Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: October 11, 2018 Guest: Ed Markey, Alex Isenstadt, Myrna Perez, Rula Jebreal, Brittney Cooper, Jelani Cobb
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: 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.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I need you to get friends, get your families, get your neighbors, get your coworkers and get out and vote.
HAYES: 26 days out. New polling, new reports of voter suppression, and the same old billionaire spending tens of millions more to save Republican.
TRUMP: Sheldon, Sheldon, Sheldon Adelson.
HAYES: Then, breaking news from the Mueller probe.
TRUMP: No collusion.
HAYES: Tonight, the President of the United States is preparing answers to Mueller questions about collusion with Russia. Plus, can a president whose hotels are propped up by Saudi money hold the Crown Prince accountable for Jamal Khashoggi.
TRUMP: To the best of our knowledge, Khashoggi is not a United States citizen is that right?
HAYES: And Kanye`s hashtag him too explanation of his love affair with Donald Trump.
KANYE WEST, RAPPER: I love Hillary, I love everyone, right? But the campaign I would prefer just didn`t make me feel as a guy that didn`t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that can play catch with his son.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts. right now.
WEST: No (BLEEP).
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Good evening, from New York I`m Chris Hayes. We are now just 26 days from the midterms and Republicans are in triage mode. New York Times reporting the GOP is now abandoning vulnerable lawmakers as they strive to keep the House and have begun to pull millions of dollars from Republican candidates who have fallen substantially behind in one`s competitive races. There is after all only so much money to go around. Well, at least in theory, in practice, not really. Because in 2010 as you might recall the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted in Citizens United to effectively allow an unlimited flow of money into politics and that turned out to be amazing news for Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate worth an estimated $35 billion who has emerged as the most important donor for Donald Trump at the GOP.
Just a few hours after we learned Republicans were cutting costs, Politico broke the news that in addition to the $55 million he and his wife had already spent to maintain the House in the Senate Adelson was now committing to dropping tens of millions more to save the Republican Congress. It`s frankly a little surprising he`s not spending even more than that because Republicans have been very, very good to Sheldon Adelson.
After Trump signed the GOP tax cut for corporations and the rich, Adelson`s company Las Vegas Sands estimated it would get a $1.2 billion benefit of the law, that`s billion with a B. And that`s just part of his return on investment. Adelson really wants to build a casino in Japan. He`s aggressively lobbying for a license. According to ProPublica Trump is trying to help. in February 2017 during a meeting of Mar-a-Lago Trump reportedly raised Adelson`s casino bid to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. That`s the U.S. President effectively seeking to leverage U.S. foreign policy to push the business interests of a single mega-donor.
As one source told ProPublica, the Japanese were a little incredulous that he would be so brazen. Getting Sheldon Adelson and other wealthy donors what they want and then using their money to fund their campaigns is only one prong of the GOP electoral strategy for the Midterms. There`s also their ever-present effort to prevents people from voting spearheaded by people like this.
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BRIAN KEMP, SECRETARY OF STATE, GEORGIA: I`m Brian Kemp I`m so conservative, I blow up government spending. I own guns that no one is taken away.
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HAYES: That`s just your lawn. Awesome. Kemp is running for Governor of Georgia. And as the current Secretary of State, he`s responsible for elections and voter registration. The A.P. is now reporting that Kemp`s office has canceled over 1.4 million voter registration since back in 2012 and one months before this election in which he is running, over 53,000 voter applications are sitting on hold with Kemp`s office. Then there`s this. Georgia`s population is approximately 32 percent black but the list of voter registrations on hold is nearly 70 percent black.
Now, Republican voter suppression efforts are now happening all across the country which Republicans like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach justify by citing voter fraud that they claim is rampant but which well, doesn`t really exist in any significant number according to every single expert that has studied the issue. And it`s just one aspect of the democratically dangerous formula Republicans are deploying before the midterms in an effort to counter the unpopularity of their party and their president.
I asked Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey to react to this news about Adelson.
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SEN. ED MARKEY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: Well, look at it`s just a further indication of the fact that everything is on the table on this November election. That`s why they`re going back to the biggest contributors and they`re asking them to pour tens of millions of dollars additionally into the congressional races. They`re afraid they`re going to lose. And if they lose, they lose everything because right now they have a House and Senate that`s a rubber-stamp for Donald Trump on everything he wants to do from Supreme Court nominees, through repealing the Affordable Care Act, pre-existing conditions being eviscerated, no gun laws that go on the books to protect ordinary citizens, climate change ignored.
And if they win, if they win, the president can fire Robert Mueller, Jeff Sessions, and Rod Rosenstein and just make sure that they can sweep the entire Russian scandal under the rugs. Everything is on the table --
HAYES: Is that -- is that your suspicion if they do win that you will just see a quick move to consolidate along those lines by the President and the Republicans in the party to just destroy every part of inquiry that exists?
MARKEY: There`s no question about it. The health of our democracy is on the ballot this November. It`s as simple as that. Are we going to in fact have a completion of an inquiry as to whether or not the Russians in collusion with the Trump campaign tried to compromise our presidential election? That`s all that`s on the ballot and that`s why they`re so paranoid because they know that the investigations that the House and the Senate will conduct will ensure that every single bit of information is out there.
So even if they fired a Mueller or fire Sessions or Rosenstein that the House and Senate will be on the job they were doing back in 1974 during the Nixon impeachment process.
HAYES: There was -- you mention the Supreme Court, there was news today about a deal that was struck by the Chuck Schumer Mitch McConnell for essentially I think a voice vote on 15 judicial nominees, 13 district court or 12 district court, 13 circuit that allows all of you to go home and for those in cycle the campaign. A lot of people wondering on the Democratic side why give this up after the bitter fight over Kavanaugh, after the fact that stuffing the courts at an unprecedented rate. Can you explain the logic here?
MARKEY: Well, we`re not having voice votes on those judges. We`re having actual votes on the Senate floor on those judges up and down, yes and no. We`re voting on them this evening so there`ll be a record of how everyone was voting on each and every one of those judges.
HAYES: There`s a real concern right now I think about these sort of anti- democratic impulses coming to the floor and I think it`s a concern about the courts increasingly tilting against sort of majoritarian instincts, citizens united paired with the ability of Sheldon Adelson, and then things like voter purges. I mean, how concerned are you about what`s happening in Georgia, the reports out about North Dakota in terms of voter I.D., and this sort of precinct by precinct battle over exactly who gets to vote?
MARKEY: Yes, they can see what`s happening. An African-American on the ballot in Florida for Governor, African-American on the ballot in Georgia for governor. They can see a wave of voters, minority voters that are getting ready to come out into tip this election towards Democrats, not just in those two states but across the country. And in that paranoia, they are going to do anything they can to suppress that vote, anything.
History has told us that that is their battle plan for Election Day and that`s why we have to be totally on alert this year because we have got victory right now that is right in front of us and our side has to be up not agonizing but organizing to make sure that we battle in every single state in every single district to make sure that they cannot, in fact, implement a plan of voter suppression as hard as they try.
HAYES: All right, Senator Ed Markey, thank you for making sometimes tonight.
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HAYES: Joining me now Politico Reporter Alex Isenstadt who co-wrote today`s scoop on Adelson dropping tens of millions more to try to save the GOP Congress. Also with me Myrna Perez, Deputy Director of the Brennan Center for Justice Democracy Program, Leader of its Voting Rights and Elections Project.
And Alex, let me start with you. Adelson has been the single biggest donor. What`s the thinking behind the latest set of checks he`s writing?
ALEX ISENSTADT, REPORTER, POLITICO: Well, look Republicans are facing a brutal midterm environment and they`re turning to Sheldon Adelson. They`re really making him their white knight in this case because Democrats have had a lot of money that they`re spending in these races and they`re going back to Sheldon Adelson for more. As you mentioned in your intro, he`s already given $55 million and we hear that this additional infusion of cash, this 11th-hour infusion of cash is well into the tens of millions of dollars and you`re already starting to see the effects of it.
You know, this week the Senate leadership fund, one of the groups that Adelson is giving to started air-dropping millions of more dollars in T.V. ads on Democrats and you`re seeing the same happen in the House so the effects potentially are already being seen here.
HAYES: Yes, I mean, what I always think about Sheldon Adelson is that he`s underinvested. I mean, the Sands got $1.2 billion from the tax cut. It seems like he could go up way, way higher in there but he`s spending now and I`m sure he`s getting that argument from Republicans, these solicitations. There`s a lot more money that he could presumably give.
ISENSTADT: Yes, this is -- look, you`re exactly right. This is a drop in the bucket for Sheldon Adelson. He typically gives election cycles prior around $100 million. And so what he gets in exchange for that is a tremendous amount of access. He has a lot of access to the President of the United States. He speaks frequently with Jared Kushner. And so he`s getting a lot of bang for his buck at this point.
HAYES: All right, Alex I want to turn to Myrna now for this sort of other prong of this approach right. So you`ve got the donor class and they`re writing the big checks and getting money and then you`ve got the voter suppression fights. Georgia right now, there`s a lawsuit being filed about these 53,000 upheld registrations. What is going on in Georgia right now?
MYRNA PEREZ, Deputy Director, Brennan Center for Justice Democracy Program: There`s a number of things going on in Georgia and Georgia voters are getting a raw deal. First, Georgia has been purging at a humongous rate that has been increasing after the Shelby County decision which used to put some restrictions on what Georgia could do that would make minority voters worse off.
HAYES: Shelby County, another 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court with the same five who voted for Citizens United. There`s kind of a theme there.
PEREZ: Right. We produce some recent analysis that showed that about one out of ten persons registered to vote in Georgia were getting purged and --
HAYES: 10 percent purged from the rolls?
PEREZ: From the last two years. And in some counties the purge rates were up to 15 percent.
HAYES: Let me just stop you there.
PEREZ: Sure.
HAYES: The person doing that is the guy running for governor right, or do the counties?
PEREZ: Well, to be very clear, there`s a system where the counties are the ones responsible for this but certainly the chief election officer could be setting a tone for what the purge practices need to be. So --
HAYES: Good distinction.
PEREZ: Right. We have purges that are happening to these folks. We have this complicated voter registration law which is blocking eligible people from getting on the rolls. And what`s really important about that is that if you are not registered, there are consequences to that. People don`t send you election mailings, people don`t knock on your doors and ask you to turn out. People don`t get phone calls telling --
HAYES: You`re not in the universe.
PEREZ: You`re not in the universe that people are using to dry and drop you out. And the studies suggest that those kinds of touches, people engaging people turns people out. So while on Election Day, if people have the specific specified kind of I.D. they will be able to cast a ballot that`ll count. The damage will be done if people aren`t turned out.
Then they have the problem of all these voter fraud allegations. There was a fracas a few years ago where there was this giant investigation into some of the third party registration groups that turned out to be nothing. But then it became this very embarrassing cycle where the Secretary of State got sued over it and you know, just a lot of distaste and disgust. And then we all were following what happened with the polling place closures. So --
HAYES: Right. A bunch of counties that that disproportionately African- American, although not exclusively. There were some that were predominantly white with big polling closures that were being followed.
PEREZ: Right. So when you have these compounding problems, the result is very predictable.
HAYES: Important point for the 53,000 folks that are sort of in a kind of limbo right now. They can vote if they show up with a voter I.D. correct?
PEREZ: With the right kind of accepted I.D. they sure can. And one of the things we are super concerned about is the giant confusion.
HAYES: Right.
PEREZ: You might have poll workers not understand the rules and send them away. You might have people who have heard all the buzz and think that they aren`t on the rules and you might have some people that just don`t even know because I haven`t been engaged yet, that they don`t even know to show up. So this is going to be a bad policy. But if you were one of these 53,000 people, you should show up. You should bring the kind of I.D. that you need and you should cast a ballot.
HAYES: We should note there is lawyers Committee for civil rights under law along with the Georgia versus the NAACP has put a lawsuit on this. It`s crazy to have Brian Kemp as both the plaintiff or both that sort of defended in the civil lawsuit while he`s also running for office. Alex Isenstadt and Myrna Perez, thank you both for being with me.
PEREZ: Thank you.
ISENSTADT: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up, confirmation the special counsel is not just willing to take Donald Trump`s word for it when he says repeatedly ad nauseam no collusion. Tonight new reporting the president is responding to Mueller`s questions about collusion with Russia. The details in two minutes.
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HAYES: On their long campaign to discredit the Mueller investigation, the President and his allies have been trying to make the case. The special counsels struck out on collusion finding no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Russia and its agents and the Trump campaign and that`s why Mueller is investigating obstruction of justice, the argument goes, as a kind of backup plan.
Witness this tweet from August, where`s the collusion. They made up a phony crime called collusion. And there was no collusion they say there was obstruction. But tonight, NBC News has confirmed the President`s legal team is finally preparing answers to a list of questions submitted by the Special Counsel. And according to NBC`s source, those questions are squarely focused on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to illegally subvert the 2016 election.
To help understand this latest development in the Mueller probe, I`m joined by former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks and a former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, both MSNBC Legal Analysts. Joyce, maybe I`ll start with you. What`s your reaction to this news?
JOYCE VANCE, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: I think that there`s an interesting divide here Chris. We noticed that the President is being asked to respond or perhaps his lawyers are being asked to respond in writing to questions about collusion but apparently Mueller is still seeking an in-person interview with the president on the issue of obstruction and that`s good indication that both avenues of the investigation are still alive and ongoing.
HAYES: Yes, what do you think, Jill, about both the fact that they`ve they appear to have agreed to submit written questions which is fairly anomalous, but also that those written questions are about the sort of heart of the collusion matter.
JILL WINE-BANKS, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: I`m very pleased that they`re about what I would call conspiracy not collusion, there is no such crime. But I am disturbed that it`s so clearly being drafted by his lawyers. That`s not an answer. Obviously, he will have to submit them under his name and he will be responsible for them. But the fact that he`s being protected from answering the questions himself says that he can`t be trusted to answer those questions about conspiring with the Russians or any other foreign power so that`s disturbing. And I`m also very happy to agree with Joyce that I`m glad that the conspiracy to obstruct remains an active investigation.
HAYES: Well, Joyce, and that -- to that point about not having given up on in-person interview on that and again these negotiations we basically get one side of this because I don`t think the Mueller people are talking. The reporting we get I think tends to be from the White House. I think that`s the source of much of the word we`ve gotten that they were only interested in obstruction which now appears to be not true.
CNN is saying the two sides has still not come to agreement on whether the president will be interviewed in person by investigators probing obstruction of justice. I guess what is the sort of calculation here and what is the timeline ultimately enforcing that issue or not?
VANCE: So you know, it`s interesting that Mueller at one point in March threatened the President`s lawyers saying that if the president wouldn`t come in and submit voluntarily to an interview on obstruction that he could subpoena him. I think it`s unlikely he would have made a threat like that if he had not had permission from Rod Rosenstein. But as you point out, everything that we know about this seems to be coming from the president`s team. It`s coming through their filters, it`s their view of events, and so we have to be very cautious and recognize that there may be an entirely different side of the story from inside of the Special Counsel investigation.
HAYES: Jill, what`s your thinking about when you go to the -- let`s say so you`ve agreed to this sort of limited inquiry right where you`re going to give them written questions, they`re going to write them back. You know they`re going to come from the lawyer. You`re not going to like catch the witness right in a moment. What what`s the point of that from an investigative standpoint in terms of what knowledge you have and what you`re trying to do with those questions?
BANKS: It`s nowhere near as good as having an in-person interview where the witness has to answer extemporaneously and is thinking on the spot. And as we know from past experience the president is very poor at answering questions like that. I think that there is a limited -- you know, going back to this limited thing, during Watergate it was a limited modified hangout which was being suggested as part of the cover-up case and that`s sort of what this is. It`s a limited, modified, hangout where the lawyers are going to answer questions and legalese and very carefully.
They`re doing it based on documents that have supposedly already been given to Mueller so that it`s a very narrow kind of investigation right now and it won`t really provide much but it will limit their ability to wiggle out of certain things later on. Because once they`re committed in writing they can`t change what they want to interpret things as and that`s what they`ve been doing up until now is they sort of keep spinning in different ways.
HAYES: Joyce, you`re nodding your head. So that -- did you agree that that`s the sort of chief kind of prosecutorial or investigatory function of this set of questions?
VANCE: Jill is absolutely right on both points. It would be much better to talk to the president in person but this written questioning will keep the president`s team from continuing to move the goal posts. And if they`re asked in writing, was the president aware of ongoing contact with Russia during the campaign and if he responds no in writing, if Mueller has evidence to the contrary then it will be impossible to walk that back.
HAYES: Yes, that strikes me as sort of interesting part of this, like putting a bunch of stakes in the ground since they have been so used to pulling those up and moving them around. Final question here, Jill. Interesting filing in civil court in response to this lawsuit from the DNC and two donors about the hacking which is the Trump campaign basically saying that exploiting hacked e-mails is protected on the First Amendment. It`s -- even stolen information, if you disseminate it, it`s in the public domain, you -- it`s a First Amendment right, it can`t be illegal. What do you think about that argument?
JILL: I`d rather be on the other side of that argument. I don`t think there`s any logic to that at all. And that you cannot use the First Amendment which he is so free to attack. I mean his attack on the press is so virulent and so unfair that for him to say I have a First Amendment right to do all these things is just -- it`s absurd and it -- I don`t think it will fly.
HAYES: What do you think, Joyce?
VANCE: You know, I tend to think that Jill`s right on this one. And even if she and I are both wrong, there are plenty of crimes available around receiving stolen property and transfer of Internet based information. Mueller doesn`t have any trouble here. If the fats pan out and tend towards a crime there won`t be any trouble finding one that fits.
HAYES: Right. It`s -- there`s -- right, if the facts turned out to be the only thing they do is disseminate them then that`s the end of the chain. But likely if there`s something to prosecute there, there`s something more in terms of the transference of ownership or advance warning or being a sort of party to the conspiracy that`s already been charged in federal court.
VANCE: Exactly. There would almost have to be a conspiracy here to create this notion that the e-mails were hacked and then sent on.
HAYES: All right, Jill Wine-Banks and Joyce Vance, thank you both. Coming up, why is the White House so non-committal about missing journalists Jamal Khashoggi? A look at the President`s very personal relationship with Saudi Arabia right after this.
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HAYES: We have breaking news tonight on the assassination crisis in the Middle East from the Washington Post. The Washington Post`s Columnist Jamal Khashoggi went missing last week after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. You can see him here. The papers reporting tonight the Turkish government told U.S. officials it has audio and video recordings that prove Khashoggi was indeed killed inside that consulate. "The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered, said one person with knowledge of the recording. You can hear his voice. The voices of men speaking Arabic, this person said. You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered. The second person briefed on the recording said men could be heard beating Khashoggi.
These gruesome details are being reported on the very same day the president has continued his equivocation around even the mere possibility of sanctions or accountability for Saudi Arabia.
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TRUMP: I know they`re talking about different kinds of sanctions but they`re spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs like jobs and others for this country. Again, just took place in Turkey and to the best of our knowledge Khashoggi is not a United States citizens is that right or is that right? He`s a permanent resident, OK.
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HAYES: Yes, he`s a U.S. permanent resident. Also, that figure of $110 billion is as the Brookings Institution put it last year fake news. Well, beyond the President`s routine tendency to lie, why is he being so non- committal on this major international incident? Joining me now someone who might have an answer that, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Washington Post Reporter, MSNBC Political Analyst David Fahrenthold who has been writing for months about Donald Trump`s business ties to Saudi Arabia, and journalists and foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal who`s friends have interviewed Jamal Khashoggi. It`s good to have you both here.
Let me start, David, with you about the business ties. This is an administration that went all in on the Saudis, all in on Mohammed bin Salman from the beginning, and who had -- a president who has long-standing business connections to the Saudis.
DAVID FAHRENTHOLD, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: That`s right. Trump has been dealing with this Saudi businessmen since back in the 1990s but looking more recently he`s dealt with a Saturday government which bought a big complex of apartments from him near the U.N. a few years ago. And even since he`s taken office, we`ve seen three of his hotel, three of his biggest hotels, remember his hotels have struggled to attract American customers, three of his biggest hotels have gotten big bumps in business from Saudi customers, the hotels in Chicago, D.C. and New York. New York, just one visit by some Saudis traveling with the Crown Prince earlier this year provided enough revenue, one visit to boost the hotel`s revenue for an entire quarter.
HAYES: Yes. So -- and let me just follow up on that. We don`t have a definitive sense of the business or financial entanglements between the President and the Saudis because we don`t have any real way of peering into Trump work and we don`t have the President`s taxes, right?
FAHRENTHOLD: That`s right. We know what we know because we managed to get some investors in the Trump`s hotels in New York and Chicago to give us kind of internal data. The Trump organization hasn`t released any of these things.
There`s a couple of lawsuits going on now that may have forced that sort of disclosure. Obviously the Democrats take back one of the Houses of Congress, that could do it. But they haven`t provided anything. What we know comes from our reporting and not from what they`ve said publicly.
HAYES: Rula, you wrote a great piece, oppression piece, back for Newsweek about Mohammed bin Salman when a lot of American commentator were saying, "This guy is a reformer. He`s wonderful." He called the King Cahn (ph). This thing gets worse every day with every new detail we learn.
RULA JEBREAL, FOREIGN POLICY ANALYST: And I think it gets worse because he got away with so much. He crossed so many lines. There`s not one norm he did not shatter. Look, he kidnapped --
HAYES: You`re saying Mohammed bin Salman.
JEBREAL: Mohammed bin Salman. He kidnapped a prime minister last year and he got away with it. He actually beat him up. I believe what the Turks are saying. I think every embassy, every consulate around the world is bugged. This is how they know. They know within hours and they said he was killed.
We know he was targeted. When I interviewed Jamal, he freely told me multiple times, and even in interviews with other people said, "Why don`t you go to Saudi Arabia? Why don`t you go back?" He said, "Because I don`t want to end up in prison." And privately he told friends, "I don`t want to be killed. I don`t want to be like many of the people who disappeared and were killed."
Regarding President Trump, I think he said in some interviews recently said, "Well, am I supposed to hate them? They buy from me apartments for 50 -- $40 million. Why would I hate them?"
Well, it`s not about you, it`s about the country. You are now the president. You are not anymore a real estate tycoon who buys apartments and sells apartments. You are the guy that actually sends signals to the rest of the world what America stands for. And the signals he`s sending today, they give us $110 billion in blood monies. That means, yes, that`s impunity --
HAYES: That`s enough.
JEBREAL: -- to assassinate. That`s basically equivalent to oil for food, the program the U.N. had. Like, yes, cheap oil, and weaponry in exchange for our impunity to assassinate whoever you want.
HAYES: There is this tweet that stuck with me all day from Iyad. Again, it goes by Iyad El-Baghdadi who is sort of Arab Spring activist. And he`s very -- he lives in Norway, I believe. And he said, look -- he says, "If MBS gets away with this, if Mohammed bin Salman gets away with this, then none of us are safe. Everything changes for us, everything."
And I -- I mean, what message -- if they murder and dismember a guy, a prominent guy who lives in Virginia, U.S. permanent resident, writes for "The Washington Post," has lots of powerful friends and they cut his body up with a bone saw as being alleged by the Turkish officials inside a consulate, what does that mean for everyone else?
JEBREAL: That means all of us are -- we have targets on our backs. When the President of the United States basically expressed his love for tyrants and dictators, and I love him and he loves me and he sends me letters, and then he comes out and say to people like you and me that we are enemy of the American people, he basically is green lighting to all of these dictators, "Yes, you can get away with murder." And this is what`s happening.
And the worst part of it, Chris, it`s already happening. All of his allies, by the way -- I think in Bulgaria two days ago a journalist was raped and killed because she was investigating corruption. Jamal, himself, who was a resident here, they lured him.
I mean, the U.S. intelligence knew and had piece of information and this is very disturbing because they didn`t warn him. They failed to warn him. And I wonder, why? If you know anything to any of us, I report, and I did this, you criticize a Saudi crown prince, you know, they need to warn us because our life is at stake and we risk our life. Donald Trump doesn`t risk anything from his high office, but we do.
HAYES: David, there`s still a lot we don`t know about this relationship from sort of the business perspective. What are you sort of wanting to know more about in terms of the financial ties that may exist that we know some exist or may exist in more depth between the U.S. and -- between Trump and the Saudis?
FAHRENTHOLD: A couple things. One would be, what other sorts of hotel business are the Saudis giving to Trump`s hotels in the U.S. or overseas? The other one would be right before the elections, in the middle of Trump`s campaigns, he incorporated a bunch of LCCs that seem to indicating he was planning a hotel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the second largest city in Saudi Arabia.
Those were only active for a year or two and they were shut down. He never reported of getting any income out of those. Who -- what was that plan? Who were his partners there? What was happening in Saudi Arabia that he thought he could make money in the middle of a presidential campaign? I want to know more about that.
HAYES: That is a great, great point and I had totally forgotten that. David Farenthold and Rula Jebreal, thank you both for your time.
JEBREAL: Thank you for having us.
HAYES: We`ll be right back.
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HAYES: "Thing 1" tonight, Donald Trump sure does do a lot of campaign rallies, more than 40 of them on the schedule in just the three months before the midterms alone. And until very recently he could count on every single one of those rallies being aired in full, unedited, unfact checked, unquestioned by his enthusiastic media partners at Trump T.V.
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JEANINE PIRRO, FOX NEWS HOST: Breaking tonight, President Trump stands strong amid the Kavanaugh controversy with a rousing rally in West Virginia.
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: President Trump, of course, speaking at a rally at Elkhart, Indiana. What did you think, Mark?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it was pretty darn good.
CARLSON: Judge, what did you think of it?
PIRRO: Well, I thought it was vintage Donald Trump. I think that he gets energy from the audience. They get energy from him. He was everything.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tonight the President was on a tear, was -- it was the -- you know, the best of kind of the campaign and he reminded everyone. I beat all these candidates.
PIRRO: You watched it here live the President of the United States fired up a packed crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, and another raucous rally taking on his opponents and touting a long list of accomplishments.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He loves being out with the people.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He looked happy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is what he`s built for.
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HAYES: Let me just say, I know what it looks when someone like Cable News is trying to master the energy to say the same thing for the hundredth times.
Now, the President is built for rallying and Trump T.V. is built for transmitting those rallies without the slightest bit of shame. Remember this one in June? Trump rally live and only on Fox News. Other networks ignore presidential rally.
Well, maybe those other networks were onto something, like what if those Trump rallies got bad ratings for Trump T.V? That`s "Thing 2" in 60 seconds.
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HAYES: So if you, dear viewer, wanted to watch the Trump rally on Tuesday night, you probably went over to Trump T.V. where you`ve been able to watch every other of them. But instead, you would have found this guy in the Trump rally time slot. Tucker Carlson complaining about Antifa violence out of control. The rally, in fact, wasn`t aired live on any major network, even C-SPAN reportedly cutaway toward news.
Apparently, Trump rallies just aren`t rating like they used to and there are so many of them and they`re all the same. And so Trump T.V. reportedly doesn`t want to give up so much primetime real estate anymore, not their primetime real estate that it`s so discernible for a Trump rally anyway. Politico says the Trump White House is not happy. A senior official says they`re going to "look into that."
Last night after another rally went untelevised, the President gave the channel two different phone interviews, one after (INAUDIBLE) began, another early this morning, so thirsty, perhaps in an attempt to sweeten the pot. But for now, Tucker is back giving you the good stuff. Watch this.
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CARLSON: It`s not what it says that, you know, when they go low, we can go high. No, no. When they go low, we kick them.
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HAYES: Kick them. Yehey, yells the mob. Why not shoot them or burn them? Good question, why not?
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HAYES: If you listen to the President and Republicans and numerous conservative commentators, the battle over Brett Kavanaugh wasn`t about gender, it was about the presumption of innocence. It was not about a raw assertion of male power, it was just a complete total coincidence that the President who nominated him is this guy.
Just a total coincidence the judiciary committee that voted to confirm him is this bunch and that the Senate Republican conference has 45 men out of its 51 senators. It`s not an old boys club. It`s just a total coincidence that this party, which is a party running currently on minus 35 gender gap, a party that`s invested in taking away women`s self-determination, a bodily of autonomy by its commitment to repealed Roe v. Wade is the party with this man at its head. And this man as the enabler in chief, though far from the (INAUDIBLE), since there is after all a full throated poor Judge Kavanaugh chorus of men often near tears in his defense.
So, it`s just a coincidence that after the culmination of this entire battle that, of course, again, had nothing to do with gender, nothing to do with male power, and in the midst of a deal with Democrats to confirm another 15 Trump federal court nominations, so everyone could go home.
In the midst of that, its coincidence that yesterday the Trump administration rolled out its 18th wave of judicial nominees to various federal district and appellate court positions and that they all, well, you know what, I`m just going to read the names. Let`s see if you can find the pattern, Joseph F.Bianco, Michael H. Park, Patrick J. Bumatay, Daniel P. Collins, Kenneth Kiyul Lee, Stanley Blumenfeld, Brian C. Buescher, Clifton L. Corker, Philip M. Halpern, Thomas Marcelle, Matthew W. McFarland, Jeremy B. Rosen, and Mark C. Scarsi.
This is what they do, after they confirm Kavanaugh. 13 men nominated to the federal bench, no women. Right after Kavanaugh debacle, they went 0- 13. And they know exactly what they`re doing. They are telling you who is in charge of their party and who they want in charge of their country. No coincidences.
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KANYE WEST, AMERICAN RAPPER: I brought a gift with me right here. This right here is the iPlane 1. It`s a hydrogen tower airplane and this is what our president should be flying in. Look at this, Jerry.
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HAYES: That was Kanye West trying to sell Donald Trump the idea of ditching Air Force One for something he called the iPlane 1. That was not the half of it. Kanye sat across from the President at the Oval Office this afternoon.
What was meant to be a punitively a meeting on manufacturing and criminal justice reform, not things Kanye West is expert on, but instead became a complete and total spectacle.
Kanye spoke for nearly 10 minutes about so many things. But one of the moments that really stood out to me is when Kanye tried explaining what he finds so appealing about Trump.
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WEST: My dad and my mom separated, so I didn`t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I`m married to a family that, you know, there`s not a lot of male energy going on. It`s beautiful, though.
But there`s times where -- you know, I was talking about -- you know, I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign "I`m With Her" just didn`t make me feel as a guy that didn`t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman. That was -- that`s my favorite superhero. And you made a Superman cape.
For me also as a guy that looks up to you, looks up to Ralph Lauren, looks up American industry guys, nonpolitical, no (INAUDIBLE), put the beep on it, however you want to do it, five-second delay and just goes in and gets it done.
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HAYES: I`m trying to make sense then of what I was saw (ph). I`m joined now by Brittney Cooper, author of "Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers He Superpower," and Jelani Cobb, staff writer for "The New Yorker."
And I`ll start with you, Brittney. I actually thought that one minute summation of feeling emasculated and feeling under threat about one`s masculinity and finding and rejecting Hillary Clinton because of it and choosing Donald Trump was like as succinct an articulation for the motives of millions of male voters as you will fine.
BRITTNEY COOPER, AUTHOR, "ELOQUENT RAGE": Absolutely. So, you know, there are so many things going on here. But, you know, he`s playing from the patriarchal playbook of Trump. And basically, he sat in the Oval Office today and said, "Who`s my daddy? Trump`s my daddy."
And look, he is actually not the first politician in recent years to make this argument that black men sense a father loss or father lack drives policy. Barack Obama also did this a lot. But what I think Kanye is doing or thinks he is doing is actually setting himself up for presidential run using Trump`s playbook.
He is making a media spectacle of himself. He is trying to play on black men`s emotions, and 13 percent of black men supported Trump. So he`s trying to say that we`re putting black families back intact by putting fathers back at the center of the story. It`s all trash. We should reject all of it.
But I haven`t felt really triggered in this Kavanaugh/Cosby moment about our inability to think about the function of patriarchy, right? It`s a clunky word and so we keep on leaving it out of the discussion, but this is about male domination. This is about the ways that --
HAYES: That`s what they were explicitly bonding over.
COOPER: Absolutely. This is black men have -- there are many black men who cannot get on board with a full black liberation plan or liberation for all people because they want the kind of power that white men have.
And so Kanye modeled that for us today. He said, "Look, this is what I aspire to, is to be a Donald Trump." And any black person who is being honest will tell you that it`s not just white communities or Republicans that have a Trump problem, we have a Trump problem in black communities too.
JELANI COBB, STAFF WRITER, "THE NEW YORKER": Yes. I mean, I think that one of the things that`s instructive is that -- you know, so last night I had a conversation with historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley. We`re talking about fascism. And one of the things, the most salient things you found in authoritarian regimes across the board was this leader as paternity figure. And the father figure of the state, exactly.
And so listening to Kanye articulate that was really kind of shocking and frightening in this particular way. And, of course, it`s not unusual. We know that this is the dynamic that`s happening, but it is still nonetheless striking when you hear it so succinctly articulated.
And, you know, to Brittney`s point of saying that Kanye West wants to run for president, I remember a time when we would laugh at someone like that and say it was impossible.
HAYES: Totally.
COBB: But now, we`re in such a bizarre twilight zone kind of reality, like who knows what actually could happen in this country.
HAYES: Yes. And also, to your point about the sort of, you know, fascism or authoritarianism like, it doesn`t strikes me that Kanye likes the esthetics of it. Like he`s very explicit of that like, "I like the MAGA hat." Like in some ways like it`s all esthetically driven for him is part of the issue here.
COOPER: Right.
COBB: You remember, he was trying to sell confederate attire too.
HAYES: Right, exactly, exactly.
COOPER: Right, which is why we should perhaps, you know, respond to this by burning Yeezus. I mean, I felt like that is an appropriate response to let him know that this is not the way that we want to go. And, you know, we`re in this moment where he is trying to put black men back at the center of a conversation that they`re never not at the center of.
HAYES: Right.
COOPER: And I -- you know, I think that part of what it means to respect people is that you don`t play on their most base emotions and so there is a way that he is trying to pent black men and I really hope that they see beyond this sort of narrative to recognize that getting in bed with a white supremacist is no way to free black men. No one with good sense thinks that.
COBB: We should also keep in mind that black women were the least likely group to vote for Donald Trump and black men were the second least likely.
HAYES: Right, yes.
COBB: So I wonder like -- you know, it was like we were, you know, walking around the Harlem and there were a ton of people wearing MAGA hats.
HAYES: Yes.
COBB: But, again --
HAYES: I mean, in some ways the novelty of this is precisely because Kanye is there in the MAGA hat.
COOPER: Look, you trust brothers a little bit more than I do because I`m horrified by that 13 percent.
COBB: Well, I mean, I was -- trust me, I was terrified by it as well. I was looking over my shoulder going, "Are you one of 13?" But I think the other thing that`s really important to talk about here is the kind of shared conversation around pathology.
COOPER: Yes.
COBB: And the way that Kanye West talks about his own native Chicago --
HAYES: Yes.
COBB: -- and the way that Trump used Chicago as almost a stand-in for all the failures of urban policy in the past 50 years. But when he gave that kind of terribly articulated idea that the reason that Chicago has the problems, he called it Chiraq, is because of Democrats and the policies around welfare and removing fathers from the homes.
So if he could go back to like the scholarship on his own city, this drake and then black metropolis in 1945 who were talking about the issues confronting black families migrating into Chicago, there`s entire bodies of literature on this. It`s not hard to know.
HAYES: But also to me that was Ben Collins, my colleagues here who study sort of the right-wing on YouTube. He was like, "That`s all just verbatim right-wing YouTube stuff."
COBB: It is.
HAYES: It`s like that like word for word, like none of that was new. That`s just --
COOPER: But it`s not actually just right-wing stuff, that`s a black church discourse that says that the removal of fathers from homes is the source of the problems in the families. And so you have this -- look, even for black folks who vote for Democrats, many of them still socially feel like the restoration of fathers in home would solve a host of social ills, right?
HAYES: Totally, yes.
COOPER: And so he`s tapping into that and that`s the reason why I think he`s dangerous because we didn`t think that Trump was possible, as you said. But now we have two mellow maniacs sitting in the Oval Office normalizing social discourse.
HAYES: And this is a thing we talked about like, I have been convinced that like the super power in our time is shamelessness and attention. And I just watched Donald Trump have to sit there and take it for 10 minutes because he couldn`t say anything. He`s like, "Oh, you`ve got someone who is more shameless than you," but he does not care. And it`s like, "You thought you were the more shameless person, but you just met someone even more shameless."
Brittney Cooper and Jelani Cobb, thank you very much for coming on.
I should mention that Brittney Cooper is one of our very first guests on our podcast, "Why Is This Happening?" If you`re a new listener, like our recent conversation about power -- the "Power of Women`s Anger" or the (INAUDIBLE), you should definitely check back in with Brittney`s episode about her excellent book "Eloquent Rage."
Plus, new episode this week with Anand Giridharadas on what he calls "The Charade of Elites Trying to Change the World." You can find the episodes with Anand, Brittney, and Rebecca on TuneIn or wherever you get your podcast.
That is ALL IN this evening. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR: Good evening, Chris. Thanks my friends and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Lots of news to cover tonight.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END