day that will go down in american history as unimaginable, inconceivable, unthinkable, and also equally, hey, what took you so long? i am rachel maddow here at msnbc headquarters with joy reid, chris hayes, ari melber. we are gonna be joining you with special coverage by lawrence or diana o donnell, stephanie ruhle, alex wagner, jen psaki, plus all the legal experts and reporters we ve come to depend on so much for our coverage of this still unfolding fairly epic story. by now we all know the basics of what is going on. what s an indictment? well, that s the prosecution laying out its charges against a defendant. that happened last week. when the public got our first view of the unsealed federal indictment of former president trump on friday. 37 federal felony counts. 31 of them under the espionage act. what s an arraignment? that s what happened today. the defendant is brought to court and essentially introduced into the legal system as a defendant. for most, that means the
rachel, the feds always want to go first. and i think they re going to want first crack. and the reason for that is if you are a prosecutor state or federal, you re the one who wants to put those witnesses on first. the defendant has an advantage after they ve heard all the government s case. and the person that goes second tends to have a harder time than the person that goes first, and jack smith will have a broader array of evidence simply because he s looking at a broader scope than georgia. even understanding that the georgia injuries will include some of what happened outside of georgia. would it be proper and expected that the federal
those are related matters whereas it would seem that, for example, the e. jean carroll civil case or the business records fraud civil case that letitia james is pursuing would be a completely separate matter than the mar-a-lago classified documents case. and so maybe even though it s the same defendant, the prosecutors and judges involved in those cases might see themselves as operating in parallel separate universes. absolutely. it s just a question of scheduling. i think the most interesting is going to be the january 6th cases. if you have a fani willis case that is really a subset of what jack smith would bring because have the georgia component in his case, it ll be interesting to see who defers to who. that s whereas you alluded to,
james clip i was thinking if i were a prosecutor in alvin bragg s office i would have sort of had my jaw drop to the ground. just think about the different ways of cutting this. the normal way you would think of the case first in time and the person first imtime would go whether civil or criminal or state or federal. other another way of dicing this is a civil case versus a criminal case and a third way is state versus federal. and you have to start with the presumption that any prosecutor civil or criminal, state or federal, if they had a strong case, they want to go first because it is to your advantage to have the witnesses, to have the first crack even if you re thinking about it just in terms of you put all this work in this case, you don t want it to be scooped by someone else, it s just a standard practice. i was very surprised to hear letitia james say not only would
officer tuesday the two other place wheres trump has been arraigned after being charged so we can prep atlanta, too. it really seems they re preparing the likelihood of charges against trump. do we think she s going to delay that calender, delay that process, which otherwise seems it s in motion if for no other reason to find out if she s going to get something else out of the federal criminal trial she might be able to use? again, i m a lay person and i speak neither latin or law, but if look at the mar-a-lago case, if it was jack smith moving forward on the january 6th investigation, i think there can be a case made maybe let jack smith go first. mar-a-lago is his own animal, but i will say the expectation from various legal experts i ve spoke to is like the e. jean carroll case is already baked and that could happen whenever jack smith s case happens. i have a reverse question,