Welcome to the beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melbert. Tonight's story is about losing. It's about Donald Trump

losing in court in front of juries of his peers and judges who are fair-minded, losing so much that he

starts new battles and fights that will lead to more losing. This is very much a story about what a loser

does. I don't mean that in the pejorative sense of the insult term. I mean,

in court, there are winners and losers. In fact, it's an area where Donald Trump and his

administration lately have had trouble precisely because you can't just lie your way out of it.

You can delay sometimes, but eventually you get to the point that there's a winner and a loser.

And Donald Trump was the loser of a very serious case,

civil, not criminal, about his past alleged conduct. And our top story tonight is about how he

years later continues to respond to being the loser in court in that case. So this is important,

and in some ways it's disturbing because it involves using and, according to many critics and

legal observers, abusing the levers of power. But I don't want you, before I get into it,

to lose sight of the fact that the system was working, that he was losing, and that a lot of the

evidence we have tonight suggests he will be losing again. That is the context for a revenge campaign going to a new low, even according to many people who might sympathize with parts of Donald Trump's agenda. Because his DOJ, now led by an acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who is embattled in all sorts of scandals and credibility crises, and we'll get to that, has reportedly opened a criminal investigation that relates to E. Jean Carroll,

who was the winner of a very prominent case where Donald Trump was the loser in civil court.

Carroll had accused Trump of sexual abuse, and in a case that had many twists and turns, she was the winner.

Now we are learning at this late hour that the DOJ has done something that didn't do at the time and it didn't do right after, which I mentioned because it adds the suspicion that this is not on the level, that this is yet another baseless revenge prosecution,

but they are probing a group that helped fund Carroll's legal bills.

It included people like Reid Hoffman, who's a tech billionaire associated with Democrats,

who's criticized Donald Trump, and the post-reporting, and MS now also matching the reporting,

that the investigation

looks at whether the money trail somehow opens them up for an investigation.

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