‘The Most Significant Campaign Contributions’ in U.S. History

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.3 • 107.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2018

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It was never clear what motivated Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to hand the investigation of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, over to career prosecutors in New York rather than to the special counsel. With that investigation now implicating the president in serious campaign finance violations, we look at how fateful the decision may be. Guests: Neal Katyal, a lawyer who drafted the rules that govern special counsel investigations, and 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.

Transcript

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0:19.0	variety of expertise.
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0:25.6	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
0:32.6	This is the Daily.
0:40.3	Today, it was never clear what motivated Rod Rosenstein to hand the investigation of Michael
0:48.4	Cohen over to career prosecutors in New York rather than the special counsel.
0:54.6	Now, with that investigation implicating the present in serious campaign finance violations,
1:01.7	my colleague Mike Schmidt spoke to Neil Cotillo, the man behind the special counsel rules about
1:08.3	how fateful that decision by Rod Rosenstein may turn out to be.
1:15.5	It's Monday, December 17th.
1:20.9	To Neil, 20 years ago, you were the guy at the Justice Department who had to come up with
1:26.9	a way that we as a country were going to investigate the most powerful people in the government
1:35.0	and have that investigation protected from politics.
1:39.9	We were coming out of the star investigation into Bill Clinton, Watergate, and its legacy
1:46.3	still cast a huge shadow on executive power and how we looked at our president.
1:51.9	And you built this structure for a special counsel investigation, a special way that we
1:57.6	could look at this type of wrongdoing.
	...

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