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tv   Alex Wagner Tonight  MSNBC  July 3, 2024 9:00pm-10:00pm PDT

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thank you, as always, for watching. on that note, i wish you a very good evening. you can catch me every saturday and sunday morning on my show, "the weekend" with my colleagues. from all of our colleagues across the networks of nbc news, thank you for staying up late with us. i'll see you this weekend. it was march 31st, 1968, when the president of the united states made an announcement that changed the
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course of history. >> i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. >> president lyndon johnson decided not to seek reelection late march of an election year months before the democratic party's nominating convention. though outside observers believed at the time that president johnson exited the race largely over the quagmire in vietnam, sources in the white house would later reveal it was concern about his health that drove president johnson to withdraw. at the time johnson was already facing challenges from eugene mccarthy, a liberal anti-war candidate and from senator robert f. kennedy, a political zion, senator, and former attorney general, but president johnson's exit left a power vacuum that was filled by the entry of johnson's vice president, hubert humphrey.
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the democratic candidates were now hurdling toward a contested convention. before that convention even began there was another shock to the race. on june 5th that year robert f. kennedy was shot at the ambassador hotel in california. the next day he was pronounced dead. two weeks before the convention began south dakota senator george mcgovern announced that he would throw his hat into the ring as a stand-in candidate for voters who supported rfk and when the democratic delegates eventually gathered in chicago, nearly 10,000 anti- war protesters swept into the windy city. they were met by more than twice as many members of the national guard. >> peace now! peace now! peace now! >> demonstrators have filled the streets in front of the conrad hilton hotel. police held them back. tensions were high till they broke. >> those tensions then spilled
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into the convention hall as delegates battled over who would be the party's nominee. >> george mcgovern is president of the united states. we wouldn't have to have gestapo tactics in the streets of chicago. how hard it is to accept the truth. >> the 1968 convention went down in history as one of the most chaotic, divisive, and weird moments in democratic party history. people lit their delegate cards on fire. protesters threatened to put lsd in the chicago water supply. the youth international party nominated a pig, a pig named pigasus, for president and demanded that the pig receive
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secret service protection. at the end of it all, vice president humphrey won the delegate contest and became the nominee of a bitterly divided party. he went on to lose the general election to one of the most corrupt republican presidents in u.s. history, richard m. nixon. today right at this very hour the question is whether or not democrats are headed for another contested convention in chicago. now there are things about this moment that are both eerily similar and dramatically different than what happened in 1968. first of all, robert f. kennedy's son and namesake is running for president, albeit in a completely different context, as a fringe third- party candidate who just this week faced new allegations that he sexually assaulted a baby- sitter in 1998. msnbc has not independently verified those allegations, but rfk jr. responded to those
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allegations by saying this. >> listen, i've said this from the beginning. i am not a church boy. i am not running like that. i had a very, very rambunctious youth. i said in my announcement speech that if i have so many skeletons in my closet. >> this is not exactly the rfk of 1968. this year once again as in 1968 there is a foreign military conflict dividing the democratic party, this time in gaza, but the central issue looming over this year's convention is not the war and it is not the kennedy in the race. in fact, by all outside measurements, the democratic party is in a period of relative unity and cohesion and especially in its shared alarm about the threat posed by the party's opponent, donald trump. so both structurally and politically it is a dramatic difference from the year 1968. instead this year the issue that is fracturing the party, the thing that hangs over what
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is a very big tent at this point, isn't a policy division, but a personal one. it is the issue that lbj kept to himself all those years ago, the health and the vitality of the incumbent president, his fitness for office and his ability to run against a dangerous candidate who threatens american democracy. as of right now, as of this evening, president biden says he will remain his party's candidate. during an all-hands call with his campaign staff, biden reportedly announced, "let me say this as clearly as i possibly can, as simply and straightforward as i can. i am running. no one is pushing me out. i'm not leaving. i'm in this race to the end and we are going to win," but according to a report also today in the "new york times," biden is telling allies that he knows he has just days to save his candidacy. now the last few days have seen
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new polling showing president biden losing some ground with voters following thursday's debate. perhaps in recognition of that the biden campaign is preparing a sort of mini pr blitz over the fourth of july holiday. on friday the president will sit for an interview with george stephanopoulos of abc news. then over the weekend he will make campaign stops in pennsylvania and in wisconsin and next week the president will hold a press conference during the nato summit in washington, where he is expected to take questions from reporters. at the same time the president is now finally reaching out to party leaders. over the past 24 hours, president biden has placed calls to house minority leader hakeem jeffries and senate majority leader chuck schumer. he has reached out to former democratic leaders like speaker emerita nancy pelosi and congressman jim clyburn. tonight the president held a closed-door meeting at the white house with democratic governors, many of whom have been whispered about as potential biden replacements or running mates on a ticket with
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kamala harris, including gavin newsom and j.b. pritzker, gretchen whitmer and wes moore. both inside and outside the biden white house it is clear this party is in crisis mode. yesterday texas congressman lloyd doggett became the first elected democrat to call for president biden to step down as a democratic candidate. tonight arizona democratic representative raul grijalva became the second democratic member of congress to do the same, to call on biden to step down, all which of makes this feel like a very live question. is this the beginning of a legitimate effort to remove joe biden from the democratic ticket or is this a fire the party will succeed putting out internally? in other words, will the third week of august be business as usual or will the democratic party fracture just in time for
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a second chicago convention? joining me now is david plough, former campaign manager for obama. thank you for joining me. david, let me start with you in terms of how to interpret what we've seen in the last i'll say 12 hours from the biden white house and particularly, the biden campaign. how do you read these statements and this behavior? >> joe biden said very clearly to his campaign staff he's in the race for the duration and to win it. i think most of the democratic governors, if not all, signal support. i think that is the most likely scenario. i think there's going to continue to be unrest because we'll have public polls, but more importantly private polls that people running in top house and senate races are showing and i want to remind everybody that we were behind in this race before the debate.
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joe biden was behind for inflation reasons, incumbents all over the globe are losing elections badly. it's definitely kind of an anti- incumbent fervor, but also people's sense was he up for this job and those answers only got more challenging for him after the debate. so i think if he stays in this race and, alex, i don't think we'll have drama in chicago. maybe if we have an open convention. either this is going to settle down and joe biden's or nominee and there will be a convention to make the case for him and most importantly, against trump or he'll get out and we'll have a process, could be messy. i don't think we're looking at a repeat. listen, there's going to be protesters around the middle east. everyone has a phone now that can send videos around the world. so it will be overstated, but i think the question really is whether it's joe biden or somebody else, after the supreme court ruling yesterday the threat of donald trump is
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even more pronounced. it could be enterprise ending for the country. so this isn't about trying. you have to win and i think if joe biden is the candidate, we have to understand and i think he's capable of doing this, but the degree of difficulty is hard. we have to make up a lot of ground. we're losing. we're losing in the battleground states. so you have to pull vote away from trump, grow your vote, be worried about turnout, pull vote away from rfk. that's the mathematical reality. i hope he does well in george stephanopoulos' interview and does well this weekend and that continues, but that won't answer the mail for most voters. what will answer the mail for most voters is a repeat of the debate. i think it remains to be seen whether trump will offer biden that opportunity. >> yeah. i'm hearing a lot of sentences beginning with the words i hope as it concerns biden's performance and his future and
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what's possible with this current democratic ticket. you've been very up front about what you think needs to happen here and i wonder how you're kind of reading the moment as we hear from the president and his i think defiant posture that he's not going anywhere. >> yeah. i think defiant posture is one way of saying it. i think stubborn, hubristic is something you hear, reckless a word you hear. i think not only has biden been basically invisible since the disaster of last thursday, but morale around the party has not only gotten lower, but also there is no sign there's anything afoot, whether it's an interview or another debate in the near future, that can turn this around anytime soon. this is a mission critical election. i mean it's kind of an
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imperfect analogy i've made before. if you were an airline pilot or air traffic controller, he would have been forced to retire 20, 25 years ago. this is a mission critical job and election and obviously i don't think the party is fundamentally divided as it was around vietnam. that was just a pervasively divided time in that convention, but look, the level of confidence in the person who insists on continuing to fight and be the nominee of this party is really, really low for someone who has a lot of ground to make up for to begin with. >> i want to be clear. i don't think we're headed towards the 1968-style chicago convention, but, david, given the desires and the very big tent of the democratic party coming to an alternative to biden is going to take some negotiating, if that's even in the cards. i do want to ask, though, to mark's point about the defensiveness here, the fact that the president is only in the last 12 to 24 hours reaching out to elected
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democrats in congress, did that surprise you? >> it did. i think generally when you're in crisis, whether it's in governing or in campaign mode, the phone is your friend. it's an easy thing to do. even if those conversations don't go as well as you like, people respect that you reached out. yeah, i think a lot of the activity we're seeing, the activity, the calls, should have happened last weekend, last friday after the debate. i think we're in a moment where the president has to perform. listen, that campaign is a very strong campaign. i have no question they'll do what's required, but campaigns only make a marginal difference, always humbling for those of us that used to run them. it's the candidate really in the times that dictate kind of the most powerful winds in politics. this will be on the president to convince voters, the voters that are swing voters, democratic voters now saying they might not vote, that okay, maybe it was more of a bad
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night than not, but again, these questions about fitness and should he run have been with us the entire campaign. they've really been the headwinds he's been facing and he just dug a deeper hole in the debate. he should do everything he can, interviews, press conferences, go on with influencers, do town halls with voters. he's got to do all that, but the thing he remind you of is most people who vote in this election didn't even watch the debate. it's really hard to reach people, but "the new york times" poll suggest people who didn't watch the debate have even more concern because all they're seeing is the memes and videos. it's going to take something big like another debate. the conventions don't do it. i've led conventions. it's important they do well. they don't really reach swing voters or hard to turn out voters the same way the debate and its aftermath does. that's what it comes down to is performance. listen, generally candidates who win elections have good political appeal, good story,
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can connect with voters. joe biden can do that. it's why he won in '20. when you're behind in a race, that's where you need the political athleticism. it's like traversing a really dangerous obstacle course. i think we have to be honest that's where we are and if joe biden can manage that obstacle course, i think it gets back to a really close race, but it's going to take a lot of dexterity to do that. >> i mean i hear the words athleticism and dexterity and this is a candidate who has done a lot of the things he was supposed to do in terms of not sitdown interviews, but he's traveling the world. the gain -- campaign is trying to put him out there as much as they can in a format they thought would be good for him. they thought the debate would be a good idea. it was part of strategy. it blew up in their faces. i wonder where we are in the trajectory of knowing who is going to be on the top of the
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ticket. we have news tonight from "the new york times" that reed hastings, co-founder of netflix, huge democratic donor, saying biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous democratic leader to beat trump and keep us safe and prosperous. what are the pressure points in your mind outside the inner sanctum of the white house, the voters, democrats, none of them? >> it's also polls, reed hastings and members of congress and members of senate and governors coming out. what i was struck by that was as depressing as the actual debate itself was the sense of i guess the learned helplessness around both parties in some ways, but in this case the democrats really are helpless to do anything except to just accept the will of one obviously greatly diminished 81-year-old incumbent who has been stretch, very, very impressive and honorable throughout his career. he was very heroic in defeating
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donald trump in 2020. he's had a good presidency by many standards and yet here we are and there's nothing anyone can do about it. i keep thinking about the campaign that david plouffe led. we were all at grant park in 2008 and even both parties there was a sense of decency and possibility and here we have just no choice but to sort of go with what we have been given, which obviously people in both parties and people across america are very dissatisfied with. so i don't know. i wish people would just be honest and be vocal and speak up and not just sort of give into the learned hopelessness and give into the just sense of going along and sort of lemming- like mentality that certainly seems to have driven the republican party and the democratic party to this point.
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>> david, do you read anything into donald trump being completely silent about joe biden stepping down? does that suggest to you republicans would like this to go one way or the other? >> my sense is they would like this match-up. that's always a tell. you should pay attention to what your opponents think. i don't think the trump campaign has gotten all the mileage they could have out of this. it does speak to the other thing. this is an imminently beatable candidate, donald trump. this is not a political goliath. he cost his parties races he should have won in 2020 and 2022. he is beatable. it's not a situation where we're behind and we somehow have to find a way to slay a political dragon. his campaign's not particularly impressive. he's obviously deeply unimpressive. i think there's still a coalition of 50% plus americans who don't want him returned.
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so that's the other thing here. this is a must win race because of the damage that could be done to the country, but it's also a winnable race. whoever the nominee is, easy for me to say, i think the bar has to be you got to win the race. the truth is it is a winnable race, but i think donald trump and his campaign very much like this match-up. so that's why i think they've been so quiet. >> david plouffe, mark leibovich, this is a conversation very much to be continued. thank you for making time tonight on july 3rd. we have much more to get to tonight, including what the supreme court's presidential immunity ruling means for all of donald trump's pending criminal cases, but first as president biden vows he's in this race till the end, former democratic congressman tim ryan is calling for a new democratic nominee. i'm going to speak with him about who he'd like to see at the top of the ticket and why next.
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the moment i met him i knew he was my soulmate. you could stay undetectable with fewer medicines. "soulmates." soulmate! [giggles] why do you need me? [laughs sarcastically] but then we switched to t-mobile 5g home internet. and now his attention is spent elsewhere. but i'm thinking of her the whole time. that's so much worse. why is that thing in bed with you? this is where it gets the best signal from the cell tower! i've tried everywhere else in the house! there's always a new excuse. well if we got xfinity you wouldn't have to mess around with the connection. therapy's tough, huh? -mmm. it's like a lot about me. [laughs] a home router should never be a home wrecker. oo this is a good book title.
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based on what what just been able to see doesn't mean it will happen or not. >> republicans are out today with a new ad targeting vice president kamala harris clearly
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hedging against the possibility harris will step in to take president biden's spot if biden were to end his campaign. to that end, new reuters/ipsos polling shows in a hypothetical match-up against trump, potential democratic candidates losing to trump by just one percentage point. that is perhaps why at least one democrat is on the record saying kamala harris should be the democratic nominee for president in 2024. joining me now is that democrat, tim ryan, former congressman from ohio. tim, it's good to see you. thanks for being here. let's get right to your argument, why kamala harris? >> well, we need a generational change. there's no question about that. i think you look at what they call the double haters. they don't want biden. they don't want trump. i think it's really important we give them an alternative. so there would be the huge generational change. you look at the practical politics of the situation. look where we're bleeding out. we're soft with a lot of the
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minority communities and we're bleeding out young people and i think kamala could come in instantaneously juice our base, pull in young people. i've been getting calls from ohio that want biden to step down, working class people, and they're telling me they'd be excited for a kamala harris run. i think she checks a lot of these boxes. you take the choice issue real quick, i think there's so much at stake for women, for her to be able to prosecute that issue for us in a debate against donald trump, i think you add all that together and i think we're back in the game and we could make a good run at this thing. >> do you think it's a decidedly different moment than it was in 2020 when she did throw her hat in the ring for the presidential nomination and was out before iowa? >> oh, 1,000%. you're better at your job 3 1/2 years later. most americans who do something for 3 1/2 years, especially at a very high level, you get
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better. you grow. you become seasoned. she already has a lot of raw talent and ability and charisma and presidential campaigns are pretty tough. that's a heck of a standard, but i think it culminated for me in my mind, alex, to really start thinking about this was how she handled herself on debate night, absolute star. i mean i followed her across all the cable stations as she was doing her interviews and she was masterful. i think that's the culmination of 3 1/2 years. so to me it's like what are we waiting for? we have a very good candidate here. let's help her grow into the campaign and i think it would be a great move for biden to kind of set up somebody like kamala harris as the crowning jewel of what is this really significant and well done presidency. >> in the last 72 hours or the last five days, there have been a lot of names mentioned and
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what's been so odd about this is only in the last 12 to 24 has kamala harris' name really popped up as possibly a leading contender if with the giant caveat biden has not dropped out and only if he does drop out would she go to the top of the ticket. i wonder what that signals. the "wall street journal" sort of takes the opposite opinion from yours. they're saying biden is effectively trying to scare democrats that harris is the only alternative if he drops out. the reason we're seeing this flurry of prognostication about harris' viability is because the biden campaign is floating that as a disincentive. do you think that's tortured logic? what's your response to that idea? >> i don't know honestly. i'm not understanding a lot of what's coming out of the white house in the last 72 hours. i don't agree with it. i think the way they've handled
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this has been tremendously unhelpful to just voters like me, former members of congress and current members of congress. i don't know exactly what the machinations going on inside the white house are. i just hope they take a very, very close look, maybe even have the president watch the debate again, really see what's happening. i'm here in ohio, like the average people are still talking about what happened on the debate night thursday. we're not going to shift that narrative, alex. we've got to come to reality. one of the things people don't like about democrats, we're not decisive. we don't act with conviction enough. they don't see us as strong. this is an opportunity for us to shift all those kind of narratives that the republicans have pinned on us as a party and i think the opportunity now is to do the right thing. let's quit dilly-dallying around here. we got a race to win. you saw the chevron decision. we saw the immunity decision. the supreme court flipped the constitution and turned it upside down. what are we doing here?
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do we want federal courts that have a clarence thomas in every federal court across the country? every u.s. prosecutor in every jurisdiction, every district across the country is going to be from the federalist society? do we recognize what would happen to our country if we do that and we're sitting here thinking the biggest threat i saw the other night the debate was that trump was recreating covid, recreating the economy, recreating the tax cut without any pushback at all. he's shape shifting people's minds because we aren't pushing back. we can't do that the next four months. we'll get destroyed. so i hope members of congress step up. i hope this letter people are talking about, i hope they send it and really let the white house know what's at stake here for their own personal careers, but the potential for our own democracy here that we're all so concerned about. >> former congressman tim ryan with an impassioned argument for the vice president going to the top of the democratic
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ticket. thanks for making time tonight. >> thanks. still to come this evening, has the supreme court handed donald trump a get out of jail free card for more than one jail? the fallout from the court's decision on presidential immunity reverberates through all of his criminal cases. we'll get some legal expertise from christy greenberg next. we all need fiber for our digestive health, but less than 10% of us get enough each day. good thing metamucil gummies are an easy way to get prebiotic, plant-based fiber. with the same amount of fiber as 2 cups of broccoli. metamucil gummies the easy way to get your daily fiber.
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on monday the supreme court dropped a proverbial bomb on all of tramp's criminal cases by ruling along ideological lines that presidents are fully immune from criminal prosecution for any official acts during their presidency. by doing that, the high court has not just potentially blown a hole in the january 6th case, but in all of donald trump's cases. in the january 6th case the indictment must go back to a u.s. district court where a judge tanya chutkan must decide which acts are official and therefore must be disregarded and which allegations are unofficial acts that can still be charged. regardless of how that shakes out it, effectively means the special counsel's january 6th case has no chance of going to trial before election day.
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a similar process will probably play out in trump's other election interference case, the one brought by district attorney fanni willis in fulton county, georgia. trump and his lawyers asserted presidential immunity in this case as well, meaning the judge overseeing that case, judge scott mcafee, will have to parse through that indictment to determine what may now be off limits and judge mcafee won't be able to start that process until an appeals court decides whether or not to grant trump's motion to throw d.a. willis off the case. don't expect any significant movement down in georgia anytime soon. now in trump's new york hush money case where trump has already been convicted on 34 felony counts, yesterday we got the news the sentencing has been postponed from next week to september in order to give trump's legal time sufficient time to argue the case should be tossed out entirely because of the supreme court's immunity decision. down in florida in trump's
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classified documents case, even though that case is primarily about actions in trump's post presidency, actions that in no way could be construed as official acts, trump is still trying to argue that because he was still president when his boxes were first moved from washington, d.c. to mar-a-lago, he should be immune in that case as well. there is a lot to unpack here. luckily legal expert kristy greenberg joins me next to do just that.
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donald trump has already been found guilty in a court of law. he faces up to four years in prison for falsifying business records as part of a criminal hush money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. now for those crimes trump was originally scheduled to be sentenced next week. that was until the supreme court granted trump immunity from virtually anything that could be considered an official act. as a result, next week's sentencing has been postponed to september 18th so that the judge in this case, judge juan merchan, has time to consider an argument that trump's defense lawyers have used in multiple criminal cases, that his guilty verdict should be thrown out entirely. joining me now to discuss the likelihood of that actually happening is kristy greenberg, a former federal prosecutor. kristy, i'm intrigued by this. i will say i have long wondered
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what the impact of the supreme court decision might be potentially on the new york hush money case and i wonder what parts of that conviction are potentially most imperiled in your eyes. >> i don't think the conviction is imperiled. that's the good news. look, the charged conduct itself directing your personal lawyer to make hush money payments to a porn star and then reimbursing him and covering it up, none of that's official conduct. so it doesn't matter if they signed the checks to michael cohen from the white house. they were from his personal account to his personal attorney, unofficial conduct. the real question then becomes whether any evidence of donald trump's official acts was used to prove these unofficial acts because the supreme court says now you can't use any of that. so i spent a good amount of time reviewing the evidence trump's lawyers have cited saying it's official acts evidence that couldn't be used. it was improperly admitted at
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trial. i looked at the rest of the trial record and essentially what i found is even if you take the pieces of evidence that trump's attorneys say shouldn't have been admitted, even if you take that out, it was largely cumulative of other evidence already in that trial record that was proving trump's guilt. so the bottom line is the evidence of trump's guilt is overwhelming even without that evidence that trump's team is citing. so i don't think any of that evidence that they're concerned about is make or break evidence that would have led a jury to acquit. i think this verdict will be upheld and still be intact. this is one case i think people can breathe a sigh of relief at least for now. >> yeah. it sounds like some of the evidence they're trying to get out of this is some of those oval office conversations presumably between pecker, trump and cohen. you sound pretty bullish on the integrity of the conviction standing up. it also sounds like they tackled the immunity thing a
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while ago. they've already gone down this lane and they've effectively waived their right for immunity already, have they not? >> they definitely waived their right to challenge the charged conduct. that's for sure. the judge already ruled on this and said this is untimely. you had the opportunity to raise this a while ago, same thing with the evidence, but now we have the supreme court opinion saying that you can't use any evidence of official acts to prove the unofficial acts. that's new law. that was not the law the d.a.'s office cited. that wasn't the law that the judge seemingly relied on in letting that in. so that's new and they have to deal with that. as you said, conversations just because they happened in the oval office, that doesn't make them official. i think something like a conversation with hope hicks who was the white house communications director when they're having a conversation about how the stormy daniels story would play in 2018,
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arguably that could be an official conversation under this opinion, but there are many other conversations from testimony and michael cohen's testimony before and after the election about the fact donald trump didn't want these women's stories to come out to negatively affect the campaign. his communications even when he was president with private parties, that's not plausible to be official conduct. so again, i think we're on solid footing with a lot of this evidence. >> i do want to ask as we talk about what the impact of the court's decision on immunity is in these other federal criminal cases what you think happens on the january 6th case because the ball is in judge chutkan's court and she can have evidentiary hearings. i wonder if you think we should be expecting sort of mini trials, if you will, around the evidence that can be used in this. is the public going to get some sort of smaller bite-sized version of a trial in the form of one of these hearings or is that overestimating the sort of information we're going to get
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made public? >> bring on the mini trials. i think there's no reason here for jack smith to hold anything back. this is for all the marbles, right? you have most of the indictment still in play. he's going to have to bring out his witnesses, his documents, to be able to prove these are, in fact, either official acts, but you rebut the presumption of immunity or that they're unofficial acts. so i think we should expect to see a lot of this evidence brought forth and those hearings should happen before the election. there's no reason to delay. you'll expect there's some briefing over the summer. come fall, we should be seeing these hearings. there's a lot still at play here. donald trump's attempts to pressure mike pence to not count the legitimate elector votes. yes, there's presumptive immunity under the supreme court opinion for those, but that can be rebutted and the supreme court itself said the vice president was not acting in his executive branch function when he was presiding
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over the senate and donald trump has no authority whatsoever with respect to counting those electoral votes. so expect testimony from mike pence and others to that effect. even supreme court justice barrett said as to the slate of fake electors, that's private conduct. i think we'll hear from a lot of these state officials donald trump was trying to pressure a lot of private actors, people that he was trying to get to interfere with those state processes which the president has no authority whatsoever to tell the states how to count their electors. so i think that fake elector scheme will still be in play. we'll get a lot of evidence as to that. then there's the last bucket of everything leading up to january 6th.
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the supreme court said look, presumptively a lot of communications are going to be official acts, but there are communications that fall in the bucket of candidate trump and i think a lot of his address to take our country back. ry back. on surrounding those contacts, it's really hard to see them as anything but candidate trump and not president trump. >> kristi greenberg, it's always great to get your expertise on this. thank you so much for the drops of wisdom tonight. still ahead, one of the st masterminds behind project 2025, the e blueprint for a second trump presidency. one of the masterminds revealed what conservatives plan to do with the law free zone created by the supreme court around the presidency and in his words, they are planning for a second h american revolution. i will talk to mike joseph
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i know you love your dada. of course he loves you, he just doesn't show it on his face. or with his body language. [ cooing ] ♪ sweet child of mine ♪ pop! [ screams ] the reason they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on msnbc, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. and so, i come full circle on this response and want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second american revolution, which will remain
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bloodless if the left allows it to be. >> that was given roberts, the president of the heritage foundation and architect of project 2025, promising a possibly bloodless second american revolution. this battle plan, follows the supreme court's radical expansion of presidential power on monday, effectively along the president to be a king above the law. joining me now is marge often serves -- mark, what is your reaction to a potentially bloodless second american revolution courtesy of project 2025? >> i have to say, he's reflecting on a triumphant supreme court term where he has been delivered a number of the major policies and an aries that he was intending project 2025 to accomplish if trump winds. as like they are prevailing in the battle ahead of schedule. the supreme court has fundamentally restructured our government in a way that i
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think we are only getting to understand. the immunity decision is the tip of the iceberg. he has the attitude of somebody who has won because in a lot of ways he has and if he prevails in november, he will have even more to celebrate. >> if you like the immunity ruling is serving the top -- project 2025 goal on a silver platter. similarly cannot be denied for the wall street journal has an op-ed out today, and i know i'm laughing because it's a preposterous, not because the subject is full of levity. but they are charging that the mega supreme court doesn't exist and basically focusing on the percentage of courses that were unanimous and glossing over the substance of the course decision. what is your reaction to that in the story conservatives are telling themselves? >> i think that is an effort to prevent the american people from seeing behind what is going on in the supreme court,
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behind the curtain and recognizing how radically everything just changed, from the imperial president now immune from criminal prosecution under so many circumstances to the course he drove power from congress. the court's creation of this entirely new kind of traditional authority, second guesses --. under a democratic resident and for hierarchical government, a president who revealed his power in the tools of his office for any kind of violence --. >> mark, to underscore that point, clinical has an article in the magazine this week saying that seal team six could actually execute someone at the presence of direction based on this new immunity ruling. that is the assessment from legal scholars. why did john roberts try to gaslight sonia sotomayor or and
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elena kagan and justice jackson , and they're not alarmist reading of what the immunity decision does? >> a lot of it is sexism about justice roberts is treating the women as though they are historical and can possibly be trusted to understand what's happening. -- he seems to think that --. >> okay, mark, we are having some audio issues with your connection and i know everything you are saying is important, so please come back next week so we can talk about this more in detail with even better audio. thank you for spending your friday night with me. that is our show for tonight. now it is time for the last word with lawrence o'donnell. >> i read his every tweet, every tweet most of them, i wanted to hear

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