Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: August 23, 2016 Guest: Beto O`Rourke, Matt Mackowiak, Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, James Carville, Michael Cohen, Marc Fisher, Michael Kranish, David Sirota
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN --
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: What people don`t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country.
HAYES: Donald Trump caught in his own immigration trap, endorsing the president`s plan.
TRUMP: Perhaps with a lot more energy.
HAYES: Trailing in the polls, cancelling speeches, why Donald Trump is at a perilous crossroads.
Plus --
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is not a photo op issue.
HAYES: Democratic strategist James Carville on disaster politics and how Hillary needs to handle Donald Trump.
Then, why Melania Trump is threatening several defamation lawsuits. "The Washington Post" authors of new book Donald Trump is actively trying to stop people from reading, and a look at the good, the bad and the ugly on the latest on the Clinton Foundation.
When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.
With Donald Trump under new management trying to make him over as a serious candidate, we are now witnessing something we`ve never seen before in this campaign. Trump actively struggling to reconcile, the provocative slogans his die-hard slogans love with the actual policy details that might reassure voters at large he`s not too big of a risk.
On the signature issue of his campaign, Trump has painted himself into an extremely tight corner. He already canceled his big advertised immigration policy speech originally scheduled for Thursday amidst blowback over reports he might be softening his stance and considering legal status for some undocumented immigration. Trump denied he was flip-flopping.
Now, the man who launched his campaign, slurring Mexican immigrants who called for a physical wall on our 2,000-mile southern border, which Mexico will pay for, and depicts undocumented immigrants in this country as a lawless hoard, terrorizing citizens, that same man now appears to embrace both elite Republican orthodoxy and Obama administration policy on immigration, whether he knows it or not.
During the Republican primary, the centerpiece of Trump`s hard line immigration stance was his insistence regardless of the impracticalities that all 11 million undocumented immigrants, living in the U.S. would have to be deported.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tell me the how. Are you going to have a massive deportation force?
TRUMP: You`re going to have a deportation force. And you`re going to do it humanely.
They`re going back where they came. If they came from a certain country, they`re going to be brought back to their country.
CHUCK TODD, MEET THE PRESS: You`ll rescind the DREAM Act executive order, DACA?
TRUMP: We have to make a whole new set of standards, and when people come in, they have --
TODD: So, you`re going to split up families. You`re going to deport children.
TRUMP: Chuck, Chuck, no, no, we`re going to keep the families together. We have to keep the families together.
TODD: But you`re going to keep them together out?
TRUMP: But they have to go. They have to go.
TODD: What if they have no place to go?
TRUMP: We will work with them. They have to go.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Trump even pointed to a program under President Dwight Eisenhower that deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers, tellingly calling, Operation Wetback.
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TRUMP: I like Ike, right? The expression -- I like Ike. Moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country. You don`t get nicer. You don`t get friendlier. They moved a million and a half people out. We have no choice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: All that happened a long time ago, during a very different campaign. Now, after a stretch of catastrophic blunders, Trump is struggling to catch up to Hillary Clinton in the polls and his new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has a strategy to get back on track -- quote, "pivot to substance."
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KELLYANNE CONWAY, TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: The message has to be one of substance. It has to be about issues. I`d rather lose a campaign when we put it on all on the field substantively, where people saw the difference on a major issue of the day than win a campaign based on style.
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HAYES: This brings us to Trump`s remarkable interview with Bill O`Reilly last night, which the host pressed him on the exact kind of substantive details Conway was talking about.
And almost in real-time, Trump seemed to be climbing the learning curve on immigration policy.
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BILL O`REILLY, FOX NEWS HOST: The actual seizure of human beings, taking them from their homes and putting them in a detention center so that their illegal alien status can be adjudicated, do you see the --
TRUMP: You don`t have to put them in a detention center. You`re the first one to mention detention center. I never even heard the term. I`m not going to put them in a detention center.
O`REILLY: You cited Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Trump, you cited Dwight Eisenhower on this program.
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: That was in 1952.
O`REILLY: Right.
He took them out. And so when you cited him as an example of someone that you would emulate, that`s what the conclusion is.
TRUMP: Yes. I said that it`s something that has been done in a very strong manner. I don`t agree with that. I`m not talking about detention centers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: What are you talking about?
In that interview, Trump laid out a somewhat different more targeted approach to deporting undocumented immigrants.
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TRUMP: We`re going to obey the existing laws. Now, the existing laws are very strong. The existing laws, the first thing we`re going to do, if and when I win, is we`re going to get rid of all the bad ones, we got gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. The police know who they are.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, if that sounds vaguely familiar, because it bares more than a passing resemblance to President Obama`s priority enforcement program, which direct officials to focus on removing people who pose a danger to public safety. Incredibly, Trump acknowledged cribbing from the president`s policies.
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TRUMP: As far as everybody else, we`re going to go through the process. What people don`t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country. Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I`m going to do the same thing and I just said that.
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HAYES: Well, Donald Trump, who`s only been running for the most powerful office on earth for 15 months, may not have known as the president`s reputation as, quote, "deporter in chief", everyone else with at least a passing interest in this issue, including, notably, family members of those that have been deported, is well aware.
Later in that same interview, in an exchange on reducing crime in Chicago, Trump showed just how thoughtfully he approaches all of the most pressing policy issues of our time.
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TRUMP: I know police in Chicago. If they were given the authority to do it, they would get it done.
O`REILLY: How?
TRUMP: You have -- how? By being very much tougher than they are right now.
When I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very tough police. I said, how do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge, to a specific person, do you think you could stop it? He said, "Mr. Trump, I`d be able to stop it in one week." And I believed him a hundred percent.
O`REILLY: How? Did he tell you how he would be able --
TRUMP: No, he wants to use tough police tactics, which is OK.
O`REILLY: But you have to have a warrant to arrest people. You can`t beat them up. You have to have a warrant to arrest them. You have to have --
TRUMP: All I know is this. He said, Mr. Trump, within one week, we could stop much --
O`REILLY: But he didn`t tell you exactly precisely how, because that`s --
TRUMP: No, and I didn`t ask because I`m not the mayor of Chicago.
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HAYES: Joining me now, Congressman Beto O`Rourke, Democrat from Texas, who represents the border city of El Paso and knows a thing or two about the issue.
I guess we`ll start with your reaction to this -- what we`re seeing happen. I mean, you got Donald Trump in your state for town halls and a rally. He wants to give a speech on the border. What do you make of all this?
REP. BETO O`ROURKE (D), TEXAS: I don`t know, to be honest with you. I think he is in search of those issues that will stir the greatest amount of anxiety and fear and the poll numbers that will allow him to close the gap with Hillary Clinton. I was noticing today in a "Washington Post" article that support for extending the border wall has dropped over the last few months as the rhetoric from the Donald Trump campaign has increased.
So, maybe this is a course correction, reflecting current polling, but it`s hard to know with someone whose core beliefs we`re unable to find, whose rhetoric has rarely matched the reality and in no place is that more starkly obvious than here on the border in El Paso, Texas, the safest city in the United States, where we`ve seen -- not just a net zero migration from Mexico, but a net loss of about 140,000 out-bound migrants in the last three or four years.
We have at the U.S.-Mexico border, 330,000 apprehensions last year. That compares against 1.6 million in the year 2000. We doubled the size of the border patrol in the last ten years. We`re spending $19.5 billion a year to further secure the border. We are long past the point of diminishing returns on this. And perhaps that reality is beginning to catch up with the American public, with the electorate and Trump`s trying to change course to try to catch up with the voters.
HAYES: Well, that`s what`s so fascinating to me. It`s all symbolic, right? I mean, it`s never actually been policies from jump. It`s about channeling a certain vision of fear and anxiety about immigrants, and what they`re doing in the country and what the country is becoming. And nothing -- no place is that clearer than the border wall.
I have an opportunity to talk to a colleague of yours, Congressman Farenthold, in your delegation, also a different part of the border in Southern Texas. Listen to him. He`s the guy who endorses Trump, OK, but this is us in our exchange about the border wall. Take a listen.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You want to put a wall along the whole border with a pretty door?
REP. BLAKE FARENTHOLD (R), TEXAS: Listen, I`m a Texan and I realize the rural areas, there`s no point in spending the money on the fence.
HAYES: Thank you. It`s a ridiculous idea as any Texan will tell you, right?
FARENTHOLD: But what you can do is secure the border with technology.
HAYES: Can you just acknowledge the fact that the Texan delegation, Texans I talk to, think the idea of a wall is ridiculous?
FARENTHOLD: Yes, for -- correct.
HAYES: Thank you!
(CROSSTALK)
FARENTHOLD: For the two piles of the wall, you can get a predator drone.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Everyone knows it. I mean, this is so remarkable, your colleague, Congressman Farenthold, endorsed him, says, yes, the walls are ridiculous. It makes you wonder what all this actually is about, if his own supporters don`t even support the things that he says are his policy.
O`ROURKE: Yes, I can`t tell whether it is political genius or Republican primary electorate stupidity, but one of the facts that has been lost in this whole debate is that we already have 700 miles of wall, through much of Texas and Arizona and California. And those of us who live along the border, who understand these issues better than arguably anyone else, will tell you that that wall has not in any way changed for the better our relationship with Mexico, our security of our communities, or that of the United States.
And in fact, those of us who live along the border, I think, or at least the majority of us would love to see the wall we have up, start to come down. I think we need to move from a defensive posture of defending the U.S.-Mexico border to a posture of pride and celebration of what we have here. An incredibly diverse, safe, wonderful immigrant-filled community that is the best representation of the United States, no walls needed here.
HAYES: All right. Congressman Beto O`Rourke, appreciate your time tonight. Thank you.
I`m joined now by Matt Mackowiak, Texas-based Republican consultant, and Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, professor of Mexican-American Latino studies, University of Texas.
And, Victoria, what do you make of this? I mean, I hesitate -- one of the things I want to be clear is, to me, you can`t really call this a flip flop, because there was no flip to flop. There was no actual substance in the first place to then be reversed.
VICTORIA DEFRANCESCO SOTO, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS: Well, Chris, I have to admit, I`m surprised but I`m not. You know, when we were in Cleveland at the convention, we saw Donald Trump double-down on this immigration rhetoric. And I thought, this is going to be the course he`ll take to November. But then I take two steps back and I remember back in 2012, I remember this very clearly, that Donald Trump did an interview with Newsmax where he was criticizing Mitt Romney for using the words "self-deportation" and for being so harsh with regard to immigrants.
So, you know, what he feels in his heart of hearts, I don`t know. But this pattern of flip flopping is not entirely new for Donald Trump. I wouldn`t be surprised if he flips back to a more conservative stance on immigration in the last 60 days of the campaign.
HAYES: Yes, Matt, this is what I find so remarkable watching this. In real-time, you`re watching this individual discover the policy dilemma of immigration reform that everyone who`s worked on it for 20 years has understood extremely well and has caused the electoral defeat of many of the people in the Republican Party, including poor Rick Perry, who was destroyed by Mitt Romney over it, and other people that Donald Trump bludgeoned to death over it on precisely these terms.
MATT MACKOWIAK, TEXAS-BASED GOP CONSULTANT: Yes, I remember in Orlando at the -- one of the debates four years ago, when Rick Perry made the heartless comment. You could compare that to the softening comment that he made today in a taped town hall which will air on another network tonight. So, look, it`s pretty clear to me that Trump wanted to run very far to the right on immigration, in the primary.
He thought he had a real opportunity to lock down the hard-line immigration wing of the party. He had credibility with that wing to begin with, and he really played that issue to the fullest extent.
What`s also clear to me is he did that through the convention. If you think about it, the time to soften your approach would have been at the convention, when you had the largest television audience you`re going to have until the televised debates.
He didn`t do that. They`ve changed the senior team and I think he`s been presented with poling that shows him he cannot win this election with 20 percent or less of the Hispanic vote and with 1 or 2 percent of the African American vote. That`s why he`s trying now to pivot, I think to some extent, to make himself more acceptable to that portion of the electorate.
But as it relates to immigration, you`re right. Look, if you support limited government, how big would government have to be to identify, to locate, and to remove 11 million or 12 million illegal immigrants across the country. What would it cost? How long would it take?
You know, it would be a huge government program that no limited government conservative would ever support.
HAYES: You know, and, Victoria, to Matt`s point about -- we keep using the term "pivot." to me, to me, the issue here, this is -- the toothpaste is out of the tube on this. I mean, this is someone who has -- if you were to identify this individual with one thing, anything, it would be essentially the most restrictionist, hawkish, white nationalist, for lack of a better term, approach to immigration. And, you know, you don`t get -- something tells me voters are not just going to allow that to just be etch a sketched away.
SOTO: I think he`s going to try to have his cake and eat it too. He needs to stick to the border wall, because that`s what folks most identify him with.
But I think he feels he can pivot a little bit on the deportation issue. And to Matt`s point, so in terms of how much this would cost, there are estimates that it would be between $400 billion and $600 billion to deport all of these folks who are here in the United States illegally.
So, Trump can say, all right, all right, I`m a good businessman. I have business sense. I`m going to recant on my mass deportation, because it would just cost too much and it would cost too much for the economy. It would be over a trillion dollar impact. But let`s stick to the border wall.
So, my hunch, if I`m a betting woman, he`s going to stick to the border wall and soften on the deportation.
HAYES: But, Matt, congratulations, you have just now reinvented Mitt Romney`s immigration policy, essentially, right? You know, border enforcement and no path to citizenship, which would lead to the conditions of self-deportation. That is Mitt Romney`s 2012 policy. It is in some ways the kind of policy limbo the entire Republican Party has been trapped in and that has been killing them for a number of years now.
MACKOWIAK: It is. And, look, as Victoria knows all too well, there are so many complicated aspects to the immigration issue, as it relates to the border fence, what do you do in the Davis Mountains that are 4,000 feet up in the air? What do you do in a river? How do you put a wall in a river? Do you sub divide ranch land on both sides of the border?
These are the questions you deal with when you deal with building a fence across the entire southern border. That`s why most people say you should focus on the urban areas and you have the assets and the strategic fencing, you know, and personnel along the rural areas.
As it relates to the illegal immigrants or the undocumented immigrants that are here in the country now, what do you do when one family member is illegal and one isn`t?
HAYES: Right.
MACKOWIAK: Do you divide the family? What do you do with children? There`s a lot of complicated aspects to it.
HAYES: Yes. It turns out governing is complicated. Matt Mackowiak and Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, thanks to you both. Appreciate it.
SOTO: Thanks.
MACKOWIAK: Thank you.
HAYES: Still to come, the latest from the Clinton Foundation as Donald Trump called for its closure. What the reporting says and what the foundation actually does, ahead.
But first, President Obama visited flooded Louisiana today. We`ll have Louisiana`s own James Carville to talk about Obama`s critics and much more just after this two-minute break.
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BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sometimes once the flood water`s pass, people`s attention span pass. This is not a one-off. This is not a photo-op issue. This is how do you make sure that a month from now, three months from now, six months from now, people still are getting the help they need.
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HAYES: President Obama visited Baton Rouge today to look at the flooding which is blamed for the death of 13 people and for the displacement of thousands. A report by the Baton Rouge area chamber business organization estimates more than 40 percent of the homes in the Baton Rouge area are potentially affected by the flooding. And they estimate only about 15 percent of those homes were insured against flooding. Obama toured those affected areas and met with emergency workers and state and local officials.
Still, the president`s visit came amid criticism from Donald Trump among others that he should have cut short his vacation to Martha`s Vineyard and visiting last week when the flooding was at its worse.
Joining me now, Louisiana native, long-time Democratic strategist, James Carville, whose new book is called "We`re Still Right, They`re Still Wrong", an open-minded title of --
JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Absolutely.
HAYES: What do you think of that? I think I had two feelings while I was watching it play out, this is one of those optics thing, but I understand how people in the midst of a flooding, the optics would matter to them.
CARVILLE: Well, first of all, I`ve got five siblings in Baton Rouge. And my daughter is starting LSU. I`ve got a nephew whose house was flooded. He`s a deputy sheriff in Ascension Parish, which is an adjacent parish to Baton Rouge.
Look, I saw James Lee Witt, who is President Clinton (INAUDIBLE) said President Clinton had a rule, I`m not going anyway until you told me to come.
Our governor has done a magnificent job, who`s a son of a sheriff, who`s a West Point honor cadet, who`s an Army Ranger, asked the president not to come, that the resources that would be taken away from what they were doing, I think people appreciated it.
I think Donald Trump came. He gave, as I understand it, $100,000 check to a church in Greenwell Springs, which is an area that was really affected by the flood. I think by almost unanimous acclamation, the federal response in Baton Rouge has been very good. And I think that`s the important thing.
I think this guy, Craig Fugate, who was Jeb Bush`s FEMA director in Florida, is a professional disaster guy. I think that`s important.
But it is very serious. These people did not live in a flood plain. They weren`t required to have flood insurance. And it`s in a very long, drawn- out thing here.
But I really don`t fault Donald Trump. I don`t fault President Obama. I certainly don`t fault our governor or the FEMA response right now. It`s just a very, very tragic situation.
HAYES: I wanted to check in with you about this craziness in the campaign. One of the things I got to say, it`s remarkable, is to watch something go from a conspiracy website that`s in the fringes, the kind of place that said that Newtown was a false flag and that 9/11 was an inside job -- to go from there to the center of the campaign in basically about seven or eight days.
So, here`s Rudy Giuliani talking about the great Hillary Clinton health conspiracy theory. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER NYC MAYOR: Several signs of illness by her -- all you got to do is go online --
TV HOST: Her campaign and other people defending her saying there`s nothing factual to the claims about her health. And that --
GIULIANI: Go online --
TV HOST: -- that`s speculation at best.
GIULIANI: So, go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness and take a look at the videos for yourself.
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CARVILLE: Rudy Giuliani, M.D., (INAUDIBLE).
(LAUGHTER)
Well, you know, I don`t know what`s wrong with him. I`ll give my diagnosis. I don`t think his brain gets enough blood. But --
HAYES: We don`t do remote diagnosis on this show. That`s a rule.
CARVILLE: I`m obviously being comical here.
He`s just gone down as a bitter, cranky old man and it`s kind of a shame, because the guy was really thought of at one time. I don`t know what to say. I actually looked up her doctor. Her name is Lisa, and probably Braddock (ph) or something like that. She`s a board certified internist, graduate of NYU, the head of intern in some hospital, and she says she`s healthy. And Dr. Giuliani says not.
(CROSSTALK)
CARVILLE: So make your choice. I can`t argue with it.
HAYES: You know, I was saying last night on the show, and you`re obviously a veteran of many campaigns. We`re getting kind of a natural experiment that you can almost never get in -- you can never convince someone in a campaign from one side not to run a campaign and the other side to run a campaign, to finally test how much campaigns matter, but we`re getting that a little bit.
We`re kind of going to see like how much do campaigns actually matter?
CARVILLE: Because he doesn`t have a campaign.
HAYES: He doesn`t have a campaign?
CARVILLE: No. And no -- his signature issue was immigration. He announced in June 2015. We`re now approaching September of 2016, and he can`t get a position paper out on his signature issue. On the issue that vaulted him to the nomination.
HAYES: That he himself calls his signature issue.
CARVILLE: That he himself calls his signature issue. And he said, well, we`re working on our position paper.
I ain`t too sure but that doesn`t look too good to me. I mean, he sits in his apartment and watches FOX TV. His daughter, who is his head adviser, was in Croatia for I don`t know how long on vacation. It is the strangest thing.
And now, he`s on an apology tour and he`s sorry, and now, he said, well, President Obama deported a lot of people, I`m going to have his policy.
I don`t -- I don`t think it`s a campaign. I don`t think he knows anything about anything.
HAYES: So then how do you do debate prep against that?
CARVILLE: You know what you do -- you hit our own objectives. You have somebody that plays him, that`s watched a hundred hours of tape. And you remind yourself that, you know, you don`t have to respond to everything he says. Just talk about your things and you know he`s going to be -- he doesn`t know.
Joe Biden said if, you asked about Article 5 of NATO, he would have no idea.
HAYES: Right.
CARVILLE: He doesn`t know Tim Kaine from Tom Kane.
HAYES: Right.
CARVILLE: He has no idea what the nuclear triad is.
How do you prepare somebody running for president that doesn`t know the difference between a vice presidential nominee and the former governor of New Jersey? So, you have no idea what`s coming out of his mouth, because - -
HAYES: You just make sure you know what you want to say --
CARVILLE: Exactly, exactly.
HAYES: James Carville, thanks for joining us.
CARVILLE: Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
HAYES: Good to see you.
Coming up, two "Washington Post" staffers spent 20 hours interviewing Donald Trump. Now, they have a new book detailing what they`ve learned about the nominee. Those authors join me ahead.
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HAYES: If a publication were to run an unsubstantiated and false report accusing someone of being a sex worker, that seems pretty close to something like textbook libel. So, it might come as no surprise that Melania Trump through her lawyer is threatening to sue "The Daily Mail" for alleging she worked as an escort and is considering legal action against other news outlets for republishing that story they claim is 100 percent false.
The statement from Melania Trump`s attorney Charles Harder states that "Mrs. Trump has placed several news organizations on notice of her legal claims against them, including `Daily Mail" among others for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an escort in the 1990s. All statements are 100 percent false, highly damaging to her reputation and personally hurtful.
She understands that news media have certain leeway in a presidential campaign, but outright lying about her in this way exceeds all bounds of appropriate news reporting and human decency."
OK. Now, Harder is a prominent media lawyer who is representing Lena Dunham as well as Hulk Hogan in his successful billionaire-backed lawsuit to destroy Gawker. While Melania Trump may be on solid legal footing, at least it seems from a distance in this specific case, before the context, of course, is that she is married to the man who consistently wages war with the media, the one who vowed to, quote, "open up" libel laws to make it easier to sue the media. And today, he`s attacking a brand-new book about him. But oddly enough the authors of that book got plenty of help from him.
The co-authors of "Trump Revealed" join me next.
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HAYES: Today, Donald Trump attacked a new book that`s coming out about him, tweeting, The Washington Post quickly put together a hit-job book on me, comprised of copies of some of their inaccurate stories. Don`t buy, boring, exclamation point.
Trump is, let`s recall, a candidate that`s railed against a dishonest media almost from the start of his presidential campaign.
His campaign has actually pulled credentials of The Washington Post back in June, complaining of the paper`s coverage of his campaign.
Of course, Trump regularly attacks the media at his rallies. Just today, Trump tweeted one of his classics, "it is being reported by virtually everyone, and is a fact, that the media pile-on against me is the worst in American political history!"
The new book Trump attacked was a book that he aided by sitting down in the midst of a presidential campaign for more than 20 hours of interviews, according to its authors.
And they join me now -- Michael Kranish -- investigative political reporter of the Washington Post, and Marc Fisher, senior editor at The Washington Post, co-authors of Trump Revealed.
Gentlemen, I think i saw it was Jon Favreau, who was a speech writer for President Obama, worked on the `08 and `12 campaign saying that he just was astonished to get 20 hours of time with -- I mean, time is so precious, of a candidate. How did this happen?
MARC FISHER, THE WASHINGTON POST: He seemed to have all the time in the world. When I first approached his campaign and said, we`re writing a book about Mr. Trump and we`d love to have a series of interviews with him, we didn`t have very high expectations and in fact, his press secretary said that we were profiteering off Mr. Trump and they would not be cooperating at all.
Well, the weekend went by and on Monday she called back and said -- she was all peaches and cream all of a sudden. She said she had spoken to Mr. Trump and he was delighted to cooperate. And he invited us up to his office in Trump tower for as much time as we`d like.
And so, he was good to his word. He was generous and gracious with his time. And he kept extending the interviews by hours.
HAYES: But, Michael, this is everything you need know to know about Trump and the media, right. It`s sort of a microcosm is. In public, it`s, oh, the media are terrible, they`re biased, they`re no good. But privately, there`s nothing the guy loves more than media attention.
MICHAEL KRANISH, THE WASHINGTON POST: He certainly likes to talk about his favorite subject, which is himself. But he was very generous, gracious with his time, and we really did try to do an even-handed, fair book.
So in his tweet last night, he talked about a series of stories, it`s not a series of stories, it is a full real biography from the family ancestry right up to the Republican Convention.
HAYES: I mean, look, this guy, 15 months, just these 15 months, he`s been written about probably more than any other person in the country. Over the course of his life, the amount of press that there`s been on Donald Trump is just staggering. Can you learn anything new at this point?
FISHER: Well, there`s a lot -- Donald Trump is the first major party presidential candidate to run for office without having previously held elective office since Dwight Eisenhower. So as much as he`s been a celebrity for decades, he has not been examined. His life has not been examined with the same kind of rigor as any politician would go through just as a matter of course of their career.
And so there are all kinds of business deals, his family ancestry, his childhood, what are his values. What are the principles he operates by. All of these things have gone unexamined. And so we`ve seen this on in the book. And he said all I want is a fair and accurate book and that`s what we delivered.
Now, he may not like the idea that his life is being examined, but that`s what politics is all about. The voters get to decide what is the character of this person, what are his principles, what does he believe in, why does he say the things he does? And that`s what we examine in this book.
HAYES: Michael, can you talk a little bit about -- we were just talking in earlier segments about this sort of him channeling this kind of white nationalism, he`s sort of played footsie with the alt-right. He hired Steve Bannon who runs a webiste that is beloved by those folks.
His views on race, how much of that is a through line -- his views about immigration, race, African-Americans -- throughout sort of the totality of the guy`s career?
KRANISH: Well, chris, one of the foundational stories of Donald Trump that we tell in detail in the book is the story of 1973 when the federal government sued Donald Trump, his father Fred, and their company for not renting to blacks.
The government sent testers in, found that blacks were being directed to other facilities and sued Donald and Fred Trump. And Donald eventually had to decide, do I fight or do I settle? He met Roy Cohen at a nighclub one night in New York City. And Roy Cohen was Joe McCarthy`s infamous lawyer back in the Arthur McCarthy hearings, convinced Donald Trump, fight like hell, Roy Cohen told Trump.
And so Roy Cohen filed a $100 million counterclaim against the federal government. Lost that right away. And eventually they did have to settle the case.
So I think you see a little bit of the development story there and the animus that Trump has had towards the federal government. He still thinks that case was unfair.
HAYES: You know there`s also, Marc, there`s also this through line, it seems to me, the sort of person who has a real chip on their shoulder about being seen as one of the elite, that he was sort of new money, that he had sort of not made his way, and you saw that replay in the chip on his shoulder against, say, Jeb Bush and the establishment in how he`s gone about this whole campaign.
FISHER: Donald Trump grew up quite wealthy. His father was a very successful real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens, and yet Donald Trump from the very early part of his life thought of himself as a man of the people. He was closer to the construction workers on the site, the cab drivers, than he was to his fellow wealthy people. And he thought of himself just as we`ve seen in this campaign, as a truth teller, as a non-PC kind of guy.
And you know, you can see in his speech mannerisms in the way he carries himself as a person, he used to hang out in the `70s and `80s, not with some of his fellow executives, but with the security guards in his office, that sort of thing.
So, that`s very much a part of his identity, that`s the way he`s sort of tried to live down his wealthy background.
But, you know, he has lived a very secluded life. And a lot of the kinds of things that people take as racially offensive or as insults are really the kind of language of someone, a white guy growing up in the 1950s, whose language is essentially unchanged since then. And things that he thinks are funny in a Don Rickles sort of way, come off today as insulting or offensive
HAYES: All right, Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher, thank you both. Appreciate it.
Still ahead, as Donald Trump calls for the closure of the Clinton Foundation, how the people witnessed what the foundation has done firsthand are responding, that`s ahead.
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HAYES: Thing one tonight, before he was tapped to run as vice president, Indiana Governor Mike Pence wasn`t exactly very well known nationally. Immediately after Trump picked him to be his running mate, a poll found that 53 percent of people didn`t know enough about Mike Pence to say he was a good or bad choice, and 76 percent said the Pence pick made no difference on whether they would vote for Trump or not.
Today, after a solid month of campaigning on the Republican ticket, is Mike Pence any better known? Recent polls suggests yes, but as the governor learned at a Pennsylvania barber shop today, still a work in progress.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. MIKE PENCE, (R) INDIANA: It`s a great haircut, Henry. perfect.
HENRY, BARBER: It`s been a pleasure, young man.
PENCE; That`s great.
HENRY: Now, your name are?
PENCE: Mike Pence.
HENRY: Mike Pence.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, your name?
We`re going to play that again. And you have to see what happens next. That`s thing two. It`s coming in just 60 seconds.
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HAYES: The only reason Henry Jones of Norristown, Pennsylvania opened his barber shop today was because a local state representative asked him for a favor. He said he had a friend who needed a hair cut. And thus it was that governor, Mike Pence, ended up in the barber`s chair surrounded by family and press making small talk about grandkids and football as 74-year- old Henry Jones gave him a quick trim.
All pretty standard photo-op campaign stuff until the moment it was over when it became immediately clear that no one had told Henry Jones exactly whose hair he had just cut.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PENCE: That`s great.
JONES: Now, your name was?
PENCE: Mike Pence.
JONES: Mike Pence.
PENCE: Yes, sir. I`m the governor of the state of Indiana.
JONES: OK.
PENCE: I`m running for vice president of the United States.
JONES: Go ahead, man. Go ahead. Vice president?
PENCE: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
JONES: Oh, boy.
PENCE: I`m running with Donald Trump. So I`m his running mate.
JONES: OK, all right.
PENCE: We just tapped me a month ago. So we`re just in town doing a rally, campaigning and I heard you were the place to come for a hair cut.
JONES: Oh, boy.
PENCE: And you`re very gracious.
JONES: That`s great, great. Good to meet you. Give me a handshake again, man. Boy that`s great. That`s history, I`m telling you.
PENCE: We`re hoping to make some history.
JONES: OK.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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TRUMP: Well, number one, they should shut it down. Number two, they should give the money back to a lot of countries that we shouldn`t be taking and they shouldn`t be taking money from.
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HAYES: The Clinton Foundation finds itself at the center of Donald Trump`s latest attacks. Trump first calling on the Clintons to shut down their charitable organization, later demanding a special prosecutor look into it.
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TRUMP: The amounts involved, the favors done, and the significant number of times it was done require an expedited investigation by a special prosecutor immediately, immediately, immediately.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: This, as conservative group released new emails showing Clinton Foundation officials asking favors of Clinton staff while she was secretary of state.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENITIFIED MALE: In one email, foundation official Douglas Bann (ph) writes Clinton aide Huma Abedin for a meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain, also a big donor, noting good friend of ours.
A few days later, Abedin arranges the meeting after he goes through diplomatic channels.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: And now a new report the Associated Press giving more fuel to critics, a review of the State Department calendar shows more than half the people outside the government who met or called Clinton when she was Secretary of State, donated to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton campaign, however, is pushing back at that report, calling it grossly unfair and inaccurate, quote, "it cherry picked a limited subset of Secretary Clinton`s schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation."
Clearly, we should note, the secretary met with more than the amount of people that are listed in that article.
Now, just last week, the Clinton Foundation announced it would not take money from corporations or foreign entities if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
Bill Clinton also announced he will step down from his role on the foundation`s board and no longer raise funds for it.
But what has gotten lost in all the talk of emails and access, demands to shut it down, is what is the Clinton Foundation actually does. Supporters point out it has improved the lives of millions of people. The foundation, which has been in operation since 1997, isn`t a foundation, but a public charity. It`s funded through donations, and spends most of the money it raises on its own programs, unlike foundations that mainly give grants to other non-profits deemed worthy.
Clinton Foundation operates several different programs focused on a variety of topics, from combating climate change, to reducing poverty, and tackling some of the world`s most pressing public health issues, particularly in the global south.
Next, someone who has witnessed the foundation`s work firsthand, some are pushing back at the calls to shut it down.
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HAYES: Amidst all the talk of emails and access, demands to shut it down, a number of people who have dealt with the Clinton Foundation`s work firsthand have pushed back at the criticism. One of those people, political scientist Laura C., took to Twitter yesterday, sharing a moving and powerful testament to the work of the Clinton Foundation as she witnessed it while she was doing research in Africa.
She wrote of the Clinton Foundation bringing anti-retroviral drug programs to treat children with HIV when few other organizations were, saving the lives of many.
Yes, there are conflicts of interest between Hillary Clinton`s run for office and donations the foundation receives. It`s complex. But saying shut it down without any context or understanding that hundreds of thousands of innocent people would die is irresponsible. And I for one am very grateful the Clinton Foundation saved the lives of some Congolese kids who have grown up to be amazing adults.
Joining me now, Michael Cohen, columnist for the Boston Globe, author of the book American Maelstrom, 1968 election, the politics of division. And David Sirota, senior editor for Investigations International Business Times.
And, David, let me start with you. You have done reporting for your publication about possible, or perceptual conflicts between donors on the one side of the Clinton Foundation, things the Secretary of State office did, but to me part of the central issue is, how are donations to a foundation corrupting, right? When you think about -- when you sort of center the work of what the foundation does, which it actual does these good things, the story about corruption seems to me complicated by, if someone`s giving money to get kids in Africa anti-retroviral drugs, that`s not the same as giving to your campaign, per se.
DAVID SIROTA, INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES: Well, there`s a couple things. I mean, one the Clinton Foundation is soliciting these contributions, so they`re asking for these contributions from people who have or had business before Hillary Clinton`s State Department. So they`re asking for something while Secretary Clinton was in a position of public power.
So that`s one potential conflict.
Let`s also remember that the foundation, it has done by all reviews, it has done a lot of good work, but let`s also remember it`s built a political profile, a continuing political for the Clintons. It`s not like they don`t get anything out of the Clinton Foundation.
So, I think that`s an important part.
And then, again, to go back to this, there`s a question of access. What are the donors getting? I mean, these are not stupid donors, these are sophisticated donors -- foreign governments, corporations with business before the government. When they are giving money, what are they expecting?
And if you`re going to argue that let`s say the Saudis are giving money to the Clinton Foundation because they`re great humanitarians, I mean, that`s kind of a ridiculous argument.
I mean, really, you have to ask, what do the donors think they`re getting, and why do they continue to give?
HAYES: Michael, my sense is you think this is all essentially overblown, that there`s no actual smoke here. So what is the response to that? Why is the Saudi government giving the Clinton Foundation money if not to essentially purchase access or influence?
MICHAEL COHEN, BOSTON GLOBE: I suppose that`s part of the reason. It`s maybe also just to burnish their international reputation. But the fact is, if you`re going to say that these donations led to access at the State Department, you have to prove that that actually happened. And every story that I`ve seen proves the opposite. Donors go through the Clinton Foundation to State Department trying to get help with things, and they`re rebuffed, or they`re not responded to.
And so there is no actual additional access that a donation provides to them.
So, I`m sure what the scandal is actually here.
I keep reading more and more, it seems to me Clinton donors are able to send emails to Huma Abedin that don`t get returned or don`t get responded to, or i`m not sure that`s a scandal. And it seems to me that the perception here of conflict of interest it`s what`s driving this, not the actual conflict of interest or actual wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons.
HAYES: Right. So, David, on this point, right -- so this is, it seems to me, part of the crux of the issue. If you made two categories, prominent global citizens, or nations that gave money to the Clinton Foundation, it`s a huge list, right? And then prominent global citizens who might meet with the secretary of state or heads of state who might with the secretary of state, those are big lists. They have a lot of people between them. And sometimes it seems to me like the AP story talks about a, quote, Bangladeshi banker with business. It`s Mohammed Yunus who won the Nobel prize who invented microfinance, or sort of -- it`s not crazy that Mohammed Yunus is meeting with the secretary of state. The fact that he might have given some money to the Clinton Foundation doesn`t strike me as the reason that he`s getting that meeting in any plausible scenario.
SIROTA: Well, we can`t know. I think -- your presumption is that it wasn`t because of money, but we can`t know. And I think that`s the key point here is that when businesses and foreign governments have business with the State Department, the question becomes is there a conflict of interest? If the secretary of state`s family foundation is soliciting contributions from those same people, who have business with her office.
I mean, we reported in our series about arms deals. I mean, foreign governments gave huge amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation at precisely the time that those foreign governments saw a huge increase in armed exports authorizations from the Clinton-led State Department. Was there access bought? Were the arms deals, the specific arms deals bought from those contributions? We do not know.
But it used to be in this country that a perception or a potential conflict of interest was enough to say, you know, that`s not something that people in government should be involved in.
COHEN: There was actually a memorandum of understand that was signed between the Clinton Foundation and the Obama administration that allowed for the Clinton Foundation to continue to exist, to allow for people who had given money to the Clinton Foundation to actually have interaction with the State Department.
I mean, there`s an actual memorandum, a document that the Clinton Foundation and the State Department had to adhere to, and they did.
So to argue that the conflict of interest perception, when there was literally an agreement to prevent that any kind of conflict from occurring, is sort of crazy to me.
SIROTA: There were agreements between Obama officials. There were agreements between Obama officials -- Obama and Clinton officials, so we should not scrutinize that.
COHEN: You can look that up!
(CROSSTALK)
SIROTA: Your argument is that because the president signed a memorandum of agreement with his own aide, therefore journalists shouldn`t scrutinize this, therefore, the public shouldn`t ask questions, therefore, we should simply say that government officials who have business with corporations and foreign governments, that we shouldn`t say that they may potentially be a problem, just because the Obama administration signed a memo between itself is absurd. That is an absurd argument.
COHEN: If you`re ignoring the rules that existed to guide interaction between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, then you`re missing a big part of the story.
HAYES: Let me just say this. To me, the argument on the perception end seems the strongest argument here, right, which is that, yes, you are going to be in a condition in which you can -- there`s a plausible case for conflict of interest, right? And that to me seems to be ultimately what is being acknowledged in the announcements that are happening now, which is that, yes, I don`t think the Clinton folks think they did anything wrong. I don`t think they sold the Saudis arms because of a Saudi donation, but I think they have come around to believing, based on their announcements, if she is president of the United States, you cannot run things in this way precisely because of this back and forth.
Michael Cohen and David Sirota, thank you very much. Appreciate that.
That is ALL IN for this evening.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END