Michael Cohen Gave Fed Investigators New Info On Insurance Policies, Claims At Trump Properties
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR, CUOMO PRIME TIME: Thank you, Anderson. I am Chris Cuomo and welcome to PRIME TIME. It's Friday and I have new information for you. Federal investigators have talked to the President's former lawyer, Michael Cohen about the President's business. And I don't mean personal peccadilloes. The President said, "Don't mess with my money," and now they are doing exactly that. CNN has learned investigators have spoken with Cohen to learn in part about insurance policies and claims at Trump properties, as well as other business practices. Why Cohen? Because the President's right. He really wasn't just a lawyer for him. He did lots of work on the business side. Cuomo's Court has the answer to why this could be worse than Mueller for the President. Speaking of the Special Counsel, tonight is the deadline to file his last major pleading in the longest-running case of his Russian interference probe. How did Paul Manafort's crimes fit into the wider Russia investigation? We may learn tonight on our watch, so don't go anywhere because that could come any minute. We also have new information on when Mueller plans to drop his final report. It's a big night, so let's get after it.</s>TEXT: CUOMO PRIME TIME.</s>CUOMO: A lot unfolding, let's immediately gavel Cuomo's Court into session. We have Neal Katyal and John Yoo.</s>TEXT: CUOMO'S COURT.</s>CUOMO: John Yoo, welcome to the show. Good to have you for the first time.</s>JOHN CHOON YOO, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL UNDER PRESIDENT G.W. BUSH: Thank you. It's great to be here.</s>CUOMO: Neal, you good? You hearing me OK? No? All right, good. John, I'll start with you.</s>NEAL KATYAL, FORMER ACTING SOLICITOR GENERAL UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA: I can, thank you.</s>CUOMO: You're the new guest anyway, so you get to go first. So, the new reporting we have is, yes, they want to know about the President's business practices in the Southern District of New York, insurance claims. The New York Times had that and left it there. We have advanced it to how did they use insurance at the companies? How did they file? How much did they cover? How much did they claim? How much did they recover versus how much they spent on those claims? Was it done legitimately? Pretty specific questioning, what does it mean to you? Where could it lead?</s>YOO: Well this seems to me to be part of the Southern District's broader investigation into the Trump Organization, and how it was doing business. And as you said in the lead-in to the show, this is separate from the Mueller probe, and whether there was any kind of conspiracy with the Russians. We're going to see that report hopefully next week or in the week following, and that's going to focus on a different thing. I think you're probably right. If there's going to be something that's going to continue to dog the President, that's going to give people in Congress grounds to conduct oversight, potentially even impeachment, it's going to be things that are coming out of the Southern District of New York. And unfortunately, I think it centers around this guy, Cohen, who is a convicted liar and who has been doing, you know, sounds like he was a kind of a bagman potentially for the President. Unfortunately, we can't - I can't tell whether he's telling the truth. I mean he's trying to reduce his sentence by claiming that Trump ordered him to pay off women, that the Trump Organization, it sounds like--</s>CUOMO: Right.</s>YOO: --is committing insurance fraud. Who knows?</s>CUOMO: Right. But, look, you have this Special Counsel who has worked with Cohen who said he was credible and useful, and you guys deal with liars or people who've lied all the time. You just need the corroboration. So, Neal, you know, it was interesting. When I was first developing this today, I was like, "You know, all right, so what?" They're going to find out that they cheated on their insurance policies that they, you know, took money that was more than what they had to spend on. Lot of people do that. But then I was thinking to myself, a lot of people cheat on their taxes also, and they don't go to jail for it. Michael Cohen is. Yes, he pleaded guilty. But, you know, if choose to prosecute you then you have to explain those actions. How deep could this go, in your opinion?</s>KATYAL: I think it go deep. I 100 percent agree with that. And I'm not sure I'll be saying this much tonight. But I agree almost certainly with everything that John Yoo just said that is the Southern District investigation poses a real threat to the President. I also think that the Mueller one and the Russia one does as well. But the kind of thread that ties both of these together, Chris, is the lying, constant lying, about whether it's on insurance, whether it's dealing with Russia, whatever, Trump is like a Grand Master Pinocchio, and the master of all this. And, you know, John's right that he attracts liars around him. He's like a magnet for liars, whether it's Cohen or Flynn or Manafort or all of these people. And once the Southern District starts looking into it, I think they're going to find some pretty damaging stuff. Obviously, the President is entitled to, you know, the presumption of innocence, and so on.</s>CUOMO: Sure.</s>KATYAL: But we've already - the Southern District's already uncovered lie after lie, and found, most importantly, remarkable, only time really in - in 40 years that the prosecutors have said a President, a sitting President ordered the commission of federal felonies, and they've said that back in November.</s>CUOMO: So, John, they say - the President has said don't mess with my money. Is there a line at which you think it would be OK for the Attorney General to say, "Look, this is a sitting President. You want to take up these kinds of prosecutions about his past life, about all these other actions? Do it after his sentence - after he's served his term."</s>YOO: Yes. I think this is one where you and Neal and I might disagree. I think the Constitution really gives Congress this job. If the President is unfit for Office, if he has made bad policies, committed maladministration, committed political-style crimes, I think that's what Congress' job is to investigate that and conduct impeachment proceedings. I don't think it's a job for a Special Counsel. I think that's kind of become a distraction for the real Constitution route. However, I think for these crimes at the SDNY here is investigating that occurred before Trump was President. I think that the sensible thing for the courts to do and prosecutors to do is to delay that until after the Presidency is over. Now, we didn't do that with President Clinton. There's a case called Clinton versus Jones, which says let the process work through. But it also - the court also - Supreme Court also said but we don't want those investigations to interfere with the President's ability to do his job.</s>CUOMO: Neal, counterpoint.</s>KATYAL: Yes. So, two things. One, if John is right that this is a job for Congress, the logical consequence that follows is Mueller, the Southern District, all of their information has to be given to Congress, so they can evaluate impeachment. It would be the height of - of kind of putting someone above the law to say, "Oh, you can't prosecute through the Executive Branch. And then, Congress, you can't impeach because we're going to hide all this information from you," which is why every scholar who takes John's position, which is a sitting President can't be indicted also says the remedy is impeachment, and that's a role for Congress. And then the second thing is for crimes like the Southern District ones, which go to lying and cheating to win the election in the first place, I'm not sure that the prohibition on indicting a sitting President applies because what that would incentivize is, if you cheat a lot, and lie a lot, and commit a lot of crimes enough to win an election, then you effectively get a delay or get-out-of-jail-free card, and that can't possibly be the law.</s>CUOMO: Now, on Mueller, let me use your own case against you, Neal. The idea of, you know, given what he was asked to do, he's not just a general fact-finder, although that's the way I interpret the first line of Rosenstein's delivery to the Special Counsel. The first line says, "Find any information of contacts or coordination between the government and the campaign."</s>KATYAL: Yes.</s>CUOMO: That doesn't speak to criminality to me. But even if you want to fold that into ultimately he is a prosecutor, and looking for prosecutable items, then this report could be kind of thin, Neal. And in that case, they'll be left with a lot of unanswered questions for Congress. I guess they'd have to subpoena Mueller, have him come in, tell him the parts of the story that he didn't put in the report, and proceed.</s>KATYAL: I think that's exactly right, Chris. In the - in an op-ed that I wrote in The New York Times today, I essentially outlined exactly that point, which is, you know, Trump has been hoping for a short concise report.</s>CUOMO: Right.</s>KATYAL: But that actually might be the worst thing for him because that'll just then move the entire ballgame to Congress. And there is precedent from Watergate to have all of the Special Counsel's materials and investigation turned over to Congress, including Grand Jury information, and other confidential information.</s>CUOMO: John, for Grand Jury information, John, he would have to go the AG. He'd have to get a court order for that. I mean it's attainable. But you guys should kind of be on the same page about that, right? If it's a thin report, and there are questions that are left unanswered, and suggestions of hallways that weren't walked down, then Mueller could get subpoenaed, and you wind up with a whole new round of exploration.</s>YOO: I've always thought Trump made a serious tactical mistake by attacking Mueller, by questioning his ethics, by trying to delay the report. What Trump - the best thing that could happen for Trump is that the Mueller report makes a lot of things public that's a thick telephone book size. I don't know if people know what telephone books are, but they used to be these really thick books, a telephone book thick report that lays out everything he found. That's if - if - if it sounds like Mueller has decided not to indict the President, didn't find conspiracy to commit federal crimes, then everything Mueller says, Mueller is the Gold Standard for federal prosecutors. Everything he said that clears the President will be helpful. I - so, I agree with Neal. The shorter - ironically, Trump's been doing things to make the report shorter, fighting the investigation, that's going to give Congress a lot more space in any kind of impeachment investigation.</s>CUOMO: Last quick thing. Do you guys think that this Manafort pleading, assuming it comes tonight, I know they have to get - negotiate redactions and stuff like that, he's got a midnight deadline, do you think that this is going to be the definitive tale of why this guy matters in the probe, as opposed to his previous life, and what he was doing to cover any potential debts that he had? Neal, give me a quick answer.</s>KATYAL: Yes. I don't think it'll be necessarily definitive. But it will tell us a lot. I mean this Manafort worked for 143 days for the campaign. That's like 14 Scaramouches. And he lied to Mueller, and he's been caught red- handed, lying to Mueller--</s>YOO: No one wants 14 Scaramouches.</s>KATYAL: --about--</s>YOO: One if enough</s>KATYAL: Exactly. I mean--</s>CUOMO: Anthony hasn't won (ph) 14 Scaramouches.</s>KATYAL: Right. He's been caught lying about - yes. He gave sensitive polling data to the Russians. And that, you know, that's the crown jewels of a campaign. And the question, you know, Chris and I, you - you and I have been talking about this a lot, why lie so much about Russia? We have a little suggestion in the last sentencing transcript that it's about a pardon that the prosecutors, Mueller's team think he's been angling for a pardon. I think if we hear anything more, we'd like, you know, that's the part that would be real news tonight. What is this about a pardon? What's this about pardon?</s>CUOMO: All right, let's leave it there. John Yoo, great to have you on the show, please come again.</s>YOO: Thanks.</s>CUOMO: Neal, always a pleasure. Thank you for making Anthony Scaramucci a unit of measure. All right, we are awaiting the Manafort memo. And, you know, look, you heard these guys. They're experts. They look at these kinds of things all the time. But if you want to talk about Mueller, the man winds up being an instruction in his methods, right? That's what we're learning here is that this is happening the way he does things. So, our next guest literally wrote the book on Mueller. What's his guidance on what this report would look like, what Mueller would want to achieve, and how likely is he far to go - how likely is he to go as far as this process does? Next.</s>TEXT: CUOMO PRIME TIME.