best interest of the country. the speaker of the house, kevin mccarthy has mixed feelings about this. on the one hand, throwing president biden under the microscope was exactly what he wanted to do, but on the other hand, he wanted to do it with his committee and his people. here was kevin mccarthy this morning. i think congress has to investigate this. in the end it s kind of awkward to claim the federal government is weaponized against you when it s simultaneously announcing a criminal investigation into your political opponent. joining us now is charlie savage covering the story for the new york times and matt miller for the justice department. thank you both for being here. charlie, i wonder if you can tell us at all from your reporting the degree to which garland was making a political calculation among other things here, the degree to which the pressure that the right wing had been the campaign, i will say, that they had been waging
comparisons and a lot of what-aboutisms. we re talking about hundreds of documents in a willful attempt of turning over the documents to the doj. that s different from what we re hearing. but a special counsel was still appointed, and it was said a lot on our air yesterday that a special counsel is appointed if there s a suspicion of wrongdoing. how much legal jeopardy is president biden in right now? it s not clear, right? because we re just opening a criminal investigation. and i would say that not only are there circumstance of what each of the men are thought to have done very different, john, but the stages are also quite different. the investigation with respect to former president trump was very well developed. there were accusations of criminality. they had a search warjt.
they went to a judge and said we have probable cause to believe these three specific statutes were violated. we re in a very different place with president biden not only on the facts but just in terms of where we are in that investigation. so it s really hard to say at this point, particularly given the limited information given to the public whether president biden or anyone around his is fames legal jeopardy. i would say the legal jeopardy as we understand it right now is far less because as you said there s not willfulness. lisa, tell us about robert hur, the man now, special counsel. robert hur has an extensive background in law enforcement and there are a couple of things our viewers should know. one thing people should know, he s an old school person of
conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassion at judgment. i intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly without fear and fab and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service. this continues as new details come to light about president biden s mishandling of documents during his time in the obama administration. nbc news was the first to report that the biden team was the first to locate documents in a second location, different from what we learned at the start of the week. we now learned the second spot was a garage in biden s wilmington, delaware home. their discovery was reported to the justice department by biden s team on december 20th. that search was triggered by the first discovery of documents in early november inside an office previously used by biden at the penn biden center in washington, dc. according to two sources, one of those documents found at the
Alex Wagner brings years of reporting experience and insight to covering the news of the day, politics and the cultural trends shaping the United States and.