Aaron C. Davis

So, you know, prosecutors are usually the ones who want to have the first interview with anyone involved in investigation.

Here, you had a very complicated situation because House Select Committee investigators had been the first ones to go in and interview.

And so it was a bit of a black hole that the Justice Department didn't know what they were going to find and what was going to be said in some of these hearings when they became public.

Well, this was one, you know, there are delays that were known about how slow and cautious and careful things have been under Merrick Garland.

But this is a new one, and that is heading into the midterm elections.

This is before Donald Trump announces that he's going to run for re-election.

This is, you know, with members of Congress on the ballot.

Merrick Garland decides that

In effect, Donald Trump is now the de facto head of the Republican Party.

And so for that reason, we should not continue with these investigations in an active way where any steps that we take could become known publicly or people could be seen coming into a grand jury room.

And so we're going to take a pause.

And this is a very common pause.

It's actually a regulation kind of, you know, best practice within the Department of Justice that for 60 days before an election to kind of a quiet period and then not do anything that could impact voters as they go to the polls.

There were a couple interviews that, you know, folks who were aware of this situation told us that, you know, they by that point in time did know and had indications that Donald Trump had shown people classified documents that he had retained in Mar-a-Lago, had been talking to people about them.

And they wanted to go forward with these investigations and knock out those interviews as quickly as they could.

And some of those did not take place then for months during that quiet period.

Well, Dave, this is a really interesting part of the book where you see just how different internally the election interference cases from the classified documents case.

And the night after they do that search of Donald Trump's residence in Mar-a-Lago.

The then Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Matthew Olson, convenes this hasty conference call to talk about the documents that they've just gotten.

And there's, you know, dozens of these and hundreds of pages.