got him to this point, and why he chose mr. hur. let s get into it. joining me now is nbc news justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian, so ken, was this all made more urgent by the discovery of even more documents this time in a garage next to the president s corvette, is this why we got a special counsel today? that certainly is the sense you get, if there isn t a direct relationship, it certainly had to contribute, because think about what we have here. we have a u.s. attorney in chicago, who has been conducting a review, for weeks, trying to gather the facts and understand whether there is any need for a criminal investigation. and in order to do that, you need to know where are all of the classified documents, how did they get there, and as we ve been reporting today, the fbi interviewed some of the biden aides involved in packing the boxes and moving the documents, so that u.s. attorney had been reporting to merrick garland. well then, all of a sudden, toda
today, you have another revelation of classified documents. i mean at some point it becomes the preliminary review stage has to end and you say i can t exonerate, i can t say that no crime is committed so we have to go forward with a special counsel. and it looks like that is the decision that merrick garland made. he didn t really lay out, as i thought he might today, some of the factors, some of the reasons behind why they couldn t rule this out as a series of innocent mistakes, but that s the facts, i mean that is just, that s on its face, that is the reality, because if the u.s. attorney in chicago could have established that yes, this was just some sloppiness of packing boxes then it would be no need tore a special counsel but in fact, what we have is a special counsel and rob hur, the man appointed, is a consummate career special prosecutor, katy, who was in a senior role at the trump justice department, deputy to rod rosenstein in the job that touches almost everything
are at the moment, this now layers more on top of all of that, and that s why it is going to be incumbent on the biden administration and the biden, president biden himself, to get out in front and stay out in front on this, pushing him to saying, everything you want is right here. i ve got nothing else to hide. there are no more documents. if that can be safely stated at some point. and we ve cooperated. and to david s excellent points, then the justice department piece will unfold itself naturally around this, and there will be a moment where the special prosecutor hur will come out and say done it, we ve put everything into the pot, on the table, rather, and we took off the table the stuff that didn t matter anymore, and what s left is nothing. so we ll see if that happens. that s when it might matter more that it is a trump appointee saying that. that s right. and come out and say that. josh dawsey, thank you very