Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: November 22, 2017 Guest: Michelle Goldberg, Michael Eric Dyson, Sabrina Siddiqui, Renato Mariotti
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: Yours a very happy Thanksgiving. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The rumor here was that Roy Moore likes young girls.
HAYES: Roy Moore is in trouble, despite an almost endorsement from the President of the United States.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Roy Moore denies it, that`s all I can say.
HAYES: Tonight, the state of the race in Alabama, and the President`s political calculation.
TRUMP: You have to do what you have to do.
HAYES: Then, the son-in-law now being investigated for his contacts with foreign leaders.
JARED KUSHNER, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT TRUMP: I had no improper contacts.
HAYES: Plus, the chef who is cooking 40,000 meals in Puerto Rico.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good, I mean, that`s good.
HAYES: And the President who said he had a busy day, then went golfing.
TRUMP: Golf, golf, golf, golf, more, more.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
TRUMP: I want more.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. One day after getting a de facto endorsement from the President, Roy Moore is in trouble in Alabama. Polls show the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore, which include alleged sexual assault and molestation of teenagers are having an impact on his bid to be Alabama`s next U.S. Senator. Moore now statistically tied with his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, in a deep red state that Donald Trump won by almost 30 points. Just before the allegations were first revealed, Moore had been leading the same poll by 11 percent. A double-digit margin effectively erased in just two weeks. Meanwhile, after largely holding their fire on allegations against Moore, today the Jones Campaign released a new web video naming Moore`s accusers.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leigh Corfman, Beverly Young Nelson, Debbie Wesson Gibson, Gloria Thacker Deason, Gena Richardson, Wendy Miller, Kelly Harrison Thorp and the list is growing. They were girls when Roy Moore immorally pursued them. Now they are women, witness to us all of his disturbing conduct. Will we make his abuser a U.S. Senator?
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HAYES: Powerful question. Moore denies the allegations of misconduct in a local T.V. interview last night, his first in days, he portrayed himself as a staunch advocate for women and children.
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ROY MOORE, REPUBLICAN SENATE CANDIDATE, ALABAMA: We`re talking about women`s rights here. Who stands for women`s rights? Those that stand for transgender rights and same-sex marriage? That`s undermining women. And that`s a volley, children`s rights. And I believe in those things.
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HAYES: In the 24 hours since the President of the United States took the extraordinary step of backing an accused child molester for the U.S. Senate, we`ve learned more about how the president got to that point. Top among his motivations, according to reports, were the parallels between Moore`s situation and his own after the Access Hollywood video surfaced, when the President himself was accused of nonconsensual sexual conduct of over a dozen women on the record. Like Moore, Trump denies all the allegations against him, which might explain this.
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TRUMP: 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.
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HAYES: There seems to be another kind of identification at work here, similar to what we saw in the President`s response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville last August. Both cases, Roy Moore and Charlottesville, presented an easy opportunity for the President to show moral leadership, to denounce in one case a white supremacist who had murdered a girl, a woman and in the other, an alleged child molester. But in both cases, the President has deferred instead to the sympathies of his political base. And he`s now giving Moore the same benefit of the doubt he famously gave to the men who marched with torches.
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TRUMP: You had some very bad people in that group but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
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HAYES: Very fine people. But not everyone gets that same benefit of the doubt, you see, as NBC`s Benjy Sarlin astutely points out. Trump insisted the central park five were guilty after they were exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession. But Roy Moore "totally denies it" is good enough for the U.S. Senator. That gets through the role that race plays in this President`s perception of law and order. In his remarks defending Moore yesterday, the President claims that Moore`s opponent, Doug Jones, who successfully prosecuted the Klansman responsible for the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls, that Doug Jones is soft on crime. Doug Jones, and not the candidate who is accused of preying on teenage girls.
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TRUMP: 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, you don`t need somebody who`s soft on crime like Jones.
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HAYES: Not 24 hours later, the President was on Twitter, threatening an African-American man with up to 10 years in prison for shoplifting. He`s been attacking LaVar Ball, the father of one of the UCLA basketball players recently detained in China for shoplifting for failing to thank the President sufficiently for intervening on the players` behalf. This morning the President tweeted, "it wasn`t the White House, it wasn`t the State Department, it wasn`t father LaVar`s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long-term prison sentence, it was me! Too bad. LaVar is just a poor man`s version of Don King but without the hair.
Just think, LaVar, you could have spent the next five to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your Son in China, with no NBA contract to support you. But remember, LaVar, shoplifting is not a small thing. It`s a really big deal, especially in China. Ungrateful fool." Michelle Goldberg is Columnist for the New York Times. It does seem to me like everything you need to know about the President`s theory of the law, the theory of justice and theory of law and order and crime and all of that is there contained in the 12 hours in which he essentially endorses Roy Moore against Doug Jones and rants at LaVar Ball about his son`s shoplifting.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Right, I mean, any but on the one hand, it is shocking to see the President of the United States stick up for somebody who is almost certainly a child molester, who at the very least has admitted to pursuing teenage girls when he was in his 30s, albeit with their parent`s permission. But like you said, I mean, everything --it`s of a piece with the defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville. And I think that the only question that Donald Trump asks himself when he decides who to support is, do these people support me? Are they -- are they on my side? Do they -- do they show me the right kind of gratitude and deference? And the other questions, I don`t think he even grapples with them. I mean, I would be surprised if he`s even given it any thought at all, whether he really thinks it`s -- whether he really thinks that he`s done these things, Roy Moore. I just think it`s an irrelevance to him.
HAYES: But there`s a larger thing happening. First of all, I totally agree with that. There`s this headline about Trump infuriated after backing Luther Strange, right? So he felt like he already got burned in this race by getting on the wrong side of his base once. But there is also to me the fact that he -- it`s not just him, there are people who are currently working overtime in Alabama to justify their support for Roy Moore. I mean, you really got to take a step back. I mean, this is a guy we saw in the interview, family values, family integrity, the integrity of women and children because of bathroom bills, because of gay marriage. It is remarkable to watch an entire structural of ideology built around the sanctity of family and purity and protection come behind this individual.
GOLDBERG: Well, right. And I think, on the one hand, it shows how rickety it is and how situational it is and to some extent, the -- there are two things that I think are fundamental here, right? There`s both race and the fact that Roy Moore, you know, in addition to being a theocrat is also somebody who opposed taking segregationist language out of the Alabama constitution, who just the other day was talking about Alabama being on the right side of the civil war. And so -- and believes in patriarchy, for lack of a better word, who believes in the subordination of women. And I think all these other issues are just sort of embroideries on that. And we see how quickly people are willing to let them go when these two fundamentals are at stake.
HAYES: Yeah, that`s what is being fought for. I want to ask you a follow up about Al Franken because we had you on the program when the first allegation by Leeann Tweeden surfaced. There was a subsequent one about him groping a woman when she was taking a picture with him with the Senator. The Huffington Post reporting tonight, two more women accused Senator Al Franken of inappropriate touching. You had called on him to resign after the first allegation, I just wanted to get your response.
GOLDBERG: I mean, you know, I`ve gone back and forth on this.
HAYES: You struggled with it on the program.
GOLDBERG: Right. I struggled with it in real time, you know, right after I published this piece, and then thought, maybe this is the wrong thing. And at the time, what I -- it wasn`t necessarily that think that grabbing someone`s butt means that you must then be banished from public life, as much as I thought that in this particular time, do Democrats really want to be defending this, particularly when there`s probably going to be more and we could just kind of cauterize the wound and draw a line in the sand and be the non-groping party. But you know, at the same time, I did struggle with it, because I do think that we are conflating at of different --
HAYES: Behaviors.
GOLDBERG: Behaviors, right, grabbing someone on the butt is not the same as taking a 14-year-old girl to the woods and taking all her clothes off. I mean --
HAYES: After you`ve picked her up at her mother`s custody hearing.
GOLDBERG: Right. So I am really uncomfortable with the way a whole bunch of different stuff is being mashed together in this current reckoning. But I also just -- I mean, it`s so disappointing to have to, as, you know, as a kind of liberal woman, to have to split hairs over how much butt grabbing is OK.
HAYES: Right. I mean, the details in the HuffPost story is that one of these alleged incidences, which I should say, the Senator says it`s hard to react to anonymous accusations I think was --
GOLDBERG: Right, which is a legitimate --- that`s a legitimate --
HAYES: Yes, and they`re anonymous. Their -- the names are not given. But was at a -- after a performance of a feminist choir at a women`s political event was sort of this happened, to speak to your point about the (INAUDIBLE). Michelle Goldberg, have a great Thanksgiving.
GOLDBERG: Thank you, you too.
HAYES: Michael Eric Dyson is a Professor at Georgetown University and Author of Tears We Cannot Stop, A Sermon to White America and Sabrina Siddiqui, Politics Reporter for The Guardian. And Michael, I wanted to ask you about your reaction to the -- within this short span of time, the President attacking Doug Jones as soft on crime, and then berating LaVar Ball about his son`s is shoplifting and how it`s a serious crime and gets 10 years in China and what that -- what that communicates to you.
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, PROFESSOR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: Ungrateful Negroes. You can never do enough for you people to make you appreciate what I, the leader of the free world, have done for you. It`s a stand-in argument. It`s a substitute argument for a general malaise when it comes to race in America. If black people -- Colin Kaepernick`s, why aren`t you being grateful for the opportunity to do what you do and to ply your wares as an athlete in this country? So this ungrateful negrotude is said to be characteristic of African-American people.
And when you think about it across the board, what he`s saying to LaVar Ball, blowhard that he is, that you are not sufficiently deferential to me. And he uses, by the way, Don King who supported and endorsed him as an example of a fallen figure. No black person is good enough to rise above Donald Trump`s calumny or assault. And no black person will ever have his word taken for granted. Look, he`s taking Roy Moore`s word for granted. Well, I think Barack Obama said, hey, I`m a citizen of the United States of America. His word wasn`t good enough. I think his vicious racial politics are pretty clear here.
HAYES: That`s a very good point that he did not believe the President about his place of birth, he didn`t believe the document about his birth certificate but if Roy Moore says, yes, I did not try to sexually assault the 16-year-old girl who talked about it at the time contemporaneously and I did not try to -- I did not molest the 14-year-old girl who I picked up outside the custody hearing, that word is good enough.
DYSON: That`s right.
HAYES: Sabrina, having cover this White House, there`s a real question now which way they go in the next three days. There was this fence straddling, this, we`re not going to weigh in on this. We don`t want to get on the wrong side of our base again, but we don`t want to be backing an accused child molester. Yesterday, when asked if he`s going to go campaign for Roy Moore, he said, I`ll let you know. What do you think they`re going to do?
SABRINA SIDDIQUI, POLITICS REPORTER, THE GUARDIAN: Well, I think that they might not put the President out there campaigning for Roy Moore, but he effectively gave him his endorsement. And you know, the truth here is that for all the political calculations that may have been transpiring behind the scenes, once again, the President, Donald Trump, has revealed who he really is and what he really thinks. And, you know, when he`s saying, for example, about Doug Jones, Roy Moore`s opponent, that he`s soft on crime, we know that what that is. Is, you know, a throwaway line that really gets at Trump`s perception of so-called black crime. When he says that he`s weak on the border, we know that that feeds into Trump`s message that it really is rooted in the criminalization of predominantly Hispanic immigrants.
And when he says he`s weak on the military, frankly I think he meant to say national security. He would have been gotten in a dig at Muslims as well. I mean, this messaging is tried and tested on Trump`s part. It was very much at the heart of his campaign. And I think one year out when you look at his support for someone like Roy Moore, there really shouldn`t be any doubt, that as much as Republicans try to say this isn`t the party of Trump and this isn`t the party of Roy Moore, it very much is. And you`ll have more and more candidates like Roy Moore who were once on the fringe who are now a part of the Republican mainstream. Even if he loses, he`s probably just the first in a string of primary challengers who are going to come up and arguably run on so-called Trumpism and really leave Republicans with no choice but to support them.
HAYES: Michael, I was reminded of this tweet from the Virginia -- I mean, the President has this theme. He talks about tough on crime or weak on crime. Meanwhile, we should note his former campaign manager has been indicted on 12 counts, along with his associate. The President doesn`t seem that upset about those alleged crimes. But the President said this during the Virginia race, Ed Gillespie will turn the really bad Virginia economy numbers around -- OK fine -- and fast. Second sentence is, strong on crime, he might even save our great statues` heritage. It seems like there`s a lot of subtext there.
DYSON: Yes, except the text isn`t so sub. I mean, the reality is that it`s a pretext and a context for bigotry here. This is a President who rises every morning to excrete the moral -- to excrete the feces of his moral depravity into a nation into -- that he`s turned into his psychic mode. Here`s a guy who doesn`t understand the difference between right and wrong fundamentally and who doesn`t care. So for him, race Trumps everything. And in this case, sending these dog whistles out there, suggesting that the statues are part of our heritage, and it`s a false argument. When people say, these are part of our -- statues are part of our heritage, yes, but your heritage is bigotry. The civil war was not fought in regard to race and slavery, it was fought for state`s right. The state`s right to do what? Own slaves.
HAYES: Right.
DYSON: So this is a manipulation of history. Gore Vidal said we live in the united states of amnesia. Donald Trump is one of the greatest amnesiacs alive. And yet he`s able to join amnesia and nostalgia for a way of life that passed long ago that now the white supremacists are trying to revive and Donald Trump is their greatest champion and they get extra points -- they give extra points to him, because he doesn`t quite explicitly say it, he just signifies. He`s in the realm of inference and that being in the realm of inference means you can have plausible deniability. What do you mean? That`s not what I was saying, I didn`t mean that at all.
HAYES: Well, there`s not -- I mean, Sabrina, what strikes me with the Roy Moore situation is Roy Moore is not subtext. You know, he said last night that Alabama always stands, whether it`s a civil war or civil rights, you know, you can understand what he means there, that this is -- this is the Trump era, which is the dog whistle got very loud. The subtext has turned into text, and Roy Moore embodies that. And ultimately, Roy Moore`s defeat or victory strikes me, a defining moment for the future of how many more Donald Trumps we`re going to have. What do you think?
SIDDIQUI: Absolutely. I think that`s the point that I was trying to make is that, you know, we`re talking right now about Roy Moore, but he`s probably the first among many similar candidates who will not only be backed by someone like Steve Bannon but potentially also by Donald Trump whether Republicans in Washington like it or not. And I think it`s also important to remember that we`re talking about the sexual assault allegations, which obviously are front and center now, in the Alabama Senate race, even before that, it`s almost now an afterthought that Roy Moore once said that homosexuality should be illegal.
And that he suggested that a Muslim should not be allowed to serve in Congress. And Republicans were actually still willing to support him, despite that which tells you where they are, as a party. I mean, every candidate is not necessarily going to be an accused child molester but they`re certainly going to potentially have a history of making comments that are either explicitly racist, or at a minimum, dog whistles and they`re going to have to reconcile with that.
HAYES: Or be kicked off the supreme court twice by his conservative Republican colleagues for disobeying federal law in violation of the supremacy clause of the Constitution. Michael Eric Dyson and Sabrina Siddiqui, thank you, both.
SIDDIQUI: Thank you.
DYSON: Thank you.
HAYES: Still to come, my colleague, Lawrence O`Donnell on the President`s calculation to standby an accused child molester. And tonight, there are reports that Robert Mueller is focusing hard on the President`s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his interaction with foreign leaders. That story in two minutes.
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HAYES: -- appears to be zeroing in on the President`s son-in-law and Senior Adviser, Jared Kushner. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mueller`s investigators are asking questions about Jared Kushner`s interactions with foreign leaders during the Presidential transition. That`s shaping up to be an interesting period of time for Kushner, since it was also during the transition that Kushner set up a secret Trump Tower meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and discussed setting up a back channel communications between the Trump transition team and the Russian government, according to U.S. intercepts of Russian communications. Kushner also met during the transition with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a sanctioned Russian bank, and Kushner initially omitted more than 100 foreign contacts from a security clearance form under penalty of perjury.
It is also the case that Trump`s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, lied to the FBI and others about his own discussion of sanctions against Russia with the Russian Ambassador during the transition. It`s possible Mueller`s team is looking into violation of the Logan Act which prohibits Americans from communicating with a foreign government under certain circumstances. Former Federal Prosecutor Renato Mariotti joins me now. And I want to start with the Logan Act. People always throw around the Logan Act, oh, it`s the violation of the Logan Act, because you know, private citizens essentially cannot conduct foreign policy.
RENATO MARIOTTI, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Right.
HAYES: The counter to that is that this is a very, very, very rarely used statute. I think no one`s been prosecuted under it in years and years and years. What do you make of the criminal exposure here?
MARIOTTI: Well, I think that it`s much more likely for the reason you just said, Chris, that Kushner is going to be charged with either making deliberate omissions from his disclosure forms or potentially making a false statement to Congress. So those are -- those are crimes that are charged pretty often. And I think, you know, Kushner`s defense and the omissions is just, hey, there was a mistake, you know, we slipped up. There`s been a number of back and forth drafts, we deliberately were planning to add stuff later.
And, you know, I think more and more, the fact that there are just numerous contacts that are popping up, that is going to make it harder for Kushner to explain away, not including that information on the form. And then you talked about that meeting with the head of the Russian bank. Well, you know, that was something he discussed with Congress. And so, you know, I would expect Mueller to be matching up very closely what he said to Congress, with, you know, the facts and the evidence he has, to see whether or not Kushner was telling the truth.
HAYES: So here`s an interesting tidbit from that Wall Street Journal story because it`s broader than Russia, right? It says the investigators have asked witness questions about the involvement of Mr. Kushner in a controversy over U.N. resolution passed December 23rd that condemned Israel`s construction of settlements in disputed territories. And that relates to essentially the Trump administration in waiting, kind of conducting their own parallel foreign policy. Do you think that`s part of a broader investigation to sort of establish what if any channels they had with Russia during that moment, as well?
MARIOTTI: I think that`s very possible. And certainly, as we -- as we know, there have been, you know, allegations that there were discussions between members of the Trump campaign and Russia regarding certain foreign policy decisions obviously, towards the Ukraine and the GOP platform, and then, of course, the Russian lawyer, all of that according to Bloomberg, alleged that Trump Jr. mentioned in a meeting that they would reconsider lifting sanctions. So I would expect that you know, anything that Kushner is directly involved in relating to foreign policy, is going to be something that Mueller will look at, because, you know, he`ll want to establish why it was that Kushner omitted names from that disclosure form.
HAYES: The other person who just keeps coming up, it seems to me, is Don Jr. I mean, obviously, Don Jr. plays a key role in the Trump Tower meeting. He`s the one who says when offered dirt on behalf -- from the Russian government, which is backing his father on Hillary Clinton, he says, if it`s what you say it is, I love it, particularly later in the summer. He`s also the person who we know now has established going back and forth with WikiLeaks, despite repeated denials by members of the campaign that any of that was happening. And now this, he met with Aleksander Torshin, a man with close ties to the Kremlin at an NRA event in May 201 6. Torshin had been trying to set up a meeting with then-Candidate Donald Trump but ended up being introduced to Mr. Trump`s son. This is the meeting that Kushner in that e-mail said no, don`t do this, but he ended up meeting with Don Junior. Do you think that brings Junior some exposure?
MARIOTTI: Well, for sure. I mean, look, Mueller`s going to be looking at all of these meetings between Donald Trump Jr. and various Russians and it is interesting, as you`re pointing out, Chris, I think you`re right on the right track. It seems like essentially the son is a stand-in for the father. And as we know from those WikiLeaks conversations that you referred to, essentially, you know, WikiLeaks or Julian Assange or whoever was running that account was passing information to Trump Jr. and that it appeared that you know, he was communicating with Hope Hicks, who is somebody who`s you know, could be a conduit to Trump himself. And then Trump is tweeting about the very things that WikiLeaks is passing. So you know, whatever Trump Jr. is being told, I would expect Mueller to be asking a lot of questions of Trump Jr. about what exactly he`s telling his father.
HAYES: Yes, it`s a good point, right? Anything that goes to Trump Jr., like, what is a plausibility that doesn`t go to the candidate himself, to the man who is now president, to the man who has the same name, who is his father. If anyone can get information to the principal in the campaign, it`s the candidate`s child. Renato Mariotti, thank you very much.
MARIOTTI: Thank you.
HAYES: Next, what do you do when the person rambling on the other end of the phone is the President? The amazing story from the members of Congress in that very situation after this very quick break.
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HAYES: Democratic Senator Tom Carper went on national television today and made some news, telling a story about President Trump calling into a meeting on tax cuts involving Democratic Senators and members of the Trump administration, including White House Chief Economic Adviser, Gary Cohn.
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SEN. TOM CARPER (D) DELAWARE: Gary gets up and takes a call on his cell phone, comes backs into the room, he says, we have somebody calling in from Asia. And it was the President, which was nice. It`s nice of him to do that. 15 minutes later, the President is still talking and we -- I said to Gary, it was a room where we`re all sitting around this big square table, and I said, Gary, why don`t you do this, why don`t you just take the phone from, you know, your cell phone back and just say, Mr. President, you`re brilliant, and -- but we`re losing contact and I think we`re going to lose you now so good-bye, and that`s what he did and hung up. And then we went back to having the kind of conversation that we needed to.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you saying that Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the President off the phone?
CARPER: Well, I wouldn`t -- I don`t want to throw him under the bus but yes.
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HAYES: I don`t want to throw him under the bus, but that`s exactly what he did. Two sources who were in the room tell NBC News they do not recall Cohn faking a bad connection to get off the call and Carper`s office is now backing off that claim. But most everyone agrees that the President rambled for so long that folks got uncomfortable and wanted the call end to so they could get back to work.
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CARPER: It was a long call. It was clear that there was some eagerness in the room for us to resume our conversation. We heard a lot from the president. It was a challenge to transition him off the call.
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HAYES: A challenge to transition him off the call. Use that the next time you want to use a euphemism for hanging up on someone. And just take a moment to digest that. The President, the self-styled great negotiator calls in to make his case to Democrats on tax reform, his top domestic priority, but instead of closing the deal, the supposed closer in chief just rambles until everybody wants him to hang up.
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TRUMP: We like to win. We know how to close deals. I close. I`m a closer. Even in sports, I`ve always been a closer. I win. I win club championships. You`ve got to know how to close. Our country doesn`t have closers.
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HAYES: In September, ProPublica revealed something shocking: Facebook allowed advertisers to target, quote, Jew haters among other anti-Semitic categories.
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JULIA ANGWIN, PROPUBLICA REPORTER: This really came to me from a tip. Somebody sent me a screen shot of the ad-buying platform with the words "Jew hater" and showed that you could buy them. And I thought it was probably a hoax, so I went online and looked and it did seem to be there. But then I thought, well, it`s probably a bug. So I`ll try to buy one and it won`t go through, but then I bought one and it went through, bought another one, it went through, bought a third one it went through, and then I called Facebook and said, why are you selling the ability to target your ads at Jew-haters?
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HAYES: Good question.
Facebook removed the anti-Semitic categories, but this wasn`t the first such incident.
Last year, ProPublica successfully submitted an ad to Facebook`s housing categories that included a request that the ad not be shown to African- American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. The revelation that people could essentially target their ads to whites only wasn`t just a black eye for Facebook, it was also an apparent violation of the Federal Fair Housing Act, which explicitly bans discrimination in housing ads.
In the wake of that story, Facebook vowed to step up enforcement of its prohibition on housing discrimination in housing, employment and credit ads. But whatever they did, it didn`t seem to work very well, because ProPublica is now out with a new investigation.
Here to tell us what she found, co-author of all these stories, ProPublica senior reporter, Julia Angwin.
Great to have you and great reporting.
HAYES: So you went back at it. They were supposed to fix it,and what did you do? And what did you find?
ANGWIN: So we bought the same ads that we bought last year, actually, the ones that violated the fair housing law, a rental property available for people, but excluding African-Americans from seeing the ad. And it sailed through their system. So we tried a couple other things: people in wheelchairs, blind people, Hispanic people, everything sailed through. And it turns out they maybe didn`t fix it.
HAYES: OK, so just to be clear, the Fair Housing Act is really clear on this, because people would often do this, right. It was a key driver of housing discrimination was that they would target ads, and sometimes they would use code words, sometimes it would just be explicit, but basically whites only. The Fair Housing Act says you can`t do that. You can`t advertise a rental property and say, like, we`re looking for people that aren`t in a wheelchair, like that`s explicitly against the law.
And Facebook has a platform where you could just easily, seamlessly violate the law, is what you found?
ANGWIN: Yeah, it`s kind of like a drop-down menu for law violation. You choose what you want to exclude in the audience segment and everything is available to you, so you can make sure that those people never see your ads.
It`s a little weird, though, because you don`t write -- you don`t have to write "no whites," right? So, it`s just embedded in the ad. But no one would ever know that you did that, unless they had some insight into this.
HAYES: That`s what`s a great point about this. Like, if you run an ad in a local paper saying, we won`t rent to black people, like someone can circle that ad and send it into the housing -- urban development or Department of Justice and say, this violates the Fair Housing Act.
In this case, you could do this and no one would ever know that you`ve done it explicitly in violation of the law.
ANGWIN: Right. I mean, this is the problem with Facebook is that there`s no accountability in the sense that everything is so micro-targeted that the only people who -- well, we don`t know yet who saw the Russian ads, but you know, the only people who see the things are the people to whom they were targeted. And no one else knows that they didn`t see it, right?
I could pick up The Wall Street Journal and read the ads there. Let`s say I wanted like a higher class of ads than my normal thing, I could do that with a paper. But with Facebook, you will never see it.
HAYES: There`s another Facebook story that`s related to that, which is that they`re going to show users which Russian propaganda they followed, which I thought was a hilarious 2017 headline, like Facebook to show users which Russian propaganda to follow.
We thought it would be like hilarious in terms of like your entire family were just Russian bots. Like all my friends. I thought I went to high school with that dude.
What are they doing here? And what got them to do this?
ANGWIN: Well, so, I mean, the Russia story is sort of like the ultimate in the ad-buying problem at Facebook. So it`s also, by the way, illegal for foreigners to buy ads in...
HAYES: Campaign ads.
ANGWIN: Campaign ads.
And so it turns out, though, that Russia had placed all these ads, not all of them would probably be defined as campaign ads by the FEC, but some were.
HAYES: But some were.
ANGWIN: But some were, and they were definitely political ads and very divisive. And Facebook didn`t catch them, despite, as Al Franken said, you know, they were paid for in rubles, so like -- but they didn`t notice it. And now they are trying to figure out how to come clean. And so I guess this is the latest effort in transparency is that everyone will get to see what propaganda was spread to them.
HAYES: They seem to have built a machine. When you say, like, no one can see it. And one of the things that`s been helpful as I have read through your reporting and some others is just how automated the whole system is. So, like, it`s just -- it`s just like buying something on Amazon. Like buying an ad is like buying something on Amazon. You just go through, there`s no -- it`s just a machine. You`re just going and filling out a web form.
That like Facebook appears to be partly invisible to itself. Is that a fair characterization?
ANGWIN: Yeah. I think that`s a very good way to describe it. I mean, wherever I bring these things to Facebook, whether it`s the Jew hater or the housing ads, they seem legitimately shocked and they do seem to legitimately to have no idea what is happening on their system.
And maybe somebody there does, but...
HAYES: It`s the largest media company that`s ever existed in human history and the largest reach to human eyeballs that has ever been constructed in the history of human beings on the planet.
ANGWIN: Yeah, but their beautiful profit margins are based on the fact that it`s all automated.
Now, they`ve say they`re going to double their staff from 10,000 people are going to be added like to review ads and human review. We don`t know what that`s going to look like or whether that`s going to make a difference.
HAYES: All right, Julia Angwin, thanks for your time tonight and your great reporting. Appreciate it.
ANGWIN: Thank you.
HAYES: Still ahead, the state of American politics during a week when the president of the United States all but endorses an accused child molester. And my colleague Lawrence O`Donnell who has also got a new book out joins me to talk about that.
And next, the president says he`ll be spending the weekend having meetings and working the phones, which is totally believable, but also, tonight Thing One, Thing Two next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Thing One tonight, President Trump is at his private resort in Florida today, Mar-a-Lago, making this the 99th day he`s spent at a Trump property since inauguration, 99. On average, President Trump has spent one of every three days at a Trump-owned property. That`s a lot of time, so it can`t just be fun and games, right?
Trump seemed intent on clarifying that point tweeting shortly before 7:00 a.m., we`ll be having meetings and working the phones from the winter White House in Florida, Mar-a-Lago."
This morning, the White House press pool was briefed on Trump`s schedule. According to the first pool note, which was sent out at 7:56 a.m., by deputy press secretary,Lindsay Walters, said the president planned to make a number of calls this week, otherwise, she expects a, quote, low-key day.
But less than 10 minutes later, the White House asked reporters to make a very, very important correction. At 8:06 a.m., this correction was issued. While the White House communications staff expects the press pool to have a low-key day, the president will not have a low-key day and has a full schedule of meetings and phone calls. Got that? No fun and games here. All work.
Well, about on hour later, 9:15 a.m., Trump`s motorcade departed Mar-a- Lago. And can you guess where Trump was head amidst his busy day of meetings and calls? That`s Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: It`s been a busy day for President Trump down at Mar-a-Lago. He tweeted this afternoon, "51 million Americans to travel this year, highest number in 12 years -- AAA @foxnews."
That`s after a Fox News anchor made that exact statement, almost word for word, like he`s repeating it back to the TV, a holiday travel segment on Twitter.
And the president has been watching Trump TV all day. He departed Mar-a- Lago for his golf course shortly after 9:00 a.m., returned over five hours later. The press pool wasn`t told what Trump was doing for five hours at the golf course, but it takes about four hours to play a round of golf.
So in addition to today being Trump`s 99th day at a Trump property, it`s his 77th day at a Trump golf course since becoming president, which I know some people would find outrageous.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TRUMP: I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don`t think I would ever seen Turnberry again. I don`t think I would ever see Doral again. I own Doral in Miami. I don`t think I would ever see many of the places that I have. I don`t think I would see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off and make great deals, right? Who is going to leave?
There won`t be time to go on vacations. There won`t be time to go golfing all the time.
I`m not going to play much golf, because there`s a lot of work to be done.
You need leadership. You can`t flay to Hawaii to play golf. I don`t know where the president was, he wasn`t very far away. Maybe he was playing golf.
Obama, it was reported today, played 250 rounds of golf.
Obama went golfing every day.
Let Obama go play golf every day. Obama plays more golf than professional players in the PGA tour!
Playing a lot of golf. He`s played more than most PGA touring professionals play. More than a guy who plays ones the PGA tour.
PGA tour.
Plays more golf.
Plays more golf.
PGA Tour.
PGA Tour.
I mean, this guy. Golf, golf, golf, golf, golf. More, more. Learning how to chip, learning how to hit the drive, learning how to putt. Oh, it more.
If you become president and you go to the White House, why would you want to leave the White House?
When you`re in the White House, who the hell wants to play golf?
Who wants to leave the White House?! How the hell do you leave for three weeks to play golf?
If I get elected president, I`m going to be in the White House a lot. I`m not leaving. I`m going to be working for you. I`m not going to have time to go play golf, believe me.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: In the two plus months since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, world-renowned chef Jose Andreas has become a fixture on the island building a food network that just since the end of October has served more than 2.2 million warm meals and sandwiches, or to put it another way, Andreas has fed more people freshly cooked food than any other single agency operating in Puerto Rico, a fact that seemed to catch the chef by surprise.
He told The New York Times, in my life, I never expected the Salvation Army to be asking me for food. If one of the biggest NGOs comes to us for food, who is actually going to be feeding Puerto Rico? We are. We are it. We only came here to try to help a few thousands, because nobody planned to feed Puerto Rico and we opened the biggest restaurant in the world in a week, that`s how crazy this is.
Nearly 60 percent of residents in Puerto Rico are still without power and a recent investigation which surveyed more than 100 funeral homes found 499 hurricane-related deaths, nine times more than the government`s official number of 55. Almost 500 people, dead.
Yet despite a U.S. recovery effort that seems patchy at the very best, Puerto Ricans are looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, many of them thanks to Chef Jose Andreas who plans to serve around 40,000 meals.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOSE ANDREAS, CHEF: So here we are in the kitchen. Eight weeks. Light goes, light comes, but that`s good news. We have generators. But right in front, they are trying to fix, finalize the electric lines. So light comes, light goes. But it`s not bad. It`s good. They are fixing the electric grid A and that`s good news.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Hopefully tomorrow we`ll have electricity. Good! Happy Thanksgiving.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, is an accused child molester better than a Democrat?
TRUMP: Well, he denies. Look, he denies it. He -- let me just tell you, Roy Moore denies it. That`s all I can say. He denies it. And by the way, he totally denies it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: As President of the United States Donald Trump literally refusing to answer whether accused child molester is better than a Democrat.
The accused child molester in question, of course, Roy Moore, Republican candidate in the Alabama Senate race, despite the troubling allegations against Moore, allegations of which he strenuously denies, he could nevertheless still win the December 12 special election for the Senate seat once occupied by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a prospect that reportedly sent GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell in a tizzy laying all kinds of drastic plans to stop Roy Moore, everything from moving the election date to forcing a new special election to even expelling Roy Moore from the Senate.
To talk about what Roy Moore means to the Republican party and for the country, I`m joined by our own Lawrence O`Donnell, host of MSNBC`s The Last Word and author of the brand new book "Playing with Fire: the 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics."
I want to -- I just read the first two chapters of the book, which are excellent. Want to get you on that.
But start on Moore. What are they going to do if he wins?
LAWRENCE O`DONNELL, MSNBC: I think, Chris, he will be expelled.
HAYES: You really think so?
O`DONNELL: Yeah, the Senate can expel anyone they want at any time. There`s no judicial review of that. You can`t then take the case to the Supreme Court. So, it`s completely up to the Senate.
And Bob Packwood faced expulsion and resigned the Senate in the early `90s because of an investigation which was for much, much less than what Roy Moore is accused of here, far less. And the case of Roy Moore with the minor would be heard by the ethics committee, probably in a public hearing.
She has in effect testified publicly now at the Today Show. And so I don`t see any reason why the ethics committee wouldn`t have the hearing be public.
And this is what Mitch McConnell knows. Mitch McConnell was running the ethics committee when they had the investigation of Republican Senator Bob Packwood. And there wasn`t a single Republican who was supporting Senator Packwood as that investigation eventually unfolded.
And by the way, when that investigation started, there was not a member of the senate who thought Bob Packwood was in serious trouble, not one that Bob Packwood would be expelled or would be forced to resign.
And so I think this one is really a very clear case. The ethics committee would start work probably day after Roy Moore was sworn in.
HAYES: Do you think they would -- I guess my question is do they have the appetite for the fight and the expenditure of the political capital it would take.
O`DONNELL: Well, there`s no real fight about these things. You know, the ethics committee is bipartisan, the only committee that has an equal number from both parties. And it tends to be populated by the more reasonable people of both parties.
So -- and there are no supporters of Roy Moore in the senate, none. There`s just -- there would be -- I can`t imagine what the resistance would be to the ethics committee doing this.
HAYES: So, there`s also now the case of Senator Al Franken. There`s two more accusers of him essentially groping them during a photo op. Unnamed women in the Huffington Post, and there`s of course the settlement against John Conyers, two separate settlements. Do you -- what do you think is developing here for the mode that congress in this moment, in the post Weinstein, #metoo moment is going to do to handle these kinds of allegations?
O`DONELL: Well, if this was a Democratically controlled -- a congress controlled by the Democratic Party you would see immediately a move to change their procedures and change the rules, because they would be very responsive to this, having seen basically their system calcify over time to point of being dysfunctional on this kind of thing.
Republicans are not responsive to this sort of thing. The modern Republican Party does not immediately respond to what we would call public pressure to clean up their interact this territory. And so any kinds of changes in procedure in the way this is handled is now completely up to Republicans in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, in the Senate Mitch McConnell. They have to convince their members to vote on rules changes and procedure changes within their own bodies. Democrats can`t do it. The Democrats can`t fix this in the congress. It`s the people in control of the congress who can fix it.
HAYES: We should note, there`s a number of Democratic members of congress who called on Conyers either to be stripped of his leadership position on the Judiciary Committee or to resign completely, a number of them today.
I want to talk to you about the state of the tax bill, which I have hard time getting read on, but I feel like you always have a very, very good read on these things and where it stands right now.
O`DONNELL: Well, you know, I used to write tax bills in the Senate Finance Committee. And the easiest thing you could ever have to predict, Chris, is the passage of a tax cut. The easiest thing to do.
HAYES: It should be a gimme.
O`DONNELL: That`s right. And when Republicans in the past have tried to do it, they`ve always picked up a significant number of Democratic votes. There are Democratic Senators and Democratic House members who simply have to get on board politically in their minds if it`s a tax cut. That`s why it was so striking to see not a single Democratic vote in the Senate Finance Committee, not a single Democratic vote in the House.
And so this one is in trouble. And I`ve never seen tax cut bill in trouble. And so my predictive capacity here could not be weaker under these circumstances. And of course I`ve never seen a president pushing it with the kind of erratic nonsense that Donald Trump does, where he attacks Jeff Flake, who he needs as vote on this bill.
So, this defies I think anyone`s predictive capacity, especially if you`re using any of our old models.
HAYES: All right, quickly, what`s a crazier year. You wrote a book about 1968. It`s incredibly engrossing. What is crazier year, 1968 or 2017?
O`DONNELL: Well, in terms of presidential elections, actually, 1968 was. It was much more dramatic, much more chaotic. 2016, you had an absolutely standard presidential election campaign with the exception of one extremely erratic and eccentric candidate. But every other piece of the campaign operated according to the manual. And it`s a manual that was actually designed and kind of set in cement in 1968.
`68 we had assassinations, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. You had the president drop out of the race. I mean, just colossally, gigantic events, each of which would have been the biggest event of any other campaign year.
HAYES: All right, Lawrence O`Donnell, thanks for making the time. Again, the new book is "Playing With Fire: the 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics." Lawrence will be here, back here with last word in exactly one hour. Thank you, Lawrence.
All right, that is All In for this evening.
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