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Hello, and welcome to a breaking news edition of Prosecuting Donald Trump. I'm Andrew Weissman. I'm here with Mary McCord. Good morning, Andrew. Hi, Mary. So once again, this is my standard mantra. I'm telling you that I'm a little groggy. I was up
very, very late last night and then again up on Morning Joe. And of course, because there was an indictment, what part of the world are you in, Mary? Because I assume that you timed this so that you would be on vacation or maybe there's a cause and effect going on.
Yeah, I am on Eastern time. Let's just say I'm on Eastern time, but I'm not at home. And this is three out of four indictments that have hit at some point when I'm traveling. No, I do not constantly vacation. I had not vacationed for a full year and had three short trips. And these happen to happen on each of the three short trips. Okay, it's emphasis on short. Yes, yes. I mean, one was just a couple of extra days tacked onto a business trip. So there.
Okay, this is starting to sound very defensive. Just note to self. Actually, yesterday on air, no one really expected this to happen. At night. At night, or even yesterday, people were sort of thinking it was going to be Tuesday, not Monday that this happened. So I was heading back from a weekend with my sister, and I was racing in, Nicole was coming in, like everyone was sort of like regrouping. But anyway, that gives you a little bit of a sense of what we're going to talk about, which is
The Georgia indictment, there was a stunning set of charges handed down last night. Fannie Willis gave a press conference. It seems like in the middle of the night, we were all up on air watching it, quickly reading the indictment. Those charges accused Donald Trump and 18, count them, 18 other people of being part of a criminal enterprise to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
And it's a sprawling indictment. That's the core charge, but there are many other charges. Remarkably, Mary, the Fulton County case
that Fannie Willis has brought to the grand jury and they voted, brings the total number of felony charges against the former president of the United States for crimes he has now been alleged to have committed before, during, and after
his presidency to 91 counts. 91. Staggering. And many of those could lead to
jail time and some quite significant jail time. And people who have been charged, for instance, with obstruction of Congress have actually already been tried, convicted and sentenced to significant jail time. Now, the indictment that was unsealed is over 90 pages. And for those people who like to take in their information orally, once again,
what we are doing is having Ali Velshi. Couldn't think of a better person to do it. I love just listening to his voice. He is going to read the indictment, and we expect that to be coming out in two separate chunks, one tonight and one tomorrow. So, Mary...
I can't believe we get to talk about something again that you and I have not had a chance to talk about. But I do think it really kind of is great. And again, we're still looking for the thing that we disagree on. It will be interesting to see if if
Today's the day. Sometimes it's nuanced. Sometimes we disagree a little. But, you know, big picture are pretty much on the same page. And in addition, of course, to obviously talking about the big picture of this indictment, we will get into who else was charged, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, whether any of them might decide they want to cooperate or, as we say in prosecutor parlance, flip.
That's also a term that Donald Trump uses quite a bit himself. I think he uses the phrase rat. Oh, yes. Rat. That's right. He doesn't say flip. He says rat. And we'll talk about what we can expect over the next 10 days or so as the defendants are
come turn themselves in. Because one of the things that Fannie Willis announced last night when she gave her press conference about these charges is that everyone would have until August the 25th to voluntarily surrender. So people are not going to be having the marshals showing up at their house and getting arrested or the sheriff. So, yeah.
Mary, let's take it away. Let's start with what was your sort of big picture takeaways from reading this? So I have two sort of overall thematic reactions to it, and they can each be described in one word, and then I'll give a little bit more detail. One is deterrence.
and one is federalism. And here's what I mean by that. On the first, this is the first indictment that we've seen of the four indictments of Mr. Trump that really includes a significant number of others who were involved in this overarching scheme. The federal indictment surrounding January 6th and the
lead up to January 6th charges only Mr. Trump, although it does very prominently include six other unindicted co-conspirators and what they all did. And I do expect that there will be federal charges coming for those six unindicted conspirators. But otherwise, you know, we have a couple of, you know, valets charged with Mr. Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case.
And we have Mr. Trump alone in the Manhattan case. So this is the first case by charging 18 other people at multiple levels of the scheme. I think this is so important. We've got people, you know, Mark Meadows, the former president's chief of staff, Rudy Giuliani, and a bunch of the other lawyers, frankly, who are not named but are referred to as unindicted co-conspirators in the Jack Smith, January 6th. You've got a bunch of those people. But then you also have
State level, three of the fraudulent electors themselves, county officials. Then you've got a group of people who frankly were part of what seems like a shakedown operation to try to intimidate and threaten and harass election officials, including Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss.
So we have people who are charged here at multiple layers of this multi-pronged scheme. And one of the things that's so important about that is it tells a complete story. And when people listen to Ali Velshi read the indictment or when they read it for themselves, they'll see in the many, many, many, well over 100 overt acts toward the RICO conspiracy, they'll see sort of like
detail by detail, different facets of the scheme, but they'll also see how far this reaches. And why is that important? That's important to me because I think it's the first real effort to hold multiple people accountable for the scheme in a way that could really deter people in the future from signing on to whatever Mr. Trump might want them to sign on to. You know, he's still
talking about fraud in the 2020 election. He's already basically talking about 2024. They're going to try to steal it. And, you know, I think it's important for people to know if you hit your wagon to these lies, there will be accountability.
So I think that's so interesting. Obviously, we've seen that with respect to the so-called foot soldiers in D.C., where there's scores and scores of people where there is just that deterrence. And just to relate that to the takeaway that the Enron Task Force prosecutors had when we were to relate it to a really different set of cases. But when we were doing that case,
The big takeaway we all talked about was that case was not about Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and Andy Fasta, the leaders of Enron. They're always going to be leaders who engage in fraud. That's going to happen, and there needs to be systems to try and thwart it and prevent it. But that wasn't what that case was about. The case was really about the problem of the enablers, the people who participated or didn't speak up
who let this go on. And that was her constant mantra, that the systemic issue here is so much enabling. And as soon as you said that, Mary, it just struck such a nerve. I think that's totally right that, you know, the big difference here is that in Jack Smith's case, they're unindemnified.
indicted co-conspirators. And here, they're indicted conspirators. Now, that's not a knock on Jack Smith. He was doing that purposely. And I totally agree with you that there are going to be those charges against those people eventually. I don't think it'll be, as we've talked about, a superseding indictment because I don't think he wants to slow up that case. But I think that's just such a great, big
picture and I hadn't thought of it that way. So this is so great. I'm learning with you and from you. Well, it's interesting because it's related to my second big overall point, which is federalism, which is and this is something Fannie Willis emphasized, although I don't think she used that verbiage, but
Our constitutional system is a system of a federal government and state governments. And state and local governments are responsible for administering elections in this country, including presidential elections. They are not administered, you know, under one scheme. Thank goodness, because that would make it easier to be, you know, tampered with or interfered with by foreign adversaries as well as domestic adversaries. I mean, it's actually very important to the security of elections that they be protected.
you know, separately administered by all of our different county, local officials and states. But at any rate, that means that states have an interest in vindicating violations of state law related to elections as well as other things. But I think a particular interest when we're talking about elections, their entire system, and you see it at every facet of this indictment, you see that this
scheme involved people making false statements to state legislators during state legislative hearings, false statements to solicit state officials to violate their oaths of office, organizing a false elector scheme involving the presidential electors in Georgia who were responsible for meeting on December 14th to actually cast their electoral college ballots. And you can only legally do that if the
candidate you represent won, and Mr. Trump did not win there. Intimidation of local level election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss. These are unique, unique
you know, state interest. Now, it goes beyond that, too. It includes solicitation of U.S. Department of Justice officials to try to get them to make false statements. Again, here's the state interest to local election officials, right, that we have evidence of significant fraud in your election and we think you need to redo it.
So drawing on federal officials to pressure local officials, solicitation of the vice president to accept the votes of the fraudulent slate of electors. And then, of course, the breach of the electoral equipment in Coffey County in an effort after the fact to try to find some sort of evidence of fraud.
And finally, the last aspect that was noted in the indictment of the scheme is then literally obstruction, right? Making false statements to investigators, perjury, etc. So these are uniquely state interests. And to the extent that anyone is thinking, oh, why did we need this?
indictment in Georgia when Jack Smith already brought an indictment about this bigger scheme. Well, it's because Georgia has its own interest, and that's totally consistent with our system of federalism. We have federal interests, we have state interests. And so I think it's entirely reasonable for the district attorney to seek this. And I do think it provides a lot more detail, like a lot of what was in the Jack Smith indictment
we'd heard about or knew about either through the House Select Committee report or what's come out afterwards. And I would say most of this indictment we've heard about or seen, but to see it all in all one package, getting down to that really granular local level really shows the state and local interest. But I don't know if you had a similar reaction there.
With respect to your point about balkanization of the electoral system, because we have this federalized system where the presidential election is happening all over the country and is owned by the different states and within the states, even different counties. It's so fascinating because the first time I was very focused on that as a way of protecting our elections was as part of special counsel Mueller's investigation. Because one of the ways that we
strongly suspected and were able to sort of ferret out that there wasn't going to be foreign election interference that actually could get into the voting machines and change them was that it was just too complicated and too hard to do that to scale in any big way. And now it turns out that the same thing served to protect our system from
Donald Trump and his allies because of this system. But that is the nature of the scheme, which is they realized, and Fannie Willis lays it out, that what was going on in Georgia was also something going on in the other states. Which brings me to my second point, which is when you read particularly the fake elector scheme, it is a clarion call to other states to
to snap a doodle, which is, you know, where are you? We do know that it's happening in Michigan, but this is very much a blueprint for what other states can look into. Obviously, there are nuances. I'm not going to bore everyone with that now, but it really is a way of saying, you know, it's really important for them to be doing what you're saying, Mary, which is to vindicate their state interests here. I wanted to just take a moment, Mary, and talk a little bit about what
people might expect from Donald Trump now, because I do think his interest right now is to really throw sand in the gears, to do whatever he can to slow this down. And he can try to do that in various ways. One is he's going to try to remove this case to federal court. We saw he tried to do that in Manhattan and it didn't work. But this is a different set of charges.
and there will be litigation over that. And that would not mean that Fannie Willis is removed. She would stay with the case. The same prosecutors stay with the case. But you would have a closed courtroom because it's a federal case, not a state case. That'd be one effect. You'd have a different judge. You'd have a different potential jury pool. So it would be in that
federal system. So before you move on from that, I want to make sure listeners know exactly. I mean, I know we went through this back when we talked about the Manhattan case, but I think it bears repeating because it's not, I think, at all obvious or intuitive why you ought to be able to. Good to slow me down. As I told you, I'm like running on like high caffeine that I don't think is out of my system. Yeah. You know, these are all state charges. Every single count here is a state offense. So it's not at all intuitive. Why should
that be in federal court anyway. It's really about making sure state law can't just undermine federal law, right? And that federal officials can't get hauled into state court for doing things in their federal official capacity. So the question here, right, is I don't really think it's part of your official capacity as the president or the chief of staff to the president to interfere in elections. You think so? You think? You know, it's part of my presidential duties. It's important for me to stay-
Yeah. And so committing crimes is actually part of my presidential duties. Let's just leave aside that little oath of office to protect the Constitution, defend us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Let's just leave that aside. OK, what else? What else do we expect? So one, there could be this removal. Two, there could be removal of Fannie Willis because Georgia is about to have a statute that was put in effect.
that allows, and apparently a board will have to do it, that allows the state to remove a state prosecutor. Again, there'll be lots of issues there. There'll be litigation over it. It's not at all clear that the replacement would be more favorable to Donald Trump. But again, it's a way of gumming up the work
And then there will be lots of legal claims about is the indictment really within her jurisdiction? Are there parts that presidential immunity applies to? And they're going to throw the kitchen sink at her. I am confident that she is prepared and ready for this. And part of the reason for the delay from January when she said these charges were imminent and today, I am confident is in part to be super prepared for what she knows is incoming. But
All of that is going to be something that we are going to see in very short order. More prosecuting Donald Trump, the Georgia indictment, in just a moment.
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That is a really good segue to the second topic, Mary, that you mentioned, which is sort of cooperating witnesses, flippers, or as you would say, rats. So one of the reasons that Donald Trump will be doing this is that with these 18 other people who are charged,
He has to keep everyone close and aligned in the same way we've seen him do that in the documents case. We saw him do that in the special counsel Mueller case where he went out of his way to praise Paul Manafort, or now he's praising Walt Nauda. He's got to keep everyone in line, and he will not have time.
presidential pardon power, even if he wins the election. So he's got a cooperator problem. And it works sort of this way. If he does not become president, if he loses, or even if there's a Republican in office who's an ally, there's a lot of problems because those other 18 people are not going to get a pardon. And whether he wins or not, there's still that problem. Now,
If he wins, Donald Trump does, he may be able to make an argument that this case should be delayed until after he is no longer president. There's sort of a temporary pause. But that does not help those 18 people. Right.
Right.
And this sort of callous disregard for their lives, for their duty to the public. It's just shocking allegations. And just to interrupt really briefly there, you know, when people, again, either listen to Ali Velji read the indictment or read it themselves, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss were volunteers that were responsible for tabulating the vote.
by all legitimate accounts, they were just doing their jobs. These are jobs they've held for years and years, usually pretty thankless jobs, but usually things we just trust them and every reason to trust them. And not only did Rudy Giuliani make up, and he has basically admitted this in civil litigation, make up lies about them, lies about them
passing a thumb drive of votes between each other, which was actually a mint they were passing, taking suitcases of fraudulent ballots and bringing them in and counting them and recounting and counting dead people's ballots. They have sued him for defamation. He has admitted essentially to the facts. But beyond that, this indictment talks about, and I referenced this at the top,
a shakedown scheme. People coming to their door at night, knocking on their door to try to convince Ruby Freeman that she should go in and admit that she helped commit fraud. And that police were called, body camera video shows these people who are now indicted
Some guy who worked for Kanye West, like crazy stuff, man, is part of this scheme. Really showing them, you know, there at her doorway on body cam video. That's what's so shocking about this. And this is not just the highest level of conspirators. This is down to the nitty gritty. Yeah, Mary, in Act 89, there's one of the more discerning,
disturbing, upsetting allegations, which, I mean, first, I don't think it's any coincidence that this was targeting to Black women. And that they were accused, essentially, of being drug dealers. I mean, the racism of Donald Trump and his followers, in my opinion, just so we're protecting ourselves from lawsuits. In my opinion, he's a racist. And
And you see it in the fact that these two women were targeted. That shakedown, they deliberately, to try and get them to admit to something that didn't happen, they say, well, I, one of the defendants, am white, so we need to send in somebody who's Black who's going to be able to talk to them. I mean, it's just...
Apollos. But going back to our point, which is these 18 people are going to be holding the bag because they cannot be pardoned. And so the pressure on them to cooperate, whether you want them as cooperators or not, is a second matter. But the pressure on them because
because of these state charges just went way up in a way that Jack Smith does not have the same power because there's always the thing that we had to deal with in Special Counsel Mueller. There's always that issue of the dangling of the pardon.
Right.
could really end up going to trial with or without Donald Trump. And so the other is that their window for cooperating, their best window is now. Because if they wait too long, other people could come in or it just can become moot. So it's just a very skillful thing. This very much relates to your main point,
Mary, which took away, which is deterrence. So this all sort of fits in, in terms of what's going on. But just to be clear, Donald Trump has to keep attacking this indictment to keep people in the fold within the tent, whatever, whatever analogy you want to use. He needs to be able to show them he's fighting this. Don't worry. Don't think you're going to be left holding the bag. But the reality is that these people have good lawyers who are independent. Yes. Right. Um,
We've talked about that before, yep.
We ask every week for people to send in questions and sometimes we don't get to them. But this is so apropos of what's been happening. This question is really, I think, a good one. It goes to exactly what you were just talking about. And that is this listener, Will, says, my question is just taking Jeffrey Clark as an example and just a little interjection here. Jeffrey Clark is indicted in this particular case. He was a former Justice Department official that the former president at one point
wanted to make the acting attorney general because Jeffrey Clark, as is alleged in this indictment, sought to send a letter to Georgia officials demanding that they can basically decertify the vote and do a new slate of electors because of significant fraud there. By the way, Jeffrey Clark was the attorney general for a day on January 3rd, I think. So anyway, the question is,
Taking him as an example, how would he negotiate with Georgia prosecutors for a possible plea deal if he has possible, if not probable, federal charges hanging over his head? And that's because he is pretty clearly one of the unindicted co-conspirators whose actions are detailed in the Jack Smith federal indictment. But he's not been federally charged yet at DOJ. So here he is. He's a guy. And we could say this, frankly, um,
Well, no, a little different, I guess, about Mark Meadows, because Jeffrey Clark is pretty clearly one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case and now is an indicted conspirator in the state case. Mark Meadows is pretty clearly not one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case because he's mentioned as the former chief of staff as opposed to unindicted co-conspirator number X.
but is an indicted co-conspirator and just indicted on individual charges as well in Georgia. So Andrew, how does he negotiate this? How do either one of them negotiate this?
Yeah. So Meadows is the one that I think is fascinating. But let's just deal with Jeff Clark. And I've dealt with this. Mary, I don't know if you have, too. It's not common, but it's not unusual to have somebody who is facing potential federal and or state charges so that they've got exposure in two different jurisdictions. Sometimes they're actually even indicted in two jurisdictions, but
And, you know, the prosecutors actually are talking, are coordinating. There's nothing wrong with that. So in that situation where somebody wants to cooperate, it's all or nothing. You cannot have a cooperation agreement at the federal level and not at the state level and vice versa. It just doesn't work. I mean, for one reason, the testimony you'd be giving at the federal level would implicate you. Exactly. Exactly. It'd be like, oh,
Oh, yeah. Wait a second. I need a new lawyer because this isn't working for me. And here, especially because they're overlapping factual allegations. So the way it would work is, and I've done these, is you could have a global agreement where it's an agreement signed by the federal government, that prosecutor and the state. And one agreement, you could have two agreements signed.
that sort of link to each other. I've seen it both ways, but essentially you could have the person plead to something at the state level or at the federal level or at both levels. I've seen it in all sorts of ways. The main thing is that you have to admit what you're doing and then you are a cooperating witness
who can be called to the stand in either of those cases. And then whoever the sentencing judge or judges are, whether you pled just in one jurisdiction or in both, that judge would learn what your cooperation was and could take that into account. Mark Meadows, very, very unclear what's going on there. Because we've heard that there's no coordination, it is conceivable that Mark Meadows is...
Well, first, if he's fully cooperating at the federal level, which I never...
think is possible. I don't think that's what's happening. If he is, there's now a major problem because I doubt that he is actually admitting his wrongdoing at the state level. I guess that, again, is possible. But, you know, I think one of the things he might have done is done this sort of like, I'm going to give you a little bit of information, but I'm not really going to cooperate at the federal level. I'm just going to give you some data and some
emails and things that are useful. And frankly, some of that information may be written down, so you don't really need to call me, which is why Jack Smith may have included that information, because he doesn't need to call Mark Meadows as a witness. It is possible he got an immunity deal at the federal level
But he's now charged at the state level, and that's going to be real tension between the two cases. I think it is probably more likely that he just isn't cooperating at the federal level. And this just puts a lot more pressure on him, as it should. He is the chief of staff. I have always been a believer that with somebody with that high level, unless he is...
fully cooperating, admitting all of his wrongdoing. There's no way on God's green earth I would give him a deal. Now, I know some people, there's reasonable amounts could differ, but I just suspect what's going on here is there's just a lot more pressure on him to cooperate because he's now facing these charges. One of the charges is the Raffensperger tape recording. And we know from his private emails with his own family that he knew at the time that there was no fraud in Georgia.
and he actually was reporting that to the then president. So it'll be really interesting, but look to see Donald Trump slowing things down and really trying to keep everyone within the tent. More prosecuting Donald Trump, the Georgia indictment, in just a moment.
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Let's turn to, Mary, a topic that until the Georgia indictment we were all sort of very focused on, which is Donald Trump continuing to attack the system. You know, he is going full bore on attacking the prosecutors and witnesses in the case.
But he is out on bail on three cases, soon to be some kind of bail status with respect to a fourth criminal case. What do you think is going to happen? How does a judge deal with this? Judge Chutkan and the magistrate judge in D.C. couldn't have been clearer.
Yeah, I think the next time that he's in court in D.C., you're going to hear this brought up again. So far, we have not seen Jack Smith move to change the conditions of his release. I mean, people like to talk about
Detaining him pretrial. Yes, that is a possibility. I don't think that's the first or most likely possibility in D.C. There are other things that we mentioned last year that a judge could do, such as requiring his last year. Last year feels like yesterday. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Oh,
Lord. Yeah. Things like requiring his social media to be cleared by his or him to show them to his attorney. So this attorney could keep him on the straight and narrow. But, you know, it just keeps happening. And so it can't be ignored by the judge because these kind of comments, they do chill witnesses. They do make people afraid. And they risk I'm going to be channeling my inner Mary McCord.
It risks violence. This is not hypothetical. This isn't something where you say, oh, it could interfere because somebody may feel like they no longer want to testify. I mean, that's bad enough. But there are all sorts of, to use the technical term, wackadoodles out there who...
take the law into their hands. And there's tons of firearms in this country, as we all know. And we've seen, unfortunately, this happen, whether it's against Republican legislatures, Democratic ones, Paul Pelosi, just so many people. Investigators, prosecutors, judges. Former President Obama. Biden. So anyway, I just feel like that has to be weighing on
on the judge and the prosecutors. Because, I mean, Mary, you and I have been in that position where you're thinking about the worst case scenario, which is
What if there was something I could have done and the violence occurred and I had not taken every step to try and stop that? And, you know, this is going to also come up in the Georgia case just when it comes to setting the conditions of release. I do not expect Mr. Trump to be detained pretrial there, nor do I expect really any of the other 18, at least at this point.
staged to be detained pretrial. But, you know, a court will be looking at, are there conditions I need to impose because of the risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice? And the judge could look at what has already happened in other cases, as well as what has already been tweeted about Fonny, or not tweeted, but you know what I mean, social media posted about, about, uh,
Fannie Willis and others involved in Georgia and could already just the first time that Trump does turn himself in and appear, we'll have to decide what kind of conditions of release are necessary. And, you know, Jack Smith in both the Mar-a-Lago case and the January 6th related case, I think, has been very
what's the word I want to use? Solicitous isn't quite right, but has been very kid gloves with the former president in terms of not requiring really any special conditions, no turning in passport, no restrictions on travel and that kind of thing. Fannie Willis might take a very different view. She may come in and say, we actually think that, you know, the court that because of
what we've already seen going on with social media posts and other things and his access to the means to, you know, not return to court that, that I don't, again, I don't think she'll ask for detention, but it wouldn't surprise me if she didn't ask for some special conditions. What about, what do you think? So maybe we can end on what I think might be a positive note, not just because we have these charges and, and the deterrent value that you're talking about and the potential of cooperation, but again,
I think that Donald Trump and what he has been doing and his behavior has handed Judge Chutkan exactly what she needs to have a speedy trial. Yeah. She said to the defense at her first appearance, "If you continue this kind of conduct, it is a reason for me to give an earlier trial date to protect the integrity
And that is exactly what Donald Trump has done. Handed on a silver platter. I can read the paragraph in her decision as to the trial date right now, where she can quote all the things that he has been doing before she gave that admonition and after.
So I think she actually didn't say that because she wanted to use it. But I think she was trying to have a brushback to say, you got to cut this out. I need to protect the system. But he hasn't done it. And so this really does allow her to say, I need to do something. And this is what I'm going to do in terms of the trial date. It doesn't deal with the bigger issue, which is how to stop that. Because just remember, I think this is maybe ending on a sour note, which is
Given that there are four criminal cases, Donald Trump is going to, in my view, have no disincentive to engage in the most corrupt political campaign for the presidency we have ever seen. And that's saying a lot because the 19th century saw a lot of issues that arose in connection with political campaigning.
This, I think, is one where he is going to be, I don't care whatever happens later. I don't care if you want to investigate, you think you're going to investigate foreign interference later. I am going to engage. I need to win this because I need to stay out of jail. And I think at this point, it's going to be like all tactics are OK. And that, I think, though, is going to lead to Judge Chutkan and maybe the other judges needing to take action.
firm action. Remember, you can run for office and not engage in obstruction of justice, to state the obvious. That's not an either or. It's not something which is being imposed on him. It would be happening to him because of his own conduct and his own choices.
But that's the other thing to keep an eye on, which is what is going to happen between now and August 28th when Judge Chutkin said she has every intention of choosing a trial date in the federal case. And in that case, that's the whole ball of wax, whether that trial goes through.
before the Republican nomination or the general election. And we're due to hear from Trump's team on their proposed trial date on Thursday, and I suspect they'll do what they've done before, which is we think a trial date should occur after the election. And I do think it is clear to your point about Judge Chuckin mentioning that this kind of behavior could contribute to the urgency of a trial date. That's not like a punishment for the behavior. That is, I have to ensure that the administration of justice
It happens here. That means ensuring the due process rights of Mr. Trump, that he has the opportunity with his attorneys to prepare his defense. But it also ensures that this doesn't become a circus or a carnival, as she said, and ensure the rights of the public.
to a speedy trial and one that it comports with the rule of law and the administration of justice. So she's really just saying your behavior can impact the ability for us to carry out my duty as a judicial officer in ensuring these things. And that would be very well supported. So we'll see. You know what? It's because she has enormous discretion. Due process doesn't require a single date. And it basically says, you know what? Given your conduct,
your team's going to have to work harder. So maybe you're going to have to stay past five o'clock and work on the weekends because you decided to obstruct justice. Mary, it is so nice to see you. It's nice to have this little break. It feels like a little respite in my MSNBC 24-7 life. I look forward to seeing you in person and hopefully no more emergency episodes. Well, I mean, I'm not going to hold my breath. Don't
know of another indictment dropping, but there's just stuff, stuff that happens. I know. I do think, since I'm always predicting, I do think, as you mentioned, that we could see in D.C. a separate indictment of the unindicted co-conspirators. So we'll be talking about the indicted conspirators in the same way that we were just talking about them at the state level. Mary,
So nice to see you. Try and enjoy that vacation because we're going to need you back safe and sound and whole, especially since I'm deteriorating fast. Well, if I can, well, this wouldn't be good. If I could do TV like from the beach in a swimming suit, that'd be easier. But they don't, they tend to frown on that. And I don't think I want to be in the swimming suit on TV anyway, you know, but anyhow. Yeah.
It was so funny when we were on air together for the Sunday show. I was like, okay, this is weird. We can see each other in adult clothes. And I actually had a joke, which is like, you were like, I'm usually in running clothes and I'm using my pajamas, which kind of tells you everything you need to know about you and me, which is like, you've been up running every day.
fit as a fiddle, and I'm still groggy going, "I need my third cup of coffee. Wait, fourth cup of coffee." No, I think you quit sleeping a few indictments ago, Andrew. I think that's true. That's my excuse for my lack of being articulate, and I'm sticking to it. Okay, Mary, I'll talk to you soon. If you've got questions, you can leave us a voicemail at 917-342-2934.
Maybe we'll play it on the pod. Or you can email us at prosecutingtrumpquestions at NBCUNI.com. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with much more.
The senior producer for this show is Alicia Conley. Ivy Green is a segment producer. Our technical director is Bryson Barnes. Cedric Wilson is an audio engineer. Janmaris Perez is the associate producer. Aisha Turner is an executive producer. And Rebecca Cutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC. Search for Prosecuting Donald Trump wherever you get your podcasts and follow the series.
Hi, everyone. It's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, Why Is This Happening? Author and philosopher Daniel Chandler on the roots of a just society. I think that those genuinely big fundamental questions about whether liberal democracy will survive, what the shape of our society should be, feel like they're genuinely back on the agenda. I think it feels like we're at a real, you know, an inflection point or a turning point in the history of liberal democracy. That's this week on Why Is This Happening? Search for Why Is This Happening wherever you're listening right now and follow.