Attorney General Merrick Garland could significantly expand the case against Donald Trump by filing an indictment in the District of Columbia, instead of Florida, which is where DOJ sought a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.
Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe explained the dynamics to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday.
"When the question is 'what will the Supreme Court do?' there is a no one better to ask than Harvard Law professor and very successful Supreme Court practitioner Laurence Tribe," O'Donnell said. "And when the question is, 'what is Attorney General Merrick Garland going to do?' there is no one available to us who is better to ask than Merrick Garland's constitutional law professor, Laurence Tribe."
O'Donnell asked Tribe about Trump's Supreme Court filing and asked if he thought Garland would indict Trump.
"It seems to me that in these circumstances, it's clear that all three of the crimes that led to the search and seizures, three alleged crimes, are strongly provable, including obstruction of justice," Tribe said. "And that is not even to mention the grave crimes involving seditious conspiracy and insurrection."
He explained, "the real questions before Merrick Garland are not whether to indict, but when? And where? And for which crimes? Where, you would have to decide whether to indict him in Washington D.C., which by the way, he could do even over the Mar-a-Lago offenses because they began when he took the documents illegally from the White House, in Washington, and it was institutions in Washington that he was stiffing and deceiving when he didn't return them."
"And when it comes to trying the case in Washington, there one could include insurrection and seditious conspiracy, in addition to espionage, theft of government documents, and obstruction of justice," Tribe explained. "And the question of when depends very much on exactly when all the ducks are lined up in a row, when all the witnesses are ready. Merrick Garland is not going to bring less than an overwhelming case, that I know by knowing him for all these years."
"He doesn't do things halfway -- he's an enormously thorough," Tribe added, though he did note frustration with Garland's pace when he worked as his research assistant.
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