Fascist dictatorship, and so bill barr, after, ive got to say, humiliating himself for several years, bill barr decides, this is where i get off. This is enough. This is my line. I believe in an imperial presidency, but i dont believe in a fascist presidency. Thats what donald trump was asking him to do. Asking him to steal an election. Asking him to arrest his political opponents. Asking him to do the sort of things, again, that fascist dictators do. He wouldnt do it. Now, trump has turned on him. As far as fani willis goes and jack smith and everything else, again, we can point you back to it and play it for you again, what we were saying in 2019. If donald trump lost in 2020, he would run again, and hed run again simply to avoid all the crimes he was committing. Im not good at math, but that was four years ago. Four years ago, we were saying he will run again so he can try to avoid jail. Going to jail. Here we are. I must say, a lot of people were saying that, so its hard to believe anybody is stupid enough, watching that show, to completely forget that we all saw this coming like a Freight Train out of the mist. Now, he says this when, again, hes running to try to avoid jail time, as weve been saying for four years. Pretty much the only reason. That was, by the way, donald trump going after his former Attorney General, bill barr. Also, the prosecutor seeking to hold him accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Well have the new developments on the former president s legal troubles that now includes his twitter account. They didnt want to turn the information over to the government. In fact, they wanted to run and rat out the government. Meanwhile, trumps former Campaign Manager is calling the results of tuesdays special election in ohio, quote, rocket fuel for the democrats. Well have much more on the fallout for the Republican Party. Plus, the latest from hawaii, where raging wildfires have turned deadly overnight. Oh, such a sad story. Well have the latest. With us this morning, we have u. S. Special correspondent for bbc news, katty kay. Pulitzer prize winning columnist and Associate Editor for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson. And senior columnist for the daily beast, matt lewis joins us this morning. We begin with a new court ruling that has revealed months before charging donald trump in two separate cases, special counsel jack smiths office executed a Search Warrant of the former president s twitter account. According to the redacted ruling made public yesterday, the Justice Department executed the warrant back in january, despite being challenged by the elon musk owned company. Musk refused to turn over trumps account at first because of his objection to a part of the warrant that barred twitter from informing the former president that his account was being searched. It was a criminal investigation. Wow. The billionaire claimed the order, quote, violated the companys First Amendment right. Thats a little flexible these days, by the way, with twitter. They were sanctioned 350,000 and ultimately forced to comply after a judge ruled there was, quote, probable cause to search the account for evidence of criminal offenses. The judge also found, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that telling trump about the search beforehand would give him the chance to destroy potential evidence. Its unclear what evidence smiths office collected as a result of the warrant. Youll remember trumps twitter account was banned in the days following the january 6th attack, but it was restored last year after musk purchased the company. Nbc news has reached out to trumps lawyers and twitter, which has now since been renamed x, for comment. Didnt get any. Jean robi gene robinson, it is fascinating, a polite way to put it. A company that bends backwards to do what the Chinese Communist party wants them to do, other dictatorships wants them to do, are now worried about First Amendment rights and, oh, we need to notify donald trump, even though that would actually hamper the investigation. Yeah, they seem to have no problem following Government Instructions, orders or restrictions elsewhere in the world, especially china. They have a Problem Doing what the u. S. Courts instruct them to do, which theyre legally required to do and which they finally did after being sanctioned and fined. You know, whats fascinating about this is one worries, one wonders what it is in that account they wanted to go after. Are they trying to, you know something that you cant see publicly . Are they trying to get into his direct messages . It is unclear to me exactly what it is, but, clearly, jack smith thought there was something in there, and well see what it was, i guess, in the fullness of time when it comes out in court. Joining us now, nbc news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian with more on the former president s legal woes. Ken, first of all, whats your take on the twitter story, or x . Mika, i think eugene is absolutely onto something there. Obviously, Donald Trumps tweets are public, right . You can even now go online and find the old account which has been dormant for two years. But whats not public are direct messages or, for example, drafts of tweets that were never sent, or metadata that might show whether a tweet was sent from a phone or a desktop. If youll recall the January 6th Committee trying to get those outtakes of the video that trump was making on january 6th, a message to the rioters, and the point of that was to try to figure out what he didnt say, what he didnt want to say, what he proposed to say. Again, this is speculation, but people are wondering if that is one of the things jack smith is going after. Another fascinating thing about this is that for a few days, smith and his team reached out to twitter through the channel that they had established for Legal Process, and nobody responded. Elon musk had gutted the staff of the place to such an extent. Any of us who tried to reach out to their Press Operation have found the same problem. Finally, you know, the special counsel gets through, and then twitter delays. In fact, they were fined 350,000 by the court for that initial reluctance to comply with this, again, Search Warrant. Not a subpoena. This is getting content, which is protected by the fourth amendment. You need to go to a judge and Show Evidence of crimes. Very significant development. Well have to see how it figures in the case. Yeah. Obviously, a lot of all of President Trumps tweets are public and can be found in a different way. A draft of a tweet, is that saved . If you type something out, does anyone know . If you erase it, is it in there . Is that what theyre looking at . Youre asking me that because im a technological wiz kid. Its public. It begs the question, katty, theyre in search of a crime. If its not on the public tweets, you wonder where that is. Im not even a simple Country Lawyer, but i dont see how something that is written in draft, which would be your kind of thoughts or things you didnt actually put into action, that seems less pertinent than perhaps things that were sent to your dms that youd written to Somebody Else. We know trump is careful about not sending many texts and emails to people. Its not a form of communication he favors. Did he send a lot of dms . I dont know whether his twitter account is full of the kinds of conversations, effectively, which is what direct messages are, one to one conversations, is it full of the direct conversations he would have been having that would be useful to prosecutors . It is intriguing. Im sure well finally know. We will get to know during the trial what happens, but itll be intriguing to see what this led to. The Trump Campaign is taking on the former president s indictments in a new attack ad. Can i just say this . Yeah. If they went searching, it is because somebody on his staff said Something Like, you should check the direct messages or check the drafts. Hes given someone else the password, so anybody can open it up and see the drafts. Like, theyre just not going to do that fishing expedition. Yeah, thats what i i was just thinking as we were talking about it, if they went searching there, they went searching because a trumper who worked on the inside of trumps team said, hey, youll want to know how who communicated, go there. Yeah. So this attack ad, the minutelong Television Spot names the prosecutors and investigators that brought charges against him, connecting them to President Biden. The majority of the ad focuses on Fulton County da fani willis and spouts a number of inaccurate and misleading allegations. Willis addressed the ad in an email to her staff, calling it derogatory and false. The ad is scheduled to air frequently in Fulton County, georgia, as well as nationally. Time to air as willis is prepared to bring charges against trump and his allies, maybe next week. Matt lewis, that is just specifically designed to influence a future jury pool. Of course. By actually doing a hit job against Law Enforcement. So you do the hit job against Law Enforcement, spread all of these lies, and what are you doing . What youre doing is, again, youre tampering with the jury pool. Absolutely. And i think, you know, the interesting thing is that we have, what, four indictments now, so ill try not to confuse them, but in georgia, legally, the people i talk to who are legal experts im not even a Country Lawyer either they say that the, you know whats happening in georgia, for example, and the maralago case, that both of those cases would legally be very easy to prove. Whereas, the January 6th Case, legally, even though obviously what trump did was, you know, in my opinion, he incited the riot, but legally hard to prove. But the difference, of course, is venue, right . So if youre having a trial in washington, d. C. , thats going to be a very different jury pool than if youre having it in florida. And i do think, obviously, donald trump is engaged in, you know, sort of preemptive witness tampering. Joe, to your point about the twitter thing, i think that is the other interest thing. Like, im listening to all of these conservative legal experts who are talking about the january 6th trial, and theyre basically saying, yeah, what trump did is horrible, but im not sure he broke the law. Its going to be hard to prove that he actually broke the law. I think the thing to keep in mind is, that jack smith knows things we dont yet know. Whether it is somebody flipping on him, as youve sort of suggested, whether its his former Chief Of Staff or whoever, there may be details that come out that are dispositive. So this we dont know yet what jack smith knows. Ken dilanian, i want you to underline that fact. Also, ill just make ill just take note that, again, over the past several days, ive been disturbed by the fact that Establishment Republicans who claim to be antitrump, even if they were anti antitrump at the same time, have all said, oh, this is jack smith. This is about the First Amendment. Or what about Hunter Bidens laptop . A lot of different distractions from jack smith and january 6th. For some reason, the republican establishment that was antitrump is now scurrying back to him, claiming, somehow, that jack smith is attacking donald trump for using his First Amendment rights. I mean, we saw that memo yesterday. My gosh, the conspiracy that was hatched, seems to me, again, i dont know as much about the law as you im sure, but it seems to me to be a laughable offense. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. It is a conspiracy to push fake electors on mike pence to change and to discount the votes of tens of millions of americans. And, joe, not all of the republican accomplishment is trying to justify it. You may have noticed that alberto gonzalez, the Bush AdministrationAttorney General, wrote an oped the other day and came out and said, look, this indictment is very strong, and im disturbed my fellow republicans and pundits on fox news are impugning the Justice System and the Justice Department, that he used to lead. He knows it is full of nonpartisan people who are pursuing the law and, in this view, the indictment was quite strong. Youre absolutely right. The cheeseboro memo, the lawyer from wisconsin who was advising trump, appears to be the blueprint for the false elector scheme. Theres some covering language in there. For example, he said, we should only execute this if there are plausible legal claims that we think are going to show fraud. Of course, that wasnt by the time false electors were voting in December 2020, there were no plausible legal claims. They went forward anyway, and thats the crux of the issue here. Joe, i also want to go to what you said about Jury Tampering and trumps, you know, inflammatory criticism of prosecutors and now the judge in the federal case. Ive been talking to legal experts. I wrote a piece about this which will be published later today. Its a really horrible dilemma that all these judges are in because donald trump is running for president , and political speech is the most protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet, normally, a criminal defendant would not be allowed to get away with trying to influence the jury pool by impugning the prosecutors. But a lot of experts i talked to, even ones critical of trump, think that these judges are going to have to choice but to let him do almost everything, except threaten like he did the other day with, you know, if you come after me, im coming after you. Yeah. Thats what they think would be the line, threats against judges or prosecutors. Then there is a horrible situation of what do the judges leverage . They can fine him, but the ultimate leverage is they can throw him in jail. Now, were into this situation where a person with Lifetime Secret Service protection, can they be jailed . How will the Secret Service react . We say this all the time, but we are in really dangerous, Uncharted Territory with these legal cases against the former president. Right. I fear for former law schools who are going to be grappling with this First Amendment question in con law. You have the balancing of protecting prosecutors, stopping somebody from subverting the judicial process, the Legal Process, a criminal process. Thats on one hand. On the other hand, you have, again, political speech. As we said yesterday, all free speech is not created equally. The constitution, the Supreme Court has also valued political speech the most and are the least likely to interfere with political speech. You can tell the difference between political speech and threatening a witness. Thats where these come together. Yes, you can. I mean it is not always going to be simple. Speaking of former Attorney General alberto gonzalez, we can ask him about all this. He will be our guest at the top of the hour. In an interview last night, trump essentially admitted that he inter interfered in georgias 2020 election. Discussing his phone call to Secretary Of State brad raffensperger. I believe i won that election by many, many votes. Many, many Hundreds Of Thousands of votes. Thats what i think. I expressed that on the phone call, and i said, i dont know what the number was, 11,000 or something. I said, what i need is 11,000 votes. I won this thing by Hundreds Of Thousands of votes. Thats my opinion. Its a strong opinion, and i think its born out by the fact s. Were see that. I think i won the masters in 1987. Ill take the trophy from the person they awarded it to. I think i have more number one hits and gold records than the beatles, Rolling Stones and cw call combined. Come on. They had to do a disclaimer on the network. He knows they didnt win by Hundreds Of Thousands of votes. Newsmax, afterwards, did a disclaimer, saying that they knew joe biden legally won the context. Ask him about it. This idea among donald trump and his trumpers, just because he says he believes, as somebody said yesterday, he owns all the money in the bank, doesnt mean he can have a conspiracy, like an oceans 12 conspiracy or ocean 13, i forget, to have brad pitt go in, break into the safe and take all the money out of the bank. Yeah. Here again, yet another admission, yeah, i told him i needed 11,000 votes. That perfect phone call not sounding so perfect anymore, gene. No, its not. I think that was oceans 11 when they took the bags full of money out of the casino. But in any event, no, you cant just