indeed, good to have you. i m jim sciutto. justice department facing a noon deadline, two hours from now, to give a judge and we should be clear a redacted version, perhaps highly redacted of the affidavit behind the search warrant for the mar-a-lago home of the former president. the judge will then decide whether to release that redacted version to the public or continue to keep it under wraps. plus, new details about the national archives multiyear effort to get former president trump to hand over classified documents from his time in office. a top white house lawyer at the time told trump he should hand those documents over. so why didn t it happen? key question. also overnight, the department of justice releasing an unredacted full memo from 2019 that unveils why former attorney general bill barr decided then president trump could not be charged with obstructing the russia probe. we ll break down what is ahead in all of that. all right, let s begin this morning with
another judge said bill barr already decided that there was going to be no prosecution of the former president for obstruction despite the fact that robert mueller s report found multiple instances where possibly he could be charged with obstruction and left it up to the attorney general to make that decision. if you remember there was this case where don mcgahn was being told to fire the form to try to find a way to fire the special counsel. trump tried to get him to deny that. this was analyzed in this memo, and essentially they came up with an excuse saying, you know, he didn t really mean that, he really meant let s find another special counsel who doesn t have conflicts. that s the kind of stuff you see in this nine-page memo, guys. and to bring us back to 2022, obviously, there is now obviously a new investigation, looking at possible obstruction that could include the president, perhaps other people involved in this effort to get these documents from mar-a-lago.
momo is h this memo, if you look at scooter luby, in the valerie plame case or john poindexter back to the iran/contra investigation, what is the precedent here, typically in tis does there have to be an underlying crime to indict and convict for obstruction of justice? two points, jim, first of all, there were underlieying there was underlying conduct that may have amounted to a crime. mueller didn t decide to charge it regarding russia. but more fundamentally if you look at those cases, the quetto case, with the current crew executive director noah bookbinder, this memo also
there was powerful evidence here, on the facts. the memo soft pedals donald trump s dangling pardons, it says, oh, he had some disagreements with witnesses, no, poppy. he was dangling pardons, he was engaging in conduct that any other he was intimidating witnesses. conduct that would have led to any other american who didn t work in the white house being prosecuted, on the law. i wrote a long analysis of the many cases, they say there is no case, that s ridiculous. and then when they talk about the specific cases, poppy, they distort them like the case that they focus on, that s on all fours with what donald trump did. there was an investigation he wanted to interfere with it. it is all wrong. let me ask you this, norm, another argument made in this
indeed, good to have you. i m jim sciutto. justice department facing a noon deadline, two hours from now, to give a judge and we should be clear a redacted version, perhaps highly redacted of the affidavit behind the search warrant for the mar-a-lago home of the former president. the judge will then decide whether to release that redacted version to the public or continue to keep it under wraps. plus, new details about the national archives multiyear effort to get former president trump to hand over classified documents from his time in office. a top white house lawyer at the time told trump he should hand those documents over. so why didn t it happen? key question. also overnight, the department of justice releasing an unredacted full memo from 2019 that unveils why former attorney general bill barr decided then president trump could not be charged with obstructing the russia probe. we ll break down what is ahead in all of that. all right, let s begin this morning with senior cr