MS NOW Highlights - March 25

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. There are real questions about the ability of the US intelligence apparatus to provide the Commander-in-Chief with accurate information. Not to mention the intelligence of the Commander-in-Chief and his ability to absorb the information provided. Today NBC News reports that Donald Trump is getting his daily briefing on the war in the form of a highlight reel of, and I quote here, stuff blowing up, quote, each day since the start of the war in Iran,

U.S. military officials compile a video update for Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said. The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the official said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of stuff blowing up. National intelligence in the form of Instagram reels, basically, the kind of thing that could keep the attention of

like a, you know, child, a phone-addicted teen. To be clear, the sources stress that Trump also receives more traditional briefings. But given what we know about how much reading this man does, it's fair to have questions about how much information he actually retains or understands. In fact, today, the Iranian foreign minister mocked Trump on social media, calling him essentially a kind of patsy for his own intelligence agencies. It is said that Edward Bernays, a pioneer of mass persuasion,

served on the Committee on Public Information and worked to help Woodrow Wilson rally Americans for war in Europe. When he and Walter Lippmann met president in 1917, they reportedly said, we can sell the war to the public. More than a century later, little has changed,

except now it seems the war is being sold not once, but daily, even to the president himself, carefully curated videos. To that point, it's completely unclear who's putting these little high-right reels together in the first place. Is it a best-of reel from Pete Hegssis' Department of Defense?

Or from National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard? She says Trump is getting the best information. Did you brief the president if he starts a war of choice that the likely result would be that Iran would strike adjacent Gulf nations and close the Strait of Hormuz? Did you brief him on those two facts

that I think have been consistently

the assumptions of the intelligence community.

I have not and won't divulge internal conversations. I will say that those of us within the intelligence community continue to provide the president with all of the best objective intelligence

available to inform his decisions. All the best intelligence and the most awesome explosion videos. Who knows? But it just does not seem like there is a functioning, truth-telling process right now in the intelligence apparatus. And there are profound implications there, as of course we all learned at 9-11, and as we learned again in the Iraq War. Do you trust an intelligence apparatus run by Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump and handpicked MAGA loyalists at the top.

Because that's what we have. In many accounts, it's been it's been hollowed out and loyalty has been elevated to the most important concern. And we are seeing day by day the consequences. Remember, on the very first day of this war, the US struck a girls elementary school in Iran multiple times, apparently while meaning to target a nearby military installation.

And nearly 200 people were killed, most of them children. And one mother whose child was killed told NBC News this week, quote, Trump should not think that killing our children has made us despair. He should cry for himself, because he will end up in hell. This administration's total lack of competence has had effects like this all over the place. Here's one, and this is thanks to some great reporting in the New York Times.

Do you remember earlier this month, in fact I remember getting the push notification while we were on set during the Texas primary, when the Pentagon announced it had conducted, and this was kind of weird, a joint operation with the military of Ecuador. Okay? And they were apparently targeting narco-terrorists there, according to the Pentagon. In fact, as they always do with this sort of thing, they posted a video to social media which showed a large explosion. And they told us the large explosion was a drug camp. Now, according to the government of Ecuador, the attack was based on intelligence and support from the United States.

And at this point, you could probably guess where I'm going with this. As the New York Times reports, quote, the military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm's owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers, and residents and leaders in San Martin, where the strike took place. Workers on the farm told the Times that Ecuadorian soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3,

doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline, and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns. Three of the workers said the soldiers later choked and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go. Three days later, on March 6th,

the Ecuadorian military reappeared in helicopters, residents said. They dropped at least two explosives on the farm's smoldering remains. You have to wonder if that explosion of the dairy farm that got bombed made it into Trump's Daily Highlight video.

That's the apparent product of US intelligence right now. Garbage in, terrible garbage decisions out. Just today, the country of Iraq says the US struck a medical clinic on a military base there, killing seven members of the Iraqi military and wounding more than a dozen more. The US denies targeting a clinic.

Did they know what they were targeting? Again, who do you believe here? And right now, as this war just continues to threaten to spiral throughout the region, it's not even clear if Trump knows whether or not our country is actually negotiating to end it. This seems like a crucial thing, but it's really not clear. He keeps saying

we are in negotiations, active negotiations. Are we? I don't know. Iran insists negotiations aren't happening and in fact are a nonstarter. And in fact, they say straight up they will not negotiate with Steve Whitkoff and the president's son-in-law, who, by the way, why is he the U.S. negotiator to begin with? And that makes a lot of sense when you consider we have attacked them in the middle of negotiations twice. Twice.

Even as the negotiators in the latest round say that a nuclear deal was within reach. So here we are with Iran using its leverage, running essentially a toll operation or a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, making their own deals for safe passage with China, Russia, India, Iraq, Pakistan. And maybe they'll decide to negotiate with the US and maybe they won't. Who knows? Here's the former head of Britain's foreign intelligence service. Who has the upper hand right now?

Who is in a stronger position as that process unfolds?

Iran. The reality is that the US underestimated the task. And I think as of about two weeks ago, lost the initiative to Iran. In practice, the Iranian regime has been more resilient than I think anyone would have expected.

Donald Trump clearly thought this was going to be a cakewalk, that this would be easy. He thought it would be a quick process to depose a regime like what they did in Venezuela. Now the war is dragging into its fourth week. The human toll grows with each passing day. Thousands of people dead in Iran alone, 13 U.S. service members, hundreds throughout the Gulf.

I don't know if the commander in chief is even aware of the costs of the mess he has

created.

For years now, we've known that when Trump left his first term in office, he illegally took hundreds and hundreds of pages of classified documents with him. We all remember those photos. Stashed them away at Mar-a-Lago, and refused to return them to the government, even after he was subpoenaed for them.

We've known Trump did all of that for years, but we've never had any idea as to why he did. That is, until today, because today we learned that special prosecutor Jack Smith identified a possible motive while investigating Trump. In a progress memo from January of 2023, Smith's team wrote, Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests, establishing a motive

for retaining them. In response to this news, a spokesperson for the White House called Jack Smith deranged and a liar, of course, it's kind of their go-to, and insisted that Trump did nothing wrong. The idea that Trump took classified documents, potentially endangering our national security so that he could enrich himself, may not be that surprising, it's kind of on-brand, but it should be incredibly alarming. Now if you're wondering how we learned any of

this information today, that is quite a story in its own right. Because even though Jack Smith indicted Trump back in 2023, the case never made it to trial. The Trump-appointed judge assigned to the case, Aileen Cannon, dismissed the case,

saying that Smith hadn't been appointed properly, and tossed the case out with him. Smith memorialized both the classified documents case and his investigation into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election writing a report on both of the cases. But at Trump's request, Judge Cannon barred the report about classified documents in that case from ever being made public.

And you may remember from Smith's own testimony that it is illegal for anyone to publish that report. He didn't even, he wouldn't even talk about it. It would defy federal court orders. And yet, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin, the Justice Department did exactly that. According to Raskin, two weeks ago,

the Justice Department handed the House Judiciary Committee a trove of documents with the purpose of providing Republicans on the committee with fodder they could use to smear Jack Smith. But the Justice Department made a big old mistake. Because as Raskin put it in a letter to Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi today, apparently

blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against special counsel Smith, you have quite amazingly missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss's conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon. That's right. In an attempt to smear Jack Smith, the Justice Department accidentally handed Democrats some of his findings. Findings that Trump literally got a court to bar the release of.

That is quite the own goal right there. Now what the Justice Department gave Congress is not Jack Smith's full classified documents report. It is just a progress memo that Smith filed back in January of 2023, which was five months before he indicted Trump.

In addition to saying that Trump took these documents with the motive of enriching himself, Raskin says that the memo suggests that Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them. That's six people, including the president. He also says that the memo specifies that quote the disclosure of the documents Trump took represented an aggravated potential harm to national security and that Trump and his staff acted recklessly with the documents not just

storing them in unsecured locations around Mar-a-Lago but doing things like having a 23 year old staffer scan some of the documents onto her laptop and then upload the scan to the cloud I I mean, what? Raskin goes on to say that the Justice Department redacted the text in the memo that followed incidents like these, so it's impossible to determine if any of those incidents led to the documents being compromised or of course taken by a foreign adversary. More than anything else, the memo

the Justice Department inadvertently gave Congress just underscores how much it is in the public interest for the Justice Department to give Congress the rest of the Jack Smith report. Take this example, for instance. Raskin says that the memo shows that in June of 2022, Trump apparently took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Prosecutors determined that they identified a classified map that they believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board. An event that prosecutors believe was witnessed by Trump's now chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The memo also includes a map of the aircraft seating assignments and a list of the passengers, but the Justice Department redacted the list. Now Raskin points out that around the same time as that flight, Trump was entering into

a business partnership with the Saudi backed Live Golf and with a Saudi backed real estate firm. Remember after January 6, most of the business world turned its back on Trump. I mean, the PGA, which held tournament, had held tournaments at Trump's courses for decades and gave the courses a whole lot of clout, even cut ties with Trump. But then the Saudis threw Trump a bit of a lifeline.

They funded a brand new golf league, spending through the nose to poach players from the PGA and hosted their events at Trump properties. That story has always been incredibly fishy, and now it is even more so. I mean, as Raskin puts it,

without access to Jack Smith's report on the classified documents or his investigative files, there's no way to know what that classified map contained or what the relationship was between the documents Trump stole and Trump's business interests. Clearly, this is a lot more. There's a lot, lot more the American public deserves to know here.

Joining me now is Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and the person who sounded the alarm about this Jack Smith memo just today, just today. The day has been long. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for being with us tonight.

I should note that this letter you sent is public, people can read it, but I just wanted to dive into more of the specifics here with you because Jack Smith clearly believed that Trump's motive for taking classified documents was business. That's one of the things you outlined, that Trump was attempting to use the documents for some sort of financial game.

Can you tell us why? What do you believe Trump was doing here?

Well, what's interesting is we asked Jack Smith that when he appeared before our committee, and he dutifully said he couldn't remark upon it because he'd been ordered by Judge Cannon not to talk about what was in the indictment. So he refused to opine on it. And I wish I could say it was brilliant detective work on our part that somehow released this document.

But the Trump Justice Department just inadvertently sent it to us. So that's where we learned of this memo stating that there was a business motivation behind Donald Trump's pilfering of those documents and his illegal retention and storage of them in the ballroom, in the bathrooms, in the pool house, and so on down at Mar-a-Lago. Well, everybody had suspected that it had to do with business, and there are lots of different theories out there. They're all just theories

at this point, Jen, but we know Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a $2.5 billion contract with the Saudis. They gave him that money. He's got money with other corrupt oil monarchies. And so some of the documents taken were maps and there was defense information allegedly taken and stored. So that's one possibility. We don't know if it relates to crypto and some of Donald Trump's new crypto friends. We have no idea. That's why we say release volume two of the Jack Smith report, the volume about

the mishandling of government documents case. Every other special counsel report by every other special counsel, you name it, Robert Herr, Robert Mueller, Kenneth Starr, back in independent counsel days, all of them have been released to the public. Republicans have always demanded that the public get to see them. And now suddenly there's this huge cover up and they want to sweep it under the rug. And what did we learn from this document that the Trump Justice Department in their

inimitable way sent to us by accident? Well, we learned that the prosecutors believe there was a business motivation behind it. There were documents in there so top secret that only six people in the entire U.S. government could see them, including the president, which means only five people other than the president could look at these documents. And we also learned that Donald Trump was, you know, brandishing the documents and showing them off on an airplane to people, including

Susan Wiles. So those are some of the small glimpses we have gotten into what took place. But there's a very simple way to settle this. The White House doesn't like the fact that it came out. They claim that Jack Smith is a fraud and a liar, which is sweet, coming from a woman who works for a guy who has 34 felony convictions on his

record for criminal fraud, but Jack Smith can defend himself. In any event, if they want to get to the bottom of it and there's nothing to hide, release the special counsel's report. Every other special counsel report has been released. Why not this one? Why is this one any different?

What are they afraid of? That's the big question. I mean, you raise a lot of interesting questions. I should note you just mentioned Jared Kushner. You also named Chekhlev Gulf. I just talked about this and a real estate deal that Trump made back in 2022. Those were of course happening around the same time that Trump had these documents, which makes that interesting. You also ask, one of your demands to Panbandi is for it to produce a list of which members of Trump's family, if any, were made aware of these classified documents. I mean, we're all paying attention to and covering the fact that Trump and his family have made oodles of money during this administration.

Why did you ask for the family members specifically? Is that what you're getting at or what are you getting at there? Well it seems clear when you look at Bush's occupancy of the White House in the first term and from what we've seen in the second that this is a money making operation. Donald Trump has made billions of dollars more in one year in office in the second term than every other president in American history combined. If you put them all together, it doesn't come close to what Donald Trump has done. He has turned the White House into an instrument of moneymaking and private profiteering.

And his family is totally part of it. In fact, his defense for what he's done when people raise the foreign emoluments clause and the domestic emoluments clause, which he calls the phony emoluments clause, is that he is no longer running his business. He's just profiting from it. He's just benefiting from it. But it's his sons who are running his business.

That's quite a defense. But in any event, it's clear that it's a family business. They're all working together.

And so we want to know exactly what the role of everybody was.

Joining us, staff writer for The Atlantic and MSNOW political analyst Ashley Parker, host of the Bulwark podcast and MSNOW political analyst Tim Miller and co-founder and director of economic policy and Veda Partners, Henrietta Trace. All right, Henrietta, let us start with the move in question, the most recent move in question. How likely is it that somebody 15 minutes before would know to sell a bunch of oil futures

and buy a bunch of stock futures?

It is not realistic at all. And I will say my universe is investors. I just left a lunch with 20 of them and I spend all my time with them. And this is the topic of conversation in so many of these meetings, because it's plain that somebody had the information you could tell by the size of the trade. You can tell by the timing of the trade. You can tell by the repeated instances of this kind of activity, whether it's with bombing of Iran, whether it's a presidential tweet, it's consistent.

The killing of the Ayatollah.

Exactly. Exactly. So these questions around Pali market and Cauchi, investors have to watch those because they set the tone of how folks are thinking in the market, what we're anticipating for the price of oil. They all fluctuate.

And part of the matrix that investors use is to understand what public sentiment is. So it's hugely problematic that you're seeing these advanced trades.

Normally there'd be an investigation, right?

Absolutely, and I suspect that Katherine Clark

will be doing that when Democrats take control

of the House next year.

Does this incentivize people to try and break rules more because they think they can get away with it, or are they just expecting that down the line, somebody is going to look back at this and say, uh, I'm not so sure.

Right now it's an opportunistic market. You can make millions of dollars. You can do it over and over and over again. There's no restriction. There is no oversight, plainly.

And there are another two and a half years of the Trump administration. can see that people are taking advantage of this and trying to get in. But it's not just regular people.

It's people who are well-connected and have a lot of money to spend already.

Statistically, it can't be a regular person with no knowledge. The accuracy is too consistent. So when you get something like 93% precision, when you're supposed to have maybe 51%, 52%, 53% precision

for even a good gambler, this is beyond the pale. So Ashley, you were with me for 2015 and 2016 as the president made that pitch. We heard that was after he was president, but he was making that pitch for a long time, that the system is rigged. He understands how it's rigged, he would say.

And that's why he's in such a perfect position to unrig it for you. How surprising is it? Everything I just laid out. I mean, is it surprising? It's certainly pretty bold, especially after this administration and all of his allies were going after Hunter Biden and President Biden over the last few years.

Well, first of all, one of President Trump's superpowers is his shamelessness. So the idea that he or his allies would criticize Hunter Biden and then go and potentially do the exact same thing on steroids is not particularly surprising. You're right, Katie, we did see for what it's worth some of this in Trump's first term. We're seeing it explode now, but I would just point you to the Trump Hotel. He owned a hotel just several blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and that's where you were seeing lots of foreign leaders and their delegations coming to stay. There was concern about Jared Kushner's role in the White House, acting as an envoy, negotiating deals while also negotiating on behalf of his private businesses. We're seeing that again, as well as everything you laid out.

I think one difference here, though, and when some of the stuff I'm about to name is a bit more benign, frankly, but you are hearing voters in focus groups and elsewhere, Trump voters, MAGA voters, saying when, you know, when he put his name on the Kennedy Center, for instance, potentially again, benign, but you're hearing them say, why is he doing that? That has nothing to do with helping me.

That's not for me. Same with tearing down the East Wing. They're saying, that might be his right. Maybe there really does need to be a real venue to host state dinners, but that's not my priority. That's not helping me.

So some of this, not even for the most egregious allegations of grift, but even for some smaller things, you are hearing that discomfort and concern reflected from voters who deeply believed his promises that first time around.

Let me put up a poll that gets to that. This is a YouGov poll, and we have it for you. Voters are asked what most Americans, the words most Americans think apply to Trump. And the top of the list is arrogant, opportunist, corrupt, dishonest. A lot arrogant, a lot opportunist, a lot corrupt, a lot dishonest. And you see those numbers.

It's the majority of the American public who says this. Tim, is that, is Donald Trump going to face consequences for this? Will he suffer because of these numbers?

Well, I mean, I guess I can't speak about eternal suffering or whatever. consequences for this? Will he suffer because of these numbers? degree to which the Republicans are suffering in these special elections, China will get to. So I do think the Republicans will suffer. That corrupt number, just to what we've all been talking about here, feels a little low to me, only 54%. What is happening, I think you mentioned the historian said that's unprecedented in modern history. It's unprecedented in American history. And we've seen this kind of grift and corruption elsewhere in the world. And the things we've disparagingly called the third world or banana republics or whatever. But the Trump family is acting indistinguishable from any of that right now. I mean, we don't exactly know what's happening with these trades.

Is it possible that Trump's just so predictable that there's some gamblers out there that are like, I bet he's going to taco on Monday morning before the market opens. That's possible. But even if that is the case, right, even if this isn't an insider trade, Trump is getting insider deals. The Trump family is.

You know, Jared Kushner and Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are in business with three of the main players in the Iran war right now. Kushner is getting money from MBS, the Trump family is getting money from UAE as part of their crypto deal, and Qatar gave Trump a plane. There is unimaginable amounts of money, awash, right now in the Trump family. Some based on corrupt deals, some, who knows, potentially based on inside knowledge. Like we can't be sure because nobody's investigating this stuff. And I think that's like

what this comes down to. We cannot know as long as these guys be sure, because nobody's investigating this stuff. And I think that's, like, what this comes down to. We cannot know as long as these guys are in charge, because nobody's investigating them. I mean, hopefully, the attorney general in New York and other states can start doing these investigations. But we have an—the other thing that is unprecedented is the small number of white-collar criminal investigations that have happened in the last year.

Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder if the question that we should be asking Ashley is that because this is the final term that Donald Trump can run for, I mean, constitutionally speaking, we always leave open the possibility that he'll try to overrun the constitution. Do they just feel like they should be grabbing all the bananas while they can? I mean, they're in there. Take advantage, run roughshod over ethics and get really, really wealthy.

Who's going to stop them?

Well, I will say the concern for his party is not a motivating factor. You know, he's not on the ballot anymore. And he doesn't particularly care, at least not deep in his bones, according to people I've talked to, what happens to House Republicans? You know, what happens to the Senate?

He cares a bit more about the Senate than he does about the House, and he cares looking a bit to the future. There's a sense that he would like to have a Republican MAGA successor as the next president, but he is not behaving the way a typical president would in this

moment where you have the midterms coming up and you would be fighting hard for your party and trying to behave in ways that would help your party at the ballot box, even though you're not at the top of the ticket. So that's the first thing. That is not – those considerations that would hem in a different president are not a limiting factor

for Donald Trump. And the second thing is, I view it more through the lens of how, you know, based on my reporting, I view his entire second term, which is this is just Donald Trump. And it's not necessarily because he's not running again, but it's just Donald Trump emboldened, and unleashed, and doing things he didn't do the previous term, whether there were guardrails there that aren't there this time, whether he understands the system better.

And so you are seeing that as well with conflicts of interest with his family and with these concerns about corruption and grifting.

Let me give you a bit more about the SEC. Reuters is an exclusive. The SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan resigned last Monday after just six months on the job. Two of the people said Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct, including in cases that touched the president's circle, but faced resistance from SEC Chair Paul Atkins

and other top Republican political appointees.

Yeah, and you can see it in not just the SEC, but look at the fact that Jay Powell is deciding to stay on in an almost unprecedented way beyond his term as chairman, just because he doesn't trust

what the administration is gonna do.

So he'll stay on the board.

Exactly, and that has only happened once before in history, and it's basically an indicator of I don't believe you. I don't trust that you're going to do the right thing. I don't think that you're even going to preserve Fed independence. And I would say that the American public really has an understanding of this. There's some fascinating data in the home buying space, for example, 17 percent

of Americans think that this is a good time to buy a economy. They're not buying that narrative and that's the lowest rate It's been at since the 1960s according to some Keller Williams data sets

So you're saying they're just not confident that it's gonna keep going well That it's not going well right now, and they don't want to sink that up that amount of money into into a house

That's exactly right. They're not exactly they're not confident if you buy a home you're you're confident that you're going to stay secure, you're going to keep your job. You're going to be able to pay that mortgage.

Precisely.

Yeah. Welcome back. Minnesota officials are now upping the ante against the federal government and suing to get access to evidence they say the feds are withholding in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty says the federal government has gone back on its promise to cooperate with state investigators

and they want answers. Federal officials say Minnesota lacks jurisdiction to investigate these cases. Let's bring in Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty who filed this suit. Mary, there isn't much precedent

for a state suing the federal government over obtaining evidence in an investigation. What made you finally decide to move forward with this suit?

Well, there's not much precedent because this is unprecedented that the federal government has refused to share information with our state law enforcement agency, which is called the BCA. And just, you need only look last summer

at the political assassinations that we had here, where both the FBI and the BCA did a joint investigation. That investigation went to both my office and the U.S. Attorney, and we're both prosecuting separately. That is historically how things have happened here in Minnesota. So the reason that we filed the lawsuit was that we went through the process that we are supposed to do by rule called the TUI process.

In other words, we can't subpoena a federal agency for the information we don't have. So we went through that process. We made a case for why we needed that to investigate, and we did not get a response from the Department of Justice at all. Not a response at all. So our next step was to file a lawsuit to ask a judge to order the federal government to give us that information.

And we do have jurisdiction. Anytime anyone commits a crime in a state, in the state of Minnesota, local prosecutors have jurisdiction to investigate that case and to bring charges if appropriate. We've heard from the administration, although I think they're backing off of this, that there's absolute immunity. That's just not the case. That's just not the case. There is a defense that the defendant could allege if we charge, but we absolutely do have jurisdiction. And my goal here is to bring transparency

and potentially accountability if a crime was committed in both or in all three of the cases, Renee Good, Julio Sosa-Solis, and Alex Preti.

So what specific evidence are they withholding from you? What are you hoping to get your hands on?

So if we start with Renee Good, they took her car, and typically our BCA would have done a lot of processing of that car. We know that there was a bullet hole in the windshield, but they would have done a lot of 3D kind of processing. We don't know, they took the gun, they took the ballistics,

and we don't know whether any of the agents made any statements in the pretty case. For instance, they took the gun. They took the ballistics. And we also don't know whether any of the agents gave any statements. We don't have personnel records. We don't have training records. So those are things that we want that we should have, but I will also say they're not necessarily things that will prevent us ultimately from deciding whether to bring charges or not.

But in a normal investigation, oh, I'm sorry. Have you been able to get any of the evidence

collected by federal authorities?

None, in fact, our BCA has tried very hard to work with the FBI. And I should say the local agents here, the FBI, the US Attorney's Office, they want to cooperate because that's the way it's always been here. It is the administration that is engaging

in a pattern and practice of hiding evidence from us.

You've encouraged the public to send in videos and photos to your office related to these shootings. Where does your independent investigation stand today?

So we received over 1,000 submissions to that portal. The portal was very unusual, but we felt because of the number of people that were at these scenes and the fact that they were videoing and the fact that a lot of the evidence we were actually seeing was being leaked by the federal government, such as Jonathan Ross's video, that the best opportunity we had to collect all of the evidence out there was to ask the public to do that. And I know that we received information from the public that we would not otherwise have received. So that's been very successful. And the BCA continues to do interviews. And we are looking at all three

of these cases independently.

How can you move forward then with this probe if you don't get all the evidence that you're requesting from federal officials?

So we receive cases every day. We receive thousands of felony cases in this office every year. And rarely do we have a case that's perfect. You know, a perfect prosecution case would be the gun, the ballistics, video from every different angle, all the witnesses and confessions and all that kind of thing. We just don't get that in cases. And this is not different.

There are some unusual barriers, such as we haven't had confirmation of who the people were who shot Alex Pretty. However, what we will do is look at all of the evidence that we have, and we will decide whether we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that

a crime committed was committed. Now the defense will we anticipate move to transfer the case to federal court.

That creates other barriers, but we are also working on anticipating what we would do if that should happen.

Sounds like you have a few steps planned ahead. Thank you, Mary Moriarty, for bringing us this update, and we'll keep following the trajectory of this lawsuit that you've now filed and look forward to having you back.

Thank you.

I didn't find it credible, the fact that he could have worked for Jeffrey Epstein for this long in a very in-depth way, including before Epstein was originally arrested and found to have committed a sex crime. Then he continues to work for Epstein and Epstein is constantly surrounded by young women, a revolving group of young women. Money's going into a black bag as Indyk and Khan

are making withdrawals from Epstein's bank account. The idea that he saw no evil and heard no evil about the crimes that were being committed, I don't buy it, but more more importantly more important than what I think the survivors have told us that it was not possible For those who worked closely with Epstein to not have known what was going on

They knew what was going on and that's an important point that we have to continue to hammer home and continue to ask questions about. Right, and to be even more specific there, Congressman, part of the reason we know that to be true is because a lot of these young women and girls were going to them over their immigration claims and their immigration needs. There was an exchange from Indyk's testimony that I want to listen to and also Representatives Minns concerned that Indyk perjured I want to listen to, and also Representative Minn's concern that Indyk perjured himself.

Take a listen.

Six or seven survivors, when they got to this country, under the promise of a job of education,

of modeling, whatever it is, they then have an immigration issue.

So I don't know how they got to this country. I don't know about those promises. I know nothing of that.

He claimed, and I think this is in the statement you all received, that he had no knowledge of any women or girls, and yet that doesn't account for the fact that numerous women have described how he helped them fix their problems. One woman had described how he had helped her get an apartment. He helped women with their immigration issues. If I was advising him, I'd tell him to take the Fifth Amendment because I believe he's guilty of perjury.

Just to extend that even further, in reporting that our colleagues have done, there is at least one woman who says that in some of those conversations with Indyk around her immigration status, that he also told her not to speak with federal agents about Jeffrey Epstein. Do you believe that Indyk perjured himself?

And do you have more questions for him coming out of this deposition?

I think it's very possible that he perjured himself with respect to his knowledge of the women, their immigration issues. what we haven't talked about yet is the marriages that Indyk and Khan helped to facilitate that you know appear to have been fraudulent and be fraudulent at Epstein's behest. And look I think what's outrageous here is we learned that Khan, Indyk, and we can go all the way back to Les Wexner who provided a lot of the money for Epstein to commit these crimes, never investigated

by the FBI. That is outrageous. If we had a serious Department of Justice that was serious about this issue, they'd

be opening a new investigation and questioning these folks that clearly should have been

questioned years ago. Darren Indyk, the attorney from the clip Alicia just played, worked for Jeffrey Epstein, like represented him for nearly 20 years.

23.

23 years. He and Khan are now the co-executors of Jeffrey Epstein's estate. To me that says, or that indicates rather, that they do have a vested interest in protecting whatever they think could be Jeffrey Epstein's legacy and I'm using air quotes for people at home. And they received benefits from the estate. And so I do you believe that they were truthful I guess throughout their testimony and then what what if they

were not or depending on your answer? What does this mean going forward? Like how how else how deep does the rabbit hole go here?

Well, you asked whether I was the one asking the question that was shown earlier and I didn't ask that question But I did ask mr Indyke how much he received in payment for his services to Epstein over the course of 23 years. And the answer was in salary, $27 to $30 million. In loans that were never paid back, have not to date been paid back, $7 million. And hasn't yet received it. $50 million left in Epstein's will to Indyk.

As Indyk claims, he had no personal relationship or friendship with Epstein.

He's just going to give him $50 million.

You leave us a body $50 million.

So why would you do that? You want to make sure he's happy. Why do you want to make sure he's happy? Maybe he has information that at the time Epstein didn't want to be revealed. So we have to continue to pull every thread here. I hope one day we'll have a Justice Department and Attorney General who's serious and can have some of these real investigations and interviews with folks like Khan and Indyk building on what the Oversight

Committee has has developed to get to the truth here. We're not going to stop till we get there. I want to shift real quick because when you were talking about the payments and all of that, you know, it reminded me of the Lewandowski situation where there are allegations of his pressure to pay contractors to pay him. Noting GEO Group and several other companies in government contracting have complained to officials in Trump's inner circle that Lowendowski as a special government employee has directly or indirectly stood to

personally profit from the DHS contracting process according to four senior White House officials, a former White House official and a person familiar with the conversations. Now for the record a lawyer for Mr. Lowendowski told MSNOW in a statement that he adamantly denies any of the allegations which he calls not supported by a single piece of evidence. But that's a whole lot of people talking about your behavior.

Yep.

Yep. So somebody, somebody knows something to say something. What does that say to you? What are you looking at there? How does that proceed?

Well, that reporting is very well sourced. When you read it, they have a lot of sources. And this is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington, right, that Corey Lewandowski has had his hand in this cookie jar. And you go back to Secretary Noman, the policy she put in place alongside her right-hand man Corey Lewandowski, where any contract at DHS over $100,000 had to be personally approved by her. The whole world knew that Corey Lewandowski was the one signing off on most of those contracts.

That creates a perfect situation for corruption and abuse because all of the power is concentrated right there in the secretary's office and with Corey Lewandowski. We now have reporting showing that they use that perfect opportunity for corruption and abuse to potentially line his pockets. We've launched an investigation Democrats on the Oversight Committee have, Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee held a hearing today with ethics experts and talk about how this

could happen, how it can be investigated, whether prosecutions can come from it,

how we can prevent it from happening in the future. But this is the most corrupt how we can prevent it from happening in the future. But this is the most corrupt

administration in American history and this is a prime example of it.