criminal trial and how much he has incriminated himself. now, we all know a lot s happened this week, but there continues to be new reporting and developments including trump s focus on the boxes. the new york times reports trump was attached to the boxes of documents even while he was in office. a white house official said trump would notice if somebody rifled through them or they weren t arranged in a particular way. that s how his, quote, mind worked. those boxes were found ultimately in the bathroom and other unsecure areas in mar-a-lago. so trump has continued to lash out, to publicly bemoan this process, also in a way to give prosecutors evidence. trump has written that he is, quote, totally exonerated. he s asked, when are they going to drop all charges against him, apologize, and return everything that was, quote, illegally taken. he is basically saying out of court what his lawyers have not been able to prove in court that somehow this was an illegal search or s
of the probe, people are, at a minimum, imagining or projecting. so while lawyers knew what bob mueller s ceilings were, what he legally could do, there was still a folk hero intrigue built up around him about stopping, or quote, unquote, taking down donald trump. that wasn t even in his purview under the rules. there was, i guess, the broader idea that some smoking gun would come out that would change everything. then we ve seen that process again in other jurisdictions. new york, georgia, january 6th committee, which had a different purview. i m curious what you think about what we re actually seeing jack smith do this week, how it is different from some of those other probes, and how it kind of what i might call a narrative irony. the prosecutor who was less hyped, who was kind of held out in public as less of a folk hero, maybe because people have moved on or retired, is actually the one who came through and federally indicted him with, i would argue, based on what we ve seen, so