investigation full steam ahead, so we ll see if this is any factor in it. thank you very much. let s talk about the special counsel work. the newly appointed special counsel jack smith is moving swiftly on a pair of criminal probes around former president trump. there are two things they re looking at here. senior crime and justice reporter katelyn polantz. what have you learned about the speed and the work he s doing. there is a lot of pead and quite a bit of focus. that the special counsel s office has just three weeks after the appointment of jack smith, a few of the things that we learned our reporting team was digging into what this office looks like right now. and it is big. there are already 20 prosecutors working on the january 6 side of the case that smith is going to be inheriting. and will be managing as they continue forward. that is in addition to the set of prosecutors that is largely going to be moving over from the mar-a-lago documents
counsel s office looks like when smith is stepping in oversee. on the january 6th commission there s been an investigation that existed for some time. all types of financial crimes have been looked at the funding of rioters, money laundering, and now they re looking at potential political contributions and misuse of that. that s just an aspect. there s a lot of other things that are under investigation. one of of the things about this existing team that we found, even a year ago when january 6th prosecutors were being brought in to look at more political circles they always have had the ability to take a business up to donald trump if the evidence leads them there. smith may now be making decisions on what to do with that sort of evidence, but they are still asking witnesses about trump himself. and then the other thing we found, john, just a really interesting comparison to other special counsels is that this is not a shadow justice department being set up by smith from scratch. sort
seen this image. it is the single photograph in the doj court filing earlier this week that shows top secret documents fanned across a carpet on mar-a-lago, and it became the center of trump s latest attack on the fbi. listen to what his lawyer alina habba had to say about it on fox. i do have firsthand knowledge, as you know. i have been down there. i have been down there frequently. i had never seen that. i have never, ever seen that. that is not the way that his office looks. anybody that knows president trump s office, he has guessed frequently there. look, i am not sure that this argument is the right run for the trump team. his lawyer is openly admitting as their legal defense that trump frequently has guests inside his mar-a-lago office.
center of trump s latest attack on the fbi. listen to what his lawyer alina habba had to say about it on fox. i do have firsthand knowledge, as you know. i have been down there. i have been down there frequently. i had never seen that. i have never, ever seen that. that is not the way that his office looks. anybody that knows president trump s office, he has guessed frequently there. look, i am not sure that this argument is the right one for the trump team. his lawyer is openly admitting as their legal defense that trump frequently has guests inside his mar-a-lago office. thee office where the fbi found boxes of top secret and highly classified documents. i am not sure that will work, but, again, i am not a lawyer. joining me now is my saturday night panel. jonathan allen, coauthor of lucky, how joe biden barely won the presidency. alicia garza, cofounder of the black lives
want that essentially right it for access. once lots of interesting dynamics going on. i m not sure we will ever know, entirely, or feel confident that we know that all of the documents have been recovered. that is very disturbing, right there. something this week with one of trump s attorney slammed the doj for releasing this photo which my director put that one up again. these documents scrawled across, sprawled across trump s office. it also gave some insight into how secure that location is. let s take a listen. i am down there frequently. i have never seen that. i am never ever seen that that is not the way his office looks. everybody knows trump s office, he has to guess frequently there it s just a joke. a couple of things peter, authorities say those documents were intentionally placed there on the ground for the photo. that s why you might not see them in disarray like that. when you went to mar-a-lago to