Brian Williams examines the days top political stories and current politicalcampaign news. Here in new york. Day 581 of the trump administration, and just tonight a short time ago, in fact, new legal troubles potentially for the president on a new front. Well let the New York Times tell it. Quote, the Manhattan District Attorneys Office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two Senior Company officials in connection with Michael Cohens Hush Money Payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials of the matter. A State Investigation would settle on how the company accounted for its reimbursements to mr. Cohen for the 130,000 he paid to the actress, stephanie clifford, who has said she had an affair with President Trump, closed quote. Mostly along those same lines a big story today had to do with a long time friend of the president who has apparently turned on him. The publisher of the national
they came from me. Remember we heard the pres
the trial was about to start in the senate and the year earlier with the lewinsky story. this is a big opportunity. i m struck by two things. one is the dilemma he s in. it s hard for him to be partisan one day a year and be believable. and how little they have done to set up and amplify the speech. typically you spend a couple weeks leaking out pieces of it to get support. we got some last night. i m talking weeks. yeah. then a week traveling, delivering the message. the basic block and tackling they don t do. it is a huge opportunity because of the drama we ll have tonight. it s hard to see him threading the political unity. is it brigadoon where every hundred years the president reaches across the aisle and does his base want that?
cooperating witnesses he s never going to touch the real leaders of those organizations. jill, talk about your organization s reporting on this safe, reportedly there at the headquarters of the national enquirer. my colleague who s really been covering this story for over a year, talked to former ami employees. ami, american media international. exactly. the company that owns the national enquirer. a lot of these folks are under a confidentiality agreement. what they told jeff is there s actually a safe in the offices there used to store all of the documents that had to do with the various hush fund payments, documents related to the trump hush money settlements but also related to other celebrities. the way the national enquirer appears to have worked is they had this catch and kill policy, whereby they would pay people for their stories in an effort to prevent them from ever being
stories, kind of boosting the president s ambitions. linking to a site cohen had set up. and there s stories in which the national enquirer wrote no negative stories about president trump and had story after story that was deeply negative not only to hillary clinton but remember their ted cruz coverage, really ridiculous allegations the president then used on the campaign trail to try to discredit ted cruz. you see this pattern of this news organization i use the term news organization very loosely this organization, you know, seemingly working on behalf of trump s campaign. and i imagine a lot more will be coming out. bob costa, you had the president today seemingly divorced from his role as the head of a law-abiding society. you ve always been a very good west wing whisperer and interpreter. by how much is there a sense that the walls may be closing in?
damaging. of course that kicked off the impeachment drama with clinton. clinton survived. how did he survive, why did he survive and what does that tell us about trump s situation now? number one, there s this, when the lewinsky story broke he was very popular, already at 60% in the polls. and the numbers didn t crash. they kept going up. clinton was forced in the summer of 98 to admit to the affair. his popularity got higher. september 98, almost exactly 20 years ago ken starr came out with a report that formally accused the president of the a imcro crime, committing perjury. the white house party, we tell you every time we re on this doing election previews this year, the white house party always loses seats. they gained seats. that told folks there was a backlash against the idea of impeaching clinton. this is the bottom line story of 1998. by the end of that year when impeachment was being pushed by republicans the question was asked, did the president of the united states commit