the president s lead lawyer again creating more questions with his answers. rudy giuliani appearing on a pair of sunday talk shows yesterday for what should have been t-ball, a ready made public relations win following a friday night gift from the russia s special counsel. robert mueller s office took a rare step of issuing a statement debunking a buzzfeed report saying the special counsel had witnesses and documents saying the president instructed michael cohen to lie to congress. instead of just trashing buzzfeed and thanking mueller, giuliani created a flurry saying it s possible the president did talk to cohen before he testified to congress. as far as i know, president trump did not have discussions with him, certainly had no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie. if he had any discussions with him, they would be about the
chris, i want to agree with andrew sullivan. i called ben smith this morning, he wouldn t come on my program to discuss it because it really is indefensible. excuse me, i have a little laryngit laryngitis. we ve been waiting for months to talk to donald trump about his finances. they finally declared the details about the trump trust that was put together, thee-person, don jr., eric, rizenburg, they have to act in unanimous a chief compliance officer, 30 deals that got struck out, how he would not take prosts out of people staying in his hotels, elaborate white paper put together by a bunch of other people. dlfs there was a lot of news to be made today, a lot of serious news. what buzzfeed did was to throw the shiny object out there, make a nefarious allegation of an inappropriate relationship with russia which is mccarthyism for clicks. it was wrong and destroyed an important news media cycle. when we come back, i want to talk about three things trump has done very well and nobody
gives him an opening to score a political point which is the media is somehow biased or out to get him. i think it s especially important in the trump incoming trump administration that the media is a fierce crusader for what is true and what we can prove and that is why buzzfeed airing an unverified dossier is so damaging because we don t know if it s true and trump thrives in a culture where we don t really know whathe facts are. he can just sayn the one hand or on the other, and the media needs to say, no, there are things that are true, there are things that are accurate, and these facts will hold donald trump accountable. i d like to have known what the cnn reporter s question was, by the way, we could have talked about what it meant. buzzfeed s editor in chief ben smith was on meet the press daily. here s how he defended his decision to release those documents. i think there was an when you would be the gatekeeper for information, you would say to your audience, trust u
there were some news organizations with all that was just said that were so professional, so incredibly professional, that i ve just gone up a notch as to what i think of you. okay? nbc s ken dilanian joins us now with the latest on what we know about those reports. i get from trump, it s not anger, it s righteous indignation playing that card pretty well, he s accusing cnn who introduced the notion of this story without giving any of its contents. it was not delivered to him in person as you and i talked about but delivered to his office in a classified manner, appropriate manner. but they were somehow in basketball terms using an alley-oop play, somehow cnn was setting up buzzfeed to do the dirty work. that seems to be what s driving donald trump. or is he simply trying to smear cnn be the behavior of what is right? accusing cnn or alley-oop play,
was identified, tagged, marked, clearly as disinformation. i believe cnn would have listed it that way and reported it that way. whoever gave it to them didn t tell them who it was. i think that s a fair assessment, i think they looked at it and said it s significant this is included in a classified intelligence report, why is it being transmitted this way, not some other way? that s the question i still have. ken dilanian, you re the pro. joining me right now, hallie jackson, a reporter with nbc news. she s outside trump tower. she was there today. give us your sense about having watched trump now, covered him, it can get very frictional. reporter: yeah. he seems like he s got the high ground tonight because he caught buzzfeed leaking putting out all these stuff that really turns out to be basically disinformation, not intelligence. reporter: right. i mean, listen, what happened today, right, the president-ele president-elect s, if you want to call it a performance or show