Moments ago, through his attorney, Todd Blanche,
former President Trump pleaded not guilty to these 37 federal charges.
And Todd Blanche in fact said the former president is, quote,
most certainly pleading not guilty.
>> Todd Blanche his lawyer, and what's interesting about
Todd Blanche is that while he is a lawyer working with Trump.
Working on the New York case with him, Donald Trump didn't have a Florida lawyer,
he couldn't find one in time.
The two lawyers that were on this case, originally Trustee and
Raleigh, left the defense of Donald Trump just days ago.
And they looked and interviewed yesterday for an attorney in Miami,
It's important to note that lawyers all say that you do need local representation.
It's very important, you can bring your legal team in, but
it both helps the legal team.
It helps the case as well, because you'll have lawyers locally who know the judge
who knows what the judge likes, doesn't like the kind of case you can put forward.
Donald Trump wasn't able to find that and today he walked into court,
there were no cameras in the court.
But we did through Shane Goldmacher's Twitter account,
we see Donald Trump walking into court today.
He's flanked I think that's his son Eric, if we can show this graphic,
his son Eric walking beside him.
And then Walt Nada, who is I don't know if it's up there Walt Nada,
who is his co defendant in this case.
A Trump confidant who he sort of brought down with him,
he was also part of this case.
And the only order of restriction that came out of this case,
Donald Trump can travel, they didn't take his passport.
They didn't make him do a mug shot, they did electronic fingerprints for
the former president.
However, he is not allowed to speak to Walt Nada,
there is no contact allowed to discuss this case going forward.
So guys, I'll throw it first to you was tell me what this means in the sort
of in the pantheon of American history and also for Donald Trump?
>> I mean, [COUGH] as unprecedented as it is for
a former president to be getting arrested and indicted,
this is his second one since leaving office, right?
That's sort of the unprecedented nature of this
guy's life as a president and afterwards.
And I thought it was interesting when you said, well, we've never had this before,
even before he became president.
I don't think we ever had a president who ran a fake college right I don't think
we ever had a president who had seven to eight bankruptcies before
coming into office.
Never had a president admit that when you have contractors and
people will work for you.
The first thing you should try to do is stiff them on their money and
have them take you to court.
This is a guy who's been openly engaging in criminal and
fraudulent activities for a while now, for decades even.
And so as unprecedented as today has been,
I think Donald Trump has telegraphed this kind of stuff.
Showed you his sort of, I guess moral scruples, if you will, if he even has any,
throughout his presidency, his campaign and since losing.
>> Yeah, Thomas Jefferson ran what is a real college,
I went to it University of Virginia, maybe it's not real, they gave me a diploma.
But before we get to you Max, let's take a look at what
some of the indictments said and what was really going on in court.
It's important to remember what brought Donald Trump to court and
we could go to graphic two here.
Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information,
a crime delineated in the Espionage Act that carries a maximum prison sentence of
ten years.
Each count represents a different, highly sensitive document that
Trump allegedly kept at Mar a Lago, his Florida residence and private club.
More to this, 21 of those documents, including some involving nuclear secrets.
Were found by FBI agents who searched the estate in August,
yielding a total of 102 classified documents, according to the indictment.
The other ten willful retention charges stem from a batch of 38 classified
documents turned over to the FBI last June in response to a grand jury subpoena.
So Max this again, we're in uncharted waters, as Wos said, and
we all know, where does it go from here and what does it mean for Donald Trump?
And I'm going to ask you another question here,
there's a lot of pushback on the Republican side.
>> Yeah, the main thing we've seen Republicans exemplify here is that there
is no low, too low for them not to defend Donald Trump.
We've had people out, like Marjorie Taylor Green calling to defund
the Department of justice, to defund the FBI, to jail Jack Smith.
And meanwhile, former President Trump can't seem to find a defense lawyer in
Florida, which should send red flags blaring everywhere.
I mean, what shocked me so much in this [COUGH] is how clear the evidence is,
the overwhelming, documentary primary evidence.
Just what Jack Smith has chosen to reveal as his baseline in these documents.
So now we go forward in this, and the concerning thing I see is that,
once again, in small ways, we're bending the justice system for
deference to a powerful man.
He's been allowed to not follow the process that every other person who's
arrested follows.
And it creates worries that, in the interest of looking fair,
we're going to make this an unfair trial.
>> Yeah, and the fairness of the trial also in question because
of the random selection of Aileen Cannon as the presiding judge there.
We'll get into that in a little bit, but let's talk about what he's doing and part
of why he can't find a lawyer is because nobody wants to represent Donald Trump.
He is a loose cannon,
he's somebody who doesn't have a consistent way of doing things.
As a matter of fact, even in this case, the lawyers reports right now and
this is reported in the Miami Herald and the Washington Post,
is they don't even know how to go after this case.
They don't know if whether or not they should let this thing unravel and
Donald Trump should go at them saying that this is a miscarriage of justice.
And these are the worst people in the world or just go put this before a jury.
Try and convince one juror that, hey, the president was not guilty of this,
and that's all you need is that one juror.
So it is a legal mess, but not just because it's a legal mess,
because on the lawyer side, it's a mess as well.
And this was just alluded to but
let's talk about what he said today, this is number four.
Donald Trump went on truth social, called this one of the saddest days in
the history of our country, we are a nation in decline.
He earlier called Jack Smith a thug, a radical and
a lunatic, this doesn't seem to me a good legal strategy.
>> No, it certainly does not and also, there were times in public
where he essentially admitted to hoarding these documents.
Because if you remember, right afterwards,
they found some documents on Joe Biden's person.
And Donald Trump was look,
see even Joe Biden had some documents in his possession that he wasn't supposed to.
And it's a difference in kind, honestly, between what happened with Trump and
what happened with Biden.
Is that Biden, they came asking for stuff, looking for stuff, he's like, go ahead,
go find it.
Trump, he [LAUGH] intentionally obfuscated what was going on, he obstructed justice,
he lied, he cajoled, he just behaved in a different manner.
And the craziest thing, it feels he did this so
that he could do party tricks with his buddies, like Kid Rock and
show him American secrets, this seems the reason why he did it.
I know some other people might think that there might be something deeper and
more nefarious going on.
That he was stealing them to send to foreign governments and
maybe possibly American enemies abroad,
I have a hard time believing he went that crazy and that far.
But yeah, I do believe that he was stupid enough to think
that it'd be a cool idea to maybe show his buddies who killed Kennedy.
>> Right, and Max I mean, the politicization of this is blatant,
the former president went to Little Havana after he left the courtroom,
obviously not held.
Went to Little Havana, spoke to Cubans at Cafe Versailles,
there people who would be natural supporters of Republicans.
Although Barack Obama won the Cuban vote in Florida in 2012, and so
I think that you go to where you're comfortable before he even got there.
His partisans were there, there were threats of violence as we all saw
from Carrie Lake, even indirectly from the president himself, from Trump himself.
I keep calling him the president, the former president, and that didn't happen,
at least it hasn't happened yet, but it's certainly something to look at.
Max, let's listen to what his supporter, Alina Haba,
who is a lawyer and a spokesperson for Trump.
Said before the proceedings today in front of a gathering of
Trump people neatly placed behind her.
>> In recent years, we have seen the rise of politically
motivated prosecutors, who don't care for impartiality,
who don't care for due process or equal protection of laws.
They have been quietly but aggressively cultivating a two
tiered system of justice, where selective treatment is the norm.
From the Russia hoax to the attorney generals to
the corrupt DAs in Georgia and New York, and now this.
The people in charge of this country do not
love America, they hate Donald Trump.
The targeting prosecution of a leading political
opponent is the type of thing you see in dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela.
>> Max, couldn't it be argued that dictatorships are the places where they
bring home the classified documents and they show them to their friends?
Couldn't it be argued that these people who are saying it's unpatriotic and
unamerican.
Are talking about someone who is doing absolutely
the most unpatriotic thing you could do that this is treason.
Bringing these things home and waving them around and
keeping them from the people who are looking for them?
>> Yeah I mean, these are the arguments you make when you have no legal defense.
These are the arguments that Republicans are in effect left with, and
it needs to be in their worldview that this is a political prosecution.
Forget for a minute that Donald Trump isn't being prosecuted for his politics.
He's being prosecuted because he stole US battle plans and
nobody knows quite what he did with them.
But for this to be true, and we've seen this not just from Trump's lawyers,
but from MAGA, fundamentalist Christians.
Who have called for religious warfare on behalf of Trump, for Trump himself,
who's called for war for the law.
And one of the main reasons we didn't see a bigger crowd out there today.
Is because several hundred of the people most likely to commit violence are already
in prison because of what they did on January 6.
>> Right yeah, they've thinned the herd a little bit, are these then the dying
gasps of a group of people who really have nowhere to turn right now?
I mean look, there are partisans, he does have this what we think is a solid 30%
waz of people who support him within the Republican Party.
His numbers have gone up each time something like this has happened within
the Republican Party.
What has to happen here to start chipping away at that, or
is it already chipped away at enough that these people don't matter?
>> For now, Donald Trump is firmly in control of the GOP I mean,
63% of voters support him, It's his show.
At this point, the Republican Party is a brand attached to Donald Trump,
not the other way around, so I don't think he's in any fear.
And judging by what we've seen from the 2020 candidates, they are terrified to
even attack Donald Trump for this, so how they plan to beat him is anyone's guess.
>> And Wos?
>> Yeah, and
I think that the reason why Trump continues to have a hold on these people.
Is because I think a lot of his appeal was the unorthodox nature of his candidacy,
that he was not some cookie cutter country club GOP flak.
He was not a Mitt Romney, he was not a Mike Pence quite frankly,
he was not a Jeb Bush low energy.
He felt like somebody that was from a different planet than the normal
Republican candidates, and I don't know,
have you seen Ronda Santa speak in public recently?
That guy is about as robotic and calculated and kind of the same old crap.
Honestly, when it comes to Republican cookie cutter politicians,
Trump still as battered and bruised as he's been in the public.
I think he still cuts a pretty distinct figure amongst his cohort in
the Republican Party.
>> Yeah, it's clear those numbers, if we are to believe polls and
sometimes we do, those numbers are convincing of the fact that he is
still the strongest horse in that race.
Maybe being chipped away at a little because there's so many people running.
But the more people that run, the better it is likely for Donald Trump,
as we've seen.
So before we get out of court for a second, here's what he's doing next, and
this is what happens to the president next to Donald, the former president.
This is number five, now that Trump has entered his plea of not guilty,
his case will barring the unforeseen.
And that's a big clause in that sentence, because there's always something
unforeseen with Trump, follow a familiar path.
The government will begin to reveal its evidence through the discovery process,
pretrial motions will be filed and argued, all that is likely to take months.
And most likely, Donald Trump is going to try and
push this as far out after the 2024 election as possible.
But again, the legal troubles continue, we are still waiting on Georgia,
we're still waiting on January 6.
There are still legal stories to come down the road for Donald Trump,
which may in fact, be why so many people are running for president against him.
Because they think that he won't be there when it's time
to go to vote next November, and in the primaries earlier in the year.