‘Evidentiary Gold!’ MSNBC Legal Panel Says Maggie Haberman’s Latest Trump Bombshell Could Be Subpoenaed – And Might Be On Tape
An MSNBC legal panel led by Lawrence O’Donnell speculated that New York Times correspondent and author Maggie Haberman‘s latest Trump bombshell could be subpoenaed as evidence — especially if it’s on tape.
Haberman is under fire from some quarters for reporting in her upcoming book Confidence Man that former President Donald Trump disclosed that he had taken sensitive documents from the White House long before that issue became the subject of a Justice Department investigation. A tweet suggesting her alleged failure to immediately report this constitutes a felony racked up viral engagement.
But on Tuesday night’s edition of The Last Word, O’Donnell and his panel of legal experts saw great value in the reporting — as evidence to put Trump in jail.
“I was struck by the Maggie Haberman quotes of a year ago from Witness Trump. Now, if there is an audio tape of that, and I, not sure if Donald Trump allows her to tape their conversations, but if there is, that is something that could be subpoenaed in this case,” O’Donnell said, adding “it appears that Donald Trump realizes in mid-answer, by her surprise, that he’s not supposed to have these. But we know that he did have those at that time.”
MSNBC legal analyst Neal Katyal agreed, telling O’Donnell that “a crime requires two things. It requires a bad act and a bad criminal intent. And what Maggie Haberman’s reporting is suggesting is that there was a bad criminal intent as early as a year ago, in September of last year, that he knew about these documents and the like.”
Former federal prosecutor and current MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner was even more enthusiastic:
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Glenn Kirschner, as a former federal prosecutor, what do you, what do you see in the Maggie Haberman interview, stacking it up with the evidence as we know it?
GLENN KIRSCHNER: You know, I see Donald Trump making admission after admission, all of which are statements by a party opponent, which is not hearsay. We introduced those kind of statements in criminal prosecutions all the time. And I will tell you, Lawrence, as an old career prosecutor, a trial guy, I see all of Donald Trump’s admissions, like the ones to Maggie Haberman, as evidentiary gold.
And I keep waiting to see when some prosecutor will be able to plant her feet in the well of a courtroom and argue to 12 people in the jury box sitting as the conscience of the community and begin presenting this evidence. But there is a prerequisite to us getting to that point. It’s an indictment. And as Neil said, if he had, if I had top secret documents, I handled an espionage case as an Army JAG with a TSSCIC clearance, and I was scared to death. I was going to say or do something that might inadvertently run afoul of the rules by which I had to abide. You know, we would be in jail lickety split. So I await the Department of Justice to get to a point where it believes the time is right, because this is only a timing issue. The evidence is there.
Watch above via MSNBC.
