Garrett Graff & Elie Honig on President Trump

HONIG: If I’m the president, I’m looking at really sort of three main fronts. One of them is the campaign financing, which I think, at this moment in time, is the most readily provable case. I think based on what’s publicly known, it’s the case that if I was a prosecutor I can most easily go into a grand jury, give them the evidence and walk out of there with an indictment against the president. Let’s put to the side whether we can indict the president or not, that’s a separate issue, but against the executives or the president. The second one is the obstruction of justice probe, and that goes back to the firing of James Comey, the firing of Jeff Sessions, we’ve seen all the tweets trying to intimidate or dissuade cooperating witnesses, trying to encourage people to stay silent and we now know that Mueller’s people have spoken with Michael Flynn, who is the chief of staff and of course inner circle within the White House and Don again as well who was legal counsel. And then, the third front that I think is out there, and this is probably the highest stakes politically, is what we’ll call the coordination with Russia, the campaign coordination with Russia. We already know some information about the WikiLeaks hack and the coordination potentially through Roger Stone and others close to the president. And we learned recently that Michael Cohen was involved in lying to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow, which is a hundred of millions of dollars’ worth project. And so, you can start to see the president’s financial and political motivations on collusion coming into focus.

AMANPOUR: So, let me turn to Garrett Graff. As I announced, you are the author of “The Threat Matrix; Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror.” So, moving from this investigation in New York to the broader allegations of collusion with Russia over the campaign, I want to ask you about what you think it might mean for that investigation. And let us just read off a few of Cohen’s quotes as he was speaking in court, the broader case that he’s talking about. “Recently,” he said, “the president tweeted a statement calling me weak and he was correct but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was because time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my own moral compass.” Well, he was talking about what he specifically was being sentenced for. But how do you think this plays in to the cooperation that Mueller says he’s giving him on the other issue, the Russia issue?

GARRETT GRAFF, AUTHOR, “THE THREAT MATRIX; INSIDE ROBERT MUELLER’S FBI”: This is been a fascinating story to watch unfold just really within the last two weeks and to see how much more we’ve learned and how much further this narrative has been advanced. To put it a little bit starkly here, prosecutors over the last 18 months have outlined two separate criminal conspiracies that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016.