comrades that drives everybody, not just sergeant chapman. everybody to do what he needs to do in combat. >> i knew you'd come for me. thanks for being with me once again. as much as people don't like it, i will always cover the medal of honor recipients. that wraps it up for me. "deadline white house" with nicolle wallace starts right now. >> hi, everyone. it's 4:00 in new york. today is the first day of the rest of donald trump's presidency, a presidency that will forever be remembered in terms of before and after. everything that happened before the president's former fixer michael cohen implicated the president for directing payments to two women before the 2016 election goes, and one column, and everything that happens now goes in the after column. donald trump stumbled into this new reality with only one certain source of reassurance, his belief that a sitting president can't be indicted. just about everything else from the outcome of the mueller investigation and obstruction of

justice, one in which the president may very well be a target not just a subject, is unknown. the outcome of mueller's investigation into whether there was a conspiracy between the trump campaign and russia is also unknown. and the fallout for the president from michael cohen's stunning testimony yesterday that donald trump ordered those hush money payments, a clear campaign finance violation also unknown. "the new york times" reports on the mood inside the trump west wing in the aftermath of a devastating news day. quote, inside the west wing, aides to mr. trump numbed and desensitized by breathless news cycles, said privately on tuesday that they were having trouble assessing how devastating the day's legal events might be. the times also reporting on cohen and manafort's new potential usefulness to robert mueller. the cases of both men are at the moment tangential to the central questions of mr. mueller's inquiry whether president trump

and his associates conspired with russia's election interference and whether the president tried to obstruct the justice department's investigation. but neither mr. manafort nor mr. cohen are believed to be cooperating with the special counsel. situations that could change now that they face years in prison. for his part, donald trump took to twitter writing, quote, if anyone is looking for a good lawyer, i would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of michael cohen. here to help us understand just what happens next, some of our favorite reporters and friends. former u.s. attorney and former deputy assistant attorney general harry litman. with us at the table from "the new york times," mike schmidt. eli stokols, white house reporter for the l.a. times, emily jane fox who was up as late as i was last night, maybe later, senior reporter for vanity fair who spoke extensively with michael cohen. and heilman is back, nbc news, national affairs analyst. let me start with you. you spoke to michael cohen yesterday after this dramatic

day in court. did he realize that what he was saying -- i think it was counts 7 and 8 -- would leave all of us really as some of those white house aides described, breathlessly covering the president as possibly an unindicted coconspirator? >> that was the point. he went in there with a set of notes that were written down. he said in court that they were to keep his mind focused. but there is another intention there, and that was to throw a man who had thrown him under the bus under a bus of his own. and i think that what lanny davis, his attorney, has said in multiple television appearances since has been, let's focus on counts 7 and 8. forget 1 through 6 which are counts of tax evasion and lying to a bank. but let's focus on 7 and 8 because they throw the president under the bus. so that is the message that michael cohen wanted to get across. that is the message his attorney has been pushing ever since. it's very clear that's the message he's going to push going forward. >> heilman, they don't just throw him under the bus.

that's what the president has been doing to michael cohen, it would appear, based on maggie haberman's reporting since spring, their relationship. he implicated him in what they've been talking about, not in hyperbolic realistic way, but in misdemeanors. >> i'd like to, in your opening statement, you referred to it as clear violation of campaign finance law. i would like to be jeremy bash now and say, just like we shouldn't talk about collusion, we should talk about conspiracy. we should not talk about this a campaign violation. it violates campaign finance law. what happens in october of a presidential year, a presidential nominee goes to his lawyer to ask for a payoff that could sway the election one way or the other is an attempt to defraud the american people and defraud the democratic process. yes, the law in question is a campaign finance violation, but what's going on there is not a narrow technical thing.

it's not like somebody former president got to report, somebody gave a little more than the minimum, some pac didn't follow a small regulation. this is a fundamental thing. the nominee at the closing days of the campaign, when he thought his campaign was on the line and a story or two stories potentially threatened his nomination went be and said, i have to make this story go away, according to michael cohen and said, go make this go away and pay for it. i think that goes not in a resistance way at all. a much more dramatic and more accurate way of stating what happened there. and, yes, it implicates the president in the commission of a felony, but it also implicates the president in what is now a growing sense that a lot of people have and not just resistance people, that this is one more way in which the 2016 election was facacta. >> harry litman, we're in dangerous territory here. two non-lawyers talking about what may be under investigation in the southern district is a conspiracy. that is a pretty clear parallel to what we are told by folks

like yourself about the mueller investigation and that it's not collusion, collusion in and of itself wouldn't be the crime. it's the conspiracy to impact the election. do you think that is what the southern district is investigating when it comes to the hush money payments? do you think that's what they went in looking for? we know from the day of the raid that's one of the things they were looking for when they seized items from michael cohen's homes and offices. >> well, look, they were probably looking for the whole mother load of financial miss deeds that they found. but they also found this point and i can't say strongly enough, john is so dead-on here. the second defense of team trump now is, oh, a technical campaign finance violation. that makes it seem ministerial. it's the exact opposite. it gives rise to the watergate comparisons. what cohen says in court -- by the way, it's not in the information. he made a point of saying it. not only was it at the direction of trump, but it was for the

purpose of influencing the election. that gets down the middle in the bull's-eye of high crime of misdemeanor, especially given how excruciatingly close the election was. it's quite like what the watergate burglars did, except nixon was up 25 points against mcgovern. that is a serious corruption of governmental function and of the election and it has to be thought of in those terms. in terms of going forward, i think there will be much to say about the mueller investigation, but cohen will be saying that to mueller and it will go on two tracks. the kind of money track that's now at the sdny, but he will also be cooperating, i think it's clear, with the mueller probe. >> i was going to say it's been a long week, but it's only wednesday. the president's week started with your reporting over the weekend that don mcgahn has spent more than 30 hours with the special counsel. tuesday he got the twin bombshells, the manafort guilty verdict and the cohen plea. i understand from all of your

reporting on the obstruction of justice investigation, there's a lot of angst in the president's legal team. we put together the way the president answered questions on michael cohen. it explains the angst. let's watch and talk about it on the other side. >> do you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? >> no. >> then why did michael cohen make that statement -- >> you have to ask michael cohen. michael is my attorney and you'll have to ask michael. >> he agreed with michael cohen as far as i know is a long-standing agreement, that michael cohen takes care of situations like this, then gets paid for them, sometimes. paid for them sometimes, reimbursed in another way. depends whether it's business or personal. >> it's not campaign money, no campaign finance violation. >> they funneled it through a law firm. >> funneled through a law firm and the president repaid it. >> oh, i didn't know he did.

>> yeah. >> that will forever -- the evolution of a response that's at the center of pretty serious prosecution out of the southern district. how is the legal team managing the fact patterns? >> they thought the new york part of this was the more troubling one because they didn't understand it. they claim to under the four corners of the mueller investigation and thought the president was in an okay spot. but all along they never thought they got straight answers from the president about this, and they never thought that they understood the full extent of the president's lee lags ship with michael cohen. so as this has gone forward, they've really, really been in the dark. this is not like the investigation where they read through the questions the investigators wanted to and have an understanding of what's there. this is going on with knowing very little. >> it's not been smeared the way the mueller investigation has been smeared. you talked about they feel

inoculated from whatever the wit witch-hunt is. this doesn't fall under the category of witch-hunt. >> why is it that rod rosenstein did not give mueller this aspect of the case and gave it to the prosecutors in the southern district. by doing that, it insulated mueller from some of the criticisms that he truly is on an unending witch-hunt that's looking at all sorts of things that have nothing with russia. these career prosecutors who do not have political faces, who do not have the public images that mueller has, has r have gone in and done this case. what does the president say? is this part of the witch-hunt? is it a justice department wide thing? it insulated mueller. >> do you think, eli, the fact this is getting more sprawling, not less, the fact that there are enemies within -- if the president doesn't make it, if the president is ever impeached in the house, it will not be the 17 angry democrats that he tweets about. it will be his former campaign chairman paul manafort, his former fixer and personal

attorney michael cohen. it will be mike flynn. he's been a cooperating witness for many, many months now. it will be his own inner circle that gave federal prosecutors and investigators evidence against him. >> there have been a lot of people indict the. i don't know if you heard the press secretary. the president didn't do anything wrong, i don't know why we're talking about impeachment. this is a growing investigation, it keeps me taft sizing and getting bigger. no matter what the white house says they're struggling to control it. the attorneys, as mike said, they don't know all the answers. they don't necessarily trust the president. part of why this has gotten worse and worse because the president continues to talk. every little thing that bubbles up from the press he has to respond to it. he answers these questions with a very sort of short-term focus on getting past the story. so when the president has done that over and over again, you see him on air force one saying he knew nothing about the payment, we've heard mike l cohen and the president on tape discussing the payment. we know that's a lie.

even if the white house says it's a ridiculous accusation he's lying, the whole country can see he's lying. the president himself who has told thousands of falsehoods over the course of his presidency on matters big and small is not very trustworthy and does not have a lot of credibility on this matter because we've seen already so many big and small efforts to mislead the american public and investigators as well. >> harry litman, the president's message on collusion went from no collusion almost like a tick to collusion isn't a crime. the president's message around cohen, we just showed the evolution from i didn't know anything about it to rudy saying he was reimbursed -- the president had a nonsensical word salad we're going to spare our viewers of. he said on fox news business later on i knew. you have to understand, ainsley, they weren't taken out of campaign finance. the president goes on and on. i'll cliff note it for our

viewers. it was my money, it wasn't campaign finance money. but as you and heilman have been saying, they may be investigating a broader conspiracy. can you speak to that? and also explain to me how the decision to make michael cohen someone who cooperates with multiple investigations may be something we don't know about yet, maybe something underway, may be something that is still going to happen, but isn't locked down the way emily has been explaining for two days to us now? >> yes. so, two points. on the conspiracy, now, at least on these shows people are beginning to talk about conspiracy, not collusion, which is a good thing. and the first -- there is this very serious conspiracy that john outlined to influence the election, and then also in the next thing that's coming it appears lanny davis said, probably imprudently yesterday, that michael cohen has information about -- knowledge about the hacking. that's the other broad conspiracy that's been alleged

by mueller, and that -- if the president is now stitched up in that, we have sort of a -- two different conspiracies he'd have to fight. in general there are brush fires breaking out everywhere. on cohen, i think the key here, it is an odd procedural posture, but he has a very fine lawyer who is the former criminal division chief in sdny. and i think both parties wanted to lock this down quickly for different reasons, and they basically have a good faith understanding that they can reach given the credibility that guy petrillo has that he will, in fact -- he, cohen, in fact, will be cooperating both with sdny and with mueller and, in fact, he needs to do so because otherwise the crimes he pleaded to yesterday he just gets the full sheet and he's in front of a tough sentencer of five or six years. so i think we can expect a formal cooperation agreement

that hadn't been nailed down as of yesterday and we can expect him to go forward on both these conspiracy charges. >> do you have any reporting on where a cooperation agreement stands? >> no different from what i reported yesterday which is talks between cohen and prosecutors, cohen's attorney and prosecutors really only began the end of last week so this is just at the beginning. it feels like the guilty plea was the start, which seems to be backwards, but that is where they started and i don't think there is an update from yesterday. cohen, from my sense, is still reeling from what happened yesterday. >> and very willing to cooperate. i mean, he's waiving his arms and saying pick me, pick me. >> not only is he willing to cooperate. lanny davis, his p.r. attorney -- >> a good name. >> been on television a million times since yesterday basically waving a red flag. mueller, please call us. i got ask on morning joe, why not just go to mueller.

didn't really get a straight answer on that. >> they have phones. heilman? >> there is no one i've paid attention to more than emily jane fox. she's inside mueller's head than any reporter. one of the things you've read, nothing about yesterday, as shocking as it was, is surprising. she said at the very top of the show. michael cohen is throwing donald trump under the bus. that's a colloquial way of putting it. if you read the art of the story, he came to understand as we saw yesterday, if he did not make some kind of deal, he could be in jail 40 years, right? he's not going to go to jail for 40 years for donald trump. that sentence might be five years if he works out, this cooperation agreement gets settled, bob mueller eventually walks in in december when the sentencing come up, he's been helpful to us, i'd like to

recommend he has probation in six months. that is the game for him. how do i play this game out -- >> wait, wait, wait. >> so i don't have to go to jail at all. >> it's not just jail. this man is already in financial dire straits. it's hard for people to understand he lives a lavish life-style. he has been bleeding money for these attorneys for just the last couple of months. he has no clients. he is no longer a lawyer. he's no longer donald trump's lawyer. he has no way of making money going forward. and so he is shelling out tens of -- hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. it's not just about jail and it's not just about him. he has a wife, he has two children and young children -- he has said this to me for the last six months that he has felt he has collateral damage and never has that been on public difficult play mo

display more than this week. >> thank you for being here. the whisper goes to a roar after dramatic set backs. will republic kanans finally gr spine? donald trump has nothing but warm fuzzies for paul manafort who was convicted yet on eight of the charges got against him. is a pardon next? it's not a beach town in italy, it's what james comey had to say about the trump crew after first meeting them why he's more right now than ever. ♪ be right back. with moderate to severe crohn's disease, i was there, just not always where i needed to be. is she alright? i hope so. so i talked to my doctor about humira. i learned humira is for people who still have symptoms of crohn's disease after trying other medications. and the majority of people on humira saw significant symptom relief and many achieved remission in as little as 4 weeks. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis.

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court of the united states of america has accepted a guilty plea from someone who was the lawyer for the president of the united states, and that person in pleading guilty basically made very clear that it was the then candidate and now the president of the united states who directed him to commit a crime. this is a serious matter. >> i've been here 11 1/2 years, and this is -- i don't think i've witnessed anything like i've witnessed over the last year and a half. probably the american people haven't in modern times. >> i feel like corker is desperate to scream. one of these days. senators from both sides of the aisle in rare agreement these are historic times. in the wake of his former fixer's guilty plea and his former campaign chairman's conviction, the editorial boards of the two largest papers paint trump as a crook. and even "the wall street

journal" whose editorial parjs a pages are as editorial as they come, describe the news cycle like this. all of this reveals mr. trump at his worst and shows why so many republicans had doubts about making him the party's nominee. our friend steve schmidt was as always the most blunt writing, this means trump's presidency is not only illegitimate, but criminal. it means the presidential election was compromised by the most insidious criminal american in history. trump is a traitor and putin determined the outcome. the impeachment bar has been reached. joining us, university professor and msnbc contributor. joining the table, bill crystal, editor at large for the weekly standard. eddie, let me start with you can you get yourself to the left of steve schmidt today? >> oh, my goodness. >> it's hard. >> i've been walking around for the last 24 hours with my mouth wide open trying to, trying to make sense of what happened

yesterday. as john said, it wasn't a surprise, but it made everything concrete. and so the question that we have to ask ourselves today is where is mitch mcconnell? where is paul ryan? we're hearing the voices of kamala harris and corker, but where is the leadership of the republican party? and so we have to ask ourselves the question, will the congress actually perform its function? or will they reveal that it's not just simply the presidency that has been sullied, that the presidency has been deeply diminished, but congress itself has been diminished as well. >> i don't think they're ever going to come out and say anything. if access hollywood didn't tip them over the edge, if people coming from bleep-hole countries didn't tip them, if all the examples of the president maligning and smearing the republicans running the justice department and the fbi haven't tipped them over the edge, why would a guilty plea from a pretty shady fixer do it?

>> i don't think it will in the short term -- i'm critical of the congressional republicans as anyone. i don't agree actually with steve and eddie on this. the congressional republicans have one important thing they need to do the next few months, protect mueller, protect the justice department, protect the investigation. i don't know if i could vote for impeachment on cohen's plea. people who defend the rule of law must remember there is a will of law. it's not as clear as the rule of law. the key here -- i'm not trying to let the monkey off the back of the republican members. they've been terribly irresponsible and pathetic in not standing up to trump in many different ways. when impeachment comes, they have a serious responsibility to make sure the justice department continues to do the investigation unimpeded. that's what they can do the next few months. >> i have a sense that the white house was more focused on the

possibility of impeachment than we may have understood. there is some reporting from your colleagues in your paper and others that they have sort of run the numbers and thought through the possibility of being -- impeachment in the house and already looking at the numbers in the senate. >> that was the whole thing about bringing giuliani on earlier this year, was that they determined the president had no real-time criminal exposure and all that mattered was the house. that was it. so giuliani's job was to try and push public opinion as far as possible against the investigation. there are some polls that have shown that. and what he has done is he has made it confusing. he has raised all these arguments. he's constantly on tv sort of adopting the model trump used during the campaign by just going out and talking and talking and talking. and they think that's been successful. and as much as yesterday changes things and it puts things out there in a different way and it looks like the ball is headed in one way with one investigation,

what does it really change? it all comes down to the republicans. they're the ones who hold the key. >> there is concern, maggie and your colleagues use fisher. the news cycle like yesterday may be the beginning of some cracks? >> don't you think -- the republicans should have fissures more than we think. we are the fissures. we are the crackpots of the crack. more is going to have to be learned, right? >> you're not a crack head. >> thank you. >> we got that. we got it all. mueller investigations are going forward. not just mueller, the southern district of new york. rosenstein is an unsung hero. if you think about the coordination and supervision he's done, the protecting of the southern district in this whole story, again, that's where i think republicans can do. let the investigation go forward. trump, it turns out, was actually -- he was right in a certain sense to hate -- as soon as mueller was appointed, he saw how dangerous it was. he saw that given his history,

financial, sexual, russia-related, letting serious prosecutor, the former head of the fbi -- >> sexual, financial -- >> the justice department behind him start digging into this was terribly dangerous. >> but that's not what he did. >> he didn't have the nerve to quite fire mueller. >> the first several months of this investigation are the president trying to cooperate as much as possible. >> don't you think trump always had the instinct this is dangerous -- >> it's two track as we know. they sold him on docs and trying to dee legitimatize until mueller muell mueller increasingly -- bill and i were up late last night. you were, too, hanging around talking about the meaning of this. one of the things we agreed about, i think one of the things we've learned in these 18 months -- i'm going to republicans right now -- nothing is going to change their

behavior at all. >> totally agree. >> until, until there is a different calculus, electoral political self-interesting calculus in play. the date for that is the date after the midterms. maybe it won't change anything. maybe republicans will keep the house. maybe they'll keep the house and the senate and nothing will change. but i'm firmly of the belief if democrats win the control of the house of representatives and all these republicans who have been operating according to a certain math the last 18 months, it costs more to abandon trump for me than to stay with trump. i'll stay with him, i don't like it, but i'll stay with him because leaving him costs me more. when they look up and 60 of their colleagues have lost their seats and democrats are now in control, they will have a different math equation to run at that point. and the question of what does it cost more to stick with him or leave him will be a different question than it has been the last 18 months. i'm not predicting where they will come. that's the moment when if it's going to change that's the moment it's going to change. it's going do change after november. >> eli, that's the republican calculation. you sort of look at the

democrats as the inverse. how can the democrats lose with the president who -- more and more people shall d-- more and closely associated with his presidency are in bigger trouble. >> we ask the question, who are the leaders, what's the message of it. they've come up organically through primaries. they have candidates who fit districts than others. they have the wind at their back, no doubt about it. the white house, whether republicans want donald trump on the trail or not, he's coming. the white house is putting him out there. >> to a rally near you. >> up until november because it makes the of president feel good to be out there and he likes to think of himself as the head of the party and he is whether people like it or not. and so he's mostly going, though, at least in the near term to a lot of red states where there are senate seats they're trying to defend and they should defend. is he going to these house races that are competitive where all these republican candidates are trying to make this calculation, what do i say about the

developments this week? how do i say -- he's not going. >> trump is going to be surfing that imaginary red wave. orange head riding a big red wave in his mind. >> wave on the south lawn. >> people are underestimating. it's hard when you're in the middle one day in. what do candidates and office holders say? you're running against claire mccaskill in missouri. what do you say? you can't avoid debating mccaskill. mr. holly, you want to be senator holly, how do you take your duty seriously if there is impeachment? do you think some of this evidence is troubling? if he goes totally pro-trump, it will hurt him with swing voters. i think this causes more trouble for republican candidates as well as elected officials, maybe more for candidates in a funny way. >> if you're on capitol hill you can run from the cameras. we've seen a republican run from the camera.

>> they have. >> on a debate stage you're stuck. >> let me ask eddie, why are they even today, even today i saw some flinching -- why not say, yes, when the mueller report comes out, if he's found to have obstructed justice, we're going to vote to impeach him. why are they so flinchy and nervous and awkward about the "i" word? >> because i think they lack spine, nicolle. i think it has something to do with a kind of political calculus where they're trying to find that sweet spot so that it can attract particular sorts of voters and not alienate their base. by playing it safe, i think they're playing it dangerous here. but i wanted to go back to something that john and bill said. we can take it outside of the kind of politics, the political calculus, but what does it mean that politicians on the hill are going to make a decision about

the president of the united states who has been indicted as ai a coconspirator, in many ways. it speaks volumes about who they are. you know, we talk about the credibility of omarosa or the credibility of michael cohen. we know these people aren't saints. they might try to position them selves as saints vis-a-vis the disaster that is donald trump. who are these republicans who won't just come out and condemn the guy? what does it say about them? >> really quickly, bill. >> they should condemn the guy for a million reasons. what they should say, we swant to see the report, we want to see the falkts. >> the facts don't matter. >> we need to sneak in a break and get back to this. no one is going anywhere. as donald trump flirts with the idea of a pardon for manafort, members of his own party are warning him not to go down that road. ♪

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i would not recommend a pardon. i mean, you've got to earn a pardon. i think it would be seen as a bridge too far. i think a lot of people probably feel bad. but that's different than using the power of the presidency. again, a pardon in this circumstance would be perceived by many americans as, you know, interfering with an investigation. >> staunch trump ally talking to the president the only way he hears on television, warning the president do not pardon paul manafort. now that manafort is facing what could amount to decades in prison, trump seems to be saying anything he can to make sure his former campaign chair doesn't flip and make a deal with the special counsel. the president tweeted this earlier. quote, i feel very badly for paul manafort and his wonderful family. such respect for a brave man. never said anything that nice about mccain. does trump understand how

pardons work? manafort may not have to go to jail but he would be required to testify in court. as "the wall street journal" reports, beyond that former aides like mr. manafort or cohen could lose constitutional immunity against self-incrimination if they were offered to testify in matters invofling mr. trump. barbara mcquade is back with us. you explained every inch of this manafort journey with us. flesh out the idea even if trump pardons him, he's not safe for what manafort could reveal about him and mr. gates who is manafort's deputy who is already a cooperating witness. there is probably nowhere to hide from what manafort and gates know. >> yeah, you know, it's interesting. you'd have to sort of game this out how it would work with a pardon. if manafort were pardoned, that means he is no longer able to be convicted of a crime and so that means he doesn't have a 5th

amendment right not to testify. that means that a prosecutor could compel him to testify and make him answer questions. a couple of wrinkles with that. number one, when you compel a witness as opposed to having a witness cooperate, they're a lot less likely to volunteer and tell the fulgt story. they may answer yes and no truthfully but they're not going to volunteer the information you really need to tell a compelling narrative. they're not quite as useful as a cooperator. the other thing is i'm not so sure you could get that compulsion order. what you have to get from a judge based on a showing you're giving a person immunity or they don't have a 5th amendment right. there is the possibility of state charges against paul manafort for other crimes. so i don't know that a pardon for federal offenses would completely get him off the hook because the president doesn't have the power to pardon for state offenses. so it's a little more

complicated than saying once you pardon him, he's free to testify. >> pardons have come up before. the president's former lawyer dangled pardons in front of flynn and manafort. is that under scrutiny by the special counsel? >> yes, they wanted to ask what they tried to do in regards to flynn and manafort. the other thing, this assumes manafort has something to offer, because manafort was looking at two serious cases in which a lot of the evidence is based on documents, that show he was convicted here. it was serious. they never made a deal. he wasn't around for that long, so what does he really? he was in the trump tower meeting. if you're mueller, you need to talk to everyone that was in the trump tower meeting before this investigation is over to feel like you did turnover every rock. maybe manafort doesn't have much. maybe there is no real way he can help mueller. >> the politics -- you talk about the equation. does the politics for manafort if he doesn't have anything left to offer, gates may know as much

or more -- >> if the white house had any political shop of any significance, someone would be sitting around. so what do we get if -- just in terms -- always care about keeping the house. >> pardons are always a bleep you to the prosecute erdos. that was the common thread people prosecuted by comey -- >> at this point you're talking about someone -- ipds. we' -- i understand. we're talking about paul manafort and a couple months out from an election. if i'm in a shop and advising the president about the politics, what do we get, what do we lose? if the only thing we care about, the only way to save your presidency is to keep control of the house, what does this do on the playing field for house republicans? and i don't think you get much in terms of politics because the base is already as spun up as it get. pardoning manafort doesn't get

you more enthusiasm. you probably have some college educated public leaning women who would be annoyed by this because it makes trump look guilty. the politics, if all you care about the house, the politics net-net, this is not a winner for trump. on top of that as you said, he loses his ability to plead the 5th. he might have to get called in front of congressional committee if he has anything to say. i think on -- just in a purely self-interested way, it would be a bad dumb move for him to do this. >> barbara, let me give you the last word. if you were the president's lawyer, would you be advising him to pardon manafort if he wanted to, or steer clear from making a decision like that at this point? re: it-- >> it's really difficult. if you're trump you have to think about the legal implications as well as political implications. he can pardon later.

some issue pardon their last day, for example. in the meantime, manafort might have to continue to spend time in jail after he's sentenced. to do it right now seems to smack of potential obstruction of justice if it's done to try to prevent him from cooperating with robert mueller. >> barbara mcquade, thank you so much. when we come back, a different way of looking at the robert mueller investigation. more signs that the special counsel is treating the president like a mob boss. it was here.

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i felt this effort to make us all -- maybe this wasn't their intention, but it's the way it felt to me. we're all part of the messaging, we're all part of the effort. the boss is at the head of the table. we're going to figure out together how to do this. >> how strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss? >> very strange. and i don't do it lightly. that leadership culture

constantly comes back to me when i think about my experience with the trump administration. >> james comey said it, robert mueller just might be acting on it. the special counsel seemingly rounding up the president's good fellas with his sights quite possibly set on trump. the guardian said in the news the last 24 hours it is a sobering reminder of how closely the president of the united states resembles a crime boss struggling to keep his head above water as his hin much men are picked off one by one. the panel is still here. eddie glaude is with us. eddie, let me start with you. people project onto comey all of their angst the last 24 months. i think that seemed hyperbolic in the moment. if you look at the way these prosecutions are going down, really not so far off. >> not at all. and those persons who know donald trump from new york might even make it more concrete. there's always been this kind of underlying suspicion given his

work in atlantic city that he's had these kind of, shall we say, shady connections. and it seems, given the all-star team mueller has pull together, they've approached donald trump in this way. so there's concrete evidence, the analogy orients us perfectly. i think there is something real about how donald trump is being treated and how donald trump operates. and so it's not farfetched at all. >> there's a lot of attempts to draw parallels, the mueller probe is like the enron probe. the mueller probe is -- the mueller probe is like the gotty prosecution. >> a lot of people make that comparison to the prosecution. he acts that way in plain sight. just take the tweet about manafort this morning and what the president is basically saying. paul is a good boy, pauly didn't flip. that's what he's saying. his view of the law is incredibly selective. we talk about him going on the campaign trail. what does he say on the campaign trail, what does he want to emphasize? immigration. what did he say at the white

house this week with i.c.e. officers? we're a nation of immigrants, but above all we are a nation of laws. which laws? the laws seeing his associates prosecuted now the president tells us in real time, those laws don't matter because for years i talked to people close to the president all day yesterday, this morning and they say he has this view of what manafort did and what cohen did as sort of what everybody does. and he feels that he and his associates are being targeted unfairly because now he's president, and that may be true. none of this may be happening if he hadn't won the election, but this is where we are. and in his mind, this is something -- these are things, maybe they're illegal, but people just do it -- they've done for a long time. >> it's unfair he's being targeted. >> he thought about this. who did he want to make attorney general of the united states? jeff sessions. what did he say? you reported this or someone -- what did he say? he said this publicly. he's so disappointed in sessions because he thought sessions as attorney general it would be loyal to him and would protect

him and would use the justice department for him. the analogy would be a mob boss who has the police in his pocket. he goes rogue andinvestigating. >> but where are we actually? i think everything 49 minutes in, i know you're dying to get in. let me throw out one last question for all of you. where are we right now in terms of the president's greatest threat? is it all of his conduct in office, everything we've been talking about, dangling the pardons, the tweets, this obstruction of justice? is that what he's potentially in the most trouble for? >> who knows. they're looking at it all. >> this is why i will just say the only thing i object to in this conversation is we're talking about it like the mob thing is metaphor cal. it's not metaphorical. felix sader was in bed with the russian mafia of he was an fbi informant against russian organized crime. donald trump has been dealing

with people in organized crime. american organized crime and russian organized crime for his entire career. this is not -- and this is why the michael cohen thing is so threatening. again, to go back to the point that schmidt made earlier today, the politics of this again, they have spent all this time demonizing the deep state, now it's brennan, but first it was comey and then it was mueller. all of those people. trump needs a boogieman but he goes after people he can point to and they're his enemies. there's nobody to point to in the michael cohen prosecution because we can't name any of the prosecutors in the sdny. certainly no one in america can. there's only one face in the michael cohen case and it's michael cohen. michael cohen was donald trump's lawyer for 12 years. what are you going to do? michael cohen is a long-time liar, really? he was your lawyer for the last decade. >> don't hire michael cohen. who hired him? donald trump. >> hearing comey there reminded me and the whole mob theme of

the incredible miscalculation that trump made early on, which was to ask comey for loyalty. trump never appreciated the subtlies of washington where that would be such a problem. he came in as a new york businessman and immediately turns to jim comey of all people and says how can you be loyal? >> and his firing put much of this in motion. all right, we have to sneak in our last break. up next, one of trump's first supporters, surprise surprise, also now finds himself in the crosshairs of law enforcement with trump at the head as the entire republican party looking more like a criminal enterprise? ♪i believe, i really do believe that♪ ♪something's got a hold on me, yeah♪ ♪oh, it must be love ♪oh, something's got a hold on me right now, child♪

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today was almost the day that i recorded the commercial break. donald trump has some company today thanks to another elected rip in washington. california congressman duncan hunter and his wife are being hit with federal charges today. they're facing accusations they converted and stole more than a quarter million dollars in campaign funds. all that adds up to this from axios. with the corruption indictment of representative duncan hunter capping republicans' hell day, the top gop guru told axios the republican party looks like a criminal enterprise. hunter was the second member of congress to endorse trump. the first was representative chris collins. he was charged two weeks ago with insider trading, of course. both collins and hunter deny any

wrongdoing. bill, what is going on? >> it's lucky we have a justice department that enforces the law. seriously. that was a federal indictment, wasn't it? and chris collins was as well. i give a huge amount of credit to rosenstein and others at justice for doing their job in extremely difficult circumstances. >> a trump appointingy, he picks them well. it's pretty amazing out there. the world is full of more possibilities than ever before. and american express has your back every step of the way- whether it's the comfort of knowing help is just a call away with global assist.

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