the way these things work, and i think this week is a really good example of how it works, in dealing with someone like jerome corsi and in seeing paul manafort. the mueller team is going to gather all of the documentary evidence that they have collected, whether it s e-mails, phone records, contracts, bank records. i mean, everything you can imagine. and they have those records that are relevant to that witness in front of them. and they will go through e-mail after e-mail after e-mail and say what is this? what is this? when someone is cooperating. so michael cohen can provide a road map to any e-mails that he s on, but he can also explain the context for other e-mails they have. and what we saw this week, chris, and tom mentioned it a little bit earlier, is mueller has documentary evidence for everything that he asserts. you saw it in the jerome corsi draft statement of offense where
tree lighting ceremony. this morning, before the public knew that cohen flipped trump fired off a tweet calling mueller s federal investigation a illegal joseph mccarthy style witch hunt, and no collusion with russia. tonight we basically know it was chafing him. cnn reporting tonight the justice department notified the trump legal team on wednesday night about michael cohen s planned plea. but perhaps the strangest turn of events took place after cohen pleaded guilty. that s when trump came out and said cohen was lying to get a lighter prison sentence. but trump wanted the president s written answer to robert mueller s question about the trump moscow project was basically identical to what cohen admitted today in court. in other words cohen is a liar who is telling the truth on this and also the president is too. talk more about how the president is handling this, i m joined by kim wehle. ben, i ll start with you, you
the proposed tower and financing construction. assistant one asked details stating she would follow up. this is the president of the united states, personal bag man, secretly calling the russian president s office, to ask, to beg for help to get a deal cleared. it s an extraordinary moment in there. i mean, this is something he s lied about, that he was not truthful with congress about. so he s lied. he hadn t fully disclosed that before today. and then you have this discussion. it was interesting to me, everything in this criminal information, even though michael cohen pled guilty to it, the special counsel s office has to back it up. it s their duty to back it up. so the fact that notes were taken, the fact there were these type of intricate details in there, the fact that there are elsewhere in the information it states there s actual messages quoted in there tells me they have a lot of evidence. that is a great point. it backs these up. assistant one has details and took no
winter, who was inside the courthouse when michael cohen pleaded guilty today. and a reporter with the washington post whose new piece extends trump s quest to expand business in russia. what was that scene like this morning? in past scenes we ve had a heads up. shortly after 8:15 this morning we received a note and the note said usa versus john doe, and there will be a hearing at 9:00 a.m. and i called somebody and that person said i was strongly advise that you be there. it was a mad scramble for everybody to get to the courthouse. we didn t know right away what it was going to be. we knew because mueller s prosecutors were in the courtroom and his spokesperson was in the courtroom. and michael cohen a few minutes before 9:00 a.m. strode in and was a much more confident, i think a much more calm michael cohen than we d seen in previous hearings. interesting. you and i talked when he pled guilty in august. the enormity of that moment hit
basically, the congress says you have a duty to uphold the law. that if one of your surrogates or underlings comes before us and lies to us and you know it, you have a duty to correct the record. there is ten articles probably staring the president in the face right now. we were in real life, this would be game over already. but we re more in like a crazy trump movie. i just think that today is the day, today is the part of the money where michael corleone brings carlo into the room. robert mueller has basically told donald trump i got your manafort, i got your cohen, i got your barzeen any, i got your at the talia, i got your kim corsi, i ve got your assange. don t insult my intelligence, right? all of the walls are closing on him, and we also know trump is zhiefrd because he is reacting like a feral cat in a corner, lashing out on twitter to all these people. so i think earlier in the day katyal said this could be the beginning of the end.