Dave Davies

That's J.P.

Cooney, who was an aggressive prosecutor.

Right.

And these prosecutors wanted to do things like who was booked at the Willard Hotel during what days.

And there are kind of issues of, well, privacy.

If somebody wasn't engaged in a crime, where they stay overnight isn't necessarily anybody's business.

And then maybe First Amendment concerns.

I mean it's legal to advocate even strongly against the government.

This is a pattern that we see for the coming months where at various time, investigators and prosecutors see connections that might suggest a wider conspiracy, even the president being involved in trying to deliberately subvert the results of the elections.

And there's resistance.

And one element of this might be the new attorney general, Merrick Garland, who –

You know, he had strong feelings about the independence and fairness of the Justice Department.

Tell us about his approach and how it affected all this.

So what changed in the year?

This was Thomas Windham, who was transferred in from Maryland and suddenly said, we've got to look into a potential conspiracy here, right?

That's right.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting that, you know, I've covered a lot of federal criminal cases and I've always found defense attorneys can be chatty.

They can be good sources.

I never could get anything out of federal prosecutors that wasn't in the public record.