Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: July 27, 2018 Guest: Ted Lieu, Betsy Woodruff, David Cay Johnston, Jacob Soboroff, Michelle Goldberg, Margie Omero, Lee Gelernt
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: Putin is in a small country economically, a pathetic land in many ways. Why then does Donald Trump snap to so readily at Putin`s call? Why does an American president disrespect our country`s old friends in Canada, Great Britain and kind of all Europe, play bellhop to the tyrant in the Kremlin? It is embarrassing. And that`s HARDBALL for now, thanks for being with us. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
RUDY GIULIANI, LAWYER OF DONALD TRUMP: There`s nobody that I know that knows him that hasn`t warned me that if his back is up against the wall he`ll lie like crazy because he`s lied all his life.
HAYES: Is the fixer flipping? Michael Cohen`s dirt on the President and that infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I just want to know if you`re worried if he`s going to cooperate with federal investigators?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I`m not because I did nothing wrong.
HAYES: Tonight, what did the President know and when did he know it?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did you dictate the statement about Donald Trump Jr.?
TRUMP: Let`s not talk about it.
HAYES: Plus, what is really going on between Michael Cohen and team Trump?
GIULIANI: The man is an honest, honorable lawyer.
HAYES: And who to believe?
GIULIANI: Well, I expected something like this from Cohen. He`s been lying all week.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
TRUMP: I always liked Michael.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. What did the President know and when do you know it? That`s a question that we`ve had ever since we first found out about a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting which you`ll recall was set up by Donald Trump Jr. after apparent agents of the Russian government had promised via an e-mail exchange dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government`s effort to get Trump elected. An e-mail exchange in which Donald Trump Jr. infamously responded if it`s what you say, I love it. The question has always been, did candidate Donald Trump know about that meeting before it happened? Did he know about it soon after? And the answer for the White House has always been no, not before and not shortly after. The man at the top of the campaign was totally in the dark.
But now, now Trump`s former lawyer Michael Cohen appears to be prepared to blow that out of the water. And if what he`s saying is true, it would expose the president as lying and covering up attempted collusion with Russian agents at the very least. It could mean much, much more. A knowledgeable source tells NBC News that Cohen asserts the President did, in fact, know about the 2016 Trump town meeting in advance and was told by his son Don Jr. before it happened. CNN`s reporting adds that Cohen alleges that he was present along with several others when Trump was informed and that Trump approved going ahead with the meeting with the Russians. The source of this story I should note is unclear who exactly is divulging that Cohen is prepared to say this. President Trump`s attorney Rudy Giuliani was conveniently on hand at CNN last night to immediately denounced Michael Cohen as a liar.
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GIULIANI: I expected something like this from Cohen. He`s been lying all week. I mean or for two -- he`s been lying for years. I don`t see how he has any credibility.
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HAYES: Yes, how does my client`s former attorney whose job I now have, have any credibility? And this morning on a day the President had been hoping to dedicate to the very good quarterly GDP numbers, the President said tweeting a denial "I did not know of the meeting with my son Don Jr., sounds to me like someone`s trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam. There have always been real questions about whether Donald Trump Jr. would have actually failed to tell his own father about this meeting.
You`ll remember a few days before the meeting in between calls to Emin Agalarov, that`s the Russian entertainer and businessman closely tied to it all who is sort of helping set it up, Don Jr. had a four-minute phone call either to or from a blocked number that he says he does not recall. We don`t know who was on the other end of that line. And then just a day later after the meeting had been confirmed and scheduled on the promise of Clinton dirt, it was happening, it was going to happen at Trump Tower, just a day after that gets confirmed and put into the schedule, suddenly candidate Trump ominously promises a major new speech on Hillary Clinton.
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TRUMP: I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we`re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you`re going to find it very informative and very, very intense.
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HAYES: OK, so two days later, the Trump Tower meeting actually happened and a year later, New York Times reported those Don Jr. e-mails which led to days of misleading, false, constantly changing stories to the White House about the nature of the meeting. Remember they first said, oh, it`s just about adoption. And a Washington Post report that President Trump dictated his son`s misleading statement about that meeting. It seems somehow fitting this morning at Reagan National Airport in Washington that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Donald Trump Jr. were spotted waiting for their flights at the same gate. For more on the explosive allegations from Michael Cohen and what it means to the President, I`m joined by Congressman Ted Lieu of California, Assistant Whip for the Democratic Caucus and a Member of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman, let me start with you. Do you think Michael Cohen is credible?
REP. TED LIEU (D-CA), HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: I do. And if Michael Cohen is telling the truth, it means there`s at least three felonies and what he`s about to say. `First Donald Trump conspired with a foreign power to influence the election, second Donald Trump went ahead and lied about the meeting which could be potential obstruction of justice, and third Trump Jr. lied to Congress when he said his father did not know about this meeting. We`re way beyond not normalizing what shouldn`t be normalized. These are potential criminal felonies that`s why the Robert Mueller investigation needs to proceed without any more political interference.
HAYES: You know, there was always a striking thing that happened in -- on the House side, on the House Intelligence Committee in its investigation into these matters which it sort of said well, we wrapped up we found no collusion which is that they never got their hands on the phone records, they never subpoena the phone records of the phone call that Don Jr. places to an unknown number amidst him confirming and setting up the whole meeting. Is that something you`d like to see as a member of Congress?
LIEU: I`m a former prosecutor. If there was that allegation and I intentionally did not subpoena those records, I would have been fired. And so it was very clear that the House Republicans were not interested in trying to find evidence of collusion. They were in fact trying to do a whitewash of what actually happened and I think history would not judge them kindly.
HAYES: There has been the reporting yesterday about Senator Claire McCaskill being the target of essentially an identical attack to what happened to John Podesta. A fake Web site set up phishing e-mail sent to people in her orbit. We don`t know a lot more details about that but how concerned are you about this election and how prepared is the government to protect campaigns?
LIEU: I`m very concerned. House Democrats last week put up a bill to provide election security funding. The Republicans rejected that and then they adjourned and went out on recess so it`s clear that the House Republicans have completely gone derelict and their duty to protect America and hopefully the voters will change a makeup of Congress this November. But in addition, we know that the President convened a hearing with his top officials on election security. We`re also told that only lasted about 30 minutes so I`m very concerned about what`s going to happen.
HAYES: You started off this interview by nodding to possible crimes committed if it is, in fact, true that the President knew about this meeting that he gave the green light that he then lied about it afterwards, that his son lied about it. There are people on the right and defenders of President saying even if it`s true, even if the President knew about it it`s fine. It`s fine to get derogatory information about your opponent from a foreign government.
LIEU: I know it`s not. It`s a straight violation of the Campaign Finance Laws. But in addition, Robert Mueller has indicted a large number of Russian operatives that he knows he`s never going to ever be able to prosecute because they`re in Russia. And why would he do that? My view is he is doing that to tell the Americans a story that it is illegal to influence American elections. And if an American whether it was Trump Jr. or Donald Trump himself conspired with the Russians to do that they would also be guilty of conspiracy to influence these elections. It`s absolutely a crime.
HAYES: So you -- that`s interesting. As a prosecutor, you`re saying these indictments, again, Russians particularly the GRU agents who of course are never going to be rendered to the U.S. it`s unlikely, to say the least. You`re saying that you view that as sort of setting the predicate for an existing criminal conspiracy that might also involve others?
LIEU: That is correct. So conspiracy means that you didn`t necessarily complete the act, you just help complete the act. And so if Donald Trump or Trump Jr. help in any way with what the Russians are doing, they will be guilty of conspiracy.
HAYES: All right, Congressman Ted Lieu, thank you for your time tonight.
LIEU: Thank you.
HAYES: For the full implications on possible collusion, obstruction and the strategy at play here, I`m joined by MSNBC Legal Analyst, former Prosecutor Paul Butler, MSNBC Contributor Natasha Bertrand, Staff Writer at the Atlantic and MSNBC National Security Contributor Matt Miller who`s former spokesman for DOJ. I`ll start here at the table. Natasha, you wrote a piece in the Atlantic about how -- again, this is if true right? We -- there is circumstantial reason to believe it`s absolutely plausible. I have long thought it`s the case that it`s likely that he told his dad about this meeting that his brother-in-law and the campaign manager (INAUDIBLE). If it is true, what is the significance of it?
NATASHA BERTRAND, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it`s huge because it essentially places Trump himself at the center of efforts by a foreign power to interfere in the election and that, of course, adds to the complete picture, it`s another tile in the complete mosaic of this conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia and Trump`s willingness to accept help from the Russians. And of course, you have to look back at the timeline there was a lot of weird things going on in the beginning of June. So you know, June 3rd is when Donald Trump Jr. first received this e-mail from Rob Goldstone talking about the Russian government support from the Trump campaign. Three days later you have Donald Trump giving a speech about how he was going to talk about very negative information that he was going to get Hillary Clinton which in and of itself was made the whole thing pretty obvious because it never actually gave the speech.
HAYES: That`s right. That`s a key part of this.
BERTRAND: Right, exactly. And then June 8th, you had right before the day of the Trump Tower meeting, you have D.C. leaks which is the Russian government-owned Web site that was going to release all of the hacked DNC e-mails that was created June 9th with the actual Trump Tower --
HAYES: Wait, let me be clear on that. It`s an amazing detail that`s emerged but from all the little (INAUDIBLE). June 8th the Russian GRU agents create D.C. Leaks which is a Web site to disseminate hacked information about Hillary Clinton.
BERTRAND: Yes, and --
HAYES: The next day is the Trump Tower meeting?
BERTRAND: Yes, correct. And that exactly -- that that kind of timeline and all of -- all of this evidence put together is what prosecutors are going to be looking at. They`re going to say these were probably separate events but were they separate events in a larger conspiracy. They`re going to try to string them together. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence around those couple weeks that make it look really bad for the President.
HAYES: Paul, as a former Prosecutor, what do you make that?
PAUL BUTLER, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, I think that`s right. So first a caution, Michael Cohen is a shady character who wants to snitch in order to keep himself out of prison so everything he says has to be taken with skepticism. That said, President Trump`s version of events is even harder to believe. All of these coincidences, you`d have to believe that again Manafort, Trump Jr., Jared Kushner didn`t tell him about this meeting, why is he lying about it after the fact he gins up this false narrative. You don`t try to cover up things that are on the up and up. So Mueller has probably already done the most important corroboration which of the phone records.
HAYES: That`s right.
BUTLER: So the Congressional Republicans may not have g0tten in. We can be certain that Mueller has it. If Trump Jr. was lying about that, he`s getting charged with perjury and then Mueller uses that to squeeze the President of the United States.
HAYES: That`s very interesting. There are 20 times that Trump and his allies denied that the President knew. This is him, Don Jr., everyone has denied this right, consistently. The note -- I mean over and over, there on the record. Jay Sekulow, like all of them, all of them. so if it`s -- if that`s a lie, they lied and a lot of circumstances including to Congress. And Matt, there`s a key point here, right, which is about the credibility. I mean, this is a very strange thing that we`re watching unfold that I can`t quite make sense of because if you were trying to get a cooperating deal with Robert Mueller, you would stay silent and yet we`re watching this whole thing play out in public and I wonder what do you make of that part of it?
MATT MILLER, MSNBC NATIONAL SECURITY CONTRIBUTOR: You know, it makes no sense strategically. As you say, if you want to go get a deal with Mueller, if you want to get a deal with the Southern District of New York, the best card you have is your information and you want to offer that information to them quietly. There`s no need to broadcast it publicly and in fact, it hurts you. You know, the explanation that some people have floated that maybe the Trump team leaked this, you know, I don`t know how the Trump team would know that he was ready to testify to this unless --
I mean, the only thing I can think of and it`s a -- it`s a somewhat suspect circumstances, is if Cohen had gone to trump or gone to the people around him and said look I`m ready to testify this -- to Robert Mueller and his team unless you`re ready to help me out. That`s the only circumstance so - - which would raise obviously a lot of other questions. The one thing I can think of and it`s not a strategic reason they would be doing this but it`s something that happens to people in these circumstances.
I represented people before that are in legal trouble and they feel battered down. If they see their reputations being dragged through the mud, they want fight back publicly even if it`s not the best thing for them to do. And I would guess that -- usually what happens is the attorney, in that case, is telling them no be quiet, take your time, you`ll have your time to talk to the -- to the prosecutors and we`ll tell our story eventually. The only thing I can guess here is that not his lawyer but his lawyer spokesman Lanny Davis is telling him something else or maybe Michael Cohen is just doing this on his own.
HAYES: Well there`s also -- there`s another aspect to this too which is that you know, Michael Cohen does show up in the dossier, the infamous dossier as the person who essentially takes over running the Russia collusion portfolio after the heat -- there`s too much heat on Paul Manafort and he actually flies to Prague. You know, Michael Cohen strenuously denied this. He showed people his passport. There was then later that there was McClatchy reporting and it`s never been corroborated by anyone else. No one else has reported this so I have no idea whether this is true or not that he -- that two sources familiar with the matter said that he did, in fact, do this right? He secretly made a late summer trip to Prague during the 2016 Presidential Campaign. If that`s true, then we`re at the center of the whole thing if in fact, Cohen were to talk to Mueller.
BERTRAND: Right. So this is a huge, huge aspect of it. If Cohen has suddenly decided that he`s willing to talk to Bob Mueller about issues at the center of the Russia investigation --
HAYES: Which again, there`s also reporting saying someone close to him saying he`s ready to talk about things that go to "the core of the Mueller inquiry."
BERTRAND: Exactly. And that, of course, is whether or not Trump colluded with Russia. So if that is the case and you know, Michael Cohen was pretty much central to this dossier, he was dispatched to Prague apparently to clean up the mess --
BERTRAND: Again, allegedly, he denies this. I just want to be clear.
BERTRAND: And he was allegedly dispatched to pay off the Russian hackers etcetera, etcetera. That would be consistent with his lifetime role as Trump`s fixer. That is consistent with that. So if he were to start talking about things that he witnessed during the campaign or you know, try to lessen his sentence perhaps to get to the heart of what Bob Mueller is investigating and therefore be extremely valuable to that investigation, then that would just open Pandora`s box.
HAYES: I also think, Paul, I mean, the thing -- the most implausible thing about the Trump Tower meeting to me that I`m obsessed with is it the cover story of all participants including the Russians who were present who have spoken is that there`s this huge buildup in which the senior members of the campaign set up a meeting in campaign headquarters where they are promised dirt from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton and the meeting takes a weird turn and they don`t really get the dirt and they talk about adoption and no one ever says anything about it again.
BUTLER: Again, and what prosecutors say to juries is use your common sense.
HAYES: Right, exactly. And so you know, the day before President Trump promises that this campaign rally, oh, you`re going to hear some really good stuff about Hillary next week, then they have the meeting the dirt doesn`t come out and that speech that the President promised it never happened. And so again, when jurors use their common sense, there`s not going to be a criminal trial of the President yet maybe after he leaves office. Again, that`s the rule that Justice Department ruled that Mueller is following but in terms of impeachment, in terms of evidence of criminality that`s kind of a smoking gun.
HAYES: Yes, and it -- and it goes, Matt, and that -- the other part of that to me again, you got on record, you`ve got this meeting, we know the meaning happened. It`s possible the President is doing this, it`s possible Michael Cohen knew that he knew and others did. No one -- just based on what we already know, no one says word one as they watched the Russians interfere over and over in the election having been told that an e-mail the Russian government wants your dad to win.
MILLER: Yes, that`s right. And you know, Natasha talked about looking not just at one event but the entire mosaic. I think you actually pull -- to understand this meeting, you have to pull back the lens and look at even a few more times. You have to pull back and remember that they were told, George Papadopoulos was told in April, two months before this meeting that the Russians had obtained Hillary Clinton`s e-mail. So I suspect when Don Jr. gets that e-mail and probably calls his father and maybe has a meeting with his father, they go into that meeting suspecting that there Hillary Clinton`s e-mails. They don`t get it in their meeting but they still think it`s coming which is why a month later in July you see Donald Trump standing at the podium publicly asking the Russians to do what they didn`t deliver in that meeting they had privately.
HAYES: Paul Butler, Natasha Bertrand, and Matt Miller thank you. That was great. All right, who to believe, the President or his fixer or neither, sorting through the lies, lies, and more lies next.
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HAYES: First we heard the secret recording that Donald Trump and Michael Cohen talking about a hush money payment. Then we learned Michael Cohen is willing to testify that Donald Trump was in on Russian collusion at Trump Tower. And now according to a source in The Daily Beast, the two men are "dead to each other." In other words there`s an ongoing public possibly to the career death feud between the President United States and his former personal lawyer both of whom have let`s say substantial credibility issues which not only prompts a question of whose story we`re supposed to believe but also why all this information is kind of like publicly as Cohen is presumably pursuing some kind of cooperation agreement that something usually done and quiet.
Joining me now Betsy Woodruff Co-author of that great piece in The Daily Beast and David Cay Johnston Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Author of It`s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is doing to America. Betsy, what -- so your reporting indicates that we are seeing this play out in public because these two men have just are now sort of caught an existential deathmatch and what you see is what you get as they play this out in public.
BETSY WOODRUFF, POLITICS REPORTER, THE DAILY BEAST: Existential deathmatch is a good way of putting it. What we`ve seen unfold over the last few months and sort of reach a breaking point in the last 48 hours is the final irreparable, unfixable rift between Michael Cohen and his former boss President Donald Trump. And it`s important to take a step back and sort of put this in context. Michael Cohen spent most of his career presenting himself as the as the watchdog of Trump. As somebody who would go to the mat for him, as someone who was recently at several months ago said he would jump out of a building for Trump. But rapidly we`ve seen that shift. We`ve seen a sea change.
And now, according to numerous sources that my colleagues would see of saying and I spoke with the break is unfixable. Michael Cohen has resolved himself, has made peace with the fact or is making peace with the fact that he`s never going to have a relationship with Trump again, that he can`t go back that this is done. And at the same time, the President has accepted and is very much ready for this project that his outside allies are going to undertake of trying to nuke Michael Cohen`s credibility. Any ounce of credibility Michael Cohen has is a liability for Trump so we`re going to see the President`s outside allies do everything in their power to just try to undermine him.
HAYES: We saw yesterday obviously, Rudy Giuliani talking about Michael Cohen has been a liar`s whole life which is hilarious because Rudy Giuliani himself called Michael Cohen honest just a few months ago in the role that Michael Cohen once had and we also saw the Drudge Report call him a rat. David, you`ve reported on Trump for years. What do you -- what do you make of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST: Well, Michael Cohen clearly has done as Betsy put it, a complete break here and he`s a terrible threat to Donald because Donald tears up his documents. We`ve had stories that they have to piece together things in the White House whereas this guy kept records. Well, audio recordings and memos to the file with the lawyers called memorializing, those are powerful information to juries. And the fact that you`ve lied about something, I mean, all of us have lied. I`ll bet you you`ve told your children that yes there is an Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or whatever, and as we put people --
HAYES: Well, I`m not Michael Cohen, though, David.
JOHNSTON: OK, but --
HAYES: I mean, I just -- I just want to be clear here about the credibility issues of this individual who I`m just not prepared to take at face value.
JOHNSTON: But there`s no less substantial, Chris, than then Sammy "the bull" Gravano.
HAYES: Well, sure. Yes.
JOHNSTON: They are no less then all sorts of criminals who Rudy Giuliani used to convict other criminals. So the idea that because Michael Cohen has been lying and dissembling and hiding things for Trump, that that is going to reduce his credibility. Well, maybe in the court of public opinion but it won`t in a courtroom.
HAYES: All right, Betsy, can I give you a very paranoid feeling I keep having and you can talk me out of it. I keep feeling like there`s some setup, that this is -- to use the professional wrestling term kayfabe which is when sort of fake animus is created between two wrestling characters that somehow what we`re watching is some weird kind of public setup and there`s something happening behind the scenes I`m not seeing. Is that -- is that paranoia? Is that happening?
WOODRUFF: I think you`re probably giving too much credit to the President`s legal team here. I think the idea that Rudy Giuliani is puppet mastering some sophisticated effort to secretly reverse engineer Michael Cohen`s credibility although the year is 2018 and I don`t want to put anything outside the realm of possibility, maybe I`ll eat my words but I don`t think that`s what`s happening.
I think rather what`s happening is we are seeing this bare-knuckle brawl between two lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Lanny Davis both of whom have a deep affection for the spotlight, both of whom have a deep affection for media attention and are also deeply loyal to their clients and are embroiled in a legal battle, in a public affairs battle, the likes of which has not been seen at least since the Clinton administration even to say that. And a lot of weird stuff is happening. And sometimes weird stuff happens just because it`s weird and not because there`s necessarily some sort of complex backstory going on. I haven`t received any indicators of that. It`s possible but based on my reporting, I haven`t seen any evidence that that`s what`s happening.
HAYES: Yes, I mean, the Occam`s razor here is it`s happening in public because the people around this all love going on television. I mean, that -- you know, which is -- which is clearly true. And David, I mean through Trump`s career, right he has successfully essentially kind of wriggled out of a very, very severe legal liability and often done it with a kind of public panache.
JOHNSTON: Oh and this is a man who beat for federal grand juries when he was a young man. I mean, he`s skill at getting away from law enforcement is absolutely extraordinary. On the other hand, he`s never had to deal with someone the likes of Bob Mueller.
HAYES: He also hasn`t had -- I mean, I want to close quickly by your sense of Allen Weisselberg`s significance is. That`s the longtime accountant who we now know yesterday was -- we`ve learned was called before this Michael Cohen`s grand jury and seems to be a greater threat than almost any other development we`ve heard of.
JOHNSTON: He is the number one threat to Donald. Now he may want to take the Fifth Amendment. In which case they`re going to grant him I`m sure immunity because nobody cares about whatever offenses he may have committed. But he has been with the family, the Trump Organization since Fred Trump ran it with his business partner Willie Tomasello identified by law enforcement as a front for the Gambino and Genovese Mafia families. Donald once told the President of his casino first casino in Atlantic City Jack O`Donnell when he found out that the vice president for finance there was black. I don`t want black guys touching my money, I only want short guys who wear yarmulkes.
HAYES: Right.
JOHNSTON: And he has made it clear in previous comments who he trusts and the guy who handles his money he has to totally trust him and that`s a guy who can deliver up the facts, the details, where the money came from and where the money went.
HAYES: Betsy Woodruff and David Cay Johnston, thanks for joining us.
WOODRUFF: Sure thing.
HAYES: The deadline for the Trump Administration to return the children that they took from my grandparents expires with hundreds of kids still according to the government, ineligible for reunification. Where are they? What`s happening? The latest on that next
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HAYES: Today the Trump administration appeared in front of a federal judge and argued they had met the court ordered deadline to reunite immigrant children taken from their parents. According to the government, approximately 1,820 kids have been reunited with their parents or been placed with a family member or sponsor. And that leaves 650 children still deemed ineligible by the government for reunification, which means regardless of the administration`s attempt today to declare mission accomplished, it is not over, particularly for those 600 plus kids.
MSNBC Jacob Soboroff was inside that courthouse in San Diego today where Lee Gelernt, deputy director of ACLU`s immigrant rights project argued the case in front of the federal judge. Thank you both for joining me.
Lee, let me start with you. Your sort of headline take away of where things are stand now.
LEE GELERNT, ACLU: We are pleased that this many children are now in their parent`s arms. But I think the headline is what you said is there is still a lot of children who haven`t been reunified. There are parents missing. And I think the judge left no doubt that he is going to stay on the government until that happens.
The o ther headline is that we desperately need a continuation of the stay of removal so that parents and children can have some time to talk about the profound decisions they need to make about whether they are going to fight for their asylum or they are going to allow the child to stay behind, and they need some counseling from lawyers.
There has been so much trauma inflicted on these families that explaining their legal options as complex as they are under normal circumstances is almost impossible. So we are asking the judge to continue a stay of removal. He set he`ll rule on it this weekend.
Jacob, what does ineligible mean?
JACOB SOBOROFF, MSNBC: Yeah, that`s a great question. And it`s something that people have not only been asking me, but it`s sort of what the judge was asking the Trump administration. today, sort of like we have to go through now these 650 people, including people that have some sort of criminal conviction may have been deported already outside of the United States and figure out if we can get them back together.
The judge was really emphatic about that today, Chris. And we have been asking the Trump administration judge about this, what makes them ineligible. And the judge said these are missing parents that should be together with their children as of right now. So, he said the immediate next steps are going to issue an order basically laying out the ground rules for the government to work with Lee and the ACLU in order to go and find these parents that are outside of the country, the 52 parents that have been released to the interior of the counry, and her children are sitting somewhere in HHS custody, but also figure out something to get the 1,000 parents that now have final orders of removal, meaning there are 1,000 other reunited parents that could be deported at any minute, and what to do with those 1,000 parents.
It`s an extraordinary thing to think about. They put these people back together, but 1,000 of them might be kicked out of the country immediately.
HAYES: To the point that Jacob was making there Lee, so are you confident the judge is basically going to say, like, you don`t just get to call it quits, these other 650 plus, like, the court order is going to extend to them somehow and that the government will actually cooperate and adhere to that court order?
GELERNT: Absolutely, the judge is not going to let them off the hook. He has made it clear that he is issuing new deadlines to get us information about those individuals. He is absolutely not planning on letting them off the hook.
The government fought back today in court and said, well, we don`t want to be under deadlines to even give the plaintiffs information. I don`t think the judge is going to stand for that. He is going to set new deadlines to get us information, and he is going to ask what is the United States being done to find these parents.
HAYES: Jacob, there`s also been a really worrying set of reporting about the conditions of many of the places these children have been. And I want to be clear about this, some of these questions -- ProPublica has this comprehensive list of allegations of sexual assault, sexual molestation of minors, they extend back to 2014, 2015, some of these facilities before the Trump administration under the Obama administration, the nation today has an article about a 6-year-old girl who had to sign a form, who was taken from her parents, forcibly separated, put in as an unaccompanied minor and then sexually abused in an immigrant detention center, signing a form that says -- confirming she understand it was her responsibility to stay away from her abuser.
My sense, Jacob, is there are going to be a lot of stories along these lines as the reporting continues with these families now reunited.
SOBOROFF: And that is the thing, right now the onous is on Lee and the ACLU to go through individually each and every one of these ineligible cases that have not yet been reunified and figure out were they wronged in some way.
The report from ProPublica today was just absolutely mindblowing, and the idea that the government wants to put the onus on an outside organization or agencies or NGOs in order to protect the children, that they forcibly separated from their parents when they came into the United States, continues to be mindblowing. And when you hear the circumstances like we heard today in this ProPublica report, it even goes further than that.
HAYES: Lee, what are the next steps here now for the ACLU?
GELERNT: Yeah, the next steps are to immediately get the people who are in detention who have been reunified counseling to make sure that people who mistakenly waved their right to reunify with their children can take back that, and also to find the missing parents. Jacob is absolutely right. The onus has been put on us. The government doesn`t seem to have a plan, so we are contacting NGOs all over the world to help us. Thats all we can do, but we need to find these parents.
These children are suffering every single day. The stories we have been hearing from the ground about the reunified families, parents not recognizing their children, they have lost so much weight. The parent and child just weeping the whole time. The child feeling like the parent let them down, because they let them be separated and sent to detention, too young to understand that the parent couldn`t stop it, it is heart breaking.
And the most amazing thing that came out of the hearing today was that we know that parents didn`t understand the forms they signed and mistakenly signed away their kids. The judge asked the government can`t we at least agree that those parents should have the right to get their kids back. And the government said we can`t even agree to that. I mean, that is shocking that the United States government would want to keep these children here based on a mistake. It`s as if the government is playing gotcha.
HAYES: Two things that have been haunting me. One are -- several bits of reporting that immigration officials informing kids that their parents opted to be separated, lying to them, and inflicting this evil on them, this trauma, to lie to them and say their parents abandoned them. And, two, I keep seeing these pictures of reunited families with smiling parents who are beaming, and this vacant look in the eyes of the kid that keep haunting me because of what they have seen and what has gone on. You can see picture after picture, and video after video of this and you can see it in front of you what has been done to these children by our government. It is not over the day that they`re reunited. Lee Gelernt and Jacob Soboroff, thank you so much for joining me.
SOBOROFF: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: 102 days until November 6 and Donald Trump is having an unprecedented effect on half of the American electorate that could tip the balance of Washington coming up.
But first, tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two, next.
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HAYES: Thing One tonight, this was supposed to be Manafort week with the start of the trial of Donald Trump`s former campaign chair on money laundering and tax evasion charges, but the judge granted a last minute delay to give Manafort`s lawyers more time to review documents and the trial will instead begin on Tuesday.
In the meantime, Paul Manafort has been sit anything a Virginia jail in solitary confinement and some on Trump`s team are concerned.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUDY GIULIANI, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP`S PERSONAL ATTORNEY: They are putting him in solitary confinement, which sounds more like Russia than the U.S., in order to get him to break. And maybe they`ve succeeded in cracking this guy and getting him to lie. I don`t know, I am not sure of that
I have a -- well, I shouldn`t say it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Then don`t say it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Say it. I want to know.
Fact check, we use a lot of solitary confinement here in the U.S. It`s not a Russian thing
We don`t know what Rudy Giuliani thought he shouldn`t say there. We also don`t know if Paul Manafort has flipped during his stay in solitary confinement. We do know, though, that he isn`t singing. And we know that because today we found out he wasn`t able to bring his $18,000 karaoke machine to jail with him. That`s Thing Two in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: Paul Manafort remains in solitary confinement as he awaits the start of his trial in Virginia for allegedly funneling millions of dollars through offshore shell account companies to find his extravagant lifestyle.
Filled with luxury cars, over a million dollars in clothing and several lavish homes, including one in the Hamptons.
You may be wondering why today we found out a a landscaper is testifying at Paul Manafort`s trial last week, until we found out he spent half a million dollars in less than two years on lawn mowing and hedge pruning? That seems like a lot.
And the lavish spending in the Hampton house didn`t end there. We`re also seeing receipts for the first time that show Manafort spent over $18,000 on a karaoke set up. The invoices revealed in the new court filing show the karaoke machine itself only set Manfort back $500, but he also got the $950 song package -- you`ve got to have variety, obviously -- two microphone stands for duets, of course, and a $600 touch screen remote, among other accessories, all of which sounds like an extremely sweet set up to me.
No word on Manafort`s favorite karaoke song, but I would absolutely pay to watch him sing Confessions.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did Michael Cohen betray you, Mr. President?
TRUMP: Thank you very much.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you everybody.
TRUMP: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did Michael Cohen betray you?
TRUMP: Thank you very much.
Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, are you worried about what Michael Cohen is going to say to prosecutors?
TRUMP: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you worried about what is on the other tapes, Mr. President?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: By NBC`s count, the president has ignored questions from reporters 10 times since the Cohen tape came out. But only one reporter, a pool reporter from CNN who tried to get answers from the president on Wednesday, was later banned from a White House event. CNN says the man behind that decision is the new White House Communications Director Bill Shine. And that`s a man who has plenty of experience marginalizing women who work for cable news networks, because as the former Fox News co-president, multiple lawsuit allege that Bill Shine repeatedly covered up for the sexual harassment, blackmail, and retaliation of Chairman Roger Ailes.
And that behavior rendered Bill Shine unemployable even at Fox News, but there was one place that gave him a job: the White House, that would be a place occupied by a man who has been accused by multiple women of everything from unwanted comments to grouping and more, a White House that repleatedly defended staff secretary Rob Porter, even though the administration knew for months about accusations of domestic violence by two ex-wives, including one who sought a restraining order, and one who says Porter gave her a black eye -- that`s what you see right there.
In completely unrelated news, Quinnipiac has a new poll out this week with an astounding difference between the party preferences of men and women on the generic House ballot. Men prefer Republicans by a slim two point margin, women prefer Democrats by 25 points, which suggests there will be one question answered on every ballot in the mid-term elections, should men like Donald Trump and Bill Shine have more power or less?
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HAYES: This year`s elections are shaping up to make political history for women from the differences between how men and women could vote to the surge in female candidates, Davis Wasserman, who is the U.S. house editor for the Cook Political Report tweeting today, fact, as of this week, Democrats have nominated women in 85 out of 179, 47 percent of the 18 House races, excluding incumbents. On the GOP side, 24 out of 139, just 17 percent.
Here to help analyze the ramifications of a widening gender gap for 2018 and beyond, Democratic pollster Margie Omero and New York Times op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg.
Margie, you know, we`re used to sort of splits in demographics -- college/non-college , weekly church attendance, race, ethnicity. My sense is there has never been a gender partisan split like what we are seeing now. Is that true?
MARGIE OMERO, COOK POLITICAL REPORT: Well, there`s been a gender gap in elections that benefits Democrats since since 1980, so this is not new. What is new, I think, is how pervasive this is. It is not just about women voters. The Quinnipiac poll you mentioned is striking. There is a Pew poll a few week ago that showed a majority of Americans feel that Trump doesn`t respect women, which pretty astounding, that obviously infects a lot of what we`re seeing.
This surge in women candidates, which is really -- is incredible. I mean, it is just so pervasive up and down the ticket -- it`s not just congressional races -- and how well they`re doing, how excited people are. And the continued participation of women voters in primaries relative to Republicans in their primaries, which are, you know, far more evenly divided between men and women.
Women don`t emerge from those primaries as much as the statistic that you showed. And they are less -- there are fewer of them, there were fewer women running and supported on the right.
So, it just -- and I think the third leg of the stool is the saliance of women`s issues, issues like abortion which are going to be more of a driver on the left according to the polling that we`ve done than I think sometimes people think, conventional wisdom.
So, if you put all of that together, it really does make it quite astounding and unique.
HAYES: You`ve been writing about this as -- partly because of your writing and other peole`s writing and reporting, I`m convinced like this is the central axis of this election right now.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, NEW YORK TIMES: It is astonishing. You know, and often when I`m in New York, I kind of can spiral into a deep pit of despair and then I go out to different parts of the country and it`s just amazing what women are doing, you know, women who have never been particularly active before or you know maybe voted in elections, but didn`t go door knocking. And now these women, they just live and breathe politics. They feel this so deeply, right?
I mean, there a lot of people across this land who find Trump to be repellent, but it just hits women especially hard.
And then the other part is the female candidates. When I`ve spoken to political scientists, they`re say that, you know, often women are less likely than men to aspire to political office. They run for specific reasons or because they run because they want to do a specific thing.
So just the -- so just -- so Donald Trump has given, you know, all these excellent candidates who maybe otherwise would have never thought about running for office, a reason to step up, because people really do feel like this is such an existential threat.
HAYES: And it is also against -- I mean, it`s against the backlash of both the president`s behavior, Bill Shine being brought into the White House, which just strikes me as just like absolute insult to people that take this stuff seriously. I mean, this guy was chased out of a place because of covering up, allegedly, years of sexual harassment. Do you -- were the women you talk to that you`ve been covering, like does that get them? Is there a visceral part of this?
GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, they cannot believe this person is president, something I hear from women a lot is they`ll tell me kind of unprompted, you know, my kid is 4. She`ll be 8 when he leaves office, you know, and they`ll think about what the fact of having this man and this administration as kind of a formative experience for their child, what that is going do to their understanding of American leadershipm what that is going to do to their understanding of what`s acceptable for men.
I mean, yeah, people are disgusted.
HAYES: Margie, you mentioned women`s issues, abortion being one of them. And I wonder what you think about the fact that this is the gender gap right now, which is around 20, 25 points. Particularly among young women, it is really, really wide. What a big hearing that highlights the possibility of Roe being overturned is going to do to that as we head toward the mid-terms?
OMERO: Yeah, so we did a poll for NARAL, National Abortion Rights Action League, of suburban women who live in battleground congressional districts, who are not strong partisans, so neither strong Democrats or strong Republicans. And not only are these women, no matter how we asked the question, including Republican women in this group, say that they support abortion rights.
They also say it`s going to be a bigger driver for their vote. They say Democrats are more likely to say than Republicans in this group that they are -- they want to know how the next Supreme Court justice feels with abortion. And this is hugely important issue.
We`ve had other done work looking at Supreme Court, the next pick and the next nominee. And people say they don`t want a court that is out of balance. They don`t want a court that`s too political, that just moves things farther to the right and just infects yet another branch with this political divide that we see all over the country.
And it is going to be a really big issue.
HAYES: Quickly, the optics there are going to be clear, too.
GOLDBERG: Right. And I think it is not clear yet to most women how endangered Roe is, but it is going to be.
HAYES: Absolutely agree.
Margie Omero and Michelle Goldberg, thank you for being here.
Before we go, time for my nightly reminder about our podcast Why is This Happening, which folks seem to be really enjoying.
Here is one review, "Chris Hayes`s new podcasts is like Marc Maron`s WTF for news junkies and I`m here for it." That`s what one critic on Twitter said today. And by critic, I mean a guy who used to work for my cable news show, so take it with a grain of salt. Hi, Andrew.
Anyway, we`re really proud of the podcast. Our latest episode is on housing with the documentary filmmaker Giorgio Angelini. You can download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now with Ari Melber whose show just turned one in for Rachel. Congratulations, Ari.
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