While reporting on Donald Trump’s Monday night interview with Fox News — his first since his arraignment in the classified documents case against him one week ago — MSNBC’s Ari Melber was so enthused by the revelations therein that he began rapping Lauryn Hill’s hip-hop classic “Lost Ones” on Tuesday’s episode of “The Beat.”
“Think about what Lauryn Hill once said in her wisdom,” the host said before getting lyrical: “‘Hypocrites always wanna play innocent, always wanna take it to the full-out extent / Never wanna face it when it’s time for punishment / Can’t slick talk on the day of judgement because consequence is no coincidence.’ That’s a deep statement about justice or consequence or accountability or what some people call karma.”
The moment came about 10 minutes into Melber’s report on Trump’s Fox News interview with Bret Baier that had the former president saying that he returned “some” of the mishandled classified documents to the Department of Justice upon being subpoenaed (contrary to previous statements saying he returned “all”) and that he didn’t return them in a timely manner because he was “very busy.”
Melber took the interview as the latest evidence that special counsel Jack Smith has an altogether “measurably stronger hand than other prosecutors” Trump has faced in the past.
“So I’ve shown you some of these breakthrough pieces of information. You take it altogether: What’s happening here? What is he getting at in this interview? What is this defendant doing?” Melber said, addressing his audience directly. He then admitted that it’s easy to write off these incremental developments as been there, done that, but he emphasized that this time might be different.
“You follow the news, so you’ve probably seen this thing before where Trump mixes lies with brazen confessions and then seems to get away, seems to duck accountability. That’s one hand,” Melber said. “On the other hand, the facts do show that there are parts of this that are actually different right now.”
Firstly, the 37 charges against Trump, in part falling under the Espionage Act, for taking hundreds of classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate and allegedly refusing to return them upon a subpoena from the Department of Justice, marks the former president’s first time facing down a federal case. And “he’s certainly never faced a prosecutor like Jack Smith,” Melber said.
“Jack Smith has a clearly measurably stronger hand than some other prosecutors who’ve been down these roads,” he continued. “He has this probe where he’s actually delivered some goods and now has an August trial scheduled, which is rattling Trump World. Jack Smith also still has more in the barrel. He has an open probe into Jan. 6, which puts pressure on others in Trump’s orbit in both of these cases.”
That’s when Melber turned to the Grammy-winning Hill for some wisdom.
“You know, you take it together and you can think about what Lauryn Hill once said in her wisdom: ‘Hypocrites always wanna play innocent, always wanna take it to the full-out extent / Never wanna face it when it’s time for punishment / Can’t slick talk on the day of judgement because consequence is no coincidence.’ That’s a deep statement about justice or consequence or accountability or what some people call karma,” Melber said. “Now, we don’t do karma, that’s way above our pay grade, and the DOJ’s not supposed to do karma, the spiritual sense of it. The consequences they are supposed to deal with must be based entirely on evidence without fear of favor. All I can tell you is this special counsel, who is different than the others Trump has faced, got enough evidence for a lawful, court-ordered search, then found the very things he was looking for, went slowly and deferentially at first, giving this defendant every possible off ramp, then filed his indictment overloading with damning evidence.”
Watch the full “The Beat With Ari Melber” segment in the video above.
