america s most famou presidential statements. today, wow they are going to arrest me. can t believe this i happening. president trump, will you come speak to us the ex president surrenders he is arrested but. fingerprinted. criminally charged with 34 felonies in a manhattan courthouse. these are felony crimes i new york state no matter who you are. prosecutors say he ran a criminal scheme to conceal damaging information, unlawful activity from american voter before the 2016 election former president trump plead not guilty he is frustrated. he is upset. tonight the substance of the case. the people versus donald trump joy reid, already melbourne, alex wagner stephanie bowl all here for msnbc special coverage of the first ever criminal indictment of a forme president of the united states good evening and thank you for being with us here tonight i am rachel maddow here at msnbc headquarters in new york along with lawrence o donnel and joy reid, and nicole wallace
As to whether or not you can stay a mainstream picked figur with electoral sway while also playing footsie with fascism while also encouraging the mos violent extremists there is real into turn there. everyone at this table has covered all the ways that ou system doesn t work. and yet there is a sliver here and it may be growing, of wher the system is working. because some of thos extremists you mentioned wer convicted. sedition is a convicted crime. some people are serving long sentences,, even as we cover those who got away there has been talk about th old donald trump, and some ide of teflon. well, anyone living in reality saw a lot of that tough lawn strip today, if it was eve there. and it was a long trip for people like weisselberg. he couldn t keep his money out of rikers. even when he was president there were a lot of people that, later he tried to use th pardon power, manafort went to prison we know that bannon he went through a run on thi the other night, rachel.
And had an initial clash wit the kurdia, brag, why they r so unhappy they were doing a big swing an big stuff. and mr. pomerantz book says, that we had him on msnbc he did not win the day on this and this is why a medium hig not medium low, what we migh call a winnable moderate style case it does not throw the entire kitchen sink of everything donald trump might have done i new york it doesn t even deeply pull in the indicted trump organization, which some lawyers would b tempted to try but with the cfo weisselberg not testifying against him and available as a defense witness to say, yeah, everything a trump or capital trump, yo know how trump org is. we went rogue. well, that s not a thing the wanted to do they didn t do a conspiracy. they didn t do a ton of trum org. and other prosecutors are minus, there is this great phrase, highlighted it in the moment w got this news today, tax purposes and you mentioned it earlier rachel, there s a lot of evidence all around donald trump that th
Full disclosure. i am glad to have lanny davi joining me at 10 pm, michael cohen s lawyer i will ask him about that. i m not sure what they can say about. it but if michael cohen refuse to submit to the souther district processes for thi kind of thing, that is the reason why they could not have brought this case. we do also have though, i was sort of surprised to see this in the statement fact today, this recitation of a lo of things that are much more about forgive me, david pecker and american media, and th national enquirer, than th hour about michael cohen so yes, mr. cohen is a very bi part of the arrangements aroun four, example, the karen mcdougal payment, and certainl he is the main mover when it comes to the stormy daniel payment. but the overall scheme is very much as much about america media and david pecker as it i about mr. cohen. and that ends up being a interesting dynamic given th different types of immunit that were offered in different stages for different types o t
The crime of unlawfully or conspiring to unlawfully aide candidate is unlawful, a crime in new york law, i know this i dumb question but i want to ask, is there a federal preemptio problem? is there a problem that he is candidate for federal office and not new york office with that theory? not according to the da page one paragraph to, they sa in writing, election laws an lying for tax purposes that is lost plural. their theory of the cases that what enhances it, we have al had our crash more than one election crime the da today as i reported spoke about examples of that that is their theory of th case and also, chris races this point, if this were only misdemeanors, big if, yeah, an in different contexts, someone might play out to avoid jail time but mr. weisselberg is i rikers for the h charges falsifying business records an other fraud.