did you get a meeting with the attorney general we don't have any comment did the Attorney General say why they wouldn't meet with you did you meet with Lisa Monaco we don't have any comment we don't have any comments please part so we can go to our waiting taxi cab uh that was all we got today from lawyers for Donald Trump as they left a meeting of some sort at the U.S Department of Justice in Washington D.C you might remember two weeks ago the Trump legal team publicly asked for a meeting with
attorney general Merrick Garland um lawyers for the former president said he was being treated unfairly by the special counsel who's looking into Trump's handling of of presidential records including classified documents the FBI reported finding those documents in a search of Mar-A-Lago last year while the Trump lawyers today did not get the meeting they wanted with the attorney general or with the deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco they did meet with a group of Justice Department officials th
at included at least one career prosecutor and that also included the special counsel himself Jack Smith moments after that meeting let out the former president himself posted a shouty barely literate misspelled message in all capital letters on social media that said in part how could the justice department possibly charge me who did nothing wrong when no other presidents misspelled were charged he used to channel more of his excitement into exclamation points I think now it all just goes into
capital letters I think pretty soon he's just gonna be emojis you know poo poo volcano hammer grand jury in DC is expected to come back this week from a sort of break that they've been on they're supposed to start in again on the Mar-A-Lago documents case we don't know what that means in terms of the overall trajectory of the case there's lots of speculation but we will not know about what's happening before the grand jury until the grand jury speaks also another Federal grand jury is meeting in
Florida on something related to Trump we don't know what the New York Times reports tonight that Federal prosecutors there are expected to question a new witness before that Florida Federal grand jury this week again we don't know what's going on before that grand jury until the grand jury speaks almost always only with an indictment if they are going to speak at all right on time Bloomberg news reports tonight that Trump is looking to add new lawyers to his already large legal team specificall
y looking for lawyers with federal trial experience which if nothing else means they are planning ahead for a potential federal trial it's not your typical start to a Republican presidential primary but as Donald Rumsfeld might say you go to war with the politicians you have not with the politicians you might wish to have joining us now is Brandon van grack he's a former National Security official at the Department of Justice former prosecutor and special counsel Robert Mueller's team Mr van gra
ck thank you very much for joining us here tonight I'm really looking forward to speaking with you about this it's my pleasure so um the grand jury only lets us know what they're doing when an indictment is filed on the basis of the evidence that they have collected it is a secretive process that is not stopping everybody and their sister from speculating as to what the various publicly visible actions around Grand Jury rooms and courtrooms and Justice Department headquarters might mean do you f
eel like the Tea Leaf reading that's going on around these actions is accurate given what you know about the federal investigative process yeah I think the tea leaves are accurate that we're going to see a charging document very soon that's indicative of the fact that the former president's attorneys requested a meeting with the Department of Justice to try to convince them to not uh bring charges and his the former president's attorneys have more more tea leaves more signals than we do and so I
think it's just further evidence of the fact that that it's it's going to be coming down soon I feel like a lot was made today over the fact that President Trump's attorneys had asked to meet with the attorney general they did not meet with the Attorney General on the one hand that means that they didn't get the direct thing they were requesting on the other hand it sort of seems correct given that what they are complaining about is the special counsel's investigation and by the very nature of
a special counsel appointment that investigation is supposed to be separate from the regular everyday work of the department and the Attorney General isn't supposed to be directly overseeing it is that is that fair that's right I wouldn't read anything into the fact that the Attorney General didn't take that meeting it's not uncommon at the end of an investigation for the Department of Justice to offer a defendant's attorneys the opportunity to convince the decision maker often the U.S attorney
for a district the uh an argument as to why they shouldn't be charged and that's all that happened here ultimately the special counsel is the decision maker uh and and the decision hasn't been made yet in terms of what the Federal grand jury process is here and at what state it's at um it seems like there's a few different sort of slices of this to look at one is the Federal grand jury that's meeting in Washington looking at the handling of classified documents the stuff that was seized at Mar-A
-Lago based on the the remit that special counsel Jack Smith was assigned we believe that there is also a federal investigation at some stage that is looking at matters about the president former president trying to overturn the election results and how that might have contributed to January 6th now we're also hearing that there is a Federal grand jury that is at work in Florida it would seem that that's related to the classified documents invested part of this investigation but I get it it's it
feels very opaque it feels hard to parse from the outside what do you make in terms of what do you make of what's what's publicly known about what special excuse me what grand juries are meeting where and what they're looking at yeah yeah I mean a couple things which is one is we need to be careful about over interpreting uh what what piece of information that we get I think in terms of Florida it does seem just the fact that we're talking about Florida very likely connected to Mar-A-Lago and I
think there there are perhaps three possibilities one is it's possible the Mar-A-Lago case could be charged in Florida there would be venue there would be the ability to bring those charges there I would still speculate it's more likely to see those charges in DC um the second is that uh special counsel um just simply wanted to obtain the testimony of an individual in Florida and for convenience purposes chose to get that testimony in Florida one grand jury testimony can presented to another gr
and jury and the third possibilities there are other charges there may be other individuals who may be charged and perhaps Florida is the appropriate venue to charge those individuals from a prosecutor's perspective is there a disadvantage to having related indictments bought brought in multiple jurisdictions if there was going to be a DC indictment and a Florida indictment for that matter is there an advantage to being bringing your indictment in DC versus bringing it in Florida well uh a few p
ieces which is it's certain there there certainly would be a preference to bring like charges combined into one but but I think in fact it gets to one of your other points as well in terms of reading the tea leaves which is time is of the essence uh the Department of Justice it's incumbent on them to try this case if they're going to be charges probably before March and whenever the every week that goes by it makes that increasingly challenging to bring one of these cases involving the Espionage
acting classified information in seven to eight months that's very challenging and so every week that goes by I think it makes it increasingly difficult to meet that goal Brandon van grack very helpful perspective on that thanks for making time to join us tonight it's good to have you here thank you [Music]
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