Donald Trump, in my view as an old tax prosecutor, he is deathly afraid of tweaking that tax settlement-

settlement-Not only for himself, but for his kids, his family, and his corporations.

I think it's 80% the tax deal that he's afraid of.

The fund, eh, as they say, Larry David, eh.

Mm-hmm.

But you have two people who are different.

Trump is basically having a meeting of the minds of himself, and he had his attorney, current or former, he had a Freudian slip saying he's the current attorney for Donald Trump, but he's got his old attorney negotiating a meeting of the minds settlement between himself.

That is outrageous, and I'm not-

Yes

... where the terms are very specific.

And if you violate any of those terms, and that's a big one, 1.776 billion is a big one, if you violate that terms, you can go back into court, which they don't wanna do, and you can enforce it by preponderance of the evidence that they breached it.

Here's what bothers me about Todd Blanche, and I think, uh, Senator Schiff probably had, in my view, the most powerful questions.

Mm-hmm

...

if you have either one of those, you gotta back away.

He should never have gotten involved in the settlement between Trump, who's suing himself, and they come out with this sweetheart deal that, I don't care what he said at that hearing under oath, that settlement gave civil and criminal immunity to not just Donald Trump, but his whole family.

Could switching the psychological defense itself come back to haunt the team? Could prosecutors use it against them?

Lauren, that's a fantastic question.

And the answer is a resounding no.

They put their foot in the water and they took it out, but they didn't jump in the pool and swim.

So they made a very good decision in my book to withdraw the notice.

And I got to say that Mr. Mangione has a fantastic legal team.

But I wanted to just, if you don't mind, just describe what that defense was.

Also, for viewers, there's the federal charge, right? That's different.

Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor and now shareholder at law firm Carlton Fields in Washington, D.C., speaking before Blanche became acting AG, commented on what strikes him as most alarming and unprecedented about the relationship between the president and the DOJ.

Before Donald Trump took office in his second term, there had been a historical wall, figurative of course, between the White House and the Department of Justice.

Even though it's a federal agency and the president can appoint the attorney general, every president that I'm familiar with always had some separation between the workings of the White House, the political urges and predilections and biases, and the functioning of the Department of Justice.

I think the only president before Trump who came close to chiseling through that wall was Richard Nixon because he had John Mitchell as the Attorney General and John Mitchell was his campaign manager in 1972.

So the wall took a lot of chiseled hits in 72 and under Nixon, but nothing compared to today.

And the reason I say that is this is the first time in history that I'm aware of where the top two officials of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, are the personal criminal defense attorneys of Donald Trump.

So there is a conflict there, I think, on its face because those attorneys, A.G. Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, they have confidential and attorney-client privileged information that could possibly affect their judgment on cases that affect the president, current and future.

Gene Rossi suggests ways in which Congress might legislate to create a stronger level of independence for the DOJ.

If that is the case, is that automatically federal charges?

It's not automatically, but it sure points towards federal involvement, and there are two federal charges, uh, that could occur here, and I'll get to a third in, in a moment.

But, uh, I wanna go to the child pornography.

They have seized eight terabytes of information from his iCloud account.

They've only reviewed one terabyte.

So they got seven more terabytes to go where they could even enhance the murder charge and also child pornography.

But go to feds.

Is it just the fact you put it on your device and it connects to the iCloud, is that sufficient? I mean, I think a lot of these statutes were built before our technology, um, and so it's not like the classic example, child pornography, you put it in a mail, you send it to somebody, right? If it's on your phone and it's in the iCloud, is that enough?

Mm-hmm

... to prove insanity, and you have to prove it beyond a preponderance.

Um, so the, what you have to show is that at the time of the crime, Mr. Allen did not understand the actions that he was taking.

He didn't know right from wrong.

He didn't know whether he was doing anything that was, um, uh, evil-

Mm

... because he's sort of an architect.

He wrote out his biography of what he was gonna do, how he was gonna do it, and when.