All In with Chris Hayes, Transcript 02/06/15

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HARDBALL HOST: ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES starts right now. CHRIS HAYES, ALL IN HOST: Tonight on ALL IN. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this, one of these reports that literally you can not find bad news in. HAYES: Actual good news to report as the beast mode economy kicks in to another gear. BARACK OBAMA, 44TH AND CURRENT PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICAL: And now, you`re welcome. HAYES: Tonight, the changing political landscape for Republicans as they search for a dark side in the Obama economy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So the headline is unemployment rate takes up to 5.7. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wow. HAYES: Then, first it was vaccines, now we area actually debating the crusades. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You`re basically saying the Catholic Church was the al- Qaeda of its day. HAYES: Brand new investigation that could finally dome Chris Christie 2016 hopes and it is the new HBO series everyone will be talking about. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What could you do with it? If he`s not -- the key is with them. HAYES: Tonight, my exclusive interview with the director of The Jinx. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Where is he (inaudible)? What did you do with it? HAYES: ALL IN starts right now. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: All right, good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. We`ve got some huge economic news today, it`s being describe as a black buster jobs report that latest in what now appears to be the strongest run of good economic news in over a decade. Labor Department announced this morning American employers added 257,000 jobs in January. All the estimates for November and December were raised up, significantly, by a combined 147,000, bringing the total number of jobs created in 2014 to 3.1 million. That is the strongest annual job growth since 1999. And it`s why you`re almost seeing almost ex-static headlines about today`s report. It`s raining jobs. The best economy in 15 years, the job report crushes it. And while unemployment tickled up or ticked up very slightly, turns out that`s actually good news too. According to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate grew a 10th of a point to 5.7 percent, mainly because people who had given up on looking for work decided to give another shot into labor force. So let`s put all these in context. What does it mean for President Obama`s record on job creation and his legacy as President during the economic recovery? Now, look at this chart compiled by Steve Benen at MaddowBlog, of job totaled in the 5th and 6th years of presidency, President Obama is approaching Clinton territory, which is of course a big deal. At a town hall today in Indiana, he took what is arguably a pretty well deserved victory lap. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: All told, over the past 59 months, the private sector has added about 11.8, so that`s, you know, almost 12 million new jobs, and that`s the longest streak of private sector job growth in our history. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Barack Obama presidency as our economy has slowly but surely recovered from the financial crisis, there`s been a common refrain on the right anybody out the quality and kinds of jobs being created. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. ROGER WICKER (R), MISSISSIPPI: The Obama economy is a part-time economy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A part-time economy under President Obama. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The truth about this economy is that it`s essentially a part-time economy... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A part-time working economy rather than having real jobs. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is really underscoring a part-time economy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Work rapidly converting to a part-time economy. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: But this chart in 538, completely disproves that claim, the jobs added during this recovery have been overwhelmingly fulltime jobs. And while where are concerns at the labor force participation rate, the share of working either (inaudible) side or working or actively looking for work remains low. As you see here, the rate on employment among (inaudible) workers is now rising steadily, but still hast bounce back to prerecession levels. Probably the biggest problem with the recovery, the biggest by far I would say, is how uneven it`s been. With the majority, in fact, by some measures, all of the economic gains going to the wealthiest Americans while middle class incomes from being stagnant or declined. Today though, there are signs that too may finally be starting to turn around. In 2014, average weekly earnings grew almost 2.3 percent, well above the 0.8 percent inflation rate, which means real gains. They`re still below where they should be, but the trend continue through January with the best wage growth in six years, an encouraging sign that we`re headed in the right direction. I talked with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and ask him for his take on today`s job report. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ROBERT REICH, FRM. SECRETARY OF LABOR: Well I would like to think that something really good is happening, Chris. Obviously we are in the upturn of an economic cycle. I can`t say it`s very much about the structural changes in the economy, but clearly we are creating more jobs over the past year, 3.2 million new jobs. That`s as good as we have seen since the Clinton Administration. If I do say so myself. HAYES: And the other thing I think about that that`s key to recognize here, there`s also strong (inaudible) with me that this could have been happening back in 2011, had you not had this turn towards austerity partly brought on by a Tea Party Congress and the White House kind of seeding to their demands? REICH: Yes. As long as the obsession was deficit reduction, it was very difficult to create new jobs because there was not enough demand in the economy. The other thing that`s notable here is that Republicans were saying for years before the Affordable Care Act got implemented, "Oh, it`s going to be a jobs killer." Well then the Affordable Care Act came along, got implemented, and what we`ve seen is even more a new jobs. HAYES: Yeah, and every single part of the attack on the Obama economy, which is predictions about jobs being killed, predictions about regulatory burden, you know, strangling domestic energy production when we have, you know, oil at all time low prices. I mean, if you have this record, if Mitt Romney had this record right now, if had run in one, could you imagine the victory laps that would be -- they would be doing about what the Mitt Romney turnaround of the economy. REICH: Well I don`t even want to imagine it. But, you know, the fact of the matter is that had Mitt Romney been elected president, there would be still austerity economic, even more deficit reduction, even more tax cuts on the rich, even more of a burden on the middle class. And at the same time, there would be probably no Affordable Care Act. So you probably wouldn`t not get this much job creation. But having said all of that, let me -- and I don`t want to rain on the parade, but let me just say that the jobs that are being created are not all that great. In fact, the jobs that are being created attained to pay less than the jobs we lost in the great recession. HAYES: We are though, and let`s just talk about this. Because this is the key part, right? We had this recovery that wasn`t helping average people, right? We`ve seen -- we`re stagnating wages, stagnating personal income, we`re starting maybe to see some upper lift in wages, we`re starting to see job creations and some sectors that really need it, things like construction, we`re starting to see. And the question is, can you get to a place like what we had in the late 90s where the economic boom really is doing quite a bit at the bottom of the wage scale and creating jobs that can really sustain the kind of pillars in the middle class life? REICH: And that`s the big question, can we get back to the late 1990s? And that was the only time over the past 30 years where inequality started to actually decline because people at the bottom were in such demand, unemployment got so low, jobs were in so scares that or people to feel the jobs were so scares, that employers try to pay more to people in the bottom 20 percent. Now, are we going to get there? It`s possible, but there are lot of headwinds, economist love to talk about headwinds, because there`s a lot of headwinds that are going to slow the economy down. For example, the dollar is very high, relative on their currencies. It`s hard to export. A lot of the rest of the world is slowing down. Europe is very close to recession. Gas tag -- Gas prices are good, but that`s likely to be temporary. When things pick up again, our gas prices are likely to go up. So we don`t really know how solid this recovery is, as certainly in terms of wages. HAYES: Yeah, this is really the biggest question. It`s the biggest question, it`s kind of how to define American politics, in the prudential politics. And what`s huge part of what the Obama Legacy is over the next few years is, do you see this kind of growth? Can America be a kind of island of robust growth amidst a whole world full of economic disaster, possibly catastrophe, possibly, you know, crisis across the world? That is the big open question. REICH: That`s a big open question. And let me go back to the Clinton years for a second, because even though the economy was very, very good, the best economy we`ve seen in the latter Clinton years, still the long- terms structural... HAYES: Yup. REICH: ... problems of widening and equality and slow down of middle class growth and stagnant wages, really were not over economy. HAYES: That`s right. REICH: That was a business phenomenon, not a structural phenomenon. HAYES: That is exactly right. The people of the top have too much power and they continue to have too much power. Until that`s solved, nothing else get solved. Robert Reich, thank you very much. REICH: Thanks Chris. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Now since the moment he took office, Republicans have been criticizing President Obama for his economic record. Right of the back, they oppose a stimulus plan. They accused him of punting on the countries debt and deficit woes and they blame him for the slow economic recovery. Now the economy appears to be back on its feet, they`ve been attacking him, somewhat remarkably from the left, over inequality wage stagnation. Just this week during an economic address in Detroit, likely 2016 candidate Jeb Bush, sounded a distinctly populous tone. Today, (inaudible), as the evidence of a strong recovery became pretty instrumentable, there were apparently only three accepted responses to the news. One is Bennett, is Fox`s headline about those jobless numbers we told you about, no mention there what it actually says about the rise, even though labor force participation rate. Two, (inaudible), Senator Dan Coats, who`s home state of Indiana played host to the President`s victory lap, tweeted earlier, "As President Obama visits Indiana today, long-term unemployment (inaudible) high at 31.5 percent." In fact as New York Times contributor Justine Wolfers pointed out, the actual number is 1.8 percent, slightly different. Senator Coats later revised he`s tweet to reflect that 31.5 percent is the share of the unemployed, not of the entire workforce who are long-term unemployed. And then there`s a third response, which is to just ignore it. Joining me now, Josh Barro, Domestic Correspondent for the Upshot, New York Times and MSNBC contributor. This is striking to me, the relative emphasis in the world of conservative, media, particularly between foreign affairs and the economy as the economy has gotten better. JOSH BARRO, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Yeah. Well, I mean, does it surprise you? It makes a fair amount of sense, Republicans have made a lot of hay (ph) over the last six years, over the fact that the economy was not very good. It was talking to the point that served them very well because it was true. As the economy is improved, what`s left for them to say about, you know, great job, you know, things look really good. I mean, they could say someone accurately, well a lot of this is driven by falling gas prices which is a non-policy phenomenon, that President... HAYES: Or it is where we are in the business cycle. BARRO: Right. And that`s actually -- I think the form the President her is over sold for that reason, which is... HAYES: Right. BARRO: ... when you come out of a recession, you are suppose to have really fast job growth. This was suppose to happen in 2010, 2011. If you look back at 1983, 1984, coming out of 1982 recession, we were typically creating 400,000 jobs a month, even though the population was smaller than it is now. When you have -- when you`re on a recession of all these people who are out of work, you have excess capacity in the economy, you are suppose to be able to have fast growth. So it`s great that we`re getting it now, it could be even faster, it would have been better if it happen five years ago. HAYES: 100 percent, great, right? BARRO: So, you know, yes. Enjoy this, but, you know, bragging too much about is a little much. HAYES: Yes, but I also do think that there`s kind of a asymmetry in politics sometimes which is that if it`s bad, it`s the President`s fault the economy is bad. And then if it`s good, I mean, in both cases often it`s not attributed to the President, right? BARRO: Right. HAYES: Which you get it on the downside, you might as well take it on the upside, politically, right? BARRO: Sure. I mean, I... HAYES: The fact of the matter is, President to legacies often just get written by the accident of where a president happen to be on the business cycle. BARRO: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if I were President, I would take as much credit as possible for falling gas prices. And I think, you know, this happened to Bill Clinton, he sort of wrote this... HAYES: Right. BARRO: ... exactly the right time. He was -- He -- You had these inherited recession. HAYES: Right. BARRO: And then we came out of it with good growth and then with really strong growth in 98, 99, driven in large (inaudible) and asset bubble. HAYES: That then bust rate. BARRO: That only started busting right as he was about to leave office. So people have these wonderful memories of the Clinton administration and the strong Clinton economy, even though it was partly built on a mirage. And George Bush gets a lot of blame for that, even though that wasn`t his fault that that bubble had gotten blown before he was elected president. HAYES: There is also the case that there are sort of prove -- there are for predictive claims made about the effects of the certainly policy choices, like for instance, the deficit or debt as a drag on growth, or Obamacare is a drag on growth, or Obamacare pushing people in the part-time work, those are theoretical predictions made by politicians as kind of ideological attacks on the President that are not being shown false, empirically. BARRA: Well, I wouldn`t quite say that, because a lot of those, the effects they were going to have in late market were always very small. When we were talking about the effects of... HAYES: That`s fair enough. BARRO: ... Obamacare pushing people into part-time work. There`s, you know, there`s a real phenomenon there when you charge employers... HAYES: Yup. BARRO: ... the ample time employees but not part-time employees, it cost the for part-time employees. But the likely at the margins -- yeah, the likely effect is on the order of one in every 1,500 workers, it was a really small effect. And even if that effect is really going on right now, and I think that effect is very small, it can be swamped by other things, such as falling gas prices leading to the creation of a lot of jobs and making the Obamacare effect look like just a tiny bit of noise in the system. You see this with a lot of stuff, Republicans now, one talking point I`ve been hearing is at the end of extended unemployment benefits has driven the job growth of 2014, the taking away unemployment benefits made people more energized to look for work... HAYES: Right. BARRO: ... and created a lot of jobs. There`s an economic working paper out there that says that`s a fair amount of play on the right. Again, unemployment benefits do have really... HAYES: Right. BARRO: ... incentive benefit -- incentive effects. HAYES: Because right now they`re... BARRO: Some (inaudible) swamped by a lot of other stuff that`s happening. HAYES: Right, exactly. Yeah. Josh Barro, always a pleasure. Thank you. BARRO: Thank you. HAYES: All right, why? Why? You might be asking yourself, are the crusades suddenly on the news. I will explain ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Tonight, both U.S and Jordanian officials are advising caution against claims made by ISIS, that an American hostage, a 26-year-old woman has been killed in Syria following a coalition airstike. Kayla Mueller, a humanitarian aid volunteer from Arizona was taken hostage by ISIS in August of 2013, near the Syrian city of Aleppo. She is believed to be the last American hostage held captive by the group. And today, ISIS claimed that Mueller was killed in the city of Raqqa, buried in the rabble of a building hit by Jordanian aircraft. Jordan has deployed its air force to strike ISIS targets in an effort to avenge the death of a Jordanian pilot burned alive by ISIS fighters. But as NBC reports the Pentagon says there were no U.S. or Jordanian combat missions near that city. Gun camera video released by the Defense Department, shows the raids take place 140 miles away. U.S. Special Forces attempt to rescue captives held by ISIS in July, but Mueller and her fellow American hostages had been moved. The other Americans held with here, James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Abdul- Rahman Kassig were all beheaded. Mueller has never been shown by ISIS in front of a camera, and her family has previously asked news organization not to identify her by name, that is until today. Mueller is and was or is by all account a remarkable human being, committed to helping victims of Syria`s civil war, as she explained in this video posted two years before she was taken hostage. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) KAYLA MUELLER, ISIS HOSTAGE: I am in solidarity with the Syrian people. I reject the brutality and the killings that the Syrian authorities are committing against the Syrian people. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: She was a friend to the Syrian people. She put her life on the line to aid them. Tonight, Mueller`s family and the rest of the world await news of her fate. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: There is an annual even in Washington dating back in 1953 called the National Prayers Breakfast, sponsored by a politically connected and secretive ministry called the Fellowship. It attracts political religions and cultural leads from around the world. Including this year, the Dalai Lama and former NASCAR Darell Walltrip. Every President since Dwight Eisenhower has attended the breakfast. Yesterday, President Obama took the podium and delivered remarks, I though were pretty unremarkable and uncontroversial. Overall, the speech was a call for the faithful to be humble before god and rejects the certainty of violent extremism. There was one passage that sent the conservative outrage machine into overdrive. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: In response to that passage, potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal release statements to crying the President`s comments. And former Virginia GOP Governor, Jim Gilmore call the President`s remarks, in not joking here, "The most offensive I`ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime." At Drudge Report, right-wing bloggers and commentators outside a field day, but no one got more mileage out of the comments than the talking heads over at Fox News. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the President, 48 hours after we saw that Jordanian men burned alive, for some reason though it was important to remind the world about the evils that Christians committed 1,000 years ago. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, it`s inexplicable to me. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He wanted to bring Christianity into fight. And I want... UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Christians are evil too. Who launched the crusades? The Catholic Church. So he`s basically saying the Catholic Church was the al-Qaeda of it`s day. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He said, "You know what? Yeah, ISIS is bad. But you know what? Christians were just as bad as ISIS was a couple of centuries ago." He`s making excuses it seems for ISIS`s behavior. He`s seem to be saying, "We started it." (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: In fact, the President was not doing any of that, you know, calling Christianity evil or defending ISIS, which he called a brutal vicious death cult, which seems about right. He`s message, if you actually listen to the full speech, it`s pretty clear. Religion has tremendous value, it has too often, over the years, across many phases been used to justify terrible acts. And not faith is immune from that tendency. And yes, that includes what happen in the crusades, as discussed in this 2012 History Channel Documentary. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MIKE LOADES, HISTORIAN: (inaudible) deceived this idea, it`s not a sin if you kill non-Christians, if you kill non-believers in our faith. And so he made this deal that if you go and fight in the holy land, you will be forgiven all your past sins. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Now, you wouldn`t know this if you just listen to (inaudible) in Fox News. The President`s speech was not focused on the hordes of Christianity. Here`s what he said, immediately after, the next, the very next sentence after that passage that got conservatives (inaudible) about. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: Michelle and I returned from India, an incredible, beautiful country, full of this magnificent diversity, but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Joining me now Anthea Butler, she`s Professor of Religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. All right, so I don`t think I wan to litigate the wisdom of the crusades in a short cable news segment. I`m seeing some contrarian hot cakes online today about how great the crusades were, so let`s just put those aside. But the general principle that during -- keep in mind, the President said, during the crusades and inquisition people did horrible things in the name of their faith. That is 100 percent true historical claim, right? ANTHEA BUTLER, RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROF. UNIV. OF PA: Absolutely. I mean, Chris, this is just history, it`s always mind bugling to me that the people who were saying these things would make an F in any high school or university classroom, because this is what people are thought. You`ve know that the crusades get started because Christian started to go take back the Holy Land, and everybody is fighting each other, or the inquisition where you do terrible things to people because you want them to say things about the catholic faith he want or taking over the Americans by conquistadores, drowning at a Baptist, you name it. Christians have done lots of terrible things in the name of religion. HAYES: It does, so -- I mean, the other thing I would say here is you don`t have to go back to the crusades, I mean, in the war in Bosnia -- Herzegovina, I mean, people did horrible things to each other because they were on the wrong side of ethnoreligious divide. In Northern Ireland, people murdered each other very recently because they`re (inaudible) on a linguistic and religious divide. This is not an uncommon think in the history of human beings on the planet, religiously motivated violence. BUTLER: No it is not. And I think it`s really disingenuous and -- yeah, I`m sorry, just rather lame for them to claim that this is the worst thing ever that a president has ever said. Is the one -- a true thing, it is just history. But when you are as invested as some on the right are about rewriting the history of America, rewriting Christian history, you run into people who are going to have these really horrible ideas that are changing what has happen in lots of religious traditions. And I think in this particular case, you can`t privilege Christianity over Islam, because all of these religions have violence within them. And the violence happens either because people believe in (inaudible) that`s telling them, maybe we should do this or they are using religion for political and their social needs. HAYES: And it comes down to this insistence right now, this drum beat about in having to name the enemy as Islamic terrorism, Islamic fanaticisms, that the specialness and distinctness of Islam, the President`s point seemed to be that throughout history, different religious in different time, in different propensities that are, you know, played to. BUTLER: Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the things that people are missing here is that, if you play into ISIS`s hand or Diach, like some of us call it, it`s basically what you want that they want you to do... HAYES: That`s right. BUTLER: ... they want you to declare a holy war, they want you to come after them. Because it`s going to make them martyrs, you know, we just make more martyrs and then this thing continues at infinitum. HAYES: Yeah. BUTLER: So I really think that, you know, the rhetoric needs to be retched down. HAYES: It takes two sides to make a proper crusade. Anthea Butler... BUTLER: Absolutely. HAYES: ... thanks you very much. BUTLER: Thank you. HAYES: The Senator who said Guantanamo detainees could "Root in Hell," ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. TOM COTTON, (R) ARKANSAS: In my opinion, the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorist there for further interrogation, to keep this country safe. As far as I`m concern, every last one of them can root in hell. But as long as they don`t do that and they can root in Guantanamo Bay. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Senator Tom Cotton, Republican for Arkansas, a newly minted member of the Senate Armed Services Committee laid out his case against closing Guantanamo Bay yesterday. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) COTTON: Now, let`s look at the propaganda value, how many detainees are at Guantanamo Bay on September 11th, 2001? BRIAN MCKEON, PRINCIPAL DEPUTY UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR POLICY: Zero. COTTON: How many were there in October 2000 when al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole? MCKEON: Zero. COTTON: Or that 1998, when they bomb their embassies? MCKEON: The facility was not open before 2002, Senator. COTTON: 1993, in the first World Trade Center bombing? MCKEON: The same answer. COTTON: 1979 when Iran took over our embassy? 1983 when Hezbollah bombed our embassy and marine barracks in Lebanon? The answer is zero. MCKEON: Correct. COTTON: Islamic terrorists don`t need an excuse to attack the United States. They don`t attack us for what they do, they attack us for who we are. It is not a security decision, it is a political decision based on a promise that the president made on his campaign. To say that it is security decision based on propaganda value that our enemies get from it is a pretext to justify a political decision. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Now Senator Cotton is by all accounts pretty smart guy, definitely well credentialed -- a Harvard law graduate, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran. His arguments seemed to lack fundamental logic. First, the idea that terrorists were being recruited before Guantanamo Bay, therefore it`s a pretext to say Guantanamo should be shut down because its existence recruits more terrorists, it`s a bit like saying that drivers were crashing cars without being drunk and therefore it`s a pretext to say drunk driving should be stopped because it causes more crashes. It doesn`t make sense. Second, his contention there are too many empty beds in Guantanamo right now, of the 122 inmates still there, 54 have been cleared for release but are still stuck in prison. These are, among them, people who very likely have never done anything wrong, who were misidentified or sold to captors who we`ve imprisoned for over a decade. People, Cotton says, we should keep locked away to spare us the risk that someone in the future might turn against us. And I would note that that, itself, is a logic of eternal internment. And it is offensive at its roots to our constitution and our founders` very conception of liberty. And finally, Senator Cotton`s his final point that when it comes to terrorists every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don`t they can rot in Guantanamo Bay, well, a lot of them have tried to get out of Guantanamo Bay by killing themselves so that they can rot somewhere other than this planet. As a lawyer of one of the Guatanamo detainees pointed out today, his client is subjected to solitary confinement, daily tube feeding through his nose, and violent cell extractions all without ever having been charged with a crime. So for his client, Senator Cotton, Guantanamo is hell. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Remember when people said that Bridgegate was over, old news, settled in the past -- not so fast. It`s not simply the U.S. attorney`s office has yet to wrap up its Bridgegate investigation, which could lead to indictments of former Christie staffers, it`s that once a federal investigation is up and running other possible issues can get uncovered. So today we learned new subpoenas have reportedly been issued looking into the travel records of former Port Authority Chairman David Samson, the man appointed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who has had close ties with the governor since chairing Christie`s transition team when he was elected governor in 2009. Here are the new key points of the new inquiry, according to the (inaudible) Record, from September 6, 2012 to April 1, United Airlines operated a flight that went from Newark Liberty Airport to Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina. The nonstop flight was available for 19 months. Now, that alone obviously would be innocuous. Here is the problem, the airport in South Carolina was, according to the record, quote, about 50 miles from a home where Samson often spent weekends with his wife, and United halted the nonstop route on April 1 of last year just three days after Samson resigned under a cloud. OK, fine, interesting circumstantial details -- flight from Newark to South Carolina, exists, then it gets stopped when Samson resigns, could be a coincidence. It gets worse. According to the record, quote, "Samson referred to the twice a week route with a flight leaving Newark on Thursday evenings and another returning on Monday mornings as the chairman`s flight," one story said. "Federation aviation records show that during the 19 months United offered the non-stop service, the 50-seat planes that flew the route were, on average, only about half full." The spokeswoman for Samson would not comment to the publication, nor would the office of U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman which is reportedly issuing the subpoenas, nor would Christie`s office comment. However United Airlines told the Record, quote, "United has received subpeonas for information and is cooperating. United has no further comment." During David Samson`s tenure as chairman of the Port Authority, United Airlines was, of course, in regular negotiations with both the Port Authority and the Christie administration over a variety of issues such as whether to extend United Airlines service to Atlantic City. While United Airlines began flights to and from Atlantic City in April last year, it pulled out last December just eight monts later. Joining me now syndicated political columnist from Gannett Newspaper, Bob Ingle, author of "Chris Christie: The Inside Story of his Rise to Power." The big thing here is that you`ve got a U.S. attorney looking at Samson, and we have said all along for over a year Samson is the key to all of this. Do you agree? BOB INGLE, GANNETT NEWSPAPERS: I do. There is a theory about that what is going on here is Samson is about 75 years old and he`s had a long and distinguished career. He was, in fact, attorney general of New Jersey at one time. The theory is that if they get enough and they can scare him, he may tell them what they want to know about certain other political types. HAYES: well, who do you mean by that? INGLE: Well, we all know we`re talking about Chris Christie. HAYES: Right. I mean, the idea... INGLE: And maybe other people. HAYES: Samson knows a lot of stuff. INGLE: He does. HAYES: And we now have concern -- I mean, the reporting is pretty clear, right? I mean, we`re a year -- you know, 13 months out from the sort of initial brouhaha over this -- the time for traffic in Fort Lee. There`s a lot of reports. I mean, we know there is an active investigation happening in U.S. attorney`s office in Newark. This is further evidence of that. We know they`ve got a bunch of people that they`ve been looking at, talking to, interviewing. I mean, at some point you`ve got to imagine some shoe is going to drop, right? INGLE: Well, I would think so and that is one of the questions people keep asking. Well, when is the U.S. attorney, Fishman going to do anything? Well, he`s known for taking his time and dotting his Is and crossing his Ts. He doesn`t seem to be in a particular hurry. I think he wants to get it right. HAYES: This has been a week from hell for Chris Christie. He starts out he is in England, he`s doing this sort of foreign policy trip. He starts out with the vaccination thing, which blows up in his face. He`s got to walk that back. He has got a new criminal investigation that was reported yesterday having to do with the possibility of quashing investigations and subpoenas for politically connected people, that`s just an investigation that`s been confirmed. And then you`ve got this news today. What has this week been like for Christie`s chances as a Republican presidential candidate? INGLE: I had a column in Gannett papers today and online that`s saying if he can take back three days, it would probably be these three days, and then this United thing came up and I think I should have said if he could take back this week. What is happening, I think, is that the people who had this image of Christie as this guy who is above all of the corruption, this guy who is a regular sort of fellow, who`d eat a cheesesteak on the boardwalk, is not really who they thought he was, that he is more or less politics as usual. And I think, that is hurting him with his fan base. HAYES: Bob Ingle, thank you very much. INGLE: You bet. HAYES: All right, are you, dear viewer, looking for the next version of the podcast Serial, a new six part series is set to premiere Sunday night on HBO. It`s a true crime tale with twists and turns and I`ve seen a few episodes, it`s amazing. I want to talk to the director ahead. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AKON, RAPPER: Hey, check it out, Kurdistan, how are you doing, man? This is your boy Akon. And, yes, I`m so excited to be there to visit that 8,000- year-old city to perform live at the Hariri Stadium in March. So make sure you`re all be there, man. I`m telling you, you will not regret it, let`s go. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Hello, Irbil. Hip hop star Akon says he will hold an anti-ISIS charity concert in the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan next month. As Newsweek reports, proceeds from the concern will support families of Kurdistan`s unofficial military, the Peshmerga, who are currently fighting quite successfully I might add against Islamic state militants. This is a very cool thing to do, a noble gesture. But, I would say, consider yourself warned, Kurdistan. As The Washington Post notes, Akon has been involved in a series of international incidents. He`s been banned from entering Sri Lanka after offending Buddhists with a video showed a risque poll party with a Buddha statue in the background, caused a major uproar after he was accused of simulating sex on stage with a teenaged girl in Trinidad and Tobago. So that guy is putting on a concert for the Peshmerga. But here`s the thing, should any ISIS fighter think they could just show up Akon`s charity event and taunt him, this is pretty much what they can expect. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AKON: Now we can start the show. You all with me? (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFEID MALE: One thing was very telling that Bob said, he said all of my life I`ve had more money than I could spend and it didn`t make me happy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She talked on the telephone with her husband, then she vanished and no one has seen Kathleen Durst since. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Durst was wanted for murder in Texas, was a suspect for murders in Los Angeles and Westchester County New York. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He belongs to one of the richest families in New York City. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Might be a little eccentric. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think Bob is very smart. I mean, he`s managed to get away with three murders. (BEGIN VIDOE CLIP) HAYES: Robert Durst, or Bob, is the scion to one of New York City`s most prominent real estate families. The Durst Organization built the Bank of America tower, the Conde Nast building and most recently the Freedom Tower, possibly the most famous skyscraper in the country. But Robert has always been an outsider in the family. He`s also been connected to three murder disappearances over the last 30 years. The first in 1982 when his wife Cathy went missing. She is now presumed dead -- Durst who is a prime suspect at the time was never charged. Then, almost two decades later, Susan Berman, who police wanted to question about Cathy`s disappearance turned up dead in Los Angeles, a gunshot to the back of the head. Once again, Durst was a suspect and never charged. A year later, a fisherman in Texas found Durst`s neighbor Morris Black`s torso floating in the Galveston Bay. Durst was charced with murdering and dismembering the 71-year-old. He cops to the dismembering, but not the murder. Durst said that he killed Black in self-defense and then panicked, chopped up his body and dumped it into the bay. After skipping bail, he was arrested in Pennsylvania for shoplifting a sandwich with $500 in his pocket. In 2003, he was acquitted of Black`s murder after the jury bought his self- defense story. Robert Durst has never spoken public about any of any of that until now. A fantastic new HBO documentary miniseries titled Jinx: the Life and Deaths of Robert Durst premieres this Sunday 8:00 p.m. with Robert Durst speaking out for the first time. And I can say that after watching the first two episodes, it is going to be a huge hit. The series aims through interviews with Durst himself, friends and families to answer one huge question: is Robert Durst a murderer or the most unlucky man alive? (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was having a late afternoon dinner party for my family, and Cathy really wasn`t invited, but when Cathy called me that morning and said I need to get out of here, I`m not going to tell my best friend no. Everybody was getting along and everybody was enjoying, you know, it was just a nice evening. And I can remember very clearly the telephone calls and Bobby insisting that Cathy come home. And Cathy being visibly shaken after the phone calls, she went out and she warmed up her Mercedes. She came back in and she said I`m leaving now. So we stood on the front porch and she said to me, Gilberta, promise me if something happens you`ll check it out. I`m afraid of Bobby. And I just said, Cathy, of course, you can count on me. It didn`t even register that she was telling me that for some dreadful reason, I just didn`t get it. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: All right, next, my interview with the series director Andrew Jarecki who sat down with Robert Durst for more than 20 hours. Stick around. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ANDREW JARECKI, DIREDCTOR: If you had him sitting here, what would you say to him? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What did you do with her? Because the key is with him. Where is she? What did you do with her? JARECKI: I didn`t meet him right away. I heard about him, that he was courting her and she was very swept off of her feet is the way I like to describe it. You know, he just came on like Prince Charming and she was basically Cinderella. ROBERT DURST: She thought I was good looking in my a little way, cute or whatever it was. And she was very outgoing and social, and got along with people real good. It was perfect. Because I don`t get along with people, most people don`t get along with me. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: All right, this weekend, a new weekly documentary series "Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst," debuts on HBO, examines the life of a man born into one of the most powerful real estate families in the country, later connected to three murder disappearances. I sat down with director Andrew Jarecki. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: So, first of all, I`ve watched the first two episodes, they`re phenomenal. And they`re riveting. So congratulations, it`s really -- it feels new, it feels like some of new genre. JARECKI: It`s a new -- it feels that way to me, too., HAYES: Yeah, like, something that moves out past the border of true crime into something else. JARECKI: Yeah, and even the format of it, you know, we started making this thing -- we made this other movie first. It was a narrative feature, then Bob Durst reached out to me, so I thought well, now I`m making an interview. I don`t know what it`s going to become. HAYES: Right, so let`s go through that story, right? Because -- so this is a crazy story that -- of the Durst brothers and Bob Durst and this family and who he is. You start by making a feature fictional film based on his story. Tell me about how that came about, why you chose to do that, what that was like. JARECKI: Well, about ten years ago, I thought the subject of Bob Durst would be interesting. He is a very unusual character because he`s enormously complicated. He started out in this in this very luxurious life. He was a young man born into tremendous wealth, was sort of the sign of this giant real estate family in New York. And somehow 70 years later, we find him in a $300 a rooming house in Galveston, Texas, disguiasd as a mute woman with his neighbor lying dead on the floor. This was a trajectory that really fascinated me. And I thought how do yuo start here and end up there. So, we started to write a film about him and concentrating a lot on his relationship with a wife, this beautiful girl named Cathy McCormick, who he married, who was really she was from a very different world. She was from a modest family, Irish Catholic background in Long Island. They were together for about ten years and then she disappeared. So 1982, this big mystery arises. And I grew up in West Chester, a couple towns away from Scarsdale where Bob grew up and it always interested me that this young man had gone through such a strange series of events in his life. And then 20 years later, the West Chester County district attorney takes another look at that case, for the first time considering the possibility that Bob might have killed his wife. And when she starts looking into it, they discover this witness that nobody had ever spoken to. And they said we have got to talk to that witness. They go to find that witness, she is found murdered. So 20 years after the initial disappearance of the wife, there is a new person who is murdered. And then that case goes to sleep for awhile. A then about a year later a body washes up on the shore in Galveston Texas, and they trace this dismembered body back to the same person Robert Durst. So he... HAYES: Robert Durst, who we just say, is found in a car, connected to the address that was found washed up with the body, with a bow saw in the back seat of the car. JARECKI: That`s right, he had a bow saw in the car with him. HAYES: And the police have just found a dismembered body, that is not open/shut but that is pretty bad. JARECKI: I mean, there`s a sort of sense of entitlement that Bob has, you know, so that he has this disarming level of honesty. And ultimately, he will say to you, well, that was the bow saw that I used to dismember my neighbor. He is very frank about the things that he is frank about. You know, people concern themselves with things that he says that maybe turn out not to be true, but he is disarmingly honest about a lot of things that you or I would never consider to be things that we would give away if we could imagine being in his situation. HAYES: Right. So you make this -- the `82 disappearance of his wife, which is huge -- it`s the cover of tabloids -- it`s a huge story. You make this film, fictional film. He reaches out to you. This is a guy who is estranged from his family, his brother is in the New York Times just a week ago saying -- or two weeks ago saying he is worried that Bob is going to try to kill him. He is a guy that`s been connected or associated with three disappearances and two murders. So what -- how do you understand this relationship? JARECKI: Well, the story -- I mean, we had made this narrative film. Ryan Gosling was playing a character based on Robert Durst and Kirsten Dunst, his wife. And we felt it would be important to reach out to the real Bob Durst. He`s out there. He`s a living person, we thought it would be respectful to ask him if he wanted to weigh in in any way. And so we reached out to his very clever Texas lawyer Dick DeGarin (ph) and we said we`re making this film would he be interested. And he said, you know, Bob is a very private guys. He is probably not going to want to participate. And so they decline politely. But then a week before the movie came out in movie theaters, I get a phone call out of the blue from Bob Durst saying I`ve heard good things about the movie I`d like to see it. I arrange for him to see the movie. He calls me three or four minutes after the movie finishes and he says, I want you to know I liked the movie very much. I cried three times. And I think we should talk. You know more about Bob Durst than anybody. HAYES: And you then enter into a relationship that, I don`t know what`s the best -- like Errol Morris (ph) and Donald Rumsfeld? Or, I mean... You are a documentarian, but you`re -- this is in some ways an authorized biography. I mean what is this? JARECKI: Well, I think it was very clear that it was not going to be Bob`s story, t was not going to be an evening -- it wasn`t dinner theater with Bob Durst, you know, it was going to be unique in that Bob Durst was going to talk to us for the first time ever. But at the same time he knows the kind of deep dive that we do, you know, the things that we worked on in Capturing the Friedmans or other things. We are sort of obsessional about our research. So, if you wanted to do a kind of puff piece about yourself, you are not going to call me, you would call somebody else. So I knew that he was prepared for us to do the kind of work that we were going to do. So, in the end he is a voice, but there are all the voices in this story. HAYES: Is -- what is your takeaway from this story? I mean... JARECKI: Well, you know, there are so many angles to it, because I -- you know, still this morning I got an e-mail from Bob Durst because he read something that his brother planted in the New York Post and he wanted to respond to it. and he is very funny and very clever. You know, he wrote me a note saying well obviously Doug -- DD -- he calls his brother Doug Durst who is the chairman of this giant organization, you know, and this is not like some local real estate family, these guys built the Bank of America tower, and the Conde Nast building and they just built the Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site, which you have a picture of on your New York skyline behind you. You know, this is a unique situation where you have a family like this exposed in this way, and Bob says -- he says well my brother said this and he said this -- this is ridiculous. And he says, by the way, it looks like Doug Durst is not going to be very excited about the series. You should probably call up HBO and tell them that, you know, maybe they should give him a refund on his HBO monthly fee. He has a tremendous sense of humor about it. And he recognizes that he`s seen as a kind of burlesque figure. And this may be the chance that he has to really tell a story that`s a much, much deeper story. HAYES: Well, thank you. And congratulations. It`s really, really fascinating. JARECKI: Thanks. I appreciate your watching it. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: All right, that is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts now. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END