hearings, that s what we re seeing with these trump aides and what we re seeing in the criminal prosecution. and frankly that doesn t bode well for donald trump because the typical line of attack when you re cross examining prosecution witnesses is the bias those witnesses have for one reason or another against the defendant, but virtually all these people frankly are in the defendant s camp and corner than they are against the defendant. keep our eye on walt nauta, the other individual charged, whether he initially decides to turn on the former president. so, glenn, let s talk about that the washington post story about how trump refused to consider a settlement plan last fall that was proposed by one of his attorneys. the proposal anyway would have avoided all of the charges and returned all the documents. two parter here. do you think the doj would have been open to such a settlement there, and secondly do you think the doj would be open to some
from trump lawyers like don mcgahn, who a guest brought up randomly tonight to make the comparison. he cooperated like maybe meadows will, and mueller got other trump aides who knew the campaign in and out to cooperate like sam nunberg. he used his voice to about a tense probe. both special counsels are operating with great powers and a layer of independence in doj. the only difference, remember, is that mueller had a ceiling, a standing rule against indicting any sitting president. while smith, who has the same job title today, has the same powers and no ceiling, because there is no limit in doj rules or law, that would ever stop a prosecutor with evidence from indicting a former president. with all of that in mind, we turn to the aforementioned and former trump adviser sam
we have some breaking news just into cnn. a federal judge has ordered former trump chief of staff mark meadows and a number of other former top aides to testify in the special counsel s january 6th investigation. the judge rejected trump s claims of executive privilege. let s get right to cnn s evan perez. evan tell us what this means because this may open the door to so much more information. in this case, it really does. brianna the just the justice department been winning these these cases where they re asking a judge to compel some of these, these former trump aides. to answer questions to part of this investigation into the attempts by the former president to overturn the 2020 election results. and you know, they keep winning these because you know, the judges are finding that
does it matter years later? people busy, people moving on. does it matter he is getting aired out in the new york times tonight? well, it s very interesting, because you and i had a moment when the memo by barr went out involving the mueller investigation, and i called it a contract for the president to bury that. it was after that that they assigned durham basically to find how the russian investigation was all made up, and then they mimicked all the things they were supposedly investigating. mm-hmm. so they actually did the misconduct that they were looking at the fbi and others to see if they did. you re saying there s a animal farm quality, that what everyone think of bob mueller, he was always a registered republican who had a lot of his team, and when he did his report, the only thing i think he got a lot of public flak for was after indicting a lot of trump aides, he didn t make a
investigating the people who are physically present. he s only investigating the people who weren t but might still have committed election crimes, aka, the people who said, hey, come to washington on the 6th. the lawyers, trump aides, or trump himself. so, if in this country the doj gets around two years later to doing what these other countries did within days and actually recommends the indictment of elites, garland will approve or deny that, and we ll know if there s a disagreement under the rules. but this wider contrast is the point. it didn t take germany or peru two years to charge political elites involve in the public coup planning in peru or the evidence of coup planning in germany. much of it was secret. and even if you put aside the possibly intricate questions about whether former president trump now running for office can be charged, we know the doj s investigating lawyers like john eastman because he was publicly searched for his phone. we know they re looking at their