On Friday morning, the paperwork for a new federal indictment of Donald Trump was made public. We now know that the disgraced former president faces 37 charges related to illegal possession of classified documents and, more importantly, his refusal to return documents to the government. And naturally, MSNBC’s primetime lineup later in the day focused on a lot of damning details.
On “The Read Out,” along with a panel of other MSNBC hosts, including “The Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell, it was host Joy Reid, who was naturally baffled by what Trump was alleging, He too was completely astonished. thing. “Everything about it is incredible,” he quipped at one point.
Now, the indictment is over 40 pages and it’s not easy to summarize, but it does include surprising details, for example how Trump subordinates hid documents in a bathroom, and photos of that same bathroom. which has a chandelier,
Reid told the panel, “I know you all probably feel as I do, reading this was like reading a crime novel and a comedy at the same time.” “But here are three buckets. There’s sloppy behavior, putting documents in the toilet, putting in the bathroom, and that dirty ballroom, I think he’s to blame for the stiffness of the 80s ballroom.
“Don’t forget about the chandelier in the bathroom,” interjected panelist and fellow MSNBC primetime host Alex Wagner.
“Listen, I mean, it’s all accusatory in itself, only from the point of view of taste. So that is. Then chases for documents in which he knows Corcoran, who is his lawyer, has to go and They have to be sought, so he says… His servant, ‘Hide them, hide them, hide them.’ He does this for several days,” Reed continued.
“And then there’s a line. [The valet] Lies to the FBI etc. So let’s start with careless handling. And I’m going to go to you first,” Reid said, pointing to O’Donnell. “It seems to me that when you go through the actual documents that are at issue in the indictment, it looks like Donald Trump, who didn’t pay attention to his PDB, his Presidential Daily Brief, may have paid a little more attention than we thought and took home the goods with him. Because these are clearly documents, most of them from his time as president.”
“What he was doing with that sloppy storage was a crime in and of itself,” O’Donnell began. “would never have charged for [it], It would have completely gotten away with it, and in fact, the officers would not have actually known that it was all over the floor in that room. If only he had sent it back when requested.
“Actually, if he had sent it back a third time, he was requested to send it back, right? It’s one of those things where, it’s one of those rare situations where they basically bank robbers saying to, ‘You know what? If you give the money back, if you just give, you know? O’Donnell continued.” And he couldn’t bring himself to do it, which Very pathological.”
“I really want to stress to everybody out there, something like [Special Consel] Jack Smith said today, who ‘please read these pages.’ You know, we’re saying 49 pages, but look, it’s typed pages, it’s not even like 49 pages of a book, it’s double spaced, and look at all that dialogue in white space, “O ‘ Donnell said, holding a copy up to the camera.
“It’s really easy to read,” O’Donnell said with a smile.
“And, on the issue of where to start, you can actually randomly drop it, flip it over, ‘Oh, turns out it’s on page 37,’ something great, I guarantee you Page 16, something great,” O’Donnell said.
“Speaking of Page 16, these are the lines that jump out, the moment where Donald Trump says, ‘Isn’t this unbelievable.’ And he’s saying that on committing a crime. He’s showing a classified document to a visitor who has no right to it, and he tells them, ‘It’s secret. Look at it.’ And his next line is, ‘By the way, isn’t that incredible,'” O’Donnell explained.
“Yeah, everything about it is incredible. What you just did is incredible. And that’s why we’re here tonight,” O’Donnell said with a laugh.
Watch the full clip at the top of the page now.