welcome to our viewer in the united states and around the world. i m christine romans. and we begin with donald trump s arrest and arraignment in the classified documents case. the washington post reports that trump rejected efforts by one of his lawyers to cut a deal with the justice department to return the documents and avoid indictment. post says chris kise wanted to negotiate with the doj back in the fall after the fbi found more than 100 class filed documents at mar-a-lago. but cnn spoke to sources close to trump s legal team and they cast doubt on whether that was a real opportunity to settle. and merrick garland is depending the special counsel behind the trump indictment, jack smith. paula reid has more. reporter: speaking for the first time since former president trump was indicted mr. smith is a veteran career prosecutor. reporter: attorney general merrick garland standing by special counsel jack smith who was prosecuting former president trump and ad
strauss. good morning. you heard pence and haley calling the charges serious but reiterating that the former president deserves his day in court. what do you make of how the xwop field is reacting and positioning around the president s indictment? two things. first, everything that we saw in the past few clips underscores what pollsters have seen for a while, that there is an immovable base of the republican party that won t change their position and stop supporting donald trump. nothing will change that. no event will affect that in any serious way. and the other thing we saw here is that there is a healthy sort of skepticism toward various other institutions in the united states. and trump represents a defiance in a way to all of that. there is a large sort of sense of embattlement and trump embodies the polar opposite of