Aaron C. Davis

And he turns to this woman who's kind of considered the encyclopedia of the Justice Department when it comes to mishandled and classified documents, Julie Edelstein.

And he says, what do we do now?

And Julie turns to him and says, if it was anybody else, we would arrest him tomorrow.

And it just kind of, for me, crystallized how the FBI, the agents, you know, these grizzled agents who did not want to go back and step into an investigation against Donald Trump after everything that happened through a crossfire hurricane, felt compelled and had no choice in their minds to go forward with this investigation.

That there was just too many really important documents, secrets of the government that had been left in the wind down there in Florida.

That has another effect of that decision is that there was, by that point in time, a document inside Jack Smith's office that was a 100-page plan for how they were going to try Donald Trump for election interference.

And so the folks in his office have to go back through and begin to redline and take out everything that they think could no longer be brought.

And there were a lot of interesting things that they had, some that the public's never really heard about before.

We have some details of the things that were taken out of that case that were going to be presented at trial.

And that included a meeting way back at the beginning of COVID when Donald Trump was in a room with a bunch of Homeland Security and election security folks.

And they were telling him about all the improvements they'd done in election security.

And by the accounts of people in that room, he says, great, we should have a press conference and tell everybody how secure the 2020 election is going to be.

And obviously that the COVID hits and that press conference never happens.

But it goes to the point of, you know, his understanding of election security evolved a whole lot over the course of 2020 and how secure it was after he ended up on the wrong side of the ballot numbers.

He never did.

Yeah.

They never had that press conference that was that they had talked about and encouraged his administration to have.

I think the short answer is yes.

There's several folks we've talked to for the book who feel terribly about how things have gone.

You know, I think you have to stand back and realize that in so many ways, Donald Trump benefited from a very cautious, very cross your T's and dot your I's Justice Department.