the mueller special that aired on this network last night, the headliner special. i want to know what you think it says about bob mueller and the way he is running this investigation, that he sent this over to his colleagues in the southern district, also fed wrath ral prosecutors obvious and also able to work with the fbi but that he referred it to that office. what does that say to you about the substance of what they are looking for from michael cohen? it says a couple of things. first, there may be evidence that came to light from mueller s team that is not exactly on point with his mission. and that s going to get referred and worked by the southern district of new york. so that s likely the case, that there is a mixture of things going on here, some of which, perhaps even the whole stormy daniels issues, may get just referred and flipped to the southern district. but there s another thing here, that s logistics. you are talking about manhattan. you are talking about a search
but a lot of coordination obviously between the fbi and the u.s. attorney s office, is that right? yeah, i don t think partnering is overstating it at all. there is complete coordination and partnership between the fbi and between the u.s. attorney s office. and between different fbi offices around the country and between different u.s. attorney s offices around the country. i don t want to portray it as one seamless web where balls never get dropped because occasionally they do. but in the main, nicolle, prosecutors and agents around the country work together. another thing i think is important here for context, if bob mueller and his team come across something that they believe to be a federal crime or evidence of a federal crime, they have a binary choice. they either do something with it or they do nothing with it. and doing nothing with it is almost never a good choice, forgive the double negative. so, in this case, they kicked it over to the u.s. attorney for the southern distr
whether or not there is a case here to be investigated. and so in that sense he s probably saved himself a little bit of political grief. let me just recap this breaking news. we came on the air as the new york times was reporting that the fbi raids the office of donald trump s long-time lawyer michael cohen. it s a matt apuzzo story. he s broken a lot of news in the investigation. this is his beat and he reports that the fbi on monday raided the office of president trump s long time personal lawyer michael cohen, seizing records related to several topics including payments to pornographic film actress. let me bring in chuck rosenberg, former u.s. attorney, former senior fbi official, now an msnbc contributor, which is our good fortune. you figure prominently in the one-hour special that aired on msnbc about robert mueller and this seems to underscore the special counsel s adherence to all of the kind of letter of the law of how a special counsel is supposed to operate, that this
in because, peter, i watched that video come in from aboard air force one. the pool report broke during our hour and i saw the video a little later. i think i was doing a double header of my own and showed it that night on the 11:00. it was clear that the president was either unprepared for questions about stormy daniels and the $130,000 payment to keep her quiet, or it was his plan all along to throw his lawyer, michael cohen, under the bus. but neither if you stood at a fork in the road and those were his two choices, neither one really frees him from legal jeopardy. my sense is that by his statements aboard air force one, he strengthened mr. avenatti s case. any reaction from folks in the white house? i ve heard from your paper and others that many white house staffers view stormy daniels as a credible individual who is telling a credible story. she doesn t come across as a
start squeezing these guys because they know things, they know things that trump is conspencer christian lco conspicuously been unwilling to reveal. i want to go back to the never released tax returns. the time we covered it incorrectly. we covered it as a norm that was busted. it was obviously a much bigger and different story. david farenthold from the washington post had a story last week where he laid out the three legal devices that are squeezing him and his financial records. the least sexy of which is the emoluments case in virginia and d.c. or maryland and d.c. the other is avenatti s legal case and the other is the mueller probe. do you think those three investigations, we will eventually see those tax returns? i don t know. i obviously think we are all wondering whether robert mueller is going to produce a report for the public to digest. i think it is very important that he does. but if anyone is going to get his hands on the tax returns it