charges like this often have cascading effects and as you mentioned, the president s facing at least three other potential criminal investigations into his conduct right now. whichever way these charges go and hopefully we ll be privy to all of them in the next 15 minutes or so, how might this strengthen or weaken the former president s hand in those other key cases? i think that s a great question on the politics side of things. not on the legal side of things. you know, i don t think any of these district attorneys or the special counsel are interacting saying you go first, no, you go first, or i m ready to go. that s not how it works behind the scenes. but it is the case that this went first and it may be the thinnest gruel of them all in the end. by going first does it paint others with this, you know, an aura of it s all political and the answer is yes from the former president, he s going to use it to say it fits with the entire narrative of russia russia russia, and
polls or is this going to be a distant memory? this may stretch out for some time. and jonathan and andy and others will tell you some of these cases may take a while. others will fast track. but we are looking at probably a first debate in august of this year. you know, you are looking toe polls now where the president is up 30 points in most polls over his nearest challenger, someone not yet in the race, florida governor ron desantis, others are well below that. so, there s not a sense that you know, he s seeing any detriment from these moments and these charges and we ll see, you know, what happens after what goes forward with january 6th and the trump documents case in mar-a-lago and the election interference case in georgia. but i will say that it will be an issue if it s still a big
andy, why don t we delay that request for just a second. i ll just say that the former president was on hannity s show, and said i can t see you doing that, and donald trump said i had the right to do it, and i m not quite clear, i wanted to ask andy whether he does have the right after being president to look through potential classified documents unless he has previously declassified them but he maintained he had previously declassified them, so that s an argument we can take up in a few moments. again, i was advised the former president is heading up to the courtroom now, so any moment now, gillian, should see him come through those doors. gillian: and if he stops to speak to cameras and the american public we ll see him there. if he doesn t, a few steps from the door into the courtroom, we ll have to wait from the former president until after he is arraigned. we will hopefully hear him. he has expressed to his team as recently as this morning that he
through documents after they surrendered the documents and said they had given up the documents, that would be a clear indication in my layman s mind there were still documents left to be turned over. precisely, that s what the issue is. gillian: andy, would it matter if those documents were considered totally declassified at the time he looked at them as i claims or does that not matter either? gillian, that s a much misunderstood part of all this. the espionage act does not refer to classified documents. it refers to national defense information. so whether something has classified markings on it or not and whether it was in fact classified is evidence that it is national defense information but it s not depositive so whether he declassified them or not, there s no evidence that he did declassify them. in terms of the espionage act,
way out. bret, we kind of kicked this around with martha and andy and jonathan and trey before, but let get your thoughts on it. do you believe, whether constitutionally or otherwise, this judge would be able to impose a gag order on not just a former president, but a current presidential candidate? i think it s really tough to defend big picture and constitutionally. the legal minds will probably have more of a backing on this, but i think it would be tough politically to defend especially since it s a district attorney who started this whole campaign, campaigning on trying to go after former president trump. i think the gag order, if it comes down, can be pretty quickly taken to court and challenged. in this case in particular. gillian: bret, we know from previous cases that criminal