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President Trump’s former lawyer has pleaded guilty to lying about Mr. Trump’s business ties to Russia and has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation. It’s the second time this week that a subject of the inquiry has been charged with lying. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.
Duration
23m
Broadcast on
30 Nov 2018
Audio Format
other

President Trump’s former lawyer has pleaded guilty to lying about Mr. Trump’s business ties to Russia and has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation. It’s the second time this week that a subject of the inquiry has been charged with lying. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see CapitalOne.com/BankGuy, Capital One NA. Member FDIC. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbara. This is The Daily. Today, Michael Cohen leads guilty to lying about the President's ties to Russia and agrees to cooperate with the Special Counsel. What it means that a second subject of the Russia investigation has been charged with lying this week. It's Friday, November 30th. Mike, what happened in August of 2017? What was extraordinary about this week was how ordinary it was. The Russian investigation heated up again. There was a shakeup in the White House again. Congress couldn't get anything done again. There are all of these questions about ties between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia. Capitol Hill, the intelligence committees in both the Senate and the House, are looking into these accusations, these issues. What was really going on between Russia and the campaign in the course of that? But with the President's son-in-law now under intensifying microscope, his personal lawyer now part of the mess. Everyone in Trump's orbit is sort of hauled up to Capitol Hill to answer questions about what they knew. New reporting on the President's personal attorneys now being asked to provide sensitive information to the U.S. Congress. They want to speak with Michael Cohen. House and Senate investigators have asked him to testify about any contacts he had with people connected in any way to Moscow. Cohen lashing out claiming a lack of evidence to corroborate the Russia narrative, labeling the investigation a total fishing expedition and accusing lawmakers of a rush to judgment. So Michael Cohen, like the others, engages with the Hill and tries to provide them answers to the questions they have. With Cohen, there were a lot of questions. If you had to make a list of who you didn't want speaking to investigators or to Congress, Michael Cohen would be near the top of the list. His name was in the dossier. There were allegations in there about meetings that he had had with Russians. And there was an even more specific business question about what they called the Moscow Project. And what was the Moscow Project? The Moscow Project was a deal that the Trump organization was working on to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. And in response to the questions from the committees, Cohen lays out three claims about this effort. He says that the efforts to do the project ended in January of 2016 and were not extensively discussed within the company after that. He says that he never agreed to travel to Russia trying to finish this thing and didn't consider talking to Trump about it. And finally, Cohen says that he was not in contact with the Russian government about the project. Okay, so with that in mind, what happened on Thursday? Michael Cohen went into a courtroom in Lower Manhattan and said those things he said about the Moscow Project were not true. All of them. He lied about all of it. He walks in and says, on these three issues, I lied about the Moscow Project because I wanted to try and protect Donald Trump. Donald Trump was under investigation for his ties to Russia. And if I went out and said, yeah, we were trying to build a tower with them in the middle of the campaign. It was not going to be helpful to them. So I was being loyal. And this is why I told them these lies. So what are we learning is the truth of what really happened in those three claims that Michael Cohen made in August of 2017? We now know that the discussions went on for at least six months longer than he said they did about this Moscow Project. Based on his original story, the discussions happened before the Republican primary begins. We don't know why he lied about that. But if you're trying to spin this, you could say, look, we were talking about this and then we realized we were running for president and we put this aside. Not sure that would hold up. But now with what we know today, the discussions went on through the primary up until the point that he was clenching the nomination. It went on longer than we thought it did. He discussed it several times with the president and even talked to the president about traveling to Russia, talked to Trump about the possibility in the middle of the presidential campaign of going to Russia

Transcription truncated.

President Trump’s former lawyer has pleaded guilty to lying about Mr. Trump’s business ties to Russia and has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation. It’s the second time this week that a subject of the inquiry has been charged with lying. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.