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 out of a referral from the mueller investigation. his team referred it to the southern district of new york. you know, the president and his folks like to say it s not connected to the
be that cohen doesn t know much right now that mueller doesn t already know? i don t buy that. i think he knows a lot and he holds the key to what goes on here. in terms of the referral to the southern district, the right and appropriate call and may be the reason why he s not spoken to by mueller and mueller s team allowing the southern district to do the prosecution and then perhaps see that. also something you have heard a lot, wolf, of proffer and when you tell the government what you know and also a tool called reverse proffer and that s when we go as lawyers with our client, right, in this case and you will have the government tell you what they know about you about your guilt and what they ll do to you should you not do things which comply with what they want you to do and may see moving forward a reverse proffer and the government sits down with him saying we have a, b, c, the whole alphabet. what do you want to do? and then a deal could be cut and speak to mueller and the do
and, you know, if the president decides not to cooperate, he decides not to cooperate. mueller can address that in terms of whether the president is a target or not. and whether the president, frankly, could be indicted as nixon was cited. we are also learning today, the wall street journal first reporting, the former fixer michael cohen is being investigated for potential tax fraud and other sordid problems. he s not been charged with anything yet. but if he s charged, presumably to put pressure, additional pressure on him to cooperate with mueller s investigation. i think that s right. and obviously, robert mueller has followed the old axiom of follow the money and we see it in the matter of fact case, the gates case and now in the cohen case. and obviously, cohen with taxi cab medallions was a but the
coming up next? you get to the end of the day and nothing changed. byron the fact he moved some of these cases to new york. is this a significance in that? i think there is. the significance is these are things that the special counsel uncovered that he believes are not in the core mission of his office, that is searching for some sort of conspiracy and contacts between russia and the trump campaign to influence the 2016 election. we have seen him spin off a number of cases. the michael cohen case. a person very close to donald trump. gave that to federal prosecutors in new york. bill: why? because it doesn t deal with manafort? what is the legal reason for doing that? mueller hasn t said why. most experts interrupted this as meaning whatever they discovered about cohen doesn t involve the trump and russia affair.
second, there s another leak, this one is out, and this one, he says he was in donald trump s office when donald trump jr. walked in and told him about a russian meeting that was about to start. that is also not true. melissa: this is melissa francis and i just want to jump in. i don t think any of that really addresses the question of why he would say he wasn t at the meeting? why are you saying that the president wasn t at the meeting? i understand those two meetings that you just set out there, but that doesn t explain why you re saying. who asked if he was there? no when asked if he was there. he is alleging the meeting took place and we are making it clear that the president was not at that meeting. cohen doesn t even allege that the cut it off. two alleged meetings, first meeting, a group people, not the