Summary
President Joe Biden pushes policy goals in his first address to Congress. President Biden ends the Reagan era with bold, progressive agenda. According to the New York Times, the firing of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was at the center of Giuliani`s probe. Justice Department is to indict Derek Chauvin and three other ex-police officers on civil rights charges.
Transcript
JASON JOHNSON, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you.
Thank you so very much, Dr. Greer. Thank you very much, Jelani Cobb, for joining our show tonight. Joy will be back tomorrow night with a special guest, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight, on ALL IN.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Trickledown economics has never worked. It`s time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out.
HAYES: 100 days into office, how Joe Biden and his predecessor just ended the Reagan era, leaving Republicans with nothing.
REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): He`s going to control how much meat you can eat. Can you imagine that?
HAYES: Then, what we`re learning about what`s at the heart of the Rudy Giuliani investigation.
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He just loves this country, and they rate his apartment. It`s like so unfair and such a double -- it`s like a double standard.
HAYES: Tonight, look back at just how far Rudy has fallen.
RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER LAWYER OF PRESIDENT TRUMP: Nothing disturbs me more than to see all of the revelations of crime committed by some of the most powerful and some of the wealthiest members of our society.
HAYES: And Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on police reform as George Floyd`s family comes to Washington, when ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. You know something I noticed that across the ideological spectrum in a sort of surprising way, there`s agreement about President Joe Biden`s first joint address to Congress last night. You`ve got lots of folks on the left and a lot of folks in the right that both agree that the scope and ambition of the domestic agenda Biden laid out was truly staggering.
And all that would come on the heels of all the accomplishments of his first 100 days, which are just impressive. I mean, there`s no other way to say it. The huge COVID relief package, the massively successful vaccination effort, one of the best in the world after the U.S. has been an international laggard, more than a million jobs gained in the first 100 days more than any other president history.
Last night, Biden proposed a wide range of progressive programs, from a jobs plan and a family`s plan to a $15 minimum wage, and a change to labor law that would be the most significant pro worker legislation since the New Deal. He proposed extensions and expansions of the U.S. social safety net that would bring this country finally into line with developed democracies.
I mean, we are our international laggards in a whole bunch of ways. Our level of unionization is way below many of our peers, about 10 percent compared to 23 percent in the U.K., 54 percent and Belgium, 66 percent in Sweden. We`ve got the highest level of income inequality of all the G7 countries, more than Italy, Japan, and Germany, and France. We don`t even have paid family leave, OK.
We are one of just a handful, a handful of nearly 200 countries in the U.N. without a national paid parental leave law. We`re the international exception. We are the laggard. And for years, people on the left, progressives, have been pointing out these deficiencies and trying to scratch and claw our way to bring the U.S. up to the more humane standards of other developed rich liberal democracies and by and large, hasn`t worked.
Now, there are a bunch of reasons why we have not been able to get there. But a big one, I would even contend a central one, is the last 40 years of American politics have been dominated by the ideology and legacy of President Ronald Reagan and this succinct defining quip.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think you all know that I`ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I`m from the government and I`m here to help.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, Reagan was elected at this very interesting moment, right, high levels of inflation and stagnating economy and intellectual school of free- market economists who are making arguments of why it happened. There was the anger of an increasingly imperiled ownership class after the welfare state had been expanded, and there was backlash against civil rights and social changes.
And basically, Reagan brought all that together creating modern conservatism as we know it. And the central pillar of that was skepticism of the state and state interventions in the domestic sphere, accepting of course, national security and military which grew a ton under his watch.
And it was amazingly effective politically and ideologically. He`d even carried over into Democratic politics.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there`s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Big applause, big government is over, that was President Bill Clinton State of the Union January 1996, 10 years after that Reagan clip, and the year of Clinton`s reelection, and he was not alone. I mean, he`s -- the next Democratic President, Barack Obama, he in many ways, certainly turned the corner on Reaganism. Huge investments like the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act, in the wake of a once in a century Cataclysm of American capitalism collapsing in on itself. But Obama also spent a lot of time shadowboxing with Reagan`s ghost.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: From some on the right, I expect we`ll hear a different argument. If we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts, including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on healthcare, our deficits will go away.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Which is really what makes last night so remarkable really, surprising in lots of ways because Joe Biden is nearly 50 years into his political career. He has never been particularly on the leading edge of the left of his party. He has been a centrist through and through, a dealmaker and the glad hander.
I mean, he`s the guy who walked down from the podium last night, started shaking hands and ask the lawmaker, how`s your mom, give her my love. And he was also the guy who laid out the most ambitious Democratic agenda for robust government safety net in generations, probably since Lyndon Johnson proposed Medicare.
And not only was there no shadowboxing with Ronald Reagan, there was no real apology, there was no defensiveness. He was on the offensive.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: My fellow Americans, trickle-down, trickle-down economics has never worked. It`s time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The big part of Biden`s shift has to do with what`s happened in American life, particularly since that financial crash which I think discredited a certain kind of market fetishism. And we have the rise year after year of staggering gilded age levels of inequality and a bunch of ideological battles that have been fought and won by people in the left.
But I got to say this as I watched this last night, Donald Trump also deserves some credit. Because Donald Trump could not possibly care less about any of the punitive principles of Reaganism or Paul Ryan-ism or Romney-ism about limited government and freedom and all that stuff. Donald Trump is just a corrupt would-be autocrat who really likes the state and state power when it helps him, and he doesn`t when want it doesn`t.
I mean he told people he`s going to give them universal health care and he passed an enormous COVID relief package and wanted to shove as many checks into people`s hands as possible because he knew it was good politics. Utterly absent from almost all of his rhetoric was any of the echoes of talk about freedom and individual choice and small government blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, after all that, right, I mean, Republicans were along for the ride. They`re still going through the motions on that rhetoric. But no one really cares. I don`t think anyone is listening. I mean, during Biden`s address last night, the Twitter account for Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee tweeted that infamous Reagan line, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I`m from the government, I`m here to help. It got all of 391 retweets.
We saw the same thing in the Republican rebuttal. It was pretty thin on conservative policy ideas. He checked the boxes about socialism and your tax dollars, but very quickly moved to the stuff that really animates the Republican Party, the conservative base, cancel culture and the big lie about voter fraud. That and how progressives are the real racist and how liberal schools are teaching kids white self-loathing. That is where the Republican Party`s energy is.
You can see it every night on Fox News, and in the right-wing press, and what primary challengers are talking about, in the audit happening in Arizona. But they have basically declared a total intellectual bankruptcy on the big questions at the center of how we should structure our economy and who it should work for.
That doesn`t mean they`re going to stop fighting it, right? I mean, the donor class is still very powerful. The gilded age billionaires don`t really want to have their capital gains taxed. I mean, the one big thing they passed under Donald Trump, right, the coalition of convenience before the pandemic was an enormous tax cut for the rich and corporations.
It`s just they don`t have any good arguments, or messaging left or even it seems to me like much heart in it. So, while the political battle is not over, it does really feel like the conservatives, Republicans that are party in a movement that is utterly ideologically exhausted.
Michelle Goldberg is an opinion columnist in the New York Times who wrote this piece back in January calling Joe Biden the first post-Reagan presidency, and she joins me now. I think I realized that I ripped off the thesis for the A block from you subconsciously. When I went -- when I saw that that was in your guest sheet, and I was like, oh, right, I guess this is a Michelle Goldberg take that I appropriated. But it was really on display last night I thought.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, OPINION COLUMNIST, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Yes. And to be fair, I ripped off that thesis from a political scientist named Stephen Skowronek who has this idea about different regimes, right? That there are certain presidents who inaugurate transformative regimes, and they go through several phases, and then there`s usually someone who brings them to a catastrophic close, right?
So, in his scheme, Donald Trump is akin to Jimmy Carter, who sort of marked the end of the New Deal era. And I think you could see that from the beginning of the Biden administration, right, that as you said, Reaganism had exhausted itself. The rights fundamental economic commitments are now all over the place.
Even the fact that there`s -- the debate has now shifted from sort of, should we have an interventionist family policy to what should that policy look like, right? So, that makes it much harder for the right to just scream socialism when Biden proposes this kind of transformative packages that would suddenly make parenthood in this country less isolating and brutal.
HAYES: Yes. And I think that`s such a great point, right? So, you`ve got this thing today playing out in the right where, you know, this J.D. Vance, who`s the hillbilly elegy guy who`s a big venture capitalist who`s going to probably run for Senate in Ohio saying that, you know, universal daycare is, you know, class war on the working class.
But the better thing to do is what Josh Hawley and Mitt Romney are doing which is just give parents money. And it`s like, OK, well, that`s the debate now. Like, should we subsidize universal daycare, should we give parents money, that`s just in a different stratosphere than get government off my back, which has been just the constant refrain for so long.
GOLDBERG: I mean, it was get government off my back. And it was also in the case of daycare, women should be at home taking care of their kids. And that ship has really sailed, right? The religious right -- religious fundamentalism might still be extremely potent in the United States, but there is no sort of family values party anymore, and certainly not the party of Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz.
And so, you know, I think that, like you said, they`re sort of going through the motions, but their heart really isn`t in it. And that quote, you know, that that famous Reagan quote was so striking, because I thought about that quote a lot of times during the pandemic about how ecstatic I would be when I was trying to homeschool my kids at home, or when I was worrying about when I was going to get a vaccine, if somebody rang my doorbell and said I`m from the government and I`m here to help.
HAYES: Yes, literally holding a syringe, if you said those words to me, I`d be like, please. Like, yes, nothing would bring you more joy. And, you know, you can always tell I think in politics -- so much of politics is what terrain things are being contested on, what -- you know, what are the fights that people want to have.
And for a long time, I just -- you know, in covering politics and arguing conservatives, these were fights they wanted to have. They wanted to have fights about why the capital gains tax has to be lower than ordinary income, because if not, where we`ll capital -- there won`t be enough capital and we won`t get productive investment. And it just doesn`t seem like fights they want to have anymore.
And I think it`s partly because their base doesn`t buy it. Increasingly, they have -- you know, that this stat always jumps out to me. You know, Reagan won 80 of 100 counties, the larger share residents with college degrees, Trump won 16. Like, there are -- there is a class realignment happening among white voters particularly a little bit in this coalition that is also changing like, how much they could sell it to their own people.
GOLDBERG: And the Republican Party, I think, is still very confused about this, because you see them making a lot of anti-corporate noises, you know, particularly Marco Rubio. They`re still not really willing to do very much about it. They`re still not willing, for example, to raise corporate taxes to fund infrastructure.
But there -- again, there`s such ideological incoherence that it`s very hard for them to sort of get it together to make a furious counter case.
HAYES: Michelle Goldberg who wrote that great column that I guess unintentionally ripped off. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks a lot.
All right, I want to bring in Brian Deese. Brian is the director of the National Economic Council. That`s a very big job in the White House. He`s President Biden`s top economic adviser. He`s also been around the block, as it were, in terms of the previous administration. He formerly served in the Obama administration as senior advisor. He helped lead the auto industry bailout and negotiate the Paris Climate Accords.
Brian, good to have you on. Let`s start with the scope of what`s laid out. You`ve got -- you`ve got the big COVID relief package, there`s the vaccination effort underway, and these two big packages the families plan and the and the jobs plan. Together, it`s I think about $4 trillion combined cost and there`s going to be tax hikes to sort offset that and pay for that. Were there discussions inside the White House saying like this is too much we should pare back?
BRIAN DEESE, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: Well, it`s good to be here. We`re here at 100 days. It`s big day. And we -- it`s also a day where we learned that the economy in the first quarter grew by 6.4 percent, historic growth in the economy, historic growth and jobs. And you can connect that directly to that early action around delivering the American Rescue Plan, COVID relief and effective gap vaccination program.
And the Jobs Plan and the Family Plan, to your point, try to build on that with a view that public investment in areas that we know will have high value for future productivity, future labor force participation, better jobs, is actually the economic recipe we need to succeed.
And so, when we put these packages together, to answer your question, the focus was really on a bottom-up where do we see that high-value public investment will actually complement and drive strong, durable, sustained growth job creation in the -- in the U.S. in ways that we haven`t seen for some time?
And can we put this together in a way that, you know, that we can responsibly pay for by getting out some of the tax fairness that you were just -- you were just referencing? So, for us and for the president, this was really about what are the needs of the country right now, particularly as we face growing global competitive threats.
And, you know, let`s put it together. Let`s put it out there. And the President wanted to say this is what I think the country needs and wanted to make that case in a relatively unabashed way.
HAYES: The pay-fors are interesting here. That`s a -- pay-for is a Washington term, budget term, right, for where you`re going to --
DEESE: Where the money comes from.
HAYES: Where the money comes from, right? And the COVID relief package, there were not pay-fors. That was -- that was seen as sort of emergency spending, which I think made a lot of sense. Here, there`s a lot of -- basically, there`s a lot of, for lack of a better phrase, soaking the rich. I mean, you`ve got capital gains being raised, you got the top bracket being raised.
And what I find fascinating is, is that the popularity of the polling of this actually goes up when you tell people how you`re going to pay for it. Morning Consult said that 57 percent of voters said they are more likely to support the $3 trillion infrastructure plan if it`s funded by a tax increase on those making over $400,000.
Do you feel like you have the -- this is a tough sell, or do you feel like you`ve got the winning at your backs on it?
DEESE: Well, we feel like this makes a lot of sense. And I think that also resonates with a lot of people across the country. First of all, we`re talking about paying for these things over a longer period of time. Pay-for is just a Washington term. There`s also been a Washington Convention to say you`ve got to pay for everything over a 10-year window or match spending to offsets. That`s not how we`re approaching this.
We do think that we need to make these investments. Think about them as capital investments. Invest now and offset those costs over the longer term. That`s where the economics of it. And then, in terms of the practicalities of it, I think that people have seen for several years, but it`s only been accentuated during this pandemic, that we do have a fundamental challenge in this country where the largest companies and very wealthy individuals are keep doing better and better and better.
And if we`re going to actually invest in the country, we`re going to make a big capital investment in ourselves. We`re all going to have to do our part. So, on the economics, we think this actually is helpful. If you look at the corporate reform that we`re proposing, we think that actually it would make the country more competitive, it would be better for domestic investment, if we fix some of the problems in the tax cut that President Trump and the Republican Congress passed. And it would also generate revenue that we could invest in things like fixing our physical infrastructure, fixing our care infrastructure in the like.
HAYES: All right, Brian, Deese who works in the White House advising on these big and ambitious projects, thanks so much for your time.
DEESE: Thanks for having me.
HAYES: All right, now, a little honesty here. One of the realities the TV news business, most nights, at this point of the show, we deliver what`s called a tease in order to keep you the viewer engaged through the commercial break, so you come back, find out more about the next story, keep watching me, keep giving me your eyeballs.
OK, then there are nights like tonight, we have the Rudy Giuliani story. Tonight, I`m not going to do any teasing about the latest reports on Donald Trump`s second personal attorney raided by the FBI. I will let Donald Trump`s first lawyer who was raided by the FBI do it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL COHEN, FORMER LAWYER OF DONALD TRUMP: Here`s the interesting thing. It may start with just the Ukraine, but that`s not where it`s going to stop because Rudy is actually a stupid guy. He`s only right now imagining what does he have to do in order to stay out of prison.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The Rudy story is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: The second time in just over three years, the FBI has raided the home and office of one of -- one of Donald Trump`s personal lawyers. In 2018, of course, it was Michael Cohen, the guy who helped Trump get elected the first time by paying hush money in violation of the law. 1He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Now, it is Rudy Giuliani. He`s Cohen`s successor. He is being investigated by the same U.S. Attorney`s office he used to lead in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors are reportedly interested in whether he broke lobbying laws by working as an unregistered foreign agent while serving the president as his personal lawyer.
Just this evening, The New York Times reported that investigators are exploring whether Rudy Giuliani pushed for the removal of the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine back in 2019, Marie Yovanovitch, on behalf of Trump, or whether he was also serving the interests of Ukrainian officials, an act that could violate federal law.
And Miss Yovanovitch testified during Mr. Trump`s impeachment hearings in late 2019. She told lawmakers she had only minimal contact with Mr. Giuliani during her tenure as ambassador. I do not know Mr. Giuliani`s motives for attacking me, she said. But individuals who have been named in the press who have contacted Mr. Giuliani may well believe their personal and financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.
The FBI ceased cell phones and computers from Rudy Giuliani`s home and office in the early morning raid yesterday. Giuliani`s lawyer called it legal thuggery. And Giuliani himself in his radio show this afternoon called the investigators crooks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GIULIANI: I`ve been fighting all my life. I`ve been fighting crooks all my life. I`m fighting crooks again. The only tragedy of it is they have titles from the government, but they were disgrace.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We`re going to get them.
GIULIANI: They are a complete disgrace to the office that I distinguished.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: You distinguished. Trump`s former personal lawyer who is also raided and has experienced with this kind of thing thinks Giuliani should be concerned.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COHEN: Rudy Giuliani knows that he`s in big trouble, as your previous guests had just advised. He ran the Southern District of New York. He knows exactly the games that they play, because he`s the one that created that that playbook. And they take no prisoners. They did exactly the same thing to me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: For more nuanced look at the kind of legal trouble Rudy Giuliani might be facing, I`m joined by Betsy Woodruff Swan, national political reporter for Politico, who reported today that a Ukrainian ex-lawmaker says he spoke to the FBI about Giuliani, as well as Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Betsy, let me start with you. And I feel like between your reporting and the Times reporting and the substance of the warrant, we`ve got a much clearer view now of what the theory of the government`s case to the extent there will be one is, which is basically he was being paid to do this on behalf of some shady Ukrainian interests and was kind of running that parallel to the -- to whatever Trump`s interests are. Is that your understanding?
BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "POLITICO": That`s certainly my sense of it. We`ve reached the point of the DOJ investigation integrity Giuliani where the feds have stopped being subtle. And the fact that now they`ve executed multiple search warrants and have issued at least one grand jury subpoena suggests things are moving pretty quickly.
One important detail from the reporting that`s come out over the last 24 hours is that a name that`s mentioned in one of these subpoenas is reportedly John Solomon, who was formerly a columnist for The Hill. That`s important, in part, because one of the things that you can do that is illegal is if a foreign government official pays you not just to lobby U.S. government officials, but also to secretly do public relations on their behalf without disclosing it.
You`re secretly working for a foreign government official to try to shape U.S. media narratives. That can get you in legal trouble with the Justice Department. So, the fact that the DOJ is looking into a potential conversation between Giuliani and this former columnist suggests that could be a piece of the case that they may be building against him.
And of course, we know DOJ is getting help Andrii Artemenko, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who I was in touch with over the last 24 hours, told me that back last summer the FBI reached out to him and he spoke with him about his knowledge of Rudy Giuliani. He appeared in one American news documentary with Giuliani. So, he has detailed firsthand knowledge as to the way the former mayor was interacting with Ukrainians.
HAYES: Yes, we should -- that one American news documentary, we should note, Giuliani`s activities here have not been particularly subtle. Like he`s been doing this all out in the public and everyone was asking, well, who`s paying him? And he definitely didn`t declare. He didn`t register as an agent of a foreign government as the foreign law requires.
Joyce, as someone who ran -- who was a U.S. attorney and ran a U.S. Attorney`s Office, from that perspective and that experience, what do you see when you see these big, you know, dramatic moves from the southern district?
JOYCE VANCE, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: Well, it`s an interesting point in a case when you make the decision to stop being covert and become over.
HAYES: Right.
VANCE: This case was never really fully covert. Of course, it was clear that there was an investigation going on to some extent. But now, everything is overt. And they`re into the phone. And what you can find in a cell phone after a search like this can be of immense value.
Maybe ultimately, there`s not a case, maybe you get passwords that let you take a look at accounts that you`re just learning now exists. Maybe you find in photographs, visual evidence of crimes that are committed. So this is a breakaway point in a case where you often find out if they`re going to indict or not.
HAYES: We should note here, you know, FARA is the law of the land. It`s not that well enforced. It can be tough to enforce for lots of reasons. There`s ways to kind of dodge it. But we`re dealing here with the -- if there was ever a reason to have this law enforce it, this is the President`s lawyer possibly secretly working on behalf of foreign interests to go to attack an American official in the form of Marie Yovanovitch.
Like, Betsy, if that were the case, this is as serious as that kind of violation could be.
SWAN: Yes, not great. And one of the problems that the Justice Department has had historically with enforcing this particular law that we`re talking about is that defendants have been able to argue that they didn`t understand it, and therefore they shouldn`t be punished for failing to abide by it.
That argument has been successful in the past. In this case, though, Rudy Giuliani former very senior U.S. law enforcement official, and a guy who spent a huge amount of his time post public service talking about legal problems other people could find themselves in for being engaged in corrupt efforts to influence lawmakers. One of his huge hobbyhorses was the allegation that Joe Biden corruptly moved to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Giuliani is very much steeped in these questions about law and corruption, so it`ll be tough for him to argue, oh, whoops, sorry, I didn`t know if FARA was a thing.
HAYES: In fact, Giuliani just gave an interview in which he said that he tried to foist the Hunter Biden hard drives on the FBI who apparently were not that interested. Can you imagine what the discussion is like, Joyce, when you`re about to serve a warrant on the President`s lawyer and a former U.S. Attorney in the office that you work in?
VANCE: You know what`s coming in this sort of a situation. So, you know, you`ve got to do everything right. And the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence around phone searches and computer searches is extremely complicated. So, you know that there was a careful legal review to make sure that if agents got to a place on the computer or a phone where they needed an additional warrant, it was very clear that they would go out and get those additional warrants from a judge before they went back in.
I suspect that this was a meticulous operation, designed to avoid these sorts of primary legal problems, but always knowing that down the road, there would be challenges from Giuliani about attorney-client privilege and other legal issues. They`re well prepared.
HAYES: Betsy Woodruff Swan and Joyce Vance, thank you both. Coming up, to properly understand the dissent of Rudy Giuliani, you need to know how he came to power in New York City. There`s no one better to talk about that than my next guest. Do not go anywhere.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Rudy Giuliani achieved true national and international fame in the aftermath of 9/11. But before he became "America`s Mayor," ridiculous term, and then a failed presidential candidate and a buck raker going around the world getting paid for God knows what, he was Rudy Giuliani, the self- styled crimefighter. Tough on crime, a law-and-order guy from Brooklyn, who made his big splash as a swaggering, press hungry, sanctimonious imperious U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.
He used that office to launch a successful campaign for mayor on a law-and- order platform with cops rallying to his side, the man who is going to bring order to a lawless city, crackdown on the thugs and the criminals and the guys that have tried to clean your car windows. Never mind how many people ended up harassed or roughed up by the police or shot by them or how much the city`s jails swelled.
And through it all, Giuliani sold this worldview, always shot through with racist ideas of a crime and violence, that it all came down to good guys and the bad guys. And he was the good guy, and the criminals were the bad guys, and he was the one protecting you from them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. attorney said he`d like to throw the book at them and anybody else involved in an insider trading scheme.
GIULIANI: Maybe we can`t catch all of them, but we sure as heck can deliver a message which if you do get caught, you are going to lose your liberty, you`re going to go to prison.
I do think that the work in my office and other parts of the Justice Department has changed the definition of the problem of crime in America.
Nothing disturbs me more than to see all of the revelations of crime committed by some of the most powerful when some of the wealthiest members of our society.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani won his second race against David Dinkins for mayor of New York City.
GIULIANI: In the area of crime, the city of New York really has had a great deal of success. City-wide arrests have gone up to record highs, which is one of the ways in which we`ve also brought down crime. We arrest a lot of people, particularly drug dealers.
You`ve got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street. It may be a minor thing. It may be a serious thing.
People are riding the subways again and they`re walking in the park. In fact, New York is so safe, I`d like to take this moment to officially announce that it is once again all right to hitchhike.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, what kind of mayor has he been?
WILLIAM BRATTON, FORMER NEW YORK CITY POLICE COMMISSIONER: Good Mayor? Awful, man. That`s simple.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, this guy, this guy whose entire life and career about going after crooks, right? This guy finds himself on the wrong side of search warrants, staring down the barrel of an indictment by his former office. It`s just an incredible plot twist. As a columnist for The New York Daily News, staff writer from New York Magazine, Michael Daly chronicled decades of nefarious incidents in the checkered political career of Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani even once referred to Daly as public enemy number one. And Michael Daly now a special correspondent for The Daily Beast, he joins me now. Michael, I thought of you yesterday when I saw this news. What is Michael Daly thinking right now having reported on this guy and watched his rise, and particularly the kind of sanctimony he brought to it and the bullying and imperiousness about him being the good guy? What goes through your mind as you watch the news on roll that his apartment is being raided by the FBI?
MICHAEL DALY, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, "THE DAILY BEAST": I can tell you from personal experience, he does not take well to being caught at things. I once had -- I had nothing to do one day. I happen to be driving by -- I almost never drive. I had a car. I`m going past city hall. Who do I see but Rudy and his entourage coming out of city hall? And he just announced a crackdown on speeding, so I said, I got nothing else do. Let me follow him.
9:00 and going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit, passing a loaded school bus on the right in the Battery Tunnel. And when I wrote that, they went nuts. They said I was a liar. There`s no way it happened, that they have counter-surveillance. I couldn`t have been there. And I said, well, I had an easy pass, you had an easy pass, and I`ll show you that I was one second behind you. And all of a sudden, you think he would go quiet, but he had press conferences for three days. At one point, he said, the car wouldn`t go that fast and General Motors got nuts and flew on a team. They were going to say that it did go that fast.
And at one point, I`m told Rudy, he said if this can happen, this is no longer American. So, tell us a little thing about speeding, you can imagine what`s going to happen here. And you know, Michael Cohen says that Rudy is dumb. He`s not at all dumb. He`s just nuts. And he just is. I mean, this is a guy -- he used to scream about parole, the evils of parole. And it turns out that he was conceived when his father was on parole for armed robbery. And Rudy wouldn`t exist if it weren`t for parole.
I mean, it`s -- you just -- you just -- everything you learn about him, you just like -- I mean, I can remember one day they called us and they said the mayor is going to have -- this is when he`s married, and he`s supposedly living with his wife. The mayor is going to meet his girlfriend for dinner, call all the papers, everybody, you know, watch Rudy had dinner with his girlfriend and he walked her home and then he`s walking back to Gracie Mansion.
I had nothing else to do so I felt I just walk behind him. Then what happened, there`s a little Protestant church on a side street on the way to Gracie Mansion. There was a couple sitting on a bench, and they were necking, and Rudy stopped and he turned to his aide and said, that`s disgusting. So, it just -- it goes on and on and on.
HAYES: Well, I mean --
DALY: I would bet to this day I`d bet money to this day Rudy does not know why crime went down in New York. He thinks there`s something to broken windows, squeegee (INAUDIBLE) like, 12 of them, right?
HAYES: Right.
DALY: Crime went down in New York because of fat transit cop named Jack Maple instituted a system whereby crime -- black on black crime was treated as seriously as black on white crime. In other words, if you got robbed on Junior Street in Brooklyn, it got treated as seriously as if you were robbed on Central Park south. And that changed the whole city. That`s why crime went down. I think Rudy to this day doesn`t know that.
HAYES: He said this, and this is sort of classic Rudy sanctimony on his radio show today, which I imagine his lawyers were thrilled that he went ahead and did. I`ve done your job longer and much better than you have. You people have any convictions like I have when I was U.S. Attorney? You haven`t had a person like me in the U.S. Attorney`s office since I left. No wonder you`re jealous.
I mean that -- but that`s -- that ego, that perspective is, to your point, people say what happened to Rudy. That`s been the guy for 40 years.
I mean, I September 10, 2001, I was by the city hall and I watched Rudy come down the steps with his entourage, right. Not a single person said hello. No one even noticed them. The tourists didn`t take his picture. It was awkward. Rudy gone past, everybody was tired of him, all his antics, all this stuff with his personal girlfriends and his lies and his craziness. It was done. It was over.
The next morning was a very bad morning, as everybody knows. And then like two days later, I`m down there and I get a call from the city that said we want you to write about Rudy Giuliani. And I said, why? And they said, well, he`s like the face of 9/11. And I said, what are you talking about? I haven`t even seen him down here. And they said, oh, no, no, he`s the -- he`s the face of it.
Well, it turns out he was on the TV camera the whole time. And everybody decided this is Mr. New York. I mean, the reason he was walking around down there with you know, that famous footage of him walking on with his people with the mask, the reason he was there was that he built the world`s only aerial bunker on the 17th floor beside the World Trade Center with diesel fuel tanks above it. And it was burning. He couldn`t go to his command center.
HAYES: Right.
DALY: He had to go yet to go to ladder five up in Greenwich Village and break into there to make his command post while those guys rolled downtown getting killed.
HAYES: Michael Daly who did an incredible job chronicling Mayor Giuliani and 9/11 and the days afterwards, it`s always such a pleasure to talk to you, Michael. Thank you.
DALY: I talk too much when I get on that.
HAYES: No, you`re good. You`re great. Just keep talking, all right. Talk to you soon. Still ahead, it was a big day for police reform on Capitol Hill. The Floyd family is in D.C. to meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. I`ll ask Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison what changes he`s looking for in the wake of the Chauvin prosecution ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: OK, this one`s a fun story. I first learned to love performing in the theater as a high school student in New York City back in the 1990s when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. In fact, I went to Hunter College High School where I was cast in a student-run production that we called Brick Prison Playhouse. And that was a reference to the fact that our school was a converted armory with as you can see, barely any windows.
Now, early on, Brick Prison`s faculty advisor was this incredible man named Dr. Rembert Herbert. You can see right there in this home video from back in the day. That`s him. It just so happens it was on that day this video was taken that Dr. Herbert proposed that an enterprising young student, the one who happens to be holding the camera here should write a musical for Brick Prison to stage, a student-written musical.
In fact, you can hear the exact moment captured in the video. Now, pay attention to the end of this next clip. Oh, and the kid in the blue shirt, that`d be me.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It wasn`t anyone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It wasn`t anyone.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I like (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You`re in 89?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It wasn`t -- it was ready. I was in 81 --
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fine, then 90.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, Lin, you`re on.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You`re on.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: OK, Lin, you`re on. The guy behind the camera was a skinny eighth grader named Lin Manuel Miranda A few years later, Lin would write an original musical called Nightmare in D Major which I directed and I suppose the rest is history. Lin will be featured in an upcoming special event on NBC called inspiring America where we highlight extraordinary people making a positive impact in their communities.
And when Lester Holt sat down to interview Lin, Lin talked about the influence that Dr. Herbert and Brick Prison have in the course of his life.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, ACTOR: Well, I think I always knew I wanted to life in the arts and making stuff and I didn`t know what form that would take. I always credit my eighth grade English teacher Rembert Herbert who kind of caught me writing poems in the back and said, you know, when you apply that stuff to our class, you`re actually pretty good.
I think he was the first person outside of my very supportive family to say you`re a writer. And he nudged me in the direction of playwriting because we had a student-written -- student-run theatre group where you could -- where we produced student-written plays. And that`s what nudged me in that direction. I don`t know what I`d be writing if it weren`t for Dr. Herbert saying, go hang out with those kids.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Those kids, that was me in that room. Those are the kids that we were hanging out with. You`ll hear from other incredible individuals on Inspiring America, the 2021 Inspiration List which airs this Saturday May 1st 8:00 p.m. Eastern on NBC, then right here on MSNBC this Sunday at 10:00 p.m. Eastern. Don`t miss it.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: In light of the verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, the foreign Minneapolis police officer was leaving the courtroom that day in handcuffs according to a new report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They report that the Department of Justice spent months gathering evidence to indict Chauvin on federal police brutality charges in a separate case from 2017 but feared the publicity could influence the state`s trials, so they came up with a contingency plan.
If Chauvin were found not guilty on all count or the case entered a mistrial, they would arrest him at the courthouse. But of course, he was convicted on three murder and manslaughter charges. And a big part of that had to do with the case presented and the team put together but the state`s Attorney General Keith Ellison who was appointed as special prosecutor.
So, now, federal prosecutors are moving forward with their case to indict Chauvin and the three other officers involved in George Floyd`s murder on charges of civil rights violations. Joining me now is Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota.
That was a surprising thing to read. I`m curious to your reaction as a person that supervised the team, this prosecution. Did you know anything about the feds looking into this?
KEITH ELLISON, ATTORNEY GENERAL, MINNESOTA: No. Well, I didn`t know anything about the fed`s action. I know that they have jurisdiction. I know that the office was interested in concerned, but I didn`t know any of the details. And I`m glad I didn`t because it really -- I really had enough to do to focus on the state prosecution.
But I am glad that they that the federal government, through the DOJ pattern and practice, and even through criminal enforcement of civil rights violations is interested, it makes a big difference.
HAYES: How much different -- how important was it that this prosecution happened under your supervision, the State Attorney General, and not out of the Hennepin County prosecutor`s office where it normally would happen and where we`ve seen local prosecutors have a very tight relationship, obviously, the police in their jurisdiction?
ELLISON: Well, I just want to say as a preliminary matter. The Hennepin County Attorney`s Office led by Mike Freeman was very helpful to us. They were our partners. I want to make that very clear. But I will -- but I will say, that gave us an opportunity to look at the charges anew. And we decided to go from third-degree murder up to second-degree murder, which we charged, and we charged the other three.
So, when the case went from the county attorneys to my office, the charges increase, and the number of defendants increase. So -- and you know, we`re -- we`ve only dealt with one defendant, the other ones are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But that matter is set on for August. And we are working diligently to put on an excellent prosecution.
HAYES: When you say presumed innocent until proven guilty, that, of course, is a core and important constitutional principle. It`s also something that --
ELLISON: Absolutely.
HAYES: -- that you spent decades, you know years as a defense attorney.
ELLISON: Yes.
HAYES: And I wonder how that informed of how you thought about this case?
ELLISON: Well, let me tell you. You know, as a defense attorney, and now as a prosecutor, and as a legislator, I`ve learned that it`s not -- it`s not the position, or the role that you play in the system, it`s whether you bring integrity and honesty to it.
As a defense attorney, I knew a lot of people who just mailed it in for their -- for their clients. And I know a lot of people who started out talking about what they`re going to plead their clients to. I never thought that was the right thing to do.
Now that I`m in another role, we`re prosecuting vigorously and we look forward to and hope that there`s a vigorous defense so that we know that the person is treated with fairness, dignity, and respect, even if they`re found guilty as Derek Chauvin was.
We didn`t want to be unfair to Derek Chauvin. As a matter of fact, we want to be scrupulously fair to him so that we can convict him based on a law beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of his peers, which we did do and we plan on moving forward in that same direction with the remainder of this case.
But yes, I do care about defendants. I think as a prosecutor, you know, you`re not a minister of punishment, you`re a minister of justice. And that is a very important thing. And our system would be better served if we all proceeded that way.
HAYES: Yes, I thought that there was a really notable moment from Brandon Mitchell, one of the other jurors -- one of the jurors in the in a case talking about just sort of seeing the humanity in the entire situation saying that when Mr. Mitch Mitchell saw a video of Chauvin being taken into custody, he said he felt compassioned for him. He`s a human too. I almost broke down from that. We decided his life. That`s tough. That`s tough to deal with. Even though it`s the right decision, it`s still tough. What do you think of that?
ELLISON: I think that I`m so proud of this jury, man. I mean, we were so fortunate to get 12 people who really cared, who listened carefully. Not every bit of this trial was riveting testimony. Some of it was just regular procedure-type stuff. But it didn`t matter. They were focused every inch. They were taking notes, they were watching, they were paying attention. Some of the medical testimony was kind of complicated, but they still pay close attention.
So, yes, I am not surprised that they had -- that they had some sympathy or that particular jury had some sympathy for Derek Chauvin. But this case, justice can`t be about it simply. It`s got to be about what are the facts show, you know, and it`s the judge`s job to decide what the sentence is going to be now and not the jurors. They just decided the facts and the facts were clear beyond a reasonable doubt and they came back pretty quick.
HAYES: Keith Ellison, Attorney General of the State of Minnesota who oversaw that team, I was so fascinated to hear your take on the trial. I want to get you back to talk broader about police reform very soon if that`s cool.
ELLISON: Sure.
HAYES: Thank you very much.
ELLISON: You bet. Take care, Chris.
HAYES: All right. That is ALL IN on this Thursday night. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Good evening, Chris. Thank you, my friend.