All he wanted to do was impede a process thats, well, its stated there in the constitution. Thats all he wanted. Like a bank robber, all i wanted to do was rob a bank. Take all the money. This is exactly what he is charged for, and he admitted it. Yeah. You know, watching mr. Lauro and political defenders like Lindsey Graham, well talk about him in a minute, attempt to defend donald trump over the last couple days, its clear they dont have a lot to work with. Mr. Lauro is a real attorney, unlike some of the other attorneys trump had around him. He was a prosecutor. If he cant seem to come up with a cogent theory of the case of why donald trump was acting legally around the 2020 election in the days leading up to january 6th, because the evidence in the indictment, the allegations in that indictment are so overwhelming, theyre Hopscotching Around, hoping to find something. Nothing is hitting yet. Well, of course, theyre not going to find anything legally because theyre boxed in legal le
these extraordinary times. the beat starts right now. hi, ari. hi, nicolle. this is one of those nights. we are tracking several developments, including a brand-new hearing over evidence in a case alleging unlawful lies by fox news. if you re thinking, wait, is this a rerun? did i dvr this? no, this is a different multibillion dollar case that the network is dealing with while reeling from the other original record defamation settlement in the defamation case. that is big. we re going to get to that. also, more tom hanks. we have new material from our interview that s airing tonight for the first time. it will be new, and i m excited to share it with you. we begin with cascading set backs and a political request that s backfiring in public with house republicans pushing on on their deep state in that nothing burger report from trump and bill barr s hand picked attorney general. you can make up your own mind about the evidence, because these kind of things involve eviden
house that the justice department wanted back. what we are learning is that authorities were suspicious that the trump team was not being utterly truthful with them. they were concerned that the trump team was holding back documents. that there are not putting forward everything that they had available. they re also concerned that some of those documents to potentially have national security implications. so that is part of what led to the search. they ve, you ve been talking to local law enforcement about this. i m wondering what you re learning down there in florida. you know laura, first, off we in the state attorney s office did not know about this search in advance. neither did local law enforcement. but you can understand why we are dealing with something so sensitive, so unprecedented, you can understand why the feds want to keep this close to the best. and when i was told is that the secret service met them there and walk the plain clothes fbi agents throughout th
cnn s natasha bertrand joins me now. the director of national intelligence is taking this very seriously. she is and rightfully so, right, because of all the sensitive information we believe was in these documents and we re learning that the director of national intelligence, avril haines has written a letter to the oversight and house intelligence committees telling them that she has begun a classification review and a review of the risk to national security that these kind of loose documents could pose. now, clearly this is kind of an escalation here. we weren t sure whether the intelligence community would be able to see the documents that had been retrieved from mar-a-lago because they are part of an active criminal investigation, and the fbi typically holds very closely any evidence in those probes. but obviously the risk here, the potential risk to national security contained in these documents is just too great for the intel community to not be made aware of what s p
one, get it after the election, hope he wins, then make it all go away. thinking about all this legal trouble in that context for this man, what s your view of that? look, i mean, i think hot vax summer of 2021 has given way to hot indictment summer of 2023. if you ve been clamoring for the rule of law in this country, it feels like a great moment. i would say, note of caution. thinking about what katie was saying and others, i think we re at risk of confusing prosecutors doing their job properly with us doing our job as citizens. and this movement, frankly this leader cult around donald trump, this cult of our fellow citizens who enable his lawbreaking by wanting him to continue in power, is something that can t be defeated in a courtroom. it is something that