All that, plus Julian Castro on a potential 2020 run, and todays historic vote to rebuke the white house on yemen when all in starts right now. Good evening from new york, im chris hayes. The president sounds like a guy who is caught, and thats because he has been. Nbc news is reporting tonight that donald trump was in the room during discussions over paying hush money to silence women in august 2015. That puts the president directly in the middle of the scheme to violate Campaign Finance law that he has tried to pin squarely on Michael Cohen. Its a scheme that both prosecutors and the judge who sent cohen to prison say was a serious criminal felony. Thats not all. Also tonight a brand new federal criminal investigation into the Trump Inauguration. The wall street journal reporting that federal prosecutors in manhattan are investigating whether trumps 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record 107 million it raised from donations as well as whether some of the committees top donors gave money in exchange for access to the Incoming Trump administration, policy concessions, or to influence official administration positions. Much more on the very sketchy situation around the inauguration shortly. Meanwhile, as the revelations around the hush money payments have piled up, trump has been desperately trying out defenses, hoping one will stick. Today he took his case to trump tv where he suggested cohen should have saved trump from himself. Let me tell you, i never directed him to do anything wrong. Whatever he did, he did on his own. Hes a lawyer. A lawyer who represents a client is supposed to do the right thing. Thats why you pay them a lot of money, et cetera, et cetera. Et cetera, et cetera. Hilariously in that same interview, he undermined his own case saying actually cohen wasnt really a lawyer at all. Why did you hire Michael Cohen . He was known as a fixer. First of all that was his title, a fixer. He did very low level work. Why did you need him . He did more Public Relations than he did law. Youd see him on television. He was okay on television. Okay. Its worth taking a moment to remember just how much the president s story has changed. At the beginning when this was first being reported, it was total denial. Oh, no, never happened. No, its not true. Now we have come to this. Lets just for a moment take a trip down memory lane and see if you can follow the bouncing ball. Did the president approve of the payment that was made in october of 2016 by his longtime lawyer and advisor, Michael Cohen . Look, the president has addressed these directly and made very well clear that none of these allegations are true. Did you know about the 130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels . No. Then why did Michael Cohen make it if there was no truth to the allegations . You have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney and youll have to ask michael. Do you know where he got the money to make that payment . No, i dont know. If he didnt know about the specifics of it, as far as i know, but he did know about the general arrangement that michael would take care of things like this. Its not campaign money. No Campaign Finance violation. So they fund it through a law firm. Fund it through a law firm and the president repaid it. Did you know about the payments . Later on i knew. Later on. He is a lawyer. He represents a client. I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong. Joining me now, carol lee who reported that trump is confiding to friends hes concerned about impeachment. Also with me, adam serwer who has a piece out saying trump is running out of alibis. In that piece you lay out that the criminal violations that Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to and been sentenced to in part are quite serious and it is unusually prosecuted for them but theres a reason theyre prosecuted in this case. Right. I mean these laws are written in such a way as to make it extremely hard to be criminally prosecuted for them. The violation has to be knowing and willful. One of the things prosecutors look at when theyre trying to figure that out is whether theres a pattern of deception with the payments. What weve seen with trump, not just his public denials but in the way that cohen facilitated the hush money payments, theres an obvious effort to hide both the nature of the payments and why they were being made. And i think when you look at the president s shifting explanations, it suggests not only that he might be guilty but also that he is extremely worried about it. Carol, that is your reporting today about confiding about being worried about impeachment. I mean at some level, yes, no kidding. But is there something thats changed specifically in the thinking in the white house about that . Yeah, theres a couple of things, i think, that the president , you know, wasnt as worried about this maybe a week ago prior to interesting. Some of the things that have come out. And, you know, we started reporting this before the news even came out about the ami deal, agreement, and so thats only added to it. Now its come out that the president was in the room he was in a room, by the way, where the only two other people in the room are saying that this was campaign related, right, so hes the odd man out on this. And so what weve seen, according to our reporting, is that over the recent days, hes just gotten more concerned about this. And the people around him have gotten more concerned about this. One of the things that they have raised with him is that the need to keep Establishment Republicans onboard. The view is that if you have democrats and they start to move towards impeachment, if republicans can hold the line, then that wouldnt really take it wouldnt go anywhere. But if you start to see cracks among some Establishment Republicans, then it would be problematic. One of those republicans was marco rubio who said over the weekend that no one was above the law. He said it multiple times in the context of the president. That really got some of the president s allies to notice. Theres something remarkable here, adam, which is in the grand scheme of things the grand scheme of things that the president may have done, things that hes done in his past or his business, this is a relatively minor infraction. Its a serious one, but hes pinned on it in a way that i havent seen him pinned on other stuff yet. What do you make of it . Well, i think thats right. I think when you look at some of the president s policies that have caused a significant amount of human suffering, obviously trying to get around Campaign Finance laws isnt really high on the list. On the other hand, the fact that you have the two other people in the room, as carol said, saying that this was a campaign payment and not a, quote unquote, personal transaction or private transaction as the president has tried to make it sound has really just made it impossible for him to provide an explanation that makes him sound innocent. Yeah, thats it, carol. This is unambiguous situation in which the judge, the prosecutors, two of the three people in the room all agree what was happening was a criminal conspiracy to commit a felony and the president is the only one left denying it. It is a discreet and easily understandable crime that he appears to have committed. Hes really isolated on this. You know, you make a really good point. The other thing i would say about it is one of the things that theyre really worried about, and weve talked about this a lot over however long this Mueller Investigation has been going on, is the number of investigations that are now going on. Its just theres all of these sort of trains on the track and they dont know where theyre going and they dont know how to stop them and they dont have any control over them. On top of that, they dont know what else is going to come out. Thats whats really got everybody kind of on edge, far more so in the last few days than i think weve seen even in the last few months. Adam, the president has a lot of faith in his own ability to talk his way out of circumstances, but increasingly in the last few days hes sounded to me like someone who has just been brought into the Police Booking office and hes in the Interrogation Room and hes refusing a lawyer and hes talked himself out of a lot of jams and he thinks he can talk himself out of this one. Right. So the problem with that strategy is that the more he talks and the more his explanation shifts, the more it looks to prosecutors like he is knowingly and willfully violating the law. White collar crime is extremely hard to convict because you have to unlike with other laws that mostly apply to people who are low income, White Collar Crime you have to get inside the mind of the perpetrator. And for some reason, trump, probably against advice of his lawyers, keeps on telling everyone what hes thinking. Welcome to my mind he keeps saying. Carol and adam, thank you for your time. For more on the growing scandal on the Trump Inauguration, im joined by andrew prokop. He wrote why trumps inauguration money is a big part of the Mueller Investigation. The background here is before we found out about this investigation, mueller was already looking at it and the finances were already a little red flag raising. Explain. There are many, many red flags. So the inaugural committee raised over 106 million, appeared thats more than twice as much as any other inaugural committee in history. You know, of course hes trump, he does it really big. But then a lot of questions arose about the people who were giving that money, first of all. Kind of shady, scandalplagued people in several cases. Then there was the question of what actually happened to that money. And that is a very big unanswered question still at this point. Its the focus or at least one focus of the new investigation from the u. S. Attorneys office in new york. But mueller seemed to be more interested in the question of foreign money, particularly russia money, but also middle eastern money that they may have thought made its way into the inaugural committee somehow. We should be enclosure that inaugural committees are very loosely regulated, but one thing you cant do is you cant take foreign money. So the mueller team is looking into that as well as sdny. The wall street journal story suggests that it was the raiding of Michael Cohens office and the records therein that led them to start investigating the inaugural committee, including a conversation Michael Cohen and the woman who was tasked with running it, an argument about why it was costing so much. And thats really interesting because that person is Stephanie Winston wulkoff. She used to be a close friend of melania trump. If you look at the filings for the inaugural committee, her company got 26 million from it. Thats almost a quarter of the total spending. Its the single launchest vendor. Theres a tape where even she is saying shes concerned about how this inaugural committee is spending their money and whats actually going on here. Theres a whole lot more we dont know about where the money went. They only have to disclose very limited categories. The top vendors they spent on, certain categories where they gave a lot of spending, but its very vague. So theres about 30 million that we know nothing about and theres another 20 million or so that we know only the vaguest details about. 30 million that we dont know anything about it. And then theres another sort of 20 million to say that its a little vague. The other thing that strikes me here, there are a lot of people involved in this. One of the things that apparently theyre looking at, the Southern District of new york again, is whether there was essentially quid pro quo. Whether donations were bowing being made for policy considerations from the new administration. Thats been lurking at the back of this all along. Also in the case of mueller in the russian and middle eastern money that they have been questioning people about, oligarchs, but now in the case of the Southern District of new york office, it seems to have perhaps more of an american focus on companies. We should note that several of the major donors to the inaugural have already seemed to be under investigation. Elliott broidy is a big defense contractor. He appears to be in a lot of legal hot water. He was also separately involved in the Michael Cohen you know, one of the hush money payments. Yes, Michael Cohen, who had developed apparently an expertise in hush money payments for rich men who had had affairs decided to do a solid for Elliott Broidy, who had also done this and used the identical contract language he had set up for donald trump to hook up Elliott Broidy with whom he also served on the republican finance committee. So its an interesting small world over there as they begin to untangle the threads. Andrew prokop, thanks for being with me tonight. Thank you. I want to turn to a professor of constitutional law who is also a member of the house of representatives, democrat of maryland and a member of the judiciary committee. Youre someone who has taught, studied and legislated on Campaign Finance. I want you to respond to an argument coming from capitol hill from the president and others being Campaign Finance, are you kidding me . Really . Is that such a big deal . Who cares about Campaign Finance law. Well, thanks for having me, chris. Its a very big deal. If you think about watergate, for example, that scandal was all about Campaign Finance and crimes that were committed in pursuit of the presidency. Here what were talking about crimes committed in pursuit of the presidency and a lot of them have to do with Campaign Finance. But the president s point is debunked and contradicted by his own conduct and behavior. If it wasnt a big deal, why did they go to such Great Lengths to conceal the whole scheme . So what he did essentially was to direct, according to the u. S. Attorney, a sequence of events where they took 150,000 in corporate money and paid it in hush money right before the campaign to one former mistress and then they took 130,000 to pay in hush money to pay off another former mistress to purchase her silence. They went over the 2,700 or 5,400 limit. They shot pretty far over that. They went over that easily and violated the rule against direct corporate contributions, even under the egregious Citizens United case, doing this was not legal. It was a clearly coordinated campaign contribution. They sat in the room together and decided to direct the money there. And then they didnt report any of it. They went to Great Lengths and great pains to conceal the whole conspiracy. So its very serious business. And it is precisely the kind of conduct that was alleged in the impeachment articles by the House Judiciary Committee during watergate. And we know that there was the breakin but there was lots of illegal money flowing in. Look, what im taking from the disclosures this week and from a little conversation that i had with james comey when he came before our committee is that the president has basically been conducting his affairs like a crime family. Comey wrote in his book that when trump was interviewing him for the job of staying on, he said will you have loyalty to me . Will you have personal loyalty to me . Comey wrote and then he reaffirmed in his testimony last week that this was something that he likened to a mob boss. He said he had not experienced this before except in the context of mafia family investigations. The president basically has been running his affairs like an organized crime family. And so there are now all of these corrupt deals that are coming to light, attempts to pay off mistresses, but of course everybody is still waiting for the other shoe to drop with the moscow project, which was the big business ambition of the president. That was, you know, could they actually build for hundreds of millions of dollars a trump tower in moscow in the middle of the president ial campaign. What if the deal had gone through and we had a president who was compromised in that way by Vladimir Putin and by the russian government. It was bad enough just trying to do it, but when if it had gone through. Let me go back to what you just said about comparing to watergate and its true. The follow the money was about where they were getting the money to do all the dirty tricks they were doing. That was a key part of the entire cracking the case open. If its the case that individual 1 has done what he appears to be implicated in doing, which is directing the commission of a felony, multiple felonies, isnt that on its face a high crime or misdemeanor for purposes of the u. S. Constitution . First of all, on the Campaign Finance side, you have to prove that it was willful and knowing. But i think theres a tremendous circumstantial evidence that they knew what they were doing was an attempt to circumvent the Campaign Finance laws. Now, the question about impeachment is somewhat different because i think all the authorities agree that direct violation of a criminal statute is not necessary for impeachment. It is sufficient for impeachment in most cases, but not always. Theres always this other judgment thats built in impeachment thats not just like the way a prosecutor would look at it. You know, are the elements of the statutory offense met. But also is there a general offense against the character of our government a