Reveal battle plans in advance. and house speaker paul ryan reveals this is his last year in congress even as republicans head into a potentially bruising midterm election. how will ryan s departure impact the party of trump? i m wolf blitzer and you re in the situation room. announcer: this is cnn breaking news. breaking tonight, the infamous access hollywood video tape is coming back to haunt president trump in a surprising new way that could put him and his attorney in legal jeopardy. sources tell cnn that fbi agents who raided the president s personal lawyer michael cohen were looking for communications between him and mr. trump related to the access hollywood video that rocked the trump campaign only a month before the presidential election. i ll get reaction to the breaking news from congressman adam schiff, the top democrat in the house intelligence committee. and our correspondents and
Cetera. the other thing interesting to me that i think is significant, it sought communications between candidate trump and his associates in any effort to prevent disclosure of negative things of the tape and other negative things. so what they want to know is, were these people communicating with each other to try and stop this stuff very close to the election. it was a month before the election, joey. joey jackson when t when the video tape was aired after the postbroke that story. so what laws potentially could have been violated? let s talk about this first. first a general and then the specific. if you get michael cohen and it is determined there is any law tea violated, now you have someone close to the president, the closest of all, who can perhaps now be flipped because he knows significant information. so this imperils trump in a significant way. and this is exactly what prosecutors do. they go after people close to
Move aircraft, weapons and personnel out of way of a potential attack. russia has a key military move it will likely play. the russians have the air defense capability employed in syria that they could be a threat. reporter: moscow now knows to aim its radars and anti-air missiles towards air space over the mediterranean. european aviation authorities are warning commercial airliners of possible missile strikes in the eastern mediterranean in the coming hours. the u.s. hopes to get french and british aircraft in ships to be part of the strikes. the u.s. has two surface ships and unacknowledged submarines off syria ready to fire s satellite guided tamahawk cruise missil missiles. the russian foreign ministry keen in on the president s use of the phrase smart missiles with a warning and a question.
And this is about a crime of evading campaign finance laws and intimidation and there is a crime fraud exception that would more than justify this very unusual step. can i make one other point on rod rosenstein which i think really concerns me because firing him, the president may conclude is a more sur ept tishs way to get at robert mueller. there are two reasons americans should be concerned. the first is that he could secretly any replacement of rod rosenstein could secretly cripple the mueller investigation by telling mueller you can t follow the money and can t investigate this or you need to wrap up that. but second and this is really lost, rod rosenstein will make the decision whether a report from bob mueller ever sees the light of day. whether it is ever submitted to congress for consideration of whether the president s conduct violated the law and might rise to level of impeachable offense or whether it is even presented to the congress. that is a very important
Was everything on the up and up in every way you chose to protect donald trump. we did a piece recently and described him one of his colleagues, his former colleague described him as ray donovan. and michael cohen thinks this is a huge compliment. because he sees himself and he has said it in the past, that he will do anything for trump. the loyalty is more than anything i have really ever witnessed. and aside from maybe a spouse, this is somebody who will do anything that donald trump wants at any time and people who worked alongside cohen in the trump organization said to me, look, we never knew what he did but he got it done. probably safe to say that loyalty is getting the most stern test it ever received. and also the reason they were able to get the warrants. it is not just typical lawyer-client confident siality