they got bad advice from their lawyers, their lawyers making a last-minute correction there. certainly in the courtroom, based on our colleagues who were there, they entered with high hopes and they left with disappointment and perhaps some surprise. what do we know about what else flynn needs to cooperate on, jim, and will it be enough for this federal judge? well, the judge made clear, the more you cooperate, the more advantage you will have when the sentencing actually happens, this now a number of weeks away. it is on two lines of inquiry, one, this case about illegal foreign lobbying that two of flynn s former partners have been indicted for. flynn has not presumably because he has provided information in the investigation. the special counsellor made clear while his cooperation has been helpful, it is possible he could continue to help. that appears to be the strategy going forward, not without some encouragement from this judge saying, cooperate going forward and you may get
misleading vice president pence about the contacts with the russians. mike flynn is a fine person, and i asked for his resignation. he respectfully gave it. he is a man who there was a certain amount of information given to vice president pence, who is with us today, and i was not happy with the way that information was given. reporter: when pressed, sanders tried to put some separation between flynn s lies and whether the president colluded with the russians. maybe he did do those things, but it doesn t have anything to do with the president directly. reporter: sanders also defended the president s recent attacks on his former personal attorney, michael cohen t as a rat for turning against mr. trump. we know michael cohen to be a liar on a number of fronts and the president s opinion is extremely clear on that front. reporter: the press secretary later insisted the term rat was more than fair. using terms like rat and things like that to talk about people who are coo
institution that mueller is seeking information from. yeah, i suspect a lot of reporters, a lot of people are trying to figure out the name of the corporation and the country involved. i suspect we will figure it out fairly soon. thanks very much, shimon. we will have more on the story coming up. right now i want to turn to the other breaking news we re following on the michael flynn hearing and the reaction from the white house, the president s spokeswoman defending mr. trump for his continued defense of michael flynn. let s get to our chief white house correspondent, jim acosta. jim, there was a rare white house press briefing shortly after flynn s hearing. that s right, wolf. and the white house at that briefing was continuing to claim michael flynn was somehow ambushed by the fbi, resulting in his lying to the federal investigators, but it flies in the face of what we heard earlier and what flynn said in court today. still, the detachment from reality was on full display here
russian-owned financial institution that may have relevant financial data for the mueller investigation, and it is under the foreign sovereign immunities act which prevents these sort of suits. so it is a big deal to try to breach the sovereign immunities. they seem to have done it and they ll get their records and we will learn a lot from it. we will see if they do because the district sided with mueller, now the court of appeals sided with mueller. it is a big win for the special counsel. it is a great win. i don t bet on football, but i would like to see the odds on this one. as a national security guy, i m with michael. you are looking at this and looking where the crumbs and where they go. these cases that mueller has brought time and again involve money and they involve illegal interactions with russian companies including, as we know, russian companies that were involved in the american election. so i look at this, put two and two together and say mueller is trying to get in
sentence down the road. yeah, he needs to be a perfect cooperator over the next three months in order to convince this judge that he s not going to go to jail. jim sciutto, thank you very, very much. we have more breaking news coming into the situation room in the mueller investigation. i want to bring in our crime and justice reporter, she moan prokupecz. we just learned a little while ago details about a mystery case involving the special counsel. presumably it is a big deal for robert mueller. yes, it is tremendous here because they ve been trying to get this information from this company. what we ve learned based on what has just been filed is that this is a foreign company, a company outside of the u.s. that is trying to argue they do not need to release, they shouldn t be forced to release these information pursuant to the subpoena that the mueller team has given them because they re protected by their own country s laws. there are regulation issues and they have been fig