Charged with any crime. Will they be or there they flip on him . The testimony of former Vice President mike pence proving to be a key part of this historic indictment. Sara is off today. Im john berman with kate bolduan. This is cnn news central. Great to have you back, first of all. Thank you. Quite a day it is. This morning donald trump has been charged with trying to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. It is unprecedented. It is historic. And it puts the nation in truly uncharted territory. Two monumental almost foundational forces directly at odds. On the one hand as peter baker of the New York Times writes, can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence . On the other hand the wall street Journal Editorial Board suggests it, quote, potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president that a prosecutor deems to be false. We will explain how S
the beat with ari melber starts right now. welcome to the beat with ari melber. we have a great show for you tonight wednesday, december 27th. we look at jack smith s big coup case against donald trump which faces a key appeal in january. how will smith draw his past experience? that s where we begin tonight. he s a tough, but low-profile prosecutor with a very long record. he led difficult and victorious cases including the prosecution of new york police officer justin volpe who tortured lima, smith was a younger federal prosecutor then and went on to develop something of an expertise in the hard cases that other lawyers sometimes duck. the kind of cases that go at the powerful in government or police, senators, heads of state. he developed experience for the pressures of those specific kind of cases a something of a reputation as the kind of prosecutor you actually pick up and call with a tough case like that. smith did stints in federal and local prosecutor s
and recently, not some past generation or just the past few years, if you had been the chairman of the intelligence committee in the house of representatives again not a long time ago but recently, if you had been the attorney general of the united states recently, if you had had any of those jobs in the very recent past you d think that you d kind of be a hot ticket, right? you d think that you d hav you d be moving in impressive circles maybe not for the whole rest of your life, the sort of impactor of that highfalutin jo you had would wear off, but at least while you were in that impressive very high end government job you d think you can kind of write your own ticket and you think you d move in kind of rarefied air. you would think. alas, this week all of those people i just mentioned, literallyt the guy who was attorney general of the united states ando the guy who was pentagon chiefuy of staff and national security advisor and white house trade chief, all the rest of th
trade policy at the white house. them as parallel or do they intercept? again, recently you held that i don t think we can see they re adjacent. job. if you had been national i think at least the republican security adviser to the president of the united states and recently, not in some past party in so far as it is generation, but within the past represented by donald trump has few years. if you had been the chairman of fully embraced these elements. the intelligence committee in the fact that this speech is not the u.s. house of representatives, again, not a only sort of waved through with long time ago, but recently. a wink and a nod but they are if you had been the attorney general of the united states invited in. recently. if you had had any of those jobs we can see with nick fuentes to in the very recent past, you dinner at mar-a-lago. would think that you would be a the main welcome of the hot ticket, right? you would think that you would candidate. and the one that
and as it often goes, the consumer in paying. but here s where we do have right now. while none of this has been approved, there are things at your disposal right now that you can be using. i just want to show you what that is. you can go to flight rights.gov. it is a dashboard that shows you right now what is available to you, what different airlines offer. that is where you can go to right now. they ve actually expanded that dashboard. so, when you are in that situation, with a cancellation or an extreme delay, you can find out what is your option. and on that note, i wish you all a very good night. from all our colleagues across the networks of nbc news, thanks for staying up late. i will see you at the end of tomorrow. thanks for being with us. tonight. it s really good to have you here. if you had been the pentagon chief of staff recently, chief of staff to the defense secretary of the united states, if you had been the director of trade policy at the white house