2020 election. we re still not done. an nbc news analysis finds jack smith s grand jury has interviewed dozens of witnesses from little known campaign aides to the former vice president of the united states. and smith s questions are, quote, focused particularly on the fake elector scheme. smith is also said to be focused on that unhinged december 18th oval office meeting about seizing voting machines. the meeting was full of insults and conspiracy theory, concerning powell, michael flynn. here s how the people in the room described that december 18th meeting. someone screamed at me that i was a quitter, kept on standing up and turning and around screaming at me. they were fighting. the first thing i walked in and i looked at them and said who are you? people fighting with each other and hurling insults at each other. what they were proposing i thought was nuts. how nuts was it? this was the draft executive or they were pushing trump to sign: it was not written
[silence]. Now, turning attention to the ron johnson letter, if i may. Yes. On august 31st, Senator Johnson is getting ready to travel to the ukraine in september with murphy. Johnson called the president and sought permission to be the bearer of good news. Right. The president said i am not ready to lift the aid. Senator johnson, he writes a 10 page letter. Very detailed. He gives some remarkable details. I would like to read it. Its on page 6. This is Senator Johnson speak. I asked him whether there was some kind of arrangement or ukraine would take action and be
lifted. Without hesitation President Trump denied such an arrangement existed. And he started cursing. He said no way. President trump said no way. I would never do that. Who told you that . And Senator Johnson goes on to say that President Trumps reaction was adamant, ve hement and angry. And as august 31st, the president said you will like my decision in the end. Thats very important context on the president s State Of Min
trump. so that was kind of a key theory in seven different states in the 2020 election, propose these fake slates of electors. and notably this case that i just argued, moore versus harper, in the u.s. supreme court court solidly put to rest any notion that this is a viable legal theory whatsoever. it wasn t viable anyway. maybe you can get a person like john eastman to say it, but nobody in their right mind believed this. we live in a democracy after all. josh, so when i hear about the sort of chaotic meetings and this is one of the beauties of last year s hearings, like we saw these men and women sitting there stone faced saying, yeah, i don t know why the heck i was here, this meeting doesn t make any sense one way or another, yet they were all participating. looking at this now and where jack smith and going, do you expect more people who were testifying last year to the
wolf? fred pleitgen in berlin, thank you very much. joining us now, cnn military analyst, the former nato supreme allied commander, retired general wesley clark. general, thank you very much for joining us. as you well know, prigozhin is demanding a meeting with russia s defense minister and a top russian general. he is pledging to move to moscow, if that meeting doesn t happen. do you expect all of this, and this is great uncertainty right now, but do you expect it to escalate this tension? i think it will escalate, unless russian forces were able to crush these columns moving to moscow. what prigozhin has got to do, if he is going to succeed, is take control of the media. he s got to get his message out more widely. he is coming out on his instagram channel and we re picking it up in the west, but are the russian people getting it? usually, for a coup to work like this, you ve got have control of the television and the radio. to do that, you probably got to get to moscow. calli
this constitutes bribery. you know there is case law on bribery. i am no supreme court scholar. there is new case law with the mcdonald s case what constitutes an official act. that hasn t been addressed and professor turley mentioned that. and professor turley said a meeting doesn t constitute an official act. and the mcdonald case goes to that. and turley pointed that out last week. since this inquiry s unofficial and unsanctioned start in september, the process has been partisan, biassed, unfair. republicans questions has been curtailed routinely.