his hero was roy cohen. -- four times he was being charged just like donald trump for all sorts of perjury and conspiracy. the lesson trump learns is don't be nixon, don't quit, don't leave. roy cohen taught trump to boot it further down the line. alas, it's not about justice prevailing on this tuesday. this is a long-range story that has many manifestations yet to come, particularly because it's playing in the backdrop of the 2024 presidential campaign. >> 13th of june, 17th of june of '72 when that burglary happened in washington, d.c., in the watergate. someone said we're living in an era where there's no shame. do you think there's a change in our country? >> i do. i think we've stopped having a sense of public service. that idea of john f. kennedy had in his famous inaugural that we all have to do something to help our government, help our country. we've become largely spoiled in the united states. we've taken for granted how lucky we are to live in a society where your vote matters. there's been good n

trump learned everything from roy cohen, which is to delay. stall. obfuscate..w.a.t. team or a nazi operation and you see trump and his followers demonizing the fbi, the department of justice, and in a similar fashion. so, in retrospect, probably if nixon had to at least go through the court system, it would have once and for all proven that nobody is beyond the law. >> and trump himself is -- in some ways an accolade of nixon. admires him and people around him are great admirers of nixon and even views the watergate scandal as not being legitimate. but i want to ask you about president biden. because he's also in a unprecedented position in some ways. what should he take away, if anything, from history in how he should behave now? >> i think biden now, any time somebody is in deep legal jeopardy, is stay away. it is true, merrick garland was the appointee of biden. but you don't want to be seen together. if you're biden, the less photo ones with gar land get, keep a moat between the white house and the justice department. you don't want to be seen turning into

and he couldn't help but to try and enlist his lawyers to become the next roy cohen, the next michaelohen, the next rudy giuliani, to be part of his criminal schemes. and that's why they are all gone, as of tonight. the trump legal team on this case, a case against the former president for violations of the espionage act, is one lawyer, as far as i can tell. todd blanche, who's a great lawyer, from his credentials, but he's one guy. this is a former president of the united states. there are serious constitutional and legal questions that are gonna have to be addressed in this case that are worthy of a discussion, worthy of legal debate and judicial scrutiny. and right now the team is one guy. can he take on this entire case, and will he be able to assemble a team worthy of the role he needs to play for this client? if anything, put aside donald trump for a moment, this is the office, offices of the former presidents. there are questions of the legal authorities and the discretion afforded to former presidents. this deserves a better legal team right now than what donald trump has put

and he couldn't help but to try and enlist his lawyers to become the next roy cohen, the next michaely are all gone, as of tonight. the trump legal team on this case, a case against the former president for violations of the espionage act, is one lawyer, as far as i can tell. todd blanche, who's a great lawyer, from his credentials, but he's one guy. this is a former president of the united states. there are serious constitutional and legal questions that are gonna have to be addressed in this case that are worthy of a discussion, worthy of legal debate and judicial scrutiny. and right now the team is one guy. can he take on this entire case, and will he be able to assemble a team worthy of the role he needs to play for this client? if anything, put aside donald trump for a moment, this is the office, offices of the former presidents. there are questions of the legal authorities and the discretion afforded to former presidents. this deserves a better legal team right now than what donald trump has put together. >> neal katyal, that moment when joe biden was specific about announcing p

i can't help but think about the documentary about roy cohen. donald trump has been teflon. indicted three times by the feds and was found not guilty all the three times. i think that's emboldening donald trump. >> what do you think about some of that other evidence you say may be coming out? do you think that just because that's the way federal prosecutors work? they never reveal their entire hand at the beginning. >> first of all, there are going to be a lot of witnesses. the indictment states a lot of facts, not how they're going to prove it. there's a big obstacle. if donald trump was smart enough to let his lawyers try this case and raise defenses rather than doing the attack dog roy cohen style, there are classified documents here. there's a statute called sepa which will delay the trial. defense lawyers have to get special clearance to review these documents. that all takes time. the irony is that the very documents they're going to have to use, which donald trump has a sixth amendment right to confront, they want to keep secret. there are some interesting issues that

. >> it's the same principle he applied when he said, i want roy cohen as attorney general. >> somebody who's worked with intelligence documents for a long time. what do you think? >> so, i think it's just worth kind of going backwards because, you know, we're deep into this discussion because of the indictment. we're always deep into this discussion because it's a bottomless story. but to be clear, when you're president of the united states, you can look at anything classified and declassify anything. when that clock strikes 12:00, you know, on january 20th, when the other president is sworn in, all that goes away then and there. you can't keep those documents. you can't possess it. by the way, it has to do with classified documents because they're classified. but it has to do with all documents. >> the president in that discussion that's recorded said, see, as president, i could have declassified it. and people are laughing. he says, now i can't, you know, but this is still a secret. >> so, he understood that, despite statements made to many people, including kaitlan collins. so, when

he's had one lawyer all along, and that lawyer, unfortunately, potentially is roy cohen cannot be there physically. and roy chon was about pursuing a scorched-earth policy outside the courtroom. you just burn everybody down, and i think that paradigm is very much what's in trump's mind. it's the core of his political philosophy and approach, right? and any lawyer who sort of acts as mary said in a conventional responsible way typically is not going to evoke his admiration. and so i think -- you know, i think you have a situation in which you have a client who is essentially acting ultimately as his own counsel, and that counsel does not tend to operate from within legal parameters but political ones. >> and mary, that was fine until trump was squarely in a legal predicament. that actually worked out from him in hindsight with mueller who was bound by policy that said you can't charge a sitting president. it has been fine for him so far. he hasn't been charged criminally by the federal government. but now if you're going to burn everything down, it's going to include some things we're go

when he was under investigation by robert mueller, it was the all caps threats, his pleas for a roy cohenwhoever he thought would shield him from his own justice department. if you fast forward, i guess it was more recently his grave disappointment he's been expressing toward bill barr and other ex-doj officials. not sure what he thinks they could be doing. they certainly did a heck of a lot when they were there. what do you decipher in the tweet, the all caps did nothing wrong, the fixation of the location of president joe biden's presidential office, the witch hunt, the election interference, which is his new claim that he likes to make at the prospect of being held criminally accountable for crimes largely committed in broad daylight. what do you see in the language of his own tweets, or truths, whatever they're called? >> social media messages. two things. first, these missives on their own, it's certainly clear trump recognizes he's in significant, enormous legal trouble and he's not thrilled about it. this is the type of rhetoric he's been pushing going all the way back to the very

like other trump lawyers before him, from michael cohen 1.0 to mr. royy compared to epstein. being that kind of lawyer was rewarded. it made him rise in trump's orbit. he is now one of the top people in all of trump land according to multiple accounts. he oversees the other lawyers with more trial experience. some of them have publicly lamented that. imso facto supervisor, which included other trump lawyers saying they might leave when they could not win clashes with him. he is the one trump trusts. trump rewarding lawyers willing to play that consigliari role. he believes what doj told him, that through his lawyer he's targeted for indictment. as for ephsteyn. a damming venn diagram. he's testified now to the grand jury in georgia as well as jack smith's doj special counsel in an interview. when you face this effort by trump to turn sbu -- to drag you into his ongoing plots which may be indicted. the doj's targeting. don mcgahn trusted white house council. you may remember his face or name from the mueller probe. but this matters tonight because he had

people like his father who bailed him out financially or roy kaine, or allen weisselberg, michael cohen on all of them to make his problems go away, poof. for their trouble, they each wound up disgraced or disbarred or in prison as trump remained unscathed. now the twice impeached, twice indicted former president is in a unique situation where the walls of justice are closed in and he has no one, no big strong savior to help him wiggle his way out of there. it's apparent from trump's caterwauling tantrums on his wanna be twitter this morning that he's getting desperate for someone, anyone to help. he is so desperate that he's now begging his cull members in congress to please, please step in. however, they have some problems of their own to deal with, mainly the fact that their caucus is, to put it lightly, a total clown show. today, for example, the house narrowly avoided a vote to impeach president biden over, wait for it, his handling of the u.s./mexico border. that motion introduced by lauren boebert was instead sent to committee, postponing it indefinitely to save speaker kevin mcc