but right now, he s just a guy. and the doj has investigated plenty of candidates and politicians without special counsels. take a democratic senator, bob menendez. he was indicted for bribery allegations. he beat that case in a mistrial. doj dropped it. take a very famous convicted politician, who was actually, as a footnote, pardoned by trump. democrat rod b lo ogoovec. just this year, there was a nebraska congressman convicted of lying while they were investigating illegal campaign contributions. no special counsel. now, take it from a lawyer, lawyers can debate words like extraordinary and public interest. but the history suggests you can investigate politicians, and it s not extraordinary or unusual. that s why it usually happens without special counsels. so, this appointment doesn t mean trump is more likely to be indicted at all.
concluded the extraordinary part is that this guy is running for office. well, that s a key point, because the last major special counsel probe of trump was mueller. and he racked up indictments, he faced down those russian officials accused of meddling in our elections. he had the doj overseeing the big calls with mueller. but if this is an optional layer, what s the alternative? the answer is, well, one answer is the justice department just going forward with the work without doing this. because garland cited these campaigns as the public interest special circumstances, right? i keep repeating that for a reason. is that really special? i m going to give you the answer with the evidence. no. prosecutors investigate politicians all the time without special counsels. donald trump is just some guy. if he s elected president again, legally, he won t be some guy, and we ll report on that.
decisions of what he could and couldn t do. and i want to be clear before we bring in our experts. the last time there was a special counsel investigating donald trump, it was bob mueller, and donald trump was holding something that no one in america has other than, i guess, on the monopoly board. he was holding a get out of jail free card. there was nothing that was going to come from doj that was going to try to send him to jail then. donald trump doesn t have that card anymore. he is a citizen, albeit a citizen running for office, which is part of why garland says he had to make this decision and make this new office to provide independence of a special counsel probe. so, where do we go from here? is this an escalation, a status quo, a punt? we re going to get into all of that over the course of this hour. i can tell you this is the story that no one predicted coming today that has huge repercussions that some in trumpworld were very scared of, and now, it s here. so, let s bring in
classified documents and whether he or anyone else should be indicted for that. now, garland says he made this new move today because both trump and biden are now intending to or already running for president. and he tapped a veteran prosecutor to be the new mueller, to be special counsel. today, i signed an order appointing jack smith to serve as special counsel. the order authorizes him to continue the ongoing investigation into both of the matters. mr. smith is the right choice to complete these matters in an even-handed and urgent manner. that is the brief. that s the assignment. jack smith is a career prosecutor. he has a high reputation for integrity. he ran the doj division called the public integrity unit. he has experience with exactly the kind of special challenges that come in these cases. we hear so much about no one being above the law, and we ll discuss that later tonight, but
office is not a new development in the case. nor is the idea, quite frankly, that joe biden was going to be a candidate for office as a new development in the case. well, let me jump in there, elie. is it by facts and history extraordinary and unusual to have the regular prosecutors look at whether a politician broke the law? it is not as you i was going to bring up bob menendez and rob blagojevich when i got on. like, those were the right people to bring up, because we know that politicians running for office have been investigated by the department of justice in the regular process of the department of justice before. now, if garland thought that his department of justice just wasn t up to snuff, just wasn t going to be able to bring it all the way home because of the extraordinary situation of prosecuting a president as opposed to a governor, then he should have made this handoff, and he should have made this announcement 18 months ago when everything was just as obvious