Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: July 13, 2018 Guest: David Corn, Harry Litman, Marcy Wheeler, Ted Lieu, Julia Ioffe, Tom Perez
STEVE KORNACKI, NBC NEWS NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That is HARDBALL for now. Thank you for being with us. Chris Matthews will be back Monday and "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes, starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ALL IN: Tonight on "ALL IN."
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Russia if you`re listening I hope you`re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.
HAYES: Charges for the Russian operatives who answered Trump`s call.
ROD ROSENSTEIN, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL, UNITED STATES: The indictment charges 12 Russian military officers by name for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 Presidential Election.
HAYES: Tonight, as the President prepares to meet with Putin behind closed doors.
TRUMP: I know you`ll ask will we be talking about meddling and I will absolutely bring that up.
HAYES: New worries about collusion between Trump and Russia.
TRUMP: I don`t think you`ll have any gee, I did it. I did it. You got me. There won`t be a Perry Mason here.
HAYES: Plus the mysterious unnamed Americans in the indictment. And the President`s desperate attack on the investigation.
TRUMP: I call it the rigged witch-hunt.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. The Russians it appears were in fact listening. That`s the implication of Special Counsel Robert Mueller`s stunning indictment today of 12 named Russian military intelligence officers charged with hacking Democratic organizations, a number of them and individuals during the 2016 election and distributing the stolen material to impact the outcome. Earlier today Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein who oversees the Mueller probe went before a podium of the Justice Department to announce the charges.
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ROSENSTEIN: The defendants worked for two units of the main intelligence Directorate of the Russian general staff known as the GRU. The units engaged in active cyber operations to interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election.
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HAYES: Indictment contains an extraordinary amount of granular detail about the Russian operation including the name rank and role of each individual intelligence officer and the street addresses of their office in Moscow. Without a doubt the most explosive revelation is this. "On or about July 27, 2016 the conspirators attempted after hours to spearfish for the first time e-mail accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton`s personal office." Note the very specific language used in that indictment, they attempted after hours for the first time. That language is rather significant because earlier that very same day then-candidate Donald Trump looked into news cameras and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton.
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TRUMP: I will tell you this. Russia, if you`re listening I hope you`re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let`s see if that happens.
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HAYES: Donald Trump asked Russia to hack his political opponent. And according to the indictment, they went ahead and started doing it that day. Collusion you might call it right out in the open. This comes after NBC News reported earlier this year that Mueller`s investigators are specifically focused on those particular comments asking witnesses if Trump was advised to make this statement about Clinton`s e-mails from someone outside his campaign and if they had reason to believe Trump tried to coordinate the release of the DNC emails to do the most damage to Clinton. We do not yet know the answers to those very serious questions about the President`s role but Robert Mueller might. We do know that Russia`s election interference was intended to help Donald Trump. We know he used the materials stolen by Russia released for WikiLeaks on an almost daily basis on the campaign trail. We know the President of the United States was the beneficiary of the criminal conspiracy outlined today in Mueller`s indictment and he is continuing to cover for the alleged perpetrators. In an official statement responding to the indictment today, the White House did not condemn Russia`s election interference, not even close but they did confirm later the President is still planning to meet one-on-one with Vladimir Putin just three days from now ignoring calls to cancel. Rosenstein said he had briefed the President on this new indictment earlier in the week and yet despite knowing what Mueller had found, the document that was about to land, despite knowing what was coming the president this very morning spoke warmly about Putin and blasted Mueller`s investigation.
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TRUMP: I think I`d have a very good relationship with President Putin. I think that we`re being hurt very badly by the -- I would call it the witch- hunt. I would call it the rig to witch-hunt. We do have a political problem where -- you know in the United States. We have the stupidity going on, pure stupidity but it makes it very hard to do something with Russia.
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HAYES: In his press conference, later on, the Deputy Attorney General delivered what sounded a lot like an implicit rebuke of the president.
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ROSENSTEIN: We confront foreign interference in American elections. It`s important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. The blame for election interference belongs to the criminals who committed election interference. We need to work together to hold the perpetrators accountable and we need to keep moving forward to preserve our values, protect against future interference and defend America.
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HAYES: I`m joined now by two journalists who have been covering the Russia probe more closely than just about anyone. David Corn Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones, Co-Author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin`s War in America and the Election of Donald Trump and MSNBC Contributor Natasha Bertrand, Staffer at the Atlantic. David, I want to start with you. This is a very big step. It strikes me as someone who first reported about the dossier way back when. How does it strike you?
DAVID CORN, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, MOTHER JONES: Well to me it doesn`t tell us something that we didn`t already know in the big sense. We know there was a Russian hacking operation and dumping operation. What this is a reminder of reality because for the last almost two years Trump and his minions have kept saying this didn`t really happen or it wasn`t significant so a lot of ways this indictment is an indictment of Donald Trump of all the people who said that the Russian attack didn`t happen. Here we have it as you noted in granular detail and what sort of in between the lines of this indictment is the other half of the equation and that is throughout the campaign while this attack was going on, Donald Trump and his campaign lieutenants were saying it`s not happening again and again even when he was briefed by U.S. intelligence he came out and said no nothing happening maybe a 400-pound guy, we don`t know that it`s Russia. Well, now we know it`s Russia and now we know that while they were doing this, he was providing cover, he was covering up what they were doing which is for his benefit. And that part of the story still needs to be told.
HAYES: This strikes me as knocking on the door of the -- of Trump world. And the reason it`s knocking on the door is because Roger Stone who is a friend of the President, a confidant of the President, a man in touch with the President is not mentioned by name but appears to appear in the indictment. I want to read this section. On or about August 15, 2016, the conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0 wrote to a person who regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. "Thank you for writing back. You find anything interesting to the docs I posted?" On or about September 9th, the conspirators again posing as Guccifer 2.0 referred to a stolen DCC document posted online and asked the person, "What do you think of the info on the turnout model for the Democrats entire presidential campaign?" and the person responded pretty standard. It looks like this is Stone.
NATASHA BERTRAND, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Right. And if you`ll recall in the indictment of Paul Manafort, all of the court documents that surrounded that many times there was a person in there referred to as Person A, someone that just was never identified that subsequently that person was identified as the Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik so we have seen before that Mueller has included people in these indictments that have some kind of connection to the people being charged that aren`t necessarily named until later. So we may very well see that Roger Stone will be named in a later indictment and he himself has said that he expects to be indicted by Mueller`s team. He hasn`t said for what he has said that it will be unrelated to potential collusion between the campaign and Russia but of course Roger Stone was at the center of all of this. He was communicating with Guccifer 2.0. He wrote stories online about how Guccifer was an American patriot who was just trying to and how the whole DNC hack was a hoax and how it was actually an inside job. And now we learn of course that this was all a big front for Russian military intelligence and Roger Stone was essentially just a stooge for all of that. So whether or not he has been named -- the fact that he hasn`t been named right now does not mean that he won`t be named at all.
HAYES: Yes, so there`s -- the Stone aspect of it not named. Their organization one which is WikiLeaks and here`s also what strikes me, David. The hack of John Podesta which I think is the far more consequential of the two because the timing of it, right? So there`s a bunch of access. There`s DNC servers, there`s DCCC, there`s a bunch of information we`re going to go through all these things we learned today that was sort of put together in one place but the John Podesta hack which I think is the most consequential. It`s released of course on Access Hollywood day right before the -- right before the election. That is mentioned but it`s distribution, how it was distributed is not really mentioned an organization one which is clearly WikiLeaks appears but not a lot of detail. It makes you wonder if there`s something coming on that end.
CORN: What we do know in many instances Mueller and other special councils release what I call superseding indictments. As they find out more they expand the story and what`s interesting here is that this puts WikiLeaks right in the middle of it. They have messages of WikiLeaks reaching out to Guccifer 2.0, a Russian intelligence front and saying hey we want these documents. We want to get them out before the convention to do maximum harm to Hillary Clinton and to help Donald Trump. So we see here you know, presuming these stock -- these messages are accurate direct evidence that WikiLeaks was doing this in league with the Russian intelligence whether they knew it was Russians or not but to help Trump and to hurt Hillary Clinton and that was in as opposed -- that was regarding the documents that came out before the Democrat convention. They went even further with the Podesta documents in October closer to the election.
HAYES: I should note, there`s something you said there that just be clear these are all allegations. As an indictment, prosecutors are not infallible and not everything in an indictment turns out to be true. But it what is remarkable to me is that what is laid out here -- again, detail like this officer`s name on this news source, this title that what it -- by including to this indictment, they`re saying we can prove this in a public court. And that is an extraordinary thing. Usually, the way this stuff works is behind closed doors. Intelligence, counterintelligence, hacks, counter hacks, this is the American criminal justice system saying this was a crime under Americans law you are being indicted and we can publicly prove this in court.
BERTRAND: And it seems to be laying the groundwork for a potential indictment of American citizens. You`re laying out how it all happened, who was involved, and the next step is to lay out who were the co- conspirators. But I also think that it`s really interesting you know, the whole idea that Donald Trump asked Russia essentially to hack Hillary Clinton`s e-mail servers on the same day. Of course that Russia did, in fact, go ahead and do that. That`s something brand-new that we learned in the indictment and you laid that out in your opening segment. And I think that there is -- there is you know a reason to think that perhaps it was the other way around. I mean, there`s been a lot of speculation about hey Donald Trump, he asked the Russians to do this and then the Russians heeded that that command. But what if Donald Trump actually knew beforehand that the Russians planned to do this and was kind of giving them a signal to proceed because former intelligence officials that I spoke to said that this might have been in fact a signal to the Russians to give them kind of political cover in order to hack into Clinton`s emails, another alternative explanation is that they could do this and use it as leverage later on and say that they were just acting on the President`s orders essentially. So there are many different layers to this and what came first the chicken or the egg is something to consider.
CORN: And Chris --
HAYES: Yes, David.
CORN: You know, we`ve talked about this before. There`s a lot more that needs to come out and we can speculate and reporters like Natasha and I dig for these things but what we know already is bad enough. We know that Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. denied the Russians were involved in anything after they had their meeting with a Russian emissary. We know that Donald Trump after being briefed by U.S. Intelligence in the campaign that this was happening, presumably some details that we saw today came out in the debates and in one appearance after another and said we don`t know if it`s the Russians. We know that George Papadopoulos was trying to make contact with Putin`s own office while the Russians were attacking. To me, this shows that Trump and his acolytes, his lieutenants were eager and willing to get into bed and to help the Russians while this attack was underway. So even putting aside the question of collusion, that in itself is a profound act of betrayal.
HAYES: David Corn and Natasha Bertrand, thanks for joining me.
CORN: Thank you.
HAYES: For more on what we learned from Mueller`s new indictment I`m joined by Harry Litman former U.S. attorney and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and MSNBC Legal Analyst Jill Wine-Banks a former Watergate Prosecutor. And Jill let me start with you as a document -- as a prosecutors document. When we got the big document of the Russians involvement in this sort of like more propaganda effort the internet research agency there was this question of well the hacks not in here and that`s the one crime we know was committed. Today we got that. What are your impressions as someone who`s a Watergate prosecutor and the prosecutor more broadly about what direction this document points?
JILL WINE-BANKS, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: Well, I would say first of all that you gave a great opening statement for the prosecution of Donald Trump for collusion and David laid out some extra facts that would go into that case. I said over a year ago that there was enough circumstantial evidence of not only conspiracy to obstruct but also to collude with the Russians and now it`s laid out in this very, very scintillating document. Everyone should read it. It`s a great read and lays out all of the acts very specific by the Russian government military intelligence unit the GRU. And I`d say that we`re leading up to next indictments of the Americans involved in possibly both the social media aspects which was the first indictment and now the hacking and the false information that was put into getting the money to buy the infrastructure to do this. So I think we`re really moving ahead to what could be a really dramatic outcome and the timing of it is of course extremely interesting with it being just three days away from a meeting between Donald Trump and Putin which should not happen. He should only go there if he`s going to fly home with these defendants and put them before the justice system otherwise he shouldn`t go. You know Harry, the one thing here in sort of the broad scope of things to refer back to what Jill is talking about in the a block and that July 27th Russia if you`re listening, it`s just the timeline coming into focus some of the stuff we get hear about when the hacks happen. I mean, the Russians are hacking in March and they`re getting the DNC stuff, they`re getting the DCC, they`re getting John Podesta, and then there`s a period after that in which all sorts of different people are reaching out to the Trump campaign to be like we have Hillary`s e-mails, like George Papadopoulos is being told this and there`s dirt promise that goes to Don Jr. and they take the meeting. And then after that period, the President says we`re going to talk about Hillary`s you know, some dirt on Hillary and then he says hack Hillary and then they release a bunch of e-mails.
HARRY LITMAN, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL: Totally. Look, Chris, I think this is huge and I think your point is exactly right. It`s knock, knock, knock on the door. Mueller you know, in plain view what a craftsman has put together now. First, you know, we had been talking about Russians or foreign people. We`re talking the Russian military intelligence now and he`s built a bridge that is one-half step away from the Trump campaign. There`s no doubt that the guy in paragraph 44 is Roger Stone, no doubt. It`s a quote of the previous tweets that he released. And remember Stone all during the fall, he`s the guy who says it`s soon going to be Podesta`s time in the barrel. Wednesday Hillary Clinton is done. Lock her up. I mean he thereafter is incomplete knowledge if not coordination with the discharge of these damaging e-mails. I think it is next. It was telling by the way that this case was by Rosenstein sent over to the National Security Division. They`re going to deal with the Russian side of it but Mueller now is all over the American side of it. Of course the attempts by Giuliani and others to say oh no American involvement are 100 percent wrong. We both have it documented in the indictment and more importantly, the allegations go to the Russian side now but we are within kissing distance of the -- of the final hook between Russian government and Trump campaign. And remember Stone by his own admission, he says oh I`m not the guy who wasn`t in touch with campaign officials, I`m the guy who was in touch with Trump himself. That`s the content of that paragraph 44.
HAYES: That`s a great point.
LITMAN: I mean, we are really at the door of knowledge if not conspiracy.
HAYES: And the conspiracy part of it, it strikes me Jill from a legal -- and I don`t really quite know this very well so the question for you like it seems they`ve established a criminal conspiracy right? These are all conspiracy charges. It talks about the conspirators and you can imagine further charges about abetting or furthering that criminal conspiracy which is the criminal conspiracy contained in this indictment.
BANKS: Absolutely. You definitely can and so it`s time to stop calling this a witch-hunt. It is not a witch-hunt. It is -- first of all, it`s a warlock capture because I`ve now learned the word for a male witch which is warlock and we have captured so many warlocks. It`s a time to just put it to bed and I think we could rest the case on what`s been said just in this segment alone.
LITMAN: Chris, the actual conspiracy in count eleven, conspiracy again for -- to violate a law of the United States. It would be exactly if Stone or others joined up the charge against that. The others who are Russian specific but the actual charge and law is laid out there.
HAYES: All right, Harry Litman, and Jill Wine-Banks, great to have both of you. ahead, much more on today`s explosive indictments of the 12 Russian intelligence officers. There`s a lot of new details in these documents aside from what we just talked about. I want to go through the layers and layers of apparent collusion and other tantalizing trails and hints in there in two minutes.
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ROSENSTEIN: We do not try cases on television or in congressional hearings. Most anonymous leaks are not from the government officials who are actually conducting these investigations. We follow the rule of law which means that we follow procedures and we reserve judgment. We complete our investigations and we evaluate all of the relevant evidence before we reach any conclusion.
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HAYES: As far as we can tell, we don`t know for sure, essentially no leaked whatsoever from Robert Mueller`s team proceeded today`s bombshell indictment. Instead the special counsel today dropped an astounding document packed with crucial details that hint at collusion at a number of levels. Here to help me unpack everything going on here former Watergate Prosecutor and MSNBC Legal Analyst Nick Akerman, Marcy Wheeler a Journalist covering national security and civil liberties who`s been following this case extremely closely. Marcy, one of the things that emerges in this document that you were noting today on Emptywheel which is the site that you write at was how long the hacking was going, how broad it was in scope and particularly I thought this was interesting, in or around September 2016 the conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third party cloud computing service that computers contain test applications related to the DNC`s analytics. Do you think that`s significant?
MARCY WHEELER, EMPTYWHEEL BLOG: Since the hack happened, one of the things I`ve been really fearful of is that the Russians would get and possibly tamper with Hillary`s analytics. She ran a very analytically driven campaign and so we already knew that they had oppo research. We already knew they had their field plans which were kind of dated. Those are the hacks going back to the spring. But what we`re talking about now is in September in the heat of the general election campaign they were getting Hillary`s -- they got a copy of a backup of Hillary`s snapshot of what her campaign looked at probably nationally and that`s something I and I know a couple of other people close to this hack have been really concerned that they actually gotten today and we had confirmation that they did so.
HAYES: Nick what jumped out of you?
NICK AKERMAN, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: Well, what jumped out it me is you take that in combination with Roger Stone`s conversations with Guccifer 2.0 which are part of which is put into this indictment which show that in fact they`re talking about analytics. They`re talking about --
HAYES: Says the voter modeling. That was pretty standard.
AKERMAN: Says the voter modeling, it`s the same thing. What they were doing was it was all part of this Cambridge Analytical program to actually go in suppress the Hillary Clinton vote. If you know who it is that she thinks she`s relying on and you take that to send out fake news, phony stories, disparaging information, that`s how you suppress the vote. But what really strikes me in this entire indictment is this conspiracy that`s charged. It`s not just the hacking into the Democratic National Committee, it`s also the staging of the e-mails that were hacked and the documents that were hacked. So once you start talking about the staging, you`re talking about the American side of this equation. You`re talking about the Trump campaign and how they used it. There is no way that the Russians knew how to use this material, knew when to release it, knew what the significance of it would be in various parts on a political level, no way, no how.
HAYES: Yes, that`s a question that hangs over this particularly and there`s a quoted moment where they`re explaining to a GRU officer WikiLeaks is like we should get this out before the convention because they`re just going to have the nomination so if we can move along on, that like oh yes, that makes sense. There`s also something Marcy you`ve been covering closely which is the Board of Elections. And this has been something a little sort of adjacent to the main story of the Podesta hacks and the DNC hacks because those were -- those are things we publicly saw. But we`ve gotten a lot of information that they were sort of knocking on the doors, messing with the systems of various state boards of elections and we have this that in around July 2016 KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked the Web site of a State Board of Elections, stole information related to approximately half a million voters including names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver`s license numbers. What do you think of that?
WHEELER: Well, we knew that that had happened but the public discussion at least put the number closer to 70,000, that`s 500,000 people from the state of Illinois. And then actually even later there was a description of the same officers kind of sniffing around Iowa servers and Georgia servers and they were going to see what kind of weaknesses there were on swing states and that and that`s the kind of terrorizing possibility that we heard about. A couple days after that Barack Obama actually called President Putin on their redline to say knock it off but we now know is that these same people who had stolen that information in July were looking like they were considering doing it. I mean, Illinois is not a swing state. You`re not going to turn Illinois to a red state but Iowa, yes, Georgia, yes. So they were going after the states that that could and you know in some cases did make the difference in the election and they were doing it just 12 days before the election.
AKERMAN: The scariest part I find here is what we don`t know because what they you`re not telling us in this indictment and they shouldn`t be telling us is that they couldn`t find everything. You`re dealing with antiquated systems in the state computer systems that are not geared toward maintaining an audit trail so that you know who`s gone in what they`ve done, what they`ve taken, whether they`ve changed votes, whether they`ve removed voters, you can`t tell that and they`re not telling us that in this indictment.
HAYES: Although we should say Rosenstein says he essentially no votes for change.
AKERMAN: Well, saying that`s not what`s alleged in the indictment. He`s not saying no votes were changed, so that`s the big problem here.
HAYES: Yes. I mean, the integrity of that system and to Marcy`s point about like that being the red line phone call moment of no, no, no, no, no, this is now -- we`re escalating to something in saying. One last point in here Marcy and I want to get your thoughts on this is there is an American in here who shows up pretty prominently who`s a congressional candidate who shows up the indictment. The conspirators posing Guccifer 2.0 received a request -- a request, you`re getting solicited for stolen documents from a candidate for U.S. Congress. Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate`s opponent. That seems like Robert Mueller being like buddy get a lawyer.
WHEELER: Well, you know, he probably already has. We had known that Republican consultant in Florida had gotten a huge dump and that`s also in the indictment. A huge dump of data -- again this is oppo research so you`re -- it`s a swing state, you`re giving this oppo research for congressional campaigns to a bunch of Florida Republicans. You`re making it available. Many, many of the Republicans who have been most vocal in defending Trump Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis first and second are both from Florida. They both got that data right? But now we know and there`s been names floated out there and we haven`t had it confirmed yet anywhere. We know that a congressional candidate got on DM`s and said hey, give me stuff that`s going to help me and that sounds like -- because you know as a number of people have pointed out, that was in mid-August. Like if you knew enough to be following Guccifer 2.0 in mid-August, you knew that he was presumed to be a Russian persona. So call up the Russians and say give me the stuff on my opponent and help me win in November.
HAYES: Just slide into those DMs. Nick Akerman and Marcy Wheeler, thank you both. Coming up, amidst all of the -- of this -- the indictment, the renewed question of collusion, President Trump is no intention of course of canceling his behind closed door meetings with Vladimir Putin. What that portends next.
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ROD ROSENSTEIN, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: As I mentioned, as a function of the collection of the facts, the evidence and the law and a determination that it was sufficient to present the indictment at this time. As I mentioned, I did brief the president.
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HAYES: Today`s indictment of 12 Russian spies led to increased pressure from a number of Democrats telling the president to cancel his impending closed-door meeting with Russian President Vladmir Putin on Monday.
The White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told NBC News today that the Trump/Putin summit is, in fact, still on. And before the indictment dropped this morning, the president provided this preview.
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TRUMP: So, I know you`ll ask will we be talking about meddling, and I will absolutely bring that up. I don`t think you`ll have any gee I did it, I did it. There won`t be a Perry Mason here, I don`t think, but you never know what happens, right, but I will absolutely, firmly ask the question.
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HAYES: Joining me now, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, a member of the house judiciary who has called for Trump to cancel his meeting with Putin, and Julia Ioffe, correspondent for GQ magazine.
First of all, Congressman Liu, why do you think they should call it off? Aren`t there important things for the U.S. and Russia to discuss?
REP. TED LIEU, (D) CALIFORNIAThank you, Chris, for your question.
These indictments today show that it was the Russian military that attacked America in 2016. These were indictments of Russian military intelligence officers, which means Vladimir Putin would have ordered their attack, that`s why it is deeply disturbing that the president of the United States would meet with Putin on Monday.
And if he goes ahead with that meeting, he absolutely cannot meet with Putin alone. We need to have Putin at first acknowledge that Russia did this and then to extradict those people for prosecution.
HAYES: Julia, what message do you think it sends for the president after this document to be issued to go and sit down with Putin one-on-one?
JULIA IOFFE, GQ: You mean aside from the fact that the indictment is some pretty Perry Mason stuff? I mean, you know, I think the message is really clear, it`s -- I don`t believe this. And it doesn`t matter. And I believe you more -- or I trust you more than my own judicial system, than my own intelligence collecting system, than my -- you know, as long as it serves me, I believe you. I don`t believe these guys.
And that`s, you know, part and parcel of everything Trump has been saying since these allegations came forward.
HAYES: And also -- I want to -- I mean, that`s one explanation. I just want to put the possibility -- again, we don`t know, right, but what is being investigated right now is the possibility of criminal conspiracy by the Trump campaign up to and including the president of the United States who may or may not have known. We do not know. That is being investigated.
Like, it could also just be the case that we are watching the conspirators meet in front of us in real-time, and that`s not -- honestly, that`s not crazy. I don`t know if that`s true...
IOFFE: Hey, it`s not crazy anymore, no.
HAYES: That is being investigated right now.
IOFFE: Yeah, I mean, it`s -- I agree with you. That`s also very possible. I am just saying that the outward message is at the very least is this is all BS. You are my buddy. We are good.
But, yes, it could be that he is going to Vladimir Putin saying what do I do?
HAYES: Yeah, exactly.
IOFFE: I don`t know. We don`t know.
But again at the very least -- and also -- I mean, this indictment is a bombshell, and but it is also coming off of a bombshell week where Trump has shaken up NATO, shaken up the UK, Putin has -- that is a big win for Putin. Putin is going to be coming off the end of a triumphant end of a basically pulling off the -- hosting the World Cup, pulling it off without a hitch. Also a big victory, he`s beeng talking about how this shatters all the negative stereotypes about Russia.
And all of this coming together in this joyous, victorious kiss for him, with Donald Trump, leader of the free world. I just can`t believe it is happening.
HAYES: Congressman, you obviously think it shouldn`t happen. And I imagine it is going to happen anyway. What about -- the idea of extradiction is an interesting one, like as a sort of official formal demand from the U.S.
LIEU: That is the very least the president need to get out of this meeting, otherwise he is going to appear weak in front of the whole world.
But let me go back to a point you just made. I want to talk about the timing of this announcement. There is no reason Rod Rosenstein had to do this today. He could have waited two weeks. I think what really was happening is the United States, the Department of Justice, telling the American people and the whole world that Vladimir Putin is not our friend and that Russia is our adversary. This was a complete poke in the eye to the president of the United States. And I think it was intentionally done today, and I think it`s the entire Justice Department trying to send a message not just to the president, but to the American people.
HAYES: I couldn`t agree more. It was astounding to me that they chose this two days before the summit. They know what`s going on. They read the newspapers. They could wait until Wednesday. They could have done it a week ago. They could do it in two weeks, right Julia?
IOFFE: Yeah. I mean, President Obama canceled a meeting with Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, which most Americans honestly don`t give a hoot about.
But President Trump is not cancelling a meeting with Putin over essentially the invasion of the United States, which I would wage most Americans do give a hoot about.
You know, but I think again our information system is so bifurcated, I don`t know what`s being said to the other side. And I imagine they`re hearing it in a different -- totally different way.
HAYES: Oh, they are.
Congressman Ted Lieu and Julia Ioffe, thank you so much for joining us.
LIEU: Still to come, the president invokes European ethno nationalism while on the world stage as an unprecedented number of London protesters take to the streets.
And tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two starts next.
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HAYES: Thing One tonight, Donald Trump is taking a break from his grand European tour of meeting and insulting world leaders and will be spending the pre-Putin weekend playing golf at his Turnberry course in Scotland.
Now, the last time he was in Turnberry in the summer of 2016, you might remember, he gave a speech sorrounded by dozens of litttle Swastika golf balls. It was all thanks to a protester, a British comedian named Simon Brodkin (ph), who dumped a bucket of Nazi balls on the lawn as the then candidate spoke.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From the clubhouse, the park venue, Trump Turnberry range, and I forgot to hand them out before. I`m very sorry, Mr. Trump. And thank you. I apologize.
TRUMP: Get him out.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My bad. You can hand them out.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (inaudible) job (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`m sorry, Mr. Trump.
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HAYES: Trying to pick them up is the best part of the bit.
Get him out.
The crazy thing was that after that Trump went on to give his speech with the Nazi balls just sitting there on the ground.
That was then, this is now. But before his big return to the UK, President Trump seemed to think this time would be different.
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TRUMP): The people in the UK, Scotland, Ireland -- as you know, I have property in Ireland. I have property all over. I think that those people, they like me a lot.
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HAYES: Aside from the fact that he doesn`t seem to know which countries are in the UK, they like him so much, hundreds of thousands of them packed the streets of London to greet him today. And that is Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: Donald Trump seemed to think he would receive a pleasant welcome from the Brits when he arrived for his first visit as president this week. And, well, it might not have been what he was expecting. But someone did make this pretty awesome 650-foot crop circle for him to see from his helicopters. It says F Trump in Russian.
And then today, over 100,000 protesters and one giant inflatable diaper Trump baby crowded the streets of London. And the British cheeky sign game was in full effect. Many of them are no exactly safe for family television hour, but there was this one showing Trump`s face on a slice of toast, and another declaring teapots, not despots.
And this adorable little girl who wrote Ruby Drew thinks you are a poo. Maybe she just meant poourns (ph)?
Donald Trump ended up avoiding London altogether. He said the Trump baby blimp made him feel unwelcome, and he was probably right about that.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I`m here because I hate him. I hate this man. I hate everything he does and everything he stands for.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The way that he has treated women and families and the separation of immigrants at the border. I think it is disgusting.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We believe that women should not be spoken to -- about or about in the way that he has.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Donald Trump is just a figurehead of the rise of the far right again.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s an important thing to remember the lessons of history and where this kind of behavior leads.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don`t agree with anything that Trump stands for, none of us do.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think the children in cages was just the last straw.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He is ludicrously impossibly awful, that you -- it leaves you speechless, doesn`t it?
UNIDENTIIFED MALE: Mr. Trump is a dangerous man. I think he`s a bit icky as well, but what is more important is I think he is a dangerous man.
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HAYES: Today, yet another amazing contrast that seems to sum up the entire Trump era. On the same morning the deputy attorney general of the United States announced charges against 12 Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the DNC and the Clinton campaign, an indictment comes ever closer to implicating the president`s campaign, and the president, himself, on the very same day that happened, the White House announces its, quote, 16th wave of judicial nominees by this president, part of a tsunami of Trump judicial nominees throughout the United States federal court system.
We don`t yet know the full facts of that criminal inquiry that`s percolating in the background, which the president is being investigated to see whether he or his associates are involved in a criminal conspiracy with a foreign adversary to get himself in the White House in the first place.
But until the full facts come out, the administration is making the most of its time. This week the Senate confirmed another of Trump`s circuit court nominees, which according to The National Review, marks the 22nd federal court circuit judge confirmed during President Trump`s administration, tying President George H.W. Bush`s record for most circuit judges confirmed in the first two years of a presidency. And, well, we`re only through the first half of the second year.
And Judge Brett Kavanaugh is, of course, Trump`s second Supreme Court nominee. And Republicans are doing and will do everything they can to rush him through. And believe me, I understand why they`re rushing, because god knows what we`re going to find out by the time the Mueller probe is complete.
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TRUMP: I think the immigration, allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame. I think it changed the fabric of Europe. And unless you act very quickly, it`s never going to be what it was, and I don`t mean that in a positive way.
So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you`re losing your culture.
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HAYES: With Europe gripped by a rising far-right ethno nationalist frenzy, President Trump just stoked the most dangerous strains of the European electorate.
Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and joins me now.
What do you think of the president`s comments on immigration in Europe?
TOM PEREZ, CHAIRMAN DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE: Well, unfortunately, Chris, they`re not surprising.
You know, the most important thing we export in the United States is our values of inclusion and opportunity for everyone. America is at its best when we`re all in this together, when we don`t have the politics of fear and division. And fear and division have been the currency of this president, so it should come as a surprise to no one.
There`s this global virus of nativism going on right now. He`s stoking that virus. And we -- that`s why I`m working so hard to help elect Democrats, because when Democrats are in charge, that`s when we put hope on the ballot, that`s when we export those values of inclusion and opportunity that have always made America great.
HAYES: Do you think the president -- there`s two ways of viewing the president and Republican policy on ingrammigration. One is that they don`t like illegal immigration, and unauthorized immigration because it`s breaking the law. The other is they don`t like immigration, because they think immigration changes the country in a fundamental way that makes it worse, which is what the president said about Europe.
Do you think the president is in the latter camp that he doesn`t -- it`s not illegal immigration, unauthorized, it`s about immigration itself.
PEREZ: Well, just look at the numbers and look at efforts to contract legal immigration in the United States. And talk to people in faith communities, talk to people in the business community, and you see the negative impact this has had.
This is not the first time in our nation`s history that we`ve had these nativist instincts. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act. We had the Know Nothing movement of the mid-19th Century. We see it now embodied in Trump.
And, immigration -- you know, immigrants have been making the ultimate sacrifice this country since the revolutionary war. The first fatality in the Iraq war was an immigrant from Guatemala. He was undocumented when he came here. He got his status adjusted. He enlisted as a legal immigrant, made the ultimate sacrifice and got his citizenship posthumously.
That`s what immigrants have always done for America. And whether it`s legal immigration or illegal immigration, this administration seems to be against all forms of immigration except, of course, to help the Trump Hotel in Florida deal with some of their workforce needs.
HAYES: There`s been a real mobilization around immigration among Democrats in the center left, sort of broadly in that coalition. There`s been calls to end the -- obviously the family separation policy, which is the consent decree -- there has also been calls to abolish ICE. There`s legislation that`s been introduced by Democratic member of congress, some Democratic Senators have endorsed that position, as others. Do you think we should abolish ICE?
PEREZ: We should defeat Donald Trump, that`s what we should do. Leaders set the tone of this nation.
HAYES: Wait, did you just say we should abolish Donald Trump?
PEREZ: Intolerance. His tolerance for total ethical lapses, whether it`s the EPA or HHS, or elsewhere. This administration has set the tone.
I went after Joe Arpaio. We sued him when I was the head of the civil rights division. I didn`t try to abolish the Maricopa County Sheriff`s Office. We understood that the problem relied in the leadership of Joe Arpaio. And JoA arpaio is now the former sheriff. And the current sheriff has worked very hard to change the culture.
We need a change in leadership at the top levels of this country. We need to elect Democrats, so that we can make sure that our values of inclusion and opportunity are values that are now holding score, holding sway in the United States. I think that`s the most important thing that we can do is win elections in November, so that we can reform ICE, so that we can reform the EPA, so that we can change this culture of corruption that has infected the federal government, and it`s infected the federal government because its leadership in the form of this president is ethically void.
HAYES: Final question, does the president`s rhetoric embolden or strengthen racists and white supremacists here at home and in Europe?
PEREZ: Well, I mean, we`ve seen -- you look at the hate crime statistics that the FBI produces every year. There`s been a significant increase in hate crimes across virtually every category for which they collect data. I don`t think that`s a coicidence.
So, we have to have zero tolerance for things likes like Charlottesville. And the president couldn`t even muster the energy to do that.
And again, Chris, I think the most important thing we have to do is elect Democrats, because that`s how we`re going to change the culture of government, that`s how we`re going to make sure that we return to exporting those remarkable American values of opportunity and inclusion that have been what always have made America great and what will always make America great.
HAYES: All right, Tom Perez, thank you.
That is All In for this evening. Our coverage of today`s indictment in the Mueller case and the massive protests in London continues next with On Assignment with Richard Engel. Good evening, Richard.
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