got him to this point, and why he chose mr. hur. let s get into it. joining me now is nbc news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian, so ken, was this all made more urgent by the discovery of even more documents this time in a garage next to the president s corvette, is this why we got a special counsel today? that certainly is the sense you get, if there isn t a direct relationship, it certainly had to contribute, because think about what we have here. we have a u.s. attorney in chicago, who has been conducting a review, for weeks, trying to gather the facts and understand whether there is any need for a criminal investigation. and in order to do that, you need to know where are all of the classified documents, how did they get there, and as we ve been reporting today, the fbi interviewed some of the biden aides involved in packing the boxes and moving the documents, so that u.s. attorney had been reporting to merrick garland. well then, all of a sudden, toda
documents with classified markings than the diligent search did. donald trump said they were in one storage room and the fbi said it wasn t and they shared this picture of documents into trump s office. they say the trump team delayed at nearly every stage and at one point stop d.o.j. from personally inspecting boxes in the storage room. team trump said the former president declassified the document and the government says there s no proof he did and the actions of his lawyers show they still believed the documents were still classified. team trump said he asserted privilege. he never asserted it until now and he doesn t have it anyway. team trump says the records were his. the government says no, classified or declassified, they belong to the government. team trump said the government inappropriately swept up personal items like his passport. the fbi said no, they were allowed to pick up anything commingling. the governor has already filtered through all of it anyway and if
and saying that he was able to declassify whatever he wants. joyce, put that make sense of that for us? explain that to us. well, i d love to make sense of it, katy, but it doesn t make much in the way of sense. it is a shocker that the former president would try to distract from his own problems but invoking barack obama who by all accounts including this official one complied fully with the presidential records act. when it comes to these new suggestions that trump could have declassified these documents on his way out the door, this rings a little bit too good to be true. and certainly the president has declassification authority, he can do it with far less need to dot the i s and cross the t s than someone else could. but if for instance i had walked out of my office with tss, ci information which we re being told what was recovered in the execution of this search warrant, it is clear that if i had refused to turn it over or tried to keep it hidden saver a request was
trump empire. and what he found than probably wouldn t shock anyone today. but back then it was a big deal. tim o brien discovered that donald trump s much lauded business excellence was actually far less impressive than trump had anyone to believe. he found that donald trump had been significantly overstating his net worth by billions of dollars. that he wasn t remotely close to being a billionaire. and so in 2005, tim o brien wrote a book exposing donald trump s prolific lies, and exaggerations about his wealth. donald trump reported by suing time o brien for defamation a year later, and that is how we got to see what it s like when donald trump testifies under oath. quoting from the transcript, attorney, mr. trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties? trump, i try. attorney, have you ever not been truthful? trump, my net worth blocked away, and it goes up and down with a market and with attitudes and w
new information about the fbi s search of donald trump s florida home. trump world has now reportedly started speculating about who in the former presidents orbit, might have talked to the fbi, and what it could mean for the investigation. we will have more on that later. but let s go back in time a little. to 2005. more than a decade before donald trump s first run for president, before he started fighting with racist birtherism conspiracies, back when he was just a real estate guy, with a funny hairdo, and a reality tv show, that year the intrepid journalist, tim o brien, the guy on the left, the side to side digging into the so-called trump empire. and what he found then probably wouldn t shock anyone today. but back then it was a big deal. tim o brien discovered that donald trump s much lauded business success was actually far less impressive than trump had anyone to believe. he found that donald trump had been significantly overstating his net worth by billions of dollar