4:00 in new york with the skies above us are hazy from those canadian wildfires. we are all under air quality warnings. we re going to get to that story later in the broadcast. but we begin with what is shaping up to be a white knuckle day for the disgraced twice impeached now indicted legally liable for sex abuse ex-president thank foss fast-moving developments in special counsel jack smith s investigations, plural, into donald trump. today, a federal jury in miami is back in action hearing witness testimony as part of the special counsel s investigation into whether the ex-president mishandled classified documents. or obstructed government efforts to retrieve those documents after leaving office. and it was not just any witness, it was one of trump s closest aides. a former trump spokesman who have as super pac. saying that prosecutors weres partially interested in taylor budowich, after sending boxes of material from his private home to the national archives, trump left a
what you know match what you just heard? well, carl is absolutely right. this was a coup. and there is a coup memo that was written literally by one of trump s attorneys, john eastman, the famous eastman memo, and jane, one of your colleagues got it and ran it on cnn. and in it eastman says, oh, there is seven states with contested electors. mike lee, the republican senator from utah, a big trump supporter, started looking into this and discovered there were absolutely zero states with contested electors. he was quite upset about this. senator lee actually sent me the coup memo saying it is
answer is? who do you think he could be helpful in making a case against, is it trump, is it eastman, is it rudy, is it all of the above? yes, yes, and yes. mark meadows has communications with rudy giuliani, with eastman. he goes to georgia, as katie was saying he goes to georgia, he calls the secretaries of state to investigators, he s on that notorious january 3rd call with brad raffensperger. he s actually on the call when it happens, so he s right in the center of that. and he, on january 4th and 5th, has conversations with jerry eastman, that pat cipollone is excluded from. remember, he was going to have a meeting with the president, vice president but it was not
criminal charges, includin obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy t defraud the federal government a conspiracy to make a false statement, and this, one of th big one, inciting or assisting an insurrection. but trump is not the only on who s faith now lies in th hands of the justice department, the, sky the panel referred th conservative attorney john eastman to the doj for his rol in the fake electors scheme. those days report also som others who could face criminal prosecution, the others coul refer to a cast of who enabler or named in the report itself, such as the ex chief of staf mark meadows, trump vali lawyer rudy giuliani, jeffre clark, and kenneth chesebro, chief burrow the panel named choose burro specifically as one of the potential, quote coconspirators in the disgrace ex presidents attempt to hol on to power and its fina report the committee identifie cheese burrow as opposed t
pedigree is really important to him. but it also means he tries to use it as a way as almost a blunchon for other folks. he did with it eastman and pence. peril as well as other books, the entire eastman affair reminds us how fragile democracy is, that it literally only works if we just agree that it does. almost no one thought that a president would go as far as trump did trying to use all of the levers of his power to try to overturn an election. i think that is something this committee is looking at. that is something that scholars that care and think about democracy a lot are worried about. because now that this document is out, this eastman document, who is to say the next person that doesn t want the leave office doesn t try to use that as a blueprint to try to do something like this and what if there sent a pence there to say i can t. that s why this committee, this d.o.j., everyone is trying to