and saying that he was able to declassify whatever he wants. joyce, put that make sense of that for us? explain that to us. well, i d love to make sense of it, katy, but it doesn t make much in the way of sense. it is a shocker that the former president would try to distract from his own problems but invoking barack obama who by all accounts including this official one complied fully with the presidential records act. when it comes to these new suggestions that trump could have declassified these documents on his way out the door, this rings a little bit too good to be true. and certainly the president has declassification authority, he can do it with far less need to dot the i s and cross the t s than someone else could. but if for instance i had walked out of my office with tss, ci information which we re being told what was recovered in the execution of this search warrant, it is clear that if i had refused to turn it over or tried to keep it hidden saver a request was
involved in the death of rayshard brooks in atlanta in 2020. a live report coming up. we have a lot going on here this afternoon. i m hallie jackson in washington. i want to start with our nbc news news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian and former prosecutor and legal analyst tally winestein. the new letter that nbc news has gotten their hands on, the national archives had it, posted it, to mr. trump s attorneys where they found more than 100 documents marked as classified. talk about this letter and what changed between january when some of these docs were recovered to this summer and this past month? just how long the justice department has known that very sensitive, highly classified documents have been stored at mar-a-lago. this letter was written in may, is that the national archives found documents marked sensitive compartmented information and sap, special access programs, among the 15 boxes of documents that trump folks turned over in january whe
involved in the death of rayshard brooks in atlanta in 2020. a live report coming up. we have a lot going on here this afternoon. i m hallie jackson in washington. i want to start with our nbc news news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian and former prosecutor and legal analyst tally winestein. the new letter that nbc news has gotten their hands on, the national archives had it, posted it, to mr. trump s attorneys where they found more than 100 documents marked as classified. talk about this letter and what changed between january when some of these docs were recovered to this summer and this past month? just how long the justice department has known that very sensitive, highly classified documents have been stored at mar-a-lago. this letter was written in may, is that the national archives found documents marked sensitive compartmented information and sap, special access programs,
well. and msnbc legal analyst paul butler and joyce vance. we also have david rode, msnbc legal analyst tally winestein. thank you for being here on this breaking news. so i do want to go back to you, ryan. now that you ve had a moment to digest some of the documents, what else could you tell us? i do want to look i think one thing is important is attachment b is what described as what they were looking for here and section d, any evidence of knowing alteration, destruction or concealment of any government or presidential records or any documents with classified markings. so in addition to looking for all of the classified documents they re looking for evidence of concealment of the documents and evidence of destruction of the classified documents. so you go back to not that it is classified but maggie haberman reporting about how trump got rid of documents by flushing them down the toilet. that would be a presidential