i do think he s probably blown his best chance which would have been a preindictment plea. if he is to plead guilty now i think he ll have to plead guilty as charged and hope for leniency from the judgment in exchange for cooperation. dave, does it surprise you walt nauta who again his moving of the boxes as part of the affidavit for the search warrant, he has been sort of at the ground zero of this criminal indictment from day one. does it surprise you that he is pleading not guilty here? it doesn t surprise me at all. most defendants plead not guilty at their arraignment, and as barbara said, negotiations can proceed from there. i do think in this case as the days have gone by is that usefulness to a potential as a potential cooperator is probably declining steadily. i think if he was going to make the decision to cooperate, he s about a year late.
trump and the other plotters, it could be a destruction of evidence charge but equally important to them as they sift through the evidence for a january 6th set of charges it s consciousness of guilt evidence and the kind of thing that juries inherently understand and get, that if you do something you know is wrong, you try to cover it up so throwing documents in a fireplace is really phenomenal evidence as to the plot itself and also really great leverage for prosecutors as they think about mark meadows as a potential defendant but also a potential cooperator so there will be this kind of evidence that is important to them and certainly try to run down what actually those documents were. the transcripts also reveal similarly that meadows around this time was also telling staffers to keep white house meetings in a close hold, to not put them on the books, does that add to what you re describing here, this idea of a consciousness of guilt? they re trying to keep some things secret, ke
white house chief of staff mark meadows, waldron who was cooking up this plot to access voting machines in swing states. what is the legal significance or liability for meadows to be aware of an attempt to access and perhaps interfere with voting machines? so mark meadows has long been the kind of key to a potential cooperator who could blow this whole thing open, right? he s privy to what trump knew, he is really the funnel kind of for information coming into the white house and going out from trump to other people. so any pressure that could be put on mark meadows that puts him in jeopardy that influences him to cooperate is important. and this strikes me as something like that. here is an instance where you have someone very deeply involved in these potentially illegal schemes to access voting information and it s not just through sidney powell and rudy giuliani and mike flynn and those folks but directly to mark meadows. that to me is a pressure point
effort to have him cooperate in the department of justice investigation. and then when he made it clear he wasn t planning to do that, then no reason to hold back any further. once you indict somebody in a criminal case like this, you sort of have given up on them as a potential cooperator. i think one of the reasons make mark meadows hasn t been charged yet is either it may be possible he s going to be charged in a bigger conspiracy or there s still hope he might cooperate. with navarro, as with bannon, once you charge them, they ll going to file things and delay things and this is about punishing peter navarro, making an example to protect congress s interest in its subpoena power. you led me to my next question. pete, meadows, the other criminal contempt referrals,
potential cooperator, play it cool, be natural. do what you would normally do. weisselberg could be going into the office and collecting more information while he s there. so the fact he s going in doesn t necessarily tell me that much. you ve spoken about how much alan weisselberg knows about the former president and the family. how big is that for the case? it s not a must have. it s a nice to have. a lot of people online were flipping out over this over the last like day or so saying, oh, if they can t get weisselberg to flip the whole case is not going to happen. that s not true. there is so much other evidence in the case in terms of emails. we know how important emails can be. trump himself is not on email. trump himself is not on email. but we know there are recordings of meetings. we know about the famous recording cohen took. he said there were others he provided to prosecutors. that could be the tip of the iceberg about tape reportings.