Mark Zaid, I want
to ask
you about something that Lindsey
Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham,
who of course, has endorsed
Donald Trump, is a big supporter,
very vocal supporter of Donald Trump
and also an attorney.
He said the following.
He said President
Trump will have his day in court,
but espionage charges
are absolutely ridiculous.
Whether you like Trump or not.
He did not commit espionage.
He did not disseminate, leak
or provide information
to a foreign power
or news organizations
to damage this country.
He is on a tear about this.
I would not be surprised
if we saw him on the Senate floor
making these arguments
as an attorney
and an expert on national security.
What do you think of this argument?
Sure.
And congratulations on your new program.
Thanks. What he said is ridiculous.
It is so hypocritical
and politically frustrating
because that's
what this is, is a political statement
by him.
Lindsey Graham knows full
well the Espionage Act,
which dates back
a century,
encompasses a whole host of provisions,
one of which is spying
for a foreign power
like Aldrich Ames or Robert
Hanssen, who recently passed away
And ironically,
we see this
both on the left
extremism side
in support of Julian Assange
and Ed Snowden,
where that side decries are.
They've been prosecuted
or charged under the Espionage Act.
This is an espionage.
And yet now we see it on the right.
It has nothing to do with espionage.
In the formal James Bond sense,
other than the statute
is called the Espionage Act.
This is, as is made clear in seven 93 E,
which is the charge
he has been assessed with.
It has to do with unlawful retention
of national defense information
and failing to return it.
Lindsey Graham should know better.
He does know better.
Well, Andy, he is sticking by it.
But I think that the point
that Marc just made
is really important
there is that the law and the statute
then there is also what it conjures up
when you hear espionage
and the politics of that
and push back
on the notion that espionage equals spy
and that he was somehow involved in
that kind of
and that kind of work
by the former president.
The Conjuring creates
a great political opportunity for people
like Lindsey Graham,
but it has no legal significance.
Mark is exactly right.
The statute that the former president
charged under
is very well-suited for the behavior
that we now know he engaged in.
I want to ask you about Hillary Clinton,
your favorite topic.
You were deputy FBI
director when there was an investigation
of her and her.
Much talked about emails.
I want you to listen to
the Republicans repeatedly
alluding to that.
Talking about that
as they discuss the Trump case.
I don't think there should be classified
documents at Mar a Lago.
Joe Biden's
garage on Hillary Clinton's server.
What he did is very similar,
in my view, to what Hillary Clinton did.
People in the Clinton case took a hammer
to a BlackBerry and destroyed it.
You had Secretary Clinton
who had classified material on a server.
She was not president
of the United States.
She was Secretary Clinton.
You have that happen.
Nothing happens to her.
You know the facts.
What are the facts?
Well, then,
as you know, cases
come down to facts and evidence,
not politics.
And these two cases
could not be more different on the facts.
So let's talk
about what we actually found
in the Hillary Clinton email case.
Yes.
Hillary Clinton
maintained private
servers, emails went
across those servers.
Ultimately, she returned
30,000 emails
to the Department of Defense work
related emails.
In addition to those,
we found thousands
more emails
that she exchanged with people.
The total
classified material
seized from
that review
were essentially 55 email conversation
strings of emails
in which eight were classified
top secret, 37 secret
and ten confidential.
Now, it's important to remember
those weren't classified documents.
That was simply the content
of email exchanges
that was later deemed to be classified
These weren't documents
with with classified stamping on the tops
and bottoms and cover sheets
and all that kind of stuff.
Should it have happened?
No, but what we didn't have was evidence
that Hillary Clinton
had intentionally
exchanged or withheld
classified information.
And that's just what we could
and could not prove.
At the end of the day,
In the Trump case,
you have, what, 300 plus classified
documents, full documents
seized from his residence at Mar a Lago.
Some of
most of which from the photographs
we've seen had headers and footers
that the proper stamping portion
markings on paragraphs,
cover sheets indicating
they were some of the most
classified materials we have.
And then,
of course,
engaged in a long series of exchanges
and activity in an effort
to obstruct that investigation.
Very, very different facts.
Thank you for saying that.
Thank you for explaining that.
What about ism is very intense right now.
And you are
somebody who definitely knows facts
on this case.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mark
Zaid, appreciate it.
I know, Jeff, you
you spent a lot of time last week in Iowa
you spent a lot of time
every year in Iowa.
You've been in contact
with your sources back there.
What are you hearing from
Republicans in the first caucus state?
I was talking to a Republican who met
with the former president
when he was in Iowa just last week.
And he said, look,
the wagons are being circled.
Yes, Republicans are rallying behind him,
but there is still an opening
the same opening that existed last week.
And now there's more reason
for that opening.
If there were
any Republicans who had pause about
can he be elected?
This is raising some concern.
But he said, look,
we're going to have to sit back
and watch it all.
And the indictment has not been read
by most Republican voters.
This happens to be a lawyer,
a Republican lawyer who met with him,
who said, look,
I have read the indictment.
He said it's pretty damning.
His words echoed what
Bill Barr, the former attorney
general, said. This is not a witch hunt.
These are serious matters here.
So I think the voters, the,
you know, the elite voters,
I guess perhaps the
the lawyers and others are studying this,
but we just have to give us some time.
Yeah, absolutely.
Most people have not read the indictment,
which is why the former president
is trying
to put his stamp on it,
trying to fill that void.
I mean, legally
is a whole different question,
which we'll talk about later.
But when it comes
to the politics of this,
what he said on the campaign
trail is very telling
which
witch hunt, scam, hoax?
It's called election interference.
And they're doing the best
they can with it.
The baseless indictment of me
by the Biden administration's weaponized
Department of Injustice
will go down
as among
the most horrific abuses of power
in the history of our country.
As far as the
joke of an indictment,
it's a horrible thing.
It's a horrible thing for this country.
Witch hunt, witch hunt, scam, hoax.
It's like it's like the greatest hits.
He's the king of the buzz word.
And it works.
It is very effective.
I mean, repetition has always been
one of Trump's
most important tools in his toolkit.
But I think that the Republican Party
is grappling
with some structural issues
here, namely,
that the Republican Party,
as exists
here, was
was formed and structured
by Trump himself.
He popularized lock
her up, made Hillary Clinton's
email issue
one of the foundational
rallying cries of the Republican Party.
And so it's for that reason.
You know what I hear
from a lot of Republicans
is that if only for that one reason,
many of them
can't see a world
in which they say
that Trump should be charged
for a document
classified document related issue
when Hillary Clinton was not.
The logic of it,
if you've read the indictment,
if you look at the evidence,
does not make any sense.
But that is part of the
you know,
that's part
of the
the DNA of the Republican Party
right now.
And many of these candidates, that's
why you're seeing so many of them,
even the ones who are criticizing
Trump, like Chris Christie,
they can't do it without saying, well,
Hillary Clinton
should have been charged, but
it's always the butt
that gets in the way.
And they're really trying
to conflate the two situations,
although their cases are
dramatically different.
I mean,
really what this indictment shows
is Trump's effort
to try to allegedly cover up
these documents
that are trying to be retrieved
by the federal government
is effort
to try to hide them,
the misstatements that he allegedly made
all about it.
That is not
what it's not about simply
mishandling classified documents,
which is what the Biden situation was,
what the Penn
situation was,
what Hillary Clinton situation was after.
You know, we learned that Pence
cooperated, that case has been closed,
providing the documents back to them.
Biden apparently is cooperating.
We don't know exactly
what's going to happen,
that investigation,
but these are much different cases.
But the argument,
the political argument, facts be damned.
They're going to make that case
to try to suggest one of the same.
The big question, too,
for a lot of Republicans
is how quickly does this happen?
Does this drag for the election year
or does it is a punted until 20, 25?