i m ayman mohyeldin alongside yas money vossoughian. morning joe starts right now. i did nong wrong. you have to understand. this stuff would have come out a long time ago. i did nothing wrong. is michael cohen still your friend? i like michael. i haven t spoke ton him in a long time. is he your lawyer? no, he s not my lawyer. i always liked michael. and are you going to cooperate? are you going to let me talk. i just want to know if you re going to cooperate with federal investigators. i did nothing wrong. oh, he flipped. in june president trump said he wasn t worried at all that michael cohen would flip. he should have been. the president s former attorney admitted in court yesterday that donald trump personally directed him to buy the silence of two women whose claims of sexual affairs with the presidential candidate threatened to derail his white house ambitions and it
might say a member of congress. you don t do that as a u.s. attorney unless you have a really good reason or naming that person is essential to describing the crime. for example, bribing a member of congress is the example the manual gives. but for them to name to go into that level of specificity and to allow cohen to name him in that level of specificity really is telling. it means that there is something the government believes that there is something more there against that third party and we all know who the third party is. and whether or not bob mueller takes that with his investigation we ll see, especially according to cohen s attorney. paul manafort, the time that we have, we will delve into that. surprised that we have not full agreement from here when it comes to all the charges? not surprising at all because these charges are not your garden variety federal charges, they are complex, they involve a lot of paper, they involve a difficult interpretation of
people said, i ve got campaign finance, bank fraud, all the other things, but the hacking because the hacking suggests, although it s not conclusive, that it might involve interference in the campaign or even russia collusion. but this can also factor in when it comes to a cooperating agreement down the line. when it comes to michael cohen. absolutely. you mean for michael flynn or michael cohen? michael cohen. for michael cohen. michael cohen, yes. cooperation is an ongoing evaluation. just because we didn t see any evidence of a cooperation agreement it s very common. in my cases you don t want to mention a cooperation agreement in open court unless you absolutely have to. there are two major reasons why, number one, you could compromise an ongoing investigation but number two your clients could be at risk if people out there, bad actors, know that he is cooperating. as they say, unfortunately, snitches get stitches. that s a saying that s thrown around the courthouses for
day for the presidency since watergate. on one side a long time confidant bleeds guilty, on the other a former campaign chair found guilty by a jury. both men now convicted felons. first the case that legal experts say could pose the greatest threat to the president, the guilty plea of his former lawyer and fixer michael cohen. among the eight counts against him are two for campaign finance violations by directly implicate donald trump. hallie jackson has more. reporter: that bombshell plea deal means the man who used to fix donald trump s problems has now become one for the president. michael cohen implicating his former boss after pleading guilty to eight felony charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and notably campaign finance violations. paying out hush money, telling a judge he broke the law because a candidate told him to. he doesn t name the person, but he only worked for one, donald trump. he worked to pay money to
telling the truth. he has no shadow hanging over him. the uncertainty is gone. he has stepped up to the line and he has admitted what he did wrong, but he is now liberated to tell the truth. everything about donald trump that he knows. from this point on you re going to see liberated michael cohen speaking truth to power. and we will hear a lot more from cohen s lawyer who you just saw there, he is going to be joining morning joe later this morning. after four days of deliberations the jury in the fraud trial of paul manafort found president trump s former campaign chairman guilty on eight of the counts against him. the jury has unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the other ten counts manafort faced. his trial marked a critical first stage for robert mueller s investigation. pete williams has more. reporter: the jury found paul manafort guilty of intentionally dodging taxes on millions of dollars that he earned as a