Carol Leonnig

I'm not a prosecutor.

I only play a lawyer on TV.

But I'll tell you that a very senior former DOJ official, when he read that passage in the book, called me yesterday.

I was like walking in Hell's Kitchen trying to look for a piece of pizza that didn't cost $10.

And he said...

I cannot believe that happened.

Merrick Garland, again, like Caesar's wife, just wants to be so above board, doesn't want to play any games and errs on the side of caution every time and errs on the side of

Giving Trump the benefit, essentially, I want to say the benefit of the doubt, but like the benefit of the Justice Department's carefulness and thoroughness and apoliticalness.

But freezing that case for 60 days when Trump is not a candidate really makes a lot of prosecutors' hair blow back when they find out about it.

You and I, Tim, you and I were in the same boat.

I was watching this in, you know, real time, watching, you know, various sources say to me, especially in the house, like, you know, we're the first footprints in the snow and we're doing this work and DOJ isn't.

And I was like, huh.

It's hard to prove a negative, right?

But when we really got down into it for the book, it was so clear that key moments of the house investigation, either through embarrassment or through how public it all was, there were two or three really key moments when the house investigation spurred DOJ to do things that exact same freaking day.

So it's like hard to say that it didn't impact them.

Here's an example.

The week of January 10th, 2022, there's a story that comes out in Politico that is about a very good story, by the way, about how the House investigation has put together the fake electors scheme and the information they're getting back from swing states because they had actually subpoenaed information and records and they're getting back this pretty damning evidence about the way it was coordinated.

Right.

Rachel Maddow, now my colleague at MSNOW, did like a week of programming that was about just this.

Like, these electors look coordinated.