knowingly and willfully. and i think there are facts out there that we know about how the repayment to mr. cohen was structured, how it was funneled, to use mr. giuliani s term, to mr. cohen through a law firm that indicate that there was some potential intent to deceive. the disclosure from the president today in his financial disclosure form is a little bit it s a little bit unusual. it s 40-something pages into the declaration. it happens in a footnote. and basically, in the footnote, while making the declaration, the president asserts that he doesn t really need to be making this disclosure, that it s just in the name of transparency that he is that he is that he s putting this out there. the office of government ethics seems to be saying that the president is wrong there, that the president didn t have a choice about whether or not to disclose this, that he was required to and in fact he was required to not this year, but last year. how unusual is that, for the
of concern about other similar reports that are gone? yes. and we can absolutely report that those other two that you referenced that are now unaccounted for exist. they are internally referenced in the third suspicious activity report. okay. so that is not in dispute. what is in dispute is how and why. let s slow it down. so the one that came out last week, the documents we saw last week were based on a suspicious activity report. that report and we haven t seen the original of that. we ve only seen a derivative document that was publicized by this lawyer last week. that original document references the existence of two prior reports. exactly. so we know they exit but they re not in the data base. they exist. they should be tied to the same identifier numbers in the system when you search for cohen s name, they should come up in the normal course of business. they do not. so how can you tell me how your source discovered this? you know, what i can say is that in
earth one, but this statement today from the intelligence committee does directly contradict what pro-trump republicans in the house said just a few weeks ago when they called off and shut down their own russia investigation on their side of the capitol. the senate intelligence statement today from republican chairman richard burr and the democratic vice-chairman mark warner, it basically asserts that the intelligence community was correct last year when they issued their report blaming the russian government for interfering in the 2016 presidential election to benefit donald trump. according to today s statement from the intelligence committee in the senate, quote, the first task in our inquiry was to evaluate the intelligence community s work on this important piece of analysis. committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work. we see no reason to dispute the conclusions. there is no doubt that russia took an unprecedented effort to interfere
with the u.s. office of government ethics. specifically, the complaint requested that doj and the office of government ethics investigate whether a payment made by michael cohen to a third party constituted a loan to the president that should have been reported as a liability on his disclosure report, the one that was signed in june 2017. if so, whether the failure to report it was knowing and willful. today i certified president trump s financial disclosure report signed on may 15th, 2018. the office of government ethics has concluded that based on the information provided as a note to part 8, that would be the aforementioned footnote, the payment made by michael cohen is required to be reported. oge has determined that the information provided in that note meets the disclosure requirements for a reportable liability under the ethics in government act. now here is the nut. i am providing both reports to you because you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pur
office of government ethics to be materially disputing something in the disclosure that they re releasing to the public? the entire thing is extremely unusual, the back and forth where the president inserts that footnote and says i m not required to tell you this, but i m going to anyway, and the office of government ethics says well, actually, no, you were required. none of that is usual, but what matters is that the president doesn t get to decide what he should or shouldn t report. the office of government ethics does, and they determined that he should have reported this debt last year. adav noti, senior director of trial litigation at the campaign legal center, i really appreciate your time tonight. thank you for being here. thank you. again, the intriguing part here for me is when the office of government ethics sends this to rod rosenstein and says this may be relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the president s financial disclosure last year. is the jus