Summary
Republicans are trading dignity to stay in the party of Donald Trump. The Republican Party moves towards potentially ousting Congressman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House because she refuses the big lie that Donald Trump won the election that he actually lost. Rudy Giuliani asked for Trump money to fund his legal defense as prosecutors seek a special master to review evidence. The Biden administration announced that they will support temporary lifting patent protections on vaccines. The Biden administration established a federal task force designed to reunite those families separated at the border during the Trump administration.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Indeed. Thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate you. That is tonight`s REIDOUT. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice over): Tonight on ALL IN.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and when she`s out there attacking him, she`s attacking the leader of the Republican Party.
HAYES: The Republican push to purge the truth breaks out into the open. Tonight, the MAGA cult grows, Cheney pushes back, and the president weighs in.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We badly need a Republican Party.
HAYES: Rudy Giuliani asked for Trump money to fund his legal defense as prosecutors seek a special master to review evidence.
Then, the surprise announcement from the Biden administration that the U.S. will move to help vaccinate the world.
And my exclusive interview with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the border refugees and his investigation into domestic violent extremism within the government when ALL IN the starts right now.
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HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. You know, the defining experience, the binding glue of the Republican Party under Donald Trump is the performance of self-debasement and humiliation. That is what you do to be part of the Trump cult. That is what binds all of these people to each other. We`ve watched it happen over and over almost ritualistically.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is the most obvious and cringy example. Just last night, Senator Cruz posted this picture on Twitter, showing him and the defeated former president having dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Cruz wrote, "He`s in great spirits, which is weird because that`s what you say about someone convalescing. We spent the evening talking about working together to retake the House and Senate in 2022, three American flag, emojis."
Now, Ted Cruz is the man who pretended to get very angry when Donald Trump insulted his wife, but since then has done nothing but bend the knee and kiss the ring and completely debase it and humiliate himself publicly in a way that is frankly almost hard to watch. It is to human dignity with the sound of nails on a chalkboard are to our ears.
But Ted Cruz knows what he`s doing. He is debasing himself, because that is the price of entrance to Donald Trump`s Republican Party and Ted Cruz wants to be a part of it. We`re watching this play out on broader terms now as the party moves towards potentially ousting Congressman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House all because she refuses to debase herself, she refuses to say two plus two equals five, to carry on the big lie that Donald Trump won the election that he actually lost.
In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post this evening, Congresswoman Cheney vehemently defend herself writing, "The Republican Party is at a turning point. Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. The question before us now is whether we will join Trump`s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election with all the consequences that might have."
According to new reporting from the Daily Beast, even Cheney`s allies now think she is a "dead woman walking." There`s a full-out active race going on for her position in leadership as Republican Conference chair. Donald Trump endorsed Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York for the job this morning, which Stefanik promptly boasted about in this tweet featuring the former president Save America logo.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana also through his support behind Stefanik while Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of only a handful of Republicans to vote for Donald Trump second impeachment rally behind Liz Cheney, writing on Twitter, "Every Republican member of Congress needs to go on the record as to how they will vote on congressman Liz Cheney, in operation hashtag cover up January 6, and concern donors should take notes. I will vote for Liz."
So, votes are being whipped for a secret ballot election that can come as soon as a week from today when the Republican caucus meets next. And this movement to purge Congresswoman Cheney has nothing to do with her ideology in a traditional sense. She is a very conservative right-wing Republican. But politics are, in my humble opinion, truly awful.
No, this is about the litmus test the big lie. To give you a sense of just how touchy it is to speak the truth about the election and the big lie, just today Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked specifically about the fact that huge swaths of his party do not believe the election was valid and he could not respond.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Isn`t it a concern that a sizable chunk of the Republican base doesn`t believe that this election was valid.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): 100 percent of my focus is on standing up to this administration. What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country.
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HAYES: Now, McConnell could have easily just said yes, it is concerning and, you know, I want to turn that around? Instead, he decided to tell the obvious truth that he has no broader agenda other than stopping Biden which we`ve all know.
Now, McConnell can dodge direct questions about Cheney since it`s not his chamber, but the person overseeing this whole push to remove Congresswoman Cheney is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who knows as well as anyone that the cost of being in power in Donald Trump`s Republican Party is to humiliate yourself as much as humanly possible. That is what you have to do.
Kevin McCarthy has seen this play out up close. More than a decade ago, McCarthy is one of the young guns, the Republican Trio, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and McCarthy was going to be the future of conservative leadership.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is a better way, and the new team is ready to bring America back. Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, joined by common sense conservative candidates from across the country. Together, they are ready to make history. Together, they are the young guns.
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HAYES: I`m sorry, we just set off that sadness bomb in your television. So much hope, so much promise. We know what happened. First, in 2014, Eric Cantor lost his seat in a shocking primary upset getting knocked out by an essentially proto Trump anti-immigrant Republican challenger.
The next year after the hard-right wing of the Republican caucus basically booted House Speaker John Boehner, young gun Paul Ryan was dragged into duty to take his place. But as the cult of Donald Trump grew, Paul Ryan, who was going to be the future of the party, was completely an abjectly dragged, and humiliated, and jeered when he did not tow the Trump party line culminating in Ryan`s early retirement from politics.
And so, Kevin McCarthy understands the rules of the game, which are that Kevin McCarthy has to humiliate Kevin McCarthy. He has to make Kevin McCarthy as small and it`s painfully abject as possible in order for Kevin McCarthy to thrive in the Trump cult. The story that says it all comes from the Washington Post in January of 2018.
McCarthy noticed during the flight on Air Force I that then-President Trump only likes two flavors of Starburst candies, cherry and strawberry. Days later, the number two Republican in the House known for his relentless cultivation of political alliances bought a plentiful supply of Starburst and ask a staffer to sort through the pile, placing only those two flavors in a jar. McCarthy made sure his name was on the side of the gift which was delivered to a grinning Trump, according to a White House official.
Of course, now, Donald Trump is no longer in office. He lost badly. Republicans lost both houses of Congress under his watch. He spends his days entertaining guests at Mar-a-Lago, but Kevin McCarthy is still standing, the last Young Gun, because he`s still debasing himself for Donald Trump. And he is now fielding calls from the former President about Liz Cheney, telling him that Cheney will be on her way out soon.
At one level, this is all a compelling, if embarrassing psychodrama, right. The bigger issue is that Donald Trump tried to pull off a great crime, one of the greatest crimes ever committed against American democracy, certainly by a sitting president, arguably, which was to attempt to reverse the results of a democratic election to install himself in power over the will of the people. And he had a lot of allies in that but not quite enough of them.
And now, what he is doing from his perch in Mar-a-Lago, like a crime boss issuing his orders from prison, is going back through the obstacles that stood in his way and trying to get rid of each of them. In Georgia, a Trump loyalist has launched a primary challenge against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who you will remember refuse Trump`s demand to find enough votes to overturn the outcome of the election.
In Arizona, the Republican State Senate is running a ludicrous outsource conspiracy theory-laden ballot audit trying to create ex post facto fictitious ballot fraud. And his biggest target now is Congresswoman Liz Cheney because she voted for impeachment because she has been outspoken about the big lie and because unlike the majority of the Republican caucus, she voted to seat the electors on that fateful January 6th day.
So, ask yourself this. What happens when that faction takes over the Republican Party and they have a majority in the House in say the next presidential election? What happens when the House of Representatives maybe under speaker Kevin McCarthy refuses to simply pro forma ratify the election results of January 6, 2025. That`s where this is heading make no mistake.
Stuart Stevens wrote a whole book about his former party slide and Trumpism titled It Was All Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. And Stuart Stevens joins me now. The stakes here, Stuart, really do seem colossal to me. I think the battle has already been fought and lost by one side. What do you think?
STUART STEVENS, SENIOR ADVISOR, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: Look, I don`t think this is a tipping point for the Republican Party. I think the Republican Party has tipped. I think it`s a tipping point for America. The greatest danger is not to realize the greatest danger. And what we have here is a moment that appears normal in many ways. We have a normal president who`s going about the business of running a normal, very functional government, but this is an extraordinary moment.
And we shouldn`t look to the past to say, OK, it`s just like 1964, it`s just like `68, it`s like `52, because this really never happened in America, at least not since 1860. We should look abroad, like Hungary. This is a Viktor Orban moment. And what the Republican Party has become, and it`s painful for me to admit this because I spent decades working in it, it has become a major anti-democratic force, little D democratic force in America.
It is a dangerous organization that wants to end the American experiment. And the sooner we get about realizing that and understanding it and quit trying to pretend that it`s not, the safer will be and the more we`ll be equipped to deal with it. Because our society is not really ready to deal with what we`re forced to deal with now, not by our choosing.
HAYES: I agree. I mean, it`s very well said. And one thing that, I think, bear some investigation here and I`d like to get your thoughts is, you know, there`s always a theory about Donald Trump that his power fundamentally derived from media attention, that he had sort of hacked the media economy, he was a creature of the media and that`s how he got his power. And there`s a lot to that and I think that`s right.
But what we`re seeing here is that that`s not the whole story. Because, you know, Facebook today, they ruled they`re going to keep them off the platform. He no one reads his tweets. He gives interviews and no one cares. He doesn`t drive the news cycle. The power is still there for some other elemental reason. There`s something else going on that is making grown individuals act in a way that would be embarrassing in normal circumstances, like Kevin McCarthy.
STEVENS: Well, I mean, we assume that Kevin McCarthy has shame. I think that`s giving him a benefit of the doubt. I think Kevin McCarthy is quite happy. I don`t think he feels debased. I think he feels powerful. These are people that are different than us. They are people who have decided that they are defined by power, power to no purpose. And it`s a very dangerous reality.
Look, we`ve seen this before in American `30s fascist movement in America. But we didn`t become fascist. Why? Probably because Roosevelt was president, not Henry Ford. So, we elected someone who does not believe in American norms, who has strong autocratic tendencies. And what we`ve discovered is sort of what we used to study in civics and we still did, leadership matters.
And when you say that it`s OK to embrace the worst part of yourself, the self that doesn`t want to admit that the other side won, you`re on the road to autocracy. Democracy doesn`t work when you`re for democracy when you win and you`re not for it when you lose. That`s a different system of government and that`s the threat out there.
HAYES: You know, I`m glad you raised that, because something that I think is gone somewhat unremarked on and the landing point of that monologue into you is that something really dangerous. Aside from the violent insurrection that happened on January 6, was introducing the notion of essentially a congressional veto on the people`s vote for president, right?
Like, this idea that you got this big thing on January 6, which was seen as pro forma, they`re just there to move the paper around and make it official. The idea that, well, maybe you lose the presidential election, people spent a billion dollars, you go around your campaign and you lose if. But if you hold both houses, and you could whip the votes, who knows?
And I mean, that`s -- that is a genuine fear of mind that now looms. And to me, the Liz Cheney thing is a kind of microcosm of that bigger fight.
STEVENS: Look, you`re actually right. We shouldn`t kid ourselves. This is the plan. The plan is to be able to take the House in 2022, go about impeaching at least Harris, probably Biden. They take the Senate. They`ll try to remove him. And look, when you have something that happened as it did on January 6 and it goes unpunished, it becomes a practice.
HAYES: Yes.
STEVENS: And what happened when those Republican senators voted not to hold Trump responsible is I think will be recorded as the equivalent of the Munich accord of our time. It is when you attempt to appease something that you know is evil to gain power and to gain this.
Now, Chamberlain was certainly a much more noble figure than anyone involved in this in the Senate. At least he was anti-war in a very legitimate way with dreadful consequences. But look, this is -- we should not grant them the privilege of assuming they will revert to normality. This is normal to them. This is what they want.
They do not want to believe in a system in which they can lose. And look, when you read books like How Democracies Die by two Harvard professors or Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum, it makes it clear that most modern democracies die not because of tanks coups, it`s not like a (INAUDIBLE) and Chile. It`s more like Orban, or the Philippines had a beautiful constitution modeled after the American Constitution and Marcos trampled all over it.
It`s through the ballot box and through judicial fiat that democracies die. And that really is where we`re about now. And I can`t tell you which side is going to win. I mean, I would like to say, of course, people are going to lose. But we`ve kind of done that and we`ve proven wrong. So, I think we have to assume that we`re really in a battle for democracy.
HAYES: Stuart Stevens, that is very, very well said. Thank you so much for coming on tonight.
Next, you don`t need to be a piano tuner in Atlantic City to know how hard it is to separate Donald Trump from a dollar except as his former fixer Michael Cohen will tell you when it comes to paying hush money to make certain problems disappear, then well, you can find the cash.
So, today Trump is looking at his current fixer in big trouble and Rudy has got his handout. That story, the vast legal jeopardy the emcee of Mar-a- Lago is facing right after this.
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HAYES: Donald Trump has been a private citizen for more than four months now, which means he`s no longer protected by the Office of Legal Counsel`s opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. That matters because Donald Trump was never particularly subtle with his crimes.
Remember, in his last days in office, he was caught on tape demanding the Georgia Secretary of State find the exact number of votes he would need to take over the lead in Georgia. The explicit lobbying of a state election official to produce the votes you need to win is a crime locally and federally. And the Fulton County District Attorney began investigating that call in February. The call is one part of a big effort he put on.
Don`t forget that also Special Counsel Robert Mueller devoted half of his 448-page report to all the ways Donald Trump may have been instructed his investigation and then went before Congress and said this.
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REP. KEN BUCK (R-CO): Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?
ROBERT MUELLER, FORMER SPECIAL COUNSEL: Yes.
BUCK: You believe that he committed -- you could charge the President of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?
MUELLER: Yes.
REP. MIKE QUIGLEY (D-IL): Earlier today and throughout the day, you have stated the policy that a seated president cannot be indicted, correct?
MUELLER: Correct.
QUIGLEY: And upon questioning this morning, you were asked could that -- could a president be indicted after their service, correct?
MUELLER: Yes.
QUIGLEY: And your answer was that they could.
MUELLER: They could.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Trump`s hand-picked Attorney General Bill Barr said Mueller`s evidence was "not sufficient to establish the president committed obstruction of justice offense." Well, earlier this week, a federal judge said that Barr was disingenuous about the process behind that decision. She ordered the Department of Justice to release a memo that Barr said helped guide that decision.
But here`s the thing, Barr is gone anyway, right? He`s no longer in place to protect the president. The Justice Department announced it was under new management when the FBI raided the home and office of Trump`s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and they are apparently going to do things the right way.
In a letter unsealed yesterday, the Justice Department asked a judge to appoint an outside lawyer to review the evidence they collected from the Giuliani raid to separate any information covered by the attorney-client privilege. That`s something they did the last time when they raided the former president`s other lawyer Michael Cohen.
Now, for his part, Rudy Giuliani and his allies are saying that Donald Trump should fork over some money, pay for his legal bills. In other words, Giuliani wants something of value from the person he might be asked to testify against. I wonder if there`s a legal term for that kind of arrangement.
New York Times justice reporter Katie Benner has been covering Giuliani and his dealings with the DOJ for years, Cynthia Alksne has investigated hundreds of criminal cases as a former federal prosecutor, both join me tonight.
Katie, I want to start on this special master issue just because it`s wild we`re here again. I mean, I`m not a full-time criminal justice reporter, but you know, the feds don`t raid lawyers that often. They don`t go through this process that often of getting someone to sift through the evidence with these sort of teams cordoned off each other because, you know, it`s a big deal to rate lawyers. And we got the second Trump lawyer in a row they have to go through this now.
KATIE BENNER, JUSTICE REPORTER, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, you`re right it`s really unusual. And what it implies is that Donald Trump was really dependent on his legal team to shield him and to help him do things that were skirting the law or that were bumping up the edge against what we would think of as legal. And so to your point, is highly unusual.
And one of the reasons why they have to go in and have a team look at Giuliani`s e-mails and electronic records before the investigators can go in is to make sure that nothing that`s privileged can be seen by the public, can be seen by the prosecutors.
HAYES: Cynthia, what do you make of the money -- the money question here? I mean, this all seems pretty perilous in a bunch of different directions. If you`re Giuliani, you got to be thinking, there`s a high likelihood you`re going to get charged with something. I mean, the green light on the rate itself seems to suggest that. If you`re Trump, you got to be nervous about that. And then him sending up these smoke signals in public being, you know, why are you paying for this, it`s like, what`s going on there.
CYNTHIA ALKSNE, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Right. And let`s not forget, in the Cohen case, he was sending up smoke signals, and they were paying him. And then when they decided he`s not cooperating with us, they stopped paying him. So, the best thing Trump should -- I mean, Trump should just pay him. I mean, if I were Trump`s lawyer, I`d say, pay the guy. Pay him whatever he wants. Call the legal bill and deduct it. Move on.
But he`s so cheap and it`s going to cut off his nose to spite his face because Giuliani is facing some serious problems. I mean, you don`t get a warrant like this for nothing. And I find it hard to believe that the Southern District of New York would go through all these hoops and jump into this hornet`s nest for FARA violation. That`s probably not so. They`re probably looking for something else.
And the lawyers are -- the lawyers are the same in the campaign finance Lev Parnas case, so the logical conclusion is maybe there`s a campaign finance angle.
HAYES: Right.
ALKSNE: And also, the Ukrainians. And there could very well be a Ukrainian angle. I mean, after all, we know what is true. What is true is the President of the United States went after the Ukrainian government and basically extorted them in return for his own political needs.
HAYES: Yes.
ALKSNE: There are crimes there.
HAYES: Right.
ALKSNE: And Giuliani was heavily involved in it to the extent that he is constantly pressured. It`s a threat to Trump.
HAYES: That`s a very good point. You know, there`s also -- I mean, the institutional politics here of this, Katie, at the DOJ side are fascinating to me and just seem to be really fraught. And it`s a little -- it`s a little like the Facebook situation, right. At one level, it`s, you know, it`s -- here`s Facebook saying the former president can`t go on our platform, which is, you know, bold and wild. At the same level, it`s like he violated their terms of service over and over and over again. And if you`re inside the Justice Department, how you handle like a possible investigation of the President, a criminal investigation, his lawyer, they`ve got to be very, very careful here.
BENNER: Yes, absolutely. I think the biggest change we`ve seen at the Justice Department is obvious to say, but I`ll just say it, is that Bill Barr has gone. In Barr, you had a unique set of things all kind of coming together in one person. He did not believe that the Russian investigation should have begun in the first place. He did not believe that the special counsel Robert Mueller should have been appointed. And then he also had a much more expansive view of executive power than really any Attorney General before him.
So, you combine all these things together, and you had an incredibly protective posture around the president. And then during the election, we saw that he was also doing everything he could from walls of the Justice Department from inside the building to get Trump reelected. So, without that, you kind of see career prosecutors unfettered to go through an investigation with a leadership that`s going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and in most cases, likely let them do what they think is correct.
HAYES: There`s also -- I mean, there`s other non-federal criminal exposure here too, right? There`s Cy Vance in Manhattan D.A., and then there`s the Fulton County D.A. down in Georgia. And I got to say that case to me, Cynthia, I mean, the law here is like anything. You know, the law is debatable. That`s why there are lawyers like yourself who can argue different sides.
But I`ve said this before, and I`ll say it again, like that phone call as someone who covered politics in Chicago when I was younger, that phone call from a Chicago alderman to the county clerk about an election, gets that older man indicted by the Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorney within the week. I mean, no questions.
ALKSNE: But it doesn`t get the aldermen convicted.
HAYES: Right.
ALKSNE: I mean, we have -- I think we have to face the fact that the Georgia case, which could get him indicted, doesn`t necessarily get him convicted.
HAYES: Yes, that`s interesting.
ALKSNE: I mean, first of all, let`s look at the jury pool, right, Georgia, and -- A. And B, this is a specific intent crime. And what happens is, everybody in the White House says, well, we -- comes and testifies and said, well, we told Trump that there were boats there and that Dominion or whoever had stolen them, and that they were stealing them in Fulton County. And so, he was just doing what he thought was right.
HAYES: Yes.
ALKSNE: And they`ll have a parade of people without criminal conviction saying I told the president, I thought he should go forward. I told the president.
HAYES: Right.
ALKSNE: I mean, that screams Reasonable Doubt to me and a circus. I don`t - - I don`t feel strongly about the Fulton County case. I think the New York cases are the threat for Trump.
HAYES: Cy Vance or the Southern District?
ALKSNE: Both.
HAYES: Yes, right.
ALKSNE: Both, as well as the Attorney General. I mean, I think there`s real threat there. The Cy Vance case, the paying off of Stormy Daniels and basically -- I mean, $100 says they did not write on their taxes, oh, paid off Stormy Daniels. They wrote -- they wrote that they were paying Michael Cohen. Well, that`s not true.
HAYES: Right.
ALKSNE: And Michael Cohen is testifying about it. He may not be a great guy, but he`s pretty credible on how he got paid.
HAYES: Yes.
ALKSNE: And there`s plenty of documentation to support it. So, to me, that`s the threat and the possible Giuliani flip.
HAYES: It`s amazing. The literal Al Capone scenario there being laid out. Katie Benner and Cynthia Alksne, thank you both.
Ahead, we`ve talked a lot about the absolutely urgent need to vaccinate the world. And today, the Biden administration took a huge surprising step towards making that happen. I can`t believe we`re going to bring you the story, but we are and it`s next.
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HAYES: Today, the Biden administration took an extraordinary, and to my mind, actually quite surprising step towards helping to vaccinate the rest of the world. They announced that they will support temporary lifting patent protections on vaccines.
Now, there`s been a very high-stakes battle brewing over this you might have seen. Big pharma obviously not surprisingly opposed, as well as reportedly many in the administration, while Democratic legislators and world leaders were calling with increasing urgency for those patents to be waived.
The intellectual property protections on the vaccines that have been developed and are being produced are one of the numerous obstacles now standing in the way of vaccination in the broad global south in brutalized countries like India, for example. Now, the White House admitted it will take time to work out the details of this waiver with the World Trade Organization which is the body that oversees this. The hope is that in the near future countries that don`t have enough vaccines right now will be able to manufacture the vaccines that have been developed and that have already made a difference in the U.S.
Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves says the current COVID vaccine situation gives him deja vu after he spent years trying to get AIDS medication distributed equitably across the world. He is now co-director of the global health justice partnership at the Yale School of Public Health, and he joins me tonight.
Gregg, I want to talk about some of the similarities here with HIV. But first, just your reaction to the announcement today which did not at all seemed like -- I was surprised by it frankly.
GREGG GONSALVES, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: I think we`re all surprised by it. You know, given the power of the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S., and there are sort of diehard opposition to the trips waiver. The fact that Biden`s administration took this step today is a great sign and good beginning to get us where we need to go.
HAYES: I`ve noticed that folks like yourself, the folks in organization called PrEP4All as well as another colleague at Yale Law, Amy Kaczynski who`s been -- who`s been writing about this, that these are folks that came out of the sort of battle over intellectual property and AIDS medication. What why is that the case? What did we learn from that battle that is now being applied?
GONSALVES: So, what we saw in the -- in the world 20 years ago, the case of market failure, we had medicines that I take every day, which kept me alive and keep me alive with living with HIV, but they didn`t reach the rest of the world because they were too expensive to produce in a quantity and at a price that would be affordable to the rest of the world. We see this for lots of neglected diseases.
So, here we are again 20 years later with vaccines which are pretty costly and they`re making a bundle through Pfizer, Madonna, and the rest of the companies. But as you see in the sort of rates of vaccination across the world, there`s very, very few doses getting to anybody outside of the global north, the industrialized countries that have never been immunized 30, 40 percent of their populations.
HAYES: So, this specific waiver basically would allow companies -- allow countries and companies in other countries to basically use the underlying intellectual property to actually make the vaccine themselves. But there`s a real like, devil in the details here. I`ve spent the last 24 hours like trying to get my head around this, and it`s very complicated.
So I guess the question is, like, what has to happen to make it the case that India, for instance, can produce the vaccine it needs and get it into arms as fast as possible?
GONSALVES: So, it`s three steps. One is that this waiver has been read you by the United States, but the text hasn`t been written yet. So, we don`t know what the eventual agreement will look like. But the idea is to push away this thicket of patents in order for global coordination to sort of rise up to make the number of doses we need.
So, now we have intellectual property rights relaxation, which is one step. But now, we desperately need tech transfer, right? This isn`t a recipe like the old (INAUDIBLE) from the AIDS days. These are complex vaccines that are going to need the originator companies to help companies in the global south and elsewhere to figure out how to make these vaccines, how to scale up production.
And then we have $16 billion sitting in the bank at the U.S. Treasury from the American Rescue Plan, which has been dedicated to vaccine manufacturer and other sort of -- with other parties around immunization in the United States and globally. We can use that money to subsidize global scope and production.
So, we need three things. We need the (INAUDIBLE) waiver which we`re on our way to getting, we need tech transfer, and we need manufacturing skill up. And this is sort of -- think of it as a Manhattan Project for good, right? We need a worldwide really shift in thinking that takes us towards global vaccination for the planet not just in the state of Connecticut or the state of New York or the United States alone.
HAYES: What I`m hearing from you is that -- I mean, obviously, this intellectual property waiver is important. It has been the site of a lot of conflict and sort of lobbying on both sides. But we need basically a U.S. administration committed as a primary foreign policy goal to vaccinate the world and throwing the heft, the might, the resources, the capital, reputational capital of the U.S. behind that goal.
GONSALVES: Yes. And our partners around the world, in the E.U., Australia, New Zealand, everybody needs to be at the table, right? There`s no more single important task on the planet today than crushing COVID, right? We do not want to live with it for three, five, 10, 15 years, or think of this as an endemic disease that`s with us for the next decade or more.
So, we need to put the full weight of the United States government or corporate partners, our partners around the world in different countries and their industries to get this done.
HAYES: All right, we`re going to keep up on this story because there`s a lot of fascinating wrinkles in it. But thank you for your clarity on this tonight, Greg Gonsalves. Thanks a lot.
GONSALVES: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: Coming up, my exclusive interview with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on the situation the southern border and the administration`s new effort to reunite separated families. Secretary Mayorkas joins me just ahead.
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HAYES: A couple of months ago, Republicans along with the right-wing media whipped up a tabloid panic about a Biden administration crisis at the border.
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JOHN ROBERTS, ANCHOR, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: Tonight, a behind-the-scenes view of the humanitarian crisis along our southern border.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The majority of Americans say yes. That seven out of 10 say the vitamin efficient is botching and mishandling the border crisis.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For more on the migrant surge and President Biden finally referring to it as a crisis.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One of the things that has been, I think, a persistent challenge for most American presidents in recent history and now for President Biden, which is the border crisis.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Facing a growing crisis at our southern border, the Biden administration has now allowed journalists into a border facility holding migrants in Donna, Texas.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This morning, the Biden administration is grappling with an intensifying humanitarian and political crisis at the border.
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): And I`ve been to the border many, many times. It is the worst that I`ve ever seen it. It is a full-blown crisis.
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HAYES: Now, this is one of those classic situations where the right, particularly Fox, pounced on the story, would not stop covering it. But part of the reason it got so much coverage was that what was happening was also an actual phenomenon. There was something happening at the border. The Biden administration was dealing with what some said was a predictable seasonal surge when migrants tend to show up after the winter months when the weather gets a little warmer.
But then there was also the pent-up demand from unaccompanied minors who would have come last year probably if not for COVID restrictions. And all that led to overcrowding, and really bad conditions at migrant facilities, and again, still under COVID protocol, and then urgency to get those kids into better conditions and placed in better living environments as fast as possible.
And then you had this completely cynical frenzy whipped up by Republicans looking for something to hammer Joe Biden with who all made their obligatory trips to the border in camouflage and on gunboats, you know, to look for little kids. But have you noticed the border crisis talk is just gone now?
Since the middle of March weekday cable news segments on immigration have plummeted. The drop-off has been most significant on Fox News. Now, partly that`s because Fox has moved on to covering other crises like schools teaching kids the bad parts of slavery, but it`s also due to an administration that really wasn`t doing a good job of handling this and then started doing a much better job.
You can see it in the number here. The number of unaccompanied migrants held by Border Patrol has dropped by nearly 90 percent since late March. During that same period, unaccompanied children went from spending an average of 130 hours of border patrol facilities to an average of 20 hours. So, what happened here? What`s the story? Is this a precursor for what immigration policy on the ground is going to look like in this administration compared to the last one?
That`s a central question that hangs over the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. And he will join me right after this break.
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HAYES: Perhaps the most morally odious way the Trump ministration broke the immigration system was with the infamous zero-tolerance policy that intentionally separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents and they did really nothing to reunite them. The Biden administration has gone about beginning to fix this. They`ve established a federal task force designed to reunite those families.
I want to show you some footage of one of these reunifications. This actually happened yesterday in Philadelphia. This mother was granted entry to the U.S. under parole by the Biden Reunification Task Force. This is one of the first parents to be separated from her children.
And yesterday, she surprised them. They were reunited. This moment was captured by a documentary crew with Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She is one of three other separated parents traveling here this very week to be reunited with their children, which is perhaps a source of some pride for new Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. He joins me now for his first primetime cable news interview.
It`s great to have you, Secretary. I guess maybe you can tell us a little bit about where things stand on reunification and what you need to do to make sure that no child is left behind.
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Chris, thank you very much for having me on the show. Yesterday was a remarkable day. We were able to reunite sons and daughters with their mothers and their fathers. It was a day of tremendous pride. It was also a day on which we reflect on the commitment and obligation we have to achieve many, many more reunifications.
You so correctly put it when you spoke of the cruelty of the past administration, and we will restore humanity, order, and safety to our country`s immigration system. Yesterday was just the beginning. We have many, many more families to reunite and we will achieve that goal.
HAYES: There are organizations that are working to do some of the legwork, detective workout. Al Otro Lado is one of them that has -- that is sort of putting these people together. Are you doing enough, I guess is the question. I mean, this is -- this is resource-intensive work. You`re granting these parole waivers so that folks that would be otherwise banned from the country can come to reunite. But is there enough resources and work being done to make sure this happens in a -- in a relatively short period of time?
MAYORKAS: President Biden from day one directed us to get it done and do whatever it takes to get it done, to work day and night, seven days a week. It is very, very difficult work. We inherited an absolute mess born of the cruelty of the past administration, and we cannot do it alone.
Groups like Al Otro Lado, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that represents so many of the families and seek to vindicate their rights. We need to do it together with them and together across the entire government. And President Biden directed an all of government effort.
We need to do more. We need to deliver stability and resources to these families so that they can begin the process of healing and restore themselves to the united, close, stable condition that they once enjoyed. We achieved something and it is the trigger of that much more that we need to do. And we will get it done.
HAYES: I want to ask your understanding the story of what happened at the border in terms of both the swell of unaccompanied migrants, those long periods of time in facilities, particularly CBP facilities that kids should not be in for those long periods of time, and now the big reduction, the fact that kids have been moved to more permanent facilities. What happened there? Like, how did that get turned around? What`s the story?
MAYORKAS: Once again, leadership. Leadership by the President of the United States and this Department of Homeland Security in partnership with other agencies and departments in the government executing on a on a plan. I said just a little bit more than 30 days ago when we were confronted with more than 5,000 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody. We know how to do this, we have a plan. We`re executing on the plan, but it`s going to take time.
And it`s going to take time because we inherited a system that was entirely dismantled. We are now a little bit more than 30 days after I spoke of the fact that we had a plan. And we now no longer have more than 5,000 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody. We have just over 500. No longer are unaccompanied children spending an average of 133 hours in a border patrol facility, but rather they`re spending just less than 25 hours.
This is because we have dedicated resources from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management, Administration, asylum and refugee officers in executing our plan, and the Border Patrol`s heroic work on the front lines. This is what it`s all about. This is what we do. It`s hard work. We have addressed the challenge.
The challenge is not behind us. There will be many more challenges ahead of us because that is the nature of a dynamic immigration system that is broken at its core. But we will get it done.
HAYES: You had announced I think it was a few weeks ago, thy release -- a press release you`re beginning investigation into extremism inside the Department of Homeland Security. And that seemed to come a little bit out of nowhere. I wonder if you could just tell us what precipitated that and what that investigation is going to be.
MAYORKAS: Chris, good government precipitated that I identified from the very outset that the most significant terrorism-related threat that we face in our homeland is the threat of domestic violent extremism, an effort to incite or drive to or commit acts of violence born of extreme ideologies and false narratives.
We have an obligation to the Department of Homeland Security to reflect the nation that we want to achieve. And therefore, we must identify and root out any domestic violent extremism within our own ranks. I was inspired by Secretary Austin of the Department of Defense`s stand down to achieve the very same result in his extraordinary organization.
HAYES: There`s been reporting. This has happened in a few -- there was a trial in Arizona of a CBP officer who was accused of assaulting a migrant. There was reporting about a border patrol Facebook group that a bunch of Border Patrol folks had participated in with lots of really ugly, racist comments, racist comments about members of Congress who had come to the border and about migrants.
And you know, I think some people feel that there is a deep institutional cultural problem in CBP. Is that true?
MAYORKAS: I am extraordinarily proud of the men and women of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And Chris, I will not allow the failings of a few, however terrible, to define the service and commitment and honor of so many.
HAYES: You have inherited a system that you say is broken. You basically have southern -- asylum at the southern border doesn`t exist functionally between remain in Mexico, third country agreements, and COVID. How do you open it back up?
MAYORKAS: We open it back up, Chris, in a safe, orderly, and humane way. That`s made especially challenging because we are in fact working through a time of pandemic, which makes our work that much more difficult.
We can do a great deal within the system that we have. But we can by no means do everything that people who are seeking asylum and relief under our laws deserve in such a fundamentally broken immigration system. We really do need Congress to pass immigration reform. It is essential that we do so.
And frankly, there is unanimity around the fact that the immigration system is in fact broken. Now, we have to come together to actually deliver for the American people in our proudest traditions, the solution, and that is legislative reform.
HAYES: Alejandro Mayorkas is the Secretary Department of Homeland Security. Final question for you. Your family came from another country. What does your experience and the experience of your family, how does that inform the work that you`re doing?
MAYORKAS: My family came to the United States to realize the opportunities and freedom that democracy has to offer. We fled the communist takeover of Cuba. I understand the challenges that displaced experience and suffering. I understand what this country means to so many people.
I understand that what I do and what this department does reflects not only who we are but who we want to be as a country. And we are going to achieve so much under the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris. And I`m so proud to be part of this effort.
HAYES: Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, thank you for making time tonight. Sir, come back any time.
That is ALL IN for this evening, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.