Good evening from New York, I'm Ali Valshi in for Chris Hayes.

The gravest crime that Donald Trump ever committed was to undermine democracy, the will of

the people by trying to overthrow a free and fair election.

And today, we saw the first signs that justice may be coming for him.

Today we learned that the ex-president received a letter from the special counsel Jack Smith

indicating that he is the target of a criminal investigation into efforts to interfere with

the presidential election of 2020, leading to the insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

According to Trump, the special counsel gave him a four-day deadline in which to speak

to the Washington, D.C. grand jury hearing the case, it's an offer he will almost certainly

not accept seeing that anything that he says can then be used against him in a subsequent

trial.

And all of this indicates that the Department of Justice is wrapping up what has been

a long and sprawling investigation led by this man, Jack Smith, for the past eight

months.

We do not have any indication of what the exact charges are that Smith is considering,

and the ex-president said himself, a target letter like this quote, almost always means

an arrest and indictment are coming.

That's exactly what happened just last month when Jack Smith sent Trump another target

letter regarding the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents.

And just days after that letter became public, Smith brought a 37 count indictment against

the ex-president, charging him with seven federal crimes.

Of course, that was already the second indictment against Trump this year following the 34 counts

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