so solomon, to you, from your perch as you re reading about all these different stories, you have the fact this time yesterday we were reporting the investigators raided michael cohen, before that it was stormy daniels and karen mcdougal and now this doorman. would you consider that a pattern? solomon? well, i d consider it a pattern but not a very important part ea pattern. you re talking about potential violations of campaign finance law, which is almost never truth prooute prosecuted. with cohen, you re talking about potential bank fraud. it stuff that if it wasn t the president of the united states would be utterly garden variety at best. so it s a pattern. it s too early to say anything
i think the issue with the pattern and practice with this new $30,000 payment, it seems pretty clear there was an systemic pattern and practice among team trump to pay off stories that were unfavorable to them. now, catch and kill is not if and of itself illegal, brook, but the fact is ami, they didn t publish the stories because they weren t credible. brook, when has credibility ever been a hallmark of the national enquirer s reporting policies and procedures? the whole reason they didn t print was story was to protect the president. go ahead, dana. i m pretty confident that the alien babies that the national inquir inquirer has reported. that s not real? yeah that, has not happened. solomon, because of your
against the united states. which is both an incredibly sort of striking charge to see a senior presidential campaign aide plead to. but also now that bob mueller has established a conspiracy, what that means is that he can charge others who abetted it, knew about it, and didn t say anything. so that sort of opens up a possibility that we might see other people brought to charges under this same conspiracy. solomon, did you want to respond to that? i just think it s all of this speculation about it being a big deal is just guess work at this point. yes, it s obviously significant that gates pled. but the offense that they re investigating it goes back years before the campaign, and it s not related to the campaign. we don t know that yet, though. that s part of the challenge here. right.
they ll take awaysend amendmen. first, that wo that s not repeag to happen. why is the president stirring up conservatives? why is he making such dumb statements? could it be part of a strategy from the white house that he loves to distract and deflect? maybe from the russia investigation? i want to get right now to the breaking news on the mueller investigation. here to discuss cnn s legal analyst, laura coats, garrett graph, and solomon wisenberg. good to have you all. man, what a busy news night. friday night used to be a quiet night. now everything happens on a friday. so solomon, thank you for joining us. what stands out to you in this document that came out? well, it s a standard guilty
i m but well, but sorry, i m talking about yeah there s a lot we don t know f. for all we know mueller is about to wrap up everything. i m speaking about the public record. what is known on the public record, and there are things that you can look at in the various mueller pleas that tell me that he does not have much of a case on either collusion or obstruction of justice. he might have a great case. he may have a great obstruction case, but not based upon what we see. if he s looking at donald trump s international transactions over the last ten years, god knows what he ll find. all we really know right now is that the case against all we can say based on today s event is the case against manafort has gotten stronger because we have an insider who s going to say yeah, that s what we did. i don t think it s primarily based simply on guess work. you re right, solomon. a lot of this is speculative because of the fact that mueller keeps everything close to the vest. it s intend