[Anderson Cooper, Cnn:] Good evening. We have a big night of breaking news, whether it's famous actors in court accused of helping cheat their kids' way into elite colleges, or the federal government refusing to ground the world's best-selling airliner, even though the rest of the world now is. We'll have that and more in the hour ahead. We begin, though, keeping them honest with President Trump. He intended to lead the story by saying that he'd gone the entire day without tweeting once about the Russia investigation or any other of more than half dozen inquiries now under way into virtually everything he's touched. That's what we were going to do. And then he tweeted just after 6:00 p.m. Eastern. Quoting the president: New York state and its governor, Andrew Cuomo, are now proud members of the group of presidential harassers. No wonder people are fleeing the state in record numbers. The witch hunt continues. He's talking about New York's attorney general doing what the president had once said would be a no-no, at least if Robert Mueller did it.
[Michael Schmidt, Nyt:] If Mueller was looking at your finances or your family's finances unrelated to Russia, is that a red line?
[Maggie Haberman, Nyt:] Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?
[Donald Trump, President Of The United States:] I would say yes. I would say yes.
[Cooper:] Now, we don't fully know how far Mr. Mueller has gone in his pursuit of Russia evidence or whether he's crossed that particular line. However, New York state just did. The attorney general's office issuing subpoenas according to a sourse familiar with the matter for Deutsche Bank, seeking records relating to the Trump Organization and a number of high dollar loans and lines of credit. The attorney general also wants to see documents relating to a failed bid to buy the NHL's Buffalo Bills. And if that sounds familiar to you, there's a good reason why.
[Michael Cohen, Former Trump Attorney:] I'm giving to the committee today three years of Mr. Trump's personal financial statements from 2011, 2012 and 2013. Which he gave to Deutsche Bank to inquire about a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills and to Forbes. These are exhibits 1A, 1B, and 1C to my testimony.
[Cooper:] That obviously is Michael Cohen's opening statement to the House Oversight Committee just last month. He was talking about what he said was the president's habit of inflating or shrinking the declared values of assets depending on whether he was seeking loans, buying insurance for his properties or paying taxes on them. In short, if proven, it could amount to a whole lot of several types of fraud. During his questioning, several lawmakers asked him to elaborate.
[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez , New York:] To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?
[Cohen:] Yes.
[Ocasio-cortez:] Who else knows that the president did this?
[Cohen:] Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.
[Ocasio-cortez:] And where would the committee find more information on this? Do you think we need to review his financial statements and his tax returns in order to compare them?
[Cohen:] Yes, and you'd find it at the Trump Org.
[Cooper:] Or Deutsche Bank perhaps. The New York inquiry is a civil matter, it's not a criminal one it's important to point out, and it joins a long list of other investigations surrounding the president of the campaign, transition, inauguration, administration, as well as his now defunct so-called charity which the state of New York ordered dissolved. Like we said, he almost made it through a full day without tweeting about any of it, but he didn't. More now on this latest shoe to drop, as well as the widely attempted Mueller report, joining us is CNN senior legal analyst Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He's also the author of a book that's just coming out this week entitled "Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law." So, Preet, what does this mean? I mean, how concerned should the president be about an investigation in which Deutsche Bank records are subpoenaed?
[Preet Bharara, Cnn Senior Legal Analyst:] I mean, if you add it on top of all the other investigations, you put out a nice graphic, that basically, you know, every aspect of his business and foundation, life is being put under the microscope either by SDNY or the special counsel's office or other U.S. attorney's offices. And now, the New York attorney general's office. What's interesting to me is the degree to which there might be coordination between my old office, the SDNY, with respect to Michael Cohen, sharing him as someone who's provided information to SDNY and the special counsel's office and how much of that is being done with the state A.G.'s office. You know, obviously, Michael Cohen made his statements that look like they prompted these subpoenas that were issued yesterday in an open forum, out in the open before Congress. You would have expected there to be some behind-the-scenes proffering, interviewing, debriefing of Michael Cohen that would lead the New York A.G. to issue subpoenas and perhaps do other investigative work we still don't know about because it's being done behind the scenes.
[Cooper:] So you're saying that kind of interview would have happened before would have happened after his testimony?
[Bharara:] Yes, it could have happened before or after. I mean, ordinarily, and these are not ordinary circumstances and Michael Cohen is not in an ordinary circumstance because he's already pled guilty to two sets of crimes and has been sentenced already. But ordinarily, you have different units of prosecution. You have SDNY, the special counsel, you have the New York attorney general's office and they're all looking for evidence of crimes or civil violations in this case with respect to somebody, in this case the president and his organization and his foundation. And usually, you figure out a way to coordinate. If you have a witness that has overlapping information that could be useful to multiple jurisdictions, usually there's a lead office. I would imagine in this case it's the SDNY because they took the principal guilty plea from Michael Cohen. And they make that person available to other offices. And to the extent that some other jurisdiction has a different way of looking at the facts and has some other possibility of bringing a civil or a criminal case, then they get baby-sat by the feds and information comes out and they take note of it and they can take whatever action they can take but usually it's done in some kind of coordinated way. So I would expect that has happened but I can't be sure.
[Cooper:] But Michael Cohen never did a full cooperation agreement with the SDNY if I'm correct. So, would he be willing to cooperate on anything with any entity?
[Bharara:] Well, it looks like what Michael Cohen did is not fully cooperate, as you said, did not enter into a cooperation agreement. Michael Cohen's folks say that because he didn't want to do that at the time because he didn't want to delay I guess the moment of his redemption and paying his debt to society and getting on with his life. It may be that the Southern District folks didn't think that he would be a viable witness and he wasn't able to provide either substantial assistance, or he was violating the principle that the SDNY has gone by, which is you have to tell everything you know about everyone and everything you've done, you can't be selective in what you've put forward. Michael Cohen has also said in his testimony that notwithstanding the lack of a formal cooperation agreement, he's really excited about the prospect of what's called the Rule 35, which is essentially a cooperation agreement but done after the fact, after you pled guilty, after you've been sentenced in an extraordinary way. That's very uncommon but he's probably looking for some benefit in a Rule 35 by cooperating both with SDNY, special counsel's office and also potentially the state
[A.g. Cooper:] There are potentially severe penalties that could be imposed, even possibly dissolving the businesses that the president has, correct?
[Bharara:] Yes. I don't know all the different remedies that the state A.G. if they find certain civil violations could seek but they could be very serious. We've already seen with respect to the New York A.G.'s office and Trump organization, a very powerful petition that was filed some time ago to which the Trump foundation doesn't have much of a defense and has agreed to pay a lot of money. So, we should be clear, even if the penalties are severe in a financial way, it's not a criminal case according to reports. In a criminal case, it's a much bigger deal for a lot of reasons. In particular here, a criminal case is one in which you can't pardon people if you're president of the United States because it's a state crime. And there are other reasons to believe, and I don't want to get way, way ahead of ourselves, but if you had a state prosecutor who felt he or she had proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a crime by the president, I'm not saying this would happen. But if you did have it hypothetically, that person would not be subject to the guideline that's been subject to a lot of conversation that opinion in the office of legal counsel at the Department of Justice says a sitting president can't be prosecuted. So, there's a degree of peril because it's some entity outside of the Justice Department, outside of the federal system. But I think it's too early to see how serious a matter it is.
[Cooper:] All right. Preet Bharara, appreciate it. Thanks very much. Congressman Adam Schiff who chairs the House Intelligence Committee weighed in today on the Mueller report. He said he was concerned about the signals from the Justice Department suggesting they won't give Congress or the public full accounting of the findings, a thin report he said. It would cramp legislative efforts to find out what happened.
[Rep. Adam Schiff , Chairman, Intelligence Committee:] Congress' interest and the public's interest and an expeditious investigation by the Congress will be severely inhibited if we have to retrace all the steps that the Mueller team took with far greater resources.
[Cooper:] Let's dig deeper on this. Joining us is investigative reporter and author Carl Bernstein. He's a CNN political analyst. Also with us, senior political analyst and frequent senior White House advisor David Gergen. David, if the Department of Justice does not provide Congress with the entire Mueller report, should they retrace Mueller's steps here just for transparency's sake if nothing else? At least call him to testify?
[David Gergen, Former Presidential Adviser To Nixon, Ford, Reagan & Clinton:] Well, I think they will call him to testify if they can't get the report itself. And if the report itself is not issued publicly, then I think they have every reason to try to construct a narrative coming out of the Congress. After all, that's what the public has been waiting for for two years, for this investigation. I don't think the public is going to be very happy if what we have is basically a very short redacted piece of paper that tells us virtually nothing about what they really found. And so, I think Adam Schiff is on I think he will have a lot of strong public support if he gets to the point where he feels he has to subpoena or write up a narrative.
[Cooper:] Carl, where's the line, though? If the Department of Justice provides Congress with a summary but withholds the full report, is that reason enough for Chairman Schiff to reinvestigate the whole thing?
[Carl Bernstein, Journalist And Author:] I think it would depend upon the specifics of what was turned over. I think there is a general principle here that must obtain, and that is the American people be fully informed about the most important aspects of this investigation by the special prosecutor and what he has found. There is an ample precedent that Jaworski, the Watergate prosecutor, turned over to the House of Representatives actually a so-called road map of everything he found, stacked finding upon finding upon finding stacked up on top of each other. Not pejorative in the least, not accusatory, just factual. And I think that's what the American people deserve to see. There's no other way to judge the president of the United States short of an impeachment proceeding, and you can't have an impeachment proceeding without or even way of judging what the president may or may not have done without those relevant facts. I can't imagine that the new attorney general of the United States, Mr. Barr, wants to end his public career by suppressing what the American people need to know. I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let's see what happens. We keep saying we expect the report two weeks ago. We don't have it yet. Let's see what happens.
[Cooper:] Yes. David, to Carl's point, for all the speculation, the reporting, you know, it seems endless that Mueller is on the brink of delivering his report. The probe has reportedly been funded all the way through September. So, it's feasible, I mean, it's possible we won't know anything for several months more.
[Gergen:] Absolutely. And I think when it got extended to September, that sent a signal that this could go on a long time. So, I think Carl's counsel of patience is exactly on point.
[Cooper:] Carl, there are a lot of people out there expecting some kind of comprehensive 911 commission-style report. That's not what Mueller is required to produce for Congress or the public, right?
[Bernstein:] No. But he is expected, I think reasonably, to produce an account of what happened in regard to what the Russians did in terms of undermining our election in this country and what Americans did to help it, whether unwittingly, wittingly, half-wittingly, especially in the case of the president of the United States and whether or not he engaged in such conduct. We also have the question of the president's business interests and how they fit together with perhaps him furthering those business aims and in exchange whether wittingly, half-wittingly, unwittingly, purposely or not, providing information to the Kremlin in terms of the sanctions. We keep coming back to the question of why did Donald Trump go so hard to remove the sanctions on Russians? And we don't have a satisfactory answer to that yet. We also don't know what Mr. Manafort and Mr. Trump said to each other, which is of key importance here. Of course, Manafort is not talking. There may be a reason for that. And that might figure in some of what the special prosecutor lays out in terms of the facts. We need to see it all.
[Cooper:] David, you know, the president obviously is continually calling the Mueller investigation a witch hunt. He's calling what the attorney general is doing today part of the witch hunt as well. Is there should Democrats have a concern that all these congressional probes that are being launched right now, and you looked at the graphic we put up earlier of all the different aspects of Trump world that are being investigated, you know, somebody could look at that and say, well, you know, maybe it does maybe they are maybe that is a witch hunt. They're investigating everything. Is that really fair?
[Bernstein:] If the Mueller report basically does not address what the president has done or gives him some sort of clean bill of health, then after all of this time and this thorough investigation, I think a lot of people in the public and not just in Trump's base are going to ask the question why are you going to keep jumping on this guy? Why don't you get off his back and let's move on? You know, this was the heart of the collusion and the Russians was the heart of these investigations. Now, you've proliferated all these investigations. Is that really fair? Is that what we want? I do think there's a danger of the Democrats overplaying their hand. I do think they would be much better off with a small number of committees collapsing this half dozen committees into one or two that would investigate this in some fashion. But I do think, Anderson, in addition to that, the fact that the New York attorney general today issued these subpoenas with regard to Deutsche Bank underscores that even if the Congress holds back, there are going to be other bodies, such as the New York A.G.'s office and the southern district, the federal office in New York that are going to continue investigations. And it's especially important that the new A.G. investigation centers on the Deutsche Bank. You know, for a long time in circles around Washington, the Deutsche Bank has been at the heart of the conversations. Was there money laundering? We didn't think there were inflated assets, but many people in the financial community believe strongly that there's money laundering of some sort that went on here and the New York A.G. may find that. This woman, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is quite something. She's a tough cookie. She said what Donald Trump has to worry about is Mueller, Cohen and Tish James.
[Cooper:] Carl, I'm wondering what you make of that risk for Democrats in appearing to or actually going too far and starting to look like they're just that there wasn't any there, there in collusion and now they're just going after whatever they can.
[Bernstein:] Two things. Yes, there's a risk. But the greatest risk of all is that the American people not find out what the answers are to the questions they need to know about the president of the United States and about the Russians and what they did in our elections. It is hugely important that we find that out. If it takes committees of Congress to do it, that is the job of the Congress of the United States as we learned in Watergate when we had one of the great investigations, a bipartisan investigation. And yes, as David suggests, let the Democrats be a little more clever about how they run their investigations and scale it down and make it more streamlined, but let's get the information. But one of the things Trump has been so successful in doing is to set down this marker of, quote, collusion, which is not a legal term to begin with. There are much larger questions about his conduct in dealing with the Russians than just, quote, collusions. Did he indeed make it possible for the Russians to further their goals by taking on positions and conduct that enabled the Russians to get their way on foreign policy matters and influence his presidency? That is relevant. And there are ways to get at it and that's what we need to find out whether it happened and how.
[Cooper:] Carl Bernstein, David Gergen, thanks very much. A quick note on something I said a moment ago, the Buffalo Bills are in the NFL, not the NHL. One of our writers is a Steelers fan which might explain the typo and the fact I know nothing about sports. Coming up next, breaking news on Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, and everyone else swept up in what the federal government calls the largest college admissions cheating scam ever prosecuted. It is bizarre. We'll have the details on that. And later, new and even more inflammatory audio surfaces from Tucker Carlson's past. The question now, what will Fox News do, if anything, about it?