I missed being on Twitter this week, and confess that along with Googling the latest Mark Harris tweets, I also checked out what George Conway, Preet Bharara, Joyce Vance, Laurence Tribe, The Lincoln Project, et al., were saying about Trump indictment Part II. I lurked behind the scenes. Press reports about breaking legal matters tend to be too vague to my liking, whereas lawyers often cut to the heart of it.

I do recommend the latest episode of Bharara's podcast, “In Brief,” with Joyce Vance. Both are former U.S. attorneys who know a little something-something about prosecution, and, though they try to stay sober-minded, there's a kind of astonishment at how good the case against Trump is—how much evidence he has given the prosecution. At one point, Bharara calls the recording of Trump meeting with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters “the single most damning thing in the indictment.” Vance responds:

This is the smoking-gun piece of evidence in this case. This is Trump, in essence, committing a crime while he's in the room with these folks, on tape. He's actually showing classified material, that he is not entitled to have, to other people, who are not entitled to see it, while discussing his guilty state of mind and knowledge that it's a crime at the same time—it's really pretty remarkable. I can't remember ever seeing anything like this. 

They also seem to think that rumored appointed judge Aileen Cannon, who was not only tapped by Trump after he lost the 2020 election but made some very suspect calls in his favor earlier in this case, calls so bad that she was chastised by (I believe) the Fifth Circuit—Preet and Joyce seem to think she'll either recuse herself or be asked to recuse herself. We'll see.

Anyway, it was a good week.