established vis-a-vis ukraine. right. all right. steve hall, thanks as always for those insights. we appreciate it. sure. new today a federal appeals court says senator lindsey graham doesn t have to comply for now with a subpoena from a georgia grand jury investigating efforts to pressure officials in the state to change the results of the 2020 election. graham has acknowledged calling georgia election officials about the process of counting absentee ballots but says it was part of his duties as chair of the senate judiciary committee and his position in congress protects him from appearing before the grand jury. joining me now to talk about this is senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor elie hoenig. do you see it another way? jim, it is a temporary win with more to come. the dispute here centers on this obscure provision in the constitution called the speech and debate clause. it rarely comes up. a member cannot be forced to answer questions in any other
needs to keep sealed, but and this judge basically said, i ve seen this document, i know what s in it, and he s telling the justice department there is stuff here that can be released. does it go as far as we all would love it? probably not. but i think more is better. as much as possible is better than what we have right now. when you say we all would love it, i mean, look, if it does impede the investigation none of us wants that, right? we don t want to get in the way of the investigation. that s never our goal here as journalists. but i think we all understand that this is an incredibly tenuous situation. we know that there s a lot of disinformation that s coming from one side of this story. so give us more information so we can at least understand better what s happening. i think more is better. elie, when the attorney general merrick garland came out to say his department had filed a motion to make the warrant and the receipt public, saying that there was substantial pu
either way. doj may give hum a redacted version that s all black redaction and the judge may say not acceptable, i m releasing the whole thing or i m releasing more of it. but the judge is giving doj a chance to come to him first and say make me an offer, show me what you think i can put out there so we can give the american people, the media something. evan, when it comes to possibly releasing a redacted version of the affidavit, it sounds like the judge in florida is leaning towards more transparency here. he is. and look, i think elie is pointing to the fact that obviously this is a very unusual situation, this is a former president, and the justice department itself has moved to do the unusual thing of unsealing the search warrant, citing the public interest. right? they ve opened that door. and i think what the lawyers today, including the ones represent k the media, including cnn, were pmaking the point of look, we understand there are things the justice department
something in court in a filing or in person. but they didn t say anything. no. they ve been saying everything on cable and on twitter and in other venues. they ve not done they had someone there, as you said, christina bobb, who was one of the people at the search, she was there when the fbi was searching. and look, you ve seen them say in some of these appearances on various networks, they ve said that they want to know who these witnesses were, they want to know who dropped the dime on the former president. and i get it. that s obviously anybody would want that. that is not something that the judge is going to allow. right? but the problem is as elie s pointing out, it depends on how you do these redactions. we have seen redacted versions of these documents and, you know, have been able to figure things out. we probably even in the unredacted versions, right, don? there wouldn t be names of witnesses. but it will say, you know, person a or person 1a or
it s not my word. it s theirs. another senior official calling it total nonsense. former chief of staff john kelly saying, another quote, nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given. there are procedures. rules. agencies like the cia, nsa, the defense department would have to be notified. don t get it twisted. all of this, the unprecedented search of a former president s home, the 11 sets of classified documents the fbi found there, some marked top secret sci, all of that is for one reason. he took classified documents. the new york times reporting another quote, the former president repeatedly resisted entreaties from his advisers. it s not theirs, it s mine, several advisers say mr. trump told them. so there s a lot to discuss and i want to bring in cnn s senior justice correspondent evan perez and senior legal analyst elie hoenig. good evening, gentlemen.