he says that it isn t. and even, i think, very pro-trump people may find that hard to swallow. there was just the manafort hold juror was apparently a lone woman. but the woman who came out and spoke for the manafort jury was a very pro-trump voter who said nonetheless she was persuaded by the evidence. i think that s got to be troubling for donald trump. that s such a great point. in fact, we just had josh dawsey on before you, susan, who had interviewed a republican donor who said, how can you spin a fact? that s what they re grappling with this morning. how are they going to spin this fact set. susan glasser, thank you very much for sharing your reporting with us. jeffrey toobin, always a pleasure. there s more and more sound coming out from the president this morning ....
Let me just add to you, the president says this money didn t come from the campaign, it came from the trump organization. so then he says, that can t break the law. well, he actually said, it came from me. now, whether it comes from the trump organization or him personally is still not clear. but it s illegal either way, because, yes, individuals are allowed to fund their campaigns, but they have to disclose that they are doing it, how much they re doing it for, and where the money went. and the reason the law exists is so the public knows how the money is spent. don t you think on the eve of the election, when these transactions were taking place, that the public would have been interested that $280,000 was going to silence two women that the president i do think that that would have been a fundamental piece of information. don t you think the public i think the public would like to know that. and the reason they covered it up is because they didn t want the public to ....
I want to highlight three because we don t have unlimited time. i want to highlight three. first i want to start, we ll play the sound of donald trump talking, broadly speaking, about i believe michael cohen. let s play that. did you direct him to make he made the deal. he made the deals. and, by the way, he pled to two counts that aren t a crime. which nobody understands. i watched a number of shows, sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows. those two counts aren t even a crime. it they weren t campaign finance. right. well, someone doesn t understand something, ana, and it s donald trump and campaign finance law. he s trying to draw this distinction somehow between the fact the money wasn t given from the campaign to cohen to pay off stormy daniels and karen mcdougal, it was given personally. doesn t matter. that s an illegal loan. and remember when he is asked directly in that clip, did you direct michael cohen to do this? he says, he made the deals. ....
Chief rallying cries along with lock her up. 19 months into the trump administration, things seem swampier than ever. the president s former campaign chairman paul manafort and his personal lawyer michael cohen both convicted. his first national security adviser michael flynn pled guilty to lying to the fbi. so did foreign policy adviser george papadopoulos whose bragging about dirt on hillary clinton kicked off the investigation and rick gates. with that crew, trump is on a path of being a class of his own potentially rivaling richard nixon. let me explain. only one person in the obama administration pled guilty to a crime and it was a misdemeanor. then-cia director david petraeus who pled guilty to removing classified information in connection with an affair. george w. bush, eight members of his administration got caught up in the jack abramoff lobbying scandals. there were 21 guilty pleas and ten prison sentences including scooter libby who was later pardoned by president trump. ....