is one reason why, in this case, almost 300 pages long. is there a strategic point for jack smith to consider to indict donald trump alone with no codefendants, because codefendants, on their own, can create their own delays in legal process? that s right. one of the reasons that we do not know of any other target letters, and all the other people who undoubtedly conspired with donald trump to achieve what he did, one reason may be that jack smith has decided, not only to have a narrow case against donald trump, but to avoid the circus of a bunch of defendants with all of their lawyers and all their arguments about why it is not fair to try them together, about why on this or that
an area where the lack of experience of the judge may become a problem in terms of her not handling large cases in the course of her career, either as a prosecutor or as a judge, is this idea that this case somehow involves voluminous discovery. it doesn t. i have handled numerous cases that involve luminous discovery, where we are dealing with terabytes of information from hard drives, email accounts. this is just not such a case. section, where there are kinds of cases are handled all the time. and ron, from 20 years ago, was a case involving a voluminous discovery. and so what stood out to me is this idea that this might be a
suddenly, the prosecutors were working in a different courthouse, more than 1000 miles away, from where we thought they would be in washington and suddenly that case gets brought in florida. is anything like that possible at the stage, given that there may be included in this indictment issues involving georgia and as a phone call to georgia that we have all heard, is there anything in that i could give us a last inning surprise about the way this case might unfold? it s a fair question in light of what happened with the mar-a-lago documents case, but i don t think so with his case. really the locust of this took place in washington. donald trump was in the oval office when all of the reported allegations of the orchestration and meeting with john eastman, the meetings with rudy giuliani, the speech on the ellipse, all of these things occurring between election day in november, maybe even prior to election day as
of michigan law school, also with us is andrew weissmann former fbi general counsel and chief in the district of new york, he s a professor of practice at nyu all law school. both are msnbc legal analysts. andrew, to you first, on the target letter. because you have been predicting this, predicting it pretty much on schedule, what happens next. apparently the letter gave donald trump for days to consider doing what we know he is not going to do, which is testify to the grand jury. then what? sure. so, a target letter does not legally mean that you are going to be indicted. i needed a say that because it is not that you get a target lighter and you are 100% know that you are going to be indicted. however, in this case, it does not look like that. in this case, absent the most unusual circumstances that he would issue a target letter and
indictment, and as sure as the documents case was brought in florida, because that were the of that case was, the so-called january 6th case, even though it involves a lot of work from the former president and conspiracy prior to january 6th, that case is going to be brought in d. c.. so i think that is something that we should fully expect. the one thing that i am waiting to hear is whether the defense counsel has gone into doj to, so-called, appeal jacks smith s decision. as you know, we saw an appeal in the documents case. we saw an appeal in the alvin bragg case. it is something that a defense council should be entitled to argue. they should be given that opportunity, and most defense counsel would avail themselves of that opportunity. i do not