against that, if they make that argument, they shouldn t use it as an excuse to call this case complex, and ask for an indefinite, you know, indeterminate delay, katy. ken dilanian, thank you very much. joining me now is former prosecutor and nbc news legal analyst, charles coleman, so judge aileen cannon has a hearing on tuesday where she ll decide how to land on this. i mean, delays happen in the legal system. they do. john sale who s a south florida prosecutor or defense attorney was telling me that judge aileen cannon has had a trial in front of her for 18 months, an 18-month delay over a medicare fraud issue. things get delayed quite a long time. right. if you were considering this, what would you think would be fair to the prosecution, jack smith, and donald trump s defense team? katy, there s a lot to watch here with respect to judge cannon s decision and how she goes about it. let s remember that everyone is watching to see how judge cannon
have to take all my things out. they were interspersed with all sorts of things. golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes. this morning on cbs, donald trump s 2024 presidential rival, chris christie, called that defense ludicrous. last night he said the reason he didn t give the documents back was because he s so very busy and didn t have time to respond to a grand jury subpoena because he needed to get his golf shirts and pants out of the box. i mean, does anybody in america believe this? apparently so. i think the problem for him over time is that people are just not going buy it and when you think about how many days of golf he s played since he s left office, maybe he could skipped a couple of rounds of golf and gone through the boxes. joining me now is john sale. he served as an assistant special prosecutor on the watergate team. he turned down the opportunity
i can tell you. breaking news. it s going to be when judge cannon says it s going to be. well, you said the defs have a right to review all the discovery and national security documents. they don t have a lawyer on this team with clearance to do that. that s going to take a substantial amount of time so they can review these national security documents. so john, one of the other interesting things about you is that you were a special prosecutor for watergate. and in that case, nixon had some distance between himself and some of the people doing the dirty work for him. in this indictment, there is this really clear and very direct connection between trump and the direction to his attorneys and to his valet. how do you think this indictment is different or similar to watergate? the similarity is the cover-up. and if the turning point for president trump was the subpoena, if at the time of the subpoena he had said to his
have been shocked too at how easy this potentially was. words that aren t used explicitly in the indictment but sort of lurk behind the scenes are that the defendant knew information that could reasonably be expected to hurt or harm the defense interests of the united states, that s a paraphrase of it a little bit. by running through and identifying the nature of the documents and also by identifying how they were spilled and mishandled in the way that john talks about, you really see how the indictment sort of tracks the language of federal law and makes clear that it s not just obstruction and mishandling documents but also could be used to harm america. yeah, i mean, they sum up basically what was in there. it talks about information regarding convention and weapons capabilities of the u.s. and foreign countries, nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the united states and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response
appointee, will oversee the case against former president trump, at least initially. she is the judge who appointed a special master in the documents probe last year, a ruling that faced a lot of scrutiny and was ultimately struck down by an appeals court. let s bring in former assistant special watergate prosecutor john sale, part of the committee selection process that screened judge cannon for a judgeship during the trump administration. john, thanks for being here. you know judge cannon. what influence do you think she will have on this trial? and is this a boon for the former president and his defense team? it s not a question of what influence she would have. if she remains the judge, i mean, is judge presides over the proceeding, makes all the rulings. to give somebody a quick geography lesson, the southern district of florida goes from key west all the way up to fort pierce and a little bit beyond. but we have two divisions. and she is in the northern division.