Mel Li News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> paula reid, appreciate it. thanks so much. joining me now, chief correspondent kaitlan collins, former prosecutor elie honig, and adam kinzinger, also ashley alison, former national coalitions director of the biden/harris campaign, and former senior obama adviser, david axelrod, and john miller. el li, just from a legal standpoint, what stands out to you? >> i've read a lot of indictments and sometimes they fall into two buckets. sometimes you can't tell. they're too general and you don't know if they have the goods to back it up. sometimes you bring an indictment and it sounds like a littl...

Person, this new prosecutor, who is going to be in charge of it. and the idea being that these are already pretty far along, and this person is simply going to take them over. it's not going to start from scratch. that's the theory. but in practice, what alisyn just said is absolutely true. they have -- special counsels have a way of just going on and on, and so that's going to be the challenge for this person. >> all right. evan, jessica, paula, elli, stand by. we're going to take a quick break but we continue to follow the breaking news on the other side. attorney general merrick garland set...

He's still going after being appointed by bill barr during the trump administration. so, the question is, how do you limit that? and the answer is, there's no really good way. the law -- as elli just described, the law really makes it clear that the pouspecial counsel is kind of his own boss. he or she is going to be in charge of this investigation. what they're going to do is they're going to take over the investigation that's already ongoing. the mar-a-lago investigation is being run out of this building by national security investigators upstairs in the national security division. they're l...

Counsel. crucially here, this will be an independent prosecutor. however, ultimately, it will -- whatever decisions this special counsel makes, it will have to be approved as to potentially whether to charge the former president or any of his associates. it will have to be given the green light ultimately by the attorney general and top officials at the justice department. so, whereas this will be operating independently, there is still some involvement in the end from the attorney general here. that's also what we saw in those other two special counsels that we saw in the past five years as w...

Particularly the mar-a-lago investigation. so, it's not great news for the president's attorneys, who will be the first ones to tell you they were kind of hoping things would wrap up soon. >> we just got the two-minute warning while paula was answering that question. let me bring you in on what this means for trump and his team, elli. >> well, i don't think it makes an indictment any more or less likely than it was otherwise. the justice department, normal prosecutors, the regular rank and file, were already well into this investigation. ultimately, they have the power to make a decision. now,...