The days biggest political and news stories, with interviews and reporting from around the nation. Ricochetting across the political universe tonight which are the ones that involve appear to involve the president of the United States. That he was directed to make payments in coordination with the candidate and with the campaign of President Donald Trump to two women. One was in one involved a payment to a woman 150,000, believed to be Karen Mcdougal. The second to a payment believed to be Stormy Daniels in october of 2016, rather, for 130,000. And for that payment Michael Cohen told the court that he received restitution for that payment or he received the money back for that payment from the candidate who is believed to be donald trump. Throughout this investigation, this particular investigation which stemmed from the Special Counsels office, from robert mueller, has been done in coordination with that office and prosecuted by career and seasoned Public Corruption Public Corruption
things. which is saying a lot. to go back to what happens next, it s also interesting to note right now it s not connected to the russian investigation, but it s clear that if cohen were to provide valuable information to mueller that that could, in fact, affect his sentence. and i think that s another thing that there s going to you know, to be watching as we move forward. right now he s looking at 43 to 64 months in that category. that s what the guidelines say. he might be looking at getting a reduced sentence if he s able he would not plead to that without a cooperation agreement. normally i do these all the time in the criminal practice. you get a cooperation agreement that s under seal and you have a plea agreement like you have here that s public. right. so i would bet anything there is a cooperation agreement with mueller s office and he s looking to bring down that sentence, which the judge can bring down to zero if he wants
was hillary clinton. he was charged to keep outcomes in the election from occurring. that s what he was kacharged fr doing. what s different from the obstruction case, we talk about this alma tl the time. he said, he said, she said, she said. that is not the case here. there is documented in the deal, in the agreement today cohen said this, trump said this. no, cohen said this, trump said that, there is a tape and oh, by the way, here are the bank transfers, here are the financial transfers. here are the communications. that is a much stronger case than you re going to see this is easy to read. this is not complicated reading. any sort of conversational thing, money and communications is where it falls. that was filled with that. i thought it was interesting if you listen to the prosecutor when he came out of the courthouse and was addressing the crowd. he said after spelling out the charges, he went back to the campaign finance issue. and if i heard him correctly said he wou
imprisonment basically, is going to have to turn in his ostrich jacket for a jump suit, it s going to be focused on the russian investigation and putting together that case that s going to put an end to this whole idea that nothing happened on the campaign side with the russians. all right. we re going to talk a little bit about the manafort trial now. john harwood and jessica levinson, thank you both for joining us. i want to turn to that other bombshell news. paul manafort guilty, convicted on eight counts including false tax returns, failing to file foreign bank account reports and two counts of bank fraud. the judge declaring a mistrial in the remaining ten counts. trump choosing to talk about manafort but not cohen. paul manafort s a good man. he was with ronald reagan. he was with a lot of different people over the years. and i feel very sad about that. because it involved me, but i still feel, you know, it s a very sad thing thapdt happened.
trump had been reimbursed that trump had reimbursed cohen for the payments made to stormy daniels. trump tried to sort of walk back some of the things that giuliani had said. they ve had a hard time getting their story straight. so i think once again, the reimbursements, what happened with the money after the fact, it s interesting what we ve learned today is that cohen actually submitted invoices to the trump organization. he claimed before that the trump organization was not part of this, that, you know, that there was no reimbursement through the trump organization. there are details in hereof not only invoices submitted, but extra money michael cohen was paid i guess in good will, for services rendered. right. this thing is backed up by documents and receipts. interesting documents will be looking forgo beyond the reimbursements that happen after the fact. it would be what was the communication that happened on the front end. what does directing when cohen says he did t