Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: February 5, 2018 Guest: Adam Schiff, Richard Blumenthal, Michael Schmidt, Jennifer Rodgers, Dan Dicker
CHRIS MATTHEW, MSNBC HOST: Thanks for being with us. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
REP. TREY GOWDY (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: There`s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.
HAYES: Republicans give up the game and nobody seems to have told the President.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We caught them! Hey, we caught them. It`s so much fun. We`re like the great sleuth.
HAYES: Tonight, Congressman Adam Schiff on the vote to release the Democrats` memo and Senator Richard Blumenthal on the President`s charges of treason.
TRUMP: Can we call that treason? Why not?
HAYES: Plus, debunking the Trumpian lies of Devin Nunes.
REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-CA), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Papadopoulos had never even knew who Trump -- you know, never even have met with the President.
TRUMP: The Stock Market is at an all-time high and continues to go up, up, up.
HAYES: The politics and practical reality of today`s historic market loss. And what the President`s deportation force is up to while no one is watching.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No one should have the right to destroy a family like this.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. Tonight, the Democratic rebuttal that we`ve heard about to the Nunes memo is headed to the White House. That`s after the House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously to release it earlier this evening. Now, this happens on a day when the Stock Market went into free fall, just as the President hit the road to promote his tax bill. The Dow Jones suffering its largest single- day point drop in history, erasing its gains for the year, much more on that, coming up. While he was in Ohio today, the President also accused Democrats of treason for declining to give him a standing ovation during his state of the union last week. And he appeared to weigh in once again on the Nunes memo release last Friday, at least we think that`s what he was talking about.
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TRUMP: Oh, but did we catch them in the act or what? You know what I`m talking about -- oh, did we catch them in the act! They are very embarrassed. They never thought they were going to get caught. We caught them! Hey, we caught them. Oh, it`s so much fun. We`re like the great sleuth.
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HAYES: Cute, polite applause and bewilderment. The President belongs to a small group of people including members of his family and certain Trump T.V. hosts who believe the Nunes memo now invalidates the totality of the Russia investigation. This, despite the fact, is memo actually confirms crucially that the investigation itself was opened for reasons having nothing to do with the now-infamous Steele Dossier. But to the President and his allies, the 3 1/2-page document is evidence of a vast anti-Trump conspiracy at the highest levels of the Justice Department.
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SEAN HANNITY, HOST, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: These revelations are so profound, this corruption so deep, it is so obvious that the Special Counsel needs to be shut down immediately. Look, if we as a country, if we care about the Constitution, if we believe in civil liberties, if we believe in those protections, then the Special Counsel must be disbanded immediately. And by the way, nobody else will say this, all charges against Paul Manafort and General Michael Flynn need to be dropped.
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HAYES: It`s true, probably nobody else would say that, because, the Nunes memo said nothing about the charges against Manafort and Flynn, not a single, solitary thing. Also, the Muellergate headline there, Mueller wasn`t in charge of the operation when that FISA warrant for Carter Page, that`s the subject of the Nunes memo was written. He had yet to be announced. So, the other thing to think about is that Flynn has already pleaded guilty to a federal crime. Meaning, he has already admitted lying to the FBI. It would be weird to drop the charges after he`s pleaded guilty.
The President, however, tweeted over the weekend, this memo totally vindicates Trump in probe, but the Russia witch hunt goes on and on. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction, the word not used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding nothing, collusion is dead. This is an American disgrace. That is not how lawmakers from his own party see it. According to House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, one of the very few members of Congress who has actually viewed the actual classified material that underlies the Nunes memo, the document has nothing to do with Robert Mueller`s investigation.
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GOWDY: I actually don`t think it has any impact on the Russian probe, for this reason.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The memo has no impact on the Russia probe?
GOWDY: Not to me, it doesn`t. And I was pretty intricately involved in the drafting of it. There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. So to the extent, the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an e-mail sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos` meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn`t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.
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HAYES: Wow, OK. Well, that`s the same guy who used to Chair the Benghazi committee, just to give you an idea of where he`s coming from. Tonight, a week after voting to release the Nunes memo and not the Democratic memo, the House Intelligence Committee just voted unanimously to indeed release the Democratic response. Now it`s up to the president to declassify the Democrats` memo so it can be made public. The White House says it will be subjected to the same review process as the Nunes memo. If that`s the case, the President may already have made up his mind, because, well, it was reported last week that the President was convinced to release the Nunes memo before ever having read it.
And this morning, the President trained his sights on the top Democrat on the House Intelligence, Ranking Member Adam Schiff, who wrote the Democratic response, "Little Adam Schiff who`s desperate to run for higher office is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan, and Clapper. Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!" Joining me now is Congressman Adam Schiff, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee. I saw a response earlier today suggesting that the President should be placed in time-out by his Chief of Staff. Is there anything else you want to say in response?
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), RANKING MEMBER, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: No, it`s just very confusing because he had gave me a different nickname before, which seemed worse, so does that mean he likes me better now? I don`t know. It`s just -- it`s just very confusing, Chris.
HAYES: Let me ask you, seriously, though. The President accused you of a crime today. What do you want to say to that?
SCHIFF: Well, I guess he accused me of two crimes. He accused me of illegally leaking classified information, and as I didn`t give him a standing ovation during the state of the union, I`m apparently a traitor as well. But in terms of the accusation of leaking, what that refers to is when Don Junior came before our Committee, after publicly saying that he was going to fully cooperate, he invoked a nonexistent attorney/client privilege to refuse to answer questions about his conversation with his father in the preparation of that false statement about the meeting at Trump Tower with the Russians.
Now, I called him out on that and that`s been our practice. We don`t talk about what the witnesses affirmatively say, but when they refuse to answer questions, we don`t let them hide behind closed doors. And indeed the Republicans have done the same thing when they took issue with Steve Bannon refusing to answer questions in closed session. So that`s really what he`s complaining about, that he and his son, that`s not a leak, but it is calling them on the carpet for refusing to answer very relevant questions that go to the issue of whether the President of the United States obstructed justice.
HAYES: All right, I have to say that I am confused this evening and I would like you to clarify.
SCHIFF: OK.
HAYES: Last week, the Committee voted on party lines to release the Nunes memo and not the rebuttal memo. The Nunes memo gets declassified and the President released. It comes out, I think it lands largely with a thud, but not to folks like Sean Hannity and the President. Now, today they voted unanimously to release the Democratic memo. What -- why? What changed?
SCHIFF: Well, what changed is I think a week of shaming, essentially. They tried to make the argument publicly that they were taking this extraordinary step, this never-before-used House process to release classified information in the interest of full transparency. And when asked, well, if you want to be fully transparent, why are you stifling the Democratic response? There was no answer. So even the Speaker, after a few days of this, was forced to say, we`re going to have to release the Democratic response. So nothing like shame in this case to get a response. They turned and they voted in favor of this. And I suspect the same problem will be encountered at the White House if they try to prohibit the publication of this response, they`ll be subject to the same claims of hypocrisy, not that Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn`t capable of trying to rationalize any hypocrisy. But, still, I think it`s going to be very tough for them to say no.
HAYES: Now, there`s these complaints from you and others that the release of the Nunes memo would compromise sources and methods, it represented a threat to the nation`s security and safety. And I have to say, having read it, I`m a little unconvinced by that, but wouldn`t that same argument pertains to the memo that you wrote and want to release now?
SCHIFF: No, because we`re taking a step that the Republicans refused to take. And that is that we have already days ago sent our memo to the Department of Justice and the FBI so that they can begin the process of vetting anything that would compromise sources or methods. In the transmittal letter tonight that went to the President, we urged them to consult with the Department of Justice and the FBI. We want those agencies to report back to us if they have any redactions that are necessary. We asked the Republicans to do the same thing and they refused. So we`re taking the responsible step here. But, Chris, I have to say, we are also asking for specificity because we don`t want the White House making political redactions to our memo. It`s one thing if the Department of Justice and the FBI says it`s necessary, it`s another if the political voices when the White House says, we don`t want the public to see certain information.
HAYES: It`s interesting, the rebuttal memo hasn`t come out, and yet it seems an essential premise of the Nunes memo has already been rebutted.
SCHIFF: Yes.
HAYES: And this is -- the Republicans have now conceded that contrary to the impression one gets when one reads the Nunes memo, it was, in fact, stipulated in the FISA warrant application that some of the information originated from a political source. It didn`t explicitly say DNC-funded oppo, but that was actually in that underlying FISA warrant. That seemed now -- is your understanding they concede to that?
SCHIFF: Yes. Well, yes and no. It really depends on which Republican is speaking to which news outlet, whether they concede that point or not. But this is one of the areas that we go into in our Democratic response. We set out what, in fact, the FBI did disclose to the FISA court, as they should. It`s also very interesting, Chris, that the same group that was earlier alleging that names were improperly unmasked seems to say that the FBI should have been unmasking names in the submission to the FISA Court. But this is what we go through in our responsive memo. It`s designed really to set the context, to provide some of the information that was omitted. Certainly not all of the information in the FISA applications and renewals, but some of the information to give context. And that`s what was really missing. That`s what we`ve made the Republican memo so misleading.
HAYES: All right, Congressman Adam Schiff, great to have you with us tonight.
SCHIFF: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: Senator Richard Blumenthal is a Democrat from Connecticut, a Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Senator, I want to start with some news that just crossed the New York Times reporting that the President`s own lawyers are now advising him to decline or I should say refuse stronger words, refuse an interview with Mueller`s team and the Russia inquiry. You`re response to that.
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT), SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: He certainly has a right to refuse to be interviewed. He has a right to claim the Fifth Amendment politically and ethically. There really is no excuse for him to fail, to be forthcoming in this investigation, except, of course, that he is becoming increasingly desperate, as the investigative vice tightens around the Oval Office. There`s now a credible case of obstruction of justice against the President. And so he is trying to weaponize the Nunes memo and he`s trying to comment on this investigation in a way that suggests he`s either delusional or desperate or both.
HAYES: I just want to make sure I understand. You`re saying it`s perfectly fine for him to refuse an interview with Mueller`s team if he invokes the Fifth Amendment because he has the right that all, American citizens do, but you don`t see any other way that he can refuse?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, if he refuses to be interviewed, he will be subpoenaed to the grand jury. That will be my prediction, as a former United States Attorney, a prosecutor for Connecticut, as well as Attorney General. And then he would have to invoke the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid responding to questions, which I think would be a profound sign, adding to this case of obstruction of justice. Remember that he`s the President of the United States. Ultimately, he is responsible for enforcing the law. He`s dragged the FBI into the muck and mire of partisan politics, trying to discredit what the FBI has found in the course of his investigation. Now he`s refusing to cooperate, I think, will speak volumes, really, incredible volumes about his potential culpability for obstruction of justice. And he`ll have to take the Fifth Amendment if he`s subpoenaed to the grand jury if he wishes to avoid answering questions.
HAYES: Senator, I want you to -- if it`s OK, I want you to stand by and stay with us because I want to bring in by phone Michael Schmidt who actually reported this. He`s one of the two bylines on that story that just broke in the New York Times. And Michael, what is the rationale his lawyers are giving in urging the President to refuse this interview.
MICHAEL SCHMIDT, CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, there`s a few different reasons. The more outward reason is the fact that Mueller doesn`t have legal standing to ask the President about these, but internally, they realize that there`s really no win here for the President. There`s only downside. And there are some concerns about whether the President would be truthful or whether the President may go on and talk for too long. The President really likes to talk and when you ask him a question he continues to go on and on. And that may give Mueller a lot of fodder and a lot of things. So it`s unclear how disciplined -- the President doesn`t show a lot of discipline when he speaks publicly. He says things that usually are at times are either off-message or not truthful and undercut himself. So I don`t think they trust that in such a setting he would be disciplined in that way.
HAYES: Do they have a strategy, you heard the Senator, Senator Blumenthal just say that, of course, the President can invoke the Fifth Amendment. But that`s not what they`re talking about. I mean, it sounds like what they want to do is just refuse the interview and have it go away without invoking the Fifth Amendment?
SCHMIDT: I think that if they were to refuse the interview, I don`t think it`s just going to go away. I think what would happen is that Mueller would try and take this to court and try to get the court to side with him and give him the power to compel the President to do this. If you look at historical precedence here, looking at the Nixon tapes case, the government usually -- the prosecutors are usually able to get what they want from a President, in terms of a criminal investigation, an investigation similar to this.
HAYES: All right, Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, who just broke that, broke that story on the lawyers, the President. I want to ask Senator Blumenthal, if you think we`re headed towards a court case now and whether your understanding of the law is that the President is on the wrong side of it?
BLUMENTHAL: If the President invokes either the executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment, he faces huge hurdles on executive privilege. Clearly the Nixon take place case, united states versus Nixon shows what the outcome is going to be, because it holds that the President`s broad indefinite claim of executive simply will not withstand a challenge based on a specific need for evidence in a criminal case like this one. And the Fifth Amendment defense may be in some sense viable, but it will lead to the potential for charges, at least in a report against him.
HAYES: Let me ask you one more question because there`s reporting that the White House says that lawyers are in favor of appointing a second special counsel, which seems in some ways a means of sort of curtailing and reining in Robert Mueller without firing him. What do you think of that idea? How realistic do you think that is?
BLUMENTHAL: The great danger here, Chris, is in fact, that the Nunes memo is a pretext for firing Rod Rosenstein and then the appointment of someone to replace him who would either fire Robert Mueller or appoint a second special counsel. And the real danger here is the effort to distract and discredit law enforcement will have some effect on ultimately demeaning the viability of this investigation. That`s why I think the Special Counsel has to be protected. I`m pushing legislation, it`s bipartisan, that would protect Robert Mueller and the special counsel. The danger is growing by the day. And it`s really a time for Paul Ryan to exercise some leadership here and Republicans to say in effect, have you no decency, sir, to Nunes and even to the President, in terms of what they are trying to do to law enforcement, to the rule of law, and to the continuing investigation into obstruction of justice and the continuing threat of Russian interference in our elections.
HAYES: All right, Senator Richard Blumenthal, thanks for making time tonight and hanging with us as we roll this breaking news. Jennifer Rodgers, a former Federal Prosecutor, Executive Director at the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School and Mark Miller, former Chief Spokesperson for the Justice Department under President Obama and an MSNBC Justice and Security Analyst. Let`s respond to this news. So, the President comes out, gives an impromptu press avail. He says I`d love -- I`d love to talk to the Special Counsel. I would love nothing more, I mean, subject to my lawyer`s approval. And then predictably, we now have the New York Times saying the lawyers are recommending to refuse this interview. What do you make of it?
JENNIFER RODGERS, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Well, he certainly can refuse the interview. The interview is voluntary. Nobody has to be interviewed. You can just insist on your subpoena. I think if he does refuse, he will get the subpoena, and then he`ll be faced with the decision is he`s going to take the Fifth or not.
HAYES: In terms the of the subpoena, presumably that would be contested and would end up in the Supreme Court fairly quickly, correct?
RODGERS: I don`t know where it would end up? I mean, it`s not that controversial. You get a subpoena, you have to go unless you`re going to assert your Fifth Amendment right. I mean, there don`t seem to be too many complicated legal issues here. So, you know yes, they can try to appeal, appeal, appeal, but the Supreme Court really shouldn`t take something like this. So --
HAYES: You think it`s that clear-cut?
RODGERS: I do. I do. I mean, there`s really no special presidential "I don`t want to go" law here that would prohibit the enforcement of the grand jury`s subpoena. So I think it is pretty clear-cut.
HAYES: Matt, do you think this was -- I guess, are you surprised to hear this advice from his lawyers?
MATT MILLER, MSNBC JUSTICE AND SECURITY ANALYST: No, not at all. I think they`ve been telegraphing this for a while after he gave that interview a couple of weeks ago that you mentioned. They were very quick to come out and send signals, both from Ty Cobb and from John Dowd. John Dowd Saying that it would be him, John Dowd, that would make the final decision, not the President. I look at that as a very significant walk back. They have to be obviously very concerned about this interview because I think if they go in and the President tells the truth, he`s probably going to admit to obstruction of justice.
And if he goes in and tells a lie, then he`s going to have committed a second crime. So it`s a very dangerous thing for any witness that`s in his -- the kind of -- faces the kind of legal jeopardy that he faces. And it`s an especially serious situation for someone with him who has such a demonstrated track record of never being able to tell the truth. We seem him do it over and over in public. And you see him faced with tough serious questioning from prosecutors that Bob Mueller has assembled, he`d face great, great legal jeopardy.
HAYES: Do you think the Nunes memo has accomplished what`s seen as tactical goal which was to put some dent in the Mueller probe or at least sow further seeds in doubts in the President`s supporters and his integrity?
RODGERS: Well, I don`t think it has made a dent with people who are paying attention. But I just feel like there are so many people out there who just look to what he`s saying and just look to the headlines that Fox News is reporting. So, you know, I do worry that those people are not going to read the alternative, you know, the Democratic memo and really reason through it. So, I think maybe they did do a little bit of what they`re -- of what they`re trying to accomplish here.
HAYES: I mean, part of the problem, Matt, it seems to me, is that the interview with Mueller is a sort of plot point at which there`s going to be necessary escalation in one direction or the other, right?
MILLER: Yes, that`s absolutely right. Look, Donald Trump, private citizen, by all means, could -- would be well within his rights to take the Fifth Amendment. But I think we ought to expect better than that from the President of the United States, who is charged with faithfully executing all of our laws. We ought to expect the President to cooperate with an investigation. We ought to expect him to come in and give truthful testimony, just like we want any other witness to come in and give truthful testimony. It`s not a high ask to ask that the President of the United States, you know, meet the highest possible standard.
And I think what -- you know, what we`ll see here is, you know, he`s probably not going to want to take the Fifth, because that is, obviously, somewhat of a damaging political admission. The worst-case scenario is not that he takes the Fifth, but that he defies a subpoena, defies the courts. You know, he`s thumbed his nose at judges, rhetorically, at least, and on Twitter a number of times. That`s where you would face a grave constitutional crisis. If this went all the way to the Supreme Court, they enforce the subpoena and the President just says no.
HAYES: Yes, that`s an interesting point. We should note that on big high- profile standoffs with the federal courts, they haven`t done that. I mean, they didn`t do it in the Muslim ban. They have complied with federal orders, so far. This would -- this would be a shocking departure were they to do that.
RODGERS: It would and I mean, you know, the scenario that Matthew laid out where you are getting all the way to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is telling him he has to comply and he just refuses, I mean, I don`t know where we go from there, I don`t know if anyone knows but I don`t -- the Supreme Court is not going to be partisan about this. The Supreme Court is going to enforce that subpoena.
HAYES: Let me just make sure, your confidence in that, about the Supreme Court -- I remember hearing law professors be like, this ACA case is a dog, it`s going to get thrown out, the next thing I know, it was at the Supreme Court. So I just want to make sure, .like your confidence on this, that based on the Nixon tapes precedent? Like, where does that come from?
RODGERS: Well, it comes from that, and also, you know, the courts have pushed back against Trump. I mean, they see themselves very much as a co- equal branch. They don`t want to be told that they don`t have the power to you know, enforce the laws of this country and to interpret those laws. And you know, I don`t think they`re going to take kindly to someone saying, this grand jury subpoena, which comes from effectively the courts, is being ignored.
HAYES: So you think there`s an institutional prerogative there that gives you that confidence?
RODGERS: Definitely.
HAYES: All right, Jennifer Rodgers and Matt Miller, thank you both. Still ahead, how Devin Nunes is selling his alternate reality inside the Trump bubble and it`s one of his favorite talking points and today it tanked. The repercussions of today`s historic Stock Market plunge next.
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TRUMP: Come on up and tell us about these massive cuts and how they`re benefiting your people, your employees, your workers. Thanks, Matt.
MATT SCHRON, GENERAL MANAGER, JERGENS INCORPORATED: And thanks to your tax cuts, we see continued success in the future.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We`re interrupting for breaking news. There is a, quite a drop happening on Wall Street. A massive sell-off is happening today.
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HAYES: Ouch. Nothing like a historic drop in the Dow to interrupt your big economy speech. Over 1,100 points were lost by the end of trading today. And while most presidents understood that pegging your own performance too closely to a market you cannot control is deeply unwise, this President has been different. His own Treasury Secretary thinks the Stock Market is a good report card for the administration. And then, of course, there is the President himself.
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TRUMP: -- has picked up since the election.
We`re doing fantastically. The Stock Market hit another all-time high.
The Stock Market is at an all-time high and continues to go up, up, up.
We did, in fact, break 25,000, very substantially break it, very easily. So I guess our new number is 30,000.
Had the other side gotten in, The Market would have gone down 50 percent from where it was, 50 percent from where it was. Remember that.
You`re seeing what`s happening with the Stock Market. People are appreciating what we`re doing.
The Stock Market is smashing one record after another.
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HAYES: But today, after last week`s stock market drop, which was the worst week in two years, the market plunge continued, as you see in this time lapse between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m., at one point, dropping more than 1,500 points. It finished down 4.6 percent after Friday`s drop of 2.5 percent. The White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement which reads in part, "The President`s focus is on our long-term economic fundamentals which remain exceptionally strong." Dan Dicker is an Independent Oil Trader, Author of Shale Boom, Shale Bust and a great person to talk to about this stuff. There`s a reason that presidents tend to shy away from grabbing credit for big Dow swings upward.
DAN DICKER, INDEPENDENT OIL TRADER: Because you can`t really control it. You never know when the down turn is going to happen. And all Market analysts know when it comes -- when it starts going down, it goes down really, really fast it`s really painful and really quickly.
HAYES: What did you make of today?
DICKER: Well, I wouldn`t say much of it. You know, I`d like to blame it on Trump, you know and call this the Nunes drop or the Trump dump. It`s on a hash tag that`s kind of trending on this.
HAYES: The Nunes drop. That seems unlikely.
DICKER: Well, you know, there`s a top to a market and people try to want to put a person on top of that. This is the person who turned the market around. And Nunes is a guy who`s trending on Twitter for precisely that. But in essence, it`s mostly a market that is taking the technical retrenchment from one that was basically very overextended over the course of the last year.
HAYES: You know, that point is interesting. You and I were going back and forth on this. There`s an old Wall Street saying, you know, you buy the rumor, you sell the news, right? So you price in ahead of time and that there`s a little bit of that happening with the tax cut. That there were months and months of buying the rumor, and now people are selling the news, meaning now that it`s happened, they`re getting rid of that --
DICKER: This is -- this is all the way -- always the way that markets work. And most of the people on Wall Street knew that the Market was overextended. But there was this great kind of buildup to before the tax cut came. Everyone was waiting for it to happen and there was a lot of energy and a lot of market money that was coming into the market that drove it so high.
HAYES: Meaning a bet on this tax cut is going to happen, I want to get in now.
DICKER: Absolutely. That -- we knew that a Republican-controlled Congress, a Republican president, the first thing they were going to do even before they tried to repeal ObamaCare was to give a huge corporate tax cut. They finally managed to get that done. But now, now that it`s in, people are starting to take a look at those market prices, the valuations that are there and say, maybe this won`t stimulate the kind of 5.5, six percent growth that Gary Cohn thinks it`s going to stimulate. And therefore, the valuations that are being attached to these stocks might be a little bit pricey here.
HAYES: You know, ultimately, the stock market is not a proxy for the economy. I mean, we`ve got half of Americans own a stock, 80 percent of stock owned by ten percent --
DICKER: That`s exactly the point. I mean, the Republicans will always say, you know, this is a middle-class thing, the Stock Market is 50 percent of the people have some connection to stock. But as you said, 81 percent of stocks are owned by ten percent of Americans. So it`s a rich person`s business and it has really nothing to do with the economy.
HAYES: Although, on the flip side, we should say this. I mean, it does seem to me that if you cut hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate taxes, you should see some -- a lot of that money flow into equities. I mean, it would make sense that that would be good for the Stock Market, because you`re -- you know, you`re going to increase the cash flow for a lot of these businesses.
DICKER: Stock buybacks is generally the way it`s done. You tend to increase dividends to shareholders without extra cash. Of course, you know, you increase the dividend and the stock is worth more. There`s a general trend here that is not opposed to what`s going on with Trump. I mean, that tax cut should have a positive effect on the Stock Markert.
HAYES: That`s exactly my point.
DICKER: The question is that, is this, this drop that we`ve had over the last three days, is this the start of a true retrenchment back to what a normal P/E is for stocks, normal evaluations for stocks...
HAYES: Price to earnings ratio.
DICKER: Right. Or is it just a technical retrenchment and we`re going to take back all of those gains within the next 60, 90, 120 days.
HAYES: Here`s the big question macroeconomically in the long run it seems to me is, basically, do you have ultimately in the long run, you can`t have too much of a divergence between how the market is doing and how the macro economy is doing. The question, right, for this year is last year was a great year for the markets, not a great year for job growth. Steady, but lower.
This year it really is a question of, what does the real economy do?
DICKER: Right. And again, as good as this corporate tax cut looked to AT&T and Pfizer, in terms of growth, it really hasn`t that much of an effect yet. And it`s not sure that it will. I mean, cash was never the kind of the..
HAYES: That was never the problem for corporate America.
DICKER: That was never the problem.
HAYES: They were sitting on cash left and right.
DICKER: Exactly.
So we have here, now we have a GDP growth of about 2.6, 2.7 percent, about the same as we had under Obama. Europe is not that much different from us. Asia is moving in an entirely different rate altogether, so it`s not as if this corporate tax cut in the long run might make the kind of difference that the GOP and folks in Washington and President Trump actually hopes it`s going to be.
HAYES: Dan Dicker, that was great. Thank you. Author of "Shale Boom Shale Bust," always a pleasure.
DICKER: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: Coming up, the outsized and outright lies of the chair of the House intelligence committee. Just what is the deal with Devin Nunes?
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HAYES: All right. Breaking news at this hour, as we mentioned earlier, The New York Times reporting that the president`s own lawyers are now advising him to refuse, refuse an interview in the Russia inquiry. Of course, the president expressing his enthusiasm, how much he was looking forward to sitting down with Mueller and his team, subject, he said, to his lawyers getting involved.
Well, his lawyers appear to be vetoing now, setting up a question of whether the president invoking the fifth amendment, whether he simply refuses and waits for a compelled subpoena, and then a possible showdown over how that subpoena is enforced.
Now, in the wake of the Nunes memo, there seem to be two positions that people out there are arguing about the FBI and political interference in the election. One of them coming from Nunes and the president and his allies is at the highest level of the FBI and the Department of Justice were engaging in a nefarious conspiracy by political of opponents of Donald Trump to hurt Donald Trump.
And the other view is, well, how dare you question the integrity and the judgment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But there`s a third view, and it`s the one which to me is the obvious one, which is that the FBI really did screw up 2016 by tipping the election to Donald Trump.
What we now know is that from the summer before the election through election day, there were two investigations, one of each of the candidates. There was an investigation of Hillary Clinton, which James Comey repeatedly discussed publicly, including a stunning press conference in which he announced that while she would not be charged for any crime, she was extremely careless in her handling of classified information.
That same investigation, the investigation that the FBI publicly resurfaced 11 days before the election, in violation of DOJ rules.
Of course, Hillary Clinton was cleared yet again just three days before the election, but the damage was done.
But on top of that, which was already clear to all of us watching at the time, on top of that, is that in July 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign, into their possible collusion with a foreign adversary, a foreign adversary, remember, back in July 2016, that was engaged in criminal sabotage against Hillary Clinton`s campaign. It was unfolding in realtime. And that the origin of that counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was a Trump campaign adviser telling an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Clinton, indicating possible advanced knowledge of the cyberattack of the DNC.
This is what the FBI knew. This is what they were sitting on before the election. And yet, we never learned one word of it. It stayed secret for months. All the while, the zigs and zags of the Clinton investigation were very, very public. And that is precisely what drove Senator Harry Reid to write a letter in October of 2016 to then FBI Director James Comey, in which he said, quote, it has become clear you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.
No one knew then how right Harry Reid was, except, of course, for James Comey.
So here we are, as Republicans are engaged in a titanic bit of projection, claiming that the body that was investigating both candidates, but only talked about the Democrat, was somehow trying to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. And James Comey, the one who made this series of judgment calls now tweets MLK quotes from on high and shakes his head at the sad state of affairs that he very much helped bring about.
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HAYES: There is at least one voter that thinks the Devin Nunes, the California Republican, is doing a bang-up job. President Trump tweeting out this morning, quote, "Representative Devin Nunes, a man of tremendous courage and grit may some day be recognized as a great American hero more what he has exposed and what he has had to endure."
Now, anyone not living in the presidential bubble, however, might think a little differently, especially after Nunes got on Trump TV today and didn`t just lie, but lied in a bizarrely brazen, Trumpian fashion.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. DEVIN NUNES, (R) CALIFORNIA: I would say that if Padopoulos was such a major figure, why didn`t you get a warrant on him?
If Padopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him. You know, the guy lied. As far as we can tell, Padopoulos never even knew Trump was -- or never had met with the president.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Never had met with the president? That`s U.S. Congressman Devin Nunes saying the former Donald Trump adviser George Padopoulos didn`t know who his own boss, Donald Trump, was or he had never even met with Trump, despite the fact that Donald Trump himself tweeted evidence of at least one meeting they had together. That would be this photo, that`s been regularly used by news outlets including our own showing a national security meeting with then candidate George Trump -- Donald Trump and George Papadopoulos on March 31, 2016.
MSNBC Contributor Jennifer Rubin is a Washington Post columnistwho writes the Right Turn column.
I thought that was an interesting contention for Mr. Nunes to make.
JENNIFER RUBIN, THE WASHINGTON POST: You know, it`s pretty scary that he has such a poor grasp of details, not the kind of guy you want to be chairman of the House intelligence committee. And that really is, I think, the takeaway from all of this, which is, yes, he`s malicious. Yes, he`s trying to carry water. But, basically, he`s very thick. He`s very dumb. And that is disturbing in and of itself, because this is an important role. These positions are supposed to be exercising oversight. And this person is totally incapable of carrying out anything remotely akin to his real job.
HAYES: Well, speaking for myself, I reserve any judgment on the mental acuity of the chairman, one way or the other. I honestly mean that. I mean, at one level, if you view him engaged in a sort of tactical feint to undermine the investigation or to give people in Trump`s base some reason to doubt the FBI, there`s new polling just out today that 74 percent of Trump voters now think the FBI is biased against Donald Trump.
In that respect, what he`s doing has been successful.
RUBIN: But he didn`t have to leave contrary evidence behind. He didn`t have to include, for example, mention of George Padopoulos, if that was his goal. So he`s not doing a very good job, if that`s what his intention is.
And of course, listen, he has also, obviously, made glaring errors that are going to come back to haunt him and he`s left the door wide open for the Democrats now to come back to their contrary memo.
But I will say this. And that is that they are doing real damage to the FBI. I spoke with a former FBI official yesterday, I`ll have this tomorrow, that there is real damage being done to the way FISA requests are being held, to the oversight process, to the morale and the retention within the FBI. These people are wrecking our national security and our law enforcement organization.
And as a former Republican, I kind of take exception to this, because they used to be the law and order party. They used to be the people who accused Democrats of sabotaging our national defense, of being anti-law enforcement. No one, not any president, Democrat or Republican, has ever done the damage that this president is currently doing to the FBI and to the Department of Justice.
HAYES: Since you`re here, I want to get your take on the news that just crossed about half an hour ago, the president`s own lawyers now counseling him to refuse a sit-down interview in the Russia inquiry with Mueller`s team. What do you think of that?
RUBIN: Well, you can refuse all you like, and then the special prosecutor issues a subpoena. And the grand jury says, come on down! And when you go before the grand jury, of course, you don`t get your lawyer in the room.
So, I think that`s a temporary stall technique. And I think, really, what it shows is the degree of panic that has now gripped him and his legal team, because he goes in there and he either lies, like he usually does, or he tells the truth and essentially admits to what he`s being saying in public, which is obstruction of justice. So he really is trapped. And when you don`t have the law, you don`t have the facts, you just stall. And I think that`s what he`s trying to do right now.
HAYES: Do you think that we`re going to see more -- it looked for a while like Republicans were lockstep behind Nunes. They voted on a party line. They sort of followed him into battle. They appear to kind of beat a hasty retreat a few days later between Trey Gowdy`s comments, some of the things I`ve seen from the Senate, particularly in that unanimous vote on the Democratic memo to release it today. Adam Schiff interpreting that as essentially as they lost the argument in three days. How do you interpret it?
RUBIN: Yeah, it was interesting on the Sunday shows, there was no robust defense of Nunes, even from the Republicans who ventured out. And of course, Nunes didn`t go out himself.
So, yes, I think on the merits, he clearly lost this one. So, I think you saw that today with the unanimous vote to release the Democratic memo.
But this is a problem of their own making. And this is on Paul Ryan`s head. He was the one who left him there. He was the one that encouraged him there. And to the extent that they`re now trapped, following behind a lunatic, who is making all kinds of crazy claims that aren`t helpful to the president, that -- they can take their complaints to Paul Ryan, because he`s the one who`s responsible.
HAYES: All right, Jennifer Rubin, thanks for your time.
RUBIN: Sure.
HAYES: Still ahead, the awful reality behind the president`s anti- immigrant rhetoric. Story after story of people ambushed and deported. That`s coming up.
But first, tonight`s healthy dose of thing one, thing two next.
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HAYES: Thing One tonight, during a busy executive time for the president this morning, he tweeted a demeaning nickname for a Democrat in congress, pushed his border wall in all caps, also tweeted a story that seemingly came out of the blue. Here`s the tweet. "The Democrats are pushing for universal health care while thousands of people are marching in the UK, because their universal system is going broke and not working."
OK. Perhaps not surprisingly, the tweet came after this segment on Fox & Friends.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thousands took to the streets of London over the weekend to demand the government come up with more money for Britain`s overburdened National Health Service, the same universal system that Democrats have continued to push for here in the United States.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: A small point of clarification, Democrats did not push for a National Health Service. Single payer is not the same thing.
But the president also took time to thank Fox & Friends, quote, "for exposing the truth."
So what is the deal with those protests? And how do British physicians feel about their universal health care? The resounding response from the UK to Donald Trump`s tweet is Thing Two in 60 seconds.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thousands took to the streets of London over the weekend to demand the government come up with the over-burdened health service, the same universal system that Democrats have continued to push for here in the United States.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That`s how Fox & Friends characterized a national health care march in London over the weekend, and the president taking a cue from his favorite show tweeted that thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working.
The fact of the matter is that this was a pro-national health care march and that tens of the thousands of people were protesting against cuts to health care, not against the system itself, a fact made evident by Britain`s Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt that tweeted "I may disagree with claims made on that march, but not one of them wants to live in a system where 28 million people have no cover."
Spokesperson for Theresa May backed up the health secretary in a statement saying, "the prime minister is proud of having an NHS which is free at the point of delivery."
The opposition Labour Party also joined in rebuking Trump. Leader Jeremy Corbyn calling health care a universal right and reminding Trump that those in glass houses shouldn`t throw stones.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEREMY CORYN, LABOUR PARTY LEADER: I can`t really go through the thought process of Donald Trump on this matter. All I would say to him is that millions of Americans don`t get access to any kind of health care.
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HAYES: ...in Kansas arrested 55 year old community college Said Ahmed Jamal (ph) in his front yard as he walked his seventh grade daughter to school. Jamal, who born in Bangladesh, has lived in the United States for 30 years.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TASEEN JAMAL, SON: It didn`t seem real. And it felt like I had been shot because I couldn`t believe what was happening.
No one should have the right to destroy a family like this regardless of their position in society.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Taseen Jamal told the Kansas City Star after his father was handcuffed and his mother tried to hug him good-bye, an ICE agent said she could be charged with interfering in an arrest.
Jamal is now in jail. Members of the community have taken to writing handwritten letters begging for his release and testifying to his character.
Stories like this have been playing out every day in Donald Trump`s America in communities large and small. Michigan father deported of three decades in the country, sent to Mexico where he feels lost.
The DACA eligible man detained in traffic court after mistakes on his renewal applications who said upon release they treat people like animals. The HIV positive gay man who has lived in the U.S. for 15 years who ICE ordered deported to Venezuela where there is no medicine to treat him. He told an immigration official you are sending him to my death.
Is this what America First looks like in practice? Deporting the fathers of our fellow Americans, arresting people at court?
Joining me now Vox senior reporter Dara Lind who has been covering immigration for a decade and is doing some of the best reporting on what ICE is up to in the Trump era.
So, I guess the first question is, is this different? Is what ICE is doing under Trump different than what they were doing in previous presidents, under Obama?
DARA LIND, VOX: So, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is that if you look at the numbers in aggregate, ICE isn`t deporting people, they`re not arresting more people than they were say in 2009 or 2010, the early years of the Obama administration when they were at peak deporter-in-chief as activists used to call Obama.
But what is different is that the public stance of ICE is much less - there is much less of a push and pull with local activists on the ground. It used to be that in cases like this when a particularly sympathetic person would get detained, there would be this big community outcry, there would be an activist mobilization, and ICE would back off. They would release the person from detention. They would maybe give them a temporary stay of deportation.
Now what is happening is they are making a show, in many cases, of deporting a person no matter how much community support they have behind them, even if members of congress are saying they should stay in their communities, and being pretty defensive about it. Their social media accounts will tweet out things about how, you know, it`s perfectly legal for them to be doing what they are doing instead of having response and going, oh, if this person is particularly important to the community, maybe this isn`t somebody that should be deported right now.
HAYES: It seems to me there is two things, also a difference between saying this person is eligible for deportation because their paperwork was filed wrong or they never got right with the law, and actually saying they should be subject to arrest. It seems that they have become more proactive in actual arrests and points of contact like going to courts.
I read a story of a woman who was going to court to file the papers to get legal because her husband was a citizen who was being arrested.
LIND: Yeah, the courtroom thing is something that ICE has been very vocal in defending because they say it keeps their agents safer when they don`t have to go into people`s homes to arrest them. They know they aren`t going to be armed if they`re arresting them in courthouses.
The logic there is actually that ICE has been going after the low-hanging fruit, essentially, they`re going after immigrants where they know where they are. And that has tended to be people who have past criminal records, no matter how old those criminal records are, people who have prior orders of deportation, even if those were since stayed, and people who are involved in court cases because they are going to be on the docket.
So, it`s the kind of thing that you do if you`re much more concerned with how many people you`re deporting than who you`re deporting.
HAYES: That`s a great way of saying it, because the question I keep asking myself when I watch all of this is what is the benefit? Who is being helped? What is the positive? Like I can - when I view a community college chemistry professor who is taken away from his seventh grade daughter as he walks her to school, who is an American, kids are American, I know what the harm is to Americans because I just watched their kids who are Americans get -- have their father taken away. I can`t see what the benefit is.
LIND: It`s very interesting because you don`t actually see the right wing, who is supposed to be so supportive of this hard line approach to immigration enforcement, you don`t see Breitbart, for example, celebrating the deportation of particularly sympathetic cases. What you do see is that, you know, progressives are more broadly mobilized about things that they would have let go in the Obama years, and members of the community themselves who have always been extremely sensitive even to the slightest rumor that there is going to be an ICE raid in their community, now have the head of ICE telling them that they should feel afraid, that they shouldn`t feel secure, and it`s really hard to over state just how much of a raw nerve the Trump administration is pressing on, and how much they have been able to, without spending tons more money or vastly expanding the scope of deportations, send a message t people that they are vulnerable and can be deported at any time.
HAYES: So what you`re saying is that they are spooking people, that there`s -- and in some ways this is the intended effect to make people be fearful as they conduct their daily lives.
LIND: Whether or not it`s the intended affect, if they didn`t want it to be happening that they should have seen it coming by now and addressed it. There have been local police chiefs saying all year that they have fewer Hispanic women coming in and reporting domestic violence, because they are worried about police departments.
ICE`s response to that has been they should just come in any way and report. They don`t really understand the effect, or they`re refusing to understand the effect that this is happening on millions of people`s daily lives.
HAYES: Dara Lind, thanks for being with me tonight. This is something we`re going to keep reporting on in the weeks and months to come.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
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