IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

FBI could conclude Kavanaugh probe tonight. TRANSCRIPT: 10/2/2018, All In w Chris Hayes

Guests: Nancy Gertner, Bernie Sanders, Rebecca Traister, Jelani Cobb, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Barro, Jesse Eisenger

Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: October 2, 2018 Guest: Nancy Gertner, Bernie Sanders, Rebecca Traister, Jelani Cobb, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Barro, Jesse Eisenger

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: -- in the first place and got him this far. You know who they are. That`s HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on at ALL IN.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: The Senate will vote on Judge Kavanaugh here on this floor this week.

HAYES: Republicans push to end the Kavanaugh investigation.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don`t think we should lie to Congress.

HAYES: As Christine Blasey Ford says the FBI has yet to interview her.

TRUMP: To me that would not be acceptable.

HAYES: Tonight, the new push for a fast boat and the latest on the Kavanaugh probe. Plus --

TRUMP: Well, I`d say that it`s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of.

TRUMP: Rebecca Traister on the anger about the anger over Kavanaugh and her new book Good And Mad. And bombshell reporting from the New York Times --

TRUMP: It`s not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.

HAYES: Alleging outright tax fraud by the President and his family.

TRUMP: They borrowed very little money from my father.

HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York I`m Chris Hayes. We begin with breaking news on the investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Two sources familiar with the matter telling NBC News the FBI could wrap up its probe as early as tonight, more than two days before the Friday deadline. This as new evidence continues to come out refuting Kavanaugh sworn testimony. A letter written by Kavanaugh in 1983 published tonight by New York Times planning debauched Beach week vacation with his high school friends.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are running what amounts to a confidence game on their own members in a last-ditch ploy to drag Kavanaugh`s Supreme Court nomination over the finish line. Mitch McConnell threatening to hold a vote this week regardless of what the FBI`s investigation turns up and forced the remaining holdouts in his own caucus to go on the record with a final decision then face the consequences.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCONNELL: Here`s what they know Madam President, one thing for sure. The Senate will vote on Judge Kavanaugh here on this floor this week. Here on this floor this week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: But McConnell it seems is bluffing. Right now he does not appear to have the votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Under Senate rules for the Senate to vote on Friday, Kavanaugh`s nomination would have to clear procedural vote two days earlier and that would be tomorrow. And as of tonight, some of the key undecided senators still have concerns and are still looking for answers from the investigation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI (R), ALASKA: I have had a conversation with Mr. McGahn about the extent of what the FBI is doing. What I think we all need to do now is to wait and see exactly what comes back up. I don`t know what it`s going to be in it. I don`t know that anybody knows what`s going to be in it so I`m not going to speculate. I`m going to wait.

SEN. JEFF FLAKE (R), ARIZONA: I was very troubled by the tone of the -- of the remarks. The interaction with the members was sharp and partisan and that concerns me. And I tell myself you`d give a little leeway because of what he`s been through. But on the other hand, we can`t have this on the court. We simply can`t.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If it turns out that Kavanaugh was lying about any --

SEN. JOE MANCHIN (D), WEST VIRGINIA: That finishes everything.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Does it?

MANCHIN: If they can corroborate that he`s lying, I think everyone should, Democrats, Republicans, even the President.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley told reporters today the FBI`s findings won`t be released to the public consistent with standard background check policy. They will be shared with the White House and all 100 members of the U.S. Senate. Sources tell NBC News the FBI currently has no plans to interview Dr. Christine Blasey Ford who last week described under oath her harrowing memories of being sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh in high school. He strongly denies her claim.

The Bureau has already completed interviews with three witnesses who allegedly either aided the attack or attended the party where it`s said to have taken place as well as a second woman Deborah Ramirez accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Lawyers for Ramirez say they gave the FBI names and contact info for more than 20 witnesses who may have corroborating information but the lawyers aren`t aware of the FBI contacting any of them.

Now, we don`t know whether the Bureau has pursued any of those leads. We also don`t know if they`re examining whether Kavanaugh may have perjured himself in his testimony last week with false accounts of his drinking habits or the lewd references on his yearbook page. Now we learned the FBI may not even be using all of its allotted time to investigate. NBC News reporting the inquiry could conclude as soon as tonight and according to McConnell Senators won`t be given much time to consider the findings.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How much time do you plan to give senators to read and digest the FBI findings before you hold a vote?

MCCONNELL: It shouldn`t take long. As interesting as this all is, I can`t imagine that any members who want to read it will not go over there and read it immediately.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So you`re talking hours? A day?

MCCONNELL: They`ll read it as quickly as they can and but -- that`ll not be used as another reason for delay, I can tell you that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That may not sit well with lawmakers like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins who bumped into an A.P. reporter today on Capitol Hill. "Murkowski appears in no hurry even as McConnell pledges to move forward with Kavanaugh vote this week. He talked about a vote last week too, she told A.P. Collins riding with Murkowski on a set of Subway smiled and told Murkowski good answer.

For more on the FBI investigation and what happens next, I`m joined by MSNBC Contributor Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and Nancy Gertner former Federal Judge on the District Court of Massachusetts. And Nancy, let me start with you since you did serve as a federal judge. There`s two issues here. There`s the allegations of -- the allegation of sexual assault and of exposing himself to Deborah Ramirez. Now there`s the question of truthfulness more broadly. It seems that lots of things he said in that hearing room are simply not true and there`s more evidence coming out that that`s the case. How important is that for someone who`s going to -- who is a federal judge and wants to be in the Supreme Court?

NANCY GERTNER, FORMER FEDERAL JUDGE, DISTRICT COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS: Actually I think that there are three things one is the underlying acts, the second thing is representations about misrepresentations that he may have made during his testimony, but the third thing is something that I`ve written about and press a tribe wrote about the New York Times today which is his asset. I -- literally when I heard Judge Kavanaugh, I thought that I was -- I thought I was -- just listening on the radio and I thought he was -- he sounded like a talk-show host. He sounded so -- it was a screed.

I mean, it was so inappropriate for a judge. And I think that that raises questions about whether not just the actual partiality which we care about in a judge, but issues like the appearance of partiality. What`s it going to be like when Democrats, Clinton, you know, where any of the other people he attacked appear before him. So it`s really -- it`s not just the acts and the misrepresentation but also his affect and what he said. I`d never heard a judge speak like that before.

HAYES: Joyce, there`s some questions as well about the comprehensiveness of the FBI investigation right now. There`s this letter from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford`s lawyers to the FBI which I want to read you a portion and get your reaction. We sent you a series of e-mails and letters in which we identify witnesses and evidence that would likely assist the FBI in its investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh`s sexual assault of Dr. Ford and asked you to forward them to the Supervisory agent. Despite these efforts, we have received no response from anyone involved in this investigation and no response to our offer for Dr. Ford to be interviewed. What does that say if they haven`t actually talked to Dr. Ford?

JOYCE VANCE, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: You know, Senator McConnell likes to talk a lot about Democrats wanting to move the goalposts backwards, in essence, making it more difficult for Judge Kavanaugh. But what`s really happened here is the White House has kept the goal posts in the same place but moved the football a lot closer to them making it so very easy for Judge Kavanaugh to clear.

The reality is that the FBI works here for their client, the White House. The White House is constraining the FBI`s ability to do a background investigation and to follow up on natural leads in an unprecedented way and there won`t be any confidence in the integrity of this result when it comes forward not because the Bureau isn`t doing a good job but because they aren`t able to do things like re-interview Dr. Blasey Ford, re-interview Judge Kavanaugh. The process is not designed to produce confidence in the outcome.

HAYES: Nancy, there`s this letter that the New York Times published tonight, this 1983 letter in which young Brett Kavanaugh is organizing the logistics for the notorious beach week a high school bacchanal in Ocean City, Maryland on the beach. He says -- he signs it off as Bart O`Kavanaugh which seems a reference to a nickname for himself that appears in Mark Judge`s book and about what she was asked under oath. He says at one point it would probably be a good idea on Saturday 18th to warn the neighbors were loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us.

The argument being made by conservatives and supporters of Kavanaugh is this is ridiculous. This is absurd. The New York Times and the liberal media and the opponents of Kavanaugh are just trying to shame him over high school hijinks. And as a former federal judge who had to go through confirmation, what do you think of that argument?

GERTNER: Well, I mean, I think initially I was troubled by the notion that you know, things that happen to you in high school or college wouldn`t matter then. I thought back to the confirmation process that I went through. And we had to list every single person that we had ever lived with from the time we left our home, any illegal drugs that we`d ever experimented with, so there clearly was a sense that they were disqualifying answers and went all the way back, that this was a process like none other. Not like a you know, the ordinary job interview, not like a criminal case, not like all the other analogies that people are drawing, but there`s just another thing here which is the notion of timing.

We`re under a constraint of time. The FBI is, the Senate is, that was manufactured by Senator McConnell. When you think about the year in which Merrick Garland`s nomination didn`t even get a hearing, this is an artificial -- I mean this is really an artificial timing more -- that I`ve never seen before. I mean, I was -- my nomination took ten months. That`s about normal.

HAYES: Ten months?

GERTNER: This is -- ten months. That`s right. A Supreme Court nomination here that is essentially what was proposed in August and now they`re voting on it you know, after two months. This is extraordinary and suggests that it`s really a hollow exercise.

HAYES: Yes, do you feel that way about the timing as well, Joyce?

VANCE: I do. I think it`s just you know, completely artificial and manufactured. I had wondered this afternoon whether the FBI is sending either deliberately or perhaps just because of how little the White House has permitted them to do a message of their own with these stories that we`re hearing that they may complete their investigation as early as tonight rather than taking the full time until Friday further highlighting how artificial everything that we`re seeing is.

HAYES: All right, Joyce Vance and Nancy Gertner, great to have your insights. For more on the looming Kavanaugh vote, I`m joined by Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats. Your reaction to the news the FBI may be wrapping up as early as tonight or tomorrow and Mitch McConnell`s going to make you vote this week.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Well, I agree with your guests you just had on. I think it`s an outrage. Mitch McConnell had no problem keeping a seat vacant for ten months, and now he`s telling us that we need to shorten a thorough FBI investigation, not only regarding sexual assault issues but regarding the veracity, the honesty of Judge Kavanaugh and his testimony before Congress now and in years past.

I think what is very troubling is in years past when he was up for his judgeship, he said among other things that he never had access to information that was stolen by Republicans staffers from the Democratic staff of the Judiciary Committee. Recent e-mails suggest the very opposite. He suggests that he was not active as a member of the Bush administration in guiding through certain judges. It turns out that perhaps that is not the case. He suggests he really was not involved in discussing torture in the Bush Administration. It turns out that may not have been the case.

Then more recently he tells us that his drinking problem was not all that serious. He never blacked out. He was not a very heavy drinker. There is testimony that suggests that may not be as a case. So I think what we have got to do is let the FBI do its job. And I don`t know that they could do with that job in in in a week or in five days. And that McConnell wants to rush this thing through has everything to do with politics and very little to do with gaining the truth of the matter.

HAYES: The politics of this it seems to me and I`m curious to hear your thoughts is it seems to me he`s trying to call his own caucus on the carpet if there`s any quivering her or ambivalence he basically wants to make it as hard as possible and put as much pressure as possible on those wavering members.

SANDERS: Look, what are you saying to you know, Collins, and Murkowski, and Flake, it`s OK. You wanted this FBI investigation, here it is and now vote with us, end of discussion. And I think that is -- that is really an outrageous way to run the Senate and I think the American people no matter how they may feel about Kavanaugh want to get at the truth of the matter. You know, Dr. Ford and the other women who came forward a great personal risk to themselves. Their lives have been changed and altered in a way that will never be the same. And they came forward as credible people and they deserve a thorough investigation as to the allegations that they are making.

HAYES: What about that final point about temperament or partisanship that Nancy Gertner, former federal judge just made?

SANDERS: Well, you know, to be -- sad to say and I`m not a historian of the Supreme Court. That bothered me less. I knew from the very beginning and the reason why a day after Trump nominated Kavanaugh, I said I`m not going to vote for this guy because I know he is a right wing operative. He`s going to vote against the woman`s right to choose and overturn Roe versus Wade. He`s going to make it easier for billionaires to buy elections. He is going to be sympathetic the Republicans trying to suppress the vote making and harder for poor people or people of color to vote. He`s going to be supporting the Trump agenda on climate change and the wishes of the fossil fuel industry.

So the fact that he said hey, I`m a right-wing extremist, I`m for Trump, what`s your problem? That bothered be less because I kind of assumed that was the case. By the way, there was another issue that came out today, Chris, that I hope we can discuss today of some significance. And that is that Amazon announced that they were going to pay a $15.00 on minimum wage for 350,000 of their employees and I just want to congratulate the fight for 15 people, the hundreds of workers at Amazon who came forward and talked about how it is absurd that the richest person in the history of the world Jeff Bezos, was paying with people wages so low, they were really having a hard time getting by and many of them were forced to go on food stamps or other federal programs.

I just want to salute you congratulate the workers at Amazon for standing up, for fighting back and I want to applaud Jeff Bezos for doing the right thing and that is making sure that every worker there earns at least 15 bucks an hour. We`re going to take a hard look now at Walmart, at the fast food industry, McDonald`s, at the whole -- at the at the airline industry. We have a major crisis in this country that tens of millions of workers are working at wages you cannot live on. And Bezos did the right thing and I hope other corporations start following what he brought forth.

HAYES: That would be very interesting to see if they do. Senator Bernie Sanders, thank you so much for your time tonight.

SANDERS: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Ahead, incredible new reporting from the New York Times for what they say as the outright fraud Donald Trump used to amass his fortune. And next, the fierce organizing power of women challenging Brett Kavanaugh`s nomination. I`ll talk to Rebecca Traister on Trump, Kavanaugh and her new book detailing the political power of women`s anger. Trust me, you do not want to miss that interview in just two minutes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD, ACCUSER OF BRETT KAVANAUGH: I lean forward.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you. Thank you.

FORD: OK. Is this good? I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school. At this point, I will do my best to answer your questions and request some caffeine.

BRETT KAVANAUGH, NOMINEE, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: This confirmation process has become a national disgrace. This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit. This is a circus. What goes around comes around. \

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: We got a start lesson last week on how gender roles and stereotypes play out in the country in a very high-profile situation. Well, Christine Blasey Ford tried to be accommodating laying out the painstaking details of her alleged sexual assault before an all-male Republican panel. Judge Kavanaugh was angry, confrontational, and openly defiant. The hearing became a kind of case study in who gets to be angry in our society and who doesn`t. In an incredible new book out today called Good And Mad, the revolutionary power of women`s anger, Writer Rebecca Traister has a lot to say about this very topic.

And joining me now is Rebecca Traister. Congratulations on the book. It is phenomenal. I love it and I felt very lucky to have read it before that hearing on Thursday which was just an object lesson in everything you write about in the book.

REBECCA TRAISTER, AUTHOR, GOOD AND MAD: Well, it`s funny that you said -- I`m glad that you say that. And it`s also -- I, of course, could never in a million years have predicted that this is where we`re going to be the week before this book got published, you know. I couldn`t have predicted that this is where we were going to be a month ago as far as the actual material reality at the cabinet hearings.

But one of the things I wanted to do with this book, I actually wanted it to be a tool because I think that there`s so much that we don`t -- that happens unconsciously in terms of how we hear women`s anger, how we -- how women modulate their own anger, how they temper it, how they -- how they change, how they speak or express themselves in order to fall into a very narrow window of acceptability. And I thought that especially with so much mass anger happening, you know, the anger of protesters, the anger of candidates, the anger of teacher strikers, the anger of McDonald`s workers who went on strike last week in response to sexual harassment. I think that there`s so much that we need to really think about the political consequence of women`s anger in a way that we`re not trained to.

And one of the reasons, one of the things I sought to do with this book was to sort of outline what some of these systems and ways of hearing and ways of expressing and ways of dismissing women`s anger are to help us be able to make better sense of the world. And so I would hope that that`s part of what it did in changing the way perhaps that you heard the hearings last week.

HAYES: Well, and partly because it was such an amazing counterpoint between the way that she was talking to the committee and Diane you know, trying to be helpful and accommodating and sort of quivering voice, and his rage, his rage on display. And I feel like you know, there`s two halves here. There`s the way that women`s anger is suppressed by the society as the book talks about the way it can be marshaled collectively for political action, but there`s also the role that male rage what is -- and that which we are getting the full display of last week.

TRAISTER: Right. Well the rage of the powerful whose power is being challenged or questioned in part by you know, a dissent to whether it`s voiced with anger or whether it stems from an angry movement like me to that give -- lays the groundwork for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to be able to come forward with the story to begin with. To have that power question, I mean, that was the openly admitted source of the rage.

HAYES: How dare you.

TRAISTER: I mean, Orrin Hatch said in two instances over the past few weeks, first when it was just the protestors about abortion and health care, when there were the women in the hearing in the original hearing rooms, and Orrin Hatch said we shouldn`t have to put up with this. And then he used that exact same language this week with regard to the accusers of Brett Kavanaugh. It`s the powerful men saying we shouldn`t have to put up with this. We shouldn`t have to you know, listen to, absorb it in any way have our power diminished by -- or ascent impeded by the angry dissent of these people who have less power than we do. That is very openly what they`re angry about.

HAYES: And there`s now -- you know I want to play what the President said today because the other half of this too is it like there`s a kind of backlash -- do backlash, would that make sense?

TRAISTER: The swirling backlash.

HAYES: Or the Ford -- the Ford lash I guess, of sort of threatened or challenged male power which we totally on display now and this is what the President had to say this morning about it being a scary type for men. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Well, I`d say that it`s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. This is a very, very -- it`s a very difficult time. What`s happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice. It really does. You could be somebody that was perfect your entire life and somebody could accuse you of something. It doesn`t necessarily have to be a woman as everybody say, but somebody could accuse you of something and you`re automatically guilty. But in this realm, you are truly guilty until proven innocent. That`s one of the very, very bad things that`s taking place right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Ms. Traister, you`re response.

TRAISTER: Wow, he`s saying the quiet part loud.

HAYES: Yes, he did not leave the subtext meat on the bone for you.

TRAISTER: No. There we go. I think President Trump has really summed it up. The fear --

HAYES: (INAUDIBLE) about the book.

TRAISTER: I think that the idea that women might find curious voices that would challenge powerful men and the systems that have oppressed or subjugated them is very scary for powerful men. He said it. That`s what he`s saying.

HAYES: But they think -- what`s interesting to me too is they think there`s political upside, that powerful man is a subcategory of men and there`s a certain way in which the picture gives all men that kind of power.

TRAISTER: Right.

HAYES: They think that`s a politically winning argument. That`s not just the way he feels which it is. They think that`s a politically winning argument more broadly.

TRAISTER: But it has depending on how you view. For example the 2016 election, there is a very valid argument that it is a political argument. I mean, this is -- make America great again is a version of what he just said, right? The callbacks to the good old days, I mean, if you`ve watched you know, the clips of him talking about protesters being taken out and beaten. The idea that any kind of angry protest could be quashed with actual violence and you know --

HAYES: And now we can`t do that.

TRAISTER: And now we`re not allowed to do that anymore. It`s a very scary time for men. We`re not allowed to just do what we want to do and quash the complainants and have go away and proceed with our power. This is very scary for us. This is the message and it is being sent beyond the realms of the most powerful. It`s being sent to men. It`s being sent to white Americans. And this is -- and this is --

HAYES: And conservative women, I should say by the millions.

TRAISTER: It`s 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump and who are very much at stake in some of this, right? Like pull it -- push, pull, which side are you going to be on. This is -- Donald Trump`s political career is rooted in birtherism which is in itself a sort of we have to delegitimize the president who came and took away a piece of power that had previously been reserved for white men. I mean, this is -- this is the roots of this and his compelling narrative for the nation. And it`s -- you know, right now it`s sort of circling on gender. He said, it`s not just women. Now, it`s not just women.

HAYES: Right. That`s right.

TRAISTER: Right. It`s anybody who hasn`t previously had a claim on the kinds of political economic, public power that powerful white men have with women, of white capitalist patriarchy.

HAYES: All those worthless shrubs that you can get $400 million from dad. Rebecca Traister, what a great pleasure to have you here. The book again, there are lots of books I will recommend. This is at the top of this list right now. It`s called Good And Mad. It`s out today. You absolutely want to read this book. And if you want to hear more from Rebecca, great news. She is the guest on the latest episode of our podcast Why Is This Happening. We get into a whole long discussion about this, about the book, about women`s anger, it`s really good. You can download it wherever you get your podcast. Thank you.

TRAISTER: Thank you so much.

HAYES: Still ahead, new reporting for The New York Times on the financial building blocks of Donald Trump`s fortune and the "outright fraud" they say is the heart of it. That story next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It`s not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. And, you know, I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars. I came into Manhattan and I had to pay him back and I had to pay him back with interest.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Small loan, small loan of a million dollars. Who`s not gotten that?

Donald Trump has often bragged about being a self-made man. But a new blockbuster New York Times story today chock full of never before seen reporting proves that is not true at all. In fact, the story accuses President Donald Trump and his family, including his father Fred Trump and his siblings, of decades long machinations to hide or disguise money from the government using schemes the paper describes as everything from legal loopholes to, quote, "outright fraud."

The exhaustive New York Times investigation is based on interviews and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the Trump empire, reaching the conclusion the president, far from merely receiving a small loan of a million dollars "received the equivalent today," get this, "of at least $413 million from his father`s real estate empire starting when he was a toddler continuing to this day."

Not only does the piece put the line to the myth of Trump as a bootstrapping developer, it outlines a number of strategies, some of which the paper says appear to be illegal, used to reduce the family`s tax bills over the years, quote "the president`s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances. The Trump`s paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show" that`s a difference, just to be clear, of almost $500 million, half a billion dollars, money that should have belonged to the American people and the American public, but instead went to line the pockets of the Trump family and the Trump children, including the president.

Joining me now, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jessie Eisenger. He`s a senior writer at ProPublica, had a great piece on the IRS just yesterday in the New York Times.

It`s a hell of a story.

JESSE EISENGER, PROPUBLICA: It`s an amazing piece of reporting, absolutely.

HAYES: I mean, they have him dead to rights, that`s the thing. I mean, the thing that struck me is The New York Times does not say outright fraud without layers and layers of lawyers going through and green lighting that phrase.

EISENGER: Absolutely. I don`t think I`ve never gotten to.

HAYES: No, you never get to say outright fraud.

EISENGER: Yeah, why don`t I get the toys?

And it`s a very muscularly written piece. They call it outright fraud. They call lies, lies, which you don`t see in The New York Times. They call Donald Trump a con man. It is a piece that they felt very confident in writing and really sort of carried through with the muscular.

HAYES: And they have the documents. I mean, they have the documents that show how the family -- they`ve got the subsidiaries. They`ve got the receipts.

EISENGER: And they`ve got tax returns.

HAYES: They`ve got tax returns.

EISENGER: Now, to be clear, it`s Fred Trump`s tax returns, it`s not the golden brass ring of Donald Trump`s return, which we would love to see and which he never disclosed. But it`s Donald Trump -- I mean, it`s Fred Trump`s business and Fred Trump`s tax returns and then all the business relationships that they -- that we`ve never seen, the subsidiaries they had that they built to hide what they were doing.

HAYES: And some pretty blatant stuff -- I mean, just ways of essentially moving money from parents to children that you would have to declare as income that they hide from the IRS and rip the government off.

EISENGER: Yeah, I talked to a tax lawyer tonight who said that he was a little bit shocked at how crude all these machinations were. And he said, you know, maybe they couldn`t hire -- or maybe they were too cheap to hire good tax lawyers. But, you know, they just did very blatant stuff.

The main technique is -- which the IRS really should catch and the state tax authorities should catch is just lying about the value of the assets. And then when you`re transferring them, if you say they`re worth a lot less then you pay much lower taxes on it. That`s a kind of blatant, obvious fraud that really should be caught.

HAYES: By the way, this is lying on the underlying assets is a recurring theme in the Michael Cohen -- in some of the Michael Cohen charges, in the Paul Manafort charges and here. It`s a thing that never occurred to me that that`s a way to commit crime...

EISENGER: Well, where`s your imagination?

HAYES: Exactly. If you lie about the value of things, you can move things between different parties, you can get loans and all this. But it is fraud definitionally.

EISENGER: Yes, and it`s a classic thing that auditors should look at, the prosecutors should look at, that agents -- yes. But FBI should look at.

And now with real estate it`s not that hard. It`s not a stock where you get the value every day. But real estate buildings in Brooklyn, condos, are being sold every day. So you can get the valuations there, and you can approximate them. The IRS really should be able to -- beyond that.

HAYES: One of the things here is that it`s a family affair. It was a family affair back then. This is a guy who came up learning at the knee how to evade taxes, who`s got kids now who, lord knows what they`re doing, but also that The New York Times got these documents and sat with them for 18 months. It makes you wonder what it would look like if the president`s tax returns were in the hands of reporters.

EISENGER: It would be spectacular. I mean, we already know pieces of it. We know a lot about his business machinations that Donald Trump`s, that is, you know, like getting the loan from daddy to bail out the business, about misleading things they`ve said to the banks.

And, you know, he`s kept in the family, we broke a story, ProPublica, broke a story a year ago that he transferred apartments to his sons at artificially low prices.

HAYES: Which, again, the artificially low price keeps rearing its head and head. I should say that Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Fred Trump has been gone for nearly years. It`s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family by the, of course, failing New York Times. Jesse Eisenger, thank you.

EISENGER: Thanks for having me.

HAYES: Still ahead, 35 days left to the midterms and Republicans are turning to some tried and true messages to try to hold onto power. We`ll talk about some of the worst political ads we`ve seen coming up.

Plus, the president gets demoted in tonight`s Thing One, Thing Two next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Thing One tonight, do you remember John Barron or John Miller, the Trump spokesman who would call up reporters and leak braggadocios information about The Donald in the 80s, but obviously were just Donald Trump himself pretending to be someone else.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: He gets calling by everybody in the book in terms of women..

SUE CARSLWELL, PEOPLE: Like who?

TRUMP: Well, he gets called by a lot of people. They just call. they just call. Actresses, people that you write about just call to see if they can go out with him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: They just call. In 1984, Trump pretending to be John Barron, called up a reporter for Forbes magazine who was working on the magazine`s third annual ranking of America`s richest people. John Barron just wanted to share some really favorable information about Donald Trump`s financial situation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN GREENBERG, : I just thought that perhaps your tax papers says it`s been -- (inaudible) to Donald Trump?

TRUMP: Correct, correct, that`s correct.

GREENBERG: OK. And when you say, you know, in excess of 90 percent of the ownership...

TRUMP: I`d say in excess of 90. In fact, well, it`s really closer to even the ultimate, but in excess of 90 percent yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Not only was that not John Barron, what he`s saying was not true, it was Trump lying to Forbes pretending to be someone else to get Donald Trump on the Forbes 400 list.

Now, Trump really cares about that list, which is why tomorrow could be a tough day for him. And that`s Thing Two in 60 seconds.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Donald Trump clearly had ambitions to leave the White House more rich than when he got there. There`s, of course, the Trump International Hotel in Washington that opened his first year in office where Trump can make money off of anyone who comes to town and wants to please him. The president has also reportedly charged the government millions of dollars to rent office space in Trump Tower for the purpose of protecting him and more than $300,000 for golf cart rentals, which he charges the Secret Service when he goes to his club.

But he`s going to have to start renting shoes, too, because this plan is not working. Forbes is reporting that Donald Trump`s net worth has actually dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years. 200 million of that apparently because of the effect of Trump`s presidency on his brand. For some reason, a lot of people are turned off by the Trump name now. I can`t imagine why.

Tomorrow, Forbes releases its latest Forbes 400 list and we don`t know exactly where Trump is on it. But we know last year he was number 248. Forbes says he`s dropped 138 spots this year, which, by our math, has him barely hanging on at number 386, not that Trump cares or anything.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I mean, Forbes just came out and they said I`m worth $4.5 billion or $5 billion. And they have no idea. Actually, they have no idea. It`s much more than that, but I won`t tell them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KIRSTJEN NIELSEN, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Congress and the courts created this problem and congress alone can fix it. This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: The blatant lies from the Trump administration about its child separation policy are under a brand new spotlight tonight after the inspector general`s truly scathing report, the report obtained by The Washington Post portrays a policy that was flawed from the start. Quote, "each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error," it says, "in describing the ways children were separated and cared for. Border Patrol does not provide preverbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification."

Even a claim made on June 23, three days after Trump signed an executive order halting the separations, the DHS had created a central database, was essentially deemed a lie by the inspector general. Quoting again, "the OIG team asked several ICE employees if they knew of such a database, and they did not."

So, today, with more than 130 children out of an initial 2,500 still in detention, still separated from their parents, it`s important to note that, quote, "at least 860 migrant children were left in border patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts." Many of those children were put in chain link holding pens.

And back in June, under massive criticism for the separation policy, the Trump administration stressed illegal entry into the country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIELSEN: If an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: At the time our reporting suggested that was not true. And the inspector general report found, indeed, that Border Patrol, quote, "restricted the flow of asylum seekers at legal ports of entry" forcing people, then, to cross illegally, straight into the administration`s horrendous policy of separating children from their parents.

As of now, the United States Congress has had no sustained oversight hearings or investigations into this entire abomination.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Do you remember when Republicans were playing to run in the midterms on tax cuts? Let`s check in and see how that`s going.

New York Republican Chris Collins, who was indicted in August on insider trading, charges has decided the fact that his Democratic challenger, Nate McMurray speaks fluent Korean -- McMurray`s wife is a naturalized citizen from South Korea -- justifies running this ad.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(SUBTITLES): Nate McMurray wants to be your next congressman. Worked to send jobs to China and Korea. Helped American companies hire foreign workers. Fewer jobs for us, more jobs for China and Korea. You can take Nate McMurray at his word.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Not a lot about the tax cuts there.

By the way, those words at the bottom that are made to look like subtitles have nothing to do whatsoever with what McMurray was actually saying.

So, what about another indicted Republican? California`s Duncan Hunter Jr. Hunter is running an ad that his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Christian raised in San Diego, justifiably described as racist, xenophobic and rooted in lies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Ammar Campa-Najjar is working to infiltrate congress, using three different names to hide his family`s ties to terrorism. His grandfather masterminded the Munich Olympic massacre.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is a well orchestrated plan.

ANNOUNCER: Ammar Campa-Najjar, a risk we can`t ignore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Yeah.

Then there is New York incumbent Republican John Faso, who has, to his great credit, not been indicted. The NRCC is defending Faso`s seat in the overwhelming white 19th district of New York with a spot attacking his Rhodes Scholar opponent, Antonio Delgado, by spotlighting Delgado`s brief career as a rapper 12 years ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTONIO DELGADO, DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE FOR CONGRESS, NEW YORK: Who I am? I`m Antonio Delgado.

I was raised to believe you`re supposed to love your neighbor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: With me now to talk about what is going on here, Michelle Goldberg, columnist at the New York Times, Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New Yorker and MSNBC contributor Josh Barro, columnist at New York Magazine.

I want to start with the Delgado one, because that -- we show you one little bit, there are five or six NRCC ads -- this is not the Faso campaign -- the National Republican -- they are all rapper Antonio Delgado, big city rapper, Antonio Delgado, Antonio Delgado in a hoodie. I don`t think it`s gotten enough attention. It is like -- this is the hands ad. This is one of the most racist, obviously racist ads I`ve seen.

JELANI COBB, NEW YORKER: Yeah, I was just going say that, but that`s in the tradition of the Jesse Helms hands ad.

HAYES: Which is about a -- you couldn`t get the job and you see a black man`s hands.

COBB: Right. Right. They had to give the job to an affirmative action hire and stoking that kind of resentment.

But the curious thing about this is that people are trying to replicate the Trump playbook so to speak, but Trump was able to get away with that against a very well define and not very well liked -- I will just say, very much loathed Democratic opponent. And so for the people who are maybe racist, but don`t like to think of themselves as racist, or people who will hold their nose and vote for someone who does something that`s borderline, this turns all those people off.

HAYES: Yeah, yeah.

COBB: And so you don`t know that you can get away with that in the absence of someone who is as polarizing as Hillary Clinton.

HAYES: Although, I`m also amazed at the way that he has moved the window of the acceptable such that the Delgado ads, which I should say have been in The New York Times, are not like a big national scandal.

JOSH BARRO, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: I think an interesting thing about this choice the NRCC made there, is that this is the third campaign in a row in New York`s 19th district where Republicans are able to run the play about this candidate who is not from this district.

HAYES: Totally.

BARRO: And it`s literally true in the case of Antonio Delgado. He moved from New Jersey not very long ago. And the two previous candidates, who are white, they ran sort of the normal this person is not from the district campaign. And they decided here that this is a more effective way to do that rather than being like, he lived in Montclair, New Jersey two years ago.

I assume generally when they put up an ad it`s because they`ve tested it and they`ve decided this is the thing that tests. But I would note, you know, last year the Virginia governor`s race, you had in the Pennsylvania 18th special election that the Democrats won, you had this shift where they sort of gave up on the tax message because they decided that wasn`t working and went with the sort of Trumpiest message possible, and still lost.

HAYES: It didn`t work.

BARRO: So, just because they think this is the thing they think that works the best for them, that doesn`t mean it`s a thing that works.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, THE NEW YORK TIMES: First of all, I think it`s interesting kind of whose youthful high jinks we`ve decided matter here, right. I mean, to run these ads while simultaneously claiming that it`s out of line to go back and look at what Brett Kavanaugh did in college is pretty rich.

But also, this is -- in a way there is something honest about these ads in this is what the Republican Party is running on, right? Like, this is a battle whether America is going to be Obama`s America, a multicultural, forward thinking, multi-ethnic democracy or whether it`s going to be this brutally revanchist white patriarchy. That is what the midterm is about. And I guess to their credit they understand that.

HAYES: I`ve got say the Collins -- the McMurray-Collins one -- I mean, now, Collins has his back up against the wall. Of course, it`s no excuse at all. But he is desperate, right. But that ad is shocking also. I mean, the guy is just speaking Korean, because his wife is Korean. And it is literally, like, look at this menacing terrible dude who speaks a second language.

COBB: Well, I mean, remember John Kerry spoke that menacing language of French.

HAYES: That`s right. That`s right.

COBB: They got some mileage out of that. Of course it`s a very obviously different racial overtones to what`s happening with the Collins race.

But I do think that all of this traces back to, as they say, the cliche, the fish rots from the head, that Trump has normalized this, and he has allowed this. And we ask ourselves who we`ve become as a consequence of having this person in the White House.

This is not like an abstract philosophical question that we can kind of point by point by point look at the outrageous things that are happening because of him that people are emulating him. And the only I guess good point in this is people have not seemed to replicate the secret sauce on way it has been politically profitable.

HAYES: To Josh`s point earlier, right.

BARRO: I think the thing that`s jarring about this being in TV spots, though, is that the way Trump exploited these things focused so heavily on sort of rumor mills and conservative media outlets of varying degrees respectability and like Facebook memes.

HAYES: Yeah, it`s a great point.

BARRO: ...which Trump, you know, understood Facebook in a way that very few presidential candidates have.

These candidates, though, are sort of taking that type of content and sticking it on television in a much more traditional campaign modality. And so it looks kind of weird to actually see the thing that feels like it ought to be like a chain letter on somebody`s Facebook wall as an actual TV ad.

GOLDBERG: And one of the things about Facebook is the people who these ads are targeted to see them and nobody else does, so you kind of don`t even see...

HAYES: You don`t have to come out and like...

GOLDBERG: Right, so you don`t see what a disgusting campaign they`re running necessarily, where as this -- I mean, this basically shows all these candidates, they don`t really know how far they can go, right? I mean, Trump has opened the doors, and now everybody is kind of experimenting and trying to figure out what the limits.

HAYES: What the line is.

GOLDBERG: If there are any.

COBB: We should be mindful here that we`re actually nostalgic for the time when Republicans wanted plausible deniability with their racism. Like, we`ve now gone from the well, maybe it is, maybe it isn`t.

HAYES: Right, because there is a taboo embedded in that that has been taken away.

COBB: Right.

HAYES; And part of this, too -- to me, it`s such a sort of neat little circle, which is like the tax cuts created huge paydays for the donor class of the Republican Party. Voters don`t care about it. So what you do is you shake down the donor class who are feeling pretty fat from the tax cut to help your campaign by running ads about, you know, big city rapper X.

BARRO: Yeah, I think part of it also is a theory that they need to turn out the voter that Trump figured out how to turn out the first time.

HAYES: Right.

BARRO: You have relatively reliable Republican voters, more upscale suburban voters, who do care about things like tax cuts, judicial appointments. They may think that those are sorts of people who are going to turnout anyway. They`re really nervous that the people who had been nonvoters, who Trump managed to get out and vote, mostly non-college educated whites, that those people are not going to show up in the midterms. And I think part of the idea is that these are messages that are aimed at that group.

But again you know I mean looking back at some of those special elections, in the 2017 elections, I don`t think it`s clear that that theory is true.

HAYES: That ad, the RNCC Delgado ad, the other two are the local campaigns. But they should pull that ad, if you`re asking me.

Michelle Goldberg, Jelani Cobb, and Josh Barro, thanks for being with me tonight. That is All In for this evening.

The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END

Copy: Content and programming copyright 2018 MSNBC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 ASC Services II Media, LLC. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of ASC Services II Media, LLC. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.