Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: September 20, 2016 Guest: Ken Burns, Zainab Salbi, Sherrod Brown, David K. Johnston, Kurt Eichenwald, Ben Jealous
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: They`re bringing in -- in many cases, this is cancer from within.
(END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES (voice-over): Donald Trump`s descent into darkness continues.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We want to make sure we are only admitting people into our country who love our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (voice-over): Tonight, filmmaker Ken Burns on what he sees when Donald Trump speaks, and the dangerous logic behind the Trump campaign.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, JR., EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: If we had a bowl of Skittles on this table and three of the thousand in there were poisonous, would you take from the bowl?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (voice-over): Plus, if you thought that Donald Trump`s charity looked like a slush fund before, wait until you hear the latest from the Washington Post. Then, Hillary Clinton on the shocking Tulsa shooting.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILLARY CLINTON, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Maybe I can by speaking directly to white people say, look, this is not who we are.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (voice-over): Senator Sherrod Brown on today`s grilling of the Wells Fargo CEO. And you`ll never guess which ex-president is now ready for Hillary.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Excuse me, Jeb --
(END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES (voice-over): When ALL IN starts right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEB BUSH, FORMER GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA: That is not a fact.
TRUMP: Am I talking or are you talking?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. Donald Trump and his surrogates have said so many offensive things in this campaign, it can be easy to start tuning out each new outrage, to stop thinking about what`s really being said and what`s really at stake. Especially if the new outrage is over something as seemingly benign as a bowl full of candy. In the wake of the bombings in New York this weekend, the candidate`s son and one of his top advisors, Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted out this image last night, complete with Trump campaign branding, which reads, quote, if I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That`s our Syrian refugee problem. Now keep in mind the man who allegedly planted the bombs was a U.S. citizen and not a refugee, and he came to the country from Afghanistan when he was 7 years old. And also keep in mind the Skittles analogy wasn`t just an offhand tweet. It is, for Donald Trump, Jr., a talking point.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We have to be able to vet people coming into our country. If we had a bowl of Skittles on this table and three of the thousand in there were poisonous, would you take from the bowl? You wouldn`t, until you could figure out which ones were bad.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now there`s a glaring problem with this analogy, which was, funnily enough, I suppose, pointed out by the very people who make Skittles. It was said in a statement, quote, Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. Because, you see, a Skittle doesn`t care if you eat it or not. A human being, like this little boy covered in dust and blood pulled from a bombed building last month in the Syrian city of Aleppo, he cares if you take him in, keep him safe from harm, maybe even give him a chance of a secure life. The logic being pushed by Donald Trump, Jr., it isn`t new. I mean, for years the basic promise of body hair has been used to justify treating members of some specific other group, some minority group, with suspicion or fear, contempt. To argue, for instance, that because some black people are criminals and you don`t know which black people are criminals, well, then you have to treat all black people like criminals. White supremacists have explicitly used this argument with a bowl of M&M`s standing in for the Skittles. And we should be very clear, it`s the same logic at the heart of one of Donald Trump`s signature policy proposals.
TRUMP: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country`s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
HAYES: Trump and his campaign has sought to tweak or obfuscate this policy, but they`ve never withdrawn it, they`ve never repudiated it, this call for total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. It`s still right there up on the Trump campaign`s website. Just yesterday in the wake of this weekend`s attacks, Trump was warning darkly of this menace.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I`ve been saying this is going to be like the Trojan horse. We`re letting tens of thousands --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mm-hmm.
TRUMP: -- of people flow into this country. And they`re bringing in -- in many cases, this is cancer from within. This is something that`s --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
TRUMP: -- going to be so tough. And you know, they stay together. So nobody really knows who it is --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, right. OK.
TRUMP: -- what`s happening. They`re plotting. They keep plotting --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The logic that undergirds this kind of thinking is flatly and unambiguously the fundamental logic of bigotry, of ethnic, racial and religious hatred. It has a very dark history. In 1938 in Germany, Julius Streicher published an anti-Semitic children`s book called The Poisonous Mushroom. And in it a mother tells her son, quote, just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire volk of people. Streicher, a close ally of Adolf Hitler, was executed in 1946 for crimes against humanity. Donald Trump is not a Nazi. He is not espousing Nazism, the horror and evil of which has a singular place in history. But the rhetoric that Trump and his campaign are routinely trafficking in, the characterization of entire groups as appearing on the outside to be harmless, but containing potential poison within of infiltrating our pure people with their poison, with their cancer? That is dark stuff. It plays to the most elementally based instincts in human history, the fuel of fear and hatred for the stranger and the other that burn in the darkest chapters of human memory. That is what is powering this campaign right now as we live through this moment of what feels to me like capital H history. And we don`t know where it goes. Here with me now, award-winning documentary making filmmaker Ken Burns, co-director of the new film Defying the Nazis: The Sharps` War, which airs tonight on PBS. It`s about an American couple who repeatedly risked their lives to rescue Jews, dissidents, and other refugees from Hitler`s regime. Look, there`s a thing called Godwin`s law, right, on the Internet? You don`t want to make analogies to Hitler, for I think really good reasons. Arguments end up in these sort of dead ends, it`s very easy to invoke. So I want to just sort of bracket that and just talk a little bit about working on this film, how you are viewing this election with that sort of going through your mind as you`re working.
KEN BURNS, FILMMAKER, DEFYING THE NAZIS: THE SHARPS` WAR: You wish that you could say that you planned to do a film on refugees the day the president`s in town talking about refugees. We didn`t. We`ve been working on it for years and years and years, my partner Artemis Joukowsky and I. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn`t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And what`s very clear is that we`re hearing some rancid rhymes from the past. It isn`t Nazism. But the tropes are too similar to not put us or those of us who spend our time sifting through history in an incredibly uncomfortable position where we have to sort of wave a flag and say wait, wait, this is going on again. It may not be exactly the same thing, but we`re poised to be in a position where these things can happen. So working on a film about people who have sacrificed their lives, who have given up their home life of, you know, a middle class Unitarian minister and his wife in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the most difficult thing before them is what they`re going to say on Sunday. They get a call from the church elders a month later, she`s dodging Gestapo agents, he`s laundering money, they`re writing in code, they`re burning documents. They appealed to the better angels of our nature. This does not.
HAYES: When we think about refugees, and people have talked about the U.S.`s history of refugees, and indeed our refugee policy is largely born of guilt over what we failed to do --
BURNS: That`s right.
HAYES: -- during that period. People say to me -- I even said this today -- you know, replace the word Jew in any of this language about these groups and it suddenly strikes you in a different way. And they say, well, that`s different.
BURNS: Yes.
HAYES: That`s different. You know, there`s the Islamic State and there`s this single religion that`s focused on terror. People had arguments back in the 1930s --
BURNS: It goes back to --
HAYES: -- about why it`s bad to let Jewish refugees in.
BURNS: It goes back to the 1830s. You`ve got Irish and Catholics and Germans were demonized around the First World War. Jews, everybody. But we made excuses about why we couldn`t let them in, which is what makes the Skittles analogy of today so fraudulent and so perilous. And we now have to just invoke those better angels. We have to say enough, this is not who we are.
HAYES: The subjects of your film are operating in a time when Americans are not that into the idea of taking a lot of refugees. I mean, in some ways they stand out for exactly that reason.
BURNS: It echoes the period that Franklin Roosevelt and particularly Eleanor Roosevelt were so frustrated that -- a clearly anti-Semitic State Department, laws passed by Congress that were excluding quotas the number of people that could be let in. And so we`re facing the same kinds of things today, and we`re watching ourselves go through that again.
HAYES: What do you say to someone who says, look, I`m not a bigot, I don`t care --
BURNS: But.
HAYES: Well, no. But someone who just says, look, I`m scared. Look, it looks like this guys just tried to set off a bunch of bombs. There but for dumb luck we would be looking at dozens of people dead.
BURNS: Right.
HAYES: And, you know, sure, OK, most of them are fine. But I don`t know, it makes me uneasy to think that one of them might not be.
BURNS: Right. But you don`t want to invent an entire superstructure of attitudes towards whole groups of people based on that one action. It`s like saying all black people are...
HAYES: Right.
BURNS: It just doesn`t happen. I mean, you would turn around and -- let`s just take Dylan Roof, the man --
HAYES: Yes.
BURNS: -- accused of killing people in Charleston a year plus ago. And would you say does he stand in for all white people? Do we now have to be very careful about --
HAYES: Yes.
BURNS: -- white people now? Of course not, we don`t say that. So we have to be very, very careful.
HAYES: Does that word cancer that Donald Trump uttered, does that strike you in a particular way?
BURNS: It does indeed. I`ve made a film on cancer, my mother died of cancer. But I also know what metastasis is within a body politic. And I think that for Donald Trump to be speaking in that way is itself the cancer. That`s the problem right now. We do not wish these attitudes to grow in the United States here where we are an alloy. We are stronger because of all the things that have made us. That makes us the strongest nation on earth. And once you begin accepting people, you`re Orwell`s Animal Farm, all animals are created equal except some animals are more equal than others.
HAYES: As someone who has been making films about history in America in all different periods, particularly sort of famously probably the most wrenching period, the Civil War, how do the stakes of this election feel to you?
BURNS: I`ve just finished a film that`ll be out next year on Vietnam, and I feel like that was the second civil war. And I sort of feel like we`re in a third --
HAYES: Hmm.
BURNS: -- civil war right now. And I think that despite all the divisions, the sides, they appeal to our basest instincts in this election, that all of us, whatever the side, yearn for the things that we share in common, yearn for those mystic cords of memory, for those better angels of our nature that Lincoln in our first Civil War articulated. And I have been struggling all of my professional life, but particularly now to find the words to try to describe how powerfully objective an awareness of the past can be for dealing --
HAYES: Yes. BURNS: -- with these things. To take the examples that we already know. We`ve been here before, folks, we know what this looks like. We don`t want to go through that door. We want to go through this door. We want to bring people together --
HAYES: Yes.
BURNS: -- and try to do things in common. And it`s not a red state or a blue state issue.
HAYES: Yes.
BURNS: This is just an American issue. And I would just refer people back to the Constitution. It`s very, very clear. It`s not a beautifully written document --
HAYES: For what it protects, yes.
BURNS: -- it`s just an amazing machine. Preamble`s nice. Go to the Declaration for poetry, the Gettysburg Address for poetry, but if you want a mechanical manual for how to fix things, it`s right there. It`s right there, and it`s just four pieces of parchment --
HAYES: Yes.
BURNS: -- written in the 18th century that`s able to adjudicate our most complicated problems in this the new 21st century. It`s the best thing there is. But you got to know it and read it, and you`ve got to be willing to say sometimes it doesn`t fit in with a convenient binary --
HAYES: Right.
BURNS: -- approach to politics.
HAYES: Right. Ken Burns, the new work airs tonight on PBS. It`s really a pleasure. Come back anytime, all right?
BURNS: Thank you.
HAYES: Authorities said today that Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man accused of setting the bombs in New York and New Jersey over the weekend, including the attack in New York City that injured 29 people will be charged with federal counts of using a weapon of mass destruction and bombing public places. Rahami is believed to have purchased bomb material off eBay, used his own name. And law enforcement sources tell NBC News when he was arrested he was carrying a notebook containing a rambling missive that praised a slain al-Qaeda leader and mentioned deadly terror attacks. NBC News also learned Rahami`s father, Mohammed, once branded him a terrorist during a family fight. Though questioned by the FBI, the elder Rahami said he made the statement out of spite, that it was not true. The FBI, which had opened what`s called an assessment then dropped the case. I`m joined now by author and activist Zainab Salbi, Editor-At-Large Women in the World, founder of Women International, Malcolm Nance, career Naval intelligence officer and now an MSNBC terrorism analyst. And, Malcolm, let me start with you. So first let`s sort of start with the numbers here in this sort of Skittles analogy and then we`ll talk about Rahami, right. So we should just be clear there`s over 700,000 refugees that have been taken since 9/11. None have ever been linked to a deadly terrorist attack.
MALCOLM NANCE, MSNBC ANALYST: Right.
HAYES: The odds people put of somewhere one in 10 billion. There are refugees that in Europe have appeared to play some role in terrorist plots, but we`re talking about huge and massive numbers. From an intelligence perspective, why is this bad logic? From an intelligence prospective, from doing the job that you were tasked with doing and that so many people are tasked with doing, which is protecting American lives, why not think like the Skittles bowl?
NANCE: Well, right off the bat, the first thing it does is it -- first off, it`s racist. It`s just plain, strait out, flat out racist. Now I cannot operate in the Middle East and the rest of the world in a fish bowl of 1.6 billion innocent people whom we are assisting as war fighters and intelligence officers in the field with our Muslim allies, who are our partners in this fight, who we have shed blood for, who we have fought together with to get rid of this scourge of ISIS and al-Qaeda, right? That being said, I need everyone in the United States and as our allies to work together with this.
HAYES: Right.
NANCE: And if you separate this 10,000, you know, Syrian refugees or however many people and you say that they`re a plague and they`ve got poison in them and they`re coming to this country and doing that, well, right now what you`ve done is you`ve condemned -- as Ken Burns so eloquently put -- our entire history of immigration. But as an intelligence officer and a war fighter, you are taking resources from me. You are taking --
HAYES: Right.
NANCE: -- people who could help me.
HAYES: Who could tell you things.
NANCE: Let me tell you, foreign broadcast information service, we can use every person who is fluent in Syrian dialect Arabic right now.
HAYES: Zainab?
ZAINAB SALBI, FOUNDER, WOMEN INTERNATIONAL: But may I say, but refugees are the most vetted people who enter America, just so we know.
HAYES: This is, of course, the irony. Yes.
NANCE: (INAUDIBLE) steps.
SALBI: Exactly. It takes about two years` process. They`re vetted by several government agencies. If anybody can squeeze in are the illegal immigrants --
HAYES: Right.
SALBI: -- you know, they are the ones who can, you know.
HAYES: Right.
SALBI: But refugees are the most vetted. It`s impossible that they -- like, this is the best way to enter the country. The safest people are the refugees, actually.
HAYES: What do you think, Zainab, of this story -- you know, we began in this very interesting territory with this sort of thing. The father said at some point that he thought he was a terrorist. There`s all these questions that then why wasn`t he caught. And, you know, they talk about ideological vetting. You know, this man came when he was a 7-year-old kid. You know, you`re coming from a part in the world -- you once lived in Iraq -- that has been torn asunder by brutal violence perpetrated by ISIS, among others. You know, in that part of the world, obviously, the conversation about this is very different.
SALBI: The conversation about that part of the world is very different, and the damage Mr. Trump has done is actually very long-term damage in the Middle East. For example --
HAYES: What do you mean by that?
SALBI: Well, for example, public sentiment in the Middle East believe that ISIS has been supported by America. This is conspiracy theory, very popular in the Middle East. They say Muslims in the Middle East believe that.
HAYES: Yes. The leader of Hezbollah, in fact.
SALBI: Well, but normal people.
HAYES: Yes, right.
SALBI: Both believe that. But when Mr. Trump goes on TV and says it`s been founded by President Obama and Mrs. Hillary Clinton, this all the sudden makes it real. And that is long-term damage for America. HAYES: This is essentially -- you know, I saw the leader of Hezbollah saying in a speech after that, look, the American presidential nominee has said what we`ve been saying all along -- SALBI: Exactly. NANCE: Yes. HAYES: -- ISIS is an American creation. SALBI: Exactly. Now why this is a problem, A, it damages American reputation on the long haul. This is not, like, a sarcastic moment for Middle Easterners. HAYES: Right. SALBI: The second thing is, we`re trying to fight ISIS from within the Middle East. HAYES: Right. SALBI: This is a destruction of our own countries. And unless we own that problem, then we keep on blaming each other for it. HAYES: And this is part of what`s so perverse here, right? I mean, if there`s a unifying force in the world today, I would say, it`s ISIS, who are about the most universally loathed group in the world by people of all faiths, all creeds. I mean, and they have attacked and killed people of all faiths and creeds, and they are rejected by the overwhelming majority. And as you said, you want as many people in the pool trying to figure out how to stop them. NANCE: Yes. You know, Osama Bin Laden himself said the reason he didn`t want to go to a caliphate is because it would bring the world crushing down on it. I don`t know who Donald Trump is getting his intelligence from. But ISIS is on the verge of destruction, OK. Pay attention to the news. We`re about to do a major offensive on Mosul. HAYES: Mosul, yes. NANCE: Raqqa is surrounded on almost three sides right now. In another year, there will be no physical caliphate. Egypt has slaughtered him. HAYES: Right. NANCE: Libya has kicked them out. So to do this, you know, we need as many allies as possible. HAYES: And -- yes? SALBI: If I may -- HAYES: Yes. SALBI: -- and beyond that, there are only 1 percent Muslims in America. I`m one of them. HAYES: Yes. SALBI: Only 1 percent are Muslim -- HAYES: Yes. SALBI: -- all right? According to the FBI, nearly 80 percent of all terrorist attacks in America has happened by none of them, right? HAYES: Yes. This is an important statistic. SALBI: You are more likely to die out of a car accident -- 300 times more likely -- HAYES: Yes.
SALBI: -- to die in a car accident in Orlando than a terrorist attack, right? HAYES: Yes. SALBI: And yet all the 1 percent of Muslims in America, let alone the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world have been categorized and narrowed as one -- HAYES: Yes. SALBI: -- identity: you are bad. People are scared. I just actually went to Minnesota where a lot of attack is happening against -- HAYES: Yes. SALBI: -- Muslims. They are scared for their lives right now, the Muslims, of Americans.
HAYES: Yes. All right, Zainab Salbi and Malcolm Nance, thank you so much for your time tonight. I really appreciate it.
NANCE: It`s our pleasure.
SALBI: Thank you.
HAYES: Still ahead, a massive discovery by the Washington Post today that Donald Trump reportedly used money from his charity to pay off his legal settlements. Much more on that report ahead. But first, the CEO of Wells Fargo grilled on Capitol Hill today over widespread fraud at his company. Senator Sherrod Brown was part of that hearing, joins me to talk about it ahead.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D), OHIO: -- to minimize your influence with the board. You`re the chairman of the board --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: I call it fraud because I got tired of the euphemisms a long time ago. I think the American people did, too. This is 5,300 employees. Wells Fargo calls them team members. 5,300 team members forging signatures, stealing identities, social security numbers, and customers` hard-earned cash so as to hang onto their low-paying jobs and make money for the high-paid executives at Wells Fargo.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That was Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown at a hearing today at Capitol Hill called to investigate the massive systemic fraud at Wells Fargo uncovered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Over a five-year period, more than 5,000 Wells Fargo employees opened up millions of accounts for customers without the customers` knowledge. The scheme yielded just 2.4 million dollars in fees for those customers, but it drove the bank`s stock price up, made hundreds of millions for executives, none of whom have been fired. At the hearing this morning, the CEO of Wells Fargo had a pretty rough go of it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D), MASS.: OK. So you haven`t resigned, you haven`t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven`t fired a single senior executive. Instead, evidently your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don`t have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It`s gutless leadership.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: And joining me now, Senator Sherrod Brown, ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee. And, Senator, the malfeasance here and the fraud seems so brazen. What were you trying to learn in this hearing in terms of -- I think a lot of people when this first broke thought, well, how do you get 5,300 people independently doing the same thing without this being a bigger problem up the chain?
BROWN: Well, a couple things we wanted to do. One is I wanted to make the contrast that 5,300 employees who were fired, mostly who were -- you know, they did things they shouldn`t, but they were under great pressure from management to meet goals that actually Wells Fargo has rescinded those goals because they were just too unattainable. 5,300 people fired, 90 percent of them were non-management, only 10 percent of them management. So they were making $13 an hour as tellers, $15 or $16 or $17 an hour as personal bankers. At the same time, the head of the section who had just retired at the age of 56 and she was given up to $120 million bonus. So I want to make those contrasts that bank executives make more and more and more money, and bank rank and file workers are still stuck at $12 and $13 and $14 an hour. So the second thing is, what`s Wells Fargo going to do to begin to claw back some of this compensation? They have the right under the law to claw back, meaning to strip some of those -- that $120 million package from her saying, frankly, you engaged in malfeasance, you didn`t do good performance, you didn`t meet our standards, you shouldn`t get this kind of goodbye package. So we didn`t get an answer from the CEO about that. He just said, well, I`ll follow what the compensation committee would do. He never said he would advise the compensation committee. Under pretty intense questioning, never said he`d advise the compensation committee to claw back those dollars.
HAYES: I mean, I just want to be clear here, right. We`ve got a bank management-designed incentive structure that is paying -- you know, is essentially incentivizing. Clearly the management structure is amiss when 5,300 people independently are doing this same kind of gaming, right. So there`s a management structure here that seems deeply at issue but doesn`t stop at the 5,300 people who did it, one would assume.
BROWN: Yes. In addition to 5,300, there were hundreds, maybe thousands that just quit because they didn`t want to live like this, maybe they had another opportunity so they moved on because of that or they just quit because they just didn`t think they could live under this kind of asking them to do whatever it takes, including breaking the law. But when you look at this company, no top managers, top executives -- all of them making multiple millions of dollars a year -- none of them had any give back, claw back, deductions from their pay, any penalties, while 5,200 low wage workers lost their jobs and hundreds of others quit because they just didn`t want to cheat, didn`t want to be called to do these things.
HAYES: So I just want to be clear, as of now for this scheme that was basically uncovered, there is no financial penalty that`s been paid by anyone except the lowest level workers and a few people in management?
BROWN: Yes, and that`s exactly right, Chris. And that`s compounded by these firings have been going on for five years, starting --
HAYES: Right.
BROWN: -- at least in maybe 2011, maybe earlier. A thousand a year, 2011, 12, 13, 14, 15, roughly a thousand a year. The CEO didn`t know this was going on until the consumer bureau came in and then the LA Times wrote about it. But he found out about these firings and these unauthorized accounts -- apparently, he says -- from the consumer bureau --
HAYES: Huh.
BROWN: -- not from this woman who was directly under him who he says he met with once a week for the last eight years. He didn`t find it out from her that they had fired a thousand people a year for this kind of opening these unauthorized accounts. So something`s amiss.
HAYES: Yes.
BROWN: And we don`t know enough yet.
HAYES: All right. Senator Sherrod Brown, thanks for your time tonight.
BROWN: Thanks, Chris, for shining a light on --
HAYES: Still ahead, a bizarre story about Donald Trump, a charity golf tournament, and the 11 yards of grass worth more than a million dollars. That`s coming up right after this break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: So there`s this charity golf tournament at Donald Trump`s course in Westchester, New York, back in 2010, hosted by former NBA star Alonzo Mourning. And like lots of those tournaments, there`s a huge prize on one of the par-3`s if a player can hit a hole in one. All right. The prize at Trump National that day was one million dollars if the player hits an ace in the par-3 13, the course`s signature hole. And it`s listed now as 120 yards from the white tees. And guess what? One player put it in the hole, a guy named Martin Greenberg who got his picture here with Alonzo Mourning. You can see Zo signed the photo noted, 1 mil. But Martin Greenberg never got his money. As the New York post reported at the time, the insurer backing the event refused to pay up claiming Greenberg`s required 150-yard shot had only traveled 139 yards. Greenberg sued, his lawyer telling the daily news the markers of the tee were not set at the right yardage, that the course, owned by Trump in this case, traditionally sets those markers. So the course had set up a contest on a hole too short for the player actually to be eligible to win. Donald Trump settled that lawsuit and agreed to pay $150,000 to the charity of Greenberg`s choice. But the story doesn`t end there. Because according to a new bombshell report by the Washington Post and David Fahrenthold, it wasn`t Trump who paid that settlement. That story is coming up.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Protests in Tulsa, Oklahoma again today following the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man Terence Crutcher. A warning, this video contains graphic content. This is helicopter video released yesterday by Tulsa police. The incident happened on Friday evening. Crutcher is seen here in the white t-shirt, his hands raised next to his SUV which is in the middle of the road.
We don`t know why the car is in the middle of the road.
According to Tulsa police spokesperson, Jeanne McKenzie (ph) officers on the scene say that Crutcher did not follow commands. Quoting Spokeswoman McKenzie, they continued to talk to him, he continued not to listen and follow any commands. As they got closer to the vehicle, he reached inside the vehicle, at that time there was a taser deployment and a short time later there was one shot fired.
As you watch this video ending with Crutcher falling to the ground, you can judge for yourself if that appears to sync up with what you see there.
Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan confirmed there was no gun on Terence Crutcher with one shot, officer Betty Shelby, has been placed on routine administrative leave pending an investigation.
U.S. Department of Justice has also opened its own independent investigation.
The family of Terence Crutcher does not agree with the claim the Tulsa police that Crutcher was non-compliant. They say, through their attorneys, they do not know if Crutcher was under the influence of alcohol or drugs as has been suggested by the lawyer for Officer Shelby.
But even if he was, they say, the deadly police response was not warranted.
A Tulsa police official told the Tulsa World that officers found PCP in Crutcher`s vehicle, but we do not yet know if Crutcher had any drugs in his system. Terence Crutcher was 40 years old and the father of four.
His twin sister Tifftony has asked that protests remain peaceful. In a radio interview today Hillary Clinton had a very strong reaction to the shooting.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILLARY CLINTON, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We`ve got to tackle systemic racism, this horrible shooting again. How many times do we have to see this in our country? In Tulsa, an unarmed man with his hands in the air? I mean, this is just unbearable, and it needs to be intolerable. And so you know, maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people say, look, this is not who we are.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Joining me now, MSNBC contributor Ben Jealous, senior fellow at the center for American progress. He`s endorsed Hillary Clinton.
I feel like we`re at the point in one of these stories -- and it seems awful to say one of these stories, but there have been many of these -- where the initial -- we get the initial sort of oh, my god, I can`t believe it happened, watch the video, and then it`s some detail comes forth and you get people saying, well, there was PCP in the car or, well, he didn`t listen to commands or, well, whatever the explanation is for what we see and think is not justified when you first see it is in fact justified.
BEN JEALOUS, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Look, we had a crazy contrast in the meda in the last 24 hours, because meanwhile, in New Yersey you have a man who planted bombs in multiple places.
HAYES: That`s a fair point.
JEALOUS: Who shot two officers, and the police shot to wound him and took him away. And so it begs the question, how are our police officers being trained and why aren`t they told, if you have a man who has his hands in the air who has been walking backwards. You see him, you know. He appears to be responding to some command. Walking slowly. Why do you need to shoot to kill? And why does this only seem to happen to men of color at least 95 percent of the time? And just why?
But then you have to get to as a country, yes, it needs to be intolerable. And you know what? We need to see chiefs of police lose their jobs, mayors lose their jobs, DA`s lose their jobs if they cannot get these situations under control and hold people accountable for murdering their fellow citizens, but we have to admit other countries are doing this better.
We have no national standards for use of force. We have no national standards for use of force training. Meanwhile, and the average station in this -- the average department, rather, in this country, the standard for use of force training is one day at the academy.
Meanwhile, in England, they have no guns, most officers. And they`re trained every six months. And yes, they have national standards. They`re all trained the same way.
HAYES: And yet, in all those other countries, I mean, the thing that always strikes me is they`re not awash in guns. So if you`re a police officer walking around in England or in Denmark or in Belgium or in Japan, it is not in the back of your hand all the time that a citizen might pull out a gun.
JEALOUS: You know what, that`s exactly right.
HAYES: And that`s layered atop all the other kind of suspicions...
JEALOUS: And the militarization of our country that`s been pushed by the radicals inside of the NRA who control the place, because the NRA is not controlled by the average NRA member, let`s be clear. Who pays a price for that, the militarization...
HAYES: The arms race that happens.
JEALOUS: Right, is black men with their lives, one way or the other.
HAYES: Unarmed.
And here`s -- there`s this exchange that happens in which the pilot -- the helicopter pilot looks down at this individual that we see there and says, that looks like a bad dude. And I thought, man, that phrase -- now, we should be clear the cops didn`t hear that. That`s independent of the cops.
That phrase, I thought why? That seems like the whole thing in a nutshell.
JEALOUS: I mean, you have a suburban man in a t-shirt who is a father of four, and frankly looks like one. And his SUV breaks down, like what a nightmare that your father gets murdered by a police officer because they`re afraid of what he looks like.
And it`s stuff -- you know, and you`re getting me a little bit raw tonight, because it`s like one case too many in so many months and so many years. But the reality is that the FOP needs to stop -- they need to find a way to train officers. They need to find a way to correct officers. This slandering of victims is outrageous.
And by the way, people on PCP don`t look like that. People on PCP, they kind of have superhuman strength, they get massively aggressive. There`s nothing aggressive there.
HAYES: Ben Jealous, thanks for your time tonight. Appreciate it.
JEALOUS: Thank you, apreciate it.
HAYES: Still ahead, the latest revelation about Trump`s use of his foundation`s money that might be the most shocking yet. And we`re still just scraping the surface. More on that ahead. But first, we have tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two right after this break.
(COMMERCIEAL BREAK)
HAYES: Thing One tonight, with just six days until the first presidential debate, many are wondering whether Donald Trump leads the same kind of combative, confrontational style as he did in the primaries when he rolled in as the anti-Jeb candidate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: He has failed in this campaign. It`s been a total disaster. Nobody cares.
JEB BUSH, FRM. GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA: This is a tough business to run for president.
TRUMP: I know, you`re a tough guy, Jeb. I know.
BUSH: And we need to have a leader.
TRUMP: Two days ago he said he would take his pants off and moon everybody, and that`s fine. Nobody reports that.
BUSH: My mom is the strongest woman I know.
TRUMP: She should be, running. Am I talking or are you talking, Jeb?
BUSH: I`m talking right now. You`re never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency.
TRUMP: Let`s see, I`m at 42 and you`re at 3. So, so far I`m doing better. So far I`m doing better.
You`re not talking, you interrupted me again. Are you going to apologize, Jeb? No.
BUSH: Standard operating procedure to disparage me. That`s fine. I don`t really care.
TRUMP: spend a little more money on the commercials.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Well, that helped Trump secure the nomination, it appears now to have cost him the vote of at least one prominent Republican and that`s Thing Two in just 60 seconds.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: It seems as though at least one person might not have been so thrilled with Donald Trump`s treatment of Jeb Bush during the primaries: Jeb`s father.
Politico reported today that President George H.W. Bush plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. Posting this photo from the Facebook page of Kathleen Hardington Kennedy Townsend, daughter of the late RFK. Caption reads, the president told me he`s voting for Hillary.
NBC`s Andrea Mitchell reports Townsend confirmed Bush indeed is with her saying that Bush 41 did in fact tell her that he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton. Spokesman for the former president tells NBC not to expect a public endorsement. The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that, a private vote cast in some 50 days.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund doing favors for oppressive regimes and many others and really many, many others in exchange for cash. Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Donald Trump and other Republicans have long accused Hillary Clinton of misusing the State Department and the Clinton Foundation for personal enrichment, but while scores of reporters have published dozens of stories on potential conflicts of interest through the Clinton family`s various roles, they have all failed to produce a smoking gun.
Now, imagine, if you will, that it turned out that Hillary Clinton had, say, used over $250,000 of the foundation`s money earmarked, let`s say, to buy AIDS medication for children in a developing world, to settle her own personal legal problems. Might cause a bit of a scandal.
That is basically what Donald Trump has done, according to The Washington Post`s David Farenthold who main expertise in combing through Trump`s charitable records.
Aroudn ten years ago, he reports, Trump sued the town of Palm Beach, Florida, over fines on an 80-foot-tall American flag at his club Mar-a- Lago, almost double the height limit set out by town rules.
The suit claimed a smaller flag would -- and I`m quoting here, fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump`s patriotism.
The parties eventually settled. Palm Beach agreed to waive the fines in exchange for a donation from Trump to a specific charity. This is a copy of Trump`s check turned up by The Post, $100,00 to Fisher House, a veteran`s charity, not from Trump himself, but from the Donald J. Trump foundation.
Then there was Donald Trump`s golf course bait and switch, the case of a man who, as I mentioned earlier, won a million dollar prize for a hole in one at Trump`s club in norhtern New York City only to find out later you had to hit the ball 150 yards to win and that particular hole fell short.
The man, Martin Greenberg, sued the golf club. The parties eventually agreed to a settlement requiring the club to donate to a charity of Greenberg`s choice. That money, $158,000 to the Martin Greenberg Foundation came from the Trump Foundation, which reported it in a 2012 IRS filing.
According to the post, the Greenberg Foundation reported no contributions that year from either Trump himself or his golf club.
Just to be clear here, it is illegal to derive personal benefits like, say, fulfilling one`s legal obligations from a non-profit or charitable organization, a practice known as self-dealing.
On top of that, as Farenthold has reported, Donald Trump has given hardly any of his own money to the foundation since 2006, and none at all since 2009. It`s funded almost entirely by other people`s money, including $500,000 from NBC/Universal, our parent company in a 2012.
The Post`s David Farenthold is one of a small handful of reporters doggedly pursuing the truth about Donald Trump`s business and financial dealings in spite of his refusal to release his tax returns. Coming up next, two of those reporters: David K. Johnson, and Kurt Eichenwald.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We`re going to get the Gulf states to pay for safe zones. We`ll lead the project like it`s called OPM, I do that all the time in business -- it`s called other people`s money. There`s nothing like doing things with other people`s money.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Donald Trump at a rally in North Carolina today being uncharacteristically candid about his approach to business. Joining me now, two journalists who know more about that subject than just about anyone, Kurt Eichenwald, senior writer for Newsweek who wrote a recent cover story on the conflicts presented by Trump`s foreign business ties, and David K. Johnston, Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter author of the new book The Making of Donald Trump.
David, let me start with you first on what Farenthold has found, which seems to me like this is a real smoking gun. Like, this is just on its face a violation of the law. You can`t use the foundation to pay off your legal settlements like just -- I mean, this is it.
DAVID K. JOHNSTON, JOURNALIST: This is the, by my count, eighth example of Donald Trump engaging in self-dealing -- taking charitable funds and using them to cover his business costs or his personal obligations. That`s sufficient for the IRS to go after and revoke the charitable status of the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
If this were done by some politician out of favor with the majority in congress, there would be hearings about it. And your example I thought was perfect, imagine if Hillary Clinton had done this with any of the Clinton Foundation money, there would be all hell breaking loose about it.
HAYES: Yes.
Yeah, Kurt, I want to talk a little bit about -- because this all -- there is this sort of synergy here, right. You`ve got the foundation. You`ve got the business and you`re about to possibly elevate this man to be the most powerful person arguably in the world.
The sort of ability for self-dealing -- I mean, it`s one thing penny-ante with the foundation, right. All of a sudden you`ve got the federal government at your disposal. They have responded to your report by, being like well, we`ll put it in a blind trust. Don`t worry about it.
What do you think about that?
KURT EICHENWALD, NEWSWEEK: Well, it`s a lie. I mean, every response they have given about how they`re going to deal with the conflicts of interest presented by his very unsavory foreign business partners and his duties as national -- in terms of keeping charge of American national security has been a deception.
And I think we all need to take a stand back right now and look at David Farenthold`s reporting, look at David K. Johnston`s reporting, look at my reporting, and it all has the same thing. Donald Trump is a fraud. He puts his money on other people`s charitable contributions and uses it to buy himself out of legal problems.
He puts his name for a fee on criminals` construction projects. When they go south, he says, not me. When they go well, he says it`s all me. And then everything that David details in this book.
I mean, what`s amazing to me is that most of the American voters have no idea who this man is, but when you start picking away at the scab, there`s some very ugly things underneath.
HAYES: And you, I mean, David, one of the things that you`ve been saying from the beginning about the importance of the tax return, which we`re never going to see I think because precisely because of what Kurt is saying is this would at least lay it bare, right? This would let us know what we`re going into.
They are now saying -- I want to give you a listen to Donald Jr. talking about -- for a while there`s an audit, that`s why we can`t. But this is a kind of new line that`s been trotted out, which I think is refreshingly honest. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP JR.: He`s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create probably 300 million independent financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that are goign to distract from his main message.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: There you go. Asking questions that would distract from his main message.
JOHNSTON: Right. Well, that`s because the Trumps don`t believe in being held accountable. Donald has flouted the law all throughout his life. He`s cheated workers out of their pay, he`s used illegal immigrants. He`s cheated vendors. He has swindled investors. And Kurt is exactly right. The thing you need to understand about Donald Trump is everything is a fraud when you peel back just the surface on Donald Trump.
And it is astonishing that the American public doesn`t understand this, that he goes around saying workers are paid too much money, and yet I get emails every day from people saying Donald Trump is going to get elected, and then I`m going to make more money.
HAYES: Right.
And part of that also is because he`s had this role in American life including on The Apprentice in which he played the role of successful businessman. I mean, that`s what people know about him. They`ve never seen his tax returns.
JOHNSTON: They know the claim that he`s a successful businessman.
HAYES: Right. Kurt.
EICHENWALD: Yeah. Well, what`s interesting to me. I mean, I have been following Donald Trump since `87, that was the first time I spoke to him. And one of the things that is in his wake is just a long trail of people who have been conned. And I don`t mean, you know, breaking the law, but they`ve been deceived.
And all the Trump supporters, they think they know who this man is. And I promise you, they are the next marks on the biggest Donald Trump con of all.
HAYES: Yeah, and I think there`s a sense, right, that people like, I think some people like the sense of he`s willing to break the rules, he`s willing to maybe lie, cheat and steal, a little bit, that he will do it on behalf of America, he`ll do it on behalf of our voters and supporters.
The fear, of course, or the possibility is that he does it to them or to the American nation were he elevated to the highest office in the land.
Kurt Eichenwald and David K. Johnston, thank you both, gentlemen both, appreciate it.
That is ALL IN for this evening. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END