Results of the president ial election. Coming up, well dig deeper into the indictment and the former president s defense. Can trump be charged with lying if he believes what he said was true . The answer may hinge, at least in part, at least on district judge Tanya Chutkan, a vet ran on cases involving january 6th defendants. What members of congress are claiming and will it be a jury of his peers or the electorate who render the final verdict . We begin with tomorrows arraignment in a d. C. Federal court where donald trump will be formally charged for repeatedly spreading lies as part of an elaborate criminal scheme with the ultimate goal to hang on to power by any means necessary. In fact, trump is raising four federal counts including three conspiracy, to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding and to impede the peoples right to vote. Ever since the news broke, the former president , his allies and attorneys have been working furiously to smear jack smith and t
nothing as windy as we saw earlier on in the week. that hello. ukraine doesn t deny shooting down a russian plane inside russia, killing we re told, ukranian prisoners. 700 days in how dangerous a moment is this? our defence editor, mark urban, is here to explain the significance. ukraine nears the second anniversary of russia s invasion full of uncertainty has western commitment faltered? and how much more can they send even if they want to? we ll ask a ukrainian mp and the former us ambassador to nato. coming up. what do the post office scandal, me too, newsnight s investigation into university hospitals birmingham foundation trust and the tavistock gender identity clinic have in common? all featured whistleblowers and some of them weren t protected by the law that s supposed to keep them safe. time for a new whistleblowers bill, say these two women. we ll talk to the chair of the parliamentary group on whistleblowing and the head of whistlebowers uk in ten minutes. a
joining us now, nbc news chief political analyst, chuck todd, the man behind the article and nbc news correspondent, vaughn hillyard. chuck, when you go back and look at 2020, and why donald trump lost, is there a definitive answer for why he lost? i think if you surveyed political strategists and political scientists, you wouldn t get a definitive answer. i think he lost simply because of covid. there s a lot of people because of what happened after the election with january 6th, they think about his antics, the first impeachment. then we had the second impeachment that sort of took place right after the inauguration. we never really had that sort of consensus, you didn t have the after action reports because you have one party was in denial that they actually lost, so they didn t do an after action report. but in some ways, neither did the democrats and i think that what i feel like i m watching is what the biden campaign thought their theory of the case was in october of
to charge a conspiracy and have only one defendant in the courtroom because it naturally leads to the question, well, where are all the other conspirators you say were involved in this conspiracy? it s what we call the empty chair problem. i think it was a deliberate decision here, because if you look at the clock, jack smith s team is in a race against the clock. there s no other way to say it. he s got a defendant who is looking at probably six trials, four criminal, two civil, within the next year and a half. that s an enormous number of trials, each separated by about two months. if jack smith were in a situation where he had six or seven defendants in front of him, five of whom are lawyers and all the various motions he would have to deal with before the trial, that would take a very, very long time. i think it was a well-considered