know, the president s speech and as jonathan turley has said, pretty hard to find a criminal case and free speech is protected in that way. this is much broader than that. this is about the whole effort to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 election. so you know, that goes for everything from potentially all those meetings that we heard about that trump was having at the white house, advisers and schemes to try to overturn the results, goes to issues like georgia, the attempts to interfere in georgia, the count there. seems to me potentially very, very broad. mar-a-lago investigation is pretty narrow and clear, the extent to which the former president did or didn t essentially comply with the presidential records act. and some other matters relating to that. a pretty discreet set of evidence and witnesses. this broad investigation into efforts to interfere with the lawful transition of transfer
group of people who could really make this investigation not appear partisan. they, of course, pointed to former special counsel robert mueller and noted that is someone with sterling republican and law enforcement credentials. and of course that investigation was highly politicized in the press and by republicans. at this point, they don t seem too upset about this. but, again, this is separate from lawyers representing him on the mar-a-lago investigation, who may feel differently, as most sources would agree that right now poses a greater legal risk to the former president. so, they may have a different reaction to that. absolutely. and jessica, that is one of the $64,000 questions of who is we ll find out, as victor said, in about 14 minutes. but who is that mythical person who in this day and age will be seen by all sides as non-partisan? that was probably the hardest part for the attorney general is to find somebody who wouldn t be
he s still going after being appointed by bill barr during the trump administration. so, the question is, how do you limit that? and the answer is, there s no really good way. the law as elli just described, the law really makes it clear that the pouspecial counsel is kind of his own boss. he or she is going to be in charge of this investigation. what they re going to do is they re going to take over the investigation that s already ongoing. the mar-a-lago investigation is being run out of this building by national security investigators upstairs in the national security division. they re looking at the classified information and the potential damage and potential crimes that may have happened there. and secondly, the january 6th investigation is being handled i be a prosecutor down the street at the u.s. attorney in the district of columbia. so, both of those investigations, which are already well underway, are now going to be handed over to this
in the course of the mar-a-lago investigation, by releasing, taking extraordinary steps in releasing the affidavit and other documents is that the only people touching the mar-a-lago probe are career prosecutors, career investigators with the fbi. the only reason we know their name, the only reason that we were put in danger by being outed was to prove to the 40% of americans who probably don t believe empirical facts anyway that they were apolitical. and it seems like this justice department that has spent every day of the last two years proving over and over again to people who aren t even listening to them that they aren t political have just fallen in a trip. ivanka trump and don jr. didn t get to mar-a-lago for trump s investigation, but merrick garland was watching. it seems exactly like what donald trump wanted to happen this week. you got it exactly, nicole. that s how i see it, too. based on the publicly available facts about what we know in mar-a-lago, if this were you or m
to fire the special counsel, it makes it harder, it makes this investigation more insulated from a republican president and a republican attorney general. of course, if that president is donald trump, i don t think anyone doubts that we have no problem firing the special counsel. i was going to say, you know, the question mark on that. and also, you know, paul, go to you for some analysis but ken you say the unlikely event that this could last two years, didn t the robert mueller investigation last nearly two years and the john durham investigation was a multi-year investigation, two other special counsels appointed regarding actions that donald trump had taken after he took office in 2017, what would a time line be for something like that? do we even know? it is a great point you re making and there are some participants of this we know and some parts of this we don t know. from the evidence on the public record, in particular the mar-a-lago investigation is much further along the