the thing i was disappointed not to see was confirmation of the new york times reporting that there was, in fact, a written certification by a lawyer for the president saying everything that had been asked for had been turned over. we now know from the government s submission this week that there was a letter, and it was certified. and i was waiting to see in submission by the trump team last night how they would respond and explain away the fact that there was a sworn declaration that everything was returned, and it wasn t? you know what they did? they avoided answering the question. they have one of the most amazing footnotes that i ve ever seen, where they say, we are not going to now address the factual assertion in 11 pages of the government s brief, and they mentioned one example about mischaracterizing a meeting on june 3rd. they completely ignore the fact, the narrative, the things that are in the record from the government. so we have learned a lot from the government, littl
things it could continue doing. let me say, no special master or judge is going to order a return of these documents to former president trump. but it s really a privilege issue. and i think that the public will have more confidence in the system if there s an independent review. you know, the notion of threats of riots in the streets, unfortunately, that s reprehensible, but it s probably right. and i think we have to do everything to bring down the temperature, and i hope that an independent special master would do a little bit to bring around cooling down temperatures. but ultimately when the attorney general makes a decision, it s not going to be influenced by threats of more violence. former president donald trump boasted about the evidence, including the justice department s filing, trump claimed on his social media site, the documents why quote
criminalize what these lawyers characterized as a routine dispute between a president and the archives over presidential records. and so at one point, of course there is classified documents, they re presidential records, that s inherent of the idea of presidential records. that s really interesting because as you guys know, donald trump has been arguing on truth social and allies have been arguing that he declassified all of these documents. that argument now seems to have gone away. they did not make that in this document last night, they are not arguing as far as i can tell that these documents were declassified which is huge, because they re acknowledging that they re classified, whatever they say, when trump was the former president, he no longer had access to classified documents. period, end of story. there was no skiff, no special room in mar-a-lago where those documents could have been stored. and as you guys said, they were not his documents. they were the property of the uni
donald trump first of all had no right to have these documents and secondly he is going to be indicted for obstruction at the very least. well, because this is undeniable. that photograph we ve been showing is a crime scene effectively. and just based on what the justice department has pushed out into the public, what we know publicly, leaves a lot of people to wonder how merrick garland could not indict the former president, and i don t want to get ahead of ourselves, and speaking of those publication, the wall street journal just crossed with a new poll, that perhaps shows the heavy implications of this politically on donald trump. we re seeing big numbers up for joe biden, widening his margin in a potential head-to-head with donald trump, and independents swinging massively toward democrats right now. nbc s ken dilanian, thank you very much for coming on this morning with your insight. we appreciate it. and coming up, president biden will deliver a major prime time address ton
here. what is central to the case on the question whether or not president trump violated the law had to do with things other than the special master, and whether or not one gets imposed may lead to some delay. i don t think it s going to change the ultimate trajectory of the case, whether it s towards indictment or not. it s interesting, jennifer, because trump s attorneys today in the filing and in court, seem to be trying to keep the focus just on the presidential records act, trying to make this claim that, look, this is just a back and forth between the former president and nara. this is like an overdue library book. they don t want the focus on these potential national security violations it seems. they certainly don t. they keep talking about there s no enforcement mechanism for the presidential records act. that wasn t the basis for the search warrant. doj cited three criminal statutes, not the presidential act, when they retrieved those