hearing though now said to determine whether an independent third party will be appointed to review some of the documents the fbi obtained from trump s mar-a-lago. u.s. district judge, aileen cannon, a trump appointee has ordered a hearing. she has already signaled that she could be inclined to grant trump s request for a special master. she has also given the doj until tuesday to file a public response to that request and present a more detailed list of items taken from mar-a-lago. julie ainsley, more with us. he thank you for joining us. let s talk more about what this means for the doj s review of documents. the possibility of this third party being appointed. that is right, yasmin. that would mean there would be another party reviewing these documents. of course, this is already a pool that the justice department wanted to keep a small as possible. we also know now that the director of national townsend valant. going through the documents, figuring out what should have
And i thought the threat to our nation was well articulated earlier today by Professor Feldman when you said, if we cannot impeach a president who abuses his office for personal advantage, we no longer live in a democracy, we live in a monarchy or we live under a districtatorship. My view is if people cannot depend on the fairness of our elections, then what people are calling divisive today will be absolutely nothing compared to the shredding of our democracy. After the events of ukraine unfolded, the president claimed that the reason he requested an investigation into his political opponents and withheld desperately needed military aid for ukraine was supposedly because he was worried about corruption. However, contrary to president s statements, various witnesses, including Vice President pences special adviser jennifer williams, testified that the president s request was political. Take a listen. I found the july 25th phone call unusual because in contrast to other president ial ca
you. my next guest. msnbc legal analyst, barbara mcquade put out the following tweet in reaction to these developments we ve been talking about on this potential of the special master appointment. seems ill-advised. what happens when d.o.d. says they have already reviewed the documents? and how to assess the damage to the intelligence community if they need to wait for review by a special master? we want to bring in barbara mcquade now who is joining us. barbara, let s just pick up on your tweet and expand on that if you can for. us what are some of your concerns here for the appointment of a special master? they are just practical consequences to a decision like this. regardless of any procedure irregularities here or even this desire by the justice department to try to show that they are bending over backwards to be fair there is a cost to appointing a special master here. number one, i would be stunned if the justice department has not already reviewed these documents. they ve had
however based on the transcripts released of those calls in april and july, president trump never mentioned these points of corruption. he actually never mentioned the word corruption. does is that go to any of those factors? is that significant? yes. it goes to the one about procedure irregularities and said that you look at the kind of things that led up to the decision that you re trying to figure out somebody s motive about. so let s try another one. ambassador volker testified that the president never expressed any concerns to him about corruption in any country other than ukraine. would that be relevant to your assessment? yes, it would. it goes to the factor about substantive departures. and professor karlan there is, in fact, and my colleague mr. mcclinton mentioned this, a process lined out to assess whether countries that are receiving military aid have done enough to fight corruption. in may of 2019 my republican