Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: November 21, 2017 Guest: Joyce Vance, Asawin Suebsaeng, Diana DeGette
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: -- a time of reckoning let us try to make it a good one. That`s HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Roy Moore denies it. That`s all I can say. He denies it. And by the way, he totally denies it.
HAYES: The President appears to endorse Roy Moore.
TRUMP: He says it didn`t happen. You know, you have to listen to him also.
HAYES: Despite the nine women who have already come forward.
TRUMP: The women are Trump voters, most of them are Trump voters. You have to do what you have to do. He totally denies it.
HAYES: Why does the President support an accused child molester for U.S. Senate?
TRUMP: We don`t need a Liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones, I`ve looked at his record, it`s terrible on crime.
HAYES: Then, the President and Vladimir Putin.
TRUMP: We had a great call with President Putin.
HAYES: What did they talk about for an hour today? Plus new investigations into harassment on Capitol Hill. Charlie Rose is fired from two television networks. The President is still the President.
TRUMP: Women are very special. I think it`s a very special time.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. Today the President of the United States effectively endorsed an accused child molester for U.S. Senate. I`m going just going to repeat that to let it sink in. The President of the United States appeared to endorse an accused child molester to serve in the U.S. Senate. After spending days tiptoeing around the allegations against Roy Moore and stonewalling, Moore of course who nine women have accused of assaulting them, groping them, or pursuing them, some of them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, today the President finally broke his silence making the case against Moore`s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones.
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TRUMP: I could tell you -- I could tell you one thing for sure. We don`t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat. Jones, I`ve looked at his record, it`s terrible on crime, it`s terrible on the border, it`s terrible in the military. I can tell you for a fact, we do not need somebody that`s going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad with the military, bad for the second amendment. I can tell you don`t need somebody who`s soft on crime like Jones.
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HAYES: Soft on crime. That`s an interesting phrase for the President to use when you consider just who is on each side of that ledger. Because on one hand, you`ve got Roy Moore who was kicked off the Alabama State Supreme Court twice for defying federal law and who now stands accused of preying on young girls, girls as young as 14 years old, while he was a deputy district attorney and abusing that position in the criminal justice system to silence his victims. On the other hand, there`s Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor who put away the KKK members responsible for the 1963 church bombing that killed four little girls. And he, Doug Jones, that`s the one who`s soft on crime, according to this President. The President`s decision to weigh in on the race comes exactly three weeks till election day in Alabama where the polls remain closed, even as more and more women have come forward to share their stories about Moore, a warning some viewers may find those stories disturbing.
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LEIGH CORFMAN, ACCUSER OF ROY MOORE: He removed my clothing. He left the room and came back in wearing his white underwear. And he touched me over my clothing, what was left of it and he tried to get me to touch him as well.
TINA JOHNSON, ACCUSER OF ROY MOORE: Then he just grabbed my behind. I mean, forcefully grabbed it. And I didn`t even react. I just walked out.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What was going through your mind in that moment?
JOHNSON: I was so ashamed.
BEVERLY YOUNG NELSON, ACCUSER OF ROY MOORE: Mr. Moore reached over and began groping me and putting his hands on my breasts. I tried fighting him off while yelling at him to stop but instead of stopping he back squeezing my neck, attempting to force my head onto his crotch.
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HAYES: Moore denies those specific allegations and today the President appeared to take his side against the women who have come forward.
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TRUMP: Well, he denies it. Look, he denies it. I mean, if you look at what is really going on, and you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours, he totally denies it. He says it didn`t happen. And you know, you have to listen to him also. You`re talking about -- he said 40 years ago this did not happen. So, you know --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you going to campaign for him?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are going to campaign for him, for Roy Moore?
TRUMP: I`ll be letting you know next week, I mean, Roy Moore denies it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And what about the women? What about the nine women?
TRUMP: And by the way, he gives a total denial and I do have to say 40 years is a long time. He`s run eight races and this has never come up, so 40 years is a long time. The women are Trump voters, most of them are Trump voters. All you can do is you have to do what you have to do. He totally denies it.
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HAYES: That stance puts the President as some of his top political allies, including the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, the Attorney General, and the President`s own daughter Ivanka who have all said they find those women`s allegations, the one you just saw to be credible. The Jones campaign just put out a new ad that makes exactly that point.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On Roy Moore`s disturbing actions, Ivanka Trump says there`s a special place in hell for people who prey on children and I have no reason to doubt the victims` accounts. Jeff Sessions says I have no reason to doubt these young women. And Richard Shelby says he will absolutely not vote for Roy Moore. Conservative voices putting children and women over party, doing what`s right.
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HAYES: Of course believing women is a tricky subject for this President who is elected to office after being accused by 15 women, on the record, of unwanted physical contact. He denied all their allegations despite having admitted to some of the same kind of behavior on the Access Hollywood tape. And it is now the official position of this White House, even at this very moment, that all 15 of those women, all of them on the record, all who have described their recollections the President`s unwanted physical contact that every single last one of them are liars, everyone. Nevertheless, when asked if he has a message to American women in the midst of what`s become a historic national reckoning on sexual misconduct, this was the President`s response.
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TRUMP: Women are very special. I think it`s a very special time because a lot of things are coming out and I think that`s good for our society and I think it`s very, very good for women. And I`m very happy a lot of these things are coming out and I`m very happy -- I`m very happy it`s being exposed.
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HAYES: Steve Schmidt is a Republican Strategist and MSNBC Political Analyst. The President of the United States basically endorsed, I mean, the accused child molester, a man that`s credibly accused of molesting a child, over the Democrat today. What`s your reaction as a Republican?
STEVE SCHMIDT, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Tragic day for the Republican Party. I just think, Chris, to use an analogy, you know, no one`s ever been injured jumping out of an airplane, it`s the landing that gets you. And I wonder proverbially, thinking about that, when we look back, I wonder if this is the moment where, for Republicans, the party left the airplane on way to -- on the way to a devastating landing in 2018. And I just think the line is drawn, the die are cast. The forces of decency are against the forces of indecency. This is an accused child molester, credibly accused, by multiple women.
What we`re talking about here is a 14-year-old little girl. You saw the pain in the eyes and on the face of that middle-aged woman. This has been a defining event in her life. He`s unfit to serve in the United States Senate. This exposes a profound moral rot in the country, in the Republican Party. A great test for the citizens of State of Alabama and we`ve reached the hour that George Washington warned us about. A political tribalism that`s so corrosive, so corrupting, that it could take otherwise normal, decent people that you`d encounter on any day, and make them defend the indefensible and the profoundly indecent. And it`s a sad moment.
HAYES: You know, it`s interesting, I`ve been seeing -- I saw Tim Miller, who is a kind of never Trump Republican, but a real -- a Republican in good standing, not a heterodox conservative, a conservative who worked for Jeb Bush. And I saw him tweeting today raising money for Doug Jones basically saying, this is a moral -- this is a moment when people have to step and up do the right thing. And I wonder if you think there will be more of that.
SCHMIDT: Look, I think that should Roy Moore be elected, the Republicans in the Senate have a difficult decision that is going to hurt them either way to seat him or to expel him. And certainly, in my view, he should be expelled. But if Roy Moore is seated as a Republican in the United States Senate, he will be hung around the neck of every Republican running in every suburban district, everywhere in this country. And it will be a legitimate attack, it will be the right attack for Democrats to make, and I think that a large portion of this country, looking at the absurdity of these self-proclaimed men of god, these pastors in Alabama, with these indescribably despicable defenses of this.
I think that there will be a profound political punishment inflicted. You essentially have 100 percent of the Democrats, 65 percent to 70 percent of the independents, and about 25 percent of Republicans, that will stand in a coalition together against the one thing that`s going to be tested on the ballot in 2018. Do we want to continue down this road, in this age of Trump? Is this the type of country we want to live in? Is this the type of indecency we want to embrace?
HAYES: You know, there is -- there`s a thesis about our current politics, about having very, very weak parties institutionally, but very strong partisanship and Donald Trump is a great example, right? The Republican Party as an institution didn`t want the guy to get the nomination. But once he got the nomination, the partisanship so is powerful that basically if you will vote for the person who has R next to their name, and it strikes me that Roy Moore is an even more extreme illustration of just how profound that phenomenon is in our politics.
SCHMIDT: The most extreme thus far as the parties are shrinking, their bases are becoming more extreme. As the bases become more extreme, the challenge for politicians to incite them, to polarize them they do it with more extreme rhetoric, more extreme stances. In the middle of the electorate, normal people are just looks -- left looking at this saying, my goodness, what`s going on? What does it mean that when you have someone credibly accused of molesting, child molestation of a 14-year-old girl? I mean, it seems that prisoners in a penitentiary have a higher code of moral conduct than does the west wing at the White House and the President of the United States when it comes to understanding the disgustingness of the predation by an adult on a child. I mean, of all the despicable behavior that we`ve seen laid out in recent weeks, this is a special category. These are children. Children. Terrible.
HAYES: Let me add one more detail there. The 14-year-old in question was -- she says, approached by Moore while he was a district attorney at a courthouse where her mother was about to go into a custody hearing dealing with her custody during a divorce. That`s when he picked her up. Steve Schmidt, always good to talk to you, thank you.
SCHMIDT: Thank you, Chris.
HAYES: Joyce Vance is former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and lives in Alabama now, Asawin Suebsaeng is Politics Reporter for the Daily Beast. And Aswawin, I`ll start with you because you`ve been reporting on the fact that the Trump world that wanted distance from Roy Moore, and then key allies lobbied the President to reconsider. You were reporting this yesterday. Today we saw the culmination of this effort by Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, the particular two individuals who should forever be associated with Roy Moore forever and ever because they have very strongly backed him even after he has been credibly accused of attempting to rape a 16-year-old and molesting a 14-year-old, right?
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG, POLITICS REPORTER, THE DAILY BEAST: Absolutely, and for not just the President of the United States, but for the White House, for some of his top allies outside of the White House, for a lot of people in the Republican Party. This has been a week or so of coming back home to Roy Moore over the course of, as we mentioned, a very short period of time. Over the past seven days or so, the President had been wavering on Roy Moore, top officials in the White House had been wavering on Roy Moore, even Steve Bannon had voiced private reservations about Roy Moore. But over just a handful of days, they all decided to not go wobbly and buckle up and decided that this is our guy.
And as we reported in The Daily Beast yesterday, some of the President`s top`s top advisers, including Conway and Bannon -- Bannon of course no longer work in the west wing but still talks to the President regularly on the phone -- had been urging him to not publicly denounce or reject Roy Moore because, and this is going to sound very crude and cynical, but it is the calculus of a lot of these Republicans and people working in Trump`s inner circle that when it comes to things like tax cuts, that is too important a thing to throw away to a Democratic seat, even when you have allegations of child molestation.
HAYES: Joyce what is it -- you know, everyone`s looking at Alabama, the polls are closed, it seems like an impossible race to poll and to model but I`m really curious what it is like there right now and how your understanding perceiving this race and the folks you talked to.
JOYCE VANCE, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY: This will be a close race. Everyone`s saying that and it`s absolutely true. Perhaps on the ground, we see a few markers one way or the other. I drove today through Old Mountain Brook, which is Luther Strange territory, Conservative Republican territory and instead of seeing Roy Moore signs, I saw no Roy Moore signs at all in the front yards of homes but I saw a sprinkling of Doug Jones signs. A couple of signs in every neighborhood that I drove through. That`s not something I would have seen in any other election, Chris.
HAYES: So you think -- I mean, this has always been the question, Moore barely won the last time he ran statewide, he actually ran against your husband and he barely eked out that victory. He has very high unfavorables and was a polarizing figure even before that primary victory, and even before being credibly accused of attempting to rape a 16-year-old girl and to -- and molesting a 14-year-old, among other teenagers he attempted to seduce, apparently. You think -- the question is are those flipable, gettable votes?
VANCE: I think those are flipable, gettable votes. Jones has to talk to suburban women. He really has to energize his base. And that`s what he seems to be doing. He has campaigned down in Selma with Terri Sewell, the very popular Democratic Congresswoman from Selma. He campaigned with Georgia Representative John Lewis in the Wiregrass in the southern part of Alabama. He seems to be doing that well. Now he has to convince suburban women -- moms who are outraged on behalf of their daughters or their granddaughters by Roy Moore`s conduct -- to either vote for him or to stay home and that`s really the question in this race.
HAYES: I want to play what Doug Jones had to say about Moore`s accusers today, take a listen.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you believe Roy Moore was a sexual predator?
DOUG JONES, DEMOCRATIC SENATE CANDIDATE, ALABAMA: I believe the women. I think that answers the question. I believe their stories have credibility, and I believe them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How do you feel about Donald Trump at this point is endorsing, passively endorsing a man who has been accused to be a child molester?
JONES: I`m going to-- I`m going to let the people of Alabama make that decision. I feel like my record speaks for itself and I don`t have to have the President or anyone else to talk about it or try to label it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Asawin, there`s reporting that contrary to a lot of -- almost everyone in sort of the upper echelons of the Republican Party they say they find the women credible. The President saw parallels between the Alabama candidate`s situation his own Access Hollywood video surfaced, and that he privately doubted Moore`s accusers. What do you make of that?
SUEBSAENG: Well, that sounds about right for this President. And it`s also what people in his inner circle are thinking when it comes to parallels with the on-rush of sexual assault and harassment allegations that came out against him during October of the 2016 election. There was this moment where so much of the Republican Party was denouncing or distancing from Donald Trump on endorsing him. But then of course over the course of a very short period of time, just a month`s time, a few weeks, they all came home and rallied around him once he became President-elect and leader of the free world.
And the coming-home to Roy Moore that has happened in the west wing, and outside of it, within the Republican Party -- so I mean, not all the Republican Party but a lot of it -- happened within the span of about a week. That is a lot shorter than it took for them to come back to Trump. And if you don`t mind, I just want to try a thought experiment with this panel and your viewers. Does anybody honestly think that the President of the United States would be saying, oh, these allegations happened so long ago, and you know, we`re not sure who to believe if Doug Jones was accused of all of this? Not for a second.
HAYES: Not a single second. Not anyone. Joyce Vance and Asawin Suebsaeng, many thanks to you both.
VANCE: Thank you.
SUEBSAENG: Thank you so much.
HAYES: Coming up, the Kremlin scoops the White House again. What we learned about Donald Trump`s hour-long phone conversation with Vladimir Putin ahead. And next, the harassment problem already plaguing the building where Roy Moore wants to work, that story in two minutes.
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HAYES: -- of Roy Moore as Senator and the President basically endorses him. There`s running questions about how Congress has been handling its own allegations of sexual misconduct. The House Ethics Committee today announcing its opened investigations into Congressman John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan following disclosure of a 2015 confidential settlement agreement with a former staff member who says she was fired for refusing his sexual advances. Congressman Conyers responded with a statement which reads in part, "in this case I expressly and vehemently deny the allegations made against me and continue to do so." The resolution was not for millions of dollars, but rather for an amount that equated to a reasonable severance payment. And it`s true, the settlement was for more than$27,000."
According to BuzzFeed News which broke the story based on documents relating to the case, documents that included supporting affidavits claiming multiple instances of Conyers making sexual advances to female staff. It`s also the case that while BuzzFeed News independently verified the authenticity of the documents, they were, and I quote here, "first provided the BuzzFeed News by Mike Cernovich, the men`s right figure turned pro-Trump media activist" which might explain why no sitting Republican Congressman was repealed by those particular documents. But Congresswoman Jackie Speier testified she knows of two current members of Congress she says are sexual harassers, one Democrat and one Republican.
There`ve also been over the past 20 years, 264 settlements to federal employees totaling more than $17 million for various violations of employment rules, including sexual harassment. Congressman Diana DeGette is a Ranking Member of the House Sub-Committee on Oversight and Investigations and says she was groped by former Congressman Bob Filner who resigned as San Diego Mayor in 2013 due to charges of sexual harassment. Congressman, first I want to get your response --
REP. DIANA DEGETTE (D), COLORADO: Hi, Chris.
HAYES: -- you said this about Filner who of course was run out of office in San Diego after allegations by many women against him surfaced. You talked about your own experience with him. I just want to read you his statement and get your response. He says I don`t know where this comes from, we were friends, I would never do anything like that, it didn`t happen. Your response?
DEGETTE: Well, I was there, it did happen. And this is what these men often say, if not always. And what it really is and the reason I think that people need to name names, for me, I`m tough. It wasn`t that big of a deal at the time. And you know, professional women like me have to go through these things, unfortunately, on a regular basis. So I told my husband, I told my Chief of Staff but I didn`t make a complaint. And then, of course, after that what happened was he apparently harassed women who were subordinates to him, other women and eventually he was forced out of office as Mayor of San Diego and then he even was involved in a court case. And so I thought to myself, you know if I had said something at the time --
HAYES: Right.
DEGETTE: -- maybe these other people wouldn`t have been victimized. That`s why I just don`t think it cuts it to say, there are people in Congress right now who are predators, but we`re not going to say who they are. That`s what we`ve been doing all along. And you know, not only do we need to call out who`s doing this, we really need to look at the rules that we have. The office of compliance that you just referred to, which is the office that all the discrimination complaints go to, has a very archaic process, it has a 30-day arbitration, and then more time for counseling but it has no link to the Ethics Committee. So even if somebody was found in the compliance investigation to have had some kind of sexual harassment, that wouldn`t necessarily go to the Ethics investigation. And that`s really what we need to look at doing.
HAYES: You know, Ben Smith, who is editor at BuzzFeed, referred to the process as a plausible deniability machine, because basically no one gets notified, so everyone can say, in leadership or colleagues -- I mean, let me ask you this. Did you know about the allegations in the sworn affidavit against John Conyers?
DEGETTE: No. I didn`t. And --
HAYES: Do you think you should have?
DEGETTE: I think the Ethics Committee should have been investigating that. They should come up with recommendations. And if they find credible evidence that a member of Congress is engaging in sexual harassment, they should leave Congress. I think members of Congress should be held to a higher standard than anybody else. And if -- and I think it`s really important to believe the women. And I think it`s also important to preserve due process. But that`s why we need strong ethics investigations in these -- in these situations and we need a link between the administrative office that`s investigating these complaints and the Ethics Committee.
HAYES: How pervasive is this problem in Congress?
DEGETTE: Well -- just like any other workplaces like this you hear rumors, you hear people talk. But I talked -- I talked about some of the situations that happened to me, and every so often you hear that. What concerns me is if members of Congress are doing this to women who are subordinates, either junior staffers or interns and I think that we need a much more robust reporting system to find out exactly how extensive this is.
HAYES: All right, Congresswoman Diana DeGette, thank you for making time.
DEGETTE: Thank Chris, I appreciate it.
HAYES: Today before leaving for Thanksgiving, before pardoning the turkeys and notable addition, the President`s schedule, a phone call with Vladimir Putin. We`ll talk about that ahead.
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TRUMP: Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven`t made a phone call to Russia in years, don`t speak to people from Russia. Not that I wouldn`t, I just have nobody to speak to. I spoke to Putin twice. He called me on the election. I told you this. And he called me on the inauguration, a few days ago.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That was the President just one month after he was inaugurated. Since then he`s spoken many times, not just with President Putin but with his representatives. And often the White House has only confirmed those interactions after news leaked out. For example, in May, President Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia`s Ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak -- remember that guy, all tied up in the Michael Flynn stuff -- at the White House. And that meeting was closed to the U.S. press. And in that meeting, Trump reportedly boasted about his firing the FBI Director the day before saying he`d relieved the pressure he felt over Russia. Kislyak wasn`t even listed on the President`s official schedule, American journalists weren`t informed about it, and he wasn`t included in the official White House readout. We only found out about it because the Russian press was allowed in the room and tweeted out photos.
Then in July, after an official on the record meeting with the President -- with President Putin at the G-20 Summit, came word of a second undisclosed private hour-long conversation conducted through the Kremlin`s interpreter because the American translator with Mr. Trump did not speak Russian. The White House confirmed the conversation only after news reports about it but said the leaders only spoke briefly. Then in September, President Trump met Russia`s new Ambassadors to the U.S. at a credentialing ceremony at the White House which is a fairly standard thing. But the thing is, no one else knew about it until the Russian media reported it first. Again, White House later confirming the interaction, though said it wasn`t a "meeting." Which brings us to today and President Trump`s phone call with President Putin. At least we knew about it before it happened this time. Thanks to the Kremlin, which confirmed it before the White House did. What exactly did they talk about for over an hour? That`s next.
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TRUMP: We had a great call with President Putin. We had a call that lasted almost an hour and a half. We just put out a release on the call, but we`re talking very strongly about bringing peace to Syria. We`re talking very strongly about North Korea and Ukraine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Today`s phone call between Trump and President Vladimir Putin, which the White House says touched on North Korea, Ukraine, and Syria took place one day after a surprise face-to-face meeting and hug between President Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Sochi, Russia.
With me now to help to help sort out the Trump/Putin phone call, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.
What do you think the conversation about Syria was?
MICHAEL MCFAUL, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO RUSSIA: Unclear to me. Talking strongly, I don`t know what that means. Most certainly the president didn`t go out of his way to talk about the need for a constitutional reform, electoral process, a political transition, all of that language that might signal what we want in Syria was absent from the readout and absent from the readout that the president did verbally.
HAYES: Let me take a step back for a second. I mean, one of the strange things here is the president was incredibly reticent to criticize Russia during the campaign. Since he has come in, it seems to me he has been caught between that rhetoric and his inclination to have a, quote, better relationship with Putin and the political facts on the ground such that the relationship has been somewhat on auto pilot. Is that a fair characterization?
MCFAUL: Yeah, I think that`s fair. Although I would add auto pilot means we`re not involved. So auto pilot means we`re not in the negotiations about Syria when the other leaders are meeting tomorrow in Sochi to talk about that. Auto pilot means we`re a passive player in these other arenas. And I don`t think that`s good for American national interests.
But it is also true that he hasn`t done the more grandiose things that he had promised during the campaign, things that I think would have been not in America`s national interests. So at least that`s some good news.
HAYES: What do you mean by "those things?"
MCFAUL: As a candidate, he said he would look into lifting sanctions. He said he would look into recognizing Crimea as part of the Russian Federation. He called NATO obsolete. And those made people very worried about this rapprochement that he was planning to do with Vladimir Putin.
What you have instead is lots of happy talk, lots of nice words about Vladimir Putin, but very practically in terms of the policy, actually lots of continuity with the Obama administration policy towards Russia.
HAYES: Do you worry in your darkest thoughts, do you worry that the president is compromised in these interactions, that there`s part of him that is not pursuing American interests in these bilateral conversations, because of something that may be out there?
MCFAUL: I don`t know, Chris. Maybe I worry, but I don`t want to get ahead of my skis, I don`t want to get ahead of the investigation. I would just say that it`s curious for a president, Democrat or Republican, by the way, going back decades, nobody has ever spoke this fondly about a leader in the Kremlin when you compare President Trump`s words to any other president.
HAYES: There`s also, it seems to me, some continuity with the way that he deals with other strong men, whether that`s Duterte in the Philippines, or Xi in China, or Erdogan in Turkey. He does seem to have genuine affection, affinity, admiration for leaders who are in institutional settings in which they are essentially not democratically accountable.
MCFAUL: There`s most certainly a pattern there, you`re right about that. I think he also has a theory of talking nice to these people in hopes that that will achieve some objective, right? So flattery is his method of diplomacy. And if it works, I`ll be the first to congratulate him. If saying those nice things about President Xi as he did just last week gets the Chinese to help us on North Korea in a substantive way, I`ll applaud it.
So far I would say lots of nice talk, and very few results.
HAYES: Yeah, it is an irony that a person who talks about himself as so tough, such a tough dealmaker, that in the international arena he`s kind of fawning with everyone it seems to me. And he`s particularly fawning with Putin, but it`s actually a broader phenomenon than Putin.
MCFAUL: It is. It`s very striking, very strange to me to watch, because it`s all about talking, it`s never about criticism. It`s rarely even talking about American objectives.
HAYES: Right.
MCFAUL: So if you look at that readout of that phone call today, when I used to work at the White House I used to write those statements after Obama would talk to Russian leaders. And we would say, President Obama pressed for the return of sovereignty to Ukraine. President Obama said there needs to be a political solution in Syria, right, so at least we would read out our side to say what objectives we were seeking to achieve.
That is noticeably absent in the readout today for me.
HAYES: There don`t appear to be objectives.
Ambassador Michael McFaul, thank you.
MCFAUL: Thanks for having me.
HAYES: Still to come, a television icon fired one day after just an incredible report detailing years of sexual harassment. Irin Carmon, one of the outstanding reporters who broke the Charlie Rose story joins me ahead.
Plus, tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Thing One tonight, a Texas sheriff has landed himself in hot water after publicly threatening to charge a woman for an anti-Trump decal. Last week, Fort Bend County sheriff Troy Nells posted this image on his personal Facebook page, a truck with a decal reading "F Trump and F you for voting for him."
And Sheriff Nells wrote, I have received numerous calls regarding the offensive display on this truck, if you know who owns this the truck or it is yours I would like to discuss it with you.
Then adding this apparent threat, our prosecutor has informed us she would accept disorderly conduct charges regarding the decal but I feel we can come to an agreement regarding a modification to it."
One note of context here, Sheriff Nells who suggested he could maybe bring charges against someone because an anti-Trump sticker, has also said he may run for congress as a Republican next year.
After the post made headlines, the Fort Bend district attorney rebuffed the sheriff saying his office could not bring charges over a sticker. But now the woman who owns the truck is thinking about taking action. In addition to the new sticker she`s added to her truck. And that is Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: Texas Sheriff Troy Nells is mulling a Republican bid for congress next year publicly threatened to bring charges against a woman with an anti-Trump sticker on her truck, Karen Fonseca. She couldn`t be cited for her sticker, but a day later she was arrested on an unrelated charge dating back to 2014.
Now, Fonseca (ph) was released on bail. Now she`s hitting back starting with a sticker she added to her truck this weekend, that part of the right reading "F Troy Nells and F you for voting for him," and suggesting this whole incident was politically motivated.
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KAREN FONSECA: He didn`t think twice before he went and put us out on Facebook and put me on blast, involved my family and everything else. It`s making my statement and saying, if you`re going to put me on blast that you want to gain some votes, let`s put the real Troy out there and give you what you wanted.
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HAYES: Fonseca is also considIring suing Sheriff Troy Nells, a move the ACLU of Texas has already endorsed, saying you can`t prosecute speech just because it has the f-word in it.
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FONSECA: He messed with the wrong person, for one. And secondly, if I can do this, it might encourages other people to stand up for their rights as well and know that their voice will be heard.
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HAYES: Down the stretch in the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump went to the Little Haiti neighborhood in Miami to make the case for Haitian-American vote that he, and not Hillary Clinton, would look out for them at any cost, particularly in the wake of Haiti`s devastating 2010 earthquake.
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TRUMP: The 2010 Haitian earthquake unleashed a horrible and catastrophic devastation. Over 300,000 dead, unbelievable. 300,000 -- thank you, George -- millions displaced or injured; homes, businesses, schools reduced to rubble. The truth is Haiti is still suffIring very badly, maybe as badly.
The Haitian people deserve better, and that`s what I intend to give them. I will give them better. Whether you vote for me or you don`t vote for me, I really want to be your greatest champion and I will be your champion, whether you vote for me or not.
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HAYES: Just to fact check a bit, the death toll from the earthquake is widely disputed but there is no question that it decimated Haiti, prompting the Obama administration to grant what`s called temporary protected status to tens of thousands of Haitians so they could live here in the U.S.
But now the administration of Donald Trump, that man who you saw there promising to be the champion of the Haitian people, who said just last year that Haiti is still suffIring very badly, that man has now revoked that protection for 80,000 people. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke saying, quote, "significant steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens and Haiti is able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens."
Now, more than half of Haitians live in poverty, one in four in abject poverty.
And here is the thing, the country is also still suffIring from a cholera epidemic that was caused by the UN peacekeeping force that came in after the earthquake. They brought cholera to Haiti and Trump refuses to pay a penny for the UN Cholera relief fund that is designed to address the cholera the UN brought to Haiti.
And now, nearly 60,000 Haitians living in the U.S. must return to Haiti within 18 months or face deportation.
The Haitian community is in shock. Gerald Michaud (ph), who lives in Brooklyn telling The New York Times, "the situation is not good in my country. I don`t know where I am able to go."
In Florida today, protesters rallied in front of the president`s Mar-a-Lago estate to protest the decision as Haitian parents grappled with being forced to leave their U.S.- born children behind.
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TRUMP: And whether you vote for he or you don`t vote for me, I really want to be your greatest champion and I will be your champion, whether you vote for me or not.
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HAYES: Both CBS News and PBS terminated their relationship today with legendary news man Charlie Rose after eight women told The Washington Post that Rose made unwanted sexual advances, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.
Rose apologized when he called his inappropriate behavior when he accepts responsibility. But he said that not all of the allegations are accurate and added, "I always felt I was pursuing shared feelings even though I now realize I was mistaken."
This morning, Rose`s now former co-host on CBS This Morning, Nora O`Donnell, Gail King addressed the allegations.
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NORA O`DONNELL, CBS NEWS: This I know is true, women cannot achieve equality in the workplace or in society until there is a reckoning and taking of responsibility. This will be investigated. This has to end. This behavior is wrong. Period.
GAIL KING, CBS NEWS: I can`t stop thinking about the anguish of these women, what happened to their dignity, what happened to their bodies, what happened to maybe their careers. I can`t stop thinking about that and the pain they are going through.
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HAYES: I`m joined by one of the reporters who broke the news about Charlie Rose and co-bylined on that piece. Irin Carmon, contributing writer at The Washington Post`s Outlook section who first began investigating the allegations against Rose in 2010.
It`s great to have you here. It`s a phenomenal piece of reporting.
IRIN CARMON, THE WASHINGTON POST: Thank you.
HAYES: So, thank you for doing it.
I want to start with that. You started in 2010. That`s a long time.
CARMON: Yes.
HAYES: Tell me what you started to do in 2010, where it went and what happened this time around?
CARMON: So, we have eight people in our story in The Washington Post which I co-wrote with Amy Britain (ph). Two of those women, I first became aware of in 2010, two one of the ones featured in the story, one of them on the record, Kyle Godfried Ryan (ph), and I attempted to reach them in 2010 and speak to people who worked on the show. And you know we write in this story about atmosphere of fear. It was really difficult to get anyone to talk to me. And eventually I just didn`t feel like I had enough.
When the incredible reporting in The New York Times on Harvey Weinstein, our old friend Ronan Farrow, in the New Yorker and at The Washington Post, the reporting on Roy Moore, I started to think that perhaps it was time to revisit the story and got back in touch and all of a sudden my calls were being returned.
HAYES: That`s really, how would you describe the difference between trying to talk to people about this exact same story as seven years ago and this time around?
CARMON: I think there is safety in numbers. Nobody wants to be -- even -- I would say even now it is quite difficult to get anybody with an allegation of sexual harassment or assault to speak to you on the record and we know as journalist that it`s important to have as many people on the record as possible despite the fact anybody doing so is submitting themselves to scrutiny and to stigma.
But when there are many people, including famous people, including the Ashley Judds of the world, who Ashley Judd was one of the first people to go on record, it is kind of a game changer because it makes it less about one person`s individual behavior and more about a systemic phenomenon of men in power who are behaving in a particular way.
So, it`s not just why didn`t you say no or why didn`t you leave or why did you say yes to this invitation, it`s more about a pattern of behavior?
HAYES: YOu know, the pattern is one of the things that has been striking a lot of different reporting in different domains, and particularly here.
And I want to talk a little about the ways in which his alleged behavior, although some of it I think is confirmed, so I`m not sure I have to say alleged, right, because he says...
CARMON: Just try to say alleged every other word.
HAYES: Right. Inappropriate was essentially just kind of shrugged off or sort of worked around by everybody in this orbit.
You have his long-time executive producer Yvette Vega (ph). She said she would shrug and say that`s just Charlie being Charlie.
And then one of the quotes that popped out in the page. She said, I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them, speaking of the women.
CARMON: Right. So, it`s just Charlie being Charlie was the recollection of the young woman that we interviewed Kyl Godfried Ryan (ph) who was 21 years old when her boss, who was three times her age, she says he walked around her naked. He would call her with his sexual fantasies that featured her. He would ask her intimate questions about her life.
So, when she reported much of this behavior to Yvette Vega (ph), the executive producer, who was the closest thing to kind of a person of authority who was not Charlie, Charlie Rose owns his own show -- I guess still owns. And that`s when she says she would be told by Yvette, that`s just Charlie being Charlie.
Now, in Yvette`s statement to us, Yvette Vega`s statementto us, she does say I`m crushed that I didn`t protect them, which seems to me, you know, we did come to her in detail with all the allegations that concerned her and I also would say with regards to Charlie, his statement says that some of the allegations are not true.
I want to say that The Washington Post gave him ample opportunity to respond to them before publication in detail and he chose not to.
HAYES: We should also note -- I mean, that CBS presumably did not find out the story was being published when it went live on The Washington Post.
CARMON: We also asked CBS, Bloomberg and PBS for comment. We gave them a heads up. We asked them have you ever investigated him for sexual harassment and their answer was has anyone every complained? We asked them what kind of HR function is made available to employees of the Charlie Rose Show. Basically all of them said they didn`t have any HR oversight over the show, which I potentially -- you know it made these women feel like there was nowhere to turn besides Yvette Vega. And they all said that they had never received a complaint of sexual harassment.
Now CBs News reported tonight that three women at CBS hvae reported to them as I understand it in the last day.
HAYES: Wow.
CARMON: Sexual harassment that they said took place at CBS.
HAYES: That`s a new chapter in the story.
One of the things also in the story that struck me, and it`s been a pattern throughout these is the ways in which this shut the door on women from entering whole fields, that these were young women coming, aspiring to be in journalism and who found the experience so awful and traumatizing they were like screw this, I`m getting out. And we saw that with Harvey Weinstein with people who were tryingto break into that business. We`ve seen it with other examples that women basically encounter this as the first door they walk through, the first gatekeeper, and we`re like I don`t want to have anything to do with this.
CARMON: They described a culture on the show to us of fear and intimidation. Everybody, they said, was afraid of Charlie`s temper, but he was the key to their career success they thought. And it seemed to be that it was encouraged to spend time with him. They would go to his apartment to deliver research. They would work at his Bellport (ph) mansion. And many of the allegations that we describe in the piece took place in these locations.
So, the idea was, well, do you take this invitation because this guy has the key to your career? If you don`t go, you`re not going to build a relationship with him. You`re not going to get to be there when he interviews Assad. So, it`s a bit of a catch 22.
HAYES: All right, Irin Carmon, an amazing piece of reporting. Thanks for being with me tonight.
CARMON: Thank you.
HAYES: That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
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