Summary
Don Jr. was texting Mark Meadows ideas for overturning the 2020 election before the election was even called, according to CNN. Ukrainian officials are saying at least 50 people, including five children, were killed when a missile struck a train station. Republicans use the confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as a platform for an extended gross flirtation with QAnon conspiracies, dog-whistling their political opponents are sympathetic to child molestation. President Joe Biden held a celebration today at the White House commemorating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson`s confirmation to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court very likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in a few weeks. The FBI arrested these two men that had been successfully impersonating Department of Homeland Security Agents since February of 2020.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Thank you so much for being here. I wish I had been as together as a 17-year-old as you are. Thank you for your advocacy. You`re doing great work. Please promise me you`ll come back. We would love to have you back on the show.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I will be back anytime. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you guys. Peace and love.
REID: Thank you. Peace and love. Cheers. OK, that is tonight`s "REIDOUT." What a wonderful kid. ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES starts now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voiceover): Tonight on ALL IN. Donald Trump Jr. enters the coup-plotting storyline. Tonight, new reporting Don Jr. list of ways to stop Joe Biden`s certification, including his texts to Mark Meadows that "We have operational control to do it." And why the January 6 committee now believes the Capitol attack included a coordinated assault by the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy.
Then stunning evidence of what looks like a deliberate attack on a known evacuation site in Ukraine.
And as a country brown Jackson era dawns, David Plouffe on what Democrats can do to counter an out of control conservative court. When ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. The insurrection of January 6 was not a spur-of-the-moment event. The crowd did not go nuts in the heat of the moment. The rioters were not whipped up into a violent mob just on that day. No. The insurrection was incited over a period of several months, beginning even before the election, and continuing all the way through to January 6.
We know that Donald Trump and many of his allies were involved in building that incitement, from Jeffrey Clark, he`s the lawyer at the Department of Justice, Trump`s own personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who were pushing election fraud conspiracies, to John Eastman who wrote the now-infamous memo on how to actually execute the coup.
Well, today, we are learning new details about the involvement of the ex-President`s own son. We already knew that Don Jr. texted his father`s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows while the insurrection was happening, pleading with him to stop it. "He`s got to condemn this ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough." And "We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand."
We are learning though that Don Jr. was texting Mark Meadows "ideas for overturning the 2020 election before it was even called" according to CNN. The message is from November 5, just two days after the election and it is among the texts Meadows turned over the January 6 Committee.
In it, Trump Jr. lays out ideas for keeping his father in power by subverting the Electoral College process. Writing, "It`s very simple. We have multiple paths. We control them all." He goes on, "To outline a strategy that is nearly identical to what allies of the former president like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and Jeffrey Clark actually attempted to carry out in the months that follow.
He talks about filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying the results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake Trump electors. If all that failed, Republican lawmakers in Congress could simply vote to reinstall Trump as president on January 6.
"Republicans control 28 steps -- states, Democrats 22 states, once again Trump wins. We either have a vote we control and we win or it gets kicked to Congress January 6, 2021. We have operational control, total leverage, moral high ground. POTUS must start second term now."
Wow. They just wrote it all down, didn`t they? So, the ex-President`s son was stirring up plans for overturn the election, building the case for the instruction before all the votes were even counted, before it was called. And in the following days and weeks, Trump and his allies continued exactly that plan inciting what happened on January 6.
For example, one of the members of the mob confirmed that in his interview with the FBI, QAnon follower Douglas Jensen seen here on January 6 told the FBI that he was influenced by the ex-President`s lawyers. I quote him here. Lin Wood got me fired up. Sidney Powell got me fired up. Rudy Giuliani got me fired up. Yes, they were firing people up.
Trump`s lawyers following the ideas laid out by Don Jr. on November 5 incited Doug Jensen to go to the Capitol on January 6 where he broke into the building and infamously chased Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs in this now-infamous footage from that day. Jensen is now trying to suppress that interview that he voluntarily gave the FBI, perhaps regretting that he opened his mouth.
The way that I`ve come to see it is that there were basically kind of three buckets, three categories of people involved with the insurrection, and they`re all part of one story. There is, of course, the ex-president, his inner circle of enablers. Then there`s the mob who answered the call to action. And then there`s this middle category that sort of knits the two together.
That`s the key one in some ways. They`re the foot soldiers, the far-right dress-up militias. This includes the Oath Keepers, a group of whom you see here maneuvering up the Capitol steps in an organized formation, as well as the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters. They`re the ones who basically took orders from on high and executed them on the ground. They plan, they plotted, they organized in the weeks leading up to and on the day, and then carried out an invasion of the United States Capitol.
[20:05:27]
Now, we`ve learned bits and pieces about their role on January 6. The indictment of several Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy revealed that they spent months training and planning to disrupt the certification of the electoral votes, even reportedly stashing weapons in Virginia that they could move to the Capitol on short notice.
The founder of the Oath Keepers Elmer Stewart Rhodes started talking about those plans months before the sixth.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELMER STEWART RHODES, FOUNDER, OATH KEEPERS: We have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option. In case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it. So, I`ve got good men on the ground already. We`ve been doing recon there last week. And we`re sorting out what we`re going to be staging and we`ll be there. We`ll be inside D.C., we`ll also be on the outside of D.C. armed, prepared to go in if the President calls.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: All right, that`s him saying it himself, right? We know that another far-right group known as Proud Boys also plotted and organized but in the last public matter. Their leader Enrique Tarrio allegedly ordered his members to remain incognito when they arrived in Washington. And again, allegedly he held a secret meeting with the head of Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes on January 5 the day before the insurrection in an underground parking garage.
So, here you see two different of these groups coming together to plan. But now, a fuller picture is coming into focus of how these militias, dress-up gangs, whatever you want to call them, played a key role in executing the will of Donald Trump and Trump Jr. and all their cronies.
The Guardian reports the January 6 Committee has obtained new private evidence leading them to believe the Capitol attack included a coordinated assault perpetrated by the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And they came to that conclusion this week after obtaining evidence of the coordination in testimony and nonpublic video.
You see, like so many of the insurrectionists on January 6, the militia groups like to record their crimes on video. The committee spent seven hours interviewing a documentary filmmaker who captured many of the Proud Boys actions on January fifth and sixth, and they examine some of his footage in "excruciating detail."
Sources said the new information could play a large role in establishing whether Trump oversaw criminal conspiracy as part of his efforts to overturn the election. And most crucially, for the panel, it could form part of the evidence to connect the militia groups to the organizers of the rally that immediately preceded the attack who in turn are slowly being linked to the Trump White House.
Hugo Lowell reported that piece of The Guardian, and he joins me now. Hugo, let me start on the -- on the text messages we have. I`m going to go to your reporting in The Guardian next, which is excellent. You know, to me, what jumps out about the Trump text messages is it gets rid of any plausible account that this was based on things they actually empirically suspected about the nature of the vote count, and was instead what it looked like pure willpower, an attempt to stay in pattern power no matter what.
HUGO LOWELL, CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, THE GUARDIAN: Right. And that`s exactly how Judge Carter phrased it in the Eastman ruling recently. It was that it was a coup in search about a legal theory. And I think this kind of goes to the heart of everything around Trump`s effort to overturn the election, right?
The one thing that stood out to me about the text message that Don Jr. sent to Meadows was that it was coming even before the election had been finalized and we knew that Joe Biden was the winner. And it shows that this plan, the scheme to have Pence interject in the certification process on January 6 and just somehow throw this to the house in a contingent election on the 25th Amendment was not something that was just thought up in the days before the Joint Session of Congress on -- you know, even on January 2 when Eastman wrote his infamous memo about how to stage a coup. He effectively put it out in writing, right? But the ideas were being formulated months and weeks before they -- before it was ultimately, you know, Trump tried to implement it by pressuring Pence.
HAYES: Let`s talk about your reporting, which was really eye-opening to me. So, I think these groups are crucial because, you know, we have a fair amount of evidence that they were really the instigators, they were the sort of avant-garde here, right? They were the front people to sort of break-in.
They were the ones doing like actual plotting in advance of the day and on the day. And the question is, what do we know about how they coordinated with each other and who else they were coordinating with? What is your reporting suggest about what the committee is learning and the answer to those two questions?
[20:10:01]
LOWELL: Yes. So, the committee has been amassing a whole bunch of evidence in recent weeks about the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the other militia groups that were around on January 6. And the determination that they are coming to is that at least part of the Capitol attack was a coordinated assault by these militia groups who were in contact with each other in the days leading up to it, both on -- both on the phone and both in person. And I think this is where the investigation is heading next, right?
You referenced this in your -- in your opening, this underground parking lot rendezvous that happened on January 5, just a stone`s throw from the Capitol where you had Stewart Rhodes and Rick Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys group in D.C. meeting to discuss presumably what they were going to do the next day.
Now, the Justice Department has said in an indictment that they understand the word Capitol was said in that meeting. The Select Committee is not quite so sure which is -- which is causing them to look at that evidence with some skepticism. But it`s -- but the fact of the matter is that, you know, all of these ministers were meeting and they had communications with each other, and they had communications with some of the rally organizers who, you know, as I said in the reporting, you know, spoke to the Trump White House.
HAYES: Talk to me about the documentary. One of the through lines in this is probably the most documented crime in history, I think. I mean, this has been a throughline in Ryan Reilly`s reporting and other of just individuals who`ve been caught up. But there were documentary filmmakers, apparently, everyone, there were -- everywhere -- there were streamers. What can you tell us about that aspect?
LOWELL: Yes, it`s this really bizarre element of this whole Jan 6 Capitol attack was that Roger Stone had a film crew with him and Rick Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys had a film crew with him. And this is -- this is the documentary filmmaker who spoke to the committee on Wednesday for around seven hours. I think he got around 9:00 a.m. He was done around just before 4:00 p.m.
And they went through all of the footage in really minute detail. They looked at two things, in particular. The parking garage footage where they were trying to discern what was being said, what was being organized in that -- in that meeting between the head of the militia groups. And they were also looking at this 17-minute video that has not been released publicly yet that basically documents the crowd moving from the lips, to breaking the police line at the base of the Capitol.
And they have also been looking at footage of Ali Alexander and other people connected to the Stop the Steal Movement that was so instrumental in Jan 6 walking around the Capitol towards the Capitol, essentially trying to track their movements and figure out who was speaking to who, you know, who was communicating where, who was going -- you know, and then doing what, as they kind of pieced together this puzzle of the militia groups and how they connect to the Capitol attack.
HAYES: We should note, there`s some significant developments in terms of who`s cooperating. Ali Alexander, the individual we were just showing pictures of, is cooperating with the Justice Department`s January 6 inquiry. That according to New York Times reporting at least that just crossed a few minutes ago.
There`s also a leader of the Proud Boys who pled guilty to conspiracy and assault charges in the January 6 Capitol breach. And as part of his plea agreement, he`s agreed to cooperate with the government`s ongoing investigations.
It does seem like there`s -- and that`s over on the Department of Justice side, right? That`s not even on the committee side. So, it does seem like there is -- there are some very significant developments on that part of the investigation as well.
Hugo Lowell who`s been doing fantastic reporting on the committee throughout, thank you very much.
Coming up, it`s a day of celebrations for the Democrats as President Joe Biden hosted the newest member of the Supreme Court at the White House. But with the democracy under threat on several fronts, what more Democrats need to do to hold on to power?
Plus, Russia`s latest attack kills dozens of Ukrainian civilians trying to flee the invasion. How the West is responding next.
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[20:15:00]
HAYES: The actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin`s military in its war of aggression against Ukraine are growing more shocking by the day. Earlier this week, we learned about the truly horrible brutality revealed in the city of Bucha outside the capital of Kyiv. Multiple killings of people with their hands tied behind their back and more.
Today we are learning about a missile strike on a train station. And the train station was filled with civilians who are trying to flee the violence in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. At least 52 people including children are dead after two missiles hit the station with nearly 100 others injured according to Ukrainian officials.
A senior defense official tells NBC News, the strike was carried out by Russians short-range ballistic missile fired from within Ukrainian territory. Shortly after the strike, footage was captured showing the missile remains including spray paint and Russian on the side of the missile reading, "for the children."
Ivo Daalder served as a U.S. representative to NATO during the Obama administration. He is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and he joins me now. First, I guess -- I guess there`s a sense in which nothing that Russia has done on the battlefield is surprising, even though it remains horrifying.
This is particularly grotesque because it appears they have targeted a train platform where civilians had huddled in order to board trains to get out of the region. What is your reaction to the news today about this strike?
[20:20:01]
IVO DAALDER, PRESIDENT, CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS: I mean, this is -- this is just so incredible when you think about it. This is pure terrorism. This is designed to terrorize people who are already terrorized by the fact that they have to leave their homes and flee to other parts of Ukraine because Russian troops are amassing to take over parts of eastern Ukraine.
And this is a hub, a train station where everyone knew, including the Russians, that there were just civilians. This is not a military target. And so, this is as close as you can come to the definition of a war crime as possible. And it really does start to raise the question of what can we do to stop this onslaught which is now throughout every part of Ukraine, on Mariupol, which has been bombarded now for good of six weeks, and other places that were civilians are deliberately targeted, executed, as we saw on Bucha, and in this case, terrorized in ways that are really frightening and an incredible. And yes, that`s happened.
HAYES: We should note that this region of the country, the Donbas, and Luhansk, and Donetsk has been the site of fighting since 2014. It`s also the extensible justification for the Russian aggression, which is to protect the Russian-speaking people in this region from what they called "genocide."
Those are the same people on those train platforms. That`s the -- that is the population of that area that are dying at the hands of Russian. Missiles that apparently have "for the children" scrolled on them."
DAALDER: No -- I mean, you`re exactly right. These are supposed to be the people that were supposed to be liberated from the so-called Nazis that were inflicting a genocide on them. And in fact, they`re not being liberated. They`re being deliberately targeted by their so-called liberators, women and children, old people, and folks who are not part of this war, who are trying to escape the war, trying to flee.
These were not people who are in any way a part of this war. And yet, and yet, it is those very people who are being protected by the Russians or so they claim. And the justification for the war is to protect those people, and yet they`re being attacked. That`s why this is really -- it`s time to start thinking about what more can we do to stop this from continuing.
HAYES: What is -- I mean, people have been saying that from the beginning, right? And then, of course, we are in a balancing act with, you know, with -- in the confines of mutually assured destruction in the nuclear age with a country that has a thousand nuclear warheads. You know, we had a we had a cold war for decades, as I said, on this program for a reason, which was proxy battles precisely to avoid direct engagement.
There has been a lot of -- there have been a lot of weapons shipped from NATO countries to Ukraine, even more sort of increase in that. There`s enough tanks that are going to go to Slovakia, I believe. What do you see as the -- what are the bottlenecks and what can be done? What`s in the category of doable but not being done right now?
DAALDER: Yes, and clearly there is this line that you don`t want to have direct NATO or U.S. intervention in the war. You want to keep that back for hopefully deterring even worse escalation using of chemical or let alone nuclear weapons. But there`s more we can do and it`s twofold. On the sanctions side, it really is high time for the Europeans to stop oil and gas imports.
And yes, it is going to be costly for the people who are relying on this. By one calculation, for example, the German economy, if it stopped gas imports, would suffer a two percent decline and that`s, you know, not good. But perhaps the time has come, that it is worth it taking that pain in order to stop funding, what is Putin`s war?
And then secondly, it`s the kind of weaponry that we need to start sending in much larger quantities to the Ukrainians. In the first phase of this war which the Ukrainians won, defensive weapons like anti-tank and anti-air defense systems were useful in addressing long lines of tanks that were moving into the country.
Now, the Russian forces are amassing in the east. And to counter them, you need -- you need tanks and artillery and rocket launch systems that needs to be sent in far greater quantities than we have done so far. The Poles have tanks, the Czechs are sending tanks, the Germans were thinking of sending tanks.
And there`s a lot of hesitation about what people are wanting to send now or what they want to keep in reserve in case there is a war with Russia. The best way to avoid a war with Russia is to help Ukraine defeat Russia in Ukraine.
HAYES: All right, Ivo Daalder, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
DAALDER: My pleasure.
[20:25:00]
HAYES: Still to come, two men charged with impersonating federal agents for years, went before a judge today as a prosecutor say the facts are getting worse and worse. We`ll tell you that whole bizarre and fascinating story.
Plus, Republicans try to blame progressive policies for rising crime rates. But as usual, they`re leaving out quite a bit. That`s next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Republicans use the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as a platform for an extended gross flirtation with QAnon conspiracies, dog-whistling, their political opponents are sympathetic to child molestation.
[20:30:09]
They also invoked the kind of old-school Fire and Brimstone Law and Order rhetoric to pick crime is out of control and Democrats is unwilling to do anything about it. Just listen to this series of frankly ridiculous questions from Republican Tom Cotton from Arkansas.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): Does the United States need more or fewer police?
Do you know how long the average inmate convicted for a murderer serves in prison in America?
Let`s turn to right. Do you know how long the average inmate convicted of rape serves in prison in America?
In 2020, murders increased by the fastest rate ever in the United States. Do you know what percentage of murders are solved in America?
Do you know how many what percentage of sexual assaults and rapes go unsolved in this country?
Do you think we imprison too many violent criminals or not enough?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Republicans have been running this exact same playbook since the Nixon administration, at least if not longer, and it`s -- look, it`s a central core of conservative identity, not here in the U.S., across the world.
And it`s been very effective. I mean, thanks to that kind of rhetoric, the sort of fear mongering from politicians, from right-wing media, from local press often. Even as crime plummeted in the 90s and 2000s to like historically low rates, if you polled people, voters often thought the crime was on the rise. And that misconception, of course, is part of what has perpetuated the kind of throw the book at them politics, which has created the most incarcerated society in the entire world. OK?
Now, that is why some cities and states across the country have tried to reform the most egregious aspects of mass incarceration policies. Do we need to put more people in prison than any other society on Earth? I think we don`t.
And in some cases, spurred on by the social justice movements in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. And in other places due to reforms that were even prior to 2020. Some cities, localities, states reduced police budgets, or shifted more funding to mental health resources.
Often, these kinds of reform initiatives are under the leadership of progressive district attorneys.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHESA BOUDIN, SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Right now, we have a criminal justice system that`s really, really good at punishing people. It`s really bad at healing the harm that crime causes. And it`s really bad at preventing future crime.
LARRY KRASNER, PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY: This is a movement that is tired of seeing a system that has systematically picked on poor people, primarily black and brown.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: And after a string of successes of local reformers, we are now in a period of inevitable reactionary backlash. That`s what we`re living through.
Now, well, fear-mongering about crime and violence is politically resonant, even when it doesn`t reflect reality, even as crime is going down, it sure as heck is more destructive, and more resonant when crime actually is on the rise.
And to be clear, it definitely is. This is not really in dispute anymore. I mean, over the past few years, homicide rates have spiked dramatically, in some cases, to record levels.
And while during the pandemic, other kinds of crime, property crime declined during the worst stages when people were just staying home. A lot of that was because there were just fewer people on the streets. And now seems like many of those rates are increasing, as well.
Now, there is a question about what`s going on? Why did crime spike in the 90s? And then go down? We don`t really know what is driving the rise in crime right now.
Answering that question in a rigorous, clear-eyed way is going to be crucial in both designing policy to address it, to reduce the very real harm it causes, and also to avoid so many of the mistakes that we made in the 1990s, when the Tom Cotton kind of rhetoric created mass incarceration and the generation and generations of harm that followed.
Because you see, conservatives are pointing to the few gains that have been made on criminal justice reform as proof. Look, this is what happens. Crime rises. When you listen to liberals, we reformed bail practices, so people don`t rot in a cell because they can`t pay their way out. We reform policing or let nonviolent offenders out of prison.
Look, it`s a simple and appealing message. But I will also say, it is one with a pretty testable hypothesis. Again, if we want to think rigorously here.
Republicans and conservatives argue that cities that reform their policies, whether by cutting police funding, or the number of police on the street, would lead to more crime, would see a rise in homicide and other crimes.
And we`ve got a lot of data to see if that`s true or not that testable hypothesis. And one example for instance, a place where it is true is the city of Austin, Texas, which cut its police budget and did see a spike in homicides last year that happened.
But guess what, so did Columbus, Ohio, which actually increased the number of uniformed police officers between 20 and 21.
In Baton Rouge, Louisville, the Baton Rouge and Louisville and Toledo and Tucson, city leaders publicly rejected calls from activists to defund the police or reduce police budgets. And in fact, police funding increased in all of those cities, often by million dollars and yet, violent crime surging all of them last year.
[20:35:09]
There are many more examples like this. The spike in interpersonal violence and in crime is happening everywhere, big cities and small, it is happening in very conservative places. It is happening in liberal places. It is happening under so-called reformed prosecutors who are attempting to be more selective about who gets thrown in jail and how long the sentences they asked for are.
Like San Francisco`s Chesa Boudin who is recently facing a recall election. And it`s happening under Sacramento`s Anne Marie Schubert, who is just an old-school tough-on-crime prosecutor.
In fact, Schubert is running for California Attorney General on a pretty old school reactionary (PH) law and order platform, even as their own city has seen a rise in crime. Just experienced this tragic mass shooting earlier this week, which left six dead and 12 more injured.
And it`s not just California, John Pfaff, professor of criminal law at Fordham University looked at data from 69 Police Departments nationwide, found that the relative number of homicides stayed constant whether or not the city had a progressive district attorney in charge.
Regardless of the facts in the data, crime is an incredibly salient political issue. And clearly, Democrats are running scared, you can feel it.
And my fear is the mistakes of the late 20th century in particular get repeated. That some of the very real progress has been made in reducing the levels of incarceration and the harm of mass incarceration is going to succumb to the demagoguery being aimed at it.
Right now, Democrats in New York State are going to vote on a budget that the Democratic Party put together that will make pretrial detention for some crimes easier, even as the governor says rightly that studies suggest that bail reform has not increased crime, right.
So, they pass bail reform, the New York Post and others have been attacking it from day one. Now they`re going to change it a little bit, make it easier to keep people in prison pretrial, jail.
And some of the measures proposed in New York State are worth debating as policy, the aggregate effect will be to put more people in jail before trial. The aggregate effect is to say we have this problem, let`s reach for the lever we know which is to lock more people up. The calls to lock them up and throw away the key will not be seated no matter what. I`m telling you this as a political fact.
The thing to keep your eyes on is public safety, the actual substance of the question, do people feel safe and secure? Are they actually safe and secure?
Public Safety matters tremendously to society, to social cohesion. Violence is toxic, it has horrible ripple effects throughout entire communities. We have to figure out ways to reduce violence and lawlessness.
And we`re seeing it all across society, all over places, all kinds of places in the wake of pandemic. Speeding tickets, traffic violations, road fatalities, people are driving like maniacs, assaults on hockey referees and youth leagues, violent behavior on airplanes, overdoses, alcohol-induced deaths, and yes, spiking murder rates. This is all bad. We want to reverse all this, we need to restore the social bonds of cohesion that keep us together and attach to each other.
But crucially, we must dig deep for solutions that will work and not simply heed the calls to arrest and incarcerate our way out of this where we will do even more harm. I guarantee you, in the long run.
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[20:43:08]
HAYES: President Joe Biden held a celebration today at the White House commemorating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson`s confirmation to the Supreme Court. But as we`ve discussed, she joins the court as part of the progressive minority of three, at least this summer, when Breyer steps down at a time when threats to individual rights and democracy are very, very acute.
Last night, I asked Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey about this, here`s what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: What is your message to progressives to Democrats about how to think about this court, as we prepare for a series of decisions that could have truly, truly ghastly impacts on people`s lives?
SEN. CORY BOOKER (D-NJ): We have to dig in now more, be prepared for what`s to come. But understand that the next election and the one after that, one after that are building blocks to who`s going to have the majority of the court in years ahead.
The far-right has been very good at changing the court. Even Republican nominees now are no longer the kind of moderate justices of the past. Now you have people trying out by going this far to the right as they can on a lot of these areas of jurisprudence.
So, I hope every progressive understands what`s at stake and what we`re staring at right now as a result of us losing narrowly a lot of elections.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: So yes, that`s the problem. But what`s the strategy? Democrats are going to have to find a way to win elections against Republican Party that is actively dissembling the machinery of democracy to take back power, or at least to retain it.
David Plouffe served as Barack Obama`s campaign manager in 2008, was a senior advisor to President Obama from 2011 to 2013 and he joins me now.
Well, first start on the short-term question, because you`re an experienced political strategist. And there`s a political question here, it`s not necessarily an electoral one yet.
The Supreme Court of the United States is very likely, I think, to overturn Roe v. Wade in a few weeks. The state of the law in the states means that 23, 24, 25 states could see abortion inaccessible immediately, in some places criminalized.
[20:45:07]
How do you think about how, what the -- what the political response is to that and thinking about it now in advance of it happening?
DAVID PLOUFFE, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Well, Chris, I think the political response is obviously secondary to the effect this is going to have on women and doctors and families all across the country.
I think one of the issues right now we find, whether it`s democracies at risk, the Republicans will nominate people who will outlaw abortion, I think a lot of voters don`t believe it. I think sometimes Democrats don`t believe it.
But if in fact, the court does rule in that way. It`s no longer theoretical, it`s real. And I think that for everybody out there who supports women, having the ultimate choice in our health care decisions, reproductive rights, you then need to link that to the `22 election to the `24 election.
And because it`s real, because you`re going to have everyday stories of people in states who are deeply affected by this, I think you should be able to rally people.
That`s one of the challenges, I think, for Democrats, we`re at large heading into what`s going to be a pretty tough political environment at `22. And then, a must-win election in `24 is you got to raise the stakes. And you got to make this real to people, both in terms of people you need to register and turnout and swing voters.
And as you and I have talked, Chris, every single swing House District, gubernatorial race, and Senate race has a combination of those two things, you have to put them both together to win, particularly in a tough environment.
HAYES: So, I think it`s really useful to think of the Serenity Prayer when you`re talking about politics here. And like, you know, what you can control, improving the things you can control, right? Accepting the things you can`t change and the wisdom to know the difference.
So, like, the macro environment terms, like the inflation rate, like frankly, there`s not a ton that can be done. There`s some stuff on the margin that`s going to be a -- you know, particularly with the war, and that`s going to matter a lot. What you can control is what you do legislatively, what the president does for an executive action standpoint, and what your messaging is.
When you think about that, what do you see as the path here for Democrats in the next six months?
PLOUFFE: Well, Chris, you`ve set this up perfectly, because in fact, you know, in most races, the campaign itself, you know, maybe it`s a field goal unit. You know, maybe it can be a few points more than that or no more than that. It`s the macro-political environment of the moment in the timing.
And so, if you`re a candidate, the most important answer to that question is, you know, Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, whoever are nominees in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The few dozen House candidates and incumbents on the Democratic side that will determine the majority, what do they think they need to do?
So, obviously, they need to build a good campaign, they need to do registration and do organization, they need to define the election, both in terms of who they are and what they`ve done if they`re incumbent.
And then, crucially, you`ve got to swing the Republicans on the center stage. This is not a popular brand. And I think you`ve got to make the price of change to the Republicans as high as possible.
Now, if the political environment is as bad in October, November, as it would be right now, a lot of people aren`t going to survive that. But the next tranche after the maybe true swing districts will, so everybody`s got to be prepared for political environment that could be as bad as it is now. I think it`ll improve over time.
Hopefully, inflation gets reduced a little bit. I think, hopefully, the right direction, wrong track improves a little bit. We`ve got another spike of COVID throughout many parts of the country, but hopefully, by the fall, that`ll be settled down.
So, a lot of things are out of your control, but you have to prepare for that. But the thing that has to be done in every single race, if you`ve got to make voters think really hard, do you want to hand power over to that individual Republican candidate, and you handed it over to basically the MAGA crowd (PH).
And if you don`t do that, we`re not going to smite (PH) the election and I have confidence we can but that has to be task number one.
HAYES: Yes, choice not referendum here, particularly because, again, when you`re -- when you`re coming, I was looking at the 46 midterms legendarily a clock cleaning for Democrats. You know, inflation is eight percent, the country is after World War II, it`s got a lot of disruption.
And you know, the Democrats have won the election, after election, after election the (INAUDIBLE), they got their butts kicked.
Now, again, you know, it was -- it was a different circumstances but the idea of these people are actually going to take power. It`s not a thumbs up, thumbs down situation strikes me as really key here.
PLOUFFE: Yes, it`s not, oh, we`ll get the other side another chance. You know, the other side is going to destroy democracy. The other side is, you know, intent on turning America into the handmaid`s tale.
The other side is going to, you know, make it harder for kids to read books and learn history. The other side is going to cut every tax they can for anybody above 10,000,050, you know, and screw the middle class.
Like, you have to make -- you have to make this real for people. And a lot of these candidates have taken positions, the people we`re going to run as Romney`s of the world. You know, you can count them on one hand. Most people are going to be all in on the MAGA agenda.
[20:50:02]
HAYES: Rick Scott is running around saying he`s going to raise taxes basically in every middle-class American and he`s sticking to his guns on that, it seems silly.
David Plouffe, thank you very much.
PLOUFFE: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: It is one of the weirdest stories of the year and it`s been a weird year. Two men have been charged with impersonating federal agents for years, but it`s who they were talking to that is the FBI working "around the clock". That`s next.
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HAYES: It`s a high bar to break through the madness of this particular news cycle, but this story did it. Really weird and fascinating and I -- the more I read, the more I want to know.
[20:55:09]
So, here`s what happened. Two days ago, the FBI arrested these two men. Federal prosecutors say they had been successfully impersonating Department of Homeland Security Agents since February of 2020, two years.
Not only that, but authorities say that these men compromised members of the Secret Service by lavishing them with expensive gifts like rent-free apartments. One of the compromised agents was a member of First Lady Jill Biden`s protective detail. Four Secret Service agents have since been placed on administrative leave.
Today, prosecutors argued that both men should be detained the pending trial writing "As practice liars who perpetuated a long term deception, cooking up entirely fake personas and positions, elevating themselves with imagined potentials to be above the law and above others, they cannot be trusted to return to court to cease their efforts to obstruct the investigation or to simply reassemble or use an arsenal similar to the one they built here".
Julia Ainsley is an NBC News Correspondent covering the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. She joins me now.
This story is bonkers. I read the indictment. Lay out to us what these two men were doing.
JULIA AINSLEY, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, bonkers just doesn`t even begin to cover it here, Chris. I mean, so we have here, Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali who were two men who basically infiltrated top levels of the Department Homeland Security, and somehow got to the point where they could become close enough friends with members of the Secret Service that they were, as you said, lavishing gifts on them.
Not only that, but they built up an arsenal of weapons in their apartment, they had bulletproof vest, they were able to try to provide drones, they had masses of firearms in their apartment. And that is even as Taherzadeh was not able to own firearms, he was a felon, because he pleaded guilty to a battery of trying to strangle his wife nearly a decade ago.
The story is so crazy, not just because of what these men were able to get away with, but how long they were able to do it undetected. And the fact that they could become so close to the very people who are trained to have a sense about these things, and to be on lookout for anyone who might try to infiltrate.
And the biggest thing and what we really heard from prosecutors today arguing that they are a flight risk is that there may be a connection here, although it`s not -- the dots aren`t completely connected. But there may be a connection here to Pakistani intelligence, but it`s still not completely clear who funded them and what their objective was.
HAYES: Right. So the -- so the con, as I understand is these two guys impersonated DHS agents, and they got like, badges and gear and kit that made them look like they were. And then they went around and they met lots of other federal agents and other places as DHS agents, which other people thought they were, right?
They thought like, oh, these are -- we`re in some elite unit DHS, we`re high levels, we`ll hook you up with an apartment, we`ll hook you up with this, we`ll hook you up with that. They`re running multiple apartments out of this apartment building.
And the whole thing like costs a lot of money, and we don`t know where the money came from. But also, am I right that, like, to what end where they doing this is completely opaque as of now in the public filings by the government.
AINSLEY: Yes, completely opaque, not what they told these people who were completely duped by who they were and what they were doing is that they were part of a covert task force that was looking at things like gang violence in January 6. They sort of picked two of the top hot topics within DHS.
But if you think about it, this is an agency that was born to try to stop the stove piping of information that was born to try to get agents within Department of Homeland Security to talk to the Secret Service or talk to the FBI, to share information, to bring people together.
And that`s exactly the mechanism that they used to try to infiltrate and use their influence across many different agents who maybe didn`t know to question what they were doing. Maybe they weren`t in the position to do that.
So, really, there are a lot of questions about how they got those badges in the first place, how they were able to show up and do the work that they did.
And then, I think most importantly, the four people who are now on administrative leave, including that secret service, member of First Lady Jill Biden`s detail, how they were able to get to that point where those people would take any kind of bribes, whether or not it was from someone who was impersonating or whether it was a legitimate number to take a free apartment, to take a $2,000 assault rifle. That raises red flags and of itself regardless of who it`s coming from.
HAYES: Yes, you`ve got rent-free apartments, iPhone, surveillance systems, drone, flat screen television, case for storing an assault rifle, a generator, law enforcement paraphernalia.
I mean, where is this all stuff coming from to what end. We`re going to stay on this story.
Julia Ainsley, thank you very much.
[21:00:04]
That is ALL IN for this week. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now with Ali Velshi filling in. Good evening, Ali. And I want to just say, you had been doing such incredible work these last five weeks and I am so personally grateful and proud of you as a colleague to have had you out there on the ground reporting. It`s been just phenomenal for all of us. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you.