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Cooperation letter. and they come back and say you don t have that letter. what they are doing is turning this into a canned hunt. they will hit him with a sentence. only way he is out of that cage is if he tells them what they want to hear. that actually is concerning to me. because here s a guy who is obviously cooperating fully. they say he is credible. so what else did they want him to say? bret: right. when you look at where the narrative breaks down, you begin to get an idea. cohen says look, nothing happened out of this contact with the russians. nothing went forward. and one suspects that that wasn t good enough. bret: the question is where we go from here and whether this tells us anything about the road map ahead. whether these documents suggest that this is coming to a head and could lead to a mueller report in coming days or whether this tells us there is a lot more to go ....
Crime. bret: and there is evidence of it. right. then it becomes much more serious because then you can have obstruction issues that are real ones. it s obstructing a crime. so the secondary crime could actually be more serious. bret: what the special counsel was told to do was get to the bottom of russia s interference in the 2016 election. in that russia section we see the beginnings but we don t see all the puzzle pieces here. the good news here as well in the sense that the thing that got my you a was that si certain guy synergy con. he was working on the moscow project. you can argue that cohen viewed this as all about the moscow project. he had a line going on there. didn t even pick up the phone essentially to call back this guy. if there was real collusion in a criminal sense some type of conspiracy, this sure doesn t look like it. phone calls that aren t followed up, suggestions that these two individuals ....
Section of the sentencing memo. extremely overwritten and dramatic. i don t think it s settled whether this would be a campaign violation. and in order to make that case, you know, you should live your life in such a way that nobody ever tries to get you to pay money for silence. you should live your life that way. i don t think donald trump has lived his life that way. in order to make this case you have to prove that donald trump has literally never paid anyone for their silence. that is something i might not be willing to agree. bret: in the background honestly of all of that is the election ongoing. you mentioned the writing there. here it is. this is full screen memo number two. cohen s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for president of the united states struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws transparency. while many americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, told at ph ....
Stage for people and this is something that even the people who set up this special counsel are now admitting that it was set up not because they thought there was treasonous collusion with russia to steal an election. we know from their own text at the time they set up the special counsel that they knew there was not evidence of that. but, in their words, to reign in the president and to constrain him. this is something, this is a very high price to pay for donald trump winning the election and it s very important that people care about rule of law, not that you can t find things that people have done that are crimes but that there is an important issue here about the federal government, how it runs and whether it s okay to win an election even if it makes certain people very angry. bret: there is that part about russia, david, in the special counsel filing where he talks about how cohen cooperated on the russia related matters. it seems to me sort of like coming attraction, not a ....
Fact nature, and timing of the payments. in particular, and as cohen himself has now admitted with respect to both payments he acted in coordination with and in connection with individual one as a result of cohen s actions neither woman spoke to the press prior to the election. individual one again is donald trump. the implications of that? well, it seems to me this is directly implicating the president in the campaign finance violation. you can t possibly read this and conclude that this idea sort of sprang out of the head of zeus for michael cohen. doing this certainly to benefit donald trump. they suggested he did this in coordination with donald trump. bret: and direction of. and direction of. and they go on to say this was an effort to influence the election from the shadow. so they are saying that these two individuals, including the president of the united states, tried to influence the election through the shadows. so what we know at a minimum is this is going to be part ....