Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: July 10, 2018 Guest: Evan McMullin, Karine Jean-Pierre, Jason Candor, Lee Gelernt, Beto O`Rourke, Cory Booker, Melissa Murray, Jamal Greene, Evan McMullen
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: It`s worth keeping our eyes on and that`s certainly 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.
BRETT KAVANAUGH, NOMINEE, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: No president has ever consulted more widely to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.
HAYES: Flattery will get you nominated to the Supreme Court.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Brett Kavanaugh has gotten great reviews.
HAYES: Tonight, the history of Judge Kavanaugh and the Republican Party.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), SENATE MINORITY LEADER: If there has been a partisan, political fight that needed a very bright legal foot soldier, Brett Kavanaugh was probably there.
HAYES: And why Trump`s personal lawyer was there to watch the nomination. Senator Cory Booker joins me on that. Plus, new accusations against Freedom Caucus Founder Jim Jordan.
REP. JIM JORDAN (R), OHIO: Conversations in a locker room are a lot different than people coming up and talking about abuse.
HAYES: The President`s solution after missing the deadline to reunite kids with their parents.
TRUMP: Don`t come to our country illegally.
HAYES: And Trumps former National Security Adviser returns to court.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lock him up. Lock him up.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. The president`s nominee of the Supreme Court introduced himself to the nation last night by telling an obvious lie to flatter his new patron.
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KAVANAUGH: Throughout this process, I`ve witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people for more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.
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HAYES: No one consulted more widely, more backgrounds, sounds accurate. It is of course the same humiliating ritual that all of the presidents underlings had been forced to undergo showering their boss with absurd superlatives and you have to imagine that Brett Kavanaugh`s apparent eagerness to play the loyal soldier in front of the nation as we all watched helped him win over this president. Kavanagh has arguably been playing that same role for his entire career. He once called the Forrest Gump of Republican politics by Senator Dick Durbin. He came up as part of the anti-Clinton machine in the 1990s investigating the death of Vince Foster and writing much of the infamous Starr report which by the way is a truly insane document. He went on to get involved in the custody fight over Elian Gonzalez then later worked on the Republican legal team in Bush v Gore. And that earned Kavanaugh a plum job in the Bush White House where according to Karl Rove, he was central to all policy decisions, maybe not the best thing to brag about. There they are Rove and Kavanaugh on their way to take a trip on Air Force One. Kavanaugh was rewarded for his service to George W. Bush in the trenches in Florida and elsewhere by being nominated for a lifetime appointment to the second highest court in the nation, the D.C. Circuit. That despite receiving a less than stellar ratings the American Bar Association and having never tried a single case to verdict or judgment. He was very young at the time. Later, about ten years after co-writing the Starr report which examined the President`s sex life in excruciatingly minor detail listed all the different offenses for which it could be impeached and ignited a firestorm that crippled the federal government, Kavanaugh then decided he changed his mind about presidential investigations arguing they should not be allowed to go forward while the president remains in office and that Congress should consider a law that would change it. "We should not burden a sitting president with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions. The president`s job is difficult enough as it is. My bad on the whole Ken Starr thing. Now you, have to imagine that Kavanaugh`s flexibility on that particular matter, he was for criminal investigations and civil pursuits when the president was a Democrat and then against it once he`d served a Republican that White House was especially appealing to the current president. I`m joined now by member of the Senate Judiciary Committee which will hold hearings on Kavanaugh`s nomination Senator Cory Booker who has already announced his position. Let me start on this -- on that sort of instantly infamous now Law Review essay in the Minnesota Law Review from Kavanagh. His defenders say no, no, no, what he`s saying is that Congress should change the law not that the current law prohibits it. What`s your response to that?
SEN. CORY BOOKER (D), NEW JERSEY: Well, I mean, look, President Trump chose the one justice on his list provided for him by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society who he knew would give him immunity to any matters that come before them and to me it`s almost outrageous. We do not have a judicial system in which someone who is a subject of a criminal investigation can choose the judge that might have to preside over them. That`s not or our criminal justice system and the president is not above the law and the absurdity of that, this is not a partisan issue. I think any senator if you pull away from the partisanship and just look at the fact pattern. Here`s an investigation that`s led to 70 plus charges, 20 plus people in organizations being charged, five people have already been indicted and one has already been sentenced. It`s clear to me that this is a point where matters in this case. All these people swirling around the president are being charged pleading guilty and being sentenced, these are -- there are issues within this that can go before the Supreme Court. The President should not choose somebody who has made it clear to the world where he actually stands.
HAYES: Senator Richard Blumenthal I think has discussed with me the -- an explicit asset this individual should he be confirmed recuse himself from such matters given the fact that he was being evaluated and presumably interviewing one on what the president while all this world around him. What do you think of that?
BOOKER: Well, look, this is a president that Comey said explicitly asked him for loyalty, asked him to be you know one of his guys. He literally has said publicly that Jeff Sessions if he knew Jeff Sessions wasn`t going to be loyal, Jeff Sessions is going to recuse himself he would never pointed him. So this is somebody consistently asking of people their loyalty and also this is a guy who saw it in black and white in that 1998 review that he wrote. So this to me is outrage and it`s absurd. They were even having a discussion right now where the President is about to put somebody in the position that can indemnify that can give him immunity against anything that comes up against him. And again, there is a lot going on here with this investigation. This is something where we`ve had a bipartisan committee our Intelligence Committee here in the Senate both the Republican leader of that committee and the Democratic leader committee said yes the Russians have attacked this country. This prosecution continues to go on as more people are falling under investigation. A lot more to come out why are we moving forward on this. And again I agree with Senator Blumenthal. We should all be asking him during his confirmation hearings will he recuse himself. And any other answer than yes to me is unacceptable.
HAYES: Do you think he owes the committee a sort of truthful characterization of the conversations that he had with the president one on one given what we know about the conversation he had with James Comey?
BOOKER: Absolutely. He should tell exactly what the President or the President`s representatives has said to him and what he`s talked about. But again it`s not surprising to me that President Trump would choose somebody that he has the greatest assurance already before anybody needs to talk to them that this person is going to play ball, that this person is going to give him immunity. So all this has got to be thoroughly vetted and asked about during the confirmation hearing.
HAYES: Final question on tactics here. Senator Schumer, the majority -- Minority Leader basically saying look we`re going to go to the hearings, we`re going to ask certain questions, you know, we`re going to try to whip votes. Is there anything above that basically? Are there extraordinary measures available to members of the United States Senate over and above that if this is something as sort of cataclysmic as some people are arguing it may be?
BOOKER: Well, I don`t think this is hyperbole. We`ve seen so many matters on the court turn on a five-to-four decision where we have seen whether it`s the ability to marry who you want, whether it`s the Affordable Care Act and someone stopping insurance companies in discriminating against you because you have a pre-existing condition from diabetes to high blood pressure. This is not hyperbole. I talked to a young kid 18 years old today who had a heart condition, went through his insurance tap max in his first or second year of life, so he`s lifetime caps if the pre-existing condition ends he said to me I could die. So let`s not let -- allow what people on the right are saying oh they`re just being hyperbolic. This person is going to replace that swing justice on the court and we know where the cases are now going towards the Supreme Court, how he`s going to decide and how it`s going to affect the health care, the well-being, the individual rights of folks. And in (INAUDIBLE) tactics, I know that we have very few procedural levers to us but every major victory that we`ve had in this Trump administration has come against seemingly insurmountable odds, like defending the Affordable Care Act. It came because the people did not surrender to despair. They would not let despair have the last word. They kept saying we`re going to come at this. We`re going to protest. We`re going to speak up. We`re going to demonstrate. So if you are a person that believes in your individual freedoms to control your body, your right to access to health care, to marry who you love, even things like net neutrality and keeping your cable bills low, so many of these things, do not be silent. This is not a time to say hey I hope Chuck Schumer does something. This is time for every single one of us to get up and fight for our country that we love and understand that we are a nation. It is a perpetual testimony to the underdog to overcoming insurmountable odds. And we`ve done it before with this administration so we need a course of conviction in this fight. Don`t sit at home, don`t sit on the couch, don`t get stuck in a state of sedentary agitation when you`re so upset but you`re not getting up to do something about it. Remember those ten two letter words. If it is to be, it is up to me. Even one small voice can be heard in this fight. Join with others and raise those voices into that course. They ultimately can help us get the power to stop this and change. I haven`t given up hope, you should not give up hope and hope is always born from sweat and work. So get out there and join us in this fight.
HAYES: All right, Senator Cory Booker, thanks for your time tonight. Thank you very much. For more on Brett Kavanaugh`s track record both in politics and judiciary, I`m joined by Melissa Murray, Professor at NYU Law School who clerk for Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the Court of Appeals and Jamal Greene, Professor at Columbia Law School who clerked for retired Justice John Paul Stevens. You know, your mom I feel like there`s this thing that always happens here. You know, you clerk for Justice Stevens, my wife clerked for Justice Stevens and I`m familiar with the world is sort of like elite legal -- the elite legal world. And there`s this kind of thing that happens. There`s a kind of certain kind of (INAUDIBLE) right, people that sort of punch these tickets and you can say well, they`re qualified. And then there`s a sort of obfuscation about what people`s political beliefs are like Brett Kavanaugh he`s a Republican conservative dude.
JAMAL GREENE, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL: Brett Kavanagh is about as reliably Republican conservative as anyone you could pick for the Supreme Court. I mean, he`s been a foot soldier for the Republican Party for many, many years and not just a kind of random conservative but at the right hand of the President for years and years and years. So there`s doubt about his ideology or about his political views. He`s qualified for the Supreme Court. He`s a smart guy. He`s written interesting opinions. He`s savvy - -
HAYES: Right.
GREEN: But there`s no question about his politics and this is what this process is really about. Before nomination, the question is do you agree with this guy`s views about the Constitution, about the law?
HAYES: Yes, Melissa, you`ve written about abortion quite a bit in your scholarship and it`s something that that people are talking a lot about. What do you say to those who say oh you`re -- you know, progressives are always saying Roe is imperiled and it`s always in danger and that`s ridiculous what you hear from people who also turn around and say like Roe is bad and we should overturn it.
So I don`t think this is hyperbolic at all to say that Roe and Casey, the two precedents dealing with the right to abortion are imperiled with this nomination and that is indeed the point of this nomination to tilt the court rightward and to provide a crucial fifth vote for overturning the right to an abortion. It may be incremental but the ultimate endgame is clearly in view.
HAYES: You know, I want to get your response to a really interesting dissent that you rewrote in a case that was quite controversial in which the person who runs the Office of Refugee Resettlement Scott Lloyd, a sort of lifelong anti-abortion crusader basically reached down and said this undocumented minor in our care who is pregnant cannot have an abortion. I`m going to ban her from getting an abortion. There was litigation and he wrote a dissent, Kavanagh, that read the following. The unbanked majority reflects the philosophy that unlawful immigrant minors have a right to immediate abortion on demand not to be interfered with even by government efforts to help minors navigate what is undeniably a difficult situation by expeditiously transferring them to their sponsors. What do you think of that dissent and what it indicates, Melissa, about where his jurisprudence on this would be?
MELISSA MURRAY, PROFESSOR, NYU LAW SCHOOL: I think the Democrats will certainly make hay of this during the confirmation hearings in this contrasts sharply with this testimony as confirmation hearing in 2006 where he said that Roe was settled precedent and if confirmed he would follow it. To be clear in this dissent, he doesn`t dispute that there is a right to an abortion but again he is skeptical the idea that there might be access to abortion on demand and he does say that the state retains an interest in facilitating not having an abortion and certainly in the potentiality of fetal life.
HAYES: Right. And there`s the abortion on demand language which felt to me a little like an audition for this job. It`s a very sort of loaded phrase. There`s also the fact that when you - I think what`s a hard thing to communicate to people is people think about -- liberals I think, think about the Warren Court, they think about (INAUDIBLE), they think about ways in which the court stepped in to help folks as a kind of counter- majoritarian protector the civil rights. The court has for the duration of the Republic often being a deeply reactionary institution and it seems to me like one the precipice of it being that solidly right now, like at this moment.
GREENE: Well, not just at the precipice we`ve already been there for a while and Justice Kennedy has been kind of celebrated by some on the left for occasionally being not a kind of down the line conservative Republican lawyer but he usually has been. And now you`ve got what someone who`s even more reliable than him potentially replacing him. When you think about the cases the court has actually heard and decided in recent years the big- ticket cases Shelby County and Citizens United, these are cases where Congress is trying to protect people`s rights, trying to regulate the political process that money isn`t too involved and the court steps in and stopped them from doing that, right? So it`s not just for protecting people`s rights, the court also has the ability to stop Congress and other political bodies from protecting people`s rights.
HAYES: Yes, and that`s been -- that was a sort of hallmark of previous errors of the court where that sort of seen as the kind of high-water mark of the court being reactionary. Melissa, where do you -- where do you see this fight centering as we head towards the hearings?
MURRAY: Well, I think the big questions for the Democrats will certainly be his position on executive power, the question of a sitting president being subject to criminal investigation or civil suit will certainly loom large, his issues, his skepticism of agency authority. I think will loom large and of course the abortion question.
HAYES: Yes, the abortion question I think is going to play a very central role. Melissa Murray and Jamal Greene, it`s great to have both you. Thank you.
MURRAY: Thanks for having us.
HAYES: Next, the return of Michael Flynn and the status of the criminal investigation facing his former boss coming up in two minutes.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lock him up. Lock him up. Lock him up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We support you, General. We`re with you, General Flynn. We`re with you.
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HAYES: Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, he of the man who led the locker up chant at the Republican Convention made his first court appearance today since pleading guilty seven months ago to lying to the FBI, a felony. The reason for today`s hearing, Michael Flynn wants to expedite his sentencing. His lawyer says he`s "eager to move on with his life which one imagines he is." Flynn`s appearance served as a reminder in case one needed one that the President the United States continues to be part of the extensive criminal investigation and that his personal lawyer in that matter is Rudy Giuliani who was right there in the room last night as the President announced the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to highest court in the land. To discuss exactly what was going on there I`m joined by Jill Wine-Banks MSNBC Contributor, former Watergate prosecutor and Daniel Goldman MSNBC Legal Analyst and former Federal Prosecutor. Jill, what do you think about the appropriateness of Rudy Giuliani sitting there as Judge Kavanagh is introduced a man who will almost certainly if you were to be confirmed have to rule on matters that relate directly to the investigation the President?
JILL WINE-BANKS, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Well, any time I think of the word appropriate I do not think about the behavior of Donald Trump. And so this wasn`t appropriate but almost nothing that he does is appropriate. Given that he`s done so much worse, this is not the worst thing that`s happened but it is true that when you have a nominee who has written extensively that the president cannot be investigated, cannot be tried for either a civil or criminal case until he`s out of office, that shows why the president would have been attracted to him and why Rudy Giuliani would want to be in the room because he`s hoping that that`s exactly what`s going to happen.
HAYES: Yes, we should say this is -- I want to read this portion down because this is obviously getting a lot of play and it`s sort of remarkable passage. Just to be fair and clear here, he`s not saying it can`t, he says it should not, right? He`s saying -- he`s sort of suggesting actually legislative fixes to this but it shows his state of mind about this. He says the Constitution establishes a clear mechanism to deter executive malfeasance. We should not burden a sitting president with civil suits, criminal investigations or criminal prosecution. A president`s job is difficult enough as is and the country loses when the president`s focus is distracted by the burdens of civil litigation of criminal investigation and possible prosecution. What do you think of that?
DANIEL GOLDMAN, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: I think there are -- there are two things that strike me. The first is it`s a very different animal to say a president cannot be indicted while sitting and say that the president cannot be the subject of a criminal investigation. Those are two very different things.
HAYES: Thank you for making that because people have been complaining. The President can`t be indicted is actually a relatively consensus legal view about although --
GOLDMAN: The official position of the Department of Justice right now so - -
HAYES: Right, not iron-clad, there are dissenters but that`s not a crazy idea.
GOLDMAN: Right. So that has to be separated. And the notion that the president could not be the subject of a criminal investigation opens up a Pandora`s box of a parade of horrible of things that ultimately end up leading to the conclusion that the president is above the law and that just can`t be. But I want to put a different spin on that because -- and put it in the context of what he`s saying which is a bit of a contrary point of view. If he`s saying that there needs to be a legislative fix, he`s saying that the Constitution itself doesn`t prevent it.
HAYES: Right.
GOLDMAN: So it will be --
HAYES: Right. It attest to that, right, if that actually -- he`s saying as it stands now if you have to legislative fix the Constitution is not the thing standing your way, presumably he would have to make good on that as a judge or justice in this case.
GOLDMAN: That`s right.
HAYES: You know, the other thing that struck me about this passage, Jill, is that for folks that I`ve spent a lot of time sort of rereading the Watergate literature, this was Nixon`s argument. I mean, quite explicitly, Nixon`s argument was I`m running around. I`m bringing a word of clause. I`m opening up China. I`m doing all this stuff in the national stage. We got the Middle East lighting on fire and I can`t be back here dealing with all this Watergate nonsense.
BANKS: That is exactly right and I agree completely with Daniel and everything that he said but it is also true that the Supreme Court has said that yes the president can be bothered by it and it`s done it twice, once in the Nixon case where it said he could have to return documents in response to a subpoena and then again in the Clinton situation where he had to come in to a civil lawsuit. So if he can be bothered by a civil lawsuit and responding in a criminal case with subpoenas for documents then why not have him be subject to criminal investigation? And I believe he could also be indicted. That was an issue we faced in Watergate. Leon Jaworski who was a Special Prosecutor at the time thought that the correct way to proceed politically was to do an impeachment and to turn over a report to Congress. But I have to say that in the context then, Congress was already investigating impeachment. Congress was a bipartisan operation then and we didn`t feel like we were giving our information for a roadmap to impeachment to a group that would do nothing with it. Right now --
HAYES: Or use it to undermine the investigation which is what`s happened in some cases.
BANKS: Exactly.
HAYES: Let me ask you about Flynn. I`m just curious about the sort of blocking and tackling of this. I mean, when you`ve got someone that`s cooperating and they`ve pleaded, what`s the -- what is that window like where you`re waiting to sentence them? Like what`s going on behind the scenes typically in that conversation?
GOLDMAN: Well, it`s interesting. I think the easiest way to understand it is to analogize George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn. Both pled guilty to cooperation agreements. Now the government is going forward with George Papadopoulos is sentencing right and they`re delaying Michael Flynn sentencing. The most logical and unusual explanation for that is that George Papadopoulos` usefulness as a cooperating witness has expired or has been exhausted but Michael Flynn`s has not. And when I was a prosecutor, I had a cooperator whom I was relying on to charge someone, that meant that I was relying on him to also potentially testify at a trial against that person and I would put off the sentencing until after that trial. So you know, on one hand, that`s why they`re doing this but on the other hand the notion that Flynn is pushing for an expedited sentencing and the government is agreeing to do an expedited sentencing whenever they`re ready is a much more abbreviated timeframe than expect -- I would think would be a year from now.
HAYES: Interesting. Jill Wine-Banks and Daniel Goldman, thank you both. After the break, want to guess how many white nationalists are running as Republicans this fall because there is more than one. That is next.
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HAYES: OK, here a question for you. How many Nazis and or holocaust deniers and or explicit white nationalists or pro Confederacy fetishists are running for offices here? At least half a dozen and weirdly they`re all running as Republicans including the actual avowed Nazi Arthur Jones running in a Chicago area Congressional District who Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas instructed voters not to vote for even if it meant choosing the Democrat. There`s also a Holocaust denier running for Congress in California as a Republican, a white supremacist running for the State House in North Carolina. In Wisconsin, Paul Nehlen, the self-described Pro white candidate, once the darling of Breitbart and Steve Bannon is running for Paul Ryan seat. Pro-Confederacy candidate Corey Stewart is running for U.S. Senate from Virginia. He`s been openly supported by President Trump. And then there`s this guy Seth Grossman running in a swing congressional district in New Jersey who made plenty of bigoted remarks but only lost his NRCC endorsement after Media Matters unearthed his enthusiastic endorsement of a 2014 white nationalist propaganda piece that said black people "are a threat to all those who cross their paths." Karine Jean-Pierre is a Spokesperson and Senior Adviser for Move On, Jason Kander is a former Missouri Secretary of State, currently President of voting rights organization Let America Vote, and Evan McMullen is a former Chief Policy Director of the House Republican Conference and had ran for president in 2016 as an Independent. Evan, you know the Arthur Jones story in Dan Lipinski`s district in Congress you know, it`s a little bit of a weird one. He sort of snuck in there no one had filed. He`s explicit like American Nazi. You know, that could be sort of chalked up as a kind of weird wrinkle of this sort of odious gadfly. But there`s more than that here. There is something that`s really unnerving here, am I wrong?
EVAN MCMULLEN, FORMER CHIEF POLICY DIRECTOR, HOUSE REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE: No you`re right about that. But I think even in the Arthur Jones case, he made a decision to run as a Republican. And true, he might have seen an opportunity there to gather the signatures required and sneak onto the ballot when no one else would given the nature of the district, but there is a reason why the Republican Party is attracting these types of candidates, and it is because there is an audience in the party for this kind of candidate, for this kind of corrosive, cancerous, unAmerican ideology. And these candidates they are running as Republicans, not Democrats, and that is because of that.
HAYES: Yeah, the Grossman story is really remarkable to me, Karine. I mean, this is someone -- this is a swing district. This is someone -- there was a lot of stories about really nasty stuff that he had said, bigoted statements he made -- the NRCC had endorsed him, stuck with him, and then this is what he wrote. He wrote this -- he linked to this article and the article said this, "my experience has taught me that blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well, they cannot communicate as well, they cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non- black alike." That is textbook, textbook white supremacy racist.
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Yeah, And here is the thing, Chris, I mean, white supremacy, racism, has been around for a long time, since the beginning of this country. So, that is actually not new. What is new here is they are now empowered to publicly run, right, as a white supremacist and all the other awful, hateful things that they are listing themselves under and that is what has changed.
And I think the direct link to that is Donald Trump. Donald Trump has given them the green light to be public, to be out there, because he doesn`t have a whistle, he has a bull horn when he talks about racism or when he talks about this type of white identity politics that really all of this is under.
And when you have the head of the Republican Party, when you have the president of the United States, Donald Trump, watching protesters, neo- Nazis, marching down Charlottesville and praising them, what are you doing? You enabling that. You are giving a green light to that. And that is where we are today, unfortunately.
HAYES: Yeah, you know, the Paul Nellon case is interesting, too, Jason. And I want to be careful here, I mean, mainstream Republicans have rejected Nellon. You know, there`s a lot of folks who said he`s odious, but this is a guy who the president tweeted about enthusiastically, backed by Breitbart. Bannon was a big fan of him, I think appeared at a rally, who has started tweeting about the Jewish media all over the place, calling himself -- like he is basically like out-and-out anti-Semite at this point. And this is a guy who was like a stone throw away from the power centers of the Republican Party.
JASON CANDOR, FORMER MISSOURI SECRETARY OF STATE OF : Yeah, there`s a couple of things here. One, is -- as has already been alluded to, you have the president of the United States emboldening these folks, I mean, literally referring to them as very fine people. This is not history book stuff, this is on the march right now.
And then the other piece is the policy side of this. And that is, the fight for voting rights, for instance. We have to recognize not that these fights are back from the past, but instead that the civil rights movement never actually ended.
If you go to Birmingham and you go to the museum there and you look at the articles on the wall, you will be immediately reminded of the fact that the march in Selma was about registering to vote. And what are we talking about all the time now? We`re talking about, you know, just in the last couple of days, possible Supreme Court justice who is really opposed to voting rights largely for certain populations in this country.
So, this is scary, because you have a president who is telling these folks, you know, sending them signals that this is OK, but it`s also scary because of the extension of it that says it is OK to suppress the voice of whole populations of the country.
HAYES: You know, Evan, there -- it`s interesting, a question, you know, during the primary in the first part of the Trump administration about sort of his relationship with the conservative movement, the Republican Party, it`s been belabored a bit. But at this point it does seem like that -- his vision for what the Republican Party is, is what the party is at this point?
MCMULLIN: Yeah, that is right. And I think one of the problems that the party has is that it views these candidates naively and incorrectly and opportunistically in some cases as anomalies, and that`s just -- it`s wrong.
I mean, Donald Trump saw this opportunity within the party in 2011 when he started with the birther nonsense. He saw that around that time, 45 percent of Republicans thought that Obama probably wasn`t born in the United States. That number rose by the time we got to May of 2016, 69 of Trump supporters, those who felt favorably about Trump, believed that Obama probably wasn`t born in the United States. And this has been a problem since the Republicans took the southern strategy, so it is not an anomaly.
And I would like to comment on something Jason said, which is a good point, which was the civil rights movement hasn`t ended or it shouldn`t be thought to have ended. We have to understand that the fight for equality is one that is eternal. There will always voices who try to divide us and try to say some of us are better than others. It happens around the world. It will never end.
That`s why Republicans, Democrats and everyone else, as Americans especially, because this is fundamental to who we are, we have to understand that this is a fight that will always continue. We always have to be committed to that principle and actively fight for it. And if Republicans don`t actively fight for it and only occasionally comment on these lunatic white supremacist candidates, they will see their party taken over by this movement.
HAYES: Quickly, Karine, the other thing is the president refers -- talks about Muslims and immigrants, particularly, in ways that are entirely consistent with how these folks talk about black people or Jews.
JEAN-PIERRE: That is exactly right. I mean, that is the whole point. That is the message that Donald Trump has been sending them, that is why they are doing it. That`s why we see anti-hate groups have said, there has been an uptick, a record number of white supremacists running this time around in this elections.
And here`s the thing, 88 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump. So this is the Republican Party. And they have enabled it. They fostered it. They have allowed this.
One last point I`m going to make really quickly, in 2012, Mitt Romney sought after Donald Trump`s endorsement, even was going to give him a primetime slot in the convention until the hurricane happened.
This is a year after he was a grand wizard for the birther movement.
HAYES: Yeah, people have been playing with that fire, Jason, for a while.
CANDOR: Yeah. And at the end of the day, if you are a Republican candidate or a Republican office holder right now, you have got to draw a line. And you have got to say, look, I expect my commander-in-chief to have the courage to stand up to the KKK and Nazis, like, period. And it is a minimum bar to hop over.
HAYES: And he failed that test. And I will say this for the NRCC, they did the right thing in the case of that New Jersey race, so kudos for them on that.
Karine Jean-Pierre, Evan McMullin, Jason Candor, thank you.
Still ahead, the Trump administration failed to meet today`s deadline to reunite separated children under the age of 5 with their families. We are following this story day by day, and we have congressman Beto O`Rourke and Lee Gelernt who was in court join me ahead.
But first, tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two starts next.
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HAYES: Thing One tonight, in the week since Donald Trump returned from his summit with Kim Jong-un and declared mission accomplished, there are reports the North Koreans have no intention of denuclearizing, and continuing talks between the two governments have, surprise, not gone so smoothly.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just finished a visit to North Korea over the weekend, which one source told CNN went as badly as it could have gone, and the North Koreans were just messing around.
And while they certainly seemed to be messing with Pompeo at times, like after a meeting on Saturday morning when top official Kim Jong-chul asking the secretary, quote, "did you sleep well last night." Pompeo responding, "I did, I did. Thank you for the accommodation." And Kim replying, "but we did have very serious discussions on very important matters yesterday, so thinking about those discussions you might not have slept well last night."
Not sure what that is all about.
But as Pompeo left the country, he, upbeat, characterized the meetings as productive. And then just hours later, the North Koreans accuse the Americans of pushing a, quote, gangster-like demand for denuclearization.
Perhaps it would have gone better if Pompeo had met with Kim Jong-un himself. But the North Korean leader was busy, very busy, with super important top secret potato work. That`s Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to North Korea last week to continue high level talks, some people expected he would meet with Kim Jong-un like he did on his last visit in April. The secretary was snubbed and Kim was nowhere to be seen, which we now know may have been because he had an important meeting with some potatoes. Yes, potatoes.
Boil them, mash them, stick in a stew, Kim had been abnormally absent from state media headlines for the past week, including the days Pompeo was in the country. But today, the official news agency filled in the blanks, reporting that Kim had been in a remote northern county where he visited the Jeunghyueng (ph) potato farm and instructed staff to, quote, introduce various species, good to taste and ensure the quality of processed potato foods in production.
When it came to Pompeo, Kim chose potato. I`m sure this will all work out.
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HAYES: As accusations mount against Republican Congressman Jim Jordan from former wrestlers who say he knew about sexual abuse by a team doctor when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, Jordan supporters are ramping up their campaign in his defense.
Now, Jordan has repeatedly denied that he turned a blind eye to any abuse, and has suggested the allegations are politically driven, even though, and let`s be clear here, many of the former wrestlers have gone out of their way to talk about how much they like and admire Jordan, even support him politically.
Today, Jordan once again defended himself to NBC News, citing the support of six other former wrestling coaches.
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REP. JIM JORDAN, (R) OHIO: Yesterday, six coaches came out and said the exact same thing that I said. And you know why they said that? Because it is true. There is an investigation going on and if there are individuals who were harmed, who were victims, then they deserve justice.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you meeting with investigators this week?
JORDAN: We are working on setting up a time to talk to them. Yes, thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You said you were unaware of abuse, but you were aware of locker room talk. Can you tell us more specifically about that?
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HAYES: Now, House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows, even President Donald Trump, are all standing by Jim Jordan and his denials and attacking the credibility of the victims, raising the question why? Do they truly believe these accusers are not credible?
I mean, think about the fact they are not denying these boys were abused, if the accusation from these men that Jordan knew about it, is some deep state conspiracy to tarnish Jim Jordan, as he, himself, has suggested? If that is what they truly believe, then they will quite literally believe anything.
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HAYES: The Trump administration today blew through a court ordered deadline to reunite young immigrant children with their parents, and the situation is even worse than we thought. Yesterday, see, the administration said it expected to reunite 54 children under age 5 out of about 100 by today`s deadline. Instead, according to a court filing, only four have been reunited by earlier today with expectations of at least another 34 by day`s end. 34, you will notice, is not 54.
The government also said around two dozen children aren`t eligible to be reunited because some parents have criminal records or other issues.
So, is the administration really this careless about children? Plenty of evidence suggests that, yes, the government simply doesn`t care about these kids or reuniting them with their kids.
Here`s what the president had to say today when asked about the missed deadline.
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TRUMP: Well, I have a solution, tell people not to come to our country illegally. That`s the solution. Don`t come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.
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HAYES: Many people came seeking legal asylum, which is guaranteed under American law and international law, but tell that to the parents whose kids were taken from them by the Trump administration, like this mother of two from El Salvador who crossed into the U.S. in May and had her now 6-year- old daughter and 9-year-old son taken from her.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE (subtitles): How did you say goodbye to them?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (subtitles): I just hugged them and gave them a kiss and said, "my love, don`t worry, I`ll be back for you. I don`t know how long it will take me, but I want you to know I will come back for you. I don`t know when, if it`ll be a week or -- I don`t know when, my love, but don`t worry, I will come back for you. I won`t go anywhere without you."
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HAYES: Lee Gelernt is the deputy director of ACLU`s immigrants rights project, been leading the charge in court against family separation. And Democratic congressman and Senate candidate Beto O`Rourke of Texas has been monitoring the reunification process for these immigrant families.
Lee, let me start with you, what is going on in court right now?
LEE GELERNT, ACLU: Yeah. I think the takeaway is the judge held a hearing this past Friday and he realized the government was nowhere near meeting in deadlines, so he said I`ll meet with you all the time. I want status reports all the time. He is making sure the government doesn`t have an inch of wiggle room anymore.
The government came in today and said we`re going to reunite 34 more kids on top of the four children they`ve already reunited. And he said, look, you have to reunite every kid eligible for being reunited today. No excuses. And what he also told them is, look, on Thursday you tell me whether you got these reunifications done, if you didn`t, I want plaintiffs to tell me what remedy they want for you missing the deadline.
So it is clear the judge is going to be monitoring this every second. And that`s what we want, because I think the government left to their own devices will not get this done.
HAYES: Congressman, where are we right now from your perspective? I know you`ve been working with folks through your office.
REP. BETO O`ROURKE, (D) TEXAS: You know, it`s interesting, there was this urgency on the president`s part more than a month ago, though total apprehensions of children and families were actually down to criminally prosecute 100 percent of those parents who crossed in between those ports of entry, creating the crisis afterwards. And now that we have a crisis of not being able to reunite these kids with their parents, there is absolutely no urgency on the part of the administration to coordinate with Customs and Border Protection, Health and Human Services, ORR, ICE, and all the agencies involved.
And we`re meeting people in El Paso who have been released from detention, who have no idea where their kid are. And you can imagine how desperate and distraught that they feel after crossing 2,000 miles to bring that child to safety and to refuge and hopefully to asylum to have effectively lost that kid and not know when or even if they`re going to see that child again..
We`re working 48 cases out of my office right now. And I was just talking to my district director. We think two of those cases, children under the age of 5, may be reunited tonight. They may be part of that 34 or 38 total that are reunited today.
But this is an incredibly challenging process. We`ve heard from parents who brought their birth certificate for their child with them, had that birth certificate taken away by Customs and Border Protection when they crossed. Then when HHS says prove that you are that child`s parent, they said you took my birth certificate from me and HHS says well that was another federal agency and we don`t necessarily talk to each other.
So, we`re putting these parents and their kids through unbelievable trauma. And we need greater urgency on the part of the administration to reunite them and do it by the deadline that they agreed to.
HAYES: Just to give a sense, Lee, this court filing kind of blew my mind. I mean, first of all, one thing that you guys said in your court filing is that the administration right now, there are 19 in that set, right, of 100 kids under 5, tender aged children, 19 parents who are already deported. The administration is making no efforts to contact those parents. They just have those parents` kids and that`s the status quo that they`re fine with. Is that right?
GELERNT: Right. So, today they announced that they have reduced it from 19 to 12, removed parents, we`re not really sure why that discrepancy. We`re going to look into it.
But whether it is 19 or 12, they appear to have made no effort to find those parents. And so the judge said, look, you have to get with plaintiffs and find these parents. These parents are part of the class-- I mean, even worse the government tried to say well, if they`ve been removed already, they`re not part of this ruling. They don`t have a right to get children back. And the judge flatly rejected that.
I mean, every step the judge is rejected their attempt to get our from under this. It`s clear the judge is not going to let them out from under it. We`re going to see how many reunions -- the judge said I don`t want to hear about just reunifying 34 today, I want many more reunified.
We`ll see if they do it. If not, Thursday and Friday are going to be very big days in court.
HAYES: Congressman, this was a footnote in the court filing today. One child cannot be reunified at this time, because the parents` location has been unknown for more than a year. Defendants are unable to conclusively determine whether the parent is a class member and records show the parent and child might be U.S. citizens.
I just want to be clear about what this footnote means, the government took a child, possibly the child of U.S. citizens, for a year and can`t find the parents.
O`ROURKE: The government was in no way prepared to arrest and take kids and separate families on this kind of industrial scale to the point that they may very well have detained and separated U.S. citizen families in the process.
In addition, we`re now asking those families to pay the airfare for their kids to come meet them El Paso or McAllen, or Brownsville, or wherever they are. Those parents who arrived here with nothing, who have been in detention, being asked to cough up $2,000 to have that child flown to them even though it was the government of the United States that separated them in the first place.
Thank god for groups like RAICES, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to defray some of these costs, Enunciation House, ACLU, our courts, the press, that have created the pressure to at least get the administration to desist for the time being. That pressure needs to continue to make sure that we reunite these families going forward.
HAYES: We`re going to stay on this. We do this story every night. And we`re going to keep doing it.
Lee Gelernt and Congressman Beto O`Rourke, thank you both.
O`ROURKE: Thank you.
HAYES: I mentioned before that Lee was on a guest on our podcast, "Why is This Happening" explaining his lawsuit. It`s really powerful episode. This week, another great conversation with Larry Krasner. He`s the Philadelphia district attorney taking dramatic steps to fight mass incarceration, a fascinating guy. I really encourage you to check it out. Download on it TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts. Use our new hashtag #withpod to let me know what you think.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now.
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