tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC April 18, 2018 9:00pm-10:00pm PDT
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here in new york. ♪ we lead tonight with an exclusive interview. an exclusive interview with a lawyer we have never talked to on the show before, someone who will likely be new to you as a character in this ongoing national drama we are all living through as americans. but our exclusive guest tonight is somebody who is right in the middle of what appeared to be the president's legal troubles right now. at least he used to be right in the middle of the president's legal troubles, until this story took a sharp, surprise turn this evening, one that i will admit to you right now i don't get. i do not yet totally understand it. but i'm hoping that the one guy
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on earth who can actually explain it, because he did it, i'm hoping that he will explain it to me and to you live on this show in just a minute. as you know, federal prosecutors in the southern district of new york have announced in open court that the president's long time personal attorney, former trump organization executive michael cohen, is under federal criminal investigation right now. this in itself is an interesting thing to know in the life and fate of michael cohen, who has been associated with this president for a very long time. but even though we the public have not seen all that much detail about the criminal case that prosecutors are pursuing against michael cohen, the exact charges that he's being investigated for, for example, are redacted in the court filings thus far. prosecutors have explained in publicly available court filings that they obtained previously secret search warrants months ago to start reading and searching all of the
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communications that michael cohen engaged in on multiple e-mail accounts. but most of the information about what they learned from that surveillance and what in that surveillance helped them obtain another search warrant that sent federal agents to go physically raid michael cohen's home and office and safe-deposit box last week. all those records are redacted. we know he is under investigation. but a lot of it, we're not allowed to see. we haven't seen the search warrants themselves that allowed that raid on michael cohen or that surveillance of his e-mail accounts. we haven't seen the law enforcement affidavits that may have been used to persuade a judge to sign off on one or both of those warnrants. just because that stuff is secret to us doesn't mean it's secret to everybody. the judge and the lawyers involved in michael cohen's criminal case have seen all that stuff. nothing's redacted for them. they've seen all the supporting
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documents put to the court thus far. as we reported last night, in what appears to be a moment of maybe confusion, definitely a moment where some of michael cohen's lawyers seem aed a litt flustered in court when one of michael cohen's attorneys said that in a non-public document, which we the public haven't seen but the lawyers involved in the case and the judge have seen it, in something called attachment a related to michael cohen's case, quote, there are five paragraphs within that attachment a that deal directly with seeking the papers of the president of the united states, papers that are in possession of my client. so that's the basis of why this is a national story, right. the president's personal lawyer had his home and office raided by the fbi. the president's personal lawyer is the subject of an active criminal investigation. and president's personal lawyer
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has lawyers who have admitted in open court that that criminal case involving michael cohen is directly relate today td to the president. the fbi was specifically looking for documents related to president trump. we got that from open court. now, since the fbi raid on cohen, since the criminal case against cohen became a matter of public record, there have been a whole bunch of news organizations that have reported on what federal agents were looking for. a bunch of different news agencies have reported that among the documents and materials that fbi agents were looking for, among the stuff spelled out in the search warrant for them to grab from cohen, were materials related to the access hollywood tape, a tape that was made public in october 2016 right before the election, a tape in which the president, the future president bragged in crude terms about what he was able to get away with in terms of man handling and assaulting women without
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getting in trouble for it. it's also been reported that as spelled out in the search warrant related to michael cohen federal agents were also looking for material in his office and his home related to a payment, money that was paid to adult film actress stormy daniels right before the election to keep her from talking about her alleged sexual affair with donald trump. also reportedly spelled out in the search warrant and therefore a target for fbi agents when they raided michael cohen last week was information related to money that was paid to former playboy model karen mcdougal. that payment also effectively to keep her from telling her story about what she says was an ongoing 10 months long sexual relationship with donald trump. again, to be perfectly clear about this and to be honest about what we know and what we don't know, what's been reported versus what we've seen, we the public haven't seen these search warrants. only some of this case is public
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to us. but a bunch of news sources have reported that the documents that prosecutors were seeking and building this case against the president's lawyer include stuff that relates to basically how trump and his lawyer might have reacted to women claiming sexual contact or sexual interactions with the president. even with all that reporting, though, what none of us know is why that would be the basis for a criminal investigation into anyone. i believe whole heartedly in the secret nature of our campaign finance laws in this country. it may be that making a large payment to a woman so she won't talk about an affair so as to help the dude she was allegedly having an affair with win an upcoming election, i can see why that might be a violation of american's campaign finance laws. it's hard to imagine a judge signing a search warrant for federal agents to go raid a lawyer's office to obtain evidence of a campaign finance violation for which the worst
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remedy might be a fine. it just doesn't seem -- so we know what we know. we know what we don't know. we've got this mix of information, this mix of ingredients that doesn't quite bake into a single cake. we've got the president's lawyer being raided. we've got an admission in open court that the raid definitely relates to the president. the raid in part relates to payoffs to women. we've got a blunt assertion from the government that this is a federal criminal investigation. all of those details are fascinating and i have no idea how they all fit together. now we can add to that this. whether or not those payoffs to women before the 2016 presidential election are being construed by prosecutors as criminal matters. those payoffs have been the subject of some civil lawsuits,
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right. a criminal case is when the government is bringing a case against a person. it's, you know, the people versus the defendant. a civil lawsuit is a lawsuit between two parties. there are civil lawsuits about these payments. the most high profile one relates to stormy daniels and the $130,000 payment to her right before the election. this one's being pursued in the most high profile way. stormy daniels and her lawyer have done a on the of media appearances around ms. daniels' alleged affair with the president. their lawsuit against the president about this agreement has produced a side-bar separate lawsuit, a defamation suit brought by ms. daniels and her lawyer against michael cohen. that separate lawsuit against cohen says he has defamed stormy daniels in the way he has talked about that payment and this
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scandal. even today it led to the president making an online statement attempting to undercut stormy daniels' credibility. the president's online statement attacking stormy daniels on that matter led to stormy daniels and her attorney today threatening yet another lawsuit in this case. now they're threatening to sue the president again, not just over the initial agreement, but now for defaming stormy daniels today based on the president's online tweet. the stormy daniels part of this is like very, very, very high profile, tons of media coverage, lawsuits spawning lawsuits. the president himself being sued already once in that matter. maybe soon it will be twice. but if you look at that, you sort of step back from all the media noise around all that, when you drill down and look at that substantively, the basis of that civil lawsuit on the stormy daniels matter is actually very small and technical.
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stormy daniels sued president trump over that $130,000 payment specifically because of this. because see where that's highlighted? you see her signature there. but the highlighted line there, see there's no signature? the president didn't sign the agreement. that's the basis for the whole stormy daniels civil lawsuit. the conflict is that he didn't sign on that yellow highlighted line there, therefore, the deal's not valid. so that's the stormy daniels lawsuit. a lot of noise boils down to a very small matter, didn't sign it. there's also been a civil case about the other payment that happened right before the election. even though this one has been much lower profile, it's actually a much more substantive legal case. it's the case with karen mcdougal. she sued. she didn't sue the president directly. she sued the business that paid
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her for her story, the business that effectively paid her to not talk about her alleged affair with the president. that business is the publisher of the national enquirer. the basis for karen mcdougal's civil lawsuit against that media company was not that somebody forgot to sign somewhere. no, karen mcdougal's lawsuit claimed fraud, claimed serious fraud. it claimed that mesh media entered into this agreement with her basically under false pretenses. her lawsuit said ami promised to feature her in their publications. she says they never made good on those promises and it seemed like they never intended to. more importantly and of way more interest, sort of national interest to those of us who now have donald trump as our president, karen mcdougal's civil case also said this whole agreement was basically a scam by trump's lawyer. she said that the legal representation that she had that led to her signing that deal in
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the first place, that was a fraudulent arrangement. she alleged in her lawsuit that she basically believed she was working with an attorney who had her best interests at heart, who was working out this deal on her behalf. but this lawsuit says in fact the guy she thought was her lawyer was secretly working on the trump side of the deal, that michael cohen, the president's lawyer, was secretly involved in the arrangements about this deal. basically secretly in cahoots with karen mcdougal's lawyer. she didn't really have anybody looking at her interests at all. she got tricked. when that same lawyer who allegedly tricked karen mcdougal turned up in other payment deals where he appeared to be on the opposite side from michael cohen, it started to look like there might be a pattern here of michael cohen essentially rigging the legal representation for people who had claims to bring against the president. very interesting case, serious contentions, serious case. just days ago, ami, publisher of
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the enkwiquirer went to court a demanded that the case be thrown out on first amendment grounds, signaling they were going to fight this very aggressively. now a couple things have changed and a couple things have surprised everybody. in recent days prosecutors, of course, have announced that michael cohen is under federal criminal investigation. again, we don't know exactly how these payoffs may factor in to the criminal investigation, but we believe they are related. this is part of what the search warrants authorized federal agents to seize from michael cohen's home and office. and we've learned that federal prosecutors picked michael cohen clean. they got everything in his office, everything at his home, everything at the hotel room, stuff in the safe deposit box, stuff on his electronic devices, multiple e-mail accounts. for months, while cohen was presumably still using those e-mail accounts not knowing they
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were being actively surveilled by federal agents. the "new york times" reports that among the materials seized by the fbi are e-mail communications, audio recordings and other documentation related to ami and karen mcdougal's civil lawsuit. well, it appears -- i may be wrong, but it appears that that news may have had a salutary effect on ami. they appear to have changed legal course. they appear to have changed their mind about how hard they're going to fight this civil lawsuit by karen mcdougal. tonight both sides announced that they settled it. it's over. stormy daniels civil stuff goes on. the criminal case presumably goes on. but the civil lawsuit about karen mcdougal and ami, poofed tonight. why is that? that's my first question. why is that? second question, why now? why did this case get settled now when it is right in the middle of what we are just
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learning is an ongoing active criminal investigation being carried out by federal prosecutors who are as serious as a heart attack? how does it effect the criminal case against the president's lawyer and indeed the president's own legal jeopardy that may attend to that case now that this civil case at the heart of this matter has gone away. but also just to satisfy my curiosity here, according to the "new york times," had this case not been settled this evening, karen mcdougal's lawyer says he was prepared to start pretrial discovery. it sounds like a ride at disneyland. in law, it's a very scary roller coaster. pretrial discovery in this case might conceivably have forced ami to hand over e-mails, communications, any records they've got that relate to this case. the fbi has michael cohen's stuff. they don't have ami's stuff that we know of. according to karen mcdougal's
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lawyer, pretrial discovery would have also included the submission of written questions to president trump and a request to him that he should hand over any internal documents related to this matter. so the president being forced by the discovery process in this lawsuit to answer questions about and hand over materials related to this settlement. that might have happened, but now this lawsuit has been suddenly settled this evening. that discovery process will not go forward. now, one might expect in a case like this that that discovery process would be a nightmare scenario for ami, but also for the white house itself. because of that, if you're karen mcdougal and that tool is available to you in your very substantive ongoing lawsuit about this matter that relates to the president which is now in the middle of what you now know is a criminal investigation, you'd think you have all the
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led leverage in the world in exchange for making that threat of discovery go away. but they have published the settlement tonight and it does not look like karen mcdougal got the world. ami isn't even the covering her legal fees. she does get the rights to tell her story about her alleged affair with donald trump. you might remember a recent hour of cnn in which she has done that already. presumably she now can also do it for money. even if she does that, the first 75 grand she gets paid, she has to pay to ami. so why did this case get settled now and why did she get what she got at what looks from the outside like a point of maximum leverage, at least a point of maximum concern from the president, whose lawyer is under federal criminal investigation on matters related to this. i am not a lawyer. what am i not seeing here? joining me is the attorney
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representing karen mcdougal in this case. thank you so much for being here. i have explained what is interesting to me and also what doesn't make sense about this. i look at this from the outside and seeing your client have leverage to get anything at this point because of the threat that this civil case posed to the president and his lawyer in the middle of this investigation. i don't feel like she got that much. >> so this is probably the most rewarding result i've ever gotten in my career. we're a firm that does serious cases. i came this morning from d.c. we were there because my partner was arguing a case before the u.s. supreme court. what's so rewarding about this case is that it shows what makes the system great. one brave woman with competent counsel can get a quarter billion dollar company to do the right thing. we've said from day one -- you started your piece by saying people have been seeing us on tv. that's deliberate. we said on day one our mantra
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has been they're going to void this contract or face the music. i was indifferent. i studied composition. i was a music major before i went to law school so i like music. but what karen mcdougal wants and what she always wanted was to get out of this contract. let me tell you why because this is critical to what happened. this contract was being used by ami to control what she did when reporters contacted her and they wanted to do a story, they wrote information about what she was supposed to say. she doesn't want to be on a reality show. she doesn't want to make a movie. she just wanted to do what she did recently, which was go on cnn and tell her story. >> that's the thing that's hard for me to understand. ronan farrow had a long piece in the new yorker publishing her handwritten notes about her alleged affair with donald trump and getting her to comment on those. she did this long interview on cnn talking about it. if this agreement was so restrictive to her, then why --
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and she wants to be able to do things like that clearly under the agreement. before you came to the settlement tonight she was able to do that sort of media. >> that's actually not true. karen is kind of standing on the shoulders of other people. it's because of reporting by ronan farrow and people like stormy have come forward that she actually had the strength to file this lawsuit. before we filed this lawsuit ami was telling her if you give information, if you do things like this, you're going to be sued to the tune of millions of dollars. she was unbelievably frightened. >> wait. she was stilt undl under the cot when she did the cnn interview. >> that's right. >> how was the contract preventing her from doing the cnn interview? >> because the things that ami were saying privately are very different than what they said publicly. make no mistake, if we hadn't filed this lawsuit, she wouldn't have been able to do that interview. they took this contract for a
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year and said if you provide information, if you tell your story in your words, your reputation is going to be destroyed or you're going to be sued. this is all she's wanted. you say maximum leverage. >> yeah. >> we were prepared to take the deposition of david pecker, to take the deposition of other executiv executives, to get these documents, these recordings you mentioned, this correspondence. that's not what karen wanted. what karen wanted was to not be beholden to this company. she doesn't want to be on their magazin magazines. she was tricked into a catch-and-kill contract. >> the settlement that she's got, though, it's been reported that the settlement will include her getting a magazine cover. >> it's not accurate. it actually makes me upset. because we worked hard to negotiate this and we made it clear she didn't want money. she just didn't want to deal with these people. >> does she want to get columns?
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>> no. >> she's not getting any material for herself published in their publications. >> hear me out on this. ami insisted they have the right to repurpose old pictures and articles because they want to save face. they want to put her on their magazine and say, oh, there's nothing going on here, this is a commercial relationship. it's a fraud. she was tricked into a deal so that her lawyer, who was working with michael cohen and ami, could kill a story. that's what happened and they can spin it anyway they want. >> the thing that is difficult for me to understand is she was able to tell the story while under the contract even if it was under dispute because of the lawsuit. when she gets out of this now, she's not getting her legal fees paid, which means she's got to come up with money to pay you. >> no, no, no. we've donated -- >> she still has to pay 75 grand
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to ami out of what she gets paid. >> this is a total victory. >> it doesn't feel like a total victory. >> if this contract would have been voided she'd have to pay them $150,000, give the money back and she'd be done. here she got out to haof every obligation of the contract. they gave her her life rights back. >> minus 75 grand. >> if she happens to sell it, which she doesn't want to. that's the maximum they get. they get 10% up to 75 grand. that's basically the best we could have gotten had we litigated to the end. >> did you get any pressure from anybody in political circles that this should be settled? >> no. the opposite. what's made this so difficult is people want to see a fight. people want to see this used to
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essentially expose the things that are going on. i think the most important thing is, when you're a lawyer and you represent a client, the reason people like michael cohen and keith davidson are creating all of this mischief is because they're not faithfully representing people. we have a client who had an objective and that objective -- and if people can't understand this, i don't care frankly because i've never been as proud of anything as i am of this. karen came to us and she said, i want out of this contract. i don't care what people are going to say about me. i don't want money. i want to be able to correct the lies that people are telling and i don't want to be affiliated with that company. she was panicked. when i said we could sue, she said, well, they're going to sue me. stormy daniels, $20 million lawsuit, that's what she thought was going to happen to her. >> she just wanted this to go away. >> she just wanted this to go away. and she has this right. we've seen this pattern of powerful men, michael cohen and
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keith davidson doing these deals. if someone can't appreciate that someone wants to get out of it, i really have no tolerance for that. that's how the system should work. >> certainly having an advocate can get you what you want. the thing that's hard to see here is bringing the lawsuit in the first place and ending it this way at the point of maximum leverage. i hear you that she's getting what she wants out of this. i'll leave you with one last question, the serious allegation that was raised here was the case you made that michael cohen and mr. davidson were basically colluding to create a legal fraud here. do you think that they did that in other cases? >> yes. let me be clear. keith davidson and michael cohen are carved out of this lawsuit. and so we'll see where things go. >> that matter of it may still alive? >> yeah.
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karen wants to enjoy her privacy but we'll see where things go. there's a lot of information i have learned over time. and i'm very confident that michael cohen and keith davidson and others will have to account for the things that they've done. >> attorney for karen mcdougal. thank you for fighting with me about this tonight. please tell ms. mcdougal if she wants to talk to me, i do not pay but i'd be happy to talk to her. ♪ ♪ this is what getting your car serviced at lincoln looks like. complementary pickup and delivery servicing now comes with every new lincoln. i won. giving you, the luxury of time. that's the lincoln way. these are the specialists we're
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so i'm still baffled. there was a surprise settlement today of a civil lawsuit brought by one woman who says she was paid off before the election to not talk about her affair with donald trump. karen mcdougal says she had a 10 month long affair with the president. she was paid 150 grand right before the election by a trump friendly media company to not tell her story about mr. trump. that media company and karen mcdougal just tonight settled their civil lawsuit. it's interesting on its own terms, but then there's also the fact that the terms of that payoff to her are also now part
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the criminal investigation into the president's lawyer by prosecutors in the southern district of new york. so we've heard from the lawyer involved in settling this case. we've heard his take on it. i've heard his argument about it. i have legal questions that remain, though. if the criminal investigation and this civil lawsuit were about the same thing, is it important that the civil lawsuit just went away? is that a strange thing? does it matter for the criminal investigation here, particularly because it looks like the criminal investigation here is a serious thing, both for the president's lawyer and potentially for the president himself. joining us now is chuck rosenberg, former u.s. attorney, former senior fbi official. thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> you saw my interview with mr. stris. >> i did. >> the fbi has raided michael cohen's home and office. ami said that it would fight karen mcdougal's lawsuit right up until today when they settled.
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this follows the raid. this follows threats that they'd start to enter into discovery in this suit. what do you make of the timing? >> a bank gets robbed and you find a guy down the street holding a bag of money and covered in dye pack ink. coincidence? probably not. so is this a coincidence? i don't think so. i'm not a big believer in coincidences. >> what about the raid would have pushed this to settlement? >> well, a couple of things. but probably first and foremost whatever was going to come out in the civil suit is going to be influenced by the fact that there's a parallel ongoing criminal investigation. so folks who might have been deposed or might have been inclined to speak in connection with the civil suit may now be taking the fifth, for instance, so they don't face exposure in
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that other thing that means a lot more that's ongoing. it also just complicated the lives of the attorneys in the civil matter. i don't know what ms. mcdougal's goals were. i take mr. stris at his word. >> me too. >> good enough. not for us to decide. from mr. cohen's vantage point frr, from the folks at ami, they just want this whole thing to go away. they can't make the federal prosecutors go away, but they can at least make this piece of it go away. >> i was thinking about what might be the explosive evidence in this case if it's a worst case scenario for the people involved. there is this prospect that with discovery in the licivil lawsui could have resulted in ami handing to hand over any of their own communications and documents that led to this agreement with ms. mcdougal. >> absolutely. >> if this payment to ms. mcdougal is of interest to
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prosecutors who are pursuing this as a criminal matter, is there any reason they can't get that stuff from ami too? >> no reason at all. in fact, they're going to get all this stuff and probably more than what would have come out in civil discovery. nothing about this settlement undermines or undercuts the work that the federal agents and prosecutors are going to do. they get this stuff. they get to put people in the grand jury. we've seen from other indictments in the mueller case for instance how good federal prosecutors are at following the money. they're going to follow the money. >> that's the key issue here, i guess. on this issue then of the criminal case,i haven't had a chance yet to ask you what you make of the jurisdiction issues here. obviously this is described as -- this matter involving cohen is described as something that started with a referral from the special counsel's office to the prosecutors in new york. i get that's how it happened. i'm still not quite sure how
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unusual that is. what's your take? >> not that unusual. there's 94 federal offices around the country but we're all part of the same system. so when we're working well, we're working together. if i see something that happened in the district of minnesota or in tulsa, oklahoma, me sitting in the eastern district of virginia as a federal prosecutor would hand that piece off. by the way, that doesn't preclude it from coming back. if the folks in the southern district of new york say hey, we found three things and two of them seem to be ours but one of them seems to fit what bob mueller is doing, they can kick it back. >> chuck rosenberg, former u.s. attorney, former senior fbi official. much more ahead tonight. stay with us. there's little rest for a single dad.
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accused of obstructing justice to theat the fbinuclear war, and of violating the constitution by taking money from foreign governments and threatening to shut down news organizations that report the truth. if that isn't a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become? i'm tom steyer, and like you, i'm a citizen who knows it's up to us to do something. it's why i'm funding this effort to raise our voices together and demand that elected officials take a stand on impeachment. a republican congress once impeached a president for far less. yet today people in congress and his own administration know that this president is a clear and present danger who's mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons.
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so now we've learned that the cia director, the outgoing cia director mike pompeo had a secret meeting over easter weekend with the dictator of north korea. hey director pompeo, how did it go? >> what did you learn from your conversations with kim jong-un? >> i'm just here today working. >> just here today working. turns out that answer was actually directly related to that question. sounded like a non seq..
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michigan, switched from clean, predictable detroit water to drinking from the flint river instead. that decision was not made by locally elected officials in flint. they had been stripped of their power by the state government who came in and installed state appointed emergency managers to run the town instead of local people. those state appointed emergency managers put in place by the governor, that's who made that fatal decision in flint, which became an unforgettable national disaster four years ago. the state switched the water without proper precautions or treatment of the new supply. the new not properly treated water ate the pipes. the piped leeched toxic lead into the water. the people of flint drank that toxic lead filled water for
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months and they were poisoned by it. the who dun it here doesn't even need shorthand. it's very simple. under michigan's republican governor rick snyder the state of michigan made an overt, dumb, terrible decision that resulted in the poisoning of the population of the city of flint with lead from the very oldest people in flint to the very youngest. anyone who drank that water was exposed to that potent neuro toxin, irreversibly. over the years we have spent following what happened in flint, michigan, a few things have stood out. for starters, it's the obvious visceral suffering, the loss of faith in government, the sheer epic on going hassel. the city is going through a
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giant serial construction job. the city is replacing thousands of lead pipes. the construction itself raises fears that old lead scale will get dislodged and sent down the pipes and into houses. the city started construction work -u up again today after a break for winter weather. they expect to be through this at least 2019. how difficult this has been for the people who live there. also standing out in flint is the way the governor has sometimes needed to be dragged into dealing with it, whether it was admitting it was a crisis at all or acknowledging the extent of it or deciding how much help to offer. despite being the governor in charge when flint got poisoned, governor snider has not had the
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smoothest relationship to the recovery effort. now governor snider has just announced no more bottled water for flint. governor snider says it's time for the state to stop sending bottled water to flint, that things are better enough now. so he turned off the shipments of bottled water, let the water distribution centers run dry and last week closed them. the reaction in flint to the governor's decision was immediate. from a hero pediatrician in flint, quote, this is wrong. until all lead pipes are replaced, the state should make available bottled water and filters to flint residents. from the state attorney general who has been prosecuting snider administration officials, quote, bottled water distribution in flint should continue. from flint mayor karen weaver, an allegation that the governor
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laid on an extra layer of callusness callus ne -- callousness in telling her that flint needs to get over it and move on. she announced she is ready to sue the governor for what has happened to her town. joining us now is the mayor of flint michigan, karen weaver. thank you for being here. >> thank you. i'm still fighting. >> i know. did you know that this was going to be the next fight? did you know the governor was about to shut off the water supplies for flint? >> i'm not surprised because he's been trying to shut it off since september. we've been fighting since september to keep those water pods in place. september when he tried to do that, we said no. we're not there yet. we're still removing the led service lines. that's the word given to us, we will see you through the lead service line replacement and water pods will stay in place so people have access to water that they need and deserve. >> that's not an infinite time line.
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you were told until the project is done you'll still be able to get bottled water, that's a project that you have been working on fast, that as far as i understand it, there's a possibility that that will take you into next year, possibly into the year after, but this is not something that has an infinite time horizon. >> that's exactly right. it was supposed to be done over three years. you got the numbers right, rachel. we have gone ahead of schedule. we have looked at or changed almost 9,000 service lines and we started back up today. we had this year and next year to complete the project and we're ahead of schedule. so to take that from the residents, it's like pulling the scab off of a healing wound. >> when the governor says that as far as he's concerned, the state's concerned, the city's water system has recovered enough to not need this continued support from the state, what do you say to that?
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in a way he tried to make it sound like a compliment, flint's come so far we're no longer needed. >> it's not true. what is true is we've come a long way but we're not where we need to be. we know with all this construction going on in our city we have a public health issue and we have to protect ourselves while the lead service lines are being replaced. we had concerned about testing in the school. the other thing is it's an issue of trust. you gave your word these would stay in place and then you take it from us. >> last question for you, madame mayor, i know it's not an easy decision to threaten a lawsuit against the state you need to work with the state in a way that no other city has in modern history because of what happened here, because of who done it, who caused this crisis in the first place, what are you hoping from from this lawsuit? >> you know what, this lawsuit
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is about more than water pods staying open. in addition to that we talked about things we need, we need fixtures in the home, we need in home plumbing, hot water heaters, these things have been damaged. we talked about the reputation and how this impacted the reputation of our cities. during the switch, there was a loss in property values. they went down. we've had civil liabilities that have happened as a result of this, we've had permanent loss of residents so the money we would have been collecting is gone. so this is about much more than water pods. it's about justice for the city of flint. >> karen weaver, the mayor of flint, michigan. thank you for talking to us tonight. you're welcome back any time, keep us apprised. >> thank you. >> thank you. stay with us, we'll be right back. into retirement... and a little nervous. but not so much about what market volatility may do to their retirement savings. that's because they have a shield annuity from brighthouse financial, which allows them to take advantage
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director pompeo, what did you learn from your conversations with kim jong-un. >> i'm just here today. >> can you say anything about what you learned from your meeting with kim jong-un of north korea? director, do you think they're committed to denuclearization? >> how did your meeting with senator warner go? >> great day. i'm enjoying my time here. >> cia director mike pompeo on capitol hill today chased by reporters asking about his recent trip to north korea where he met the dictator there. also being asked about his shaky chances of being confirmed as secretary of state. those things as it turns out are
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related. this is fascinating. politico.com reporting that last night when it leaked that mike pompeo had gone to north korea and met the dictator, that was leak was deliberately timed by the white house, to, quote, shore up pompeo's image as a diplomat capable of sensitive negotiations on the president's behalf. they're trying to shore him up to get confirmed as secretary of state. he's due for a committee vote, very soon, as soon as monday perhaps, but doesn't appear to have the votes. it looks like mike pompeo will be the first nominee for secretary of state to not be able to get a vote out of committee in over 90 years. if he fails the vote in committee, senate republicans say they plan to put it on the floor any way, but they don't know if they'll have the votes to get him confirmed. pompeo in trouble.
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it's not just him. this afternoon trump's pick to lead nasa barely advanced. arizona senator jeff flake initially voted against him, which resulted in a 49-49 tie. that usually would have been brought in mike pence to break the tie, but mike pence was nowhere to be found, so everybody leaned on flake to switch his original no vote to a yes, which allowed the nomination to proceed, if not jeff flake's dignity. today we also learned that the confirmation hearing for trump's next cia director has been pushed off. amid bipartisan questions about her record on torture. a confirmation hearing for trump's nominee to lead the va, dr. ronny jackson will take place but he faces lots of skepticism, including by republicans, about whether he has anything near the experience to lead that agency.
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so a bunch of the president's cabinet picks are having trouble right now. but none for so than the highest profile job of all, mike pompeo, up for secretary of state, working senators furiously on capitol hill today. and he's had the white house leak details of his north korea trip to try and save his flailing nomination. patrick woke up with back pain. but he has work to do. so he took aleve. if he'd taken tylenol, he'd be stopping for more pills right now.
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last night former fbi director james comey was a guest on the late show with stephen colbert, talking about his book and his experience being fired by president trump while overseeing the russia investigation into president. at the colbert show, he was fortunate enough to run into two members of the wu tang clan backstage.
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that's him with method man and ghost face killer. tomorrow night james comey will be here live with me. we have no members of the wu evening, lawrence. >> good evening, rachel. james comey is going to be disappointed by who he runs into backstage tomorrow night when it's just me. >> lawrence, you underestimate the effect you have on people. i get asked about you in the strangest places my friend. >> i'm going to be taking notes tomorrow, rachel. i cannot wait. i'm sure you'll be spending the day trying to find all the unasked questions. >> there will be no sleeping between now and this time
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