hi, nicolle. i only ask of you one thing, and we make no predictions. i just ask that you don t go on vacation or stay near your phone or facetime and broadcasting abilities, okay? i feel like the whole summer is potentially hazardous for vacation planning. i haven t totally broken this until this moment on live tv to my family but i feel like between jack smith and willis it s dicey. to your family and everyone, we say, that s a little bit of personal breaking news. good to see you, nicolle. have a good show. thank you. our thanks to our colleague nicolle. welcome to the beat. i m ari melber. while we try to do it all with good spirit, ace mentioned, there is a lot going on. facts and precise aspects of what we know, because we don t know everything and don t know the future. here s something i know, it will be a pretty packed broadcast. donald trump s number one aide during the insurrection in the classified documents handover, chief of staff mark meadows just w
the beat with ari melber starts right now. welcome to the beat with ari melber. we have a great show for you tonight wednesday, december 27th. we look at jack smith s big coup case against donald trump which faces a key appeal in january. how will smith draw his past experience? that s where we begin tonight. he s a tough, but low-profile prosecutor with a very long record. he led difficult and victorious cases including the prosecution of new york police officer justin volpe who tortured lima, smith was a younger federal prosecutor then and went on to develop something of an expertise in the hard cases that other lawyers sometimes duck. the kind of cases that go at the powerful in government or police, senators, heads of state. he developed experience for the pressures of those specific kind of cases a something of a reputation as the kind of prosecutor you actually pick up and call with a tough case like that. smith did stints in federal and local prosecutor s
but now there s news of this damning tape that s put more focus on a different jurisdiction on that federal probe in washington where trump was caught on tape admitting key parts of a crime, including stealing documents after leaving office. the tape is from after he was in the white house, 2021, and that s bad for him based on what he appears to admit, because prosecutors are already using it while gathering their grand jury testimony, and it s showing jurors how trump acknowledges and admits himself on the tape that he had classified materials. this is a total breakthrough in the evidence in this case. real talk some people might say, all right, ari we already know trump took the documents down to mar-a-lago and the feds seized them and took them back. didn t we know all that? yes, but in court to win a case like this, prosecutors must prove, one, the documents were classified. two, trump willfully took or directed action to take the documents. and three, he intended to kee
collision course for the u.s. supreme court and those colorado democrat justices who took aim at the former president. it is set to be an unprecedented showdown after colorado s highest court called trump an insurrectionist and wiped him off the state s primary ballot. i am harris faulkner and you are in the faulkner focus. republicans are saying it s anti-american. and a huge danger to our democracy. colorado could be just the beginning. legal efforts to disqualify the former president are now underway in more than a dozen states. here is a look. the courts don t decide who will be on the ballot. this is the worst case of judicial activism that i ve ever seen. i think the supreme court will take it up and say it is ridiculous because it is. harris: even trump s critics are coming to his defense. former republican governor of ohio john kasich. you have a partisan court all democrats. they barely could say that he should be disqualified. think about the precedent o
what s moved this needle with the media? absolutely. absolutely. there s no question. you look at the polling and right now donald trump is seven point ahead of joe biden and trending upward. joe biden is trending downward. another republican says the quiet part out loud, brazenly admitting that his party s anti-biden crusade is nothing more than a time wasting political stunt to help trump. jamie raskin joins me to respond. as governor, high school teacher and author. wait until you see some of the things he wrote in a little noticed 2011 book on the founding fathers and president obama. and later, a san francisco journalist goes under cover to give us a rare behind the scenes look inside the republican party s anti-trans agenda. we begin tonight with the return of the twice-impeached, criminally indicted former president in a new york criminal courtroom today. it was donald trump s first appearance in this case, though he did so virtually from florida since he pleaded n