While all eyes focused this week on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in the matters of the Russia investigation and the firing of FBI director James Comey, another thread was being pulled with the potential to unravel the Trump White House.

Earlier this morning, the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia

filed a lawsuit in federal court against the president of the United States. That's District of

Columbia Attorney General Carl Racine. He and the Attorney General of the state of Maryland sued

the president under the Constitution's emoluments clause.

Under the premise that foreign money spent at Trump's hotels and resorts in their jurisdictions amount to bribery.

Just one example. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose government has important business and policy before the President of the United States,

has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel.

And that hotel is but one example of how President Trump's vast global businesses

and that empire he has is entangled with foreign and state government interest.

It may or may not be a legal long shot, but if permitted to proceed, the case will almost

certainly yield a major result, the release in the discovery phase of the president's long

withheld tax returns. It's a strategy first

publicly discussed by legal scholar Jed Sugarman of the Fordham University School of Law, who

imagined the lawsuit to come not from the Washington area, but New York State. He joined us

back in March. You want state attorneys general where the Trump organization does business, particularly

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, to file suit against the company under the

emoluments clause.

But that clause is in the U.S. Constitution.

Is it really a matter for individual states?

Every corporation is a creature of state law to give it a legal fiction of personhood

to have limited liability and extra legal rights like people. But they only have those

...