the indictment in this case is 39 pages and it s written well beyond those specific charges. it, like the other indictment from john durham, seems designed to try to further this project of making the russia investigation itself seem like a scandal. we re going to get into it, we ve got more on that coming in in just a few minutes with a former fbi senior counterintelligence official. but where i want to start tonight is with a story that i think isn t getting nearly enough attention. i think this story is lightning in a bottle. it has broken this week, but not broken nearly widely enough. in the last midterm elections, the elections we had in 2018, you ll recall that was a really good election for democrats. the so-called blue wave election right in the middle of president trump s term. trump and all the republicans got elected in 2016. 2018 the democrats came back, swept to power in the u.s. house. there were hopes at the time something similar might happen in the senate. republicans
for both the campaign and the nra. it s hard to argue it s not illegal coordination when there aren t even two people coordinating with each other. it s literally one guy, the same guy doing the ads for both of them. if you re just one person, you are by definition coordinating with yourself because otherwise, see a doctor. is the defy trying not to coordinate with himself? does he think he has some sort of chinese wall within? it looked on paper like the nr amt and these campaigns weren t coordinating. in fact the nra was essentially just giving money, illegally huge amounts of money, to trump s and hawley s ad guy and saying have fun. if that was how it worked, that would be illegal. a former chair of the fec said i don t think i ve ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems so obvious. it s so blatant, it doesn t even seem sloppy. everybody involved probably thinks there aren t going to be any consequences.
steele material, my sense of it remained similar to how it had stood at the beginning. some things we could corroborate, a lesser number we could show were inaccurate, and with the vast majority we just couldn t say. we treated it all accordingly. after trump became president, christopher steele was in hiding for a while and then he stayed more or less off the radar for years. peter strzok and his colleagues at the fbi who pursued the counterintelligence investigation into president trump and his campaign, they were all fired or hounded out of their jobs. but then last month christopher steele popped up again. he did an hour-long interview special with abc news george stephanopolous. in that interview christopher steele said he stood behind his work and said he believes nothing in those reports has been disproven. we ve all been wondering about the timing of that. why did he come out to publicly defend his work? well, now maybe this is it. today the special counsel that was appointed
it has been 101 days since the committee investigating the january 6th attack on the u.s. capitol held their first hearing. 101 days. we learned today from the vice chair of that investigation, republican liz cheney, that between when they started and today, the investigation has included more than 150 interviews. 150 interviews in 101 days. i m bad at math, but that s more than one a day including weekends. that enormous list will continue to grow tomorrow with a key interview with a former trump official tomorrow the january 6th investigation will interview jeffrey clark. he s the justice department official who reportedly plotted with trump in the aftermath of the election to try to use the justice department to get the results overturned to keep trump in office. trump reportedly tried to make
administration, the prosecutor tasked by trump s attorney general, bill barr, with investigating the russian investigation itself to try to prove the whole thing was a hoax like trump said all along, to try to prove that it was criminal to investigate the russia matter, that special prosecutor, john durham, has just issued his second indictment. the man he arrested and charged today was a primary source for christopher steele s intelligence reports in 2016. now, durham s most recent indictment before this one was in my opinion a little weird, problematic. that one concerned a democratic lawyer and cybersecurity expert who was in possession of research that purported to show a possible surreptitious communication channel between the trump organization and a kremlin-linked bank. special counsel john durham charged this lawyer with making a false statement because when he brought this evidence to the fbi, he allegedly was inconsistent in his statements