So good to see you again. When this all happened last night, i thought of many things, but i did think of you, and ill tell you why. Its evidence related. You have used your knowledge, your program over the many months of this to talk about how initially it was pretty clear that the Justice Department was not going beyond the events of that day, and you and i talked about that. Other reporters have weighed in, and im curious even though i know you have been talking about it for two hours how you think we got here. Because what we saw in this indictment that i thought was both strong, gripping and bad for the indicted donald trump, was how long and repeatedly they tried to end democracy in america. Yeah, the indictment is so harrowing, and i think that jack smith was at this for just ten months, obviously he built on all of the good work of the committee. I have learned that things are never as clean as what they appear, and we dont always have all the facts before them. But i think the
times. we are grateful. the beat with ari melber starts rights now. hi, ari. thanks so much. i m ari melber, and yes, this is another busy news night. we have one of the special reports we have been working on this is brand new, and i m going to share with you tonight. it is about how donald trump as a client has been likened to a mob boss by his own lawyers. how the lawyers who have gotten in trouble have been the biggest assistants, factual, evidentiary and otherwise to the prosecutors pursuing trump, and how there s a lawyer we ve heardless about but i m going to get into details tonight, who can be a key, a lynch pin in any federal indictment. as we come on the air as well as the news we brought you tonight. we brought you a reporter who broke it last night, and now it s everywhere, not being disputed that the doj formally targeted donald trump for indictment. i ll walk you through what that means. number one, it s the clearest signal that charges at this time are p
the plot to get the state lnlers or other officials to steal their own citizens votes. indicted. the pence plot, that he would somehow help overturn the votes, indicted. that s why it s so strongly featured in this set of charges i have been reporting on for you tonight. finally, sabotaging january 6th is criminal evidence in this indictment. what you see here is brand new and how we have been tracking these plots and how five of them are indicted. when you look at the electors, a trump aide who was intimately involved, boris epshteyn, toll us about it on the beat. i was part of the process to make sure there were alter mat electors when channels to the seated electors would be everything was done legally by the trump legal team according to the rules of the trump legal team and giuliani. we got that admission to
coup. when we here had a chance to try to ask other trump lawyers about those plots, one of them admitted plans to try to steal the result as eastman was suggesting through electors. i was part of the process to make sure there were alter mat electors to make sure challenges tot seated electors would be heard and successful, part of the constitution and electoral count act. he was part of the process to take electors and try to use them to tale the race, to reverse what the voters in each state actually did in states that picked joe biden. you may recognize the face there another trump lawyer and political aid boris epshteyn. he proved he would defend and admit to many types of acts on behalf of donald trump. you saw one right there. like other trump lawyers before him, from michael cohen 1.0 to
have this bombshell letter to ivanka trump from the january 6th kainvestigation, and in thi january 6n,th investigation letr to her, we do not have harsh allegations against her personally the way we do, for example, from the new york attorney general, but we do have a surprising number of sort of eye-popping revelations about what the committee has found out thus far, what the committee knows, and there are lots of questions for ms. trump to come in and talk about apparently over what she features in other people s testimony. there s so much going on with this today. we re going to get expert help in just a moment. but let me just give you a couple of them to start. this is from the letter. as january 6th approached, president trump attempted on multiple occasions to persuade vice president pence to participate in his plan to not count the allergic mat electors for the electoral college vote. one of the president s discussions with the vice president occurred on the phone on the morni