case or uses it as leverage to say, you violated the logan act, you want to test the legality of it, fine, get yourself a lawyer, spend a million dollars, and we ll see you in court. to be fair, very, very seldom prosecuted on a mere logan act. but this fits the four corners of that act. all right. we also have never had anything like this. so you can argue it is seldom used, never used, but we never had a situation like this. unprecedent. thank you all so much. and up next, the mood at the white house and how the facts we learned today shed new light on president trump s many denials of collusion or contacts between his team and the russians. can you say whether you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with russia during the course of the election? well, i told you general flynn obviously was dealing so that s one person, but he was dealing as he should have been. during the election? no, nobody that i know of. nobody. so you re not aware of
there s nothing wrong with it, then fine. then why, you know, why not tell the truth? let me just why in terms of just for context, what is the implication? why does it matter if the president did know about all of this, evan? one of the things that the president has been very out there about is sort of saying that this is a witch-hunt. so the question that i think we know that as part of this investigation mueller has been looking at is the question of obstruction and whether or not there was an attempt by the president, by anybody around him to sort of obstruct the fbi s investigation into trying to get to the bottom of what happened in the 2016 election, whether or not there was any coordination, illegal coordination between the russians and the campaign. so, look, i think that s a big open question here, and that is why it is important to know what the president knew and when did he know it. we do know that is a focus of robert mueller s investigation, do we not? yes, we
right. not really. it didn t work out well. you wonder if comey would have done what mueller is doing now. i wonder if trump is capable of learning that lesson, firing comey, taking dramatic steps? don t underestimate trump s ability have to read up on your history of the saturday night massacre. right. can we return to one quick thing shimon raised, which is this question is this implicates foreign policy. we have talked about this before, which is there is this thing called the logan act which makes it a crime for a private citizen to interfere in the foreign relations of countries. that is exactly what happened here if you take the indictment, the information on its face. they intervened with egypt and with russia with respect to a foreign policy dispute between the obama administration and israel essentially. that s exactly what the logan act was there to prevent. it will be very interesting to see whether mueller either, one, is willing to bring a logan act
said, you know, why don t you let this thing go. now you have to ask the question, why did the president do that? was it just because he thought flynn was a good guy and had been an early supporter, or was there something else there? you look at the statement of offense here. it is very detailed about these conversations. right. the white house position has been from the very beginning, the president didn t know about this, flynn was freelancing, et cetera. in fact, you look at the statement of offense and it describes flynn not only keeping the trump transition informed but senior persons in the trump transition directing him what to do with these conversations. right. and we know from our own reporting back in december when some of the stuff was happening, jim, we know that senior people inside the administration, inside the transition were managing not only this issue with the u.n. security council and the israeli settlements
they ve now put flynn in the larger trump so the president could pardon flynn but still use flynn to potentially prosecute others is what you are saying? right. because as part of the plea agreements, you know, you proffer very, very detailed sets of facts, you know, in order to show exactly what your cooperation might look like. what your value is. oftentimes those are offered before a grand jury, so it is actually sworn statements. wow. so, of course, the question is, you know, you were talking about if mueller, mueller could bring him back. but is mueller safe? i mean, you know, the president has said he s not going to fire robert mueller, but then after something like this happens today, shimon, you wonder is that really going to be the case. you never know, right. we keep hearing there are people from inside the trump orbit he is not happy with mueller and how he could fire him at any day. that would just set off a chain of events that would be very difficult for the