Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: June 22, 2017 Guest: Steve Rattner, Avik Roy, Mario Molina, Ezra Klein
AZI PAYBARAH, POLITICO CO-WRITER: - with an ad featuring a talking duck.
STEVE KORNACKI, NBC NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: There it is.. Azi gets the obscure New York political reference and I love him, I can`t get enough of him. Thank you, Nick, Caitlin, Azi. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ALL IN HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Senate bill sucks.
HAYES: Protest erupts as the Senate reveals its secret health care bill. A massive tax cut for the wealthy and huge cuts to Medicaid.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D), MASSACHUSETTS: These cuts are blood money.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: You want to rush it through, admit the consequences.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Examine your conscience.
HAYES: Tonight, as the President supports the bill, what about those campaign promises?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATE OF AMERICA: I am not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.
Everybody is going to be covered. I am going to take care of everybody.
HAYES: And will Republicans get the votes to pass it?
SEN. RAND PAUL (R), KENTUCKY: Everyone said that they`re still open to changes.
SEN. MIKE LEE (R), UTAH: I believe we can get this done. There is an agreement to reach.
HAYES: Then new revelations about the President`s obsession with the Russia investigation and the truth behind the tweet that launched a Special Counsel.
JAMES COMEY, FORMER FBI DIRECTOR: I hope there are tapes.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. Well, now we know why they were keeping it secret, Senate Republicans today releasing their long- awaited secret health care bill. And despite the President Trump`s promises, the bill would have quote "heart", that he would protect Medicaid and make sure everyone is covered, here`s the reality. Republicans are fundamentally seeking to give a massive tax cut to the wealthiest household paid for by cutting health care coverage for poor, working and sick Americans. As Sarah Kliff who`s covered this beat for a while note that the Senate bills mean that low-income Americans pay higher prices for skimpier plans with higher deductibles.
John Harwood noting that while ObamaCare redistributed billions of dollars from the rich to the poor and sick, the GOP Senate and House health bills redistribute billions from the poor and sick to the rich. Jonathan Chait even arguing the bill would represent the largest transfer of resources from poor to rich in American history. That is the bill President Trump supports despite all his promises. The President tweeting late today to make it official, "I am very supportive of the Senate health care bill. Look forward to making it really special." He then added falsely, "Remember ObamaCare is dead."
At the Capitol today, police arrested 43 from the Grassroots Disability Rights Organization Adapt. Some wheelchairs they staged what they call the Die-In in the Russell Senate office building.
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RHODA GIBSON, PROTESTING AGAINST SENATE HEALTH CARE BILL: What the Republicans and the Senate are trying to do right now is to put us back in nursing homes institutions. I am just the same person I was before I became disabled. And if you were born with a disability, you still have the right to live and to be free and to be able to enjoy life.
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HAYES: Former President Obama in his sharpest comments on any issue since leaving the Oval Office lambasted the Senate bill saying it is quote "Not a health care bill. Simply put, if there`s a chance you might get sick, get old, or start a family, this bill will do you harm. And small tweaks over the course of the next couple of weeks under the guise of making these bills easier to stomach cannot change the fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation."
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WARREN: These cuts are blood money. People will die. Let`s be very clear, Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives.
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HAYES: The bill was drafted without input from Democrats or many stakeholders, like the AARP, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Hospital Association which all lambasted the proposal. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the architect of the bill plans to hold a vote on it next week after the release of the CBO score and before the Senate goes on recess. That would mean there would be at most just eight days for the Senate to consider a bill drafted entirely in secret that would remake 1/6 of the economy. The CBO founded the House health care bill passed last month which has the same basic underlying structure as the Senate version with spike premiums for older and low-income Americans and results in 20 million people not having coverage.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that just 16 percent of Americans believe that bill is a good idea while 48 percent, three times as many, say it`s a bad idea. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate with Democrats United in opposition to the bill. McConnell can only lose two GOP votes and still get the bill pass. Today, a handful of Republican Senators expressed various degrees of displeasure with the bill while maintaining they could still eventually vote for it. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who complained this morning that she hadn`t seen the bill text because she isn`t a reporter or a lobbyist said she needed more time to digest it.
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SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI (R), ALASKA: I`m not going to tell you what I`m going to do before I know what I`m going to do. I think it`s incumbent upon me to do my due diligence. That`s what the folks back home expect me to do. I`m, going to do exactly that.
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HAYES: I`m joined now by the Economist Steven Rattner, former head of President Obama`s Auto Task Force and we have you here when the House bill was out, your reaction to the Senate bill?
STEVEN RATTNER, FORMER U.S. TREASURY AUTO ADVISOR: I think you summed it up pretty well. It`s essentially very similar to the House bill. They moved to it a little bit (INAUDIBLE) to the left to try to get some of the moderates in the Senate at the risk losing some conservatives. We`ll see how it scores. It`s going to probably be at least 20 million, maybe more, people losing insurance. And the basic concept that you said that this is a massive transfer for about a trillion dollars of resources, money, whatever you want to call it, from the poor and sick to the rich.
HAYES: That part of it, I think, it`s really key to me that folks understand that there`s a sort of different independent thing that don`t have to be together but are, right? So there`s the exchanges which (INAUDIBLE) set up and there`s all this attention paid to. And then there`s Medicaid and how Medicaid is funded and how big it is and how its cost grows, those don`t have to be connected, right?
RATTNER: A couple points. First, they don`t have to be connected, absolutely right. Number two, you could fix the problems with exchanges which are legitimate, much more easily than or much more felicitously than the way they are going to do it. But the third point which people haven`t noticed is that there are two parts to the Medicaid cuts. There`s cutting the Medicaid expansion that was part of the ACA but there`s also massive cuts for traditional Medicaid that were part of Trump`s budget, not part of the original Senate plan. And so, you add it up, the Senate - the House bill plus the Trump budget would cut Medicaid in it half from what it would otherwise be over the next ten years, traditional and expansion.
HAYES: What do you say to people - I had Michael Burgess who`s one of the architects of the House bill who`s a Doctor, a Republican Lawmaker who says, oh, it`s not a cut because we`re just changing the rate of growth.
RATTNER: Well, you play with numbers. It is true that an absolute nominal dollars, Medicaid spending would still go up but Medicare - medical inflation is faster than general inflation, more and more people need it. And so, the fact that there`s fewer and fewer people would be covered. Remember one last point about Medicaid, it`s not the just for the poor. Medicaid covers things like Nursing Home care for the elderly which is not part of Medicare. So Medicaid is the single biggest health program we have in this country. It is responsible for half the babies that are born in this country paid for by Medicaid. We`ve never unraveled a social program of this magnitude before in our history.
HAYES: You know, and this goes back to something that Paul Ryan said, someone famously about how this is something he dreamed about when he was at college keg parties, this kind of change to Medicaid which again says to me that that can`t be about the ACA because the ACA didn`t exist when Paul Ryan was in college. That`s a - that`s a vision independence of whatever ObamaCare is.
RATTNER: That`s the point. Paul Ryan is determined to change the fundamental nature of entitlements. And entitlement is what it says it is, that if you need it, you`ll get it. He doesn`t want that. He wants to put all these programs, Trump won`t let him -believe it or not - put Social Security and Medicare in a box yet. But what Ryan wants is to put it all in a box so that there`s a limited amount of resources and whatever is spent is spent and that`s it. No more.
HAYES: And if the country is - and one of the things I think that`s important to note here is we have had a long expansion, it`s been slow, and not equally distributed in many ways since the great recession. We have not had to encounter what recession might look like since then and needs change during those periods of time. Budgets contract and you can set yourself up for some really ugly choices in those sorts of condition.
RATTNER: Needs change in recession at times but also, remember, we have massive changes in income equality. So while the economy as a whole has expanded, people at the bottom is actually gotten worse then. So these programs are more and more essential to people having basic health care.
HAYES: All right, Steven Rattner, thanks for making some time tonight.
RATTNER: Thanks for having me.
HAYES: I`m joined now by Avik Roy who was the Health Care Adviser to Mitt Romney`s Presidential Campaign, who tweeted today that if the Senate bill passes, it would be the greatest policy achievement by a GOP Congress in my lifetime. I`m also joined by Doctor Mario Molina, former President and CEO of Molina Healthcare who was fired from that position May after suggesting the Trump administration was sabotaging ObamaCare. Avik, let me - let me start with you. I was somewhat surprised that you said that about this bill and I want to start on the tax side. So independent of anything that`s doing in Medicaid or what it`s doing to the exchanges in the individual market, I think people have a really hard time saying why $600 billion in tax cuts for people that are the wealthiest people in the country. If you`re making a million dollars, you going to see $50,000 more a year. Why that so central to this policy? What is the rationale for that?
AVIK ROY, MITT ROMNEY`S HEALTH CARE ADVISER: I don`t know if it`s central to the policy but if you`re reducing federal spending over a long period of time, then it is worthwhile to reduce the tax burden as well because that - if you reduce the tax burden, that leads to economic growth and more jobs and more social ability for a lot of people.
HAYES: But we don`t - we don`t know if that`s true. First of all - I mean, but also, if it`s so concentrated up the top, you could just really - you could reduce the tax burden in a much more widespread way.
ROY: Sure.
HAYES: You didn`t have to just cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, the 400 richest households are going to go about $33 billion like the distributional part just seems a little hard to stomach.
ROY: Well, ObamaCare raised taxes of the middle class. This bill would repeal those taxes too. So I mean, the vast majority of taxes in this country are paid by rich people. We have the most progressive tax code in the industrialized world. So if you reduce taxes, just by math, those tax reductions are going to fall on upper-income people. But that doesn`t mean they`re necessarily bad from a policy standpoint. And on the other side, the tax credits that will be offered to the uninsured of this bill are substantially improved from what the House bill did. As you know, Chris, I was a - a harsh critic of the House bill because it had this tax credit in which people who are really poor and people who are making six-figure incomes would get the same amount of financial system. This bill fixes that. This bill uses system that`s a bit of a -
HAYES: Income.
ROY: Yes, it`s income based and not just income based, age adjusted. So younger and healthier people will sign up for coverage in a place like Texas, but I`m here with you on. Texas is going to have millions of more people with health insurance as a result of this bill than do today.
HAYES: That seems not possible.
ROY: How so? When you don`t have a state - when you have a state that didn`t expand Medicaid, where now the tax credits will apply to all those individuals that would have gotten the Medicaid expansion, you`re going to see massive influx of coverage in places like Texas, in places like Florida.
HAYES: Right, but there`s not enough - there`s not enough money to make all that work into the long term, right? So you can`t - you can`t have more coverage. And Doctor Molina, maybe you can respond here, do you think it`s credible to think that in a state like Texas and other places, as a person who ran an insurance company, that you`re going to have more coverage over, say, a ten-year window?
MARIO MOLINA, FORMER PRESIDENT CEO OF MOLINA HEALTHCARE: In a state like Texas or Florida where you did not have expansion in Medicaid, there will be a small increase in coverage. But remember, overall across the country, tens of millions of people are going to lose their insurance. So to give a tax cut to 3 million people, we`re going to take insurance away from 20 million people? That doesn`t sound like an American concept to me.
HAYES: Well, let me ask you this Doctor Molina because the President today said - and that is interesting, right? So there these interesting geographical distributional changes depending on whether states are Medicaid expansion or not. To your - the point of the President today saying ObamaCare is dead. This is something that when you look at the arguments being made on behalf of this bill, they (INAUDIBLE) really be not affirmed of arguments on the half of the bill - the House bill but they`re about the fact the status quo is dead. It`s dying. It`s gone. You work in the insurance industry, is that true?
MOLINA: No. I don`t think that`s true. I think that the Affordable Care Act has provided a lot of insurance coverage for a lot of people. The instability in the marketplace right now has largely been generated by Republican actions especially the issues around the cost-sharing reductions. These things could be fixed. And I agree with the previous speaker. You know, we need to fix the exchanges. But what we`re going to do is we`re going to gut Medicaid. And you know, for 50 years Congress has had a pact with the American people that we will be your safety net if you need it, and that`s going away. And that`s a huge change. So for a vocal minority that are upset about increases in premiums in the marketplace, millions of people are going to lose their coverage. This bill is even worse than the House bill. If the House bill was mean, this bill is cruel and heartless.
HAYES: Avik, let me ask you this. Would you agree that these are separable issues? So if you got the exchanges in the individual markets, you`ve got Medicaid and how it`s funded in the long term and you`ve got tax cuts, you could do stuff about the individual markets and just keep the taxes to keep funding Medicaid, right? I mean, they don`t have to go together. This is an affirmative choice because the Republican majorities don`t like people on Medicaid.
ROY: Well, listen. There are a lot of different ways to do health reform but let`s talk about something very important here. So by replacing the ACA`s Medicaid expansion with tax credits for the uninsured, what are we doing? We`re taking companies like Molina Healthcare, Mario`s old company which had state sanctioned monopolies to run Medicaid managed care programs in certain states. They`re not going to have monopolies anymore. They`re going to have to compete with nonprofit insurance like Blue Cross to compete for those customers who are going to be able to choose which insurance plan they want. Just like people on the ObamaCare exchanges can do today. That`s progress. that`s going to expand choice, that`s going to lower cost, it`s going to improve the quality of coverage that people have.
HAYES: But you actually think - you actually think that the net effect will be over the course of the country, more people insured? That just seems not - the CBO is not going to not say that, right? The House bill, that`s clearly not the case.
ROY: The CBO will not say it. The real reason why is because they believe the individual mandate and the repeal of the individual mandate will reduce coverage 18 million people. That`s wrong. No serious insurance company or anyone who follows the stuff closely believe that 18 million - fewer people have health insurance because there`s no individual mandate.
HAYES: Do you - do you think Dr. Molina that fewer people will have health insurance say ten years from now if this bill passes?
MOLINA: I think fewer people will have health insurance ten years from now and I think they`ll have fewer choices. If you remove the individual mandate and still require insurance companies to insure people, it`s a little bit like saying you can wait until your roof is on fire until you get homeowners insurance. You`re going to see the individual market fall apart. This happened in Washington - state of Washington years ago and most of insurers left the individual market. I think that this is going to precipitate a death spiral for the individual market. It`s ironically not ObamaCare that`s going to be in a death spiral, it`s going to be this new bill.
HAYES: All right, Avik Roy, and Doctor -
ROY: Washington state didn`t have subsidies.
HAYES: Well, we`ll see. Right, there is an equilibrium of the subsidy point. The other thing that`s worrisome, right, is that if you start getting waivers on the essential health benefits, you could end up on the kind of subprime insurance market, right? So you`ve got the government subsidizing something. West saw this with Pel Grant and we saw it with For-Profit Colleges, right? There`s a subsidy from the government, there`s very little regulation of the provider and we saw an entire basically scam market of For-Profit Colleges rise up to basically say, oh, yes, come give us your Pel Grants, we`ll give you a degree and that was basically a worthless degree. It looks like you could create the seeds of that in the health insurance market if you`re not very careful with how you implement something like the.
MOLINA: You know what`s going to happen is -
(CROSSTALK)
HAYES: Wait, you first Doctor Molina then you Avik.
MOLINA: What I`m worried about that`s going to happen is that with the loss of the essential health benefits and the changes in the tax credit, so they`re actually going to be less generous than the subsidies, the value proposition in the future for health plan is going to be crappy care at a convenient cost.
HAYES: Right. Avik.
ROY: Totally disagree with that. I think you`re going to see premiums go down relative to prior law. You`re going to see deductibles go down. You`re going to see more access, more choice, more competition and more stable markets, which are going to be very important for the long term.
HAYES: Well, I would say this. If this thing were to pass, Lord, but I hope that Avik vision is correct, but I also think that if he`s wrong, then people are going to pay a price. Avik Roy and Doctor Mario Molina, thank you, both.
MOLINA: Thank you.
ROY: Thank Chris.
HAYES: Still to come, the President`s campaign on repealing and replacing ObamaCare, saving Medicaid and lowering premiums and so far it looks like this bill is 0-3. Donald Trump`s high-stakes health care bait-and-switch after the two-minute break.
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HAYES: The Senate health care bill unveiled today is a repudiation of nearly every promise the President made to the American public about his approach to the health care system. No cuts to Medicaid, very explicit on that, lower premiums and deductibles and insurance coverage for everyone.
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TRUMP: I`m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I`m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.
Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it.
We`re going to have a health care that is far less expensive and far better.
Yes, premiums will be coming down. Yes, deductibles will be coming down.
Everybody has to be covered. This is an un-republican thing for me to say. I am going to take care of everybody. I don`t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody is going to be taken care, much better than they`re taken care of now.
You know, I`ve been talking about a plan with heart. I said add some money to it. A plan with heart.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Strictly speaking, the bill doesn`t even fulfill the President`s promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It merely amends the ACA. In an off-camera briefing today, the Deputy White House Press Secretary was asked specifically about the President`s Medicaid promise.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So if cutting Medicaid was wrong when he was a candidate, why is it right in the new Republican Senate bill?
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY: I don`t believe that the President has specifically laid in that it`s right to cut Medicaid.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Does the President still believe as he did as a candidate, that there should be no cuts to Medicaid?
SANDERS: I haven`t - I haven`t had a specific conversation to see if there is an update to that, but I do know that he wants to protect that as much as possible.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: But there has been an update to the President`s position on Medicaid. The new position is, I like cutting Medicaid so much, I`m going to throw a party in the Rose Garden with House Republicans on TV in front of the whole country while we all watched. And if there was any doubt, the President just tweeted, "I am very supportive of the Senate health care bill." I`m joined now by the Ezra Klein, Editor-in-Chief of Vox.com. Ezra this was your summation, Senate bill, GOP health bill in one sentence, poor people pay more for worse insurance. I find the bait-and-switch here pretty remarkable given the way the President separated himself in the primary and the - and the promises that he made.
EZRA KLEIN, VOX.COM EDITOR IN CHIEF: This is a really bad day in American politics. It isn`t supposed to work like this. There is this line that you`re hearing when you talk to Republicans about this bill. I got to pass it because what they promised to do was repeal and replace ObamaCare. They got to keep their promise. They made a promise to people and you heard it when you played Trump there but also Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and all the others. They understood what people didn`t like about ObamaCare. They didn`t like that it left a lot of people uncovered. Mitch McConnell in face of the nation said about 25 million people uncovered if he`s right. They didn`t like deductibles are so high, premiums were too high, co-pays are too high, people ended up an insurance they couldn`t afford to use. So they told people they would repeal and replace ObamaCare with something that fix these problems.
HAYES: right.
KLEIN: And this makes every single one of those problems worse, every single one, higher deductibles, higher premiums on an apples to apple comparison for insurance. Higher co-pays, fewer people covered. It`s - you`re supposed to be able to trust that people basically want to go in the direction they told you. Maybe they exaggerate, maybe they`re saying it`s going to do more than they say it will. But the basic direction - but that`s not what this is at all. They said they will go one way and they`re going the exact opposite way.
HAYES: You know, part of this too is - comes back to this sort of the distributional impact of the Medicaid cuts. I was in West Virginia, in McDowell County where 48 percent of the people on the Medicaid expansion there. and Paul Ryan said this thing. I want to play this for you because to me this is such a tale about what the agenda is here. When you`re talking about what they said they would do and what they`re actually doing. Take a listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. PAUL RYAN (R-WI), HOUSE SPEAKER: So Medicaid, sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate. We`ve been dreaming of this since I`ve been around since you and I were drinking out of a keg. You know.
RICH LOWRY, NATIONAL REVIEW EDITOR: I was thinking about something else. He was thinking about reforming Medicaid.
RYAN: I was. I`ve been thinking about it for a long time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: I mean, to me that shows you in some ways what this is really about, which has nothing to do with the ACA.
KLEIN: Yes. There is a consistent vision everywhere in this bill. And basically what it is, is that poor people should pay more for less care. And I heard Avik before and Avik is a friend of mine but a lot was getting alighted in a particular discussion. There are states that have refused to expand Medicaid by choice because they don`t want poor people to have that health insurance. If they expanded Medicaid, those folks would get better health insurance. Now, if you move all the people who could get Medicaid on to these private plans and particularly onto the much cheaper plans this bill is envisioning, what they get is health insurance that is much worse. They have to pay quite a bit more for.
On page five of the bill, there is this piece that people won`t report that much on because it`s complicated but it`s really important. What it does - the Affordable Care Act ties subsidies to health insurance plans that cover 70 percent of your costs. This bill moves that down to 58 percent. A plan that covers 58 percent in your cost, you`re looking at a $7,000 deductible. So that - if you wanted to just encapsulate the plan in one move, it is that you move from health insurance that actually covers things, tell the truth about a 7,000 or more deductible, and subsidies, that`s all you can get it for. It is a really, really profound change.
HAYES: And that - let`s - key there is the insurance companies are basically set on the sidelines. They`ve been essentially, ostensibly, publicly neutrally - publicly neutral on this. And part of the - what is insidious I think about this which is your point to is this sort of shoves a lot of money toward the insurance companies to sort of keep them neutral as I understand the structure.
KLEIN: And it`s worse than that. So if you look at the Affordable Care Act, the way they keep the insurance market stable is the individual mandate. They tried to put healthy people into the insurance markets. In this iteration of the bill, there is nothing that even replaces the individual mandate, right? They zero at the individual mandate, the House bill had something called continuous coverage, probably would not abort but at least it was a shot at replacing it. This has nothing. And so I asked people, how are you going to keep insurance markets stable? And they`ve got this multi-hundred billion dollar fund that they`re just going to hand insurance money. You heard some Republican calling it insurance bail, it`s not bail out, it`s a payoff. It`s a payoff for participating and the markets are not fleeing them.
HAYES: All right, Ezra Klein, thank you for breaking that down. I really appreciate it.
KLEIN: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up next, the brazen bluff that landed the President a special investigation. And ahead, Congressman Eric Swalwell on what the director of National Intelligence told his Committee about the President`s obsession with the Russia investigation, stay with us.
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HAYES: President Trump confirmed today that what anyone paying attention had already concluded which is that there are of course no tapes of his conversations with then FBI Director James Comey. The President tweeting today, "with all of the recently reported electronics surveillance, intercepts, unmasking, and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are tapes or recordings of my conversations with James Comey but I did not make and do not have any such recordings." It was always a preposterous bluff frankly. It was probably one intended to intimidate a witness at the core of what is turning into an obstruction of justice investigation. The President`s original threat, "James Comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press" also proved to be remarkably self-destructive because, in the chain of events following the President`s firing of Comey, that was the threat that precipitated James Comey to leak his conversations with the express purpose of triggering the appointment of a Special Counsel.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COMEY: The President tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I`d better hope there`s not tapes. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn`t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a Special Counsel.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: So President Trump managed to tweet himself into a Special Counsel. And now the investigation involves Special Counsel Mueller interviewing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers about what the President asked them to do. Coats according to an NBC News source told House Investigator today that President Trump was obsessed with the Russia probe, House Intel Committee member Congressman Eric Swalwell joins me next.
HAYES: We`ve now learned through multiple reports that President Trump wanted Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers to state publicly the president was not under investigation for collusion with Russian officials. Coats told House investigators today that President Trump seemed obsessed with the Russian investigation and repeatedly asked Coats to say publicly there was no evidence of collusion.
A U.S. official familiar with the conversation told NBC News.
And joining me now, Congressman Eric Swalwell of California, a member of the House intelligence committee. Let me ask you this, if it was the case that the president had been assured privately by James Comey that he was not personally under investigation at that time, why is it so wrong of him to go around to everyone he could find in his government to try to get them to say that in public?
REP. REIC SWALWELL, (D) CALIFORNIA: Good evening, Chris. The problem is that James Comey had told congress on March 20th that the president`s campaign was under criminal and counterintelligence investigations. So you could deduct from that that people the president knew or who may be in the administration were being investigated.
And so the president, I think, had a duty to really distance himself from that investigation. And it looks like from what Jim Comey said, he was doing the opposite.
HAYES: In terms of of his conversations with other individuals, Dan Coats and Mike Rogers, there was also reporting indicating that he was essentially trying to get them to have Comey back off, that they declined those - that. What does that say to you terms the possibility of obstruction?
SWALWELL: So, right now what we want to have the public hear is just exactly what the president said to Coats and Rogers and whether that corroborates what James Comey said that the room was cleared, which I think shows intent, and whether or not other people had the same conversation.
Now, Chris, to be fair, an innocent explanation could be that the president just wanted it to be out there that he was not under investigation, another explanation could also be that the president was probing individuals like James Comey to find out what they had on people on his team.
And I think most above board individuals, once they found out their team was under investigation, would back off and be as cooperative as necessary.
HAYES: As a former prosecutor, what do you make of the president essentially admitting today that he didn`t have any tapes and that he was bluffing in an attempt to influence, fundamentally, the testimony under oath of James Comey?
SWALWELL: If he does not have tapes, then it looks line he was trying intimidate James Comey by suggesting that the conversations may have been recorded and then perhaps hoping that Comey wouldn`t come forward.
Now, the problem here, Chris, is Comey did come forward and now that makes him all the more believable that he testified under the risk that anything he said to the president at the time could have been recorded and contradicted by what he was saying to congress and then risking that he could be committing perjury.
So now that there are no tapes, there is no other point of view. There is no other evidence as to what happened and that leaves it to the president. It is in his corner.
HAYES: The president today saying in a series of statements this morning through Twitter about, you know, he called this all a hoax yet again. He said if Russia actually hacked. It really does seem that when we`re talking about the core thing that happened, which is that intelligence agencies all agree that Vladimir Putin directed Russian intelligence agents to criminally sabotage computers and servers and to affect the election. The president simply does not accept that.
SWALWELL: He doesn`t.
And yesterday we had former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and I asked him who attacked us? He said it was Russia. I said, was it our democracy that was attacked? He said yes. I said why doesn`t the president accept this? And he said he doesn`t know.
But, Chris, there is only one steering wheel in the car. So, it doesn`t matter if public servants like Dan Coats and Michael Rogers and Director Pompeo all believe that Russia did this if the person driving the car isn`t listening to them and is steering us closer to Russia, there is nothing we can do about it. We need him to accept it.
HAYES: But don`t you think there`s in terms of steering us closer with Russia, there`s reporting indicating that there behind the scenes attempting to water down some of the sanctions that were just passed. But in many ways, policywise, I mean, the U.S. just shot down an Assad fighter jet and Russia is threatening retaliation. There`s been many ways in which it`s not as if this president has really taken a line in a policy standpoint, that has been particularly friendly to Russia.
SWALWELL: Ann I would attribute that almost entirely to the light we have shined through our investigations. If we were not, if we were not as, I think, determined to get to the bottom of what happened, and if we have not really illuminated the president`s ties to Russia, I`m afraid that you would have seen the sanctions lifted already, that the president would have diminished the role of NATO even more than he already has. And that more secrets to the Russians in the Oval Office would have been conveyed.
HAYES: All right. Congressman Eric Swalwell, thank you for your time.
SWALWELL: My pleasure.
Still ahead, does the newly unveiled Republican health care bill meet so- called Jimmy Kimmel test? And will senators who are on the fence support it?
Plus, tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two starts next.
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HAYES: Thing One tonight, it was one of candidate Trump`s favorite promises.
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TRUMP: When you`re in the White House, who the hell wants to play golf?
There won`t be time to go on vacations, there won`t be time to golf all the time.
I love golf. I think it`s one of the greats. But I don`t have time
I`m not going to be paying golf. I like golf, you know what, I`m going to be be in the White House. Who wants to leave the White House?
I`m not going to play much golf, because there is a lot of work to be done.
I`m going to be working for you. I`m not going to have time to go play golf, believe me.
Golf, golf, golf, golf, more, more, learning how to chip, learning how to hit the drive, learning how to putt. I want more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Of course, when he got into office, things changed. In the 153 days of his presidency, President Trump has spent 42 days of his own properties, including 29 days at his golf properties, most recently at the prestigious Trump National Golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey where membership includes the finest amenities and service and the chance, of course, of running into the president himself as he drives his golf cart across the green. That`s Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: An unusual sight greeted those fortunate enough to frequent the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey a few weekends ago.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How great is that? That`s the only place you can drive on the green, right? At your own golf course. That`s mine. I`m going to need it.
TRUMP: Thanks, fellows.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No worries.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you doing?
What`s happening? Everything is great.
I feel very safe, thank you.
TRUMP: More security in the history of golf.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you hitting them?
TRUMP: Good until this fault.
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HAYES: Hey, prez! That wasn`t all President Trump did during his weekend at Bedminster, he also crashed a wedding party that Saturday night congratulating the delighted couple.
Such seemingly spontaneous actions by the President of the United States, who has spent a full quarter of his presidency visiting Trump properties, delights more than just the people he bumps into. It has been an enormous boon to the Trump organization`s bottom line.
After years of headlines about the declining fortunes of the Trump golf empire, the Trump courses are now flourishing. And Trump`s combined income reported from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, his golf clubs in Jupiter, West Palm Beach, and Doral, has doubled to $191 million since he was elected president.
As Eric Trump, who oversees the family golf properties puts it, the star have all aligned. I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.
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JIMMY KIMMEL, LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST: We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world. But until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all.
You know, before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease, like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition. And if your parents didn`t have medical insurance, you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition.
If your baby is going to die and it doesn`t have to, it shouldn`t matter how much money you make. I think that`s something that whether you`re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right? I mean, we do.
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HAYES: A little more than a month ago, late night host Jimmy Kimmel told a story about his infant son`s heart condition. How the experience made him realize how lucky he is to be able to afford decent health care.
And Republican Senator Bill Cassidy saw that and coined it a new standard for measuring health care, the quote, Jimmy Kimmel test. But a week after that, Cassidy joined Kimmel on his show and seemed a bit reluctant to agree with the definition of the Jimmy Kimmel test as Kimmel himself laid it out.
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KIMMEL: Since I am Jimmy Kimmel, I`ll like to make a suggestion as to what the Jimmy Kimmel test should be. I`ll keep it simple. The Jimmy Kimmel test I think should be no family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they cannot afford it. Can that be the Jimmy Kimmel test? Is that a way of oversimplifying it?
SEN. BILL CASSIDY, (R) LOUISIANA: Hey, man, you`re another right track. And if that`s as close as we get, that works great in government.
Now, we`ve got to be able to pay for it, and that`s the challenge.
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HAYES: So now that the Senators released their draft of the health care bill, it seems it will leave millions of more people without coverage, people who could find themselves in a delivery room without insurance or the money to pay for their child`s life saving surgery. In other words, it sounds like this bill doesn`t quite meet the Jimmy Kimmel test. So, where is Senator Cassidy on this bill? That`s next.
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HAYES: Today, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, after coining the Jimmy Kimmel test in May, was asked whether the new bill meets the bar.
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CASSIDY: I think it begins to address the Jimmy Kimmel test. A child who is terribly ill or any loved one would both have coverage, but also a way to keep the coverage affordable.
Now everything I`m saying -- I`ve not yet read the bill -- this is just the presentation.
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HAYES: A cautious answer from Cassidy, but other so-called moderates in the party are signaling they could want more out of the bill before they sign on, that includes Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, both of whose states are grappling with the absolutely devastating opioid epidemic at the moment.
Dean Heller, up for reelection next year in Nevada where legislators passed a Medicaid bill for all bill just this month only to see the law vetoed by the Republican governor. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine who told MSNBC Chuck Todd today she had major reservations about the bill so far.
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SEN. SUSAN COLLINS, (R) MAINE: I can`t support a bill that`s going to greatly increase premiums for our older Americans or out of pocket costs for those who aren`t quite old enough for Medicare yet. I cannot support a bill that is going to result in tens of millions of people losing their health insurance. And I cannot support a bill that`s going to make such deep cuts in Medicaid.
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HAYES: From the right, putting out a joint statement against the bill today were Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Ron Johnson of Wiscondin, and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul who said today the bill doesn`t go far enough for him.
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SEN. RAND PAUL, (R) KENTUCKY: To my mind, the most important thing is we promised to repeal Obamacare. The current bill looks like we`re keeping large parts of Obamacare. We`re keeping the subsidies. We`re boosting the subsidies for stabilization or risk pools, and I think it looks a lot like Obamacare actually.
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HAYES: Joining me now, MSNBC Political Analyst Joan Walsh, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine; and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, whose column today asked which GOP senators will walk the plank for a rotten health care bill.
It`s a good question.
Before we get to this sort of different dynamics. You`ve got in terms of the whip count and the so-called moderates and the conservatives. I want to just start with the basic suspicion that I have had all along that this entire thing is a little bit of Kabuki theater, which is to say all of these Republican senators saying I haven`t seen the bill. I haven`t seen the bill. I don`t like the process.
The bill comes out today, Joan, and immediately Ted Cruz has handouts about how to get the bill to where he wants it, which made me think well I guess you do - you have had a little bit of a chance, because otherwise how`d you get that so fast?
JOAN WALSH, THE NATION: Right. He clearly has. He`s not somebody I would count as a solid no. He`s bargaining. Rand Paul could be a solid no. Susan Collins could be a solid no. Listening to Chuck today the three things she laid out are not going to get better with this bill. It`s always going to cut millions of people off. It`s always going to do dramatic horrible things to Medicaid.
So, those are the two that I feel the most comfortable with. I cannot believe that people take Bill Cassidy seriously and he literally comes out saying this is going to pass the Kimmel test when 76 percent of children are covered by some form of Medicaid, whether it`s the CHIP expansion or traditional Medicaid. Lots of children are not going to get care for a congenital heart disease or anything else.
HAYES: Jennifer, you referred to walk the plank. And I want to talk about what Joan said. So, you`ve got the folks, Collins, Murkowski -- and one thing I want to say about Murkowski, which is really important is, Alaska has got very high health care costs and the question of whether the subsidies are enough when they`re properly indexed there matters a lot.
But I think she - Joan is right that Rand Paul could just take one of those two slots and you can also see Collins maybe taking one. And to me the big question is Heller. Heller is the only senator who represents a state that Hillary won who is a Republican who is up in 2018. He`s also has Medicaid expansion. And how could his political calculation be to vote for this bill?
JENNIFER RUBIN, WASHINGTON POST: I don`t see how it can be.
And what`s even worse is the governor of Nevada, Republican Brian Sandoval, came out against the bill pretty hard today, as did John Kasich said he had serious concerns putting really the pressure on to Rob Portman who is another one who I think in the end will find it very hard to vote for the bill.
This bill managed to find the sweet spot, the point at which no one likes it. The moderates don`t like it for the reasons that Susan Collins was outlining, the hard liners don`t like it because it`s a chintzier version of Obamacare. It`s like Obamacare, but they`re not really giving you enough to make it worthwhile. And then of course there`s this gian transfer of wealth from poorer Americans to richer Americans.
So, in there, there`s a lot for everyone to hate. And I think the problem with trying to split the difference between people who are irreconcilable is that you wind up with something that really does please no one.
HAYES: Right, but here`s the thing. And here`s why I think there`s still the odds -- I don`t think this is a done deal at all, but my feeling, folks I`ve talked to, the odds are they will get the votes. And here`s why, they`re going to play with the knobs and give people little wins. So, they`re going to give the conservatives some wins, Shelley Moore Capito and Rob Portman is going to come away triple the amount of money for opioid addiction.
WALSH: Right, it`s only $2 billion, we`re going to get $10 billion and we`re going to send out a press release and tell our constituents we really got something from leader McConnell.
HAYES: That`s right. Or Heller does something on Medicaid expansion, right, on the phaseout or the cost that they`re using, the cost peg they`re using.
I mean doesn`t it seem to you, Jennifer, that they`ve essentially set it up so they can dial a bunch of knobs and give people these kind of public wins that they need to get to the 50 votes?
RUBIN: Well, if you`re talking about sort of normal senators I would say yes. But I think you have some people in the senate who are really ideologically just dead set against the federal government subsidizing health care, and that would be the four people who said that they wouldn`t voted for it right up front.
So, I think it`s going to be hard for those people to walk back because then you`re really going to changing the structure of the bill.
Second problem is, and I think Susan Collins kind of tipped her hand when the CBO does their scoring, and it`s probably not going to be all that different than the House bill, which said that 23 million people were going to lose their health care insurance, that`s going to be the signal for the moderates.
So I think you can only turn the knobs and screws so much before you break them. And my theory has been all along that frankly Mitch McConnell just wants to get a vote and get past this. If they vote it down or it gets tripped up somewhere in the Byrd Rule in reconciliation, so be it. He can put this behind him and get on to something he likes, like giving cuts to rich people.
HAYES: Well, which is a big part of what this bill is, we should note.
You know, that`s interesting that Jennifer said. I think one of the things to really watch here is, of those four conservatives, the one that I really do think would do it is Rand Paul. I think he`s the most sort of untethered. Obviously, he`s the home state senator of Mitch McConnell, so that complicates things, but he seems to me the most untethered of them.
And the problem for McConnell from the whip count is if Paul grabs one of those slots, there`s only one more card yet to give away.
WALSH: ...to Heller. They would love to give that card to Heller.
But if Susan Collins grabs the other or Murkowski or Portman.
HAYES: ...that`s where I think that things can start to get difficult.
The other thing I`ve heard is there`s this rumbling that they`re not even going to try to do conference committee, that what they`re going to do is if they pass it they`re going to send it right back to the House and have the House pass it word for word, which is of course what happened with the ACA famously after the death of Ted Kennedy.
And then all of a sudden you`re making all those Republicans walk that plank again.
WALSH: Yeah, I think that is - I could see that happening, but that`s crazy. I mean, the moderates, the so-called moderates over there to eat this kind of Medicaid expansion and also the restructuring of traditional Medicaid and the cuts to traditional Medicaid, are they really going to go along with that?
HAYES: This is - listen, there is a window here for the public to have the debate it hasn`t had, so hopefully that will happen. People can talk to their representatives about how much...
WALSH: People are at airports tonight, which is really cool.
HAYES: Jennifer Rubin, NJoan Walsh, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
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