MSNBC host Joy Reid began her show on Monday by paraphrasing former FBI Director James Comey, saying, “Lordy there are tapes.”
She cited the New York Times report revealing Donald Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran has several recordings of his notes that he took about meetings he had with Trump. Those have since been subpoenaed by the special counsel.
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Reid asked former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks what she makes of the fact that there are tapes with his lawyer telling Trump he can’t have the documents and he can’t keep them.
“This is, again, an accumulation of evidence mounting to the point where I can’t see how you can avoid an indictment,” said Wine-Banks. “It has to go to trial. It has to be seen by a jury. You have a situation where you have the president on tape, we think. You know, I haven’t heard the tape, but based on the reporting, there’s a tape where he is saying, ‘I have a classified document, so I can’t show it to you, which means he knows, A: he has classified documents, and B: he can’t show them to anybody, and he hasn’t declassified them.”
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Lawyers are saying that he has to turn over the subpoenaed documents, which Wine-Banks said was a very broad request for “all classified documents.” All of the non-classified documents are still the property of the National Archives.
“So, this shows his knowledge, his intent in keeping it, and then you have the fact that this is supposedly a document that is to rebut Gen. [Mark] Milley and show that he was right, he Donald Trump, was right about the Iran situation. That’s really serious. That means it’s at a classification level that is guaranteed to hurt the government and our security if the information is released. And we hear the rustling of papers. We don’t know, it could be he’s just holding up a piece of paper. It could be he’s lying, and the paper he’s discussing isn’t about Iran. We don’t know. But isn’t it a shame that we have a former president of the United States where we can’t tell whether his best defense is I was lying and we would believe him because he lies so often, or whether it’s actual proof he did it.”
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Reid also mentioned that she was unaware that there were two grand juries, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Florida.
New York Times reporter Katie Benner explained that the reason that one would have a Florida case is that was the location in which Trump allegedly obstructed justice. The other charges about the documents themselves could be in Washington. She explained it wouldn’t be the first time the DOJ brought charges in two different jurisdictions.
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Her example was Paul Manafort, who was charged in both Virginia and Washington, D.C.
