defendant donald trump asked judge tanya chutkan to hold special prosecutor jack smith in contempt of court for legal filings that the prosecutors have entered in the court docket after judge chutkan stopped all proceedings in the case while awaiting the outcome in the appeals court, which will issue issue an expedited decision at some point after next tuesday s oral arguments in donald trump s appeal. leading off our discussion, andrew weissmann, former fbi general counsel and former chief of the criminal vision in the eastern district of new york, an msnbc legal analyst, and the co-host of msnbc podcast prosecuted on trump. and andrew, i want to begin with where i ended in that introduction, which is something i have never seen before. you have seen everything. i ve seen a lot but you ve seen everything. every contempt issue that i have seen raised court has always been raised or threatened from the bench, by the judge. i have never seen a party ask a judge to hold the other party in
well as the top democrat on that committee jamie raskin. the subpoena includes unverified allegations that biden, while he was vice president, was involved in a bribery scheme. so, as they came out of this briefing, comer made it very clear he was not satisfied. he thinks that they should have access, the entire house oversight committee and frankly anyone he wants to share with in congress, to this actual physical document. he said he s going to move ahead later this week with these contempt proceedings against fbi director christopher wray. we also heard from house speaker kevin mccarthy today who has pledged there s going to be a full house vote on this contempt issue. now, the fbi says this is unwarranted. they said we ve been very accommodating, we brought you this document that includes raw intelligence. it basically includes what they would get from a confidential source written down in this fbi document, again, uncorroborated, but the fbi is certainly not keen to have that out
material. just astounding that we re in that situation two years out. it shows that the people around are the people who are in his inner circle or the people who he s paying to represent him, they don t trust him. because if they were to do that, they would have criminal risk themselves. they ve seen this movie before, in a certain sense, which is in june his lawyers do make that statement, that they have returned all the documents in response to the subpoena, to the best of their knowledge. and then that particular lawyer is actually told you re in legal jeopardy now because it s proven to be false. that was the search and now they just found some more documents. this seems never-ending. and, yet, the federal judge did not side with the justice department in this contempt issue. they wanted the justice department had asked to hold trump in contempt of subpoena. and the judge refused to do that, saying go work this out, outside of court. does that mean anything to you? it mean
sarah? reporter: well we re expecting a hearing in a sealed proceeding to happen on this contempt issue later today. what the justice department is saying to this judge is, look, the trump team never complied with the subpoena we sent over the summer to return all documents with classified m marking. the trump feel found two more documents with classified markings as a storage unit and they re concerned that the trump team won t name a custodian of records to sign an attestation saying we ve looked and we ve handed over anything with classified markings. so that is all an issue in a secret court proceeding for a judge today and if held in contempt, they could face fines. as we re waiting for the january 6 committee to formally issue their criminal referrals. they ve been weighing whether to issue a criminal referral for donald trump but colleagues are also looking at referrals for