producing the document might, in fact, be incriminatory, as opposed to what s the content of the document, so that s where they ll be having a fight. so, paul, as shimon laid out, how many investigations are under way and that now you have bob mueller coming in and he could change the direction of things, and he s about to really get his hands on this. as legal counsel, as an attorney, would you advise your client to do exactly what michael flynn did, plead the fifth, when you re facing this many investigations and what you re doing? i would say probably yes, that would be the advice that i would give him, but his counsel knows one thing that i don t know, and that is, is he really guilty of some kind of criminal offense? now, clearly, if he is guilty of a criminal offense, he s going to plead the fifth and try to impede the investigations. and of course, we go to an old precedent here, the oliver north case in the iran contra investigation. paul, just pause one second. i m going
of it dealing with michael flynn not having registered as a foreign agent as required by law until later, that they knew about that, although vice president pence in an interview with bret baier in march said he didn t learn about it until the story broke in the media. so he was he must have been just out of the loop. so it seems, although now that there is an active criminal investigation of everything connected to the trump campaign and russia, we need to start drawing distinctions between what s a potential criminal offense and what s potentially just a political embarrassment. i think the failure to do due diligence on michael flynn s background and the insistence on hiring him as national security adviser even though he seemed to have all of these problems that the white house was aware of, i don t think that s a criminal problem for anyone affiliated
afraid of what will come from the investigation. there was a lot of bad blood. he certainly want him fired before he read the rosenstein memo. to say this is a case of obstruction. for purposes of legal analysis, i hear you, professor. jeff, what about the fever line? it is a big buck or bambi with the refraction? i don t believe there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. as a political matter, this is a constitution crisis of the first order and abuse of power by the president. how do you deal with that? in the courts or political system? i don t know. that is my point. not a specific criminal offense. strong points. jeff and jonathan, thank you. thanks most of all to international viewers. for you, cnn newsroom is next.
i would certainly make known to the appropriate officials that that was going on. what of the transgression was, if there were sufficient evidence of a compromise, we would file a crime report. meghan: i have two questions for you. one, what s the holdup? number two, at what point will the clintons be held accountable in held by the same laws? allen: the holdup is that this is without a doubt a criminal offense. because we continue to have this us versus them, this political elite who can do whatever they want to do and fly in the face of all reality and the rule of law when it comes to handling classified material is beyond me. not too far away from where we sit right now is staten island. united states marine corps
there is not o shred of evidence that he that general flynn got permission to receive this foreign money or that he acknowledged receipt of it. welcome back to the 11th hour. one of the democrats sharing that podium today with congressman elijah cummings was connecticut senior senator richard bloomenthal, he sits on the armed services committee and the jish rather committee. i had a chance to speak with him today. and we got a chance to talk about today s revelations regarding mike flynn and the white house pointing the finger at the obama administration. the revelations are mounting evidence that general flynn quite simply broke the law and may well be guilty of a serious criminal offense. and that evidence is that he took payments, half a million dollars, from the turkish and russian governments, that he concealed those payments in his