Live from washington, im paula reid in for jim acosta. You are in the cnn newsroom. Former President Trump is pushing back on the new criminal charges hes facing. The former president took to social media today to deny that Security Footage from maralago was deleted, but thats not what prosecutors have accused here. They allege that he was part of an attempt to delete the footage. Prosecutors say a maralago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, urged another employee to scrub the footage, saying that, quote, the boss, aka trump, wanted the entire server deleted. De oliveira is accused of lying to investigators about moving classified documents at the resort, and the indictment alleges that the desire to have this footage deleted was all aimed at trying to conceal critical information from investigators. De oliveira is due in federal Court Tomorrow morning. Trump also says that the footage was voluntary handed over. Thats also not true. It was subpoenaed. This weekend, trump has been on
after his time as vice president. sources tell cnn that it is possible that more searches elsewhere may happen. also that the white house is shifting into damage control. sources say president biden is growing frustrated by how the saga has played out. he cannot escape the questions about the timing of publicly disclosing the classified documents when some of the first pages were initially discovered in november. once again, today, the president chose not to take reports questions. [ inaudible ]. cnn s mj lee is at the white house. a spokesman for the white house counsel is defending the communication and strategy so far. tell us about that. yeah. victor and alisyn, we just wrapped up a lengthy phone call, a press call, with reporters ta that the white house counsel s spokesperson held trying to offer a robust defense of how the white house has handled all of this so far including sort of the timing of the disclosure of information and sort of the decision to wait to d
if you look at the dates on that charge, it indicates that it was something that was retained up through january 17th of 2022, which indicates that that s in the original boxes that were sent back to nara. that is correct. so if special counsel had this document since the initial referral, why didn t they put that in the initial indictment, and why did that take so long to put in? but also, from a legal standpoint f you re charging somebody with willful retention of a document and that document is one that he returned before the investigation even commenced, you re also going to have structural problems with it there. one idea that has been floated there s two. one is the level of classification. perhaps there was some conflict in the intelligence community. what do you make of that explanation? i don t see that. i mean this is a you know, what they re alleging is that it was a plan to attack a country that was rejected, and it s a couple years old.
and alisyn, we are seeing hospitalization rates slightly increase, but as you mentioned, victor, we re far below what we ve seen in previous winter surges. here s a look at that. we should have a chart looking at the past two years of hospitalization rates. you see, starting january 27th of 2021, there s a spike right there, and then as we keep going, we enter 2022, there was another spike in the middle of the chart, but at the end of the chart is where we are today, and you see how we are seeing a slight increase, but we re not nearly as high as those previous surges. that s what s welcome news. we are seeing this across the country. we should have a map showing all states, here state by state differences and hospitalization differences. here s the same map of last year. january 17th of 2022. this same map last year as you see here, there were some high hospitalization rates across various states but the map looks very different today. that s what s welcome news here.