no immunity, no vaccine. the experts say to control the virus, you literally have to stop its spread. an attempt to block over 60% of all possible human transmissions. that may mean stopping human interactions where the risk is high. truly wishing we had better news for you on this holiday monday night. that is our broadcast as we start a new week. thank you so much for being here with us and good night from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. happy presidents' day. super happy to have you here. today i learned a new thing. just to show you that sometimes it is worth coming to work on a federal holiday, today at work i learned that there's a thing called the federal judges association. i had no idea. federal judges have a group that is independent of the government, independent of the judiciary, but there are like more than a thousand federal

judges in the federal judges association. i had no idea. who knew? the reason i learned this tidbit today is because the federal judges association not only exists, but it has called an emergency meeting for tomorrow, for america's federal judges to meet on an emergency basis about this rule of law crisis that has erupted over the past week with revelations about attorney general william barr intervening in multiple active federal criminal cases on behalf of the president. attorney general william barr has been in place for almost exactly a year, and some of these abuses go back almost to the very beginning of his tenure, we are now learning. but they've all sort of burst into view with last week's absolutely unprecedented intervention by attorney general barr to try to achieve a more lenient sentence for the president's friend roger stone after the president publicly demanded such a thing.

that was followed by the resignation of four federal prosecutors from that case, apparently in protest, and that has led to a flood of new reporting about all of the other criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions that william barr has apparently been trying to fix for the president, which means he's been doing exactly what trump promised during the campaign about locking up his enemies and making sure his friends go free. and we all that it was bluster or hyperbole, but now as president, now that he's got the right attorney general in position to do it, we now know they really have been trying to gin up criminal prosecutions and criminal investigations into the president's perceived enemies, and they really have been apparently quashing prosecution and even punishment for convicts who the president has decided to protect. i mean i love bananas as much as the next guy, but this is really banana republic stuff, full

stop. i mean this is -- i mean this is the worst case scenario we've all been imagining and sort of gaming out in terms of rule of law and this president, and it is happening. it's not threatened. there are not concerns this might be coming. it is happening. and it is a serious enough thing for us to all see this as citizens and for us to confront what our own responsibilities are when our country takes this kind of a turn. but if you're a federal judge in this country, while this has happened to the u.s. department of justice, it seems like maybe you and your fellow judges should get together on an emergency basis and talk about how y'all are going to deal with this because y'all have a special role here. today i learned that apparently federal judges have a venue for doing so, and that federal judges association emergency meeting is going to take place tomorrow. we're going to have more on that topic coming up a little later on this hour. more than 2,000 former justice department officials, more than

2,000, have now come out and demanded that attorney general barr should resign because of this crisis that he has caused. the former deputy attorney general for the george h.w. bush administration, which is the other presidential administration in which bill barr once served as attorney general, a man by the name of donald ayer came out today and said not only must bill barr resign over what he has done, but there should be, quote, a public uprising demanding that bill barr resign, quote, immediately or, failing that, that he be impeached. i will say i was a little haunted all weekend. i had a great weekend, but i was a little haunted all weekend by the interview that we had on this show on this subject on friday night with david rohde from "the new yorker." david rohde is an incredible reporter with an incredible track record, and he has just done some really in-depth reporting on bill barr among other things for a book he's got coming out soon. on friday night, i asked david

rohde if what he knows, what he has reported about william barr, suggests that we might not be heading for just a breach of the rule of law, which is what we've got now, but if he's worried we might actually be heading for a legitimate constitutional crisis. we throw around the phrase constitutional crisis. it's a specific thing. one definition of a constitutional crisis, one instance that would definitely be that is if the president actually decided to defy a court order. that would be the definition of a constitutional government. we've got a try par tight government, right. it's co-equal branches of government. if the executive, if the president decides that judicial rulings do not bind him, that's a legitimate crucial crisis because there's no other authority to go to to try to resolve that issue. it would literally just be a matter of force at that point, which is not the way we are supposed to resolve things in this country. so i asked david rohde if this rule of law breakdown that we have now seen under bill barr might conceivably be an indication that we are heading

for a constitutional crisis, for an irresolvable constitutional confrontation. david rohde friday night did not hesitate at all in saying, yes, yes, bill barr would absolutely advise president trump to defy a court order if he wanted to. he wouldn't blink whatsoever about the constitutional crisis that would ensue. so that has sat very uneasily with me since i heard it, i think in large part because i believe it. but thinking ahead about that, trying to think about how to be a good citizen and an aware observer of our nation at this point, looking ahead for a potential flashpoint around which something that bad might happen, obviously could come at any point on an issue large or small. but to my mind, the thing that immediately pops for me is something that's going to happen next month because next month there will be oral arguments at the united states supreme court involving the president's taxes and his financial records. if you've been following this at

all, you know there have already been multiple federal court rulings about whether or not subpoenas for the president's taxes and financial records are valid and can be enforced. at the federal district court level, the federal appeals court level, those decisions have all gone effectively against the president. they've all gone in the same direction, which is that if kroll committ congressional --s to obtain the president's taxes and his financial records, court orders till now have said there's no reason those subpoenas should be blocked. they are valid and those records should be handed over to those committees and those investigations. well, next month is when the supreme court is going to hear oral arguments on that matter, and we don't know how those arguments will go. we don't know how the supreme court will rule. but we do know about president trump's hyper desperation to avoid the exposure of records like this, right? there is nothing that he has fought harder or on more fronts or at more personal expense than his various legal battles to stop his taxes from becoming public and to stop his financial records from becoming public or from being handed over to

investigators. so if the supreme court does rule that those kinds of records ought to be released, it is not at all hard to imagine that the president would, you know, flip the proverbial bird to the supreme court and just say no. now, that said, the way most of those cases are structured, it actually wouldn't be -- it wouldn't be easy for him to do that because it wouldn't be the president himself who would be in the position of deciding whether or not to hand over the records. the subpoenas, remember, are directed to third parties. they're directed to an accounting firm and to a bank called deutsche bank. and it is those institutions that would ultimately have to decide whether they are going to obey a court order and hand the material over, at which point there's always the possibility that the president would lean on the accounting firm and lean on the bank and tell them not to, tell them to defy the supreme court or else. i mean, heck, if this attorney

general is still in place, the president at that point could promise a politically motivated persecution, right, courtesy of bill barr. i'll roll in the fbi on you unless you defy the supreme court here. i mean that's how banana republics work, right? i mean we are in a bad place now when it comes to the rule of law, and the rule of law being perverted to serve the president instead of to serve impartial justice. i mean it's bad enough that, you guys, the judges are having an emergency meeting together tomorrow. that's how bad this is. but it is hard not to look down the road about a month and feel like there's something potentially much worse coming in terms of a direct constitutional conflagration because this president is so desperate to keep his financial records and his financial history under wraps and that is about to be litigated. because he's got bill barr at the attorney general's office, you know, provided bill barr makes it that long, that's a potentially very, very, very bad

situation not just for the rule of law but for our constitutional republic. it's also worrying or at least intriguing because looking ahead toward that potential confrontation, you need to know that the financial institution at the center of that fight is not a normal financial institution. it is a bank called deutsche bank, and they are not a normal bank. in the definitive history of deutsche bank as a worldwide disaster-making machine is being published tomorrow, and i've got it here tonight. and whoo boy does that book make it look like that coming confrontation is going to be like a 5,000-car pileup because, i mean, if you just step back for a second and think about where we have come over the last three years, right, over the course of this presidency, the issue of following the money when it comes to donald trump -- follow the money if you can -- has been paramount from the very beginning. all the way back to the republican primary, right, it

was this huge controversy. he wouldn't release his tax returns. going back to watergate, every president had done that. trump kept saying he would release his taxes, and then he didn't. his republican rivals took him to the wood shed over that. the press gave him a sustained difficult time about that. he could never explain himself during the entire course of the general election about not releasing his taxes. ultimately he became president, and he kept making noises for a while that he would still release his taxes, but he still didn't. i mean for somebody who defined his public persona in terms of his financial history and his supposed financial genius and the amount of wealth he had supposedly piled up, you know, not just by inheriting it from his father but by his business acumen, i mean for somebody who built his entire public persona on that, he has made it very difficult to follow the money when it comes to any aspect of his life or his political career. he's made it as hard as possible. back to the taxes and all the rest of it. that said, anytime any reporters or any investigators have gotten

a hold of any little piece of his financial history, it has turned out to be so unimaginably bad. i mean it's kind of hard to believe this isn't all anybody works on when it comes to him. i mean any little money thing related to him that has been fully reported reveals a catastrophe. i mean just pick one at random, right? the presidential campaign. hush money payments that were made to benefit his campaign during the time he was running for president. funds paid by checks handwritten by trump organization executives, including his eldest son. we still don't totally understand why those trump organization executives never got charged in this scheme. the president's personal lawyer who conveyed the checks to the women who were being paid off in the scheme, he ended up going to prison for this money. but, you know, michael cohen is still in prison for that hush money scandal. prosecutors from the southern district of new york named the president as the person who supervised and ordered the commission of those felonies. they described him as individual

one. who knows depending on the statute of limitations and whether he wins re-election, maybe we'll soon see him face his own felony charges on that as well. that's just a couple hundred thousand dollars during the campaign. let's take a look at that. whoa, people are going to prison, and maybe the president is too. i mean what do we know of the president's taxes? nobody has ever been able to obtain more than a few pages of his taxes. but "the new york times" combined those few known pages of his taxes with a bunch of business records from the trump family businesses that they obtained through sort of mysterious means. and a bunch of trump's father's taxes. with those materials, the new york time was able to put together a magnum opus 40-page long, 13,000 word pulitzer prize-winning exposé about the president and his siblings running a small despotic country's worth of criminal schemes to evade taxes, to rip off everyone from the city to the federal government to their own tenants, i mean to the tune

of hundreds of millions of dollars. it was such a bad exposé. it was bad enough that the president's sister resigned her lifetime seat on the federal judiciary to avoid an ethics inquiry into what she and her brother had done to evade taxes as part of this big family scheme. judges have lifetime tenure, and i learned today an association where they have emergency meetings. she gave up her seat as a federal judge. she gave up lifetime tenure on the federal bench just to evade a judicial ethics inquiry into her role in that alleged illegal tax scheme that she did with her brother, which he of course pays no penalty for because he's president now. what else? oh, the president had a business venture which he called a university, trump university. that was exposed in a tidal wave of civil lawsuits as a massive financial fraud. that was the case you might remember in which the president derided the judge overseeing that matter as being incapable

of judging his case because the judge was of mexican ethnic extraction. his parents were from mexico, and so therefore, of course, he could not be a judge of a trump-related matter. really? desperate much? the trump university scam really does appear to have been a long-running, straight-up big criminal fraud scheme. the president ultimately decided to settle those cases by paying $25 million in cash to the victims of the trump university scheme. also he ran a charity. when the president started promising charitable gifts to veterans organizations during the presidential campaign. remember he boycotted a debate and said instead he's hold a fund-raiser for veterans. a "washington post" was assigned to find out why it seemed like the veterans associations were

not getting -- ultimately the reporter from "the washington post" trying to follow that one single financial thread with trump, he ultimately stumbled upon another gigantic financial fraud scheme that the president had been operating. this time under the gieuise of s foundation, his charity, which was then, after tons of public reporting, exposed what he had been doing. it was then shut down as a fraud by new york state regulators. and the president will have a very hard time ever being associated with any charitable entity in years to come should any charity ever want him. i mean every single financial anything associated with this president that has ever been investigated to the slightest degree or reported on with any vigor has revealed something that deserves a prison sentence or at least a lot of probation or at least the entity being shut down by the authorities or at least multi-million dollar fines. even the ones you've forgotten

about. this is a young man named sam patten. he very narrowly avoided years in federal prison and instead got years of federal probation after he pled guilty to funneling illegal foreign donations into the trump inaugural committee. but of course this is the main super pac supporting trump's re-election effort. this superpac was recently subpoenaed in conjunction with the criminal case against these gentlemen, who were recently indicted for making hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations including $300,000 they illegally donated. literally is there anything financial associated with donald trump that hasn't resulted in an indictment, a settlement, or some sort of massive scandal? i mean even if you set aside the illegal emoluments stuff, right? keeping his businesses open and taking payments from foreign governments, which the constitution explicitly

prohibits. even if you set aside the self-dealing -- remember when he was going to host the g7 meeting at doral so all of the other g7 countries would have to pay him personally for the privilege of attending the g7? i mean even if you set aside him spending a third of all of the days of his presidency at properties owned by his business while his company says, oh, no, we're not profiting from that. the secret service stays at these properties for free. but it turns out his business has been charging the u.s. government full rack rate for secret service rooms. they've been making a mint on it all this time and they've just been flat out lying about it. even if you set aside just the petty rank corruption and self-dealing of his time in office, leaving even that aside, anytime anybody has been able to follow any of the money around him, it is a dumpster fire, and someone often goes to jail. and so, yeah, broad-ranging subpoenas for the entire universe of his financial and

banking records and all of his tax returns going back years? yeah, i think he's nervous about that. i believe that would be the prover hill he would choose to proverbially die on in terms of what fight he would take to the max. i believe he would do anything to stop that material from coming out. and it turns out the entity that houses his bank records, because it's the only entity that's been his bank for the last 20 years, is this bank called deutsche bank. his relationship with them started after all other financial institutions swore him off because he was constantly reneging on all of his loans. deutsche bank, for its own reasons, decided in the late '90s that they'd give him $125 million loan to rehab a downtown office building. the bank would go on to loan him over $2 billion over the next two decades, including absolutely inexplicable deals like the half billion dollars plus they loaned him to build a hotel in chicago and that he decided he wouldn't pay back any

of it. and then he decided he would sue the bank that had loaned him the money by claiming they caused the international financial crisis, which resulted in trump not being able to pay them back. so they should actually pay him $3 billion. what? the way that resolved is even crazier. the way that resolved is that a different part of that same bank agreed to loan him the money to pay back the loan to the other part of the bank that he had stiffed. i mean the fact that trump even had a business to be in by the time he decided he wanted to run for president, the fact that he even existed as an apparently solvent businessman by the time he wanted to be a politician is due in large part to this one financial institution choosing to dump a mountain of money upon him in what seemed to be increasingly inexplicable transactions that nobody else in the financial world would go anywhere near. why did that one financial institution do it, and what do their records show about

mr. trump and his financial dealings over the years? what are they going to show that he knows already, and what are they going to show all of us when they come out? hold that thought. to the community, we present limu emu & doug with this key to the city. [ applause ] it's an honor to tell you that liberty mutual customizes your car insurance so you only pay for what you need. and now we need to get back to work. [ applause and band playing ] only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ (howling wind) (howling wind) skip to the good part with alka-seltzer plus. now with 25% more concentrated power.

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david enrich is the finance editor of "the new york times." his new book is called "dark towers: deutsche bank, donald trump, and an epic trail of

destruction." we're going to talk with him in just a moment, but i want to give you a couple pieces of his reporting before we bring him in. this is basically the definitive story of what went wrong at this institution, deutsche bank, and why that coincided with deutsche bank becoming the sole underwriter of the mythical business career of donald trump, leading right up to the point where he became president. among the revelations in enrich's book are sort of small worrying signs like the original loan documents for the earliest deutsche bank loan to trump having what appeared to be at least one forged signature on it to big flashing red lights like multiple deutsche bank officials on multiple occasions flagging that there appeared to be organized crime ties to mr. trump and his businesses, and that maybe meant the bank should stop shoveling money to him. there's brand-new reporting in the book that over the course of deutsche bank's two-decade involvement with mr. trump, they repeatedly lined him up with wealthy russians who were looking to park a bunch of cash,

russian cash, in western real estate entities. that resulted in apparently a lot of russian money of murky origin finding its way into donald trump projects in places like hawaii. i'll read you a little piece from the book. quote, when he partnered in 2006 with a los angeles developer to build a trump branded resort in hoye, deutsche bank organized get-togethers in london and elsewhere to connect trump and his partners with wealthy clients who used anonymous shell companies to buy blocks of units in the sprawling waikiki hotel complex. the bank played much the same behind the scenes matchmaking role when trump sought to donald trump up interest in a planned resort in baja california in mexico. in both cases, deutsche bank steered the very rich russians -- excuse me -- steered very rich russians into the trump ventures according to people who were involved in the deals. this was just a couple of years after american regulators had punished deutsche bank for whisking russian mine into the u.s. financial system via latvia. quote, some executives at deutsche bank had discussed the

potential pitfalls of the trump relationship, and they were worried. it was not only the not insignificant risk that trump would default on loans. the bankers also knew how filthy the new york real estate industry could be. they talked about trump's well documented ties to the orked crime world and the possibility that trump's real estate projects were laundromats for illicit funds from countries like russia. specifically on the russia issue, david enrich finally pulls together all of the world's known reporting about some of the most disturbing, still open questions about what went on with the kremlin interference in the 2016 election to benefit trump and how that may have mapped to financial dealings involving his company and potentially jared kushner's family company as well. here's more. quote, tammy mcfadden had worked in dpoich bank's jacksonville offices a few buildings down from the fbi's field office there for eight years when in the summer of 2016, some suspicious jared kushner transactions landed in her

inspection queue. deutsche bank's computer systems automatically scanned thousands of transactions every day looking for any hints of impropriety and then sent those flagged transactions to experts for review. mcfadden was a veteran anti-money laundering compliance officer attached to deutsche's private banking division. she was one of those experts. in early 2016, mcfadden had noticed that many customers of deutsche's private bank, including quite a few of rosemary vrablik's super rich clients didn't have the proper documentation attached to their accounts. this is especially problematic for customers classified as politically exposed persons, a designation that's supposed to subject them to extra vetting because of the heightened risk they could be involved in bribery or other public corruption. mcfadden found that more than a hundred politically exposed clients who didn't violent requisite -- when mcfadden alerted her superiors, they told her not to worry about it.

now in the summer of 2016 with trump having clinched the republican nomination and jared kushner serving as his adviser, mcfatten was assigned 9 task of reviewing a number of transactions in the kushner company's accounts that had triggered alerts in deutsche's computer system. right off the bat she could see why the transactions had tripped up the software. kushner's real estate company was moving money to a number of russian individuals. mcfadden did some research, looked into the recipients of the money and into the kushner company's history of moving funds overseas and concluded that the appropriate response was for deutsche to file a suspicious activity report with the arm of the treasury department responsible for policing financial crimes. this didn't strike mcfadden as an especially close call. she typed up the report and sent it to her superiors. quote, word traveled back to mcfadden that her report was being killed by managers in the private bank. mcfadden was pretty sure this was an example of the private bank trying to preserve its lucrative relationship with the kushners and therefore the trumps at the cost of not

adhering to anti-money laundering laws. ultimately in april 2018 mcfadden was fired, but she had found something important. the kushners, with their long-standing ties to deutsche bank, were moving money to russians at the same time that russia was interfering in the american presidential election, trying to tilt it in favor of jared kushner's father-in-law. it was hard not to be a little suspicious. what exactly were the purposes of the transactions that mcfadden had spotted? what did they show about the interests of kushner, trump, or his presidential campaign in russia? with mcfadden fired and her suspicious activity report deleted, the answers to those questions vanished inside deutsche's computer systems. if only a subpoena could pry them loose. david enrich joins us next. stay with us. so what are you working on?

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there's one more bit of this i want you to hear. this is from david enrich's new book, dark towers, deutsche bank, donald trump, and an epic trail of destruction. it comes out tort. we've got it tonight. quote, there was no doubt that deutsche bank had extensive business dealings with russia and those dealings included acting as a conduit for dirty money to get out of russia and into the western financial system. deutsche of course was the only reliable connection that trump, his family and his company had to the mainstream banking world. and eric trump had blurted that russians financed the family's government projects even though it was deutsche who had made the doral loans. perhaps this was more than a coincidence.

maybe deutsche was what connected trump to russia. the rumor that had been ricocheting around washington, new york, and london was that the russian government supported vtb bank, had in the recent past funneled dirty money to trump via deutsche. vtb certainly seemed connected to trump. felix sater claimed that vtb was fa 1i8 sill tating in 2016 as they discussed a possible trump tower project in moscow. there was no doubt vtb had long-standing ties to deutsche. now there was a theory was that frn -- vtb had a agreed to secure the loans. if trump defaulted, deutsche could collect whatever it was owed from the russian bank. in effect that meant that vtb was the one lending to trump, a direct financial connection between the russian government and an american president. deutsche executives insisted this was false. again, this is from david enrich's new book "dark

towers: deutsche bank, donald trump, and an epic trail of destruction of" comes out tomorrow. >> what jumped out at the auditor as he scrolled through this spreadsheet was just how much business deutsche had been doing with russian banks. there were tens of millions of dollars outstanding with vtb alone and the spreadsheet showed that a network of more obscure companies like russian international bank and russian mortgage bank and russian commercial bank cypress limited to name a few also were doing tens of millions of dollars of business with deutsche, and that was just on this one particular day that this one spreadsheet captured in the fall of 2013. the spreadsheet was a tantalizing clue as to just how deeply entangled deutsche was with russia. and despite everything that was already public thanks to deutsche's repeated scrapes with lern law enforcement and regulatory agencies, just how little was really known about what the bank was up to. those answers lay hidden inside deutsche. short of theft or a very lucky break with a very disgruntled

employee, the only way to crowbar open those electronic vaults was for a government body to issue a subpoena. since that time, of course, those subpoenas have been issued. two levels of federal court already have said those subpoenas are valid and should be enforced and deutsche should hand over their financial records related to donald trump. the supreme court will hear that next month, and the president's desperation to stop the release of his financial records from deutsche bank is so palpable, you owe it to yourself to read this to understand why he's so freaked out. joining us now is david enrich. he's finance editor at "the new york times." he's author of this new book. david, thank you. >> thank you. >> i'm sorry that i just read your whole book on tv. >> it's fine. there are a few parts you didn't get, and i am happy for any publicity you give me. >> i picked those things out because those are the things -- i have your official copy of the book and then i have the galley i've been tearing up for a few weeks since i got it. >> i'm so impressed. that's the most dog eared copy of my book i've seen.

>> your book is about a lot of things i've been worried about and wondering about for a long time. let me ask you a very basic question. what was it about president trump that made it so that by the late '90s, there was no other bank in the world that would do business with him other than this one? >> he kept defaulting. that was his modus operandi. he would borrow money or accept services from banks, from contractors, from law firms, and then he would refuse to pay them back. it was that simple, and that's obviously not a type of business that many financial institutions, serious ones anyway, are eager to work with. >> and this is the story of the sort of kur sid history of deutsche bank from its origins, like literally from them financing the creation of auschwitz until the current day. and the book is essentially about what a bad and dysfunctional organization you portrayed deutsche to be. but is it that -- is that the simple answer to why they were the one institution in the world that would still do business with trump given that that was his m.o.? >> well, this is an institution

that was so hungry for short-term profits that they were willing to turn a blind eye to bad clients' reputations. this is the same reason -- the same reason they were doing business with donald trump is the same reason they were the only bank ultimately willing to do business with jeffrey epstein. this is a pattern that keeps repeating itself over the years with deutsche bank and they really wanted clients, and they were in such a weak position competitively that they had to go for the clients that no other banks would touch. and donald trump is a perfect example of that. >> during the presidential election, you write, a deutsche bank employee raised concerns about transactions related to jared kushner and that there seemed to be at least sort of soes logically, there seemed to be a link between kushner's dealings with deutsche bank and trump's dealing. they involved the same banker. they seemed to be sort of cultivating the same ties. what do you know about the seriousness of the concerns that were raised about kushner and sending money to russia during the campaign? >> i mean they were extremely serious. this is the woman who raised

these concerns named tammy mcfadden spent, i spent a lot of time talking with her. she was so concerned that she not only filed a suspicious activity report, but when that report was killed, she started complaining so loudly internally that she had to be transferred to another part of the bank and then ultimately was fired. she still feels strongly about this. she had the courage to speak up publicly and talk to me, have her picture taken, which is something that in this day and age, in this political climate, takes such guts. and people who don't feel really strongly and really alarmed by what they've seen don't do it. >> were you able to find any independent corroborating evidence that those payments might have been a thank you or a pass-through to russia basically to compensate them for the help they were offering trump in the campaign? >> i'm afraid not. that was definitely something that i was looking for, and i was not able to confirm that. what i was certainly able to confirm that a number of other people within the bank had raised similar concerns, whether it was about trump or the kushner accounts, and there's a

long-standing pattern within deutsche bank of facilitating money laundering for people in russia and elsewhere. and the anti-money laundering compliance officers at deutsche bank certainly reviewing these trump and kushner transactions through that lens. it fit the bill of the exact type of stuff they had been trained to look out for and, you know, they tried to raise these red flags and were thwarted at every turn. now, that doesn't mean -- i don't think they had any insight into what the intent of those payments were. they could just see the payments leaving the bank's accounts and going into the pockets of these russi russians. >> and knew they were a type of suspicious payment that they should have been reported. >> yeah. it wasn't a close call they said. >> i have more to ask you. we'll be right back with david enrich. his book comes out tomorrow. we'll be right back.

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alexios, add toilet paper to the shopping list. [chiseling on stone] oh, and camel milk. and a chicken. and moisturizer. alexa: thanks, guys. i'll take it from here. if you're living with hiv, and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill, once-a-day treatment used for hiv in certain adults. it's not a cure, but with one small pill, biktarvy fights hiv to help you get to and stay undetectable. that's when the amount of virus is so low it can't be measured by a lab test. research shows people who take hiv treatment every day and get to and stay undetectabe can no longer transmit hiv through sex. serious side effects can occur, including kidney problems and kidney failure. rare, life-threatening side effects include a buildup of lactic acid and liver problems. do not take biktarvy if you take dofetilide or rifampin.

tell your doctor about all the medicines and supplements you take, if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, or if you have kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis. if you have hepatitis b, do not stop taking biktarvy without talking to your doctor. common side effects were diarrhea, nausea, and headache. if you're living with hiv, keep loving who you are. and ask your doctor if biktarvy is right for you. when our daughter and her kids moved in with us... kids, bedtime! ...she was worried we wouldn't be able to keep up. course we can. what couldn't keep up was our bargain detergent. turns out it's mostly water, and water doesn't get out all the stains. so, we switched back to tide. one wash, stains are gone. kind of like our quiet time. [slurping] what are you doing? don't pay for water. tide gives you three times the active cleaning ingredients. if it's got to be clean, it's got to be tide. joining us once again is david enrich. he's finance editor at "the new

york times." his new book is called "dark towers: deutsche bank, donald trump and an epic trail of destruction." it comes out tomorrow. let me ask you about something i expected to happen at the start of the trump administration. we know very little about his finances but we do know he probably owes hundreds of millions of dollars to this one institution. that institution at the time he becomes president is expected to be in the crosshairs of the justice department. they had just been nailed, had to pay a huge fine in this russian money laundering scandal. it was widely believed that the federal justice department was about to bring a case against them for essentially that same crime, and that was going to be a big confrontation in terms of the independence of the justice department. whatever happened to that case? >> yeah, that is the million dollars question. so back at the tail end of the obama administration, my understanding is that the justice department was close to bringing a criminal case against deutsche bank, actually charging

the bank itself with a crime for its involvement in russian money laundering. and the trump administration begins and deutsche bank executives are kind of steeling themselves for this. and they just hear nothing. and the weeks go past, and initially they just think it's, you know, a presidential transition, and it's just been put on the back burner for a couple weeks. but then the months start passing and then a year passes, and deutsche bank executives became convinced this was just too hot to handle for the trump administration. they did not want anyone in the administration to bring more public attention to the very close relationship between deutsche bank and russia on the one hand and deutsche bank and trump on the other hand. >> we believe that the president still owes them a ton of money. >> hundreds of millions of dollars. >> a deutsche bank spokesperson made a statement -- gave a statement to business insider in response to your book. >> wow. this is news to me. >> here you go. ready? while elements of the narrative seem to be exaggerated to fit into a story line, we have long acknowledged and sought to learn from our historical shortcomings. that's the statement.

what has deutsche bank said to you in response to your reporting here, particularly when it comes to what you just described, their ties to russia, their admitted, confessed, and punished ties to russian money laundering and their simultaneous ties to the president? >> well, first of all, they publicly refused to speak, say much of anything in public about their client. they acknowledge trump is a client. trump has disclosed in his limited white house disclosures the amounts he owes and what those loans are. they've, in the case of tammy mcfadden, they've said that they handled everything properly. you know, they're playing defense, and they are trying to desperately, i think, to make this very bad situation where they are kind of the public face of donald trump's finances -- they're trying to make that go away as best they can. and i think to their credit here, it sounds like they're owning up. they're not really disputing anything. and it's hard to dispute because a lot of this is public. >> last question i have for you is about what i see coming next month with the supreme court

arguments over, among other things, the subpoena to deutsche bank to hand over their financial records related to trump. are you concerned they may have destroyed or mishandled or altered those records? i raise this because you had reported at "the times" that multiple deutsche bank executives had told you among their donald trump records were years of the president's federal tax returns. they then told a federal court, no, we don't have his tax returns at all. do you think they might be burning that stuff in an oil drum somewhere? >> i doubt they're burning it in an oil drum somewhere but they definitely had the tax returns because i've spoken to people who have seen them at deutsche bank, and i believe them when they say they no longer have them. that means they've destroyed them, lost them or given them back to trump. i don't know which of those things is worse but it was very surprising to me to hear them say they no longer had the returns. >> i don't know what we're ultimately going to see in terms of what deutsche bank has on the president and what that explains about who he is and how he got to be where he is. but you have given us the best

key to understanding that so far, by far. david enrich is the finance editor at "the new york times." the new book is called "dark towers." come for a preview of what's going to happen at the supreme court. stay for the surprise story of how we ended up with supreme court justice brett kavanaugh. i can't even go there. it's in the book. you'll want to see it. david, thank you very much. >> thank you, rachel. >> i really appreciate it. we'll be right back. stay with us. ng now in one pot, and with tendercrisp technology, you can cook foods that are crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside. the ninja foodi pressure cooker, the pressure cooker that crisps. we make aspirin to help save lives during a heart attack... so it never stops the heart of a family. at bayer, this is why we science.

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but it feels like we may be seeing signs of that sort of squawking happening already in the press. last week "the wall street journal" reported that the justice department is nearing a decision about whether to -- for lying to congress during the russia investigation. the reporter on that story, the

erik prince case, is currently in the hands of the d.c. u.s. attorney's office, which is the office where the u.s. attorney was unceremoniously removed from her job in recent weeks and replaced with a close aide to attorney general bill barr. that's the same u.s. attorney's office where the a.g. has been meddling in cases to benefit the president. it's been almost a year since the erik prince case was referred by congress to the justice department. we haven't really heard beep about the investigation since. so why are we just hearing about it now? again, no indictment has been made public, but somebody is letting "the wall street journal" know that the criminal case against erik prince is alive and well, and there could be charges. same thing with the investigation related to the president's lawyer, rudy giuliani. since friday night we've had a pair of reports from "the washington post" and cnn about how federal prosecutors are currently still working on and advancing their criminal investigation into rudy giuliani related to his two associates, lev parnas and igor fruman, who

are already under federal indictment. again, that's good to know. there had been earlier reporting that the giuliani case might result in criminal charges against mayor giuliani, but that's getting re-upped now when we're being told -- reporters are being told now that by the way not only is that investigation still live, it's being currently investigated. interviews are happening now, even since the end of the impeachment trial, giuliani interviews related to the giuliani case are live. why are we hearing about that stuff in the press now? i mean whatever the reason, these little flares being put out in the press by people who know something about these cases, they do serve as a kind of public notice that these investigations, these politically sensitive investigations into the president's allies, are active and ongoing cases, which honestly is good to have on the public record just in case the attorney general ever tries to make those cases go away. obama: he's been a leader

throughout the country for the past twelve years, mr. michael bloomberg is here. vo: leadership in action. mayor bloomberg and president obama worked together in the fight for gun safety laws, to improve education, and to develop innovative ways to help teens gain the skills needed to find good jobs. obama: at a time when washington is divided in old ideological battles he shows us what can be achieved when we bring people together to seek pragmatic solutions. bloomberg: i'm mike bloomberg and i approve this message. >> man: what's my my truck...is my livelihood. so when my windshield cracked...

the experts at safelite autoglass came right to me. >> tech: hi, i'm adrian. >> man: thanks for coming. ...with service i could trust. right, girl? >> singers: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace. ♪ t-mobile's new offer on iphone 11 is even better on our newest most powerful signal. switch to t-mobile now, and get 2 lines of unlimited for only $90 and 2 iphone 11s on us. only at t-mobile. all right. that's just about going to do it for us tonight. there's two things we're going to be watching for tomorrow after this conflagration we've had over attorney general bill barr interfering in the prosecution of the president's friend roger stone last week. the judge in that case scheduled a surprise conference call for lawyers on both sides of that case tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. we really do not know what that's about but we're going to be watching that closely given the huge furor that has erupted since the attorney general got

involved there. but also tomorrow is the deadline for democratic candidates to qualify for wednesday's presidential debate in nevada. so far it's sanders, biden, warren, buttigieg, and klobuchar, but bloomberg is on the cusp of qualifying for that debate. it would be the first debate he's in. he only needs 10% in one more national poll in order if there's another national poll that comes out showing him with that kind of standing tomorrow, he will be in the wednesday night debate. he has until 11:59 p.m. eastern time tomorrow to make that cutoff. it's time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." >> set your alarm for 5:00 a.m.-ish. npr has announced at dawn they are going to release the poll that you were just talking about. >> oh, they've got a poll.