Show: THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW Date: January 29, 2018 Guest: Adam Schiff, Franklin Foer
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Good evening, Chris. Thanks, my friend. Much appreciated.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST, ALL IN: You bet.
MADDOW: Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.
So, there are two things that are very important about obstruction of justice. One is that obstruction of justice is a crime and even very, very high-ranking government officials can be held accountable for obstruction of justice as a criminal matter, right? Famously, the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was about obstruction of justice. The first article of impeachment against Bill Clinton was obstruction of justice.
So, one thing that`s very important about obstruction is that it`s illegal. You can get caught for it. You can get impeached for it. Arguably, you can even get indicted for it, while you are serving this president of the United States. That`s one thing that`s very important about obstruction.
But there is something else that is important about obstruction of justice as well, which is that it might work. High-ranking government officials don`t obstruct justice because they misunderstand the law and nobody`s ever told them that it`s a crime. High-ranking government officials risk that criminal liability because sometimes it`s worth it to try, because sometimes you really want to obstruct justice, right, depending on what you might otherwise be on the hook for if justice proceeds unimpeded.
I mean, given how many famous people have been busted so badly for obstruction of justice, nobody would still try it nowadays, right, unless it sometimes still worked.
During the presidential campaign in 2016, the U.S. intelligence community saw something going on with regard to Russia and that election of ours. And part of what they were noticing was that Russia seemed to be taking more than an acute interest in our election that year. They seem to be making moves to interfere with to try to influence that election.
But simultaneously, they also saw something that concerned them that was apparently going on between Russia and the Trump campaign.
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REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Did evidence exists of collusion, coordination, conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian state actors at the time you learned of 2016 efforts?
JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: I encountered and I`m aware of information intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. There was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.
I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians either in an witting or unwitting fashion and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion, cooperation occurred.
MADDOW: That served as the basis for the FBI investigation. That is how the FBI investigation came into being.
The FBI investigation not just into Russian interference in our presidential election but the possibility of the Trump campaign being involved in it. Cooperating in that effort somehow. That is how that FBI investigation started, right?
U.S. intelligence obtained information, obtained intel about suspicious contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia while Russia was trying to influence the election to Trump`s benefit. Ex-CIA Director John Brennan testified about this in open session back in May. His testimony that day remains the best on the record information we`ve got from someone who was in a position to know because he was there about how and why that whole investigation started, basically about why we are going through this as a country.
I mean that`s still the best information and the most direct information we`ve got about what the intelligence community saw that freaked them out about the Trump campaign.
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BRENNAN: I encountered an aware of information intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign, that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn the such individuals and it raised questions in my mind again whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.
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MADDOW: That`s what it boils down to, right? That`s that was the -- that was the seed, right, that was what grew this tree, right?
Given the contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign, U.S. intelligence was concerned about whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those people, while they were attacking our election. That`s it, right? And that question while Russia was attacking our election, do they have help from the campaign they were assisting?
That remains the biggest foreign influence national security scandal to ever afflict any American presidency, and that central question is still an open question, and it remains under investigation. Now, though, increasingly and particularly on insane news days like today, that central question is being almost eclipsed by the separate but related matter of what happened when the Trump campaign became the Trump presidency.
Did President Trump and other Trump administration officials moved to obstruct justice? What if anything have the president in his administration done to try and block that investigation that started with intelligence agencies being worried about what they were seeing between the Trump campaign and Russia? What have they done to block that investigation if anything? If they have moved to block that investigation, did they do so by means that are illegal? If they did act illegally to block that investigation, what`s the remedy to that?
Well, I mean let`s look at what`s happened to everybody, everybody who has a seat who has had a senior role or a -- or a supervisory role in that investigation since Trump was sworn in, right? When the president took office, the acting attorney general was Sally Yates.
Within days of the inauguration, the first week they were in office, Sally Yates as acting attorney general as head of as head of the Justice Department, acting attorney general, and the head of the national security division at the Justice Department, those two personally went up to the White House and warned the White House about Trump`s national security advisor Mike Flynn having surreptitious conversations with Russia that he was lying about.
Both of those officials who warned the White House are now gone. The acting head of the national security division was Mary McCord. She was out this past spring. Sally Yates, of course, is gone as well. She did not leave of her own accord. The president fired her.
Jeff Sessions was then confirmed as attorney general. There were intelligence intercepts it turns out that revealed that Jeff Sessions had also had surreptitious conversations with Russia that he hadn`t disclosed. The president nevertheless forcefully pressured Jeff Sessions to not recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The president reportedly told his White House chief of staff to tell Jeff Sessions he shouldn`t recuse -- excuse me, told his White House counsel to tell Jeff Sessions he shouldn`t recuse. When Sessions recused anyway, "The Washington Post" reports that the president then sent the White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to go secure Jeff Session`s resignation.
Within the Justice Department at the FBI, the FBI`s director, of course, was fired after he says the president told him to lay off the investigation. That director says he conveyed the content of those directives from the president to a number of other FBI senior officials at the time so they could effectively corroborate what James Comey said about how the president had pressured him to lay off the Russian investigation before he refused and he was then fired.
Comey says he reported the president`s behavior, those directives from the president about the Russian investigation at the time to the FBI chief of staff. Last week, that official was let go from the FBI. He says he also conveyed that information to the FBI general counsel who was recently mysteriously reassigned to what appears to be a no-show job right around Christmastime, with no explanation.
James Comey also says he reported the president`s directives to the FBI deputy director who today was apparently forced out of his job as well. Less than a week ago, there was that dramatic reporting at Axios.com that the new Trump appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray had threatened to resign in order to protect Deputy Director Andrew McCabe against this White House effort to push McCabe out of his job. Well, today, Andrew McCabe was pushed out of his job, Christopher Wray does not seem to have resigned. Whatever was going on where Christopher Wray was suddenly inspiring people with him standing up against White House pressure, he was going to resign rather than see these other senior FBI officials pushed out of their job to being, you know, publicly maligned by the -- if you were thinking if Christopher Wray was going to resign rather than let any that happen.
Well, Andrew McCabe`s gone as of today. In the wake of Andrew McCabe being ousted today, the FBI Director Christopher Wray was seen at the White House, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Ron Rosenstein oversees Robert Mueller special counsel investigation into the Russia matter since Jeff Sessions recused himself.
The reason I go through that list is just to be -- I mean, to be blunt about it, the president has fired or tried to fire everybody in an oversight role in the Russia investigation, up to and including the special counsel himself. Rod Rosenstein is really the only one left who he hasn`t fired or tried to fire yet. But Rod Rosenstein we`re now told today is increasingly a focus of the president`s attentions and not in a good way. He really has fired or tried to fire everybody else running the Russia investigation, except Rosenstein, and now, they`ve apparently got a plan for Rod Rosenstein, too.
Three years ago this week, in 2015, Justice Department, the U.S. attorney`s office in the southern district of New York, they made a dramatic announcement. They had arrested a guy who appeared to be a random bank employee. He was picked up by FBI agents at a shopping center in Riverdale, New York. Nobody really knew what he was getting arrested for at the time. But it turned out, according to his subsequent indictment and trial and conviction, that that random bank employee who they arrested at a shopping center in 2015, he turned out to be a key figure in an active Russian spy ring.
This was the headline from the press release they put out. Attorney general, Manhattan U.S. attorney and FBI announced charges against Russian spy ring in New York City, aspiring, attempted to collect economic intelligence and recruit New York City residents as intelligence sources. Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time, these charges demonstrate our firm commitment to combating attempts by covert agents to illegally gather intel and recruit spies within the United States, will use every tool at our disposal to identify and hold accountable foreign agents operating inside this country no matter how deep their cover.
So, three people were charged in this indictment at the cover for two of them was that they work for the Russian government. One of them worked at the Russian mission to the United Nations, to the U.N. in New York. One of them works as a trade representative for the Russian government. But the third guy in this spy ring, the one who they actually picked up at that shopping center despite his deep cover his cover was that he worked at a Russian bank at their branch office in New York City.
The two guys who were running their spy ring here in New York while purportedly having normal Russian government jobs, those guys actually escaped back to Moscow before the FBI could swoop in on them. The third guy, the guy whose cover was working in a bank, he`s the one who actually got arrested. He got put on trial, he got convicted, and he ended up serving a pretty good chunk of time in federal prison in Ohio. They only sent him back to Moscow this past spring.
And one of the spy movie Inspector Gadget details from that court case is that the FBI fed these Russian guys in this Russian spy ring, they fed them documents that had bugs in them, that had listening devices. So, the spy rings operating in New York City, these Russian guys are trying to cultivate American assets who will give them sensitive or secret or stolen information which they`ll then convey home to Moscow, right? This is pure spying stuff.
Well, the FBI cotton to what they were doing and they trapped them basically. They arranged to give these guys documents that seemed awesome that seemed like super juicy stuff that they would want to feed home to Moscow center. But the FBI gave them these documents in binders, and the FBI had put little microphones inside the binders.
So, these Russian guys from the spy ring, they`ve brought this booty, this loot, this info they thought they had extracted from their American assets, they didn`t know would have come from the FBI, they didn`t know had listening devices in it. They brought those binders full of documents into the rezidentura, into the Russian government`s facilities in New York so they could convey at home through secure channels to Moscow. But even though they were in a secure facility inside the Russian government building, the FBI was listening the whole time to everything they were saying because they had bugs in the binders.
These guys were unaware that they were being bugged. They had no idea they had been found out they thought they were in a secure facility speaking to each other about their operations and so they spoke totally freely about how they were running their spy ring, about their strategy, about the American assets that they were recruiting, including someone the FBI described as, quote, a male working as a consultant in New York City.
Quote: Male one first met the Russian spy defendant in January 2013 at an energy symposium in New York City. During this initial meeting, defendant gave him his business card and two email addresses. Over the following months, male one and the defendant exchanged emails about the energy business and met on occasion in person, with male one providing the defendant with male one`s outlook on the current and future of the energy industry. Male one also provided documents to the defendant about the energy business.
So, these Russian guys, right, two of them working as Russian government employees and one of them working as a Russian bank employee -- so spy ring, and they`re trying to recruit American assets. And they got one. They got male one they got this American energy consultant guy who was happily shoveling them information, giving them documents, communicating with them regularly, meeting with them in person.
In the course of the FBI`s investigation into this Russian spy ring that was operating in New York, the FBI even paid a visit to male one, to this American guy who was successfully being recruited by Russian spies. And we later found out his name. His name was Carter Page. The same Carter Page who later turned up as one of the five named foreign policy advisors to the Donald Trump for president campaign.
"The Washington Post" reported in April that the Justice Department had obtained a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page as early as the summer of 2016. And that was a remarkable thing to learn about a presidential campaign, right? Presidential candidate has as a announced foreign policy advisor somebody who the Justice Department has under surveillance on the basis of the fact that the Justice department was able to convince a judge that there was reason to believe that guy was a foreign agent, right?
From that initial "Washington Post" reporting on them getting a FISA warrant for Carter Page, quote: The government`s application for the surveillance order targeting Carter Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out the basis for believing he was an agent of the Russian government and that he knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow.
So, the Justice Department laid out that case about Carter Page in the summer of 2016 to get a warrant to surveil him. Those warrants were granted initially and apparently renewed every 90 days thereafter. You have to keep bringing it back before a judge. You have to keep renewing it for 90 days, 90 days, and then 90 days, and then 90 days and then 90 days, and eventually the Obama administration turns into the Trump administration.
And even though this warrant had been renewed multiple times since it was initially applied for and granted by a judge, eventually the person who had to sign off on the next application to renew that warrant was a Trump appointee. It was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. And that is reportedly the basis on which Republicans in Congress and the Trump White House are now going to go after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who oversees the Mueller investigation at the Justice Department and who is the one remaining figure overseeing the Russia investigation who the president hasn`t fired or tried to fire.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee led by Trump transition team member, Devin Nunes, they voted tonight to release a memo that Nunez and his staff wrote which is based on classified information. It reportedly names Rod Rosenstein as basically a villain for him signing off on one of the many renewals of the surveillance warrant against Carter Page. The surveillance warrant against Carter Page which emerged from the fact that he really was recruited by an actual Russian spy ring in New York City. One which ended up with two of the spies fleeing the Moscow and one of the spies going to prison.
And the FBI broke that spy ring apart the FBI knew about that for years. They had Carter Page in their sights for years, because he had been recruited by Russian intelligence, right? At its heart, this whole thing, our lives now, right, this whole scandal, the biggest national security scandal to ever afflict an American presidency, at its heart, this whole thing remains a scandal about Russian government mounting a massive intelligence operation to target the U.S. presidential election to try to tip it their way. And all of the signs that many people associated with the Trump campaign appear to have something to hide about their contacts with the Russian government and with Russian intelligence during the time of that attack, right?
That`s what this is all about. That`s the reason for the initial investigation. That`s why Robert Mueller ended up getting appointed special counsel. Carter Page and his Russia ties, they were not a figment of Christopher Steele`s imagination, right?
And it is -- it is remarkable to think that the Republican Party in the Trump White House are going to try to make it a scandal that Carter Page, of all people was being surveilled as a potential foreign agent, given his background of being recruited as Russian foreign agents, right?
If that`s the scandal that Carter Page was being surveilled as a foreign agent, you should Google Carter Page, even just read about him in the FBI indictments about Russian spy rings where he surfaces.
But Republicans in Congress have voted to release this memo that they wrote tonight, and CNN is reporting that President Trump has said about Rod Rosenstein, quote, let`s fire him, let`s get rid of him. "The Washington Post" is reporting that the president thinks this Nunes memo they`re now going to release will give him a pretext so he can go ahead and fire Rod Rosenstein
Obstruction of justice is a crime it is a crime for which even presidents can get in a whole lot of trouble and it is fascinating to game out which of the president`s actions might be legally actionable if he ends up getting impeached or indicted for some aspect of obstruction of justice, I get it. But I also get that people try to obstruct justice for a reason. It is to stop an investigation to stop proceedings of justice that could reveal something that they really don`t want revealed.
And tonight, that initial investigation, the big investigation, the Russia` investigation is hanging by a thread. The FBI under pressure has now rolled over and given up all of its senior leadership, including most of the senior officials who could corroborate testimony by former FBI Director James Comey about the president`s behavior. You would expect right in the FBI that once their individual officials we`re getting called out by name and attacked and impugn by the president, you would -- you might think that the way the FBI would react to that is by saying, hey, anybody next person who gets personally attacked by the president gets promoted are we all agreement. We all in agreement on that, right?
You`d expect the FBI to stand up for its independence. Instead, what we`ve seen is the president and Republican supporters in Congress single out individual FBI officials, those with decades of experience with no blemishes on their record whatsoever. You`ve seen them single out these FBI officials by name, and the FBI -- the FBI has now rolled over and gotten rid of them, one after the other. So, the FBI is expelling its top officials as they get attacked by Republicans and by the Trump White House.
That`s what`s happening at the FBI. Mueller investigation still exists, but if this stunt by House Republicans tonight is designed to give the president an excuse to fire Rod Rosenstein -- well, Rod Rosenstein oversees the Mueller investigation. Mueller has to clear every significant step in his investigation with Rod Rosenstein. If the president fires Rosenstein, the president will then have his choice of who you`d like to put in that job instead. Anybody who he puts in that job instead would of course have the power to curtail or stymie or even just stop the Mueller investigation on his or her own say-so.
Obstruction of justice is a serious crime, but there is a reason people risk committing that crime. And tonight, it`s working.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tonight, President Nixon is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress, and at least part of it is expected to be on the state of Richard Nixon as well.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Nixon`s goal, and it`s a big one, is to convince Congress and the American people by his words tonight that despite Watergate, he is still in command of his office that he can still govern this nation effectively.
RICHARD NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker and Mr. President, my distinguished colleagues and our guests, I would like to add a personal word with regard to an issue that has been of great concern to all Americans over the past year. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair. As you know, I have provided to the special prosecutor voluntarily a great deal of material. I believe that I have provided all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.
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MADDOW: One year of Watergate is enough proclaimed Richard Nixon with sustained applause. That was January 30th 1974. By August of that year, seven months later, he had resigned from office. Turns out one year of Watergate wasn`t nearly enough.
Tomorrow will be 44 years exactly from that speech and President Trump will be giving his first State of the Union. Tonight, on the eve of that speech, Democrats in the House fired off a signal flare that the investigation into this president has just crossed a Rubicon.
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REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), RANKING MEMBER, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: And that is apparently the standard now for the release of classified information, if it`s good for the president, then fine regardless of its impacts on the bureau and the department or on the interests of justice. I should also mention that it was disclosed to the minority today for the first time that the majority has evidently opened an investigation of the FBI and an investigation of the Department of Justice. Under our committee rules, of course, that has to be the product of consultation with minority, but we learned about that for the first time here today.
Sadly, we can fully expect that the president United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest, but it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee, because today, this committee voted to put the president`s personal interest, perhaps their own political interests above the national interest in denying themselves even the ability to hear from the department and the FBI, and that is I think a deeply regrettable state of affairs.
But it does show how in my view when you have a deeply flawed person in the Oval Office, that flaw can infect the whole of government and it`s a today tragically it infected our committee.
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MADDOW: Joining us now is Congressman Adam Schiff who you saw speaking there. He is the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. That committee just voted to make public a classified Republican memo authored by committee chairman, Congressman Devin Nunes, and the committee has also decided to not release a Democratic counter memo on the same subject.
Congressman Schiff, thank you very much for joining us tonight. I really appreciate it.
SCHIFF: Thank you.
MADDOW: So, let me -- let me ask you to clarify some of what happened tonight. The committee voted along party lines to not release a memo prepared by you and your Democratic colleagues. They agreed on party lines that they would release their own memo, which is based on classified information.
What are we going to see? Is there going to be a public release of this? Who gets to make decisions in terms of the timing and redactions and things like that?
SCHIFF: Well, that`s exactly what happened tonight. Peter King made a motion to make public the Republican memo in what he said was in the full interest of transparency, and we said, OK, in the full interest of transparency, let`s release that if it has to be released alongside the Democratic memo. But apparently, full transparency doesn`t extend that far.
They voted that down the party line basis and what`s also important to realize is the chairman of this committee who`s pushing this memo out hasn`t even read the underlying materials himself. So, he can`t vouch for the accuracy or the inaccuracy as this case maybe of his own work product. But instead, we`re making this public. We also moved, Rachel, at that hearing to let the DOJ and FBI review the memo, brief all of us in the classified session so that we can understand the flaws in it, we can understand any concerns about the revolution of sources and methods, and they voted that down, as well.
Now what this means is that the spin memo will go out to the public within five days unless the president says otherwise. Of course, the president who thinks this is beneficial to him isn`t going to say otherwise. It won`t necessarily take five days if before that time he says go ahead and publish the memo. This is an act which the Department of Justice properly recalled extraordinary reckless and for people who criticized Hillary Clinton`s handling of her e-mails, this is done quite by design, there is no circumstance or error or mistake here. This is very deliberate and as the department says, extraordinary reckless.
MADDOW: Now, when the department describes this as extraordinary reckless, they are talking about the process by which the House Republicans have decided to go ahead and move this forward. As far as I understand, the FBI hasn`t been allowed to review the intelligence itself, hasn`t been able to review the memo so that they know exactly what the memo makes of the intelligence.
I know you have seen the underlying intelligence here, do you actually think it will be damming to international security if this is publicly released?
SCHIFF: I don`t know. But I would like to find out from the Department of Justice and FBI if they have that concern that will reveal sources and methods. What we made clear at the hearing today is if the majority voted to release our memo, we fully intend to have that vetted by the department, vetted by the FBI so they can redact anything that they think would be harmful.
And that will be our process if the Republicans allow us to see the light of day. Now, they tried to portray this after the hearing as seeking the input by saying we let the director view it briefly yesterday along with an intelligence analyst but that`s not the same thing as letting the intelligence agency or even the FBI vet it and point out the flaws in it, and the director told me that he had deep concerns about the memo, that he wished the bureau could express to the committee before it was made public. I conveyed that to the committee and they voted down any opportunity to hear from the bureau and department.
MADDOW: Given the seriousness of what they are doing against the expressed wishes of the FBI and Justice Department, given the historically unprecedented nature the fact that they are proceeding with the release of this document that`s based on classified material, do you feel like you understand why they are doing this? I mean, is this born of desperation because they are very worried about what`s going on with the Russia investigation right now and so, they need a very big desperate distraction in order to sort of change the narrative.
Do you think this is about trying to create a pretense for the president to fire Rod Rosenstein and thereby start the process of trying to end this investigation? I mean, we`re all speculating as to what they may be trying to do here. What do you think?
SCHIFF: I think it is an effort, really a disgraceful effort to distract public attention from the Russia probe and provide some cover to the president if he takes the step of firing people associated with the investigation. It is I think a deeply disgraceful act to politicize the process of declassifying intelligence in such a transparent way we crossed the line today.
I`ve been on the committee now I think about a decade. I`ve never seen anything like it. But it`s a continuation of what the chairman did from the very beginning when he went to the White House and he presented what he claimed was evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama administration regarding unmasking. We would only learn shortly thereafter that the very information he was presented to the White House, he had gotten from the White House.
It was the same kind of charade we saw on exhibit today. But even more serious because this involves the publication of classified information with no vetting whatsoever, no vetting for accuracy, no vetting for what it might do to the investigation, or to sources. No consideration of what it might to other sources for the FBI who see the Congress behave this way and wonder whether what they share with the FBI will be held confidential.
So, a singly destructive act by the chairman and the transcript of this is going to be released publicly. It should be released tomorrow and you`ll get to see this in all its ugliness frankly and all the sheepiness frankly of the Democratic -- of the Republican members who I think are ashamed at what they were required to do by this chairman.
MADDOW: Congressman Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, thank you very much for your time tonight, sir. I know this is a dramatic and busy time. Appreciate you being here.
SCHIFF: Thanks, Rachel.
MADDOW: Thank you.
Again, just underscoring what Congressman Schiff just announced there, the House Intelligence Committee did just vote to release this Republican memo to publish this classified information, even though the FBI Justice Department have not been able to review it in terms of assessing what kind of national security damage it might do to publish this classified information.
We don`t know exactly when they`re going to put it out but the vote and the hearing today that they held behind closed doors where they decided to do this, apparently, we`re going to get a transcript of what happened at that hearing as soon as tomorrow. So, we`ll at least know about how they decided to do this.
All right. Much more to come here tonight. It has been a very, very busy news day and news night. Stay with us.
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MADDOW: -- mysteries. Paul Manafort was broke. He was even more broke than we might have realized before now. By the time he took over the Trump campaign as its chairman in 2016, Paul Manafort had spent decades working for some of the least savory autocrats around the world, a decade working for the Vladimir Putin-aligned ruler of Ukraine, allegedly took millions of dollars and off-the-books payments for that work. He was business partners with a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, who`s very close to Putin.
Later, Oleg Deripaska then pursued Paul Manafort in court for million bucks he claimed Manafort disappeared with. Manafort was kind of in a pinch. He was moving millions of dollars through offshore accounts who`s buying tons of U.S. property. He was moving millions of dollars through offshore accounts. He was buying tons of U.S. He was taking out millions of dollars in loans against those properties.
But then that Ukrainian ruler that Manafort had been working for was swept from power in a popular revolt in 2014. And suddenly, Manafort found himself out of a job. Well, thanks to some great new in-depth reporting by Franklin at "The Atlantic" magazine, we`ve learned that Paul Manafort`s financial situation when he joined the Trump campaign as its chairman was way more fraught than we previously understood.
Quote: Money which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he had spent more freely still, soon became a problem. He complained about unpaid bills and at age 66 started scouring the world, Hungary, Uganda, Kenya, for fresh clients hustling without any apparent luck. His daughter noted that her father quote -- excuse me, his daughter noted her father`s, quote, tight cash flow state, texting her sister, quote, he is suddenly extremely cheap.
While all this was going on, an FBI investigation started into his work in Ukraine, Franklin Foer reports that in the context of that investigation, Manafort, quote, seen unwilling or perhaps unable to access his offshore accounts. To finance his expensive life, he began taking out loans against his real estate. Some $15 million over two years, according to his indictment. All of these loans would need to be paid back, of course, and one way or another, he would still need to settle his giant bill with Oleg Deripaska.
So, in 2016, when Paul Manafort went to a longtime mutual friend of his and Donald Trump`s and he reportedly told that friend Tom Barrack, quote, I really need to get to Trump, at that time, whatever was motivating him, we know that Paul Manafort was pretty much broke. He was desperate for cash, he was already under FBI investigation and he had a powerful Russian oligarch after him for millions and millions and millions of dollars.
Franklin Foer reports that when Paul Manafort called up his old associates from his lobbying days to tell them he was getting back into politics joining up with the Trump campaign, they all warned him not to do it because they knew his reputation, what he had been involved with they knew his past would never survive the spotlight of a presidential campaign. But for whatever reason, he really, really, really wanted that job. He wanted it so much that he offered to do it for free, when he was totally broke and desperate for cash. Why is that?
Franklin Foer joins us next.
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MADDOW: It`s just out. Cover story, it`s called the plot against America. Quoting, here directly.
Last year, a group of Paul Manafort`s longtime friends tried to organize a cadre of surrogates to defend him from the allegations against him, including the worst one that he collaborated with a hostile foreign power to subvert the American democratic process. Manafort`s old lobbying partner Charlie Black even showed up for a meeting, though the two of them had largely fallen out of touch. A few of the wheel men from the old firm wanted help out too.
But when volunteers were needed to go on TV as character witnesses, nobody raised his hand. Quote: There wasn`t a lot to work with, one person contacted by this group told reporter Franklin Foer, and nobody could be sure that Paul didn`t actually do it. In fact, everything about the man and the life he chose suggests that he did do it.
Joining us now is Franklin Foer, staff writer at "The Atlantic".
Mr. Foer, congratulations on this remarkable piece of reporting about Paul Manafort. It`s really nice to have you here.
FRANKLIN FOER, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Thank you so much. Great to be here.
MADDOW: So, when you say that everything about Paul Manafort`s track record, his history, his career, suggests that he did do it, that he did do the worst thing of which he is suspected -- what in his track record suggests to you that he did? So, Paul Manafort was a political consultant and a lobbyist in Washington.
And we think of the capitol as being the swamp and it`s true, it`s always been a corrupt place. But they`re different scales and magnitudes of corruption and over the course of his career, Paul Manafort kept pushing the limits of what was acceptable behavior in Washington. And one of those limits is that he started working in the 1980s and 1990s for a bunch of foreign dictators and goons who wanted to get money from Washington and who wanted to improve their reputations back home. And so, he did -- he was a full service manager for them. He would help them work on Potemkin elections back in their own country. He would lobby to get them arms in D.C.
And over the course of the last ten years of his career, in about 2005, he ended up migrating to Ukraine where he spent pretty much all of his time before the revolution swept Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian strongman, from power in 2014. And when he was in Ukraine, he kind of wanted to become an oligarch himself.
And so, so if you look at his career the way that he leveraged political corrections, the way that he laundered cash, wanted reputations -- I mean, there was a lot in his career that suggested that he would do whatever it takes, he didn`t really have a very any sort of moral baseline. There was no threshold that he wouldn`t cross.
MADDOW: So, you write pretty convincingly about his career hitting the skids after Ukraine, right? His client`s government falls apart. He gets ousted in Ukraine.
FOER: Yes.
MADDOW: And I didn`t understand before reading your reporting how much that hurt Paul Manafort`s financial day-to-day life. Given those financial straits that he was in after things went badly for his guy in Ukraine --
FOER: Right.
MADDOW: -- why did he end -- why did he offer to work for the Trump campaign for free? How could he have been offering to do anything for free at that point?
FOER: Right, right. It`s totally out of character when you look at the rest of his career where he was famously slapping these massive price tags on his services. And so, when the Trump campaign rolls around, I think he had a couple of insights. One was is that he wanted -- he understood that chump Trump is cheap because he lived in Trump Tower.
His firm had lobbied on behalf of Trump. He`d observed this guy up close over the years and so, volunteering his services by presenting himself as a guy who wouldn`t be a parasite he thought was his best way to get treated as an equal in the campaign.
But more than that, he was making a gamble. He understood that if he made this short-term sacrifice to join up with the Trump campaign, there were other opportunities down the road for him. There were opportunities during the campaign and if Trump happened to win, he would be the big shot in Donald Trump`s Washington. It was a chance to revive his career.
MADDOW: And being a big shot in Washington translating into immediate cash flow solution --
FOER: Yes, of course.
MADDOW: -- is the part of it that -- well, now he`s under indictment.
Franklin Foer, staff writer at "The Atlantic" -- a remarkable new piece --
FOER: Thank you.
MADDOW: -- long-form piece on Paul Manafort. Congratulations. Thank you.
FOER: Thank you.
MADDOW: All right. We`ll be right back. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: Thirty-three people, 33 constituents from New Jersey`s 11th district, which is the district of Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen, 33 constituents went to his office on a Friday to ask him to hold a town hall. The congressman staff met those 33 people and said no.
So, they tried again the next Friday. It wasn`t 33 this time, it was more than 60 people who showed up then.
And a week later, double that, 115 people showed up, crammed into that tiny hallway outside Rodney Frelinghuysen`s office.
The Friday after that, it was 400 people, 400 of his Rodney Frelinghuysen`s constituents standing outside his office in below freezing temperatures, asking their member of Congress to please hold a town hall meeting.
Rodney Frelinghuysen would not hold a town hall meeting. And so, this group that had been showing up every Friday, they called themselves New Jersey 11th for Change, they decided they`d not give up. They just decided they`d show up at Rodney Frelinghuysen`s office every single Friday until whenever.
They did it every Friday for a year to try to get their congressman to talk to them. They called it Fridays with Frelinghuysen. They gathered thousands of signatures from constituents demanding a town hall. They had baked them cakes, they have sent him valentines, they have decorated his office Christmas tree with stickers. They had town halls without him, where they brought a cardboard cutout of him as a place holder. They kept up stuff like this every single Friday, Fridays with Frelinghuysen, for a whole year.
Those folks are about to get their Fridays back. Today, Rodney Frelinghuysen announced that he is out. He is not seeking re-election this November. He has held that seat for 20 years. He just took over as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which is really good gig, and could have kept for six years if he wanted in his previously thought to be safe Republican district.
But after a full year of this outside his window every Friday, Rodney Frelinghuysen today became the 33rd Republican member of Congress to announce he`s leaving Congress this year.
Democrats need to flip 24 seats to win back the House. Already 33 Republicans are quitting including Rodney. New Jersey 11th for Change got themselves some serious change.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MADDOW: The State of the Uniom is tomorrow. This is what the tickets look like when they first put them out today. Address to the Congress on the state of the uniom.
I thought it was amazing when they couldn`t spell Norway. Union?
Even the Normegians will be tuning in to our State of the Union tomorrow night. I want you to know about the timing. Our coverage is going to starts at 8:00. I`ll be hosting here tomorrow night alongside my friend Brian Williams and Chris Matthews.
Our coverage starts here at 8:00. We`re going to be live straight through the whole group right until midnight. Then there`s a special midnight live edition of HARDBALL. There`s going to be continuing live coverage after that with Steve Kornacki starting at 1:00 a.m. Eastern. So, you know, round up the Normegians and join your uniom. We`ll all be together at least.
That does it for us tonight. We`ll see you tomorrow.
Now, it`s time for "THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O`DONNELL."
Good evening, Lawrence.
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