brangham: meanwhile, felix sater tells michael cohen hein wowith high-level russian officials.ails cohen, saying, "buddy, our boy can become president of the usa, and we can engineer it. i will go all of putin's teamy in on this." desjardins: the moscow trump tower project is just one source of russian contacts. mueller outlines aboutot a dozen of them in. they vary widely.gn campide carter page meets with russians and travels to moscow to give a speech. aide j.d. gordon sayhe pushed for a change in the republican platform to water down tough language about russia and ukraine. policy adviser michael flynn gives speeches in russia and thhas numerous contacts the russian ambassador, including a discussion of softening sanctions foreign policy and national security adviser jeff sessions also meets with the russian ambassador. campaign cguirman paul manafort rly shares internal polling data with a man tied to russian intelligence. and fellow trump aose george papadopoepeatedly meets with a different man connected to russian intelligence, and who tells papadopoulosge papathe russian

where president trump's one-time business associate felix sater just arrived to testify before the housentel committee. sater's appearance is part of the investigation into russian interference in the 2016 u.s. elections. and president trump's business dealings specifically in russia. sater telling "the washington post" last month, quote, i will answer every question without exception. nbc's kasie hunt is live on the hill. kasie, he's going to answer every question without exception today. but last month when he was supposed to show up, he didn't. he said he slept through his alarm and then his lawyer said no, he was home sick. so who exactly is this man? >> so, steph, you've done a pretty good job of outlining it here. felix sater is a person of interest and was written up in the mueller report because he was involved in trying to get a range of visits to russia for the president as michael cohen was negotiating the trump tower project in moscow. so this falls into the bucket of looking at the president's ties to foreign governments, in this case russia, and his financial dealings with

very interesting developments involving felix sater, who was a trump -- excuse me, a trump organization employee/associate who testified for a very long time before the house intelligence committee today. there is intriguing stuff sort of bubbling and developing in terms of robert mueller's planned testimony next week and the members of his prosecution team who may be testifying at the same time on the same day. so there's lots going on. like i said, the news is sort of like a confetti cannon today. things are going on all over the place and it sort of feels like if the news just got frozen in amber tonight, we would still be full for the rest of the week in terms of stuff to talk about. just in terms of scandals and legal stuff. >>> but i mentioned that we have a scoop tonight, and this is something that i'm sure you haven't seen anything about today. i know that for sure because this is a brand-new story that has just been broken by nbc news. now, the reporters on this story are jacob soboroff and julia ainsley. we're going to be speaking with jacob in just a moment. but the origin of

congress did get testimony today from one interesting witness from the mueller report, felix sater, aassociate who worked on the trump tower moscow project during the campaign with michael cohen. felix sater testified today behind closed doors to house intelligence committee, but after he left the committee released a sort of extraordinary statement that said in part, "while we do not typically comment on closed interviews, mr. sater has not fully cooperated with the committee and he will remain under subpoena until he does so." intriguing. and on top of all of that, we also got word today that christopher steele, the former british spy behind the dossier about donald trump's ties to russia, christopher steele was interviewed for 16 hours last month by investigators with the office of the justice department's inspector general. whatever christopher steele told them, reportedly the inspector general found it credible enough to extend his investigation into how the fbi handled its 2016 investigation of the trump campaign's ties to russia. all of that today. i know it feels like it shoul

felix sater has critical information related to the trump administration's dealings with russ russia,usiness dealings in particular. i do think we can expect to see many more of these hearings as the house continues to just sort of chip away at that work in the face of white house obstruction of trying to assemble the story in a way they can present on their own terms to the american public. >> fill us in, kaitlan, on what's going on with the president's demand that there be a formal question in the u.s. census about citizenship. >> well, things have been very fluid and they've been on shaky ground all throughout the weekend. the president was at his golf club in new jersey but he was still having several meetings and calls deciding how they're going to go forward. and we heard from the attorney general bill barr today who said essentially you're going to find out in the next day or two because we're still working on it. we know they changed legal teams overnight. it's a whole new legal team that's dealing with it, a whole new set of lawyers. essentially they're still figuring it out.