Carol Leonnig

And he actually has a conversation with Benny Thompson before he takes the job where he goes, I'm not going to be comfortable if politics is going to influence the end results.

I want our facts to drive the day.

But in the end, those clients, the lawmakers, they do not want to turn over the goods.

And they stiff arm the Department of Justice, which now is trying to play catch up.

You know, Dave, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, really set the tone on this, which was, we're not doing anything because there's an election coming up.

And we're not motivated or girded or pressed by an election calendar and the fact that Donald Trump is readying himself and making a lot of noise about running for reelection.

Now, inside, Aaron and I learned that there were prosecutors worried about how much time was left on the clock.

And this is a great moment to sort of compare Garland and the special counsel he would end up picking later when Trump really did announce that he was going to run for re-election in November of 2022, because Jack Smith, that special counsel, said literally within the first week of meeting his new team, he said,

We got to set a calendar.

How about in three months we decide whether or not we can indict?

That was on the classified documents case.

In the others, he said, we have to triage to this.

We have to get moving.

His motivation was, as he articulated it to many people we interviewed, was we can't let the American public judge.

sit out there with these incredible allegations of a potential coup, of a president potentially stoking violence to overturn a free and fair election.

We can't let that wither out there in the countryside without resolving it in a fair court.

And he also felt that it was really important for Donald Trump to not have those allegations laying out there.

And so he was moving at a pace I have actually never seen in any DOJ prosecution of a complex case, much less one involving a former president.

But not typically for a person who's not an actually named candidate.

No, it turns out to be a weapon that Donald Trump uses very effectively against the Justice Department and against Jack Smith.