Carol Leonnig

There is this incredible group of investigators on the congressional team, mostly former prosecutors, a few lawyers who Hafe hires to help him figure out what happened.

And the pace at which they are moving is devastatingly fast.

especially compared to the Department of Justice.

It's like the little U.S.

Attorney's Office that could.

Tim Heafey, who is the chief counsel, is a former U.S.

attorney with the Department of Justice.

So his goal all along was, let's treat this like a real investigation.

Let's get to the facts.

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.