of andrew weissmann and ari melber and others, it lists 38 counts total, 31 of them have to do with trump's willful retention of national defense information. that is the espionage act. and another count of false statements. then there are a number of charges that include both donald trump and his former valet, walt nauta. there are five, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, and one count of a scheme to conceal. the final of the 38 counts is just one that has been charged to walt nauta, one for false statements. both defendants have been summoned to appear on tuesday. joining us here for our continuing special coverage, my colleagues rachel maddow and joy reid. also with us in studio, msnbc

chief legal correspondent ari melber, legal analyst, andrew weissmann, and my friend and colleague, msnbc anchor katy tur. rachel, we're about to hear from jack smith himself. if i have to interrupt you abruptly, i apologize in advance. your thoughts right now. >> reading the indictment, nicolle, i was struck by the simplicity of it structurally. this is not a case where we need to wait for somebody to flip. there's no allen weisselberg character out here who we need to find out how much they're going to tell prosecutors. there's no opaque question of intent that we need to wait to see if prosecutors have some access to. there's no, you know, contingent second crime that elevates these things to a more serious thing. all things that we've seen in other serious cases involving trump and his business. in this case this is straightforward. what they're laying out, it's an accusation. it is not a conviction. what they're accusing him of is that he was not allowed to have this stuff. he knew it and he had the stuff

anyway. and that's it. and so i think it's a readable indictment, which is a service to the american people, particularly the first half of it. you could read out loud and everybody would get it. second half of it is more complicated but still basic, very basic idea here is very understandable. i think it's hard to contest as some sort of witch hunt. you're not allowed to have classified documents. you shouldn't have them. once you find out you do have them, you should hand them over. we'll see what jack smith has to say. the former president already attacking him in personal terms is a very bad sign in terms of how he's going to handle this. we can hope his allies and other republicans don't join him in attacking prosecutors, in attacking the rule of law, in attacking the justice system and instead focus on the defense of the man here. >> it's so interesting that rachel points to the simplicity. i'm always bracing for needing to use all my lifelines to call people like you or andrew weissmann when a indictment like this is made public, and again, i'm going to apologize to you the same way i did to rachel.

jack smith takes that podium, we're all going to zip up and listen. it is clear he pierced something that was always a challenge for robert mueller before him. that was the president's intent. it was his intent to take these things. it was his intent to share them with people, and he did it with the knowledge it was not allowed. >> absolutely. it helps when it's clear. o.j. famously had the book "if i did it." for donald trump this case boils down to i did it, and he said as much in public to sean hannity and others who tried to wave him off. when you have that combined with the evidence and then the inside job. we had all the questions object day of january 6th, which still remains under investigation by the special counsel about inside jobs. this was an inside job with inside witnesses. trump as a mob boss style blatantly calls them rats sometimes, right? no president had ever spoken like that. but they're not rats. lawyer 1 who we've clearly

identified as we believe to be corcoran. although to be clear the doj isn't naming him yet, made notes because he saw trump was pushing him into a crime he didn't want to help commit, and now the doj says several crimes were committed that what he couldn't get lawyer 1 to do, he got other people to do. and so it is bad news. i have never seen anything hit donald trump this hard, this broad with this much inside evidence from people who are saying i was there. he did it. it was recent, and i'll tell you about it. >> so much of what is in here were things that any of us that covered trump's presidency knew were happening, that he took classified documents to the residence. there's a vast body of contemporaneous journalism that corroborates that. what's amazing is that jack smith clearly pierced the chain of custody from the classified material that no one that worked for trump in a national security or intelligence capacity ever denied took place into the boxes, trump's role in packing them, trump's role in moving them, and trump's role in moving them from room to room at

mar-a-lago. >> and personally looking through them. but to pick up on ari's point, when you're going to attack this, you have to be able to take on the fact that the evidence that is outlined here is not coming from the fbi. these are attorneys 1, 2, and 3. those are trump's attorneys. he chose them. >> it's like a fox news lineup, right? they were his public and private attorneys. >> these are people who were the other day on tv defending him. these are employees 1 and 2 with text messages to each other talking about how donald trump was personally reviewing things, and these are messages at the time. so again, this is not the fbi planting evidence. this isn't the fbi interviewing people later. this is contemporaneous material. there are references to tape recordings, text messages, photographs, not photographs taken by the fbi during the search, photographs taken by

employees 1 and 2. >> and shown to trump. >> exactly. so this is one where you want to say, oh, this is just some witch hunt. as andrea mitchell was saying, she wants to hear from people in congress who actually care about national security, what are you going to do with this? i mean this is -- your going to say all these lawyers and all these employees just suddenly decided to be anti-trump? even though they're their people? this is a real problem for sort of i would say these sort of honest republicans who want to really react to this in good faith. >> here comes special counsel jack smith. we're going to pipe down and let everyone listen to him on this historic day. >> good afternoon. today an indictment was unsealed charging donald j. trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well

as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. this indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the southern district of florida, and i invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged. the men and women of the united states intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the united states, and they must be enforced. violations of those laws put our country at risk. adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the department of justice, and our nation's commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. we have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to

everyone. applying those laws, collecting facts, that's what determines the outcome of an investigation, nothing mor and nothing less. the prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the department of justice. they have investigated this case adhering to the highest ethical standards and they will continue to do so as this case proceeds. it's very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. to that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter consistent with a public interest and the rights of the accused. we very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the southern district of florida.

in conclusion, i would like to thank the dedicated public servants of the federal bureau of investigation with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who work tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country. i'm deeply proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. thank you very much. >> why florida, sir? why did you decide to bring the case in florida? >> anyone that has watched jack smith is unsurprised that he was as brief as he was, but there is not an absence of drama here, andrew weissmann, inviting everyone to read the document in full making clear that the men and women behind the classified information that was compromised are american patriots who risk their lives to protect u.s. national security and that is what is at stake. important that he called out his

partners in this investigation, the men and women of the fbi and called for a speedy trial both in the public interest and the right of the accused. >> and i would add and that there are one set of laws in this country. so this is in terms of a model -- i view this as a sort of merrick garland robert mueller model, not a sort of archibald cox model, just to date myself, meaning this is definitely sort of a less is more. i'm hitting key -- >> just the facts, ma'am. >> key points that i want to make. you singled them out, that he wanted to hit, but he wasn't going to belabor it. this was definitely, you know, read the indictment, and then we're going to be heard in court. the one thing i would have liked to hear if i were doing this and, you know, it's hard from the outside, is just more about why this indictment is following the rule of law. not just that there's a strong case, but that so many other

people have been charged for less than this. in other words, this is one where if you hadn't brought this, it would have been completely antithetical to what the department of justice did, and that's something that i think lots of people are going to need to sort of fill in because it's clear that a different calculus was made that's legitimate, which is, you know what, we're going to try our case in court and, you know, donald trump is going to do what donald trump does, and we're going to do what we do and count on the fact that jurors are going to have an oath that they take and count on them to do the right thing. >> nicolle, america just met jack smith, and it was a very brief meeting, and that is how he rolls. it was crisp, it was about the facts and the four corners of the case. but the unstated implication was, yes, go read it, and sure, follow the trial and the defendants have rights, and they

are presumed innocent. it was a model of fairness without any reference, i don't even think -- and i was taking notes, i don't think, correct me if you guys heard differently, i heard a single sentence that made reference to the precedent, the history making aspect that in ways that will be remembered, good, bad or in between, we have to follow the facts, he will forever be in the history books. i heard none of that in a town where lawyers, present company, even myself sometimes included, can sound loud, long, self-important. it was just the facts. it was elliott ness, and i think that's so striking because he's speaking through his actions so he has very little else to add. >> rachel, it's completely in line with the first point you made, the simplicity of the indictment was very much echoed by the simplicity of the words chosen by special counsel jack smith. >> yeah, and i would just -- i would just say one thing about the structure of his remarks that i completely agree with ari

and andrew and you in characterizing this as a very straightforward, crisp, you know, we've heard from people who have worked with jack smith before that he's not a man who likes to play with his food. he just gets that done straight ahead, and we definitely saw that. >> refuels. >> but the way this went is he said what he had done, told people to read the indictment. he said this is a rule of law issue, and everybody, you know, has the this will be tried in court and everybody's guilty -- sorry, innocent until proven guilty and he did one other thing at the end which he did not do, he added this pointed cot sill, in which he praised personnel from the fbi who have participated in this investigation. there are a lot of people who participated in this investigation. putting that at the end so that's where it lands, that is the last thing he says and he didn't have to say it, does reflect that he knows he's in an environment that has politics. he's in an environment in which the republican attacks and the

trump loyalist attacks on the fbi are like nothing we've ever seen in this country before. and part of what's going on here is that the defense of trump is not just the defense of trump as a defendant. the defense of trump is something that wants to destroy federal law enforcement in this country, and the attacks on the fbi, the reaction to the durham report, the way they tried to use the entire russia investigation as some sort of boomerang effect sort of thing that was going to take out the fbi, take out federal law enforcement, essentially neuter the ability of that part of our law enforcement apparatus to get things done, he's saying, no, the fbi are hon rabble, they're part of this. i stand by them and i thank them. letting that be the last thing he says before he walks away shows that he recognizes that those attacks on the fbi are an attack on something very fundamental about our constitutional order. >> it's such an important point. he also makes clear, joy, that quote, the prosecutors in my office are among the best in the

department. he's also, i think, to rachel's point trying to put a little bit of bubble wrap around the integrity to the degree he can, afternoon the people working specifically on this case with him. >> and that will be hard to do. i think the contrast, i think, kind of probably all agree here between the simplicity and sort of straightforwardness of jack smith who's been very no nonsense from the very beginning and the high drama and high you're already getting from trump's allies on the hill and even some of the other presidential candidates, other than the two that used to be federal prosecutors, asa hutchinson, and chris christie, the rest is hysterics, and i think that's what we can expect from this trial. is that donald trump and his people are going to provide the high drama while the prosecutors who are going to be on the receiving end of what -- i can't even imagine how vicious it's going to be and how dangerous it's going to be and how ugly it's going to be, jack smith,

they're going to keep it very simple, keep it to the facts, keep the drama to a minimum and just do their job. i feel like that does kind of reflect the way that this is written. i mean, i am struck by the misuse of donald trump of our national security, the casual misuse of it. the fact that he was storing our national security information in a ballroom, a shower, an office space, you know, an office by the liquor cabinet in his bedroom, on a stage in the ballroom. just the casual nature of it and the casual use of mr. nauta, the casual use of a navy man. the casual use of a navy veteran casually to use him for his own ends, he's in trouble too. this was an indictment of two men, not just one. i think there's so much here that is going to be -- you know, the asymmetry is going to just ride throughout this entire process, and it's -- i don't know, it's sad and it's shocking but it's also kind of -- it makes me feel a bit relieved.

donald trump when you're finished being president, that's what george washington said, you just go back to being an ordinary citizen and any citizen who did this would be prosecuted. >> one of the most striking lines of the whole thing was the first line where he says on the 20th he ceased being the american president. and all of the rest -- that we have to stipulate that is amazing but because it's donald trump we do. just pick up on joy's point, to trump every human being, no matter their resume, no matter what they once held dear, and you have to assume that walt nauta was loyal to the military in the course of his career, but everyone trump enlists in his misdeeds is tainted and tarnished and walt nauta today halls as been charged with felonies. >> michael cohen, paul manafort, the list goes on. i wonder what the conversation about walt nauta and his lawyer right now about what he does next. we had this conversation a little bit earlier about the truth social post that donald trump put out praising nauta,

calling him a beautiful man, et cetera, it sounded to andrew like it was a please don't flip on me truth social post. as you said, donald trump ceased to be president, and they put the date here at 12:00 p.m. on january 20th, 2021. and after that, he still acted like he could do whatever he wanted, and they point out that he puts people's lives in danger. he put the u.s. military in danger. this is paragraph 3 of the indictment, state nuclear secrets, nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the united states and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. they're putting it out there and they're also saying this was not the gsa moving boxes, and donald trump didn't know what was in those boxes. they say specifically that donald trump caused scores of boxes, many of which contained classified documents to be transported to mar-a-lago, and

there they are in these pictures that we have, and oh, by the way, he showed them to people on at least two occasions. i want to make one note about trying this in florida. i know when we talk to lawyers, prosecutors, they will say the d.c. circuit is the place that is easiest to do this. judges there know how to handle classified information. but i think for the health of this country to see this case as fair to donald trump, having it in florida is probably not a bad idea. having it in a red state where the jury pool is more friendly to donald trump and showing them and proving to them that he was wrong, that what he did was criminal and he should be held accountable for that, i think that's the best possible scenario for the health of this country going forward, especially in an election year, if it comes to trial. >> is that why it happened? is that how jack smith thinks? >> i don't know. i think that's probably something that you would think about in the back of your head, but if you think about the

nature of what has been charged, which is the illegal retention of documents and then the obstruction and false statements, the illegal retention happened in florida, not in d.c. this wasn't the illegal taking from the white house, the charge is the illegal retention. they charged it in d.c., and it gets transferred, that's going to look like forum shopping. the one forum where you know you can bring everything and there's no legal jeopardy is florida. and it does have the advantage of being able to say, you know what, we have great proof, we can prove the case here. i am reminded of the paul manafort try in virginia, that's where paul manafort wanted to be and the one juror who spoke after that trial was somebody who said, i voted for donald trump. i am a trump supporter, and she literally said i left my maga hat in my car. and that was because, you know

what? i acted out of principle. i took an oath, i followed the facts, i followed the law, and i it my job. >> rachel maddow, i know you have a thought on this. >> i don't mean to cut like right to the mob movie on this, but there is also -- >> please. taken us way too long to get here, rachel. this is why we love you. [ laughter ] >> jack smith just gave this like very dignified, you know, just the facts thing. let's also talk about how this fits into '70s gritty mob drama, and we did see -- i think the scariest thing that happened around the first indictment of donald trump, which was just a couple of months ago, when he was indicted in new york state, is that the florida governor came out and essentially suggested that if trump wasn't going to turn up in new york to face that indictment, if he was going to essentially go on the lam and not be arraigned refused to turn up in court, that

florida wouldn't assist in any effort to bring him to new york. wouldn't assist in any effort for him to be extradited against his will to another jurisdiction to face these charges. and so i mean, one of the very practical implications of the fact that this is being brought in florida and not in d.c. is that trump's already in florida, and so they've got to move him 75 miles from mar-a-lago to miami to do this, they don't need to get him out of the state, and we're not facing the prospect of some question that he might not turn himself in and a very thorny question whether or not some hot dogging republican political aspirant might try to turn it into a physical confrontation. i don't mean to go to mellow drama here, that's a consideration that's been weighing on me since ron desantis crossed that very fine line in response to trump's first indictment. >> i can't believe i'm going to do this on national tv, so that's the difference between

the state case versus a federal case, so in the state case there would have to be this extradition, and it could be complicated and it could take time. federally, if he didn't show up, if this was, for instance, charged in d.c. and because it's a federal case and he's in florida, the judge in d.c. just issues an arrest warrant and it gets to be executed in florida. in other words, if he just said i'm ignoring this, because it's a national case, the feds don't actually have to worry about, you know, state by state. they can just send the marshals, put the cuffs on him and take him. >> right, yes, but when they send the marshals to mar-a-lago, does ron desantis send the florida state troopers to ring mar-a-lago to confront the marshals? i mean, again, i know this is the mob movie part of this, but if you're talking about physically moving the guy, and you've got a state governor saying i'm going to use my law enforcement capabilities here in

this country to stop this from going forward, again, very, very ugly, but desantis is the one who raised the prospect that he might have the appetite for that kind of confrontation, which gets us from 0 to 60 in half a second. that's a really bad dark place for the country. >> can i make this even worse, because it's florida, a few things about florida, and it is a state that is mad cap, i'll put it that way. it's an interesting state. there still could be the kind of drama that rachel alludes to, even though we don't have the extradition drama. we now have the second highest polling candidate for president and the first highest polling candidate for president now engrossed in what will be, you know, a kind of trial of the century moment. >> yeah. >> and ron desantis has already picked a side. he's already decided that he

wants to be donald trump's savior. he's all but said he will pardon him, he's going to defend him to the end, and he's trying to corral the same maga forces who i think we're all a little bit worried about when it comes to what might happen during the trial, and all of this is now going to take place in downtown miami, which is a place that used to be a blue spot on the red florida map, but it is now red. it is blood red. donald trump has managed to do something no republican has done even facing, you know, popular democratic, you know, presidential candidates like barack obama, and that was clinton country florida for a long time. miami-dade county is maga country, and florida itself and i know you've talked about this a lot on your show, i've talked about it a lot on mine, frighteningly enough, florida has become the epicenter of the american far right and of far right extremists. it is the home of enrique tarrio.

it is a proud boys hub in the united states, if not the proud boys hub in the united states. florida was one of the states that sent the most people to the january 6th insurrection. there are oath keepers based in florida. roger stone is based in florida. a lot of the extremism radiating into the republican party comes from florida and specifically from miami. the miami republican party is now effectively controlled by the proud boys and by at least proud boys supporters, proud boys adjacent people. so what i think we have to also think about is just seeing jack smith, who, by the way, to me looks a little scary. he walks around with his sort of, you know, his bag lunch and his serious face, and you know he came from the hague and he did that and you're like that's kind of a scary attitude, but his presentation is just by the books. he's not going to be dramatic. the whole trial could be from a

national security standpoint frightening. >> jack smith knows all this, so whatever, you know, analysis we have of the politics or of the domestic security landscape, jack smith knows ten times more than we do. why did jack smith move it to miami? is it confidence in the evidence? is it confidence that even in a red state you can still receive a fair trial? tell me from the mind of jack smith why this is happening? >> so i think for the illegal retention counts, i think that there is a good legal answer, not a sort of political strategy answer, and i do think that within the department, there are going to be meetings with appellate lawyers, with the solicitor general, and they're going to be like illegal retention, the district, you have to pick a district unless there are multiple districts, and they're going to be like illegal retention, that's florida, period. there is no other choice, and so obstruction there was the ability, but once you have part

of the case in florida as a legal matter, you have to, then everything else follows. you can't indict them in two separate districts. that would really look like overkill to say i'm going to try and have two bites at the apple. the other is there is to get in the weeds, there is a pending supreme court case on venue, and what is at issue in that case is if you get the venue decision wrong, if you choose the wrong district, what the supreme court is deciding is whether you have the ability to retry the person in the correct district or whether essentially it's double jeopardy. that puts sort of a thumb on the scale to get the decision right. >> only andrew weissmann would bring up the circuit split on the venue issue of the appealability of double jeopardy. >> i warned you. >> it's like a nightmare law school exam question if you got it and it was about a former president, it's like only on a

president. >> that case involves florida, a person who had stolen some patent secrets. we did this on the show the other day. >> this is great. >> and he then moved to alabama and the question was should he be tried in alabama or in florida, but the theft took place in florida, so the supreme court actually is going to decide whether or not a retrial was even possible. he was actually convicted and his conviction was overturned because of venue. florida's in everything. >> professor reid. >> i think the first thing, i think that's true and it's their job to research every possibility, that's how you get a bullet proof filing, but i think the first answer we have today and we didn't have it this morning, or yesterday, jack smith's indictment talks ability the crimes he says occurred in florida, and one of them on page 36 says trump and nauta, this aide that american's learning more about, not only did all this lying and stuff, but that quote, trump and nauta misled trump attorney 1 when they

wanted to do this crime. >> that's corcoran. >> yep, corcoran by, quote, moving boxes with docs with classified markings so trump attorney 1 would not find the documents and produce them. you've documented this a long time, the lengths trump will go to lie to even the most loyal around him. they were concerned that trump attorney 1, that corcoran for all of his loyalty to donald trump would still do what, still follow the law as a member of the bar, which is what you're supposed to do. they knew they couldn't just issue these orders. they're out here moving boxes in florida. the purpose of the conspiracy, again, sometimes people say what was this all about and why was he doing this? there may be more than one real world answer to that, but jack smith's answer, which he wants to prove to a jury is quote, the purpose of the conspiracy was for trump to keep classified documents, again, in florida, that he'd taken with him from the white house and to hide and conceal them from a federal

grand jury. so those are smith's answers that i think before you get to law school exams, it's the first answer is a lot of these crimes, indicted crimes, alleged crimes occurred in florida. >> one point about what we haven't seen up until now. we've covered donald trump in all of his iterations for a long time now. he's been in a lot of legal trouble or apparent legal trouble. what we've never seen before is all of the receipts that include word for word verbatim discussions that donald trump had, audio recordings of donald trump, realtime text messages of his aides saying donald trump told me to do x, donald trump told me to do y. we've seen him get out of legal jeopardy because he's not on record anywhere or he's squishy. there's no text trail for him. there's no email trail for him. he famously doesn't put things in writing, and for the first time we have his words on tape a lot of them, and for the first

time we have aides in realtime talking about him, and federal prosecutors have all of this. the detail in this document is unlike anything we have seen in the eight plus years now that we've been covering donald trump. >> it's a great point, and the closest anyone came was robert mueller's volume 2 where don mcgahn and his chief of staff's notes where trump tells him to fire mueller and put out the false statement, it's i think obstructive acts 3, 4, and 5 that come the closest to what katy is saying, but actual trump's voice on tape we haven't heard or seen before. >> donald trump's reaction to don mcgahn. >> he fired him. he ultimately fired him. >> why are you taking notes. because i don't want a record. >> he ripped up papers and flushed them down the toilet. >> i think he swallowed some, didn't he? >> just a little harbinger, this is what you will see in the january 6th case because there

is going to be a tape there of famously the georgia tape, and you are going to have, again, insiders, a lot of lawyers, white house lawyers who are going to talk about what exactly they heard donald trump say and what they told him. so it's going to be repeated over and over again. it's a disaster. >> it's not helpful to donald trump. >> let's met bring in an expert voice, msnbc justice and legal affairs analyst, anthony coli, he now is here to help us wade through the day's historic, monumental events. i wonder if we could go back to what jack smith told the country to do, read the indictment. how far would you hope most people will get if they're interested in these sorts of things? >> thank you, i hope they do take the time to read it, and one of the things that, nicolle, if i can go back to what you said earlier, you talked

specifically about when jack smith said my office. and that is an important caveat here because there is a level of independence between the office of the special counsel and the office of the attorney general. jack smith is not subject to the day-to-day supervision of anyone at the justice department, and that's important because i believe when back in november when i was at doj, when garland made this appointment, he did so primarily to reassure the american people that whatever decision was made in this case was indisputably guided by the facts and the law. not partisan politics, not anything else, so i found that -- and that was -- you were right to point that out because it conveys the level of independence here. the other observation that i had, nicolle, was the fact that this press conference, unlike the many that i put together at

main justice was not held at main justice. it was held about a mile and a half away at jack smith's office. he stood alone, and i think that's important for people to understand, that this was a decision that he made himself not reporting to an attorney general that resides in a cabinet of the current president. he reached this decision himself guided by the facts and the law. that's what we should all want to see in this -- in a case like this. >> anthony, rachel made the important point that some of what hits you first when you read the indictment is its simplicity and that jack smith's statements spoken from the podium there at his office, and you're right, it within the at doj, were also incredibly simple, but they were a scalding knife through frozen butter. we've known nothing of the sum and substance of the entirety of

what he had visibility into. it is gob smacking. as you have sort of the elegance of the words in black and white, the evidence in terms of the photographs of the almost austerity of jack smith the man, you also have just the gluttonous behavior of an ex-commander in chief just slopping around classified documents in boxes. one of the most disturbing things, i worked in the white house, to read about how boxes spilled out, i almost had a physical reaction to that and they did too. what is your sense of that sort of collision of donald trump's extraordinary cavalier and allegedly criminal conduct when it came to classified documents and whether he's met his match in jack smith? >> so what i love about jack smith is that he is, if you had to look up rule of law in a dictionary, i felt like a picture of him would show up. he is by the book. he was understated, he was not animated. he was sober, in fact, driven,

and i think nicolle, what disturbed me the most when i looked at this 49 pages, detailed indictment, is the fact that there was a reference to a classified map of an ongoing military operation that was showed to a member of the president's political action committee. that is brazen behavior. there is absolutely no reason for donald trump to have had that information, and i think he has met his match in jack smith, and anyone, quite frankly, who is open minded to the even handed administration of justice and who believes that donald trump had no reason to have these documents, much less to show them, i think anyone can

come to that fair conclusion. >> rachel. >> for being with us today, i had a question for you about something that you mentioned a moment ago, which is the degree of independence that the special counsel's office has from the attorney general. can you just spell that out for us a little bit in sort of non-lawyerly terms. i mean, first of all, i basically have two questions about it. one, is there any sort of internal process in the justice department, a report or some other thing that had to happen between the special counsel's office and attorney general garland before the indictment was issued? and if attorney general garland believed that this indictment was not a good idea, not that he thought that there was misconduct or that jack smith had violated his remit in some way, it just wasn't his preference that this go ahead, would that be enough for attorney general garland to quash it and say no, don't go ahead. >> i'll start with what the

attorney general said when he made this appointment. he said that smith will exercise his own independent prosecutorial discretion to decide whether or not charges should be brought, and that's how the special counsel regs make it clear that any attorney general should have very limited involvement. now, that's not to say that garland didn't know about major prosecutorial or investigative steps before it happened. i fully expect that he would have known ahead of time whether or not smith would be proposing some type of action, major action that perhaps was not outside or within department norms. but knowing who jack smith is, rachel, he is a by the book prosecutor. that's one of the reasons that merrick garland chose him for this job. he is deeply familiar with the

department's post-watergate norms. he is meticulous and dogged, and i just can't imagine any scenario where jack smith would have suggested an action that was just not consistent with department norms. so whatever -- i think the decision was his. i'm pretty sure that the attorney general was aware of major investigative and prosecutorial steps ahead of time, but this is what the rule of law looks like, and this is how it should have unfolded. >> anthony, i want to jump in with one more question, coming back to the text of the document. there have been some press accounts about one act of alleged dissemination of national defense information and classified materials, but you just mengsed the second. i want to come back to the indictment because at least on the day that we hear from jack smith, we'll do what jack smith says, we'll read the indictment ourselves. let me read these two instances to you. these are the two instances that jack smith charges donald trump

showed classified documents to others. they're both in 2021. in july at trump national golf club in bedminster, new jersey, during an audio rorded meeting with a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, trump showed and described a plan of attack that trump said was prepared for him by the department of defense and a senior military official. trump told the individuals the plan was highly confidential and secret. he also said as president i could have declassified it, and now i can't, you know, but this is still a secret. the second is the instance you just mentioned, in august or september 2021 at the bedminster club, trump showed a representative of his political action committee who did not possess a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close to it. like covid germs or something, don't lean in. what is the significance of these two instances?

do you think that jack smith had to select items that weren't so classified that they couldn't be exhibits in a trial, or do you think this was it, or what are we to make of these two extraordinary examples that seem to show that donald trump knowingly disseminated material that he knew was classified at the time? >> nicolle, you and i have both worked in the federal government. i know that my time at the justice department, if i were to have seen anything like that, i would have had to view it in a scif and without a cell phone, right? and so the fact that he had those documents in an unsecured location, it boggles the mind that he had those documents and were showing them to individuals who did not have the authorization to see them. to your question, i do think it's important those two examples were included here

because what is unclear and maybe andrew weissmann will have some more insight into this, what is difficult in a case like this where 320 or so classiied documents were found at mar-a-lago post-presidency, some of that stuff might actually have material value, and so there will have to be -- there would have to be some type of conversations with various entities within the intelligence community to declassify all of that, and so i do think it's important that we saw these two examples here, but who knows what else the significance of the 300 and some other documents that were found at mar-a-lago post-presidency, this blows the mind that he had those documents. >> yeah, i mean, what is in black and white in very dispassionate language really does blow the mind. i think that's a technical legal

term at this point. please don't stray too far from that camera. we'll be here until forever, so we'd love to come back to you. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> it's my pleasure to welcome in to our coverage congressman adam schiff, a former impeachment manager. congressman schiff, i mean, there are echoes of the conduct that you investigated, of conduct that you would have seen and been concerned about as a member of the intelligence committee. your first reaction to the 49-page document of the ex-president? >> well, first of all, it's stunning in its detail, and in the degree to which it shows so clearly donald trump's malign intent. you know, the most difficult aspects to prove is what did the defendant defend. here it's made so clear in the instructions he gave to his aide to move the boxes, in his deceitfulness with his own attorneys. it's so graphic. the other thing that leaps out at me is it's a historic decision to charge a former

president, but here for the special counsel it was not a difficult decision because the evidence laid out in this indictment is so powerful that i don't think special counsel had any choice but to go forward. >> when you, you know, learned and we had copious amounts of news accounts of attorney/client privilege being pierced because of the crime fraud exception, that a judge had deemed that crimes had likely been committed of. there was another echo and that is a federal judge determining that felonies more likely than not were committed by donald trump and john eastman. there's been so much evidence and documentation of trump's criminality, that it is more the pattern than him being responsible in and around classified material. when you see jack smith underscoring the men and women who protect and preserve our national security by gathering intelligence information, do you think some of that is to wake

the republicans out of their zombie state of ignorance and ignoring things that some of them know very well to be true? >> you know, i don't think the special counsel is looking at it through a sort of a partisan lens of what will resonate with republicans or democrats. i think it will have that effect. you know, certainly those of us that worked in the intelligence world and of course i chaired the intel committee for many years, are stunned by the sensitivity of these documents, the fact that they included military plans in case we were attacked, our vulnerabilities, nuclear capacities of some of our adversaadversaries. you know, and that these were kept, you know, in desk drawers, in unlocked rooms, on the stage in some kind of a ballroom, it really is just staggering. but i think this is the way of special counsel and a speaking indictment letting all the american people know that this isn't some paperwork violation. these are national secrets that

present real national security risks to the country had they been shown to others or made available to others or been stolen. and you know, the president at bedminster, you know, kind of showing these off, and isn't this something is such powerful evidence of his knowledge, his guilty knowledge that, you know, these are both important and highly sensitive classified documents that he has no power to show anyone. >> congressman schiff, it's rachel maddow, thank you for being with us. i want to ask you a question that involves two of your many hats that you play in relation to events like this. one is you are a person who has experience as a prosecutor yourself, but also you're a person who has borne the slings and arrows of being attacked by president trump and therefore by his supporters and political

allies, and with both of those hats in mind, i wondered if you have thoughts about the attacks of president trump, not just leading up to this indictment, but now that the indictment has been issued and unsealed, his attacks against jack smith? i mean, he's been calling him all sorts of things, targeting him in all sorts of ways leading up to this. but now that the indictment is out he's calling him a deranged lunatic and a deranged psycho. we know that's the kind of name calling he likes to do. he thinks it's politically strategic. does it have potentially legal consequences now that this is a case that's in federal district court? >> it certainly could have legal consequences in terms of threatening the prosecution team. it also has very real world consequences for special counsel, as you point out, i know being the subject of trump's wrath all too well. when he makes utterances like that, they result in death threats. you can pretty well track the proximity to statements like that with the level of the threats that you receive, but i

also think in wearing my former impeachment hat here, donald trump didn't decide one day at mar-a-lago that he was going to lie, cheat, and steal when it came to classified information. this is who he is. this is someone who believes that following the law is for suckers and losers. he's never been held accountable, and it just breeds further disrespect for the law. this is also what sort of leaps out at me. we are in an era which as roosevelt once purportedly said, sometimes we are known by our enemies, even as much as we'd rather be known by our friends. special counsel to him is a powerful enemy. >> congressman, let me follow up on some of this. i want to ask about this part of the indictment because i think some of this, again, was covered by investigative journalism, but

the specificity with which jack smith ascertained donald trump's role in, first of all, packing his own boxes, and even before that taking his pdb up to the residence, and that he didn't obtain any waiver to have any clearance at all after the presidency, something sue gordon and others who worked with trump didn't think he should have. this is in the indictment, in january 2021 as he was preparing to leave the white house trump and his white house staff included walt nauta, trump was personally involved in this process. trump caused his boxes containing hundreds of classified documents to be transported from the white house to mar-a-lago. the to marla go. the two instances of sharing of classified documents take place at bedminster. are there for you with your shopper prosecutor hat on, are there still some mysteries? >> i'm sure there's a lot of things we're going to learn that

are not in the indictment. there's certain things the prosecutor wants to dispose and some they are going to save for trying the case. but what does leaf looep out at me is there must be multiple cooperating witnesses here, including most likely at least one, if not more of donald trump's former lawyers. and it also leaps out at me that the case that the judge had to pierce that attorney-client privilege is certainly bourn up up by the evidence revealed in this indictment. they will certainly challenge that, as they will challenge other things. the new lawyers, whoever they maybe, will realize that if they end up having to go to trial in this, they are going to have a hard tomb on their hands, so they are going to try to get rid of the indictment through motion practice, but it looks like the judge that pierced the privilege was on pretty solid ground. we don't know whether this other

person is cooperating, but if they are not, they are going to have a heavy incentive to do so before this case is over. >> congressman schiff, thank you so much for jumping on and being part of our breaking news coverage. lawrence o'donnell also joins us at the table. this line about trump not receiving any waiver to maintain any access to classified information is interesting. there's a tradition that there's a lengthy tradition of doing so, it's not clear anyone would have wanted the advice and had zero right to possess or disseminate classified information. >> the waiver is available when they are doing their memoirs and probably all of them requested the waiver at some point. and in this case, where someone is playing around with classified documents at home to not have asked for the waiver is just all part of the weird structure of the whole story.

the detail here in the indictment that we received today is beyond what andrew and i were imagineing on the night when we were covering the search warranting with served on the former the's home. it seemed pretty bad. it seemed bad enough. i didn't go to the point of imagining there would be an audio tape of the president showing a classified document to someone. the special prosecutor today urged people to read this. he said, it's returned by a grand jury of the southern district of florida and i invite everyone to read it in full to understand the gravity of the crimes charged. if you want to save yourself some time, just go to page to

16. >> we're going to go with you. >> there's a recorded conversation that is going to create -- when this comes up in the trial, the headline of the day is going to be, look at this. that's going to be the headline. on the top of page 16, you hear donald trump on tape saying to someone, this is secret information. look, look at this. that's it. you're done. now, donald trump is not going to be able to take the witness stand and explain that line. this discussion goes on to donald trump saying, people have said that it's clear that donald trump knew he could not declassify when he wasn't president. it actually isn't. when you look at this dialogue that plays out here, you see both things. he has a staffer there with him, who is more knowledgeable than

donald trump. he's showing this to a writer, who is there to talk about the mark madows biography. the writer's first word when donald trump shows him a classified document is what everyone's would be, wow. that's his first response to what the president of the united states is doing. and then this is where it gets really interesting. trump is talking to him about this document. he says to him, this was done by the military and given to me. i think we can probably declassify it. so donald trump is sitting there not president saying, i think we can declassify it. the staff member says to him, i don't know, we'll have to see. yeah, we'll have to try to figure out, yeah. so that steers donald trump back to, oh yeah, i'm not president. and then he says to the writer, see, as president, i could have declassified it. so there you see this retired man in florida in the same

conversation at one line thinking he can declassify documents, and line below that when corrected by a staff realizes, oh, i guess i can't. but this kind of detail of this is secret information, look at this, and it's on tape, that was beyond anyone's imagination. >> it calls out a dramatic reading of a court filing. i think rachel, the kill shot is on page 17. february 16th, 2017, four years before trump's disclosure of class if ied information set forth above, and lawrence us more, the other is this map, a classified map of country b that trump tells a representative he should not be showing the map to, this is in the indictment. this is a quote from donald trump from 2017. the first thing i thought of when i heard about it is how does the press get this information that's classified. how do they doe it? you know why bye-bye because it's in a legal process and the

press should be ashamed of themselves. but the people that gay you the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves. really ashamed. so right there, jack smith killing trump with his own words, sharing information is illegal. >> yes, and he's showing that and he puts that quote in from 2017 at the end of this portion of the indictment where trump is shown to be giving the information to a member of the press that's classified information that he knows is classified. he does it not just to neenor neenor him, but trump is aware that this is not some arcane point of law that nobody has to abide by. this is trump saying this is a serious matter, it's a matter of law. so he knew it was wrong when he did it. i will also say credit to lawrence's trupt reading there, but the very end of the

transcript, i just have to read it. as president i could have declassified it. staffer, yeah, ha ha. trump, now, i can't. but this is still a secret. now we have a problem. trump, isn't that interesting. yes, you do have a problem because you just acknowledged this is a classified document that you have shown to a staffer and a reporter in the room. yeah, we have a problem. yeah, suspect this interesting. >> i think andrew can tell us when juries hear people committing crimes on wiretaps, and laughing while committing crimes, it's not helpful. the laughter is not a helpful component with the jury. >> it's the profile of a sociopath. i'm just speaking as a fan of "the wire." >> the source is so important here. you'll hear so many attacks on the fbi. you hear attacks on jack smith. what does that have to do with

this? this is nothing to do with that. you talked about a political action committee, tape recordings, texts, photos taken by those employees, all of that has nothing to do with trump's own words. none of that has to do with the fbi's search. this is just you're making this case so bullet proof in terms of the source of the information. so it's just to me, it's really dvastating. >> i feel so excited that we got to page 17. i have to just tell everybody where we are, who is here and we're going to keep going. it's just ahead of 4:00 in new york. an explosive end to a week that will go down in the history books in these united states with the disgraced, twice impeached ex-president adding yet another badge of infamy to the fast-growing pile becoming the first american president to face federal criminal charges. we have the newly unsealed indictment, that's what we're pouring through together. the past hour we heard for the

first time from special counsel jack smith. listen. >> today an indictment was unsealed. charging donald trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. this indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the southern district of florida. i invite everyone to read it in full, to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged. the men and women of the united states intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. our laws that protect national defense information are critical for the safety and you are security of the united states and they must be enforced. violations of those laws put our country at risk.

adherence to