0 night. and the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening rachel. chris, do you have a connection to the fbi? do i personally? every time you go on vacation the fbi does something that nobody expected that blows everybody away and i have to call you and ask where in the world you are. i found out the search warrant in mar-a-lago from a text from you, and i hadn t even gotten to the american news, and i guess things are kinds of crazy, woe, babe, they searched mar-a-lago. rachel just rang again. every time i leave the east coast. anyway, i m putting a leash on you, my friend. i can t take the suspense anymore. welcome back. good to be back. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. great to have you here. do you remember the name brandon van greg? it is a very memorable name, you might remember the sound of it and if not the circumstance you first heard. it but if you are like me, and all likelihood the first time you heard the name brandon van grack was t
favorite name in the whole trump-russia probe. honestly if there wasn t a person involved in this investigation named brendan van grack, you d have to invent one. he is a real person. he s the veteran espionage prosecutor who joined the special counsel s team early on. brendan van grack i ll say it normally. he worked on the case against paul manafort, also on the case against mike flynn. by october last year, we learned he last the special counsel s office and returned to his old job in the justice department. brandon van grack was not the first to go. just since the beginning of this month, david archie, a lead fbi agent on the mueller team, he ran to run the richmond fbi field office. andrew weisman, arguably the highest profile prosecutor on the mueller team, also leaving the investigation. npr had the scoop he s leaving to go teach at nyu law.
an enduring mystery that has yet to be explained. well, a few weeks after they finally did fire flynn, in may of 2017, we found out in the new york times that the white house had actually had way more warning about flynn than just that heads up they got in person from sally yates. the new york times was first to report in may of last year that flynn had actually warned the white house during the transition that he was under federal investigation. i still remember reading this dramatic headline for the first time. trump team knew flynn was under investigation before he came to the white house. they did? michael t. flynn told president trump s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation. despite this warning, mr. trump made flynn his national security advisor anyway. this article in the times in may of last year, this is where we first learned that federal prosecutors, in fact a veteran