probe into an ex-president s handling of classified material. new york times notes that it is incredibly rare for even a partial affidavit to be released at all. they add this, quote, the submission by the justice department is a significant legal mile post in an investigations that has swiftly emerged as a major threat to trump, whose lawyers have offered a confused and at times stumbling response, but it is also an inflexion point for attorney general merrick garland who is trying to balance protecting the prosecutorial process by keeping secret details of the investigation and providing enough information to defend his decision to request a search unlike any other in history. the impending release of a critical document in doj s investigation into the ex-president is where we begin today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. carol leonnig is here and former national security adviser to president obama and neal katyal is back former solicitor general and now law
keep using the term unprecedented, right? it s unprecedented to have a search of the former president s home. it s unprecedented to have the affidavit partially released, but i think what i m hearing from sources over and over again at the department of justice is that they realize this is so unusual. they realize merrick garland had to come out and say something to take to make clear to the public, this is not some errant fbi agent deciding to raid a former president s home. they realize that some transparency, if not a little tiny bit of leg is necessary when they re taking the steps they re taking and let s put us unprecedented on another part of this chapter which is unprecedented for a former president to claim like a kid on a playground, these documents are mine and to do that for now what appears to be more than 19 months and for his own white house counsel and deputy white
troubled waters that he s in right now, and so i think it speaks to what happens when you pull back the veil from the wizard of oz here and it s just donald trump and a handful of funkies at mar-a-lago who are break the law and not following the justice department. i want to ask you about carol s paper, the new york times did four years of reporting about donald trump s disdain for the intelligence community and disinterest in all of its products namely the pdb. it was consumed by jared kushner and the national security adviser and never voraciously consumed by the ex-president. what do you think he took and why do you think he took it? well, what that is the $64,000 question, nicole. in terms of what he took, when this started to come out, the 700 pages of classified documents and things like that, that tells me that these are intelligence reports and the
intersection of the first amendment and politics and the justice department, sdny. as a media organization, you can be in receipt of stolen property, right? edward snowden stole those documents and gave them out to the media. but as a media organization, you cannot participate in the actual stealing of the documents. you can t go back to edward snowden and say, why don t you go back into the nsa and go break into these things and take these additional items. that brings you into the crime. so, what we see today are these two defendants, one of them agreeing to cooperate, both pleading guilty, and an ongoing investigation. one of the individuals agreed to cooperate in the ongoing investigation that is looking at project veritas and the role that its people played in this. it also, though, reveals how sick and obsessed trump and his allies were with the biden kids.
procedure. tell me about what we learned today from what will be released in less than 24 hours from now? so we learned, nicole, basically that the justice department won today, as expected and in the passage you re reading says that he agrees with the justice department s redactions and the blacking out of certain parts of the affidavit and i wouldn t be remotely surprised if they weren t blocking out huge chunks of the affidavit because it would be responsible for them to risk the disclosure of key witnesses or grand jury information or anything like that at this point in the investigation. so now what happens here is the justice department could appeal because there is a principle at stake which is we don t release affidavits, period. when that is basically the department s general position, as you said, it s incredibly rare for any sort of release and even a partial release to happen