it s quite staggering. and if you look at it, those people are in need, as i mentioned, for shelter, forfood, for water, for health, for assistance. and on the long run, they do need a source of income so they can start rebuilding their lives from scratch. some of these people, even our staff who have been impacted by this conflict sorry, by this crisis some of them lost their homes. some of them lost their lives. sadly and shockingly, we have lost two of our staff members on the ground in northern syria due to this disaster. so definitely, in terms of assistance, we re looking at something considerably huge and significant, and that should be for the donors to provide funding that could cover these gaps in needs. i mean, in syria, we already had 15 million people in desperate need of assistance even before this earthquake. so now with this natural disaster happening, we re looking at even more needs rising and spiking.
investigation, as well as in the mueller investigation, which was also over the same special counsel regulations, which applied to criminal investigations, both of these raised significant national security concerns. and i think many were highlighted in the mueller report, particularly volume i, but really both volumes. and i suspect that when all is said and done here, many of those things will be highlighted in this investigation as well. you know, the special counsel, when it completes its investigation, just like robert mueller did, jack smith will prepare a final report. and that report is a confidential report, but it s a report that the attorney general can determine to make public if it s in the public interest. now, of course, as you referred to before, bill barr decided to make it public, but only after he sat on it for 30 days and put out his own four-page summary that left out many of the very key and critical parts of the
evidence about whether or not there was what we all called collusion between trump and the russians. mueller viewed whether or not there was some form of a criminal conspiracy that could be charged. and when his report was released, there was this immediate wave from the then president that he had been exonerated and that was not what mueller found. and the part that has always stayed with me is how mueller says, this is how we view what happened based on the evidence that was available to us. but there was a lot of evidence that wasn t available to us. and the insinuation was that there had been, if not a deliberate effort to hide evidence from him, he referenced evidence that wasn t available because it wasn t in the united states or that it simply couldn t be found or that people refused to turn over. there s this baked in notion that there was obstruction of justice, the influence, the decisions that they made when they evaluated trump s conduct, back when mueller was the special c
speculate, but no one told us nor should they have told us, that s not what doj is supposed to do. does it make the work that could go into a criminal referral, should there be a criminal referral, and i know we re on the subcommittee of the select committee, that will be responsible for that, does the work become more specific now, that there is one individual, jack smith, in charge of looking at potential crimes on the part of donald trump? you know, i don t know. obviously, this just happened. we haven t had a chance to discuss it, as a subcommittee, whether it has an impact on any referral we might make, obviously, we don t know what evidence they have and we have a lot of evidence that we ve compiled. much of which we ve revealed in our public hearings. but i think we strongly believe that all of the evidence, subject to, i mean, we re not going to publish people s cell phones and email addresses, and things like that, but, you know,
former u.s. attorney, now law professor at the university of alabama, as well as an msnbc legal analyst, katie benner, much of what we know, we know from your reporting, take us through how this came to pass today. keep in mind, when merrick garland became attorney general last year, he was very loathe to appoint a special counsel. there was outside pressure to do so, of course, including from some of the panelists we see here today, but he really believed and i think does still believe that the justice department can investigate a former president. and that that is something that s well within its abilities, if they follow the rule of law. however, part of the calculation was that donald trump stopped being a former president and he became a presidential candidate who would be going toe-to-toe with merrick garland s own boss, joe biden, president joe biden, and the appearance of the conflict of interest was not something that the department would be able to create guardrails around.