bring ryan riley, i want to thank him as well, and everyone who was here tonight. i want to throw to another big gun, chris hayes. i toss it to you, my friend. this is one of the biggest nights i think for any of us who are in this business. it is a night of pathos not joy in the sense that the american republic is having to witness this integration of the presidency or the former presidency in the form of the apparently now confirmed indictment of donald trump. now c there is something so different about the manhattan district attorney indicting donald trump for actions that he took in the run up to him becoming the president in in that hush money payment scheme. we have a multi jurisdictional form of justice. they re from different jurisdictions for different crimes. the united states department of justice, this is the sort of republic at its, defending itself against itself in some senses here. it does feel like we are at the, you talk about all the clichés we is about g
that s a really important point here, because there s both a kind of bridge here in terms of a story about the way donald track trump his conduct himself a personal life. we ve had the extensive pulitzer-winning reporting about his taxes in which after getting a look at some of his tax returns for years, multiple tax experts saying, man, this pushes right up and probably over the line of what is actually criminally actionable in terms of aggressive tax avoidance strategies. we saw, in terms of not paying contractors and things like that but also, this sort of rough and ready screw the lawyers view of everything in the administration, whether it was the things they did with the census when they try to get a question in the sentence senses about citizenship. when they ran roughshod over different parts of immigration law. the sense that like, screw it, don t listen to the lawyers, do
me down. so you want somebody who s going to push the country on covid, push the country on rule of law, challenge article two of the constitution which rhonda santas has already said, i will do that. but i don t have indictments. we don t know how that would play with republican primary voters. obviously this is much more likely. i m just not sure more diamonds are good for him in an election based on what. there is a weight to this and whether or not people want to make the bet on that. that will be an interesting thing to watch and a bit unpredictable. i think it s a really good point. jen psaki, melissa murray, andrew weizmann, thank you all for joining. a cinematic scramble as we do this breaking news. thank you so much. all right, harry lippman, harry, where are you. former deputy assistant. i m here. now legal affairs columnist for the los angeles times.
memos where you indicate why you were declining a. case so they decided to go ahead. the case in its entirety would be encased in that document. i think this case would have been handled like any other case. but for the fact that you had the former president of the united states, and i m not minimizing this, that s obviously very significant, this is not a particularly difficult case, on the basis of what i have seen in the media. this is going to be about the retention of documents that you should not have had. this is going to be about obstructing a tenth attempt to get the documents back. this is not a routine case, but it s not something that is unfamiliar to people of the justice department generally, or the public integrity section specifically. to that point, there s a lot of talk in new york as to whether there s a novel theory that was being used. i think once the chart came out, it looks like it was in fact a
first appearance. that s the normal course of things. but i think laura has a point. it may dawn on some officials in the next 24 hours that in the vacuum created by the fact that this is sealed maybe some misinformation services or lack of information, a lack of clarity, and on trump s lawyers are fill feeling that vacuum. it might be interested in the interest of the department of justice to unseal. it it s not clear why they had to feel it. generally indictments are sealed when you don t want the target to flee. in some districts are always sealed. there may be a practice here of generally stealing indictments. but in this case there s really no mystery here. and probably the public would benefit from knowing sooner rather than later exactly what the charges are. and then ask you another question, which you may not know the answer to, so i apologize in advance. if you don t know, you don t know. we saw alvin bragg come forward at some point, a somewhat similar process, and trump