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Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, 9/22/21

Guests: Pramila Jayapal, Amy Klobuchar, Scott Gottlieb

Summary

Progressives say they are planning to vote against the infrastructure plan if the budget deal fails. Interview with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on the effort to pass the Biden agenda. Three House Democrats are blocking the bill that would take the prescription drugs down. Interview with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on the Dems opposing lower drug cost.

Transcript

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: The all-out battle for the Biden agenda, the Republicans trying to kill the whole thing, and the Democrats holding one of the most popular parts hostage. Senator Amy Klobuchar and Congressman Pramila Jayapal join me on the fights ahead. Then --

SCOTT GOTTLIEB, FORMER COMMISSIONER, FDA: We`re going to have to convince the public why public health officials should be empowered in a crisis like this.

The Trump`s first FDA Commissioner on what went so wrong on the COVID response and how to get it right the next time. He joins me live tonight. Plus --

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER LAWYER OF DONALD TRUMP: This is real. It is not made up. It is not -- there`s nobody here that engages in fantasies.

HAYES: It wasn`t true and the Trump campaign knew it. The truth about the election lies when ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. The President of the United States met with Democratic legislators today in an attempt to pull off what would honestly be the most incredible act of legislative sorcery since President Lyndon B. Johnson laid out his agenda for a great society in the 1960s, introduced a set of domestic programs do things like eliminate poverty, and racial injustice.

Of course, he did those with large majorities, large majorities Joe Biden doesn`t have. Joe Biden right now is trying to do that holding a series of meetings in the Oval Office with Democratic lawmakers trying to work through the deep divisions within his party, trying to push through not only the $1 trillion physical infrastructure bill that passed the Senate with bipartisan majority, that`s the bipartisan bill, but also the $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate package.

At this moment, we have no idea if we can do it. But here`s how I have come to think about where the Democrats are right now. And if you were confused about where they are right now, you`re not alone. I follow this for a living, and I am lost. I mean, honestly, I am trying very hard to understand.

But here`s the big picture, OK. Twice in my life, Democrats have come in with a new presidential administration control both chambers of Congress, and in both cases, they have gotten their butts kicked in the midterms. It happened with Bill Clinton back in 1994, and Barack Obama in 2010. And most recently, it happened to Republicans too under Donald Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Republicans are in charge, the Democrats are in a daze, and the country is in for a ride in a new direction. It is one of the most radical political shifts of the 20th century.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, MSNBC HOST: The surge of American voters sweep Republicans into office. The GOP takes command of the House.

LESTER HOLT, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: The President is going to have to now work in the framework of a divided government with Democrats riding high after winning the House and Republicans expanding their Senate majority in the midterm elections.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: OK, so under the conditions we currently have, which is partisan polarization, and something called thermostatic public opinion, right, where the public sort of moves against the party that`s in power. If your party has unified governance, like Democrats do, you`re probably going to lose one or both of those houses in the midterms.

That said, electoral politics isn`t binary. Margins, you know, matter. You can take a small hit or a huge hit, a big loss or a small loss. The key thing to understand is that presidential approval rating has a big impact on the midterms.

The Web site 538 writes, "Presidential approval rating in recent years has been a decent indicator of what will happen in the midterms. In the last four, the incumbent president disapproval rating was higher than his approval. And in all four cases, the President`s party lost a sizable block of House seats.

And because of that, Democrats have a very short amount of time to effectively govern. This is the first thing to understand. You got to understand the clocks running on unified governance. It`s not going to last forever. You`re going to get two years and you got one year maybe to legislate. So, the question is, how do you best use that precious time and power that you have? You get one year every 10, let`s say, one at every 10 years.

I would argue the most important thing to do to make the president successful since the midterms end up being a referendum on the president. So, politically, you want the president to be a success. And one way to make the president successful is to pass his legislative agenda. I mean, when you think about all the unpopular things Donald Trump did as president, the Muslim ban, both sides after Charlottesville, extorting the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on the Bidens, his lowest approval rating came in December of his first year in office.

Now, keep in mind what was going on there. Republicans have already failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They were working to pass a big unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. And there was not a ton of public support for the legislation. It even looked like they might not be able to do it. But success matters.

And when Trump signed the bill a few days after that approval low point, his approval went up, and it never got that low again until after he`d been voted out of office. Now, it was not enough to save him from losing the House in the midterms, but the Republicans did gain three seats in the Senate. And 2018 could have been much worse for Republicans if Trump faced that midterm with a 37 percent approval rating.

[20:05:21]

So, we`re entering somewhat similar days for Joe Biden. Very different presidents, very different agendas, but we`re just talking political here. Last month, Biden`s approval rating turned negative for the first time in his presidency. You can see that x right there at the end. And look, there`s a bunch of explanations for that. The Delta variant is killing 2000 people a day, even though I think it`s hard to argue that is purely Joe Biden`s fault. He`s still president in charge.

His approval rating also dropped after he pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, and the country fell to the Taliban basically overnight. But also, long drawn out legislative battles tend not to pull well. And that is exactly what Democrats are trying to pull off now. Every Congressional Democrat and all the different factions, moderates, progressives, whatever they want to call themselves, they all need to understand for both their political self-interest and for any goal of improving the country, failure here is not an option. Everyone has got to get on the same page.

They also need to consider what they want to do with their limited time and power to change people`s lives and the structure of government and deliver in a way that is going to endure after they have left. Because remember, the clock is ticking. Just everyone should just bake that in, OK. Again, we go back to you know, the last unified government, the Affordable Care Act. It did that.

More than 10 years after it passed the number of Americans out and insurance is appreciably lower than when Barack Obama took office. And even after countless Republican attacks and the removal of the mandate, it`s still there surviving time and time again.

And you know what, the Republicans did that with their one big domestic legislative priority. They cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent under Trump. And guess what, it`s going to be hard to jack it back up to 35 where it was four years ago.

These big things tend to stick. That was the priority for Republicans, cut corporate taxes and make it stick, and get people health insurance and make it stick. That`s why the Biden infrastructure and spending bills are so important.

And we said this before in this program, everyone talks about the price tag, but the price tag is meaningless without the context of what it does. One accurate way to think about the plan is that it would very slightly increase the overall federal government spending over the next 10 years in order to revolutionize our quality of life and wellness of our country and planet.

To begin with, as New York Mag`s Eric Levitz points out, even though the spending bills price tag of $3.5 trillion sounds like a lot, it`s spread out over decades. By that metric, the Democrat`s reconciliation package isn`t a $3.5 trillion bill, it`s a $350 billion one.

The reconciliation bill would move the U.S. several steps down the road to social democracy, establishing the monthly child allowance, paid family leave, childcare subsidies, and expansion of public health insurance for middle-income Americans. By the way, it would make ObamaCare cheaper just so people understand, an extension of at home care for the elderly, and universal pre-kindergarten among other things.

The legislation would also completely change the energy profile of the U.S. by imposing new import fees on polluters, give tax breaks for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. Perhaps most crucially, the legislation will put new requirements on electricity providers to use cleaner forms of energy. We`ve talked about that in the program.

So that`s all in this bill that`s out there, right, the $3.5 trillion bill. Right now, we don`t know if it`s going to work. All of this can implode in an epic disaster that`ll be terrible for Americans for the climate, but also for Democrats political future. I mean, the collapse of the Clinton health care bill was the signature trauma for a whole generation of professional Democrats.

On the other hand, this could be the most impressive legislative maneuver in half a century. But if it`s going to be the latter, all the Democrats need to work together. Like Ben Franklin told his fellow revolutionaries, we must all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

That said, right now, the different parts of the Democratic caucus are not just in disagreement, they are in conflict. The moderates in the Democratic caucus had secured this promise of a vote on that bipartisan deal, right, the one that passed the Senate by September 27th. That`s just a few days away. Progressive say, we`re not going to vote for that unless the full Biden agenda reconciliation package has been passed, and that looks very unlikely.

Yesterday, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Progressive Caucus said her caucus will vote down the bipartisan package. And so, today President Biden hosted a series of meetings with all these different players to try to bring everyone together.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington is the chair of the house Progressive Caucus. She met with President Biden today in one of those key meetings and she joins me now. It`s good to have you, Congresswoman. So, we`re -- let`s just for the next five, six minutes we`re going to put a bunch of stuff to the side, the debt ceiling, and the end the funding the Government Bill. Let`s just pretend that doesn`t happen, OK.

We`re just going to talk about the bill back better agenda, and we`re talking about these two pieces of legislation. The bipartisan physical infrastructure bill with some climate stuff but not a ton passed the Senate and the full reconciliation package. What is the Progressive Caucus` posture at this moment on these pieces of legislation?

[20:10:39]

REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL (D-WA): Thanks, Chris, for having me on our posture is that we are ready to deliver both pieces of legislation to the President`s desk for the signature. And I should be clear, the bipartisan infrastructure bill has some good things, some bad things for climate in particular, and then some things that are just missing.

So, there are many in our caucus who don`t really want to vote for that, frankly. But the agreement that we secured is that if we get a reconciliation bill that addresses the things you`ve talked about that would transform Americans lives, paid leave childcare, taking on housing, climate change all of these important issues, then we will, as a complete caucus, we will be voting for the infrastructure bill.

So, what we have said is, we need a little bit more time, if you remember, when the bipartisan infrastructure bill was being negotiated, we kept thinking it was going to be done, and then it wasn`t done, and then took another week, and then another month. We are just saying we need a couple of more weeks to be able to pull everybody together because this is a pre- conference bill. That means we`re not doing something in the House that the Senate is not going to pass. We all have to be on the same page.

HAYES: No, right.

JAYAPAL: So, we`re ready to vote for both things. But we`re not going to vote for just one, and then leave the fate of all of those other things that we talked about in the reconciliation, the Build Back Better bill to - - up to chance. That`s just not going to happen.

HAYES: Right. So, I just want to be clear here. So, I let me just say that the substance of this, like I basically -- not that anyone necessarily cares what I think, but like, I`m with you on the reconciliation package. And I think it should be a package deal. I think there`s a lot of great stuff in this. If I was in the United States Congress, I would vote for it. So, that`s my position, OK.

But on the tactics here, what you`re saying is, it`s a package deal. You don`t want to get left holding the bag, right? Let me just explain the fear. The fear is the moderates jammed leadership to say we want to dead -- date certain, September 27, we`re voting on the bipartisan bill. And the fear is you passed that bipartisan bill, it passed out of the Senate, Joe Biden signs it, and then, oh, are we doing something else? I forgot. Like, that`s your fear, right? That`s what you`re trying to avoid.

JAYAPAL: That`s exactly right. And I want to go back one more step. Because don`t forget that the only reason that the bipartisan bill passed out of the Senate is because that was the commitments that were made to those senators.

HAYES: Correct.

JAYAPAL: And so, today, 11 progressive senators, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others, put out a statement saying let us just be very clear about where we are here. We voted for the bipartisan bill only, only, only because we were told and committed to that the two would move together. So, we support the Progressive Caucus in the House making sure that we now deliver on that promise, because otherwise, you know what it`s like, Chris. It`s done, right? We`re at the end of September. Nothing gets done past a certain date in this year. And certainly, nothing gets done in next year`s election.

HAYES: No, I don`t think you`re irrational to worry about basically getting screwed here. But here`s, here`s the two issues as I see it. No, seriously. One is, I feel -- like, are you -- there`s 271 Democrats, I think, total between both houses, something like that, somewhere in that ballpark. And you basically need 268 to agree, and you need all 50 senators, right?

So, I guess my thing is, like, are you talking to mansion directly? Are you talking to Sinema? Because this kind of gamesmanship that`s happening through leadership or through Biden, it`s like, y`all got to get on the same page, or none of this is happening. And I`m just not clear that that`s -- that like, you`re having those conversations.

JAYAPAL: Yes, I mean, the conversations were happening between House leadership, Senate leadership, and the White House. So, that`s the pre- conferencing that`s been going on. I am happy to sit down with Senator Manchin or anybody else in the Senate.

We obviously work very closely with our counterparts Bernie, Elizabeth, Jeff Merkley, others in the Senate. And I work very closely to meet -- well I make sure that I am talking to -- let`s put it that way -- with my more conservative Democrat friends in the House. That`s been my role is keep the Progressive Caucus together, make sure I understand where we all are, leverage our power to get as much as we possibly can get because that`s what we said we would deliver to the American people.

[20:15:05]

And then also, you know, I`ve spoken many times to Josh Gottheimer, to others. But I will just say, Chris, that there is a very small group of people. And I just would want to say that there are many frontliners in the most vulnerable districts across the country, people that actually would call themselves moderate, and yet they want the full -- they are ready to vote on both bills, they are ready to vote on even -- I mean, a bill that is the $3.5 trillion with the things that we`ve already put in there.

HAYES: Yes.

JAYAPAL: So, I just want to be clear that these small -- this very small group of people are not representative of, you know, really moderate Democrats in the toughest district. So, that`s why I like to say, you know, I don`t think you can say that the moderates are against this. That`s not what`s going on here. We have the vast majority of the Democratic caucus on board with getting these bills done.

HAYES: No, that`s -- you`re correct about that, as a descriptive matter. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal who has a very difficult task, and everyone there has a difficult task, and we`ll keep checking in with you. Thank you very much.

JAYAPAL: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Sahil Kapur is NBC News National Political Reporter who has been covering all the moving pieces in Congress in real time, and he joins me now. I was going to ask one more question of the Congresswoman and -- but we had to let her go, so I`m going to ask you. Here`s the problem as I see it for the progressives, is that they care more than the Joe Manchins the world.

So, the idea is like, well, if we don`t get this full package, then we`re not going to get the bipartisan bill. And I think a lot of people are like, well, OK, fine, then we pass nothing. Like, it`s not clear to me that that`s a credible threat to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

SAHIL KAPUR, NBC NEWS NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: Chris, I think what progressives are trying to do is not tank the infrastructure bill, but to reorder this power dynamic within the Democratic Party where, especially in previous House Democratic majorities, the progressives tend to get rolled at the end of the day.

HAYES: Yes.

KAPUR: You and I both covered the ACA. You know, the progressives wanted bigger subsidies, they wanted the public option. They didn`t get those, they had to choke it down and deal with some anti-abortion language at the end of it. What Pramila Jayapal, your previous guests, and a bunch of other progressives are trying to do now is to reorder that dynamic flex the power of progressive. They genuinely believe that they have the party based on their side, the country on their side, and that they think that they don`t get these transformational programs now, when are they ever going to have a chance?

So, it is a gamble. It is no doubt a gamble, this could all go down in flames. And this could be a massive, massive error strategically if that happens. But they think it`s worth --they think it`s worth the gamble and trying to get these major programs on health care, universal pre-k, climate change done, Chris.

HAYES: Let me just say this. They were right about increasing the subsidies. The people that cut the subsidies back in the ACA fight are wrong. And the bill would have been more popular if everyone listened to the progressives. And that has been borne out I think over time. Sahil Kapur, thank you so much.

If the best way for Democrats to survive the midterms is to keep President Biden`s approval ratings up, you would make a lot of sense to help pass popular legislation. So, do what -- do what the people put you in office wants you to do. So why are a handful of Democrats threatening to sink one of the most popular agenda items yet? I`ll explain right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:20:00]

HAYES: After last year`s elections, some moderate Democrats were angry with the progressive wing of their party. Democrats kept the majority in the House, you might remember, but they had a net loss of 10 seats. And that came a little bit of a surprise. There`s some hand-wringing afterwards. And some folks in the House Democratic caucus thought that the messaging on police and defunding the police was to blame.

Now, to be clear, no one introduced legislation to defund the police. So, there weren`t any like votes on the record. It was a slogan, a call, a demand that was being made in the streets by activists and protesters and other people in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer and amidst this once in a generation protest movement.

Now, it`s true that the slogan itself is not very popular when you poll it. A poll earlier this year found that just 18 percent of Americans support the movement known as Defund the Police. Even among Democrats, just 34 percent support it. So, the people is saying, well, that`s not a popular slogan, they`re not wrong.

And without taking a position here one way or the other on the substance of it, let`s stipulate that there are a lot of things that might be good policy that might also be unpopular. And then there are some things that are good policy that really are popular and part of politics, not all of it, but part of it is for politicians to sort of figure out how to bring those two things together, right, to find stuff that`s both popular and good.

Take the most popular policy right now the Democrats` agenda. According to data scientists David Shore, a guy who worked on Obama`s reelection campaign and regularly consults with progressive groups, the most popular policy is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. It is the number one policy of 194 that he has tested this year. And it is in the multi-trillion dollar bill the Democrats are proposing, the big reconciliation package with the climate stuff and the safety net stuff.

But three House Democrats, Scott Peters of California, Kathleen Rice of New York, and Kurt Schrader of Oregon are threatening to kill it. Those three members have received a combined $1.6 million in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry. And get this. They`re not going to face a backlash for this move. All three are in safe Democratic seats, no skin off their nose. Opposing this is way less popular than any protest or slogan, and it`s just nuts.

Senator Amy Klobuchar is a Democrat in Minnesota. Earlier this year, she reintroduced legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. And she joins me now. You know, Senator, I think -- I think of you both based on your, you know, official political science voting score, and the campaign that you ran for president in the primary is as sort of in the center of the Democratic Caucus if you`re, you know, mapping it ideologically.

What do you say to people who are opposing this provision to allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies?

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): Well, first, let`s get to the facts. We have 46 million seniors that would benefit from this, and actually the entire country would benefit. Right now, there`s no other country that pays more for prescription drugs and we do, yet it is our taxpayers that have funded so much of this research and they should be sharing in the success of these companies.

[20:25:09]

And so, that is my argument. There is a ban in legislation. A lot of people don`t see why this is so ridiculous. A ban on negotiating for Medicare to negotiate cheaper drug prices on behalf of the seniors of this country. That is simply what we are trying to change.

And I would note, this is not really a liberal, moderate divide. Yes, there are a few members that we hope we`re going to be able to work with to get them to the right place here. But for the most part, liberal Democrats, moderate Democrats, conservative Democrats, and yes, over 85 percent of Republicans in this country actually support Medicare negotiation for prices for seniors. Why? 20 percent of seniors are actually not taking drugs they should take because they`re too expensive. And we continue to see escalation of prices that simply feeds the profits of big pharma.

HAYES: Yes. In terms of the three members and the opposition. I mean, pharma, of course, is dead set against this. And they`re lobbying very hard. And one of the things that ends up happening, and you know this very well, and I`ve covered this on Capitol Hill is people be like, oh, no, no, we`re not against that. We just have our own bill. It`s a little different, because everyone wants this.

And that`s what`s happening here. I mean, how do you -- how do you deal with that sort of, I think, somewhat disingenuous argument?

KLOBUCHAR: We have bills that have been vetted that some of these people have actually voted for in the past. And we know that it will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars to help people in this country and bring costs down. We know that it`s going to save lives. They know that. And people can negotiate things. Sure.

And I do know that President Biden in his State of the Union, I was sitting right up there in the front row, he made this one of the centerpieces of his agenda for bringing cost down for families. I know it was genuine. And so, right now, a number of these members are in meeting with him through the day, through tomorrow. And I believe we`re going to get this done.

Because I just think enough is enough. Failure is not an option here. We have to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for the people of this country. Symbicort up nearly 50 percent. Lyrica, that nerve pain drug up nearly 50 percent in just the last five years. Seniors saving insulin drops in a vial because they can`t afford it, trying to ration their drugs. This shouldn`t be happening in the United States of America where we funded the vast majority of this research.

HAYES: One thing that`s striking about this debate is I`ve been covering this for 15 years, I want to say. I mean, I can`t believe it hasn`t happened yet. And the reason it hasn`t happened yet is basically the pharmaceutical companies don`t want it to happen. I can`t come up with another reason. Am I wrong?

KLOBUCHAR: You look at the numbers. This isn`t one of those where one side says one side says. When you look at the numbers of where people are on this, they don`t buy these bogus counter arguments. They know that there`s actually Congressional Budget Office score. They may not know this, but they`re actually shows that this would not reduce new drugs coming out, or innovation, or jobs.

People intuitively understand that we are paying too much for these drugs, and that it`s going to the coffers of the drug companies. So, this is long overdue. It should have been included in the Affordable Care Act. It was too hard to get the votes. Now is the time. We have to stop admiring this problem and tweeting about it and actually do something about it. And we have a unique opportunity to do that.

HAYES: All right, Senator Amy Klobuchar, thank you so much for your time tonight.

KLOBUCHAR: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: As the White House fights to enact the President`s agenda which could create real substantive improvements for the lives of Americans, it`s worth looking back at the fight over the signature legislation from the last time, the Last time a Democrat was in the White House, and that is of course, the Affordable Care Act.

Jonathan Cohen is one of the most dogged reporters of the ACA. He joined me on my podcast this week to talk about the life and the near-death and the near-death again of law and what its fate is now. That episode is out wherever you get your podcasts.

Still to come, proof the Trump campaign knew the Dominion conspiracy theories were all a bunch of nonsense. So, why did they let Rudy Giuliani keep pushing them? That`s next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:30:00]

HAYES: Just over two weeks after the 2020 election on November 19, Donald Trump`s lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani held an absolutely ridiculous press conference, one for the ages. It was ridiculous for a number of reasons, including the fact that we`ll all remember for the rest of our lives that Rudy Giuliani was sweating profusely with some kind of undetermined dye running down his face. But it wasn`t just that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNEY POWELL, TRUMP LAYER: The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software, and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Wait, what? That was Trump`s lawyer Sidney Powell, who not only pushed the big lie the election was rigged but also peddled wild conspiracy theories like that, like Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator who had been dead for seven years meddled in the election from beyond the grave via some software, which is obviously outlandish, also not true.

I mean, we now know thanks to a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign that while they were pushing those conspiracy theories, members inside the Trump campaign knew they were a lie. This is an internal memo assembled by Trump campaign staffers on November 14, that would be five before, and look on the very first page. Dominion has no direct ties to Venezuela. It says, has not direct ties but I don`t think they really proofread this document. They don`t do that over there.

[20:35:14]

Now, that memo was put together, like I said, five days before Sidney Powell went on TV claiming otherwise. This is just the latest string of information we`re learning about how the Trump campaign was willing to lie, and do anything and everything necessary to claim the election was rigged, even though they knew it wasn`t.

Barbara McQuade as a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and she joins me now. I don`t think it matters that much. But what`s interesting to me about this memo is I do think there`s always been a question of like, lying or diluted, lying or diluted? Like, did they -- did they buy their own nonsense here? Do they really -- were they so far gone that they, you know, they thought that goes to Hugo Chavez was inside the machines changing the vote counts or were they just lying? This is definitely pretty good evidence in the lying column.

BARBARA MCQUADE, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: I agree, Chris. And I think there`s some real significance to the fact that there is a proof of a lie. Because until now, there always been a question that when Donald Trump was pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to find 11,000 votes, or pushing acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen to just say the election was corrupt, that he really believe it.

And now, I think we have evidence that he did not. That he knew it was fraudulent, and yet he persisted in these claims that the election was fixed and corrupt and rigged. And so, this could be a piece of evidence that investigators could use, whether it`s the January 6 committee, or prosecutors in Georgia, or maybe even at the Department of Justice can use to show that there was some effort to commit voter fraud here.

HAYES: Yeah, and this comes out of a defamation lawsuit, which I think they`ve they`re going to have their hands full on. We should also say that what`s also striking about this is the reason they were able to compile this, and I don`t think these were like high-level campaign staffers compiling this. The reason they were able to compile it was the lies they were saying were so consistent over time. They kept hitting the same points, and so someone says, can we pull together whether this is true or not? And so, here`s Giuliani at the infamous presser talking -- sort of offering one of these lies. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: You should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany, and in Spain, by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro. Did you ever believe that was true?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: I didn`t, because it`s not. And you can read about that in the memo that says, however, the only apparent evidence that votes are being counted in Spain was that Smartmatic is owned by a Spanish person. So, they anticipated the talking points. This is again, this is five days before they go out and say this stuff.

MCQUADE: Yes, you know, as Corey Lewandowski made very clear that there is no law against lying to the public and saying things on television or in public remarks. But there is a penalty for telling lies when it happens in court. And we have seen that happen here in Michigan and some other states where Sidney Powell and others have filed lawsuits on the basis of these kinds of lies.

And in some of these lawsuits, they`ve actually been sanctioned. Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from the practice of law based on some of these things. And so, I think that we have not heard the end of the story on accountability. And this memo, I think, is a really important piece of evidence that shows knowledge and intent to defraud.

HAYES: What`s the -- you know, these companies have sued for defamation. And, you know, I know libel and slander well and -- because you have to as a reporter. What is the standard in defamation?

MCQUADE: Well, when it comes to matters of public officials or public figures, and I suppose Dominion may qualify for that because of its role in the election, that the standard is the higher standard of actual malice, which means either that you knew that the claim was false or that you acted with reckless disregard as to whether it was false.

And so, you know, here, I would think in a lawsuit, they`d have to show what was their basis for believing this to be true. And this memo strikes me as a real smoking gun to show that either they knew it was false or they at least acted with reckless disregard as to whether it was true.

And so, it seems that by whatever standard, this is going to be a very important piece of evidence in that defamation lawsuit.

HAYES: All right, Barbara McQuade, thank you very much.

MCQUADE: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Don`t go anywhere. Scott Gottlieb spent nearly two years as the head of the FDA under Donald Trump. He`s here tonight to shed light on the country`s failed COVID response and how we can prepare for the next pandemic ahead.

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HAYES: The Trump presidency was full of these surreal moments that would sort of come and go and then you forget him. Like, two years ago this month when the then-president clumsily attempted to justify his proposed ban on flavored e-cigarettes by citing First Lady Melania Trump`s concern about their teenage son, Barron.

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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Vaping has become a very big business as I understand it. We can`t have our youth be so affected and I`m hearing it. And that`s how the First Lady got involved. She`s we got a son -- together. That is a beautiful young man and she feels very, very strongly about it.

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HAYES: She`s got a so, dot, dot, dot, together. Nice save, dad. That was September 2019. But the seed of that vaping ban was planted much earlier. The year before, the then-commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Dr. Scott Gottlieb declared youth vaping an epidemic. Flavored vape cartridges were causing a surge in teenagers becoming addicted to nicotine.

Gottlieb said at the time, "teenagers are becoming regular users. No one could look at the data and say there`s no problem. He demanded the vape companies move to curb use among children. He took steps to regulate how easily teens could access the highly addictive products.

So, on the one hand, Scott Gottlieb perfectly fit the mold of a Trump appointee. He was a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, a venture capitalist who has strong ties to big pharma. On the other hand, this kind of aggressive regulatory action was not something we saw a lot of under Trump. I mean, Gottlieb was proposing restrictions on the big business in the name of public health.

Predictably, he faced some serious pushback from special interest groups. In April 2019, Scott Gottlieb resigned apparently on good terms, ultimately leaving the flavored vape issue unsettled. Five months later, President Trump went on to propose a ban on flavored vapes, only to soften his position when his campaign manager Brad Parscale found polling that indicated the band would hurt Trump with his vape-loving base.

Some of those people protested the White House and rallies with signs reading. I vape, I vote. So, the President waffled and the FDA ended up implementing a watered down version of the proposal. But by that time, Scott Gottlieb was long gone from the administration, which in hindsight, was a shame.

Gottlieb came to be viewed as a pretty effective FDA Commissioner before he left office. And when COVID hit a year later, he became something of a voice of reason in the media. I mean, here was this conservative guy, Trump administration official who took the pandemic seriously and was warning loudly and persistently and correctly about the caste catastrophe that was unfolding. But instead of offering that advice directly to the president from inside the administration, he was you know, pushing them from the outside because he was outside of it.

I`ll talk to Dr. Scott Copley about this time -- his time in and out of the Trump ministration next.

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HAYES: Early last year, when the third of COVID was just starting to emerge, there was a small set of voices that demonstrated vision and judgment and about the course of the pandemic that I began to really rely on them. One of them somewhat surprising was a former member of the Trump administration, who before the U.S. recorded its very first COVID death, co-wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal an opinion piece warning that we must act now to prevent an American epidemic.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb served for nearly two years as Trump`s Food and Drug Administration Commissioner. He left in 2019. And he`s been one of those rare conservatives who`s remained sensible, clear-eyed, and data driven about the pandemic.

Now, he has a new book out titled Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us And How We Can Defeat The Next Pandemic, where he provides new details about what went wrong, particularly at the agency level and made the country so vulnerable to this novel Coronavirus.

And Scott Gottlieb, former FDA Commissioner, current Pfizer board member joins me now. It`s good to have you, Doctor. I`ve sort of followed your work and have benefited from it. So, thanks for coming on the program. I want to ask what your -- what your first moment -- what was your first stomach drop moment in 2019 or 2020 about this?

GOTTLIEB: Yes, I remember it vividly. It was Martin Luther King Day weekend and the reporting overnight had gone from 50 cases that were being reported in Wuhan of severe pneumonia to 200. And all the cases that were being reported were people who are hospitalized with very severe conditions.

And so, whenever you see that you worry that it`s just -- it`s just the tip of the iceberg, that if 200 people are hospitalized with very severe pneumonia, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people with milder symptoms who are going unreported. Because it`s unusual to see respiratory pathogen that just causes severe pneumonia.

So, I made a phone call that day to Joe Grogan, the head of the Domestic Policy Council in the White House to express my concerns, I talked about this in the book, and urged him to reach out to the Department of Health and Human Services to get a coordinated briefing together between FDA and CDC because I knew it was going to be important that the different agencies in HHS start to coordinate a response.

He actually followed up on that. He asked for that briefing that day. And that actually is what triggered a phone call between the secretary that day and the President. It was the first time that the Secretary briefed the President. He called him while he was on the golf course to brief them for the first time on the -- on the unfolding situation in Wuhan.

I believe that the phone call that Grogan had made to the department is what triggered that subsequent phone call.

HAYES: You write in the book about that key period late February. And for me, the key day is the Nancy Messonnier`s briefing where she says I`ll never forget it coming in here. I`ve talked to my principal about remote school and I`m thinking, you talk to the principal about remote school. This is you know, late February.

You write about the fallout. Trump was upset with the CDC briefing in February, warning the community spread was all but inevitable. The federal health officials stopped announcing new COVID mitigation measures for full two weeks. If the mere hint of mitigation prompted markets to swoon, some of the White House political team argued, it could be utter carnage if they actually implemented the measures Messonnier had discussed. It prompted the White House to freeze further action for full two weeks while they consider their options. How costly was that?

GOTTLIEB: Yet people administration refer to it as the lost two weeks. I was talking to people over the time period. That`s the President put the vice president in charge of the response at that point, but they did a sort of reassessment of where they were and it wasn`t until another two weeks that they started to take more aggressive actions.

It was very costly. This was at the point when the epidemic really was exploding inside the U.S. and we just didn`t know it. The other component of that Messonnier briefing, she said that community spread was all but inevitable. But that same briefing which got less attention, she said there was no community spread at this time, which we now know wasn`t true. There, in fact, was a lot of community spread of the virus already underway.

HAYES: Part of that was the fact that the testing was broken from the beginning. And this is a real institutional failure. You know, I mean, there`s layers to the failure that happened here. But CDC really botched the testing. I mean, they basically said, we`re going to issue our own tests, and then those tests didn`t work. What -- how do you understand that failure why it happened?

GOTTLIEB: Yes, it wasn`t just the failure of the CDC to be able to design to deploy their own test. The idea was that they were going to design a test. They had access to the virus samples. So, they would design a test. They would manufacture it as small scale and deploy to the public health labs. There`s 100 public health labs in this country, each capable of doing about 100 tests a day. So, that`s 10,000 tests a day. That`s nowhere near what we needed.

What needed to happen was we needed to get the commercial manufacturers engaged right from the outset. Someone in early January inside the administration needed to say that we needed more testing and he had to get the large scale manufacturers in the game. The CDC was not going to be able to fill the testing void.

[20:55:30]

HAYES: This is a question that doesn`t directly bear on your considerable expertise in a variety of areas but I`m going to ask it. We`re approaching 700,000 Americans that we`ve lost to this thing. We`re losing $2,000 -- 2000 human lives a day. Are you surprised that it hasn`t done more to shake up our politics, that it hasn`t done more to overcome some the vaccine resistance and hesitancy we`ve seen and some of the rhetoric we`ve seen about masking and mitigation measures?

GOTTLIEB: I think we`ve become somewhat anesthetized to the death and disease, quite frankly, because it`s grown slowly over time. You know, we had 2000 deaths a day. A year ago, it would have been a far greater tragedy in the minds of many people than it is right now because we`ve become more complacent to the risk. So, that is deeply unfortunate.

I will say from the standpoint of the achievement of getting people vaccinated, now fully 77 percent of all adults over the age of 18 have had at least one dose of vaccine. Most of them will complete this series. That`s a remarkable achievement. I think the Biden administration has done an outstanding job rolling out this vaccine.

We`ve gotten a lot of adults vaccinate. We still need to do more. I think we need to get to 80, 85 percent. But 77 percent is a remarkable achievement over this time period.

HAYES: Can you imagine a threshold in which we`re not having a brutal winter?

GOTTLIEB: Yes, I can`t. I think on the back end of this Delta wave, we`re going to have so much immunity in the population, either from vaccination or from people who acquire immunity that we`re unlikely to see a very dense wave of infection this fall late fall and winter unless something unusual happens, we get a new variant that pierces the immunity offered by vaccination.

I think on the back end of this delta wave, this may be our last major surge of Coronavirus before we settle into a more seasonal endemic pattern with this virus.

HAYES: From your lips to God`s ears. Pfizer is one of the manufacturers of the vaccine, obviously. And one of the things that -- one of the fears right now is that the longer this transmit around the world, the longer we`re -- the likelihood of new variants as well as the sort of humanitarian tragedy.

Pfizer has opposed coming out in various ways of waiving intellectual property regulations to make the vaccine manufacturable in other countries. Why shouldn`t it be the case at this point Pfizer, Moderna, other drug companies who made billions of dollars and have produced a very good product, to be clear, that is essentially open-sourced so that the world can produce it at the lowest possible marginal cost to get as many people vaccinated as possible?

GOTTLIEB: Now, look, the patents around the mRNA technology are owned by many different companies and across license. A lot of them are actually owned by Japanese firms. The key is trying to make supply available. Pfizer has made a billion doses available to low-income countries, has moved facilities into South Africa, has partner with a facility in South Africa to do fill finishing in that continent.

I think that`s really going to be the solution trying to get manufacturing stood up in other parts of the world, and get supply into other parts of the world. Right now, if you look at the supply over the next 12 months, we may have between 10 and 15 billion doses of vaccine available over the next 12 months. The real issue is going to become distribution, getting the resources on the ground to deliver vaccine in very austere settings. I think that`s where the WHO and other entities need to start to focus their attention because the supply is going to be there.

HAYES: Are we better prepared now for a future pandemic? Obviously, SARS happened in the early part of the century. We`re now dealing with COVID. It seems to me all but certain night -- I think a lot of people think this now that I will see another one of these in my lifetime. Are we better prepared now?

GOTTLIEB: Only in so far as we recognize our vulnerabilities. We haven`t started to address them. We have systemic weaknesses in the structure of our responses country. That made us excessively vulnerable to this pandemic. We haven`t fixed those. We don`t have an operational agency capable of mounting a national level of response. We don`t have an agency capable of collecting and analyzing information and offering guidance in a real-time fashion to inform real-time policymaking.

We relied on the CDC to do that. The CDC does many things very well. But they can`t respond to a fast-moving crisis. And I think we wrongly assumed that they had that capability. They don`t. We`re going to need to build it into that agency. We can`t build a new agency. We`re going to need to reform and build out the CDC to handle this crisis.

HAYES: I think that`s very astute and on the money. Scott Gottlieb whose new book uncontrolled spread is out now. Thanks for making time tonight.

GOTTLIEB: Thanks a lot.

HAYES: That is ALL IN on this Wednesday night. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Good evening, Chris. Thanks, my friend. Much appreciated. And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Happy to have you here.