but, you know, tim raise as great point. i expect many of the witnesses if there is an indictment coming soon, many of the witnesses that will have testified, whose evidence will have been used in this indictment will be republicans, and probably the republicans who are closest to donald trump who knew him best, who knew exactly what he did and said. yeah. i mean, tim, the people who will be able to testify to donald trump s role and planning inciting, wanting to join, cheering and now being for pargd and lifting up the insurrection and the insurrectionists were the dead-enders out of lack of a better word. they re the people who stayed after he lost. they re the people who were still there on january 6th and the days leading up to it. yeah. just exactly right. look, the test at the very end became loyalty over competence, right? people like bill barr, who was a champion, who argued vociferously against the russia investigation, right, who was right there on family separation
of the marathon and sort of gets off the route before the coup. not even before the election goes down, which trump has all seeded will be fraudulent if he doesn t win. what do you make of this, frank, the witnesses like him, tim, if this trial proceeds, this indictment against trump as we re told to expect any day or week? i think it makes a huge difference. look, cross-examination 101 is to look for bias. to either look for inconsistency, lack of opportunity to observe, or bias. so to the extent rich donahue is a witness in the potential criminal trial in washington, d.c., where is the bias? where is the bias against president trump? when he was right there with him on the immigration policy, on changing the priorities of the department of justice from the previous administration. he was right there lockstep with the president and his policies, was an appointee of the
they ve been accused of conspiracy together. nike cole, as you noted, the biggest development today was that the judge is going to allow the department of justice to prepare a list of witnesses with whom trump and nauta may not have communications about the facts of the case. and the problem here is with respect to nauta, the judge did not want to impair his livelihood, as he noted. walt nauta continues to work for former president trump. on the other hand, as one of our own said to me a few moments ago, what s going to stop them? how are they going to enforce that, vis-a-vis trump and nauta? if the two of them take a walk together on a golf course alone and they happen to discuss what s going to happen here and how to coordinate their stories, is anyone going to find out about it? and is anyone going to stop it? so i think the judge was very concerned about imposing certain conditions, enforcing those conditions, however, is also easier said than done. nicolle? let me bring tim haff
about your investigation. we don t have tim yet. neal is already with us. neal, let me ask you to jump in on what is now before all of us and before the country, but before a defendant. trump s just sitting at a table that any defendant in any trial like this would sit at. and lisa is describing conduct that is outside the norm. but other than doing that, there wasn t a lot of optionality for trump or his legal team. they had to sit there for the duration of today s proceedings. what do you make of everything that brought us to this moment, where donald trump, once an american president, twice impeached, now twice indicted not in charge of the room, didn t have the talking stick, as he likes to have, and very much at the i won t say mercy, but very much a cog in the wheels of the criminal justice system at this point. yeah, trump today faced what