of the first federal arraignment of a former u.s. president in the history of this nation. security is tight as donald trump is about to respond to the most serious criminal charges, twice impeached and twice indicted former commander in chief has faced. trump is at his golf club outside miami, expected to heed to the courthouse soon. this is cnn s special coverage of the arrest and arraignment of donald trump. i m anderson cooper. i m jake tapper. the former president will be placed under arrest. he will likely be fingerprinted electronically and then he is expected to plead not guilty to the unprecedented 37-count indictment. trump is accused of willfully mishandling highly classified documents brought to his mar-a-lago resort after he left office and accused of allegedly conspiring to try to hide these documents, stashing boxes in unsecured locations, including a ballroom and a bathroom. trum aide walt nauta is also charged in the indictment and expected to appear alongs
confident as they settle on a playbook for the 2024 race. in new york a grand jury just indicted the former u.s. marine who held a homeless man in a fatal chokehold on the subway. we ll tell you what we re learning about the charges. welcome to our viewers in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. tonight as the federal prosecution of donald trump moves into the next phase the nation s chief law enforcement officer is breaking his silence about the case. we re following all the new developments of trump s indictment. as the former president is predictionably lashing out what is the attorney general of the as you know attorney general garland doesn t like to talk at all about ongoing cases. this is the first time since former president trump was formally charged that we ve heard garland speak. of course he appointed special counsel jack smith back in november. today he talked just a little bit about his historic role i
filing with 11 people and i was like that scans in a nation with 30 million people. i think the rest of the folks are like i don t need to go through every book in my kid s library. please make me less involved. enough e-mails. that s for another show. thank you, chris, as always. and thanks to you at home for joining us this evening. today for only the second time in american history a former president appeared in court as a criminal defendant. now, the first time was last month when donald trump was arraigned on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the manhattan district attorney s case against him. and now today mr. trump appeared in that courtroom again virtually by videoconference from mar-a-lago. the reason for this hearing was that the judge in this case needed to explain to former president trump why he is not allowed to post any of the evidence from this case on social media. which seems like it was probably quite necessary because donald trump
so critical is a verbal one. and it relies on employee number 4. so i won t say that it is a weak point but it is something that clearly the government would want to shore up as much as possible. is this an indictment as much for trump as it is to flip walt nauta? it just seems to me at one point walt nauta s utility has diminished. with this it seems like walt nauta is back in the sea and that there is so much pressure on him that he is on the center of this, and a fishman to carry out trump s plot. do you think, if you are his lawyer, using it is time to talk to the doj? if i were the doj i would want nauta, or de oliveira on the witness stand giving the story, narrating all the documents and all the different things we ve talked about. it s always just much better to have somebody tell the story live. and i actually think what we are seeing here is that there was an attempt to get de
i know these are incentivized deals, but does this not qualify as witness intimidation? this was one of the things the committee referred to the department of justice. we are very disturbed about the testimony. we didn t have any corroborating evidence. but there were a lot of the witnesses that appeared before the committee were paid for by trump world, that s their word, not just mine. it did cause concern. was that part of the same sort of situation that happened with miss hutchinson? was it influencing their testimony? was it keeping these witnesses under control? we were unable to find out, but it made us very suspicious, and we hope that the department of justice would look at it and be able to do more digging than we were able to do. we know that walt nauta and