story that someone is a source for it. it makes me wonder is it true and what would be the purpose of telling this story. i mean, it s got to be difficult to cultivate someone in vladimir putin s orbit, in his inner circle anyway. it is very difficult. he s a spy himself. he understands these things. he takes precautions. there have been breaches before. and those people have been dealt with in horrible ways. and remember what is a source as somebody who used to read this stuff, and i need to be careful here, it could be somebody in the inner circle or somebody that interacts with the kremlin from time to time. right. we don t know exactly who they are talking about. a source doesn t necessarily mean a spy, it doesn t mean a cia asset. it could be somebody with whom there s a good relationship. but to me the point is we re confused about putin s intentions for the 2018 election and on that i agree. you know, i m somebody that
immunity to someone because you re hoping that they ll be able to either provide information or testify against someone who is a little bit higher up on the food chain than they are. you don t use a big fish to eat a smaller fish. my read is that he gets immunity in the hope that he can provide help with someone else and cohen doesn t look like the big fish that sdny would be going after here. so the implication is there s a bigger fish, we re trying to figure out who that is. the obvious choice is donald trump sr. but it could be donald trump jr. or eric. those are the only possibilities of somebody who s more senior to weisselberg in the organization. would that be true? at least in the organization. and it s important that when you give someone immunity and try to keep going up the chain in a prosecution, you don t always succeed. but these are good prosecutors, they know how to do these kinds of cases. it seems unlikely to me that they would have given weisselberg a pass if the
state and local prosecutors. can you think of any precedent for this? no, there s no precedent. this is uncharted territory. the one caution, ali, is the olc opinion is binding on the executive branch which includes the special counsel. it s not binding on state attorneys general. but the underlying analysis in the olc opinion concludes that indictment of a sitting president is unconstitutional. if that analysis is correct, in other words if courts were to agree with that analysis, that would preclude state attorneys general as well as federal prosecutors from return agindictment. so in other words the state attorney general is not bound by the rule not to indict the president but it would obviously appear before a court and that court would say it doesn t matter who did it, it s not constitutional. that s exactly right. and the way prosecutors work is they re not looking for trap doors in policies. they are trying to figure out
these cases are so important, and frankly judges when they come to sentencing these men are going to take into account the fact that they were in these positions of power and that they abused it and frankly, you know, i shudder to think what they will get in so far as sentences, but part of one of the very important factors of sentencing is deterrents effects and those are cases that you ve got to make a statement about. why do you say you shudder to think? do you think they will get harsh sentences? they very well good. they very well could get harsh sentences. these judges are reasonable, but, you know, michael cohen has a guidelines calculation with what the parties, the government and his attorneys have agreed is, you know, the top of the guidelines here for his sentence is 63 months. the judge doesn t have to do that. it s up to the judge to figure out the sentence. yeah. the judge has leeway to do what he wants. michael, remember this investigation of michael cohen. it grew