extraordinary breaking, fast-moving story we started with last hour. a judge has ordered the release by noon tomorrow of a redacted doj affidavit. that was the affidavit that was used to explain to a judge why the fbi needed to search the disgraced ex-president s mar-a-lago home/club earlier this month. judge bruce reinhart says there was, a compelling reason and good cause for the redactions sent to him by doj earlier today and that that redacted version is narrowly tailored for the integrity of the investigation. it comes as attorney general merrick garland tries to achieve both public defense of the fbi s search and private protection of that ongoing criminal investigation. joining us now to discuss all of it, barbara mcquade, former u.s. attorney, now law professor at the university of michigan, also an msnbc legal analyst in high endorsement, and asha is here, former fbi special agent for
with a very derogatory intent of smearing and coloring the 23-month investigation and it explains why mueller was so upset and there was reporting in the new york times and the washington post that mueller called this office and was upset. you can t put any of the toothpaste back in the tube and back to my first question to you, how does it fill out the understanding of how heavily donald trump depended on doj to put his finger on the scale for him? i mean, enormously, nicole. the extent to which doj, particularly after bill barr took over was functioning as an extension of the political interest of the trump white house particularly on the mueller report. i had a lot of responsibility for how the information was presented to the public. neal would know first hand that if i had sought out of the white house to manipulate the presentation of criminal cases or cases that implicated the
investigation and prosecution of high-level executive branch officials including, of course, including the precedent and what happened here is the appointed mueller special counsel, but when it came time for the key question, are you did donald trump commit federal felonies, mueller refused to answer because of a department of justice policy that says you can t indict a sitting president, a policy that goes back to 1973. barr said, well, in that case, i get to decide that for myself, and so he appoints this guy, steve engel who is at the office of legal counsel who is not a criminal division. this is a totally separate part and engel is a political appoint see and this political appointee writes this nine-page tendentious memo and i don t think donald trump committed any crimes. it is absurd start to finish and it is a betrayal of what the
counterintelligence, now assistant dean at yale s jackson school of global affairs. such a pleasure to have you. asha, tell us what you expect to see in what sounds like the judge has accepted this highly redacted version of an affidavit. yes, thanks, nicole, it s great to be on. so, the department of justice advised the court that originally the redactions would make this affidavit basically unreadable. but i think that even with any redactions, i think we re going to learn a lot. so, first, we re going to be able to just see the sheer length of the affidavit. a search warrant comes late in an investigation, and particularly in a case of this sensitivity and magnitude, there will have been a lot of evidence gathered, and so, you know, the affidavit is going to have laid out all of this evidence, much of which we won t see, but it will be there. the second thing i expect to see are things that don t implicate identities of agents and witnesses or the direction and
that infrastructure around him right now as i was saying earlier. he doesn t have the wheels of the justice department and as neal said the very peculiar choice of people for political appointees of the office of legal counsel weighing in on criminal issues. he doesn t have that, now, he has a bunch of lawyers that they re engaged in right now and it s interesting to juxtapose these two things because this memo demonstrates how this is benefiting from the ex-president and at the same time we re seeing what happens when he doesn t have this infrastructure today. ? thank you very much for sticking around. a democratic candidate hoping the momentum that we ve seen among voters to safeguard american democracy will propel him in november. this time going up a republican powerful leader backing the big