Make it very hard for the agency to look inside moscow. joining now, michael mcfaul, former u.s. ambassador to russia. good to see you again tonight. sure. thanks for having me. hasn t it always been extremely dangerous to be a spy in russia or a source that s close to putin? what s made it more dangerous? well, the answer to your first question, of course, is yes, extremely dangerous. and, you know, what has changed, i don t know. i mean, the reporting was quite extraordinary to me. i m wondering how do we know this, who are these american officials telling this story. it doesn t sound like it was coming from those directly involved. and, you know, i just have to trust that they know that for a fact. i mean, the theory that you just described and what s described in the story could make sense, but there could be alternative theories, too, as to why this line of inquiry, this line of information is no longer producing in the way it did before. right. everything about the story
And somebody who obviously works for allen weisselberg. there s nobody above. so, if there s some conversation between allen and don sr., don jr. or eric, it s not captured in that information. let me just ask you to be clear about what this trust is, there s the trump organization. there s the trump foundation, a charity that is being looked at now legally by the attorney general of new york, but this is a trust. weisselberg said, please pay this from the trust. is this the company that donald trump got up in that press conference and announced he was handing over to his sons? that s right. the trump trust is basically an umbrella group that includes the trump organization. so, when donald trump entered office, he kept ownership of his company, he kept the right to withdraw money from it at any time, he just changed something about the administration of it so while he still owns it and can withdraw money from it, he put it in this trust run by eric, don, and allen weisselberg. it
Other words, if courts were to agree with that analysis, that would preclude state attorneys general as well as federal prosecutors from return an indictment. so in other words the state attorney general is not bound by the rule not to indict the president, but it would obviously appear before a court and that court may say it doesn t matter who did it, it s not constitutional. yeah, that s exactly right and also i think one other thing worth pointing out, the way prosecutors work is they re not looking for trap doors in policies. they are trying to figure out what the law is, what the facts and the evidence are and what the law allows. so, if a state attorney general looking at this on the merits concludes in their office that the olc got it right, that it would be unconstitutional to indict a sitting president, they re not going to go forward just because they re not bound by the olc opinion. on the other hand, if they in good faith looked at the issues and concluded that they th
Weisselberg, it wouldn t be don or eric, it would be allen weisselberg. interesting. we re trying to get to the bottom of how valuable weisselberg is to investigators. given what you know about how the trump organization works and it s a little unorthodox, it s not like a lot of corporations. some of it feels like a corporation, some of it feels like something else what s your sense of how the reimbursement to michael cohen would have worked? obviously as you say weisselberg would have been involved but would he have had to get approval from someone else? would there have been more people involved? well, there s only at this time, january and february 2017 there were only three people really who had authority over the trust that donald trump put his business into. remember, donald trump still owns his business but the administration of it is left to this trust which is run by eric, don, and allen weisselberg. so, allen weisselberg to me is not somebody who typically does thin