makes this investigation the most important and central question to ask and answer ahead of that run. neal, thank you for overcoming technical issues and otherwise. we can t have these conversations without you. thank you, my friend. thank you. tim, jackie and charlie are sticking around. when we come back, we re going to turn to the story we were going to start the hour with before that breaking news. the other investigation being led by special counsel jack smith. this one even more opaque. the one concerning january 6th and the plot by the disgraced ex-president and his allies to plan a coup to overturn the results of his 2020 election defeat. we ll get to that new reporting after a quick break. also ahead, they ve done it to block voting rights. now they re doing it to block reproductive rights. how republicans are subverting the democratic process all over the country in an extreme and i should add unpopular bid to stop the right to access abortion health care and keep voters
well, you re a hundred seth meyers. look, i think that what this meeting indicates to me is we are at the end of the mar-a-lago piece of the jack smith investigation. this is the kind of thing defense attorneys will try and do as a last-ditch effort, to try and meet with the prosecutor, try and talk them out of it, try and say oh, you abused my client s rights and so on. but i think, you know, those kinds of claims, we ve heard them before, are pretty much going to fall on deaf ears. the idea that the attorney-client privilege was violated here is exactly what was litigated before the district judge and then going up to our nationtion second highest court, the d.c. circuit, which rebuked that kind of idea. so it pierced attorney-client privilege. for those really highly respected judges to have done that in the mar-a-lago investigation tells me that they
subpoena that had just been issued by a federal grand jury in washington. seeking the return of all classified material in the possession of of his presidential office. after pleasantries, according to a description of the recorded notes, trump asked corcoran if he had to comply with the subpoena. corcoran told him that he did. and this is all on tape. new developments in the final stages perhaps of the investigation into donald trump s handling of classified documents is where we begin today with some of our favorite reporters and friends, politico national correspondent and nbc contributor betsy woodruff swan is back. legal analyst andrew weissmann is back. also joining us, former fbi counterintelligence agent pete struck. anded a the table for the hour, democratic strategist and director of the public policy at hunters college. you issued a tantalizing and nudes worthy tweet in your own
know this is not the way that this would be an indictment if it were anyone else but donald trump. and that s why i think jack smith, who s such a by the boong book prosecutor, is going to see it that way. i think the mishandling of the information in the first place, maybe trump s going to have a defense like i wasn t involved, i was out of the loop, someone else packed the stuff up and so on. but it s not the finding of the documents itself that to me is the most significant thing. it s that trump s lying about it and obstruction of the investigation both before, during, and after it. that s where i think the prosecutors are going to have such a difficulty. it would be one thing if you made an innocent mistake, you owned up to the mistake, you got the materials returned and so on. you know, for heaven s sakes this is some of our most serious national security information. people, you know, very well may have died or put their lives on the line to get this, both americans and our al
believed a serious crime had been committed and that the attorney was part of that situation. and so they needed to get that information to the prosecutors of what that attorney knew and what that attorney did and what that attorney saw. that is a rare, rare thing. you almost never see it in the law. but it occurs only in really grave circumstances. here all of those judges said this meets that criteria. so what i think we are looking at is really truly, nicolle, a situation where all signs are indicating donald trump will be indicted by jack smith for the mishandling of classified information at mar-a-lago as well as the obstruction of evidence the obstruction of the investigation afterwards, hiding the boxes, dress rehearsals, all that kind of stuff. you know, that s such a declarative statement, especially coming from you, and it syncs up with what tim and andrew have said today. and again, short of jack smith sitting down at this table, you are the most trusted and expert