two days after election day in 2020 before the results of the presidential election have even beenio called. president donald trump s chief of staff received a text message laying out a veryte detailed scheme. for keeping donald trump in power. the text was from donald trump s son, don jr. and described in detail the plot to use republican legislatures to keep trump in office regardless of the actual vote count. if that failed, republicans in congress could keep dump in keep trump in power. it matches up with the scheme that trump and his allies tried to carry out by replacing biden electors with fake trump electors in states that joe biden won. today the committee investigating the deadly january 6th attack released the transcriptsse of the interview with donald trump jr. and he told the committee he doesn t remember where the idea came from. quote, question. is that something you wrote, or did you cut and paste that from somebody else? junior,me i imagine i cut and paste
and i wonder one of the crimes tond which trump was referred criminally by the committee was obstruction of an officialwa proceeding. are thesest acts also part of wt will be scrutinized by d.o.j. as that obstruction? so i suspect that d.o.j., for whatever reason, has moved past the recommendations in the mueller report. many of them will be out of the statute ofil limitations by now. there s a iofive-year statute o limitations on prosecuting federal crimes. and perhaps hindsight will view that as a mistake. we know that merrick garland is very much an institutionalist, that he wanted to strengthen the justice department, that heen didn t want to tear the country apart with ideas that the d.o.j. is political. at the end of the day, when we evaluate what the former president did, it cries out for legal accountability. and at every step along the way, we see how he starts, sometimes very narrowly, legal
into keeping trump taxes from the public on trump s part? sure, i mean i can answer that and i want to talk about the audit. but he for years, as he was in the lead-up to running, he said he would release his taxes and then he would release them under certain circumstances, and then he just decided he wasn t going to release them. and he fought the release of them all the way up to the supreme court. if not once, twice. they were eventually handed over to cy vance and the manhattan district attorney that used them in the case, in the state court in new york, where they got a tax conviction. and then separately, he fought this request from the ways and means committee all the way to the supreme court. and eventually, they were turned over. i mean he doesn t want his taxes to be seen. actually, i think seeing 20-some years of the taxes, the real kryptonite, to not have known, that he is a bad businessman, and tax return after tax return,
despite all of this rhetoric of a self-made billionaire, and to fire people on the show, trump had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father and the new york times alleges that he used complex schemes to avoid paying taxes on his inheritance while doing so. since then, susanne craig and her team have gone on to win a pulitzer prize for their investigative journalism and published multiple additional trump tax exposes all as a result of investigative work and more knowledgeable than anyone else other than trump s own accountants. smack dab in the middle of the holidays, tomorrow morning, the house ways and means committee, is going to publish trump s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. two more years than even susanne craig has ever seen. so tonight, on trump taxes eve,
through. and it echoes back to jim comey and his earliest comments where he had dinner with trump and trump asked him for his loyalty. not loyalty to the constitution, but personal loyalty. and here at the very end, we see people like gina haspel at risk of losing her job, because she was loyal to the country and the constitution, not the president. for anyone who is not getting this point, it s not very subtle at this point in time, trump was about trump. trump was never about america and democracy. heard adam schiff tonight say that he felt like the committee had reached everyone in the american public who was reachable. everyone who could list tonightl truth, and hopefully that message continues a little bit further as this evidences continues to come to light. joyce, let me just follow up with you, because the act of firing jim comey was ultimately investigated by the mueller probe as one of the acts of obstruction ofpr justice.