records that were taken by the twice-impeached ex-president when he left office in january 2021. the new reporting also details team trump s months of resistance led by the ex-president himself to handing over records containing some of the country s most important and guarded national security secrets. it reveals that the search of trump s private resident was actually many months in the making and really just the latest chapter in a long, simmering investigation. here s what happened when the national archives got their hands on the first batch of documents from mar-a-lago back in january according to this new reporting in the washington post, quote, when archives employees began opening up and sifting the material they noticed an immediate problem. the boxes arrived without logs and inventories to describe their content according to a person familiar with the recovery. instead they contained a hodgepodge of documents including some that didn t come from trump s time in o
narratives that we let slide, i think those are in in conflict in this story, as well. one is that he was so haphazard, he was a pack rat. there were, you know, tickets to wrestling matches mixed in with the pdb. i don t buy it. i just don t buy it. he doesn t give a rat s behind about pdb and multiple people struggled to get him him part pdb and kushner were the only regular consumers of the pdb. when you go as an fbi agent and you have the classified materials badly boxed and handled and who knows who s going in and out of the room, you start to try to figure out why. what are the questions about motive. why do you think they re there? nicole, that s the biggest question. for someone as you indicated, avoided paying anything in the intelligence community and why
legal precedents, and it is not the case that you cannot be guilty of obstruction if you didn t commit the underlying crime and just to bear with me, the final point is the memo really gets the mueller report wrong because they seem to think that we found that there was no evidence of the underlying crime meaning conspiracy with the russians. that s not what our report said. it said that there s evidence. it s just that we didn t think there was evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. so the sort of upshot, nicole is, i can understand why the department has fought long ask hard and not to end the day and it s quite a shocking document. i want to stay with you, andrew weissmann. i found some of this language, and i want you to take me back and do your best to explain why
not ask robert mueller to simply come to a conclusion because as it said here, the report could be read to find that indeed, he did commit obstruction. as you said, nicole, robert mueller s way of saying that, but not saying it was to say, okay, in volume one, dealing with the underlying conspiracy we conclude that there s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and we won t take that in saying in any way we are absolving the president of obstruction. this is just bill barr clearly taking advantage of and playing robert muler and just to put a fine point on it as i ve said in the past and was public manage and bill barr was a personal friend of robert mueller and it
? nicole, recall that the search warrant listed three statutes that the government had in mind when they went to the judge and asked to do this search and again, they may have been thinking about ten statutes, but they listed three of them and one of them, the espionage act citation involved the possibility of transmitting defense information and information important to the security of others and that might cover the kinds of scenarios that they ve laid out and there were also charges in there about hoarding and mutilating and destroying sensitive information and obstruction of government investigation that do not depend on those scenarios playing out, and so if criminal charges were to come out of this investigation and were there not yet, the government would not have to prove in order to make a criminal case that he did, in fact, hope to or had plans to