Summary
Trump co-author Tony Schwartz speaks out. Hunter Biden announces that his taxes have been under federal investigation. Multiple states file a lawsuit to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Transcript
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: In the meantime, "THE BEAT WITH ARI MELBER" starts right now.
Hi, Ari.
ARI MELBER, MSNBC HOST: Hi.
Real quick, because there's a lot of news, but I have to express my jealousy for your Leslie Jones chat. We want her in our-depth chart. We don't have her yet. I'm going to be watching your interview, because she is -- I will say she is one of the best live news commentators out there on Twitter and elsewhere.
N. WALLACE: No. Well, and she watches your show all the time.
And some of her funniest -- I mean, she is everything right now. She is so of the moment. She's doing what we're all doing. She's at home watching political news. And her love for Steve Kornacki is what made me really fall hook, line and sinker for her.
MELBER: I think she gets Kornacki at a deep level.
(LAUGHTER)
MELBER: We will be watching. Please tell her, if you can, on air or off, tell her I said hi.
N. WALLACE: Done.
MELBER: Thanks, Nicolle.
And welcome to THE BEAT. I am Ari Melber.
And although there are pockets of light there, some fun things, like I was just discussing with Nicolle, I can tell you right now, buckle up, because we're tracking several stories on a very significant news night.
You may already know a little bit of what I'm talking about, states locking in Donald Trump's loss, with new concerns rising over political violence, and some major news involving the Trump DOJ investigating a member of the Biden family, brand-new. Honestly, this is a lot.
And it is busier than the typical December in a presidential transition. I can tell you that. But this has not been a typical year.
Now, we have it all covered for you tonight, beginning with the top story, all 50 states certifying election results, locking in president-elect Biden's victory.
Now, this is the legal deadline that we have been reporting on, with Wisconsin today the final state to certify. Now, that's the reality tonight. That is the context for some of the increasingly extreme reactions by President Trump and many Republican officials.
We have a string of legal setbacks, which is now being increasingly met with anti-democratic and downright authoritarian calls to end American democracy, to overthrow these now certified results.
Now, this is a newsroom. We're journalists around here. We do not use the word authoritarian lightly. But we also have to be factual about what is being advocated, as there are these increasingly direct, anti-democratic and menacing pieces of rhetoric and plotting and scheming that is driving real-world results.
Take an official in the very red state of Idaho, who abruptly ended a virtual public hearing his protesters literally surrounded her hall. Here's that scene.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DIANA LACHIONDO, ADA COUNTY, IDAHO COMMISSIONER: Can I interrupt you for just a moment?
My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now, and there are protesters banging outside the door, OK? I'm going to go home and make sure is OK. So I will reconnect with you when I get there.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Any human being can relate to what that person is going through, to what that might feel like.
But this is not an isolated incident. This is not one piece of footage in one part of the country. It's fast becoming a broader pattern.
"The New York Times" reporting Trump's rhetoric accelerating among his most fervent allies, leading to -- quote -- "dangerous conduct and incidents."
A Republican official in Pennsylvania says, if she told the truth about Trump's invalid election claims -- quote -- "I would get my house bombed tonight."
A Democrat there noting the threats are getting more angry and more frequent, that this is accelerating in documentable ways.
Now, free speech, even very vile speech, is, of course, protected by the Constitution. But storming people's yards, menacing their children, pushing physical threats in a direct way, well, that's not legally protected speech, nor is a plot to overturn an election.
Now, some Trump supporters outing the location of a Wisconsin election official's home online. The pattern continues with officials in Michigan warning -- and, remember, that's, of course, where Trump met Republicans there, asking them to steal the race. Well, people there are warning about this ongoing escalating campaign of threatening and racist messages.
This is a state where, of course, armed protesters also surrounded the top election official's home. It's also a place where others were indicted for a very direct, allegedly violent plot to kidnap top state officials, several of them Democrats.
So, by these metrics, some of this is getting worse than even last week's news of Republicans in Congress simply refusing verbally to acknowledge president-elect Biden's victory.
We are seeing this documented acceleration, from Donald Trump denying the results, to demanding they be overturned, to taking explicit actions in multiple states trying to get them overturned -- that's a potential election crime, depending on the details -- to then the laundering of these related lies by many in right-wing media, the cocooning, as I mentioned, by that silence or direct support from top Republican leaders.
It brings our nation to today's sorry scene. Parts of the Republican Party are going even further. Take the entire Republican Party leadership for the state of Arizona, which posted a call for supporters to live for nothing and die for something as a choice -- you see there, this was posted on Twitter -- apparent call to die in the name of overriding democracy.
This proved too much even for those who posted it. Although, as you can see, it's a verified post from the Republican Party there, they have since taken down the message.
All of this comes together as the news tonight. But it's not exactly new. Many have been warning against precisely this problem over the last several weeks, from independent experts, to Trump's critics, to a few people in his own party, like remember this Georgia elections official?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GABRIEL STERLING, GEORGIA VOTING SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER: Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.
Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed, and it's not right.
Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions.
And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: That's worth letting sink in.
Let me you this. As citizens, let's just hope those warnings don't prove any more prescient than they already are.
As a journalist, I could just tell you, the reporting tonight reinforces a point about American democracy in this trying year of 2020. Very little changes direction all by itself. There's no automatic reason to assume 2021 will be so different than 2020, or that this steady march of lies and increasingly autocratic attacks on our democracy will simply fade out based on one election or even one important transfer of power.
I want to bring in our experts tonight. Michael Steele's a former RNC chair who supported Joe Biden in the campaign, and "The New York Times"' Michelle Goldberg.
Michael, it doesn't feel like it's getting better right now. Your thoughts?
MICHAEL STEELE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: It's not. And it's not for a very good reason.
It's because the leadership of the party, along with certainly the president of the United States, continue to allow to fester out there this notion that this election was rigged, this idea that there were criminal acts heaped upon Donald Trump and his campaign, and that, quite frankly, the election was stolen from him.
Donald Trump telegraphed this back in August, when he indicated that, if I lose, it has to be rigged, because we know everybody in the country is voting for me.
Well, duh, they're not. And the reality of it is, they now are having to give cover and license to this. You have got election officials, you have got people inside the political apparatus who feel threatened by the very process that we're going through, because they don't know, Ari, how someone's going to interpret Donald Trump's crazy rantings.
They're just not sure whether or not a mob is going to show up at their home, as they have in some cases, and what that turns into. So, what Trump is trying to do is to create a suppressive chilling effect on the process because he's not getting his way. And he wants to dumb it down and gum it up and create perceptions and, in some cases, realities around potential violence, that, folks just go, OK, OK, you win, we back away from it.
But our republic is stronger than Donald Trump. And, on January 20, Joe Biden will be -- I repeat -- will be the next president of the United States, and he will be certified as such by the Electoral College next Monday, Mr. Trump.
MELBER: Michelle?
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: I'd like to think that some of these Republicans are going along with Trump's seditious attempt to -- I mean, even a failed and farcical coup attempt is still a coup attempt.
And that is what Donald Trump is trying to do. He was trying to illegally stay in power. He is asking members of state legislatures, some of whom are ready to go along -- not enough, thank God -- to overturn the will of their state's electors.
And I would like to think that more Republicans aren't speaking out against him because they're afraid, but I think it's entirely possible that there are plenty of Republicans who have lost faith in democracy, who are not interested in a democracy that is -- that a true democracy would consign Republicans to a permanent minority party.
Democrats at this point have won seven out of the last eight elections in the popular vote. The Republicans are a minority party, and they can only enforce -- they can only be in power through increasing minority rule, through disenfranchising the majority of the country.
If you -- if they had to face the majority of the country, they would be afraid to go along with asking the Supreme Court to throw out all of the votes in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. But they're not.
And so this is a symptom of a much bigger crisis of democracy in America that, frankly, is not going to be over when Donald Trump finally leaves on January 20.
MELBER: Yes, I think you both are speaking soberly and clearly about it, particularly why what has been fomented and arguably normalized for part of the country then becomes a new baseline.
We want to add to that with some reporting. Both our panelists today.
But if you look at what FOX News, which used to be sort of the right edge of this, and Newsmax are doing, "The Washington Post" reports -- quote -- "Surreality is being presented as a valid alternative contrast to the reality, which echoes Donald Trump."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Getting warmer. These lawsuits are coming together. There are a lot of fake news headlines out there right now.
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS: The lawsuit from Texas is very serious legal challenge. At the very least, it has a right to be heard.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It was a rigged election. You look at the different states, the election was totally rigged.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Michael, something that I have reminded folks over these past few years is, Donald Trump attacks the free and independent press so much because it matters, not because it's just some side commentary.
And particularly, although we have a digital revolution going on that's pretty interesting, particularly what's beamed into people's homes on TV, at least for some amount of time longer, matters. It certainly matters to Donald Trump.
What do you think about the factual side of this? I'm not talking about whether people on FOX News want to give very conservative views, which they absolutely should do, whatever they think. I'm talking about what I just showed, which is on the right-wing alternatives to FOX giving people false information and a misunderstanding of what happened in the race, so that some of these people -- and this is a subtle point.
Some people, not the ones advocating violence, but some others may have the mistaken belief that they are the ones having the election stolen from them and what that does to civil society, Michael.
STEELE: Yes, Ari, you touch on a number of very gnarly points there, because, in many respects, we have to -- we have to unpack this differently.
We really have to almost sort of step back from it and sort of go, so why would -- the network stuff aside for a moment.
But why would a U.S. senator or a congressman or a state legislator, what is it they're getting out of this? What has triggered in their thinking and their understanding, people of reason, people who have access to facts, people who have access to reports from "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post," as well as a lot of other media outlets, still conclude that this election was rigged?
I mean, it goes beyond some fascination with Donald Trump. It goes beyond, oh, geez, I want to get a nice tweet from the guy. There's got to be something else underneath this, which we haven't quite put our finger on.
You were absolutely right in your opening point that Trump knows this, and has systematically abused it to get his way, to prick at wounds and scabs, but to also create new ones, that the press has been spending a lot of time trying to follow the story, when, in fact, they were the story, when, in fact, what Donald Trump was doing was a very different story from what they were following.
So, I think, when this is -- when we get past this year, because 2020 has been a bear.
(LAUGHTER)
STEELE: I will be polite because it's 6:00. It's been a bear.
(CROSSTALK)
STEELE: We're not doing late-night Michael yet.
But it's been -- but it is something I think that's going to require all of us to sort of step back and go, Senator, tell me exactly what it was you were thinking when you saw children in cages and you said nothing. And what were you thinking when you -- when you heard the president say that, oh, yes, I won in the battleground states, and you're looking, as a senator from a battleground state, at the numbers and the voters in your state who voted, and you said nothing?
MELBER: Right.
And I'm running over on time.
I want to get Michelle in, though, to say, can you speak to us, in closing, about the difference here between exhaustion, which Michael alluded to, and people may understandably feel, and they said, well, I went out and voted, or I did what I got to do, and vigilance, which is always a part of the democratic project?
GOLDBERG: Well, and I think that you have Democratic elites who don't want people to panic, right? They don't want to make it seem as if what Donald Trump is proposing is a live option.
And so the strategy has been to sort of laugh at Donald Trump. And that might work up to a point. But I think there needs to be much stronger pushback, including possible disbarment for some of the lawyers bringing these cases that are full of blatant untruths, right?
This is -- even a failed and ridiculous attack on our democracy is still an attack on our democracy. And I think what you're seeing is that a right wing that has created an alternative reality for people to live in for many, many years -- I mean, I wrote a book about this in 2006 -- is now realizing that they can't control it anymore, right, that their Frankenstein monster is no longer under their authority.
MELBER: Yes, I think that's very well put.
And if -- quote -- "voter fraud," which is rare, is the crime of a single elicit vote, how does America, after January 20, want to have a reckoning for those who stood up on the record and tried to steal hundreds of thousands of votes?
That's a question that doesn't just automatically answer itself.
Michael and Michelle, thanks to both of you.
Running over on time, because we have a lot in the show, 30-second break here.
When we come back, your breakdown on why the Supreme Court is not going to be the avenue to overturn this race, what to make of a new announcement tonight late in the day, the Justice Department investigating Hunter Biden. He says it's for taxes. All that, and, later tonight, the great Tony Schwartz.
We're back in 30 seconds.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MELBER: Tonight, President Trump is the certified loser of the election, all 50 states and D.C. certifying their results.
Biden's margin comes in now at just about 4.5 points and seven million votes in the margin.
Now, Donald Trump is trying to intervene in what looks to be a frivolous lawsuit coming out of Texas and quite late to the books. The state's attorney general says he wants to basically try to sue the other states where Biden won and get them to change their results. Now, 17 states, though, are saying that they join Texas.
The votes are certified. This is over. And the lawyers involved in these kinds of filings know that.
You also may recall something that broke yesterday. We reported it here, the Supreme Court very crisply denying one last-ditch Republican attempt to go after the results in PA. It was unanimous, meaning it included all three Trump appointees.
Now, the president still seems to believe that somehow the Supreme Court could save him. He said this out loud prior to the election, and linked it to one of those justices I just mentioned. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I think it's very important. I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it's very important that we have nine justices.
CHRIS WALLACE, HOST, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY": Are you counting on the Supreme Court, including a Justice Barrett, to settle any dispute?
TRUMP: Yes, I think I'm counting them to look at the ballots, definitely.
We're going to go in the night of. As soon as that election is over, we're going in with our lawyers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: We're joined now by Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU.
Thanks for joining us.
When people see headlines that a bunch of states want to take something to the Supreme Court, it would be understandable to think, well, there's got to be something there or this is normal. What is your read on what's happening here?
MELISSA MURRAY, NYU SCHOOL OF LAW: The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction for only a handful of cases, but those include cases brought by states against other states.
But it is unusual to have a state like Texas weighing in to charge that the election procedures in sister states were wrong or violated the Constitution in some way. But that's exactly what this suit does.
And, as you say, it has been joined by 17 other states. Most election law experts think that this suit is, to put it generously, outlandish. Some have gone so far as to say that this is merely a press release masquerading as a lawsuit.
So, no one really expects this to go very far with the Supreme Court, but the justices have slated responses for tomorrow. So we will see what they say tomorrow.
MELBER: Yes, I appreciate your diplomacy, Professor.
I think that's pretty kind, calling it a press release masquerading as a case. It looks to me more like a tweet masquerading as a case.
And I say that because, A, states don't get to decide, for the most part, what other states do. B, the Supreme Court's rich history of federalism, which includes, of course, a lot of conservative jurisprudence, would certainly not lean into saying that because one state doesn't like what another state did on the election or any other intramural matter, that it would get a say in that.
MURRAY: Well, that's certainly the case.
And, again, the injury to Texas is hard to discern here on what another state does with regard to its election procedures, how it impacts Texas and Texas voters, I think, is hard to say. And, as you have mentioned, each state has its own election procedures. That's one of the hallmarks of a federated system like ours.
We don't have a national uniform set of election procedures. Instead, we have 50 different sets of election procedures, one for each state. And so, again, this is a really out-there legal challenge, but, again, one that is perhaps pitched at the court of public opinion, more so than the Supreme Court itself.
MELBER: Right.
And it sort of adds to something we were just discussing in the top of the hour, which is how some of the mechanisms of Trumpism are continuing to play out widely. The president can't make a state attorney general file anything.
But the notion that people who are members of the bar, who have some notion of professional responsibility or self-respect, or whatever you want to call it, are going down much more the Giuliani route, where you say, oh, this is just one forum. Lie at the press conference.
When you go into court, you may have to tell more of the truth, so you don't commit a crime, then come back out and lie again at the presser on TV, and that this is somehow a good use of time or in the state -- in the case of these state cases, taxpayer dollars as well.
Rachel, our colleague, was speaking about this. I want to play a little bit of that. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW": The attorney general of Texas, he announced today that Texas is suing Georgia and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. He's asking the United States Supreme Court to hear this case, to step in and find that all those four other states did their elections wrong.
Is it possible that success in court is not really the goal here? Could it be that maybe somebody has the FBI breathing down his neck, and he's hoping for one of those many, many, many pardons the president is reportedly planning on handing out willy-nilly in his final days?
I mean, if you want this president to pardon you, you got to get his attention.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: The idea that there is a real problem in the system when these kind of cases become political horse-trading, does that concern you, even if we want to keep an open mind about what the A.G.'s motivation may be?
MURRAY: Well, I think everything that's transpired since the November election is concerning.
I mean, it's certainly the case that, where there are legitimate claims of election misconduct, that someone has a right to pursue those in court. But we have seen 50 different election-related lawsuits, none of which have been resolved in favor of the Trump campaign. Very few of them have actually alleged real evidence of voter misconduct or malfeasance.
Instead, we just have the courts sort of bound up in this endless litany of litigation and false claims that are ultimately, I think, aimed to delegitimize this election and this new administration that's incoming.
And, again, as a lawyer, that is really difficult to see. We are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Part of upholding the Constitution is upholding the legitimacy of the system that gives rise to our government. And that's what an election does.
MELBER: Professor Murray laying it all out and giving us context on the headlines people may be seeing, which is, oh, my gosh, they're asking for a Supreme Court review. Is that one more backdoor? Not likely.
Thank you, as always. Appreciate it.
Up ahead: reports that Donald Trump is depressed and ghosting Geraldo. We will explain.
Trump co-author Tony Schwartz is also here with insights into what's coming down the pike.
And this big news that you may want context on, the Barr Justice Department, with a U.S. attorney in Delaware, investigating Hunter Biden.
Big story. We have the context after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MELBER: Turning now to a new development involving the Justice Department and president-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, who revealed late today he has been told he is under investigation by the DOJ, saying -- quote -- "I learned yesterday for the first time the U.S. attorney's office in Delaware advised my legal counsel yesterday they are investigating my tax affairs."
Now, this is a significant legal development. In any era, the news that the family member of an incoming president's under federal investigation is a big deal.
Now, no person is above the law, including, of course, presidential family members.
Now, in this era, the probe raises many questions about how the incoming president's administration will handle a probe or any sensitive decisions. And, of course, this is not just any era, because whatever you think of the incoming Biden administration, the development comes as the outgoing president has been publicly demanding his attorney general probe and jail his opponents, go after the Biden family, and specifically go after the person now reportedly under investigation, Hunter Biden.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We have got to get the attorney general to act. He's got to act. And he's got to act fast. He's got to appoint somebody. This is major corruption. And this has to be known about before the election.
Joe Biden must immediately release all e-mails, meetings, phone calls, transcripts and records related to his involvement in his family's business dealings.
Well, I would think that, if they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens. It's a very simple answer.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: All of that puts a potential cloud over anything that goes on with the investigation. That's just perception.
However, I want to be very clear before I go any further, there is no reporting tonight that we have that links what Donald Trump has been publicly demanding with this probe. All we have is what I just shared with you, Hunter Biden's own statement. And we're not getting denials from the DOJ that he's under this tax affair investigation.
Now, in addition, under Donald Trump, the DOJ has also blatantly intervened to spare presidential allies, like Flynn and Stone. Prosecutors inside the DOJ, remember, objected to the special treatment that they said those Trump friends and aides received. And that was even before their lawful pardons, while Attorney General Barr has also made a whole series of unusual acts, like promoting the prosecutor reviewing the Mueller probe to special counsel, Barr doing that in a secret move that was only revealed on a political calendar, after the election.
Barr also facing pushback and criticism for releasing an election memo talking up those potential fraud probes which went nowhere, while Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani demanded, famously, that international Ukrainian probe centered on, yes, Hunter Biden, which literally led to Donald Trump's own impeachment.
When you take it all together, we are in a very serious stage of this story. Everything that's come up to it is suspicious. What we know now is limited. And what comes afterward, well, I would argue we always have to keep an open mind, with, as warranted, some informed skepticism.
We want to do that right now with two people who know a lot about all of these issues.
Joyce Vance is a former U.S. attorney and federal prosecutor, and will walk us through what we can glean from the little information we have about what the U.S. attorney in Delaware is doing. And David Corn, Washington, D.C., bureau chief for "Mother Jones," knows his way well around all of the substantive issues regarding at least the history with Hunter Biden, impeachment and some of what Donald Trump has demanded.
Thanks to both of you for having this conversation on a breaking news topic.
JOYCE VANCE, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Good to be with you.
DAVID CORN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Thanks for having us.
MELBER: Good to have you.
Joyce, just on the legal road, what does it mean when we learn that a U.S. attorney's office there in that state is, according to Mr. Biden, conducting a tax affairs probe of some kind?
VANCE: We really know very little at this point. In fact, there's no clarity on whether this is a criminal or a civil investigation, although I think the assumption at this point seems to be that it's criminal.
The sparse detail, we know that this case was opened at some point in 2018, actually, before Bill Barr was at the head of the Justice Department, in that brief period of time when Matthew Whitaker was the acting attorney general.
But the U.S. attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, is a career DOJ employee. He was the first assistant -- that's the number two person in a U.S. attorney's office -- during both the Bush and the Obama administrations.
So, there's no reason to believe that this is cases anything other than a normal predicated tax investigation. I think what's most interesting about this so far is Hunter Biden's very measured statement. He has not alleged that this is a witch-hunt or a hoax. He's just said that he takes the allegations seriously, and he intends to cooperate and establish his innocence.
So, we will have to see how this process evolves.
MELBER: Just briefly on the calendar, what, if anything, do you glean from Hunter Biden saying, whatever the origins are, you just reminded us, he and his counsel learned of this yesterday?
VANCE: That might be a little bit unusual, since the case was opened in 2018.
Tax cases are always slow-moving creatures. Even if, as a United States attorney, you get great cooperation from the Tax Division, it can sometimes be four or five months or even longer before you can get your hands on your subject's tax returns. And, of course, you need those tax returns before you can really investigate in earnest.
We don't know the details of why they became aware. Is it because there's an announcement of an indictment? Did they want to do an interview? None of that provides us with any clarity at this point.
So, again, I would caution that we not get too far ahead of ourselves, particularly until we know whether this is a civil or a criminal investigation.
MELBER: All great points, which I think, when you have a headline like this, it's really valuable to have someone who's been in the rarefied position you have. There aren't that many U.S. attorneys around.
David, the context, up to this point, has been suspicious, because the president has demanded, as just shown, those probes into the Bidens.
CORN: Yes, your intro got to the heart of this.
It could be going by the book. It could be a perfectly legitimate investigation. We don't know. But it's coming in a very polluted environment, not just polluted by the Donald Trump remarks in which he called on the Justice Department to go after the Bidens. He sicced his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on the Bidens to get dirt. Rudy has admitted that.
We also know that a White House lawyer, one of the White House counsel members, worked with other people in the fall to get dirt on Hunter, to "The Wall Street Journal." We know that a bunch of members of Congress have called for investigations into Hunter Biden.
I mean, again, this could be legitimate, but, in history, we have seen very few cases where as many political figures, for political reasons, have called on -- have called for this type of investigation.
And so, yes, I think we need to look at this very carefully. I'm sure Trump is going to say there was an abuse of power here because it was announced after the election, right? He will say, this was a cover-up.
But, nevertheless, anything coming out of Bill Barr's, Justice Department, even if it's associated with a well -known U.S. attorney with a good reputation, still has to be questioned, because we see how he has used...
MELBER: Right.
CORN: ... other U.S. attorneys for politically-minded investigations.
MELBER: Right.
And so, David, build on that point, because this is where it departs from the law -- and I think we have tried to cover that fairly -- to the politics or the interbranch communications, because now you have a situation where, even if everything that Joyce cautioned us is applied, you have what appears to be an open probe into a family member of Joe Biden, the incoming president.
And there's going to be a lot of talk about, well, what Bill Barr wanted here was potentially or, according to Donald Trump, as you said, who's not nobody -- he's the president -- to lock in a review of the Mueller probe that now is special counsel-proved, now to lock in an open probe of a Biden family member.
And there may be Republicans who will be demanding that any fairness requires that that also become some sort of independent special counsel probe, because why should an attorney general who reports to the president oversee the decision about potentially charging the president's son?
And I don't know about you, but I think a lot of us are old enough to remember other roving special counsels that started on one thing and ended up being about everything.
CORN: That's true.
I mean, Joe Biden is about to inherit the federal government that includes the Justice Department, that includes the attorney general who will be overseeing this case, should it be -- should it still be here after January 20.
Now, Biden has been clear, and he said, I will not make any decisions about what prosecutions the Justice Department makes once I get into the White House. But I do think there is an argument to be made, if a member of a president's family is being investigated, do you need some extra separation there? Do you need a special counsel?
I have no doubt -- I mean, three, two, one, do the countdown -- that Republicans will be out there calling for that, hoping that it will lead to other things. It may just be a very small civil matter. We don't know.
MELBER: Right.
CORN: It could be constrained at this point. But they would love to have a special counsel rooting around the affairs of the president of the president-elect's son.
MELBER: Right.
And I will echo what both of you have cautioned us, which is, there's a lot we don't know. And we have to follow the evidence. And no person is above the law.
To quote Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive," though, the timing is hinky. There is something hinky about what Joyce reminded us, which is how long this may have been dormant. And then here we're hearing about it while Bill Barr is doing all of this dancing around Donald Trump and election fraud and other issues.
Now, hinky doesn't mean illicit. We're going to follow the reporting. But hinky does mean suspicious. Let's look into it.
Joyce and David, thanks to both of you on this important story.
We will fit in a break.
Coming up: Why does Donald Trump have election depression, according to his own aides, wandering through the White House? New reporting.
And how did Geraldo get himself mixed up in all of this, including some "Apprentice"-level snubbery? Well, friend of THE BEAT Tony Schwartz.
We will go high, but we may also go a little low -- when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MELBER: President Trump rushing to use more presidential powers as he prepares to leave office, rushing to name over 20 people to key posts, including loyalists ranging from Kellyanne Conway to a top donor, while inside accounts report he's often depressed, wandering the White House, apparently taken aback that some of his own loyalists or friends do acknowledge the reality that he lost.
Take Geraldo Rivera, a longtime TV figure who did business with Trump back in the simpler days before either them were as enmeshed in politics.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Geraldo, you're tough, you're smart, you're brilliant in so many different ways. You have done such an amazing job in raising so much money for your charity.
It's really an honor to have worked with you for this period of time. And I think you have shown the world what kind of a guy you are, really special.
(CROSSTALK)
GERALDO RIVERA, FOX NEWS: I appreciate it.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Really special, very special bond.
Geraldo now says, though, he has found Donald Trump suddenly icing him out because Geraldo said on FOX that Trump lost.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RIVERA: I just want you to know that, as his friend, even if he may not be speaking to me right now because of my position on the election being over...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I mean, I can't believe we're just not talking about what Geraldo just said, and that is that Geraldo and the president are no longer speaking with him.
That seems like a pretty juicy gossip to me.
RIVERA: He didn't take my calls the last two times I tried.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Geraldo kept calling, so, apparently, he expected some level of open communication.
But Donald Trump's transactional approach to cutting people off is well-documented.
Our friend "Art of the Deal" co-author Tony Schwartz opposed Trump's election in '16 and recounts the Trump made one last official call of sorts to say, "Have a nice life," before hanging up. And they have never spoken since.
"Art of the Deal" co-author Tony Schwartz joins me now. The new audiobook "Dealing With the Devil: My Mother, Trump and Me" is out and available.
Good evening, sir.
TONY SCHWARTZ, CO-AUTHOR, "TRUMP: THE ART OF THE DEAL": Good evening to you.
MELBER: They were trying to yuk it up over there, but if you look deep into Geraldo's eyes, as I think one does from time to time, if you have the TV on long enough, he seemed pained. He seemed to feel that somehow he was going to get a different reception.
Given your experience, and given the rather serious backdrop we discussed higher in the program tonight of the way that Donald Trump continues to have impact on people, manipulate people, sometimes to devastating effect that could go past January, what do you see here?
SCHWARTZ: Well, look, he's a sociopath.
And sociopaths are inherently cruel and sadistic. They get pleasure from the pain of others, because it's a way to demonstrate their dominance. It's a way to hit back when they feel they have been wronged.
Trump feels he's been wronged by virtually everybody, but Geraldo is one of them. And now he has this lust for revenge, because he truly, delusionally, feels like a victim. And he's feeling unbearably diminished by the country's lack of acceptance of his dominance.
So, it becomes something like, I will show them. I will inflict as much suffering as I can in the weeks I have left.
MELBER: Now, this only raises a milder point, which is, does having Trump refuse to call you back connote suffering? I guess it depends on who we're asking.
SCHWARTZ: Well, I get the humor, the dry Ari humor in that.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHWARTZ: But, yes, it does.
MELBER: Yes.
SCHWARTZ: If you're a member of the cult, it absolutely inflicts suffering.
And, by the way, he's inflicting suffering on all of us. He's going to piss people off in any way he can over the next four weeks...
MELBER: Right.
SCHWARTZ: ... beginning with pardons, beginning with pardons.
Watch what he does with pardons. They will be equal opportunity -- equal opportunity offensive.
MELBER: Well put.
There's another moment I want to ask you about that you were discussing with us as we prepared our report tonight, because Donald Trump has vacated the job completely. It's been well-known that there's a lot of executive time, TV watching time, things that he skipped out on.
But this is a whole 'nother level, which again, speaks to something. And even if people think of him as somehow transactional and robotic, there's some well of feeling here, there's some anger that involves being checked out.
And so I want to play this once for everyone to see, and then we will rerack it so folks can see the subtlety here. But the president comes in to give a medal to an athlete. Presidents do these kind of things. The press is there.
And Trump, like anyone, knows the cameras are on. And he could barely get through it, to the point that the recipient here, Dan Gable, is sort of -- in the moment of this recognition, sort of at a loss. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: One of our greatest athletes of all time, and I just want to say it's an honor to be with you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.
(APPLAUSE)
QUESTION: Mr. President, one more question about the inauguration?
TRUMP: Thank you very much.
QUESTION: Anything on Bill Barr, sir?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations, sir.
DAN GABLE, PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM RECIPIENT: He's gone.
(LAUGHTER)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: A little moment, but what do you see here?
SCHWARTZ: Well, I mean, depression. I mean, he slunk out of that office, if that's a word.
You watch him slinking out of that office. He just couldn't bear to be there. He said one sentence.
But you know what? My biggest fear over the next four years is not Donald Trump, for sure. It's the cult of Trump. This notion that what happens to his supporters is that they bond to him, and then they stop caring about his falsehoods.
That's from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who just wrote this great book "Strongmen." And they believe him because they believe in him. So, the next four years, we're looking at 70 million people and most Republican officeholders who have bought into the idea that the truth just doesn't matter anymore, that you can say anything, and saying it will make it true.
And if that means living under an autocracy, fine.
So, the question is, can they -- can Biden make decency and integrity and humility cool again? Because the alternative from Trump was the end of the world as we know it.
MELBER: Well, we land on a big one.
And you have -- from time to time, you have been accused of overstatement, Tony. You have. I don't know if you know that.
SCHWARTZ: I didn't know that, Ari.
MELBER: Yes, that's happened.
(LAUGHTER)
MELBER: But...
SCHWARTZ: I don't think I have overstated much, even though I understand how it's seen that way, but, yes. Well...
MELBER: But what we're circling around -- we didn't, to be honest, really, fully plan it this way, but we were circling around from more than one vista tonight is really this issue of Trumpism, which is bigger than the person.
It's in what people actually want to do and what they're capable of doing in a society that still does require, a constitutional democracy requires a factual baseline for people to reconcile disputes, rather than the uglier alternatives.
So, when you say that, I hear it.
Tony Schwartz, thank you, as always.
We have a quick break, and up ahead: Biden making history the Pentagon.
We will explain next.
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MELBER: Turning to a bit of living history, president-elect Biden is making it, tapping retired Four-Star Army General Lloyd Austin to run the Pentagon as secretary of defense.
Now, if confirmed, he will become the first black person to lead the U.S. Pentagon.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT: He was the 200th person ever to attain the rank of a four-star general, but only the sixth African-American to ever do that.
He was the first African-American general officer to lead the Army corps in combat. He was the first African-American to command an entire theater of war. He is the person we need at this moment.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: This follows up other barriers falling, from Kamala Harris as vice president-elect, to Janet Yellen as s the first woman Treasury secretary.
And it is also a marked contrast from Donald Trump's Cabinet, you see there. Biden, of course, ran on this very hiring step.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: My administration across the board is going to look like America.
My administration will look like America.
My administration, I promise you, will look like America, both as -- from vice president, to Supreme Court, to Cabinet positions, to every major position in the White House.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: A lot of voters say they're going to hold him to it. We will keep reporting on the facts, so you know the score.
Wanted to give you that update.
And we will be back with one more thing.
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MELBER: We had David Byrne from the Talking Heads on THE BEAT last night. I'm already hearing from some of you who really liked it.
And a reminder: If you're busy, but you don't want to miss those kind of interviews, you can DVR THE BEAT on your remote. Search for Melber, press DVR, and you won't ever miss an interview like that.
Thanks again to David Byrne for joining our "Mavericks" series.
That does it for me. I will see you back here tomorrow night, hopefully, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern.
"THE REIDOUT WITH JOY REID" is up next, with a very special guest that we are very jealous of, Leslie Jones. Don't miss it.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END
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