police have permanently disbanded the s.c.o.r.p.i.o.n. unit, the unit associated with officers involved in the killing of tyre nichols, the 29-year-old man beaten after a traffic stop. the videos we re about to show you are graphic and disturbing, but of course they are critical to understanding what happened to this 29-year-old man. as you can hear in the video, nichols cries out for his mother, who was just a few blocks away. officers continued to hit and spray nichols, struggling with him on the ground. more footage appears to show inaction by deputies and officers and paramedics on the scene. five officers are facing multiple charges, including second-degree murder and kidnapping. two sheriff s deputies at the scene were placed on leave pending an investigation and cnn s shimon prokupecz is live. we ll talk about the horrific video in just a moment, but we do have new breaking news, information coming in this afternoon, and that is that the memphis police department has
commentator riva martin. we just learned they have deactivated the s.c.o.r.p.i.o.n. unit that some of the officers were a part of. let me get your reaction to that. shimon prokupecz was just telling us a few moments ago he had been asking for days whether or not the officers were a part of that unit. the police department did not want to get into that. they were saying everything was under investigation. of course we found out later they were part of the unit and now the unit has been disbanded. what are your thoughts? so let me say this, because chief davis is in cya mode, right? she understands and she deserves at the pleasure of a mayor, and we know that there have been others who have come forward and complained about these officers and she s allowed it. there was smoke and she failed to recognize it until it was a full-blown fire. and now we know that there was a couple of deputies on scene. so she had to see them there in terms of transparency. she didn t call her sheriff neigh
and right now, we want to bring in our panel for more on this. joining me now, juanita tolliver, msnbc political analyst, and tara setmeyer. former gop communications director. thank you both. a lot to talk about. let s start with the barr news. juanita, what do you make of former attorney general barr s apparent cooperation? he was loyal to the president until it all seemed to end badly in december of 2020. how forthcoming would you expect him to be with this committee? i feel like former ag barr might be in cya mode, like covering himself and trying to communicate with the select committee at this point because the timing here is what it comes down to when the select committee reached out to him or started these conversations because we know with his resignation around the same time now this newly dropped draft executive order came out just days after that, it signals something to the select committee. what did you know, what were you running from?
important. absolutely. it would actually undermine that statement that mick mulvaney said that this happens all of the time. just get over it. this is someone that could actually give information as to what was the foundation for the decision, what were the reasons given to people within the office about the halting of the aid, what was out of order about this and what was the full context, in a way of showing us for the very first time essentially that people are starting to catch on that the cya mode can t last for long and that the idea of somehow being able to thumb your nose at a subpoena would be an indefinite state of affairs and particularly with the opportunity for you to demonstrate to congress that you were not complicit in something and remember the olc opinion only relates to one person and the president of the united states and whether he could, in fact, be indicted. what do you make of this of an omb official breaking ranks and again, given that the opb was crucial h
time the conversations happened to exert executive privilege. it would only be anything while he was in the white house, not the transition, not the campaign. the transition is a little tricky. it hasn t been well established to figure out there s some reason to have it attached. things that happened as a candidate, somebody vying to be a member executive would not count. the other aspect of this, of course, is that the communications he had to have had to be with people under the nature of the executive. it can t just be because he s the president, everything is covered under the privilege. we saw this, of course, in the trump tower meeting, donald trump junior. he was trying to go into cya mode, perhaps, for his son. that may be part of a inquiry of a court who says the balancing test is the come telling candor we need for a president against the public s right to know. when the nixon case came up, of course, it s what a criminal court wanted to look at for privilege. they said i