Jack - Episode 23 - Goodbye Carrot; Hello Stick

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

This week: there may be gaps in the Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage subpoenaed by DOJ; more about a potential wire fraud case surrounding the Save America PAC; another member of the Ocho Nostra testifying before the grand jury; what’s up with Trump and LIV Golf; plus listener questions and more.Do you have questions about the cases and investigations? Click here: https://formfaca.de/sm/PTk_BSogJFollow the Podcast on Apple Podcasts:https://apple.co/3BoVRhNCheck out other MSW Media podcastshttps://mswmedia.com/shows/Follow AG on Twitter:Dr. Allison Gill https://twitter.com/allisongillhttps://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrotehttps://twitter.com/dailybeanspodAndrew McCabe isn’t on Twitter, but you can buy his book The Threathttps://www.amazon.com/Threat-Protects-America-Terror-Trump-ebook/dp/B07HFMYQPGWe would like to know more about our listeners. Please participate in this brief surveyhttp://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at the Justice Enforcers level and above:https://dailybeans.supercast.techOrhttps://patreon.com/thedailybeansOr when you subscribe on Apple Podcastshttps://apple.co/3YNpW3P

I signed in order appointing Jack Smith. And those who say Jack is a finesse. Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor. What law have I grew? The events leading up to and on January 6. Classified documents and other presidential records. You understand what prison is? Send me to jail.

Welcome to episode 23 of Jack, the podcast about all things special counsel. It is Sunday, May 7th, and I'm your host, Andy McKay. Hey, Andy. I'm the co-host here, Alison Gill. Lots of major, major breaking news in the Special Counsel investigation this week. I know we talk about this every week, every week, like, what could next week possibly bring? Well, a host of new stuff. We've got a deeper dive into the potential wire fraud case surrounding the Save America Pack.

We have another member of the Ocha Nostra testifying before the grand jury. Yes. And if you haven't been a listener for a while, this is your first time joining us. Welcome. But the Ocha Noestra will go over who that is. Those are the eight Trump aides allies and folks who were ordered to testify by Chief Judge Barrel Howe after they tried Trump tried to fight their testimony or block it using

executive privilege. And we have some more information about the testimony of former vice president Mike Pence. We do. And the cornucopia of news, special counsel, and news continues because we've also got breaking news from the times about potential gaps in the Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage subpoenaed by DOJ. Also a Trump insider who may be cooperating, and testimony from the Calamaris, my two favorite Calamaris, additional subpoenas, and a potential new arm of the investigation into Trump's involvement in the Saudi-backed live golf tournament. We'll go over all that and we'll take some listener questions.

Awesome. And if you have any questions for Andy or me or both of us, you can send them to us via email. The address is hello at mullersheywrote.com. Just put the word Jack in the subject line. And Andy and I also would like to thank you and all of the patrons who joined us last Sunday for our cocktail reception in DC. It was so much fun. It really was. It was great to see everybody in person. I mean, we had some folks who traveled a long way to get there too.

Seattle, a bunch of people from New York, New Jersey. So thanks so much for, yeah. Thanks so much for coming and enjoying a really fun night with us. All right. So shall we get started? Yeah, let's do this. So we'll start with the expanding investigation into wire fraud.

Now, this has been one of our kind of favorite things to talk about over the last several weeks, because we saw this one early on, Allison, as a very, you know, there's a lot of potential here in terms of putting some solid, you know, maybe less fancy, less sexy charges, but nevertheless, solid charges easier to prove on the plate. And so we get some reporting this week from Haberman, Feuer, and Swan at the New York Times, which indicates that federal prosecutors have been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race, but still raised money off of claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the voting results.

So in the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand the Save America pack. As you know, Alson, the first round was sent out before Jack Smith was appointed. And that one, of course, focused on, you know, Republican officials and vendors, and people who had received payments from Save America. But it's changed a bit recently. Recently, investigators have honed in on the activities of a joint fundraising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican

National Committee, among others. Yeah. And they've really been heavily focused on that, the details of the campaign's finances. They're spending, they're fundraising, such as who was approving the email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors. And what those folks who helped coordinate that knew about what they knew about the fraud claims. They know that they were false claims that they were deceiving and defrauding donors. That's like the whole cornerstone of a wire fraud charge, which by the way carries a 20 year max sentence It's not it's not a little pittance. I mean, I'm sure the Trump folks will refer to it as a process crime or something

But It's a mere technicality. It was a perfect campaign They these were fundraisers. They were perfect emails But you know, we saw a lot of this in the January 6th testimony like from Ronald Romney McDaniels and the RNC and things like that. So I mean, they're really homing in on this. They really are.

And that one aspect of it, that question that they are going after who specifically approved each email. That's the pry bar getting just behind the door, right? That's just as you got the pry bar in there and now you're really starting to lean into it to pop that door open because whoever approved the message,

that's the person you can attribute the statement to. So it goes from taking a, you know, random email from the Trump organization or the Trump campaign or whatever and turning it into the statement of John Smith. It enables you to pin that charge on that person and it puts that person in a position to say, wait, wait, no, it wasn't just me. It was these other people as well. So that's how you start to get people rolling in. Yeah, it was par scale and then par scale says, no, it was parle tour and parle tour.

That's right, it was. It was Epstein and then Epstein goes, nah, Trump told me to do it. Yeah, it's exactly. It was Epstein. It was Epstein. Yeah, it's exactly. Exactly, yeah.

And you know what's the difference here, and you can speak to this pretty well is the, I guess the teeth that DOJ has, that the January 6th committee did not have because they're able to bring criminal charges to the DOJ. And according to this reporting from the times, the DOJ has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from multiple witnesses. And, you know, to take that a step further, the prosecutors in Jackson's office have been able to develop more evidence than the House committee did because they have targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine

if those fundraising solicitations were knowingly misleading, right? So that's important because the January 6th committee was not able to get a lot of this evidence from their subpoenas. Particularly I'm thinking if you remember they subpoenaed Salesforce, which was the outside vendor probably paid by the Save America pack, which is part of this huge big first round of subpoenas. And they had to basically give that up and the RNC as well. So they couldn't get a lot of that evidence. But the DOJ, according to this reporting,

has subpoenaed Salesforce and other vendors too. So it's like, it's kind of disheartening that a co-equal branch of the government like Congress wouldn't have this kind of ability to extract this information, it kind of makes their ability to provide oversight, a little bit less toothless than the Department of Justice. But what are your thoughts on that? Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. The difference on the DOJ side is criminal penalties, the ability to levee criminal penalties on human beings for first ignoring subpoenas, you know, being held held in contempt by Congress doesn't mean much to people.

Or lizards in human being suits like technically. Yeah, exactly. But going to jail for contempt does matter to people. So, and there's no, you know, Congress holds you in contempt and they vote on it and, or I guess they vote first and then hold you in contempt and then they serve a referral to DOJ which basically has no weight whatsoever. DOJ doesn't have to do anything with that. So there's all kinds of handicaps

built on that side of the system, not so much on the DOJ side. If you don't respond to the subpoena, you can be held in contempt. If you refuse to hand over everything,poena, you can be held in contempt. If you refuse to hand over everything, they could start investigating for obstruction. So there's teeth to that. And the same is true with charges over witnesses, right? So you have the ability to hold people criminally responsible is a great incentive to get them to cooperate and

start providing information and assisting the investigation. Congress doesn't have either of those two powers, and so they just, they don't get as far. It kind of like brings home this point that government oversight works, and you get that check-in balance between Congress and let's say the federal agencies, the executive branch, because people, prior to the Trump administration, whether even though they didn't like it, you submit to it. It's the right thing.

Nobody likes to go up and testify in front of Congress, especially about bad news. Trust me, I did it many times. It was always awful, but you do it because that's what's required. That's what our system calls for. It's right that Congress, the side of our government that's most, you know, answerable to the voters, has this sort of power over the executive branch agencies. And of course, they control the budget. And that's a lot of power as well. So, but once that system starts falling apart and people begin ignoring their obligations

to comply with oversight, you get an executive branch or an administration that kind of just decides to thumb their nose at and run a mock. And I think we saw a lot of that during the four years of the Trump administration. Yeah. And we've seen this sort of happen over and over and over again with Congress versus DOJ. Not. I don't mean like they're going head to head, but you know, to get information, to get subpoenas because that's sales for, you know, when they, when the one six committee, subpoenaed Salesforce, Salesforce was like, yeah, sure, you can have it all. It looks weird to us too. We don't like it either. We thought this was strange too. Here, have everything.

And then, of course, the Trump side stepped in and said, no, no, wait a minute. You know, we want to sue to block this. And of course, you know, being the third party, you're gonna wait until that whole thing is resolved. But so DOJ was able to get the sales force stuff. We saw it with the RNC, DOJ was able to get the RNC stuff. We saw it with John Eastman in the Chapman University emails. Chapman University was 100% willing to hand everything over, but they had to go through

a nine-month protracted privilege battle and using crime fraud exception to get anything over to the January 6th committee. Meanwhile, Marigarlan had all of Eastman's emails before the committee even had held hearings. We saw it with Mizar's and the Trump organization. The criminal prosecutors were in investigators, were able to get those tax returns to sweet, whereas it took Congress what, the three, four years to be able to get the tax returns. So, and I think that,

and a lot of these privilege battles also go much, much faster when you're talking about the Department of Justice. So, you know, for those that we see sometimes the talking heads talking about how the DOJ is dumb and the January 6th Committee is God and the January 6th Committee did so much more than the Department of Justice.

I just want kind of want everybody to step back and take a 30,000-foot view and see exactly what the Department of Justice has been able to get without much, you know, without many trials and tribulations, so to speak, that the January 6th Committee simply wasn't unable to achieve. And I'm not saying that it's because the January 6th Committee didn't do the work, they certainly did, but, but they did their level best to get this information and evidence, but it's just so much easier for the Department of Justice to get it. Yeah, and at the end of the day, Congress, the January 6th committee was essentially a political, it's a political institution, and it was a political effort. I don't mean in terms of Republican or Democrat, but just in that it's part of the

political side of government. And at the end of the day, the courts recognize, I don't want to say a greater legitimacy on the criminal side, but maybe a more essential nature of what the criminal side of our government is doing. Like you have a grand jury, these things need to happen quickly. Prosecutors need to be able to access witnesses and evidence before the evidence disappears or the witnesses lose their recollections or are vulnerable to tampering by people who might not want them to testify. So the courts recognize that that's why you see

these privilege battles being teed up and heard and decided quickly, instead of the, how long did it take for Don McGann's privilege claim to get litigated before McGann ever showed up anywhere to talk to anyone? It was over a year in litigation. So just not to see that now. Then you're like, okay, yay.

And yeah, so I think that this is all just, you know, very important sort of information to have in the back of your mind as we continue forward with these investigations. And also how long it takes us to get news from the Department of Justice versus us, not, I shouldn't say from the Department of Justice, I should say about what the Department of Justice is doing. That's right.

Because the 100% of this is not coming from the DOJ, it's coming from elsewhere, witnesses and lawyers. But, you know, some other things that have been looked at here by these prosecutors include the nexus between research that the Trump campaign commissioned immediately after the election to try to prove fraud. It also they've been looking at public statements that Trump and his allies made at the time. They're fundraising efforts and the establishment. Like how why why establish Save America in the first place? And remember Jack Smith has obtained the testimony and reports and documents from two firms now, the Berkeley research group, which was paid $600,000 by the Trump campaign to look for voter fraud and Sympathico software

systems, which was paid $735,000 by the Trump campaign. Or at least they were billed. The Trump campaign was billed. I'm not sure. These payments have been made. They're accounting. We're not really sure how that worked out, but we'll see. We'll see. But the grand jury's been asking questions related to whether Donald was briefed

on these findings, bi-burkeley, suggesting there had been no widespread fraud, and also by the CEO of the Sympathico software system. So, and both of them came back. They looked over 12 different subjects of potential voter fraud. And when Donald Trump made that phone call to Brad Raffensberger on January 2nd and said we found 5,000 dead voters. But on January 1st, the report from Berkeley Research firms said they found nine, nine dead voters in Georgia. And so did Trump know ahead of that phone call from Berkeley research firms that they found nine, nine dead voters in Georgia. Right.

And so did Trump know ahead of that phone call to Raffensberger to find 11,780 votes, did he know that there were 5,000 instances of dead people casting ballots in Georgia and that there were only nine from this thing. But we do know from an Eastman email, by the way, like which I said, Jack Smith has had for a while. The DOJ, actually, Merrick Garland got it a long time ago. We know that Trump signed on to a lawsuit in Georgia after Eastman had advised him not to because the data had changed.

And so it appears that he was advised, at least per those emails that were handed over under the crime fraud exception. Yeah, don't let that data change. Just guess, just charge right ahead and sign that court filing, basically a testing that everything is true and to the best of your ability. You know, it's interesting too on these, on these two research group or the Berkeley and San Pataco, I totally get why the grand jury is asking questions about whether or not Trump himself was personally brief,

because that's what you want. As a prosecutor, you wanna be able to have a witness identified who's gonna sit on the stand and say, yeah, I sat in front of Trump and I told him X and he, you know, had a panic attack or whatever, however, he reacted. Hey, through the catch up and... Right.

But short of that, you can still get a lot out of these developments, even without that link to his personal briefing, right? You get the software guy comes in and he testifies, this is what we did, we prepared a brief and we sent it to this person or we actually briefed this person in the White House. Then you got to bring that guy in and who did he communicate it to and you get it all the way as close to Trump as you can. And that final link is going to be someone who maybe doesn't say, oh, I don't remember if I ever told Trump, okay, meadows or whatever.

Yeah. How often, Mr. hypothetical meadows, did you get information like this and not tell the president? Isn't it your job to tell the president? So, there's a whole, you, what I'm trying to say is you can leave the suggestion. You can raise the issue for the jury to consider whether or not it's reasonable to conclude that Trump paid over a million dollars for all this research and never ever heard or cared about the result. I mean, that's the kind of thing that a jury can say. Yeah, just don't believe that. I don't. Well, I often, you know,

I go to the vet and I spend 10 million dollars on my cat and I, but I don't want to know the results of any of the tests. Don't tell me. I, the council, look, the cat is alive. It's a spectacular cat. He's walking around, everything's fine. My other lawyers told me that the cat is fine. I've, yeah. And now let's, let's add to your hypothetical. Imagine you were the type of person

who routinely stiffed people, did not pay them what you owed them. So we know that like a million bucks goes out of the car. I don't like these results. That's right. A million dollars goes out of the pack to these two companies. Almost a 1.5 million like 1.5. Yeah. It's not it's there's it seems highly unlikely that he had zero. Not much of what was happening. Although I'll tell you what, you know, if you claim that you were going to, you know, if you were fundraising to find election fraud

and the election defense fund and you spent $1.5 million looking for it, that's reasonable. But where'd the other $248 million go? Like that's the problem, right? Ultimately, it's like a willful blindness type of art. Right? Well, okay, so you spend all this money to find all the, and what did you, oh, I don't know.

I don't know whatever happened from any of the, whatever, what did we get from all that money? I don't know, I should ask the guys. I should ask the team some day. It's just not, it's not credible. So if that's gonna be his biggest defense, I fire the prosecutors, I'll be like, okay, yeah, come on in. Put that defense on.

Well, I'm happy, I'm comfortable with that. They've lined up a lot of witnesses and evidence and information that they could put on to counter that defense, counter and raising it in the terms of a willful blindness sort of argument. Yeah. And you can't just say that because a couple of dollars were spent on researching election fraud, that the whole kitten caboodle that you raised, like every dollar has to have gone toward that. I mean, you can't, you know, unless you specifically say in your thing that, you know, only part of this money is

going to go toward that, the rest goes to me and my yacht or, you know, I mean, you know, whatever it is. And there were really no disclaimers on any of these emails that say that. And that was one of the issues Salesforce had and why they were so willing to hand their stock, their junk over to the January 6th committee, but were eventually stopped. But, you know, as I said, Jeff Smith has subpoenaed sales force. I'm sure he has all that information by now. Right, right, right. All right. Well, we have some blockbuster reporting from not only the New York Times,

but CNN as well. It's kind of piggyback reports. And we're going to talk about that, but we're going to take a quick break first. So everybody stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, welcome back. All right, let's get into the latest in the documents case. And some explosive reporting from Caitlin Pollinson, Paula Reed

over at CNN followed up by reporting from Havenman, foyer, protests, Goldman and Schmidt at the times. Yeah. And first of all, the reporting from CNN says that it's time to play this jingle. Sipina. Yeah. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ Matthew Calamari, Jr. Both Calamaris testified Thursday and we learned about this on Thursday, which is a testament to how leak proof the Jack Smith probe is. We talked about that sort of this just wall of cone of silence within this investigation and how judicial watch Tom Fitton tried to get the names of the Jack Smith prosecutors.

So, you know, they could sick the IRS on them for intense audits or whatever. But that, you know, that Jack Smith's like, nope, and then just goes back into his turtle shell and keep prosecuting, keeps investigating. But both of the Calamari's testified Thursday, we learned about it Thursday. Now Calamari, senior, is the executive VP and COO of the Trump org. And he largely oversees security for Trump properties among other things.

And his kid, Calamari, Jr., is the director of security for the Trump org. And the Calamari's, according to this reporting from the Times, are only two of several witnesses that testified on Thursday, but we don't have any info on who else was there that day. And we also know that prosecutors have previously brought in lower-level Trump employees for questioning about the surveillance footage specifically, including Andy, how it may have been handled in response to the subpoena

for it. And if it could have been tampered with. Yeah. That is, there's a lot packed in here. That's really interesting. I'm first, I would say, the fact that they're still bringing in new witnesses. That's a sign of kind of a healthy grand jury investigation, right? You're getting, you're creating new and viable leads from the testimony of

earlier witnesses and that's, we've talked about this before. Grand jury subpoena is typically go out and round after round if you're act and that shows that you're actually making progress and you're getting from one place to another. Secondly, the article also says that some former witnesses have now been brought back and sometimes for very brief testimony. So that could be a sign that despite the productivity of the grand jury, it may be honing in on a result, right? Because you bring back a witness when after they've testified and then you've reviewed their testimony

and then you heard from someone else a lingering question comes up. Some new issue that you didn't have a chance to ask them about the first time has now just been uncovered. And so you need them back to kind of clean up that detail. So that's likely what's happening there. It's narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. You and I first reported in one of the first handful of episodes of the jack podcast that Jack had sent out huge sweeping subpoenas for 13 different things,

including anybody who was at the legislative branch that impeded the electoral count. Anybody who was in the executive branch that impeded the electoral count, documents concerning fundraising, anybody who was a VIP at the rally on 1.6. Anybody who basically had anything to do with anything ever surrounding January 6th,

and that we saw the same with the documents too. And now it's getting narrower, narrower, narrower, narrower. And now we're down to the narrow scope of the surveillance footage that was subpoenaed secondarily to the documents, right? After that, you know, the J. Brat went down to Mar-a-Lago, to on June 3rd and got those 38 documents in a Redwell double tape envelope. Then on June 24th, we got this subpoena for the surveillance footage. And so, I mean, that's pretty huge news. And they go on here to say, seriously,

this New York Times report has like 15 different headlines. There's so many lines. It's so many directions that's going. Now, investigators, according to the New York Times, have previously asked about a text message from Walt Notta, not a good witness, to Kalamari Senior and subsequent conversations about the surveillance footage. And it seems like a lot of this new investigatory processes have been born from the fact that Walt Notta didn't cooperate with the Department of Justice. And so that's kind of how this sort of thing works. And we'll get into that in a little

bit of detail in a minute. But the Times expanded on this particular report about the Nada text message thing, stating the DOJ had previously tried to get Walt Nada to flip. But then he buttoned up, you know, there's a carrot and a stick, right? You can go in with the carrot and say, hey, you're awesome. Tell us the story. Or you can go in with the stick and say, we're going to charge you with something if you don't help us. And they chose the stick and threatened charges against Walt Naughte, which caused him to retreat and lawyer up. And he wouldn't play ball at all. So that that force kind of forces the DOJ to begin investigating him as a target.

And it seems like a lot of this surveillance footage stuff has come out from that, from Nata's unwillingness to assist the DOJ. They may not have found that text message if Nata had cooperated. And that text message if not ahead cooperated. And that text message may have been the thing that led to the Kalamari subpoenas, and then which may have led to the fact

that they found gaps in these tapes. It's, I don't know sort of what order everything went in, but it's really expanded now. And this talk, I wanted to ask you because this happened a lot in the Mueller investigation. There were a lot of people who were very uncooperative, recalcitrant, obstructy, and they wouldn't provide good information. You had to start investigating them, which turned up all these other threads that you

have to follow to their logical conclusions to wrap up. Yeah. That's right. I think the Times article lays it out pretty well, but they leave one reference out that I think would have helped, so that the carrot side of the incentive to get someone to cooperate is, hey, you know, you know a lot, you're important.

And also, if you cooperate fully and tell us the truth about everything we won't charge you, you get basically immunity, right, for being on the government side and helping the case. And then of course, the stick is we're going to investigate you and then we're going to put you in jail. So you better cooperate with us and prevent that. The problem with not is he lied to them the first time they talked to him. So the time doesn't really point that out or draw a lot of attention to that in this article. And that fact that they started out with not deceiving them on the questions he was asking, that damages his ability to ever be a really good witness

later on, because you'd have to bring that out on the stand, that first he lied and then later he told the truth. It also undermines the DOJ's estimation of him, right? So in order to be a full-on cooperator, you've got to be pretty sure that this person is telling you the truth and they're going to continue telling you the truth even about things that could make them look bad. And it sounds like they really didn't probably have a lot of trust in not a right from the beginning and rightfully so if he lied to them. Nevertheless, they ended up going with the stick and investigating the guy. And that is likely what led to the discovery of this text message between he and Calamari senior. So let's step back for one second and think about this issue with the videotape. There are a couple of ways that concerns about how the videotape was handled.

I.e. was a tampered with may have come to light. It could be, let's say some other witness tells you something that they did on a particular day, let's say hypothetically walking down the hallway and going into the room with the boxes of documents. You would then go back and take the tape that you have and look at it to see if you could confirm that because you'd want to prove that the witness had told you the truth. It's a way of corroborating the witness statement. Well, if you went back and looked at the tape and there was no sign of that witness doing

that there, now you have an inconsistency. One of the ways to explain that inconsistency is somebody's gone in and manipulated the tape. So that's a one way that you could become aware of the fact that what was given to you may have been tampered with. Another way is just to have your videofarencics folks, which we have very, very capable video forensics people at Quantico, the FBI does. There are tell, tell tale signs that are left

on a video, whether it's old school tape or actual just DVR, that show where things have been taken out or put back in. It's pretty easy to get to the bottom of that. But in any case, it seems like DOJ has some real concerns here that somebody was playing fast and loose with the videos, which is straight up obstruction. Yeah. And I wanted to, you brought up a great point about who else could have been involved in

this. And there's a tiny, teeny one single sentence thing that didn't really get any air play. That's in this report that says, and I'm quoting here, in interviews recently, the Justice Department has been focused on Walton Aura and the help he received from a Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker in moving the boxes. So there you go, you know, maintenance worker could be very key and I'm sure they are according to this reporting and the sources that they have, that that the DOJ knows about this maintenance worker

and has been asking questions about this maintenance worker. So the amount of news that has come out of this, here's some more headlines, additional blockbuster headlines from the subsequent times reporting. Jack Smith has obtained the confidential cooperation of a person who has worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago. So this is the first cooperator that at least we know about official cooperator. And that's not really, let me caveat that by saying, we don't know if they're an official cooperator. We don't know if they've signed a cooperation deal. And we do know that there have been other folks cooperating

with the Department of Justice, like Cassie Hutchinson, but they, you know, we hadn't heard that they had signed a cooperation agreement. But, and so this may just be one of those, but this is a big deal to have an inside person who worked at Mar-a-Lago to be a cooperator in the documents case. Yeah, very, very big deal. I mean, this is how big cases are made. You get people who have access to the information that you need and good knowledge of what happened

in ability to present it in effective way as a witness. And you get them to officially go on board with the government as a cooperative. Typically, the way that happens is they are facing some sort of potential criminal liability or jeopardy themselves. And so they come in and they're debriefed in what some people call a queen for a day, which I think is both sexist and also doesn't really represent how many days it takes to do this. It takes much more than one day. But in any case, you bring them in and you give them, you put them in what we call a

proffer session where they basically give up everything that they know to the prosecutors in the agents present. And it has to include things that you did wrong, right? You have to expose yourself to the prosecutors in the agents in terms of your criminality. And at the end of all that, you write up this massive memo of everything they did and everything they know. And then you come to an agreement that this co-operator will plead guilty to some minimal charge and at the end of their cooperation, the government will go before the judge and make a recommendation for a downward departure and sentence for whatever it is they plead guilty to.

It's like something like a 35. I can't,, memory is not serving, but the number 35 is involved. Yeah, so it's 5K1 letter, I think, is actually the letter that goes to the judge. 5K1 letter 35 is after the person. Yeah, we think it a rule 35. Rule 35 is after the person's been sentenced. Invicted and then they start cooperating. Yeah, so a little bit different, but same result, you get a big break. after the person's been sent. Convicted and then they start cooperating. So a little bit different, but the same result,

you get a big break and a lot of witnesses, especially white collar type situations like this, will walk away with no jail time or anything like that. Right, nothing, basically you're free. So that's how you, yeah, that's basically the process to become a cooperator. There are other people who just choose to cooperate. They decide they're gonna tell what they know and they haven't done anything wrong. But really, we refer to those people as

witnesses, not co-operators. Right. That feels like Hutchinson, right? Yeah. Exactly. Someone who's just like, I'm, you know, I've had it. I'm just going to say what's up and they haven't actually done anything wrong. So they're not in any jeopardy. Yeah, and the fact that this is worded, like they've obtained confidential cooperation, doesn't necessarily mean that it is a cooperator, like a, like, somebody signed up, correct. Right. They keep saying the article, they have an insider at Marlago who's cooperating.

And that could just mean they have someone who has been a, you been a regular and frequent witness, has provided good information who's actually still working at Mar-a-Lago. And that is very, very valuable. You know, when you have someone who's doing that, you also, and I'm not saying that this is happening in this case, but it would present the opportunity to have that person cooperate what we call proactively. So if you have an insider in the organization, you could say to them, hey, look for this, look for boxes with these sort of markings.

Go into this room and tell us what you find there. Or something as simple as the next time you're there, draw us a map of everything, of what it looks like in the basement or something like that. Or take a picture. One of the witnesses. We need to know what it looks like inside this room. Or we need to know, here's one that I've done many times.

I need to know what the door lock looks like on this door. So go up close to it and take a picture with your cell phone because that's like something that you would do in a very different situation when you were planning some sort of a tactical entry. You want to know what that hardware looks like because there's different ways to get past it. What's much more common is,

hey, here's a little piece of equipment. Next time you see Mark Meadows asking this question and record his answer, that happens a lot. Those are called consensual recordings and they can be very, very powerful pieces of evidence. So I don't know that any of these things are happening, but if you have an insider at Mar-a-Lago, that opens up a world of investigative possibilities. And that's loosely worded here too, that the confidential cooperation of a person

who has worked for Trump at Mara Lago. So again, we don't know who it is, how long they've been cooperating, whether they're still there. But we do know the Justice Department is moving aggressively now to develop a fuller picture of how the documents Trump took with him from the White House were stored, who had access to them, how the security's camera system at Mar-a-Lago works, perhaps somebody could tell you where the cameras are located

in which direction they're pointing, and what Trump told AIDS and his lawyers about what materially had and where it was, and possibly misled them. Now, the cooperating witness, Andy, has said to have provided investigators, just like I said, with a photo of the storage room where the material had been held, which at least seems to indicate that he was still at Mar-a-Lago while cooperating,

unless he just likes to take photos of the inside of storage rooms, you know? Here's my collection of storage room photos. Oh, good. You happen to have one from Marlago. But if I knew something, you know, if I worked at Marlago and I was smart enough to know something was funky and going on, I might snap a few pictures to just have and hold, you know, that I might need at some point later. But, you know, I would say if you're working, anybody who's working someplace with, they

feel like they need to be collecting evidence of possible criminal activity at work, it's time for a new job. It's like go someplace else. Yeah, or go to the FBI and say, you want me to wear a wire? That's it. Prosecutors believe Walt Nottah had failed to provide them

with a full and accurate accounting of his role of movement of boxes containing the classified documents. And it seems as though this part of the investigation here with the surveillance footage is that they're trying to fill in the gaps. And they also say in the past few weeks, at least four more Mara Lago employees have been subpoenaed, along with another person who had visibility into Trump's thinking when he first returned material to the archives.

So that's also of note, because this opens us up to a whole gaggle of people, right? We can talk about who might be this mole and who might not be, but it's potentially so many different people. Now, prosecutors have also issued several subpoenas to the Trump organization seeking additional surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago. That's brand new reporting. It was big news when we heard about the initial subpoena on June 24 for their surveillance tapes. Now, we know there have been subsequent subpoenas to the Trump organization for additional footage.

And prosecutors have questioned a number of witnesses about gaps in the footage. This brings me back to Nixon, my friend. This brings me back to the 18 minutes. All roads lead to Nixon. Don't they? So there's potential gaps in this footage. With that lead prosecutors to Sapina, the software company that handles the surveillance footage for all the properties, Andy.

And this could open the door. Were it not for Walt Nata refusing to cooperate because he's not a good witness as your dad joke says? Now they have surveillance footage for all the properties is no longer fruit of the poison tree. That's right. Yeah, I mean, it's all very logical if you step back and look at it. Obviously, the video has been a big thing from the beginning.

It's what got them really probably over the hurdle for the search warrant last summer. Now they see there's maybe some kind of fougaisy aspects to the video. And so you're going to bring in more witnesses. You're going to expand your scope a little and start talking to people who just have like technical roles at Mar-a-Lago because you want to really nail down here like who has access to the system. How do you work it? How, you know, can you go,

what happens to the tapes after they're, you know, completed, how long are they held for, all that kind of stuff? And of course, if there's an outside contractor involved, that's even better. Because now you're talking about like, you know, Berkeley research or some how to go software. Like, they don't care.

They don't want to be involved in this. You hit them with a subpoena, and you're going to get their view of, you know, you can imagine an offsite contractor who's managing the digital video recorder system. There are logs that, you know, computers create logs every time a commands are input and data is downloaded or changed.

There are logs that indicate exactly what happened when from what user and what system. Yeah, and there's brilliant analysts at the FBI who can track these keystrokes and follow the trail about what happened. And we also know that Molly Michael from previous reporting has been able to provide through her text messages a pretty good timeline of events that sort of helped prosecutors drill down on this. And you know, keep in mind too, prosecutors got to question Evan Corcoran about his phone call with Trump on June 24th, which is the day of the initial Department of Justice

Sabina for the surveillance footage. And they got that testimony using the crime fraud exception to attorney client privilege. So that's all call all of a sudden becomes a lot more important because you and I had talked about this previously. It could have just been quarker and picking up the phone and saying, Trump, we got a subpoena for our stuff. All right, go do the thing.

Now, especially since that testimony had to come pursuant to the application of the crime fraud exception from a federal judge, it makes that phone call a lot more interesting. And I'm really, really very interested about how, tell me, the evidence question for you. If I have to go and subvene a surveillance footage from an organization about something that happened in one location, and that surveillance footage is all together for all the locations. Am I now allowed to look at that other surveillance footage

at Bedminster and Sterling and Trump Tower and everything else, or do I have to sequester that that because it's not at the location that I'm having a question about. And does that tie into this next little bit of news that there are subpoenas to the Trump organization about records pertaining to Trump's dealing with the professional golf venture known as live golf Which is the you know the Saudi-backed venture that Has been happening at Trump golf courses and the PGA has been it's been a thing and got in the golf world

I'm not really I don't really follow the golf world too much But there were people who were like I'm gonna be team live team live and I'm going to stay team PGA and, you know, all this other stuff. But this is a Saudi-backed venture. And for some reason, Jack Smith is looking into it. And what does that have to do with the documents case, you know? I mean, it's really hard to put that piece on the, on the, into the puzzle just yet. That's, it's so kind of out of left field. So to answer your question about the subpoena, you know, if it were a search warrant, the answer would probably be no.

You have to stay within the four corners of the warrant and you can only review that material that was specifically requested and described in the warrant. But subpoenas are a little different. The standard for a subpoena is just simple relevance, right? You can, if you have an investigation going, you can serve a grand jury subpoena. And as long as the subpoena is not overly broad, and as long as it is designed to reasonably target material that could potentially be relevant in the investigation, then it's fair game. So because if I were a defense attorney, I would buy would buy would do the fruit of the

fruit of the poisonous tree argument like, Hey, you were investigating a document movement surveillance at Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden now you have video footage of MBS at Bedminster, burying documents in Ivana's grave. I'm kidding. But, you know, whatever else comes out of it that isn't sort of, like you said, within the four corners of that search warrant. But I'm wondering now if we're not going to be able to, if we're not, not be able to, but if we're going to see potential searches of other properties based on surveillance footage. That's where I was heading, like not knowing exactly how this live golf angle features in the narrative here. You can't rule out the idea that other locations, and therefore the video surveillance of those locations might be relevant.

So it's just hard to say, I can't imagine how you get there right now because I really don't understand the live golf thing, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out. Like I think it's possible. Obviously, Jack Smith and his team know a lot more than we do about the facts and what they're dealing with and where they're going, where they think they need to go. So really, we're still in that moment where anything could be possible. Well, everybody thought I was crazy when I made a big deal about that secret meeting, that little golf without the golf thing that Trump held on his sterling course in Virginia, where he met with folks about the live golf tournament in Epstein and Mike Roman were there.

And I was like, what's going on here? How many of these guys have been subpoenaed? What are they talking about? I was like, you're crazy, you're crazy. But it makes that meeting a little more interesting because that involved the live tournament. And, you know, I just watched Mary McCord speculate on Deadline White House,

and this is pure speculation. But she says, you know, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Donald may have used some of his classified documents. He didn't want to give some of them back in order to maybe blackmail the Saudis into investing in his golf tournament or at least holding them at his properties, or that he was meeting with the Saudis about some of the information he had because he did mention that he was meeting with the Saudis about some of the information he had because he did mention that Nixon could have made $18 million off of his tapes, which also had gaps.

But it's very... Gaby tapes. Gaby tapes. It's just interesting. I feel like that should be a band's name. Gaby tapes. But all right, maybe not. It's just interesting that that the live tournament came up in just this one

rando non-secret or paragraph. And I'm like, Oh, what? That should be a whole separate story, you guys, but there were just so many headlines in this thing. I agree. And I like Mary's comment about focusing on what Trump may or may not have done with the classified information that we know he had because that kind of takes us to the other side of the story, right? We've been focused so much on who moved the boxes when and what are the videos show of the boxes moving around all that kind of stuff. It's important. But let's if forces you to remember like there is a question here and there have been allegations in public reporting recently that he was showing documents and showing maps and things to guests at Mar-a-Lago. So if they've developed that line of inquiry

and they have some reason to believe that someone associated with the live golf organization, whether that's political figures, whatever, connected to the royal family and Saudi events, Saudi Arabia, or not, those people were at Mar-a-Lago. It's not unreasonable that you would subpoena live golf to get those individuals to testify about what they had seen or what they had been shown. So it's kind of an interesting prospect.

It is completely speculative at this point kind of an interesting prospect that is completely speculative at this point, but an interesting one, nevertheless. Yeah. And if there's other side things involved here with the Saudis that don't have to do with the documents case, those can be pursued separately, that you really don't have to wait for those to follow the end of the road of investigation to bring charges in the documents case. But it's still all well within the scope. A couple other things here, this is such a big show because there's so much news. Corkren, according to this reporting, Corkren testified that several Trump employees told him the Mar-a-Lago storage room was the only place where the documents were kept.

Corcoran also recounted to the grand jury how Trump did not tell his lawyers of any other locations where documents were stored, which may have effectively misled the legal team. Also, in interviews recently, the Justice Department has been focused on Walt Naughta. We said, and that mate, Nens man, that was an interesting tidbit again. They've asked multiple people questions about the moving boxes, as well as questions about the security cameras, what they did and did not capture, so that they, presumably, so they compare it to what they got pursuant to the subpoena, what's missing, and that's why I believe that they're able to tell that there are gaps there. Specifically, the last question is about whether Nato was walking to or from the residence on the property according to a person, briefed on the matter.

And a lot of this part of the a lot of this part of the investigation, like I said, because they weren't able to get Nato's cooperation. But Mike Schmidt told Nicole Wallace, he thinks the DOJ, using the stick instead of the carrot, backfireed on Jack Smith because it failed to get Nada's cooperation. But I don't see it that way. Mary McCord also said, Jack wouldn't indict the documents case on the cooperation of Walton Nada. Right?

No. It's certainly not when Aura started out his interaction with the government by lying about what he knew. I mean, I don't think they would rest the whole thing on that. And I'm sure I'm sure that when they went in with the stick instead of the carrot, they were like, hey, if he doesn't take the bait, we can just investigate them and get all this stuff and get all the surveillance tapes and get all the everything.

If he does, I mean, and honestly, a lot of times when you get a property, when you see, don't get as much information as you would as if you're full on investigating them. So, you know, I don't know that I agree with that characterization of the DOJ made a mistake, but it was too early to tell. And they also say in the article that NADA's attorneys have now cut off all communication

with DOJ, it's not a bad play on NADA's part, to be honest. He's paying them. Yeah, and I mean, that's also made me think that the meter just ran out. He neglected to put another quarter in, but he knows they're interested in him. He knows they want his testimony. He's not really fully on board yet. So he's gonna let it hang out there a little bit and see what happens.

If he ends up in trouble, IE, he gets indicted. I'm fairly confident he'll take another strike at cooperating, and that's just how that's the cat and mouse game. Is that kind of how it goes? It's like, oh yeah, go ahead and I dare you. And then they indict you and you go, okay. Put up a shut up.

What do you got? Oh, here's what I got. I got a 16 count indictment. Okay, let's sit down. Right, because they may have, they may have only presented him with an indictment like a 1,000 one charge when he lied to him. And now they might come back with obstruction of justice, which is a 20 year max charge

on the 1519 count. So, or at least five years, if you're looking at regular obstruction of justice, and that might be a little more persuasive. The problem though, it's a dicey game for a misdeed to play, because by the time he gets indicted, other people have been as well. Many additional witnesses have been into the grand jury. You've gone out and subpoenaed every other resort and the level of God people cooperate early and often.

That's right. Because the first guy gets the best deal. That's right. And Jack Smith might go, oh, no, cooperate, cooperate. No, we don't, we don't need you anymore. Don't need to know, man. You made us go for three more months on this fucking investigation to get all of this information. And now we have enough to nail you to the wall. You had your go for three more months on this fucking investigation to get all of

this information. And now we have enough to nail you to the wall. You had your chance. You missed it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, everybody's trying to sus everybody else out and see, you see what hand are they playing and how late can you go in the game? Yeah. He still works for Trump. He still travels with him. So he's clearly not decided, okay, I gotta get on the side of Team America here. Maybe they got his mom. Remember they were talking to somebody like Walt not his mom had something to say

about the whole thing. This is not a, and who knows the cooperator is? It could be the maintenance worker. Could be Evan Corcoran. Could be Molly Michael. Could be one of the dozens of other staffers that worked there. It could be, you know, we don't know who it is.

I'm excited to learn and I'm sure we might. But all this reporting, Andy, also speaks to the broad scope of Jack's misinvestigation. It started with January 6th, documents, and obstruction of either of those. Now it's grown to include the super PACs, what we know, wire fraud, and the payment of witness lawyers. We have additional obstruction with possible evidence tampering with the super PACs, we're in a wire fraud and the payment of witness lawyers. We have additional obstruction with possible evidence tampering with the surveillance tapes. And now we've got the live golf tournament wrapped up

in here, which could lead to other Saudi investments in the Trump family, including Kushner. I mean, who knows where this will go, but this isn't the Mueller investigation. This isn't Rod Rosenstein saying, you can investigate these two things and only these six things about the first thing and only these three things about the second thing. And meanwhile, talking to Trump saying, don't worry, I'll land the plane and just continue

into narrow the scope, which was one of the obstruction charges in volume two was the trying to narrow the scope of the Mueller investigation. And he's not walking around, um, you know, on, on a knife's edge, wondering if he's going to be fired by Merrick Garland. So that's right. Garland's basically said, have at it and let me know when you're done. And it's clearly they are having at it. This is a wide ranging, aggressive, forward leaning investigation. You know, I'm honestly the biggest enemy right now is the clock. At some point, he's going to have to decide what to do early enough on in the game that he can actually do it without getting all ballac stuff in DOJ policy.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. We have a little bit more news to get to. I know you think that's the end of the show because we've been talking it to you for an hour, but no, we do have a little bit more to get to, but we have to take a quick break. Stick around. All right, everybody. Welcome back. We now have testimony from a fourth member of the Ocha Nostra. That's half.

Quattranostra have testified. And this is... And this is... And beat me to it. You absolutely beat me. I was like, what's it? You're going Quattranostra. Quattranostra, yeah.

All right, and this is Dan Scavino. One Dan Scavino. So as you know, the Ocha Nostra is our name. Thank you, Aaron, who named the Ocho Nostra is our name. Thank you, Aaron, who named the Ocho Nostra. Eight people, Meadows, Steven Miller, Dan Skovino, John Ratcliffe, Robert O'Brien, Nick Luna, Johnny McIntee, and Ken Kuchinelli. There you go. And four have now. The testimony here is pursuant to former chief judge, Barrel Howell, rejecting Donald Trump's attempts to block all their testimony using executive privilege. The appellate court denied Trump's appeal and would not issue a stay. And Kuchenelli was brought in

that afternoon. Get him out of your hot. Get him in quick. And so we know that Miller, Kuchenelli and Ratcliffe had already testified. And this week is Dan Skivino's turn. Skivino was held in contempt with Navarro and referred to the Department of Justice, but the Department of Justice only went after Navarro. They did not. Right. Held in contempt of Congress. Contempt of Congress. They decided to not prosecute criminal contempt for Dan Scovino. Scovino helped spread false claims of voter fraud.

He might know what went into those fundraising emails. I don't know, but he was very big on the voter fraud thing. And the big lie. He also has information about discussions with Trump on January 5th about convincing members of Congress not to certify the election. And he has info about Trump's movements on January 6th because it's very important, you know,

that had he wanted to go to the Capitol and now, you know, we just got the seditious conspiracy convictions of the proud boys and Tariots, specifically who wasn't anywhere near the Capitol. He was in Baltimore that day, so that's, I think, of note Trump's movements on January 6th, because if he wanted to go

to the Capitol, that could show what his intent was. And info about the White House communication strategy leading up to the attack on the Capitol. So that's what's going on there. And then we also have some other news from CNN, right? That's right. So we also learned this week from CNN's Caitlin Pollance and Jamie Gangell, that special

council, Jack Smith sat in on the federal grand jury proceeding while former vice president Mike Pence testified for more than five hours last week. So while they are apparently Smith and Pence had some interaction while Pence was at the courthouse, which makes sense. And one source described the interaction as respectful. Smith's appearance is the first known time the special counsel has attended a grand jury proceeding in the investigation, which is also I would expect that to be the case. So what about that, Andy, because if that's the first time, I don't know if that's the first time, but talk to me about Smith's participation, did Mueller go into the federal

grand jury at all, or did he just have the line prosecutors do it? Why do you think Jack Smith himself wanted to be there? Is it because the gravity of having a former vice president there? I mean, what, what are you, what you're taking? Well, it was certainly intentional, right? It's not like, oh, I had the hour I figured I'd go over there. And do you wear his purple robe and just- I hope so.

I hope he went full jack style. I'm gonna think about Don and that look for myself, just motoring around the house, but anyway. I'm gonna say if I can get some hagg robes for years, just I'll need some help with the beard. I need mine would be like white. I look like I look more like David Letterman than Jack Smith. That's okay.

Okay, sorry for the distracted. So, Mueller did not go. Mueller, which also was not surprising, Mueller was an incredibly hands-on leader and wanted to know exactly what was going on at all times. And once you told him what was going on, he'd ask you a lot of questions and then make it very clear to you what he wanted your next steps to be. But he was not the kind of guy that would actually go do it, right?

I think Mueller had more of a Almost more of a military Respect for chain of authority like he's not gonna reach down and start doing the job of the guy beneath him Jack Smith is at a different place in his career than Mueller was when Mueller was special counsel You know Mueller had been FBI director for 12 years You know certainly a distinguished prosecutor in his own past homicide prosecutor in the DC district kind of notably, but it had been a long time since Mueller had ever gone

into a grand jury, it doesn't surprise me that he didn't go. Nothing wrong with not going. He had unbelievably accomplished people to do that work for him. Jack Smith does also, he's got very serious prosecutors who's spent a lot of time in grand juries, not like he needs to go in there to supervise what these folks are doing. He went in for some reason. He was either sending a message to Mike Pence about the seriousness of this testimony and how kind of, you know, once in a lifetime it was, is not every day that the vice president,

former VP comes into testify against his old boss. Or he was possibly sending a message to the public. Like, this is my hand on the tiller. I'm making these calls. I am watching the progress of this very closely. And either way, I think the message, that's the message I got from hearing that he was in there. I think it's kind of a bold move.

I like it. I think it's a good look for him. It's great for his team because it really shows him as a guy is, you know, leads from the front and gives them supports them and what they're doing. Doesn't leave them hanging out there to deal with the former number two country. Right.

I'm drilling to do this work too with you down in the weeds. And then here, I, and maybe he passed out hagg robes to all of his team. I hope you're great. So I'm sorry. I'm stuck on the robes. But this is, I don't mean to make light of this because this is a very serious situation. And I think that's an evidence to buy his presence during the testimony of the former vice president.

Yeah, and I'd like to say something about the respectful interaction real quick and why I'm not surprised by that at all. So to throw back to a little reference from my time is in the Bureau. So I was at the White House one day for a meeting and I was leaving and I got a call from the White House oddly enough, I was sitting in my car right outside the West Wing and I was

being summoned to the Vice President's office about what I had no idea. Turns out this was right around the beginning of the whole Mike Flynn debacle. And right around the time that we discovered this evidence, I'll say, about Mike Flynn's conversations. Having lied to Mike Pence, right? Right. Right. So your deputy director at that time. That's correct. Yeah. So I go to the vice president's office and he's in there, along with a few other folks, Don McGann and others. And basically, long story short, they wanted to see the actual evidence itself that proved conclusively that Mike Flynn had lied to the vice president and as it turns out, other people

about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. So I had someone get that evidence and bring it back to the White House for me. And I sat with him in a room in the sit room, one of the conference rooms downstairs, because it was confidential or classified information that we were looking at, so we had to go down to the sit room. And he read it and the conclusion is not,

is it's really, I'm sure it was uncomfortable for him. It was clear that he was frustrated with what he was reading, you know, confronting the fact that he'd been lied to by the National Security Advisor. And he was pretty frustrated, but the entire time he conducted himself like a gentleman. And I give him credit to that to this day. He sat there, he didn't pitch a fit, he was respectful and courteous, and as he got up to leave the room, and this guy just like had some really bad news laid on him,

he stopped to look at me, thanked me for my service, and for helping him out, showing him what he needed to see, and then he left the room. And I thought, you know what, that was uncomfortable as hell, but Mike Pence, a pretty respectful guy, you know, himself like a gentleman. So I would expect that he did the same thing in the grand jury with Jack Smith. Uncomfortable, don't want to be here, fought it, lost, kind of won a little bit, but really pretty much lost, had to be here. But nevertheless, he probably put a smile on his face and shook hands and, you know,

exchange for the choice. He's also not a target here, you know. Yeah. So it's, I mean, if nobody ever wants to go, test five or grand, you know, but he's not a target. And this could potentially, whatever comes out of this, actually help his campaign for president if he decides to run. You could help it or kill it.

So who knows? Like, it's a, that one's up in the air. It could make Trump even less electable. Let's just say that. There you go. There you go. There you go. You know, steps up and fills that gap. If anyone can do it, I don't think putting fingers can. Everybody else is just pulling so dismoly. And yeah, anyway, I would expect the same thing.

Just a fascinating amount of news this week, my friend, and I hate to speculate what'll happen next week, but I'm sure it'll be even more. So before we go, let's get to one of our listener questions. Again, if you have a question for either me or Andy, or both of us, you can send it to us at helloatmullersherote.com and just put Jack in the subject line. Andy, who do we have this week?

All right, this week we have Michael, and Michael just gave us a really long question, which I'm gonna edit significantly here. Sorry, Michael, that's what happens in the big time media world. Redacted, redacted, redacted. What happened? Oh.

You just redacted a bunch of his question. You got really serious for some reason. I know, I'm like, oh my god, did I just step on it? Did I just leak classified onto the Jack podcast? I don't think I did, though, for the record. I don't think I did. And if I did, it was mine. It's all mine.

I get to keep it anyway. You can classify anything you want. You were the head of yet. That's right. I thought it. So it happened. Okay. Michael says, is it reasonable to believe or expect that the DOJ, maybe Fannie Willis in

Georgia and anyone else investigating Trump are thinking about him as a potential flight risk He has autocratic friends around the world his own airplane and the means to get out of the country Okay, so That's a really good question and flight risk is relevant short answer is but not right now There's really nothing that any of those investigators can do at this point in their investigations. Trump has not been charged with anything in Georgia or federally yet. And so he can move around as much as he wants. The New York case is a little bit different. They don't do pre-trial detention in New York anymore on flight risk grounds. So it's kind of not relevant up there.

But if Trump is charged in, let's say in a federal case, in federal cases, you get bail, the argument to get bail, the government, if they want to deny you bail, which means you get held in jail until your trial, it comes down to two things. One is danger to the community and the other is risk of flight. In this case, if Trump is indicted, federally, there's really no argument for danger to the community. He's not, he's got no prior offenses, no violence in his past, anything like that. The only thing I could think of is something that Pete brought up with respect to the Jack Tashera investigation who is being held in pre-trial release, not only because he's a physical, violent risk to the public,

but I'll, you know, I'll, and that's, that was his thing, but Pete said, you know, also if he has been perhaps leaking classified information that could endanger the lives of sources, human sources or something like that, then that could potentially be it. But that's a big, big, long shot. I don't know, you know better than me about that.

It's a bit of a long shot. Now, you know, you've got, you've got some things to consider on the danger to the community side for him, just because of all the weapons and everything else and his statements about engaging in mass killings and things like that. Oh, Jack, yeah, Jack to share. Jack to share.

Yeah. On the other hand, you know, he also had, we don't, it seems like the government doesn't really have a good sense of how much he actually took and where it is and where he put it. And it also seems like he's not quite, you know, fully cooperating at this point. So yeah, I think there's an argument to be made there

in the to share case, not so much in the Trump case on, certainly on danger to the community. Risk of flight, you could make an argument there because of the plane, because of his ability to go anywhere in the world, because of his money, he can take, you know, he has the ability to get to where he wants to be. You can answer some of those questions by seizing his passport. You could also let him stay on, you know, home confinement, which I can't imagine that ever happening to someone who's currently running for the presidency.

So I don't think there's much there. The bottom line is if you really worried that any showed up to all of his other stuff. Yeah, he's never, he hasn't failed to show up yet. If you're investigating someone and you're really worried about them leaving the jurisdiction and therefore never getting to complete your investigation with an indictment and arrest. The answer is hurry up.

Get it done while they're here. You got that. That's why you sometimes, that's why you bring a case down a little bit before you had planned because you got to get it done before somebody runs away. I'm not saying that Trump would do that. I think if you were a flight risk or anything like that, we might have seen an arrest or if he had some sort of evidence that

could be destroyed. I mean, we saw this happen quite a bit with some of the folks in the Mueller investigation, the Roger Stone. They went and they got them because there was evidence about to be destroyed and you could probably get that arrest warrant. But again, yeah, I don't think he's a flight risk. And what can they actually, if he does, let's say, flee to a country with no extradition treaty, can he be tried an absentia? Do we do that here? No, we don't on criminal cases. But if he

did flee, there'd be an outstanding warrant for his arrest as a, as a, um, an interpol red notice or whatever. Yeah, yeah. You put a, you put the, you would take your, um, the indictment and you would have it, you would, um, log it with interpol, put out a red notice. You wouldn't be able to travel anywhere that has extradition with the United States for fear of getting arrested overseas and then extradited back. So you basically have to stay out of here forever, which is a result in and of itself. I, you know, it seems like a win-win. We got it in a diamond. I'm not trying to minimize the buy. And he'll never be back here. Yeah. You can't run for president from Russia. I know that. No, no, I don't think you could do that. That would be hard.

So anyway, thank you for the question. Yeah, Wacom. Great question, Wacom. Yeah, big week this week. Thanks for hanging in there with us, we've gone a little bit long today, but think it was well worth it. Yeah, there was just too much news. And we will all see you all next week. Also, the daily beans will be back on Monday.

I've been on hiatus for the last week, and I know that a lot of people are wanting to get the daily news back in their ears, so you can tune in to the Daily Beans on Monday. And I appreciate you, Andy. Thank you for answering all my questions. And that was a really, really interesting story about Mike Pence. So thanks for sharing that too.

Yeah, sure. Happy to do it. Thanks everyone. See you next week. I am your host, Andrew McCabe. And I am your other host, Alison Gill. We'll see you next time.