Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and mr. Trump fully reimbursed mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be 101,000 and 250,000, and the Interest Rate would be zero. Were going to explain all this in a moment. Remember, Michael Cohen paid a 130,000 settlement to the adult film star, stormy daniels, who claims she had an affair with donald trump. The president has denied those allegations. Joining me now, the senior director of the Campaign Legal center. He previously worked in the office of General Counsel for the federal election commission. We had you on yesterday. We were wondering if this disclosure was going to show up in this or this payment was going to show up in this disclosure. It did. What questions do you have now . Well, we were saying that the president s decision of whether to disclose this payment in this report put him in a really tough spot because in he did disclose it, it would raise the question of why he didnt disclose it
the way that this payment was structured being routeded, broken up into different payments, and then routed through a law firm, certainly would be read to suggest some intent to conceal it. That might factor into decision of whether to bring criminal charges. Did we learn anything else in this Financial Disclosure of interest . Well, i mean we learned that the president s lawyer is continuing to have this inability to get him out of trouble without getting him into more trouble. It is incredible that they could have resolved one of the two problems that the president faced here. They could have taken off the table the Campaign Finance violation or they could have taken off the table the personal Financial Disclosure violation, and they did neither. Adav noti, thank you for breaking this down for us. Back to the other Breaking News were following this hour, newly released documents are shedding more light on that controversial trump tower meeting between Trump Campaign officials and a kremlinconnected lawyer. The Senate Judiciary committee
hicks. In a Statement Issued this morning, donald trump jr. Seemed pleased with the release saying the public can now see that for over five hours i answered every question asked and was candid and forthright with the committee. The fallout on capitol hill regarding the Document Dump is split along party lines. To republicans the testimony is consistent with what weve heard, but to democrat they say the interviews raise more questions than answers. Do you still have questions about the extent to which the Trump Organization was communicating with the russians . The answer to your question would be question. Are you satisfied that you know the whole story now . Im satisfied that we got a lot of collaboration by different people that were there and they seemed to draw the same conclusions. We have a piece of the picture, a part of the puzzle. But the full mosaic will require further investigation. The American People deserve to know the truth. Incriminating information from these russians about Hillary Clinton. According to one participant, he by gan t began the meeting saying simply, i understand you have some information for us. At another point when the meeting was rambling along, he got right to the point and said what do you have on hillary . The testimony was he was really disappointed there wasnt any derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. The third takeaway, this russian oligarch, was really pushing this meeting even when some of his employees were telling him it might be a bad idea. He really wanted this to happen. We also learned he tried to broke of two meetings between donald trump and Vladimir Putin, one in 2013 at the Miss Universe pageant and again in 2015. Those meetings didnt happen but it is curious this man who is a billionaire and so close to Vladimir Putin is pushing this relationship between russia and donald trump. What issue do you see being raised by the special counsel
after we learned this from this Senate Testimony . Do you think that they have all this information . Do they potentially have more . Oh, absolutely. It is one of the great mysteries, what does mueller have. Clearly, for example, hes got the ability to find out if there is a blocked number who controlled that number. I mean hes also going to get into the big question that this meet being raised, it showed the trump team was willing to accept help from the russian government. They thought it was coming from the russian government, incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. The question of the whole investigation is what else what other meetings did they have, what other potential help did they accept. We know that a Campaign Aide named George Papadopoulos was approached with an offer of emails, hacked emails. What we dont know is who did papadopoulos communicate that over to, what other contacts there were with russians. We dont know it but Robert Mueller is developing a picture of that evidence, katy. Don jr. Was also asked do you know if any of the following people made any efforts to obtain clinton emails. A number of people were listed in the campaign. Did you ever have a conversation with mr. Stone about emails or
other information obtained as part of a cyber attack . Was there any discussion that you were involved in within the campaign or anyone else about Potential Use of the information that had been obtained through the Cyber Attacks . Don jr. s answer was always i dont know, or i dont recall. Eli, what do you make of that . Well, as donald trump himself has said, you dont plead the fifth if you actually are innocent. When you dont go in front of people and say, you cant recall all these things over and over again, if youre actually telling the truth, you do not go and scramble and call other attorneys who were involved of the meeting and people who were involved to try to get your story straight before you go and testify. There are a lot of damaging things that came out in these document from the Senate Committee here. We were all on the campaign. We can all recall just how frenetic it was. How they were just kind of going from one moment to the next, triaging the situation. Not really thinking about the repercussions. Not thinking long term and certainly in this situation when
this information, overture was made to them, they said we may have some information for you that could be helpful for hillary, even when they believed that this was coming from the russian government, they did not step back and think, maybe we should call the fbi and let them know that a Foreign Government could be attempting to interfere in this election. When you had this meeting and they were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, did you at any point think that maybe you should go to the federal norts and alert them to it . Don jr. Said i would have if something had come out of it but nothing came out of it, so i didnt think it was a very big deal. So many records of phone calls and conversations and emails, communications from the 26th floor of trump tower, that one call was never made. The call to alert the authorities. This is an outside influence. It is a foreign power. Attempting to influence this election, attempting to give dirt, campaign dirt, incriminating materials, about your opponent. That call never gets made. Yes, the excuse from the
campaign is, they were so ad hoc, things were flying day by day, we didnt have the resources to do that. Or, we didnt get anything incriminating, so no harm, no foul. But thats a pretty low bar to clear to say, look, we didnt accept anything. But this happened. This is a National Security threat potentially and they never did that. The perception there, the appearance is there. It is very troubling. It makes you wonder if anything else happened after that in order to get information that was dangled in front of them. The other thing i found interesting was don jr. Said he had no idea whether or not his father was involved in crafting the statement, jon. Bring us back to that moment in time and tell us what we know from our reporting about whether the president was involved in crafting that statement aboard Air Force One . Right. So the moment came as sort of this meeting was uncovered and unveiled and. Don jr. s participation was revealed in news reports. The president was actually in europe at the time. Coming back on Air Force One as this story was about to blow up. And as the new york times
the clinton administration. And also, editor in chief of government studies at Brookings Institute and an msnbc legal analy analyst. Harry, does it pass the smell test that don jr. Would not have known about his Father Crafting that statement on Air Force One about don jr. s meeting and Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with a russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton . Well, actually, as jon pointed out, he later in his its not testimony, by the way. This is the first important point. It is just an interview. Hes not under oath. But he hedges on this very point and said maybe he did it through hope hicks. I think in this kind of setting, what that means is, if im pushed to the wall, im going to cover my bases and say, well, maybe he did know. But your general point is really important. Hes got 22 I Dont Recalls in there. Some of them are understandable, but others are on details that strain credulity. Important to note that when people say, it wasnt a big deal because we didnt get anything out of it, thats not actually quite true because what the Trump Campaign in fact got out of it was the release starting relatively soon after this meeting of massive quantities of purloined emails. And releases that continued throughout the duration of the campaign. And so it isnt it is true that they didnt get disparaging information at this meeting. But it is not true that they didnt get disparaging meeting about their campaign opponent. So i think it is i think the meeting remains a terribly damaging episode for them, and at bare minimum, what it shows is that if there was no collusion, all caps, exclamation mark, exclamation mark,
exclamation mark, it certainly Wasnt For Lack of trying. Theres also a really interesting report out by the new york times, Michael Schmidt and another reporter, about an emails, a missing email that investigators are looking for. The article says that john k. Mashburn, a trump advisor, said he remembered an email coming from George Papadopoulos who was approached by a russian agent some time before the Party Conventions talking about whether there were talking about emails that the russians had on Hillary Clinton. The Senate Judiciary committee was unable to locate the email that mashburn claims having received. He they are confident in his honesty in his testimony. They believe he is telling the truth. Theyve pored through millions of documents. Still, they have not found this one email. Harry, if they cannot find this email, if muellers team cannot find this email, how damaging
is that to the investigation, or how damaging could it be . I mean i dont think it is very damaging. Its another very interesting tidbit if they dont find it, they move on. But mashburn is sure he got it and hes sure he went to other people. And papadopoulos is not the easiest last name to spell. So theyve now gone back to the campaign and asked them to try to look at different iterations of his spelling. But that final little link between papadopoulos and when he passed things along about the overtures from russia, to sessions, to manafort, to anyone on the committee, has yet be to filled in, at least based on publicly available information. So Something Like that would be really key to make a final link joining europe and russia to the United States. Its not that easy to spell if youre not greek. Lets put it that way. Im greek so i feel like i got a
good handle on spelling it. But thats just me. Rex tillerson has something to say now that hes out of the administration. Youll want to hear it. Its next. And we got to know the friends of our friends. Then our old friends from middle school, our mom, our ex and our boss joined forces to wish us happy birthday. Then we discovered our uncle use to play in a band. And realized he was young once too. And we found others just like us. And just like that we felt a little less alone. But then something happened. We had to deal with spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse. Thats going to change. From now on, facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy. So we can all get back to what made facebook good in the first place. Friends. Because when this place does what it was built for,
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grounded in facts, then we as american citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. Thats Rex Tillerson seemingly taking jabs at the president Behind Closed Doors. That was Rex Tillerson who reportedly took jabs Behind Closed Doors at the president as he served as secretary of state. Nbc news reported that he called the president a moron. He didnt exactly deny it either. Now though he is taking some of that criticism public. Latest on what tillerson called the growing crisis in ethics and integrity that im in a speech to graduates at the military institute today. Elise jordan, former advisor to senator rand pauls campaign. Shes also an msnbc political analyst. Obviously the relationship between Rex Tillerson and donald trump was not a good one. We know from the way that he was fired through twitter. We know from the way john kelly first alerted it to him and all those sordid details about that. We also know that Rex Tillerson according to our reporting called the president a moron after talk of Nuclear Warheads and nuclear capabilities. For him to come out and make this Commencement Address and bring some of it public, why do you think he would do that . I think that for Rex Tillerson the level of truth that the Trump Administration and the president himself presents to the American Public was always problematic. You look at how when he reportedly said the moron comments, which a [ bleep ]ing moron in front of it, actually, he never denied it. He didnt dig down into it but he didnt outright deny it. You look at other trump surrogates such as dina powell and h. R. Mcmaster. They would deny things on behalf of the white house such as, on this day just a year ago, in 2017, the Washington Post reported that President Trump had disclosed information to the Russian Ambassador in the oval
office. Tillerson essentially confirmed it. Powell and mcmaster denied it. So i do think that the element of truth within the administration always was a problem for Rex Tillerson. Do you think tillerson is going to want to talk more about his time and maybe what the president said to Vladimir Putin during the meetings . Do you think well ever hear about that . Frex wRex Tillerson was the male at the top of the most powerful corporation in the world, exxonmobil. Then he goes into the Trump Administration and is treated pretty terribly, the way john kelly noted him while he was suffering from if you need to, look it up. That was just disgraceful. He was treated pretty terribly by the administration and by the president himself getting fired by tweet. I think if donald trump didnt want him to talk about what he really thought, then maybe he should have treated him a little bit better. What is this going to mean for other people who might leave this administration, other
senior officials . I am looking at h. R. Mcmaster who might know things im no the saying reveal classified information but might know things of the way this white house operates. Do you expect anybody else to come out and raise some red