how much trump s legal defense strategy is intertwined with his political strategy. good luck to those lawyers. look, there is no question his lawyers will have a legal strategy for what is going on inside the courtroom. that said for donald trump this is one game. it will be what we saw at the versailles cafe, the fundraising, and his coming out as we heard him say, you know, they were my papers, or i m a victim. donald trump is going to stick to the donald trump playbook no matter how much jeopardy he is in because he thinks that s what works. it is working financially so far for his campaign. do you expect jack smith and the prosecutors to season trump s public claims he has made in that speech last night that he owns these documents, for example, that he was too busy to go through all of these boxes? what do you think?
president to face federal criminal charges, the result of a large scale justice department investigation into his handle go of national security secrets after leaving office. many people have asked me why i had these boxes. why did you want them? reporter: trump speaking to supporters at a fundraiser held at his new jersey golf club, the same day he made his first appearance in federal court. telling them how the fbi ended up recovering hundreds of classified documents from his mar-a-lago home last summer. these boxes were containing all types of personal belongings, many, many things. shirts and shoes and i hadn t had a chance to go through all the boxes. it s a long, tedious job, which i was prepared to do but i have a very busy life. don t talk about the case in public. let your lawyer do all the talking for you. reporter: attorney tim parlatori who was representing trump in the matter until a few weeks ago said ideally trump
legal peril? well, let s face it. trump s campaign chairman paul manafort as you know was giving internal campaign polling data and strategy for key states to an agent of russian intelligence, something most americans call collusion. so my statements are accurate. i stand by them. but they are going to go after me no matter what. i ll keep on defending the truth and our democracy and the only lesson i take from this recent attack is if you do your job and you stand up to the maga world you have to be prepared to take all the incoming. i am prepared to do so. what concerns do you have about these calls by some house republicans to subpoena the special counsel jack smith and to try to defund his entire office? this is another reason why they re going after me, wolf. i serve now as senior member of the judiciary committee, kevin mccarthy may rue the day he took
out that the 40-year-old former navy enlisted man who served trump in the white house mess hall, then as his white house valet, has so far demonstrated nothing but unflagging loyalty to the former president. i think the die has been cast. he s clearly made a decision that he is not going to flip on the president. he s lied for the guy at least according to what the allegations are. he s lied for the president. and so i see him sticking it out until the very end. reporter: but would donald trump be as loyal in return? i think there s little doubt that donald trump has disdain for most of the people who work for him. they understood that there was one top dog, and no one else really held any status at all. every person was expendable. reporter: if walt nauta were to flip on trump, how valuable could he be to the prosecution? it could be incredibly valuable. he s going to talk about all the conversations that he had with president trump about these documents. i know i m not supp
confident as they settle on a playbook for the 2024 race. in new york a grand jury just indicted the former u.s. marine who held a homeless man in a fatal chokehold on the subway. we ll tell you what we re learning about the charges. welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. tonight as the federal prosecution of donald trump moves into the next phase the nation s chief law enforcement officer is breaking his silence about the case. we re following all the new developments of trump s indictment. as the former president is predictionably lashing out what is the attorney general of the as you know attorney general garland doesn t like to talk at all about ongoing cases. this is the first time since former president trump was formally charged that we ve heard garland speak. of course he appointed special