George Conway and Asha Rangappa

John Heilemann goes deep with two leading voices at the intersection of law, national security, and Trumpworld – George Conway and Asha Rangappa — into the fallout from the FBI’s search-and-seizure operation at Mar-a-Lago and the Justice Department’s investigation of Donald Trump for illegally being in possession of classified documents, including top secret material ... some of which may pertain to nuclear weapons. Conway, an erstwhile conservative superstar litigator and one of the sharpest and most savage Never Trump Republicans – and also, ahem, husband to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway — and Rangappa, senior lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale and a former FBI special agent focusing on counterintelligence, discuss the severity of the crimes that Trump appears to have committed; why, despite the continuing probe of Trump's culpability for the January 6 insurrection and an array of other legal threats, the document case now represents, as Conway puts it, "the shortest distance between Trump and an orange jumpsuit;" why, even so, Attorney General Merrick Garland might choose not to prosecute him; the appalling chorus of Republican elected officials and media magpies demonizing the FBI and stirring up animus, threats, and actual violence against federal law enforcement officials; and Trump’s bizarro-world (but not necessarily errant) belief that, despite the imminent legal jeopardy he faces, last week’s events were actually a boon to him politically.