search teams desperately digging through the earthquake rubble and praying for miracles. plus former vice president subpoenaed, what could mike pence tell the special counsel about trump and january 6. and the fight over america s social safety net, both sides ignoring the cold hard truth, not touching it is not an option. welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. this is early start. and we begin with the earthquake disaster in turkey and syria where they are clinging to hope that survivors can still be found alive but that hope fading with each passing hour. but there are miraculous stories. overnight two teenage sisters were pulled from the rubble. and the staggers death toll now approaching 22,000, the number of injured in these two countries near 80,000. and salma abdelaziz is live in istanbul. and the story of the sisters is a heartwarming story amid all the tragedy. and now a secondary tragedy, many are forced in to the freezing cold. what i
investigation both in the scope in that the one involving trump actually involves a special counsel. the one involving pence never did. part of the reason why might be that trump had announced his candidacy for president and the attorney general felt like it was important to show some level of even-handed treatment and that somebody else will be taking care of that. also, the number of documents for pence, we re talking about a dozen classified documents. whereas with trump we are talking about more than 300 classified documents, which he was asked to give back and didn t. they had to go get a subpoena for it. even after that, doj wasn t sure they got all the documents back. whereas pence said come on in. they had a five-hour voluntary search. completely unrestricted access. so it s a totally different set of circumstances. but you can understand why trump is using this and saying what about me. of course. and we had that latest reporting on the documents as well at mar-a-lago in whi
welcome back, everybody. the justice department has officially closed its classified documents investigation into former vice president mike pence. joining me now is nbc news senior legal correspondent laura jarrett with more on this. what more do we know? no charges for mike pence, which is somewhat inspected. we wondered what was going on with this investigation. it was going on since january and hadn t heard much about it. we were asking about it in recent days obviously, given what s going on with his former boss, former president, and that investigation into his handling of classified information. and i learned that just yesterday the department actually informed a lawyer for pence that the investigation was officially closed and no charges would be sought. obviously the timing of that for penc pence is noteworthy since he is going to announce his candidacy
so now you see all of you saw donald trump basically saying i ll strike a deal on abortion that s better for the most amount of people. you have pence and tim scott, the senator from south carolina, saying that they re going to be basically as conservative as you possibly can be when it comes to abortion. so they re all over the place. watching how the electorate in when you re with these conservative folks, they re very excited to get rid of and have the least abortion in this country as possible. but then when you talk to women, when they start talking to women in virginia, suburban white women who are also a very important electorate for both democrats and republicans, that s where you re going to start seeing the issue and where they re going to have to make some decisions about how far right they re willing to go in this primary on abortion when the democrats are ready to make it a huge issue for them in the general election. i just want to show folks as we re talking about
spenc pence s legal team. president biden intends to run for a second term but he was asked what is stopping him. just not ready to make it. the president is expected to formally announce a 2024 run sometime in the weeks and months ahead. state of the union was seen by many of a preview of biden s campaign message. as the fbi collects the debris from the chinese spy balloon, sources say that u.s. intelligence officials believe the order to send it into american air space was given without the knowledge of president xi jinping. let s bring in kristie lu stout live in hong kong. so this is the working theory. what are we learning? it is really interesting. sources say that u.s. intelligence is looking into whether xi jinping the chinese leader was not aware of the order to send the about aen look, but they are not only looking into him, but china s