criminal trial and how much he has incriminated himself. now, we all know a lot s happened this week, but there continues to be new reporting and developments including trump s focus on the boxes. the new york times reports trump was attached to the boxes of documents even while he was in office. a white house official said trump would notice if somebody rifled through them or they weren t arranged in a particular way. that s how his, quote, mind worked. those boxes were found ultimately in the bathroom and other unsecure areas in mar-a-lago. so trump has continued to lash out, to publicly bemoan this process, also in a way to give prosecutors evidence. trump has written that he is, quote, totally exonerated. he s asked, when are they going to drop all charges against him, apologize, and return everything that was, quote, illegally taken. he is basically saying out of court what his lawyers have not been able to prove in court that somehow this was an illegal search or s
minutes. he unsealed the indictment seven months after becoming special counsel and vowed to seek a speedy trial. my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. that is his speedy approach. colleagues say that s how he s always been, that he doesn t like to sit there playing with his food. now, attorney general garland chose smith, and in choosing him, tapped a prosecutor with experience in pursuing powerful figures before this case. smith ran the doj s department of public integrity. that was over ten years ago. had high-profile defendants like bob mcdonnell, a republican, and john edwards, a democrat. in 2018, smith took on a very special role prosecuting war crimes at the hague. that job gave smith unique experience which he brought to this trump case.
it s been quite a week. we have the unsealed federal indictment of donald trump. we used that to glean what i m showing you here along with our investigator, tim heaphy. this timeline is based on the evidence in that new indictment. it shows over time as things turn red how donald trump had a fork in the road, and he chose, according to the doj, the criminal path. we re joined by tim heaphy, the top investigator for the january 6th committee. first, your response to what we see there, which is based on the doj s evidence of that timeline? i think you re exactly right to point out there are multiple off-ramps in both january 6th and the documents case. there are good people around president trump who told him the truth, who gave him very clear advice. legal and practical advice about his obligations. by found ample evidence in the january 6th investigation of his
evidence. you know, i hope that what we re seeing, i hope what the public will take away over the next weeks and months, is is a very accurate portrayal of how doj works. it s not flashy. there is very little splash. instead, it s a group of career prosecutors working together to get justice for the american people. not just in this case involving the former president, which is obviously an enormous case for all of us, but every day in every case that they do. and jack smith is that. he has worked in main justice. he has worked in the u.s. attorney s office. he has this recent experience working on international prosecutions. he s a consummate professional. he s not interested in becoming a cult leader. he s not interested in drawing attention to himself. i spent so many years in this same mode. you just want to do the job. you just want to do it right. well, here s an opportunity for the american people to see just how important doj, fbi, the law enforcement agencies, the
example, with mike pence. the doj does an analysis, if we don t have the requisite criminal intent or other problems, that s where it lands. take a listen to congressman donalds arguing somehow trump was totally out of the loop. do you know how many documents a president of the united states leaves with? you think a president has time before he leaves the white house to go through all his documents? that doesn t even make any sense because he s still running the country until january 20, noon on january 20. your response to that sort of version of events? so as you say, that could be a legitimate defense if it was true. but it s clearly not. in fact, one of the first couple of allegations in the indictment is that throughout trump s presidency, he was taking documents and storing them away in boxes. and in the last few days, we ve seen a lot of information seeping out in the press that