NBC Source Torpedoes Trump Claim Biden WH Colluded At Meeting With Jack Smith Team Before Indictment

An NBC News source came forward to torpedo ex-President Donald Trump’s claim President Joe Biden’s administration colluded to prosecute him during a pre-indictment meeting at the White House.

The New York Post published a report Saturday that publicly available visitor logs showed a meeting between senior Justice Department and special counsel official Jay Bratt and Caroline Saba, a staffer from the White House Counsel’s Office, on March 31, 2023, weeks before Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on 37 counts related to violations of the Espionage Act.

The article carried with it the heavy inference that the meeting and the indictment were connected, stating “Nine weeks later, Trump was indicted by Smith’s office on June 8, 2023.”

Trump seized on the report to accuse Smith of “colluding” with the Biden administration to indict him.

“It has just been reported that aides to TRUMP prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, met with high officials at the White House just prior to these political SleazeBags Indicating [sic] me OVER NOTHING. “If this is so, which it is, that means that Biden and his Fascist Thugs knew and APPROVED of this Country dividing Form of Election Interference, despite their insisting that they ‘knew nothing’.” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

But according to a report published Monday by NBC’s Ryan Nobles and Dareh Gregorian and independently confirmed by Mediaite, a source directly familiar with the meeting says that the purpose of the meeting was actually to facilitate the questioning of a Trump-era White House Counsel’s Office staffer by an FBI agent (named Danielle Ray and also listed in the visitor logs).

Saba, a 23-year-old assistant-level staffer, was present to “facilitate” the meeting with the witness:

A source directly familiar with the meeting said Saba had facilitated a meeting between Bratt — a key investigator in the documents case — and a career White House official who was in the same position in the Trump administration, as well.

White House visitor logs recorded the meeting on March 31, but it is shown just as a meeting between Saba and Bratt.

According to the source, the White House Counsel’s office would attend such a meeting because it represents the institution of the White House and the employees under that umbrella, not just the president.

The unnamed witness was a career employee during the Trump years who occupied the same job, deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office, as Saba then held. The interview was entirely about events during the Trump years, and Saba’s involvement was standard procedure because the interview was with a former White House employee concerning their White House tenure.

The Post story also notes that the Special Counsel’s office called the meeting na “case-related interview” and that “A person with knowledge of the 2023 visit insisted that it was ‘an interview of a career official who was also working at the White House during the Trump Administration.’”