. we wish everyone a safe memorial day weekend. the news continues. i want to hand it over to our good friend, michael smerconish. michael. >> anderson, thanks so much. i'm michael smerconish in for chris como. welcome to "prime time." there will be no 9/11-style investigation into the the events of january 6. as expected, there were not ten senate republicans willing to go along with such an inquiry. at first blush, it sounds bewildering, disinterested, even cold. when the 35 republican senators who today blocked the january 6th commission go home for their memorial day recess, i'm sure

they're going to take a moment to remember our hero who say gave their lives to protect our freedom all around the globe. so why doesn't that type of reflection translate into honoring the capitol police officers who gave their all to protect them on january 6? and to the ones still working daily to keep them safe, like eugene goodman, who used himself as bait for the mob to keep the rioters away from the senate chamber, still full of lawmakers. goodman also rushed senator mitt romney to safety. bravery like that. it earned goodman the congressional gold medal, and no senator could deny his courage that day, including this one. >> if not for the quick thinking and bravery of officer eugene goodman, in particular people in this chamber may not have escaped that day unharmed. >> eugene goodman was on duty as usual last night, protecting

some of the very senators who spent hours stalling and side tracking while most of us were sleeping, forcing the final vote to block the bipartisan commission into this holiday friday when the attention of so many americans is elsewhere. the direct pleas from the late officer brian sicknick's mother to gop lawmakers went all but nowhere. today she told jake tapper while senators were nice to her, many of the meetings were tense because she didn't think they were sincere. >> if they had a child that was hurt, was killed on a day like that, they would think very differently. or if they were hurt. i mean they very well -- somebody could have been killed, one of the congressmen, one of the senators. but apparently they just think, well, you know, we're safe because of the men in blue. >> here are the six republicans who voted to advance the bill. take a look. including lisa murkowski, who decided not to grant mitch mcconnell's request for a

personal favor because she's not nearly as worried if at all about political risk. >> to be making a decision for the short-term political gain at the expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on january 6th. i -- i think we need to look at that critically. is that really what this is about is everything is just one election cycle after another? >> well, that's a fair question. this calculation by more than three dozen republican legislators is based on the belief that riding the tide of donald trump's coat tails through 2022 and 2024, that's the ticket. the party has ousted liz cheney for this exact reason. she was the final republican leader who sought to pull the party onto a different course, one that harkened back to an era

of tradition. small government, family values. you can look no further than lindsey graham to see that gop leaders have made a different calculation. >> i've always liked liz cheney, but she's made a determination that the republican party can't grow with president trump. i've determined we can't grow without him. >> the gop made this decision to stick with donald trump and his acolytes just before the general election in 2016. and five years and one lost election later, they're sticking to their guns. a january 6th commission may turn out findings that will make it impossible for the gop to go forward with that strategy. it would also require them to relive and relitigate the big lie. so that's the state of play tonight. like i said, it sounds bewildering, but there are explanations. first, the current gop doesn't feel compelled to yield to critics who find the party at odds with democracy, whether

that's demanding answers to who knew what on january 6, ensuring ballot access, or ridding its ranks of conspiratorial theorists. see, it's a strategy premised on winning. they aren't motivated to investigate the events of january 6 because their base doesn't demand it. they view polling places as locations to gain advantage by limiting ballot access, reducing early voting, and imposing i.d. requirements. and while there's been no discernible effort to grow the gop tent in years, the party is likewise loathe to throw anybody out for fear of alienating any part of the base. hence the tolerance of marjorie taylor greene. cnn's doney o'sullivan was at the latest matt gaetz and marjorie taylor greene's road show. donie, what did you find? >> reporter: hey, michael. look, that event last night took

place in dalton, georgia. the last time we were in dalton was actually 48 hours before the insurrection. you know, last night it was a bit like returning to oz and the wizard of oz. there has been a new president inaugurated now, but so many of the people i spoke to were telling me the same things last night that they were telling me on the 4th of january earlier this year when they were saying that biden is not the fairly elected president of the united states and people are still clinging onto this belief that trump could in some way come back and they are looking to the arizona audit, they are looking to what's happening in georgia, also in their own state, and saying -- clinging on to that belief that trump in some way could come back, which of course it's being egged on by the former president. look, i think it's easy for folks to look at this and to

look at statistics that have came out in the past few days about how many republicans and how many americans believe in conspiracy theories like qanon. but when they are watching a set of essentially maga media and when they are listening to the president's allies on social media, that is their reality, michael. >> donie, i'm curious to know, do you sense that there's a love for marjorie taylor greene in settings like you were visiting last night, or is it that they so despise who they perceive her enemies to be that they sign up with her? >> reporter: yeah, you know, look, obviously we heard a lot this week about the atrocious comments that greene made about the holocaust. but i asked many people who were going into that event last night, which was in greene's constituency, by the way, what

they thought of those comments. and they, like greene, not despite those comments, they like her because of those comments. they view it as her speaking her minding. i actually spoke to one woman who was on her way into the event last night and here's what she had to say. >> a lot of people don't like greene. >> that's okay because you know what, a lot of people didn't like jesus christ. >> do you think she should apologize? >> actually i don't know exactly what was said about the holocaust. as to what she said. >> she compared covid restrictions to the holocaust. >> well, i can understand that with the nazi and how he used children and people to experiment with experimental drugs. >> so you're taulking about the vaccine? >> yes. >> so obviously we should point out what i was speaking to that

lady about after is that the nazis weren't testing experimental drugs on themselves. you know, the vaccine has been taken -- the vaccine has been taken by trump himself, so obviously the comparison is totally ridiculous. but michael, finally i would just say that this all ties together, the big lie, these holocaust comparisons, the anti-vax stuff, everything, it all ties together. it's all part of this one big conspiracy. i think sometimes we talk about qanon as if it's detached from the election lies as if it's detached from the comments and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, but it's not. it is all -- for many people that i meet out on the trail like this, it's all part of the one conspiracy and all part of the one set of beliefs and all part of a set of beliefs that frankly republican leaders are not calling out. >> so, donie, the woman that you interviewed that was dressed by

evel kneivel wasn't aware of marjorie taylor greene having said those things because the channel she watches doesn't cover her saying them. thank you so much for your report, as always. >> reporter: thanks, michael. >> donie is too young to know the evel kneivel reference, i fear. brendan buck was a top aide to former house speakers paul ryan and john boehner. and ron brownstein is back. brendan, let me begin with you. it's not a complicated vote today. why would republicans vote for it when it could yield nothing but bad information for them just on the cusp of the midterm election? >> yeah, tbad information about donald trump and bad information about their own roles leading up to it. look, we can talk about how they are trying to avoid a midterm surprise right before the election. we can talk about donald trump's sway over the party. i think both of of those things are a big factor in what's taking place. but what you've just been

talking about is actually, i think, the much more troubling aspect. what republican senators were doing voting against this commission was reflecting their constituents. this was an easy no vote for them. their constituents -- there's a poll out this week that shows most republicans think that that riot was led by left-wing activists trying to make donald trump look bad. this is the reality a lot of voters have. those senators are reflecting their voters. that's not to say that the elected officials don't have a responsibility here, but it is the reality that so many base republicans live in and senators frankly are prisoners to it. and so they're reflecting the voters that they have back home. >> ron, there's no love lost between mitch mcconnell and donald trump. this was an opportunity where he could have allowed a commission to do his dirty work, right? impanel a commission, let them do an investigation, find out exactly what went down at the white house the afternoon of

january 6, but he didn't go that machiavellian route. why? >> well, i think for the reasons that brendan said. as i wrote in february, the extremist wing of the win party has become too big for the party leadership to confront. the big reality we are facing, i mean the macro story that we are facing is that the fear of demographic eclipse is eroding the commitment to democracy among a significant share of the republican electorate. 90% of republicans say that christianity in america is under assault. two-thirds to three-quarters say that discrimination against whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. all of that is feeding an atmosphere of maintaining power by any means necessary. when you add up all of the pieces that are happening, this vote today on the commission being one just small piece of the picture with the voter suppression laws that are advancing, these audits in arizona and georgia, the challenges to republican officials that certify the

election. you know, i agree with those analysts who say we are facing the biggest challenge to small d democracy in the country since at least the civil war and maybe at any point in our history. >> brendan, do you accept that? >> well, i certainly think there are challenges to our democracy and i see it in congress all the time. we can't get basic things done because both sides, at least their voters, hate each other. look, my former boss, john boehner, worked famously with ted kennedy to do no child left behind. paul ryan worked with senator patty murray to do big deals. big deals are almost impossible now because that is treason to a lot of voters and that is the real erosion of democracy. our ability to come together and have any middle groundi. when you think the other side is trying to ruin your way of life, there is not a lot of incentive to work together. i don't think the voting laws in

georgia, my home state, i think those have been wildly exaggerated, the effect of those. i think there's a lot of hyperbole going on so i don't think necessarily democracy is at risk through some of those laws right now, but that doesn't mean that there aren't efforts under way we need to be cautious of, particularly as we've seen in georgia, you have people running for secretary of state running on the concept that the election was stolen. so those are the things that i'm worried about. >> ron brownstein, final observation. another brilliant piece in "the atlantic" in which you wrote about what the republicans are up to out on a grassroots level. we'll put it up on the screen. reducing access to mail balloting and early voting, imposing new voter identification requirements, purging voters from registration lists, limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, blocking state court oversight of voting laws an increasing republican state officials' authority to override the decisions of local election officials who are

democrats. all that is taking place and you say, hey, democrats, you're running out of time. explain quickly. >> yeah. look, both -- it may be true that both parties view the other as a threat to the country, but only one party is acting on that in a way to systematically reduce access to the ballot and to increase its leverage to try to overturn democratic victories in 2022 and 2024. there is a great deal of anxiety among voting rights groups, civil rights groups, others working in the democracy space that democrats are simply not putting enough priority on what is happening in the red states now and what it might mean for again small d democracy in '22 and '24. they have 49 votes in the senate for sweeping democracy reform. they don't have joe manchin and don't have the votes even if they had the 50 to rollibuster that legislation. i think there's a great deal of anxiety among all of these

groups about whether biden and democratic leaders are taking it serious. chuck schumer said he's going to bring it up the last week of june. speaking of democracy. the people who voted for the commission today represent 191 million people, americans. the people who voted against it represent 105 million americans and 105 prevailed, which gives you a sense of the threats to majority rule that we are now living through. >> gentlemen, thank you. brendan buck, ron brownstein, as always have a great weekend. >> thank you. more than 50% of adults now fully vaccinated heading into memorial day weekend. but how do we make sure that the holiday is both safe and fun? what if we're vaccinated but our loved ones aren't? you've got questions, dr. leana wen has the answers on the new phase in the pandemic, and that's next. why wait? we're here nights, weekends and right now, to give you exceptional care and 20% off your treatment plan.

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appreciate exactly where we are. more than 165 million americans have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine. cases are down and dropping. we've waited so long for this moment for a returning to normalcy to see family and friends, go to the pool, go to a barbecue without a mask for the vaccinated. but let's remember where we were a year ago. fear and isolation were the norm. this was the front page of "the new york times" over memorial day weekend 2020. the incalculable loss nearing 100,000 then. while we've lost five times that number now, there's clearly light at the end of the tunnel. i want to bring in dr. leana wen, an e.r. physician and former baltimore health commissioner and talk about the state of play. dr. wen, you say that the key factor in terms of determining what can i do this weekend, where can i go and how can i do it is whether you are vaccinated. explain. >> well, we are at so much of a better place than we were last

year at this time. last year we were talking about hunkering down with your family unit and we didn't know what was coming ahead of us, we just knew that it was going to be really grim and it was. and now we're at a totally different place where we're actually telling people if you're fully vaccinated, go out and see your friends and family, go travel, do the things that you've been missing the last 16 months. so it's a totally different place. but it is a totally different place for those who are fully vaccinated. those individuals are very well protected from becoming ill, from spreading coronavirus to others. but the risk to those who are unvaccinated remains really high. the risk for that unvaccinated is similar to their risk in the middle of the worst surge in january. so for those individuals if they're traveling, they should still wear n-95 or double masks. they should avoid crowded indoor gatherings, but those who are vaccinated can really enjoy and have a great time.

>> how concerned should those who are vaccinated be about mingling with those who are not? >> yeah, so it really depends and i think we're in this in between phase of the pandemic where there aren't any clear-cut answers. the rate of breakthrough infections meaning infections if you're fully vaccinated is really low, but it's not zero. so somebody who has chronic medical issues or lives at home with somebody who is immunocompromised or young children who are not vaccinated, they might still wanti to be careful because they don't want to be asymptomatic but be transmitting coronavirus to people who live in their household. so i would say if everybody in your household is fully vaccinated, don't be very concerned. you can go about many aspects of prepandemic normal but if you are living with somebody who is at high risk, you might want to take caution. i've got two little kids so my husband and i will socialize with others outdoors. we'll definitely be happy to see anyone who is also vaccinated

indoors. but we're not going to indoor crowded gatherings with up vaccinated, unmasked people. >> dr. wen, have a great memorial day weekend, and thank you. >> thank you, you too. the biden administration taking a harder look at the theory that covid may have leaked from a lab in china. but 15 months into this pandemic, why are we so short on answers? my next guests say much of the blame lies with efforts to bending the facts and turn the lab leak theory into a potent political weapon. olivia troye and david frum take it up next. it's inviting those geese over for target practice. today, let's stain™. right now get incredible savings on select behr premium® stains. starting at $26.98*.

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there's two headlines this week you might have thought conflict with one another. president biden asking the intelligence community to redouble its efforts to investigate the origins of the covid pandemic while shutting down the state department's efforts to do the same. that probe was led by then secretary of state mike pompeo. is that good reason enough to do away with their work? my next guest knows firsthand why there may be good reason for it. olivia troye is a former aide to former vice president mike pence and was a senior advisor on president trump's task force. also david frum has written extensively october right's push for the lab leak theory. olivia, you say you had a front

row seat to the politicization of the intel on covid. explain. >> i did so early on in the spring. i was watching the trends of what was happening in china. we were trying to get access on the ground early on. since we're talking mid to late january and early february. what was concerning to me is that the intelligence community had been briefing on this situation and what we publicly know now is that they had come to the conclusion that they didn't know precisely, they weren't completely, they didn't have a picture of where the virus had originated from. what was concerning to me, though, is that repeatedly i was asked about whether it came from a lab. then what was more concerning was the fact that the questions more leaned towards was it being -- was it done on purpose, was it a bioweapon. i kept refuting these responses. i'm having the intelligence people tell you this, i'm working on this myself. we have refuted these responses.

but it was upsetting when there was a "washington times" article which was corrected two months later. they walked it back and said we don't really have the facts on it. and it was just about the lab. this kept surfacing along the way. it was clear to me that the pandemic response was not going well and i think that they are looking for an answer where they could shift the blame. it was just fundamentally i was concerned about it because i was concerned about the kind of messaging that would start to surface from the white house and you saw that's what happened along the way. >> but olivia, what if it ends up being true? it seems like there's as equal an opportunity that that may have been true as if it had been false. >> here's the thing, we do need to get to the bottom of it if we can. i don't know if we'll ever have full transparency and understand the origin of it. there may be more information that we've seen in the reporting where intelligence -- the intelligence community is continuing to dig on it. president biden is within his

full right to really actually ask the questions now that we are under a different administration, a different time. so i think that we need to press china. we need to continue to try to figure out what happened here and understand the facts. but the truth is, i was more concerned because it was being politicized in a way and i'm watching people like senator josh hawley who were asking the questions and asking for the declassification solely on a lab and i just want it to be a holistic narrative, not a narrative that pushes disinformation or conspiracy theories or something like that, that is fundamentally more dangerous to push that out to citizens. >> but, david, speaking of the plil politicization of this analysis, so many of us wrote off the idea that it escaped from the lab because that's what donald trump was saying. if trump is saying x, then everybody else thinks they should say y. >> trump spent two months saying

nothing is happening. i love china, i trust china, my top priority is to let them out of the crazy trade war that i started that is depressing the stock market at the end of 2019 and pushing the country into recession. only after the pandemic began to spread in the united states to a trump began to worry it might affect him politically, did he and people in his party take up the idea that this was an attack. he compared it to pearl harbor and to 9/11. now that's plainly wrong. and that's one of the reasons why people didn't listen to him at the time is that they launched an attack on the united states by first dropping it on their own people inside the city of wuhan? how does that make sense? so what we are talking about is a very different version of the theory from that which president trump advanced. and the important question with that is the one you asked olivia just a minute ago. what if it's true? this is where you see the real folly and self-harm of the trump point of view.

if it's true. if there was a negligent or careless accident in a chinese lab and a terrible disease spread outward from there, we were blindsided because president trump had blinded the united states. he had removed americans from china. if a virus like this, a pandemic like this can spread from a lab, it shows we need more international cooperation, more american eyes inside china, more cooperation between scientists. we have to pay for that by giving china better access to what's going on inside the united states. president trump wanted the lab theory to be a justification for national selfishness and egotism and stoking rage and resentment against others. when in fact if it's true and we don't know if it is and it may not be, but it shows this is a smaller planet than we ever imagined and we need more cooperation, not less. >> olivia, final word to you. the trial lawyer in me says that if there was negligence on the part of the chinese, i have no suspicion that they did this

deliberately. but if there were negligence and they covered it up, they need to be held accountable and compensate us, no? >> the truth is we don't know. we have no evidence that i have seen back then to believe that it was done on purpose. they have been studying the vi virus, what happened there. we should be asking and we should be having accountability here. look, fundamentally there was a lack of transparency very early on from china. we did try to get access on the ground. cdc tried. we were trying to really understand the virus firsthand and what was happening early on in the pandemic, so i think the questions is right to continue to press china and see what happened from it so we can learn from it as well so we can understand these type of situations so when you're faced with a pandemic like that, it's important to have the facts early on because it certainly affected the world. >> okay. i agree with all that. but there needs to be

accountability and maybe compensation as well. thank you both. >> what does that mean? >> what does that mean? >> yeah. >> that means that if they -- i'm not saying this happened because i don't know. but if they covered up knowledge that there was negligence on their part that allowed it to leak and if hundreds of thousands of americans paid a price as a result because of the delay in treatment, they need to pay for it. >> how? what does that mean? >> it means compensation for what the united states went through that the united states would not have gone through had we known sooner what the truth was. i truly wish i could more time to pursue this but i don't. thank you both. olivia troye and david frum. it's straight out of a movie plot. a mysterious illness striking government officials near the white house. diplomats and spies complaining of nausea, headaches, hearing loss. what is it? and who's behind the strange attacks? we'll take it up with a former cia officer who suffered

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but the effects can be debilitating. nausea, vertigo, numbness and more. maybe you heard about this happening to americans in cuba, hence the name the havana syndrome. then in russia. and what about right here on u.s. soil? investigators now looking at two nsc officials that came down with a mystery illness late last year right near the white house no less. i've got two perfect guests to talk more about it. former cia officer mark, who came down with a mystery symptom in moscow. mark, how did it feel? >> this was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. it was december of 2017. i woke up in the middle of the night in a moscow hotel room and had an incredible case of vertigo. i couldn't stand up. i was falling over. i had a splitting headache and had tinnitus in my ears.

this was the most terrifying experience of my life. >> i know that now you're retired from the cia. are you retired on some form of disability? in other words, does the government recognize, formally recognize that you suffered an injury on the job? >> well, in fact quite to the contrary. i retired at age 50 because i could at the time, but i had to. i couldn't go through a single day of work without a splitting headache. i've actually had a headache for three straight years. and the fact of the matter is i was -- it was denied by the medical staff that anything happened to me. i left there at a certain time at 50 but with clear understanding that my leadership didn't believe that anything had happened to me. >> adam, how many are there like my guest mark? >> well, nobody really knows,

frankly, first of all. nobody knows the real numbers. that's the first thing we should stress. the number that they're tracking of possible cases is over 130 of which of that 130 about 50 of which are cia officers and family members. so it gives you a sense of the scale. but there were a big group of people that were injured in havana. i mean the number there that was studied at the university of pennsylvania was 40. that wasn't the all-inclusive number. so again the numbers are really hard to pin down. >> adam, what is the working hypo hypothesis? >> from the very beginning, the working hypothesis has been that this was a directed energy device. maybe that was designed to spy or to block communications and that it had this other effect of actually injuring the people. but again, this is a hypothesis.

the intelligence hasn't been collected to make that hypothesis anything more than that. and what's really kind of remarkable about this is in the four years since this -- since we started tracking this in havana, there really wasn't been much of a change on the intelligence collection side of it, but the number of people who are coming forward to say this is what happened to them has increased dramatically. >> marc, what do you think happened to you? >> well, clearly it was something pretty dramatic happened. one of the biggest things is after i finally got -- after a battle with the u.s. government for health care, when i finally received treatment at walter reed, i received a diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury suffered from an external exposure event. so the doctors know that something happened. you know, what that is remains to be seen, but make no mistake both myself, other colleagues in the cia and a lot of colleagues

in the state department as well, something pretty awful happened there. and for myself and many others, it's been an absolutely debilitating injury that's caused not only the need to retire but incredible mental health issues because ultimately this is a silent wound. a colleague of mine during some art therapy sessions at walter reed made this incredible painting. it's a black canvas and there's a red splotch on it that looks like blood. he called that the gunshot. we all wish we had been shot and had a more visible wound. so it's been a pretty awful experience and a journey that i never expected to be on. >> adam, in "the new yorker" recently you detailed the story of a 30-something working in the waning days of the trump dmrks leaves the eisenhower executive building headed to his car at the ellipse and is stricken with what marc is describing. begs the question, is the president safe? >> yeah, i mean in fact before that episode, there was an earlier episode involving

another white house staff member who was walking her dog in alexandria, virginia, near her home where she saw a van parked across the street and a guy get out of the van and then she felt this extraordinary pain and sort of doubles over in pain. when she reports that to the security staff at the white house, after that o'brien who was the national security advisor at the time convened a series of security briefings because people were worried. who else could be targeted. what's interesting is that o'brien concluded that senior officials, cabinet members, people like himself, were not at high risk. that the risk seemed to be more junior people, if you will. you know, people who had direct access because of their jobs to information, sensitive intelligence, that maybe the perpetrators of this were targeting with whatever they were doing. but frankly they -- the amount of knowledge is very limited because they haven't caught

anybody in the act. they haven't found the device. so they basically have to make these assessments based on the testimony of patients like marc. that's what they have to go on at this stage. >> hey, gents, i'm out of time. marc, everything i know about your business i learned from jason bourne, but i wonder if we're trying to replicate it. maybe that would help us figure it out. quick yes or no. do you know if the cia is trying to see can we do this? i don't mean to harm somebody but to try to understand better what maybe happened to you? >> look, i'm confident that the cia and the intelligence community, the department of defense is pulling out all the stops on this. i think it's a national security concern now. this has to do with the protection of our personnel overseas, so i'm sure they're doing everything possible, you know, to get to the bottom of this, no doubt. >> wish you good things. tell me quickly. >> they're right now starting a

program to reverse engineer it. so they want to see what it takes to build something like this and their intention is to at a military laboratory expose nonhuman primates to this kind of radiation to see whether this kind of exposure to pulse microwave would reproduce the sort of brain injuries that you're seeing in the human patients as well. so that's something that's getting under way as we speak. >> marc, we wish you good things. adam, great reporting in "the new yorker." appreciate you being here. thank you both. >> thank you. >> thank you. by the way, marc is the author of a great new book called "clarity in crisis, leadership lessons from the cia." airline travel back, but so is a disturbing surge in air rage. we're talking passengers punching flight attendttendants one case knocking out her teeth. union leader sarah nelson says

he's never seen misbehavior this bad and it's got to stop. so pack your patience, people. we'll be right back. the harry's razor is not the same. our razors have five german engineered blades designed to stay sharp, so your eighth shave is as smooth as your first. and we never upcharge you for high quality. harry's. available in store and at harrys.com.

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that means more danger for flight attendants and here is the proof. [ bleep ] that flying attendant lost two teeth and the passengers baneen banned from southwest airlines. why is this happening? we are going to the association flight attendance, sarah nelson, sarah, what the hell? >> what the hell is right, michael. this is unacceptable. this is more than 20 times incidents in the first five months of this year than it occurred in the entire year. what flight attendants are

seeing is a combative attitude. this is inconsistent information so people are not ready for the rules. people are thinking of coming the door of the airplane and taking on safety issues and political decisions rather than a public health necessity. it really got to stop. the only way that aviation works is when we come to the door of the airplane with the spirit that we are all in this together. we tell you to put your seat belt on, we don't say if you believe your seat belt is going to help you, put it on. we know turbulence can throw you on the ceiling and when you land, you can fall on someone else and hurt you, too. this is about keeping everyone safe on the plane. flight attendance suggests, begging the public and listen to our instructions and keeping everyone safe and we can check our patients as we go on our trips and we can try to get back to some sort of normal. >> is the punishment sufficient

for these incidents? >> steve dixon is taking a zero tolerance approach to any unruly passengers. you are subjected to $35,000 for each incident and jail time. these are serious consequences. someone was charged over $63,000 last week. the fines are severe but so are your actions. little problem on the plane can become big problems quickly. one thing i want to make clear is that i have been a flight attendant for 25 years, people come on our plane are microcasm of society. they are coming onto celebrating or greeting or going to a big business deal and you have unaccompanied children going to different family members. all coming on board, guess why? because they want to come together.

aviation is about bringing people together and not tear them apart. what we have to do now is really lift that up and encourage that kind of attitude and understand their severe consequences if you don't just act like an adult. >> one thing i am taking away from this discussion is you think better direction need be given to the traveling public to avoid the tension that builds and creates these circumstances. >> we have to be very clear in the instructions about what is expected of each travelers and secretary mayorkas made it clear yesterday and tsa made it clear and so as president biden. everybody needs to listen up and we need to repeat that messaging and let me just say this. no drinking alcohol in the airport. we need to pause alcohol sales on the airport and airplane, everyone needs to focus on getting along and wear your masks and get vaccinated and come fly with us. let's regain our freedom.

>> sarah nelson, that was excellent, thank you very much. >> thank you, michael. >> we'll be right back. (announcer) carvana's had a lot of firsts. 100% online car buying. car vending machines. and now, putting you in control of your financing. at carvana, get personalized terms, browse for cars that fit your budget, then customize your down payment and monthly payment. and these aren't made-up numbers. it's what you'll really pay, right down to the penny. whether you're shopping or just looking. it only takes a few seconds, and it won't affect your credit score. finally! a totally different way to finance your ride. only from carvana. the new way to buy a car.

♪ sometimes you wanna go ♪ ♪ where everybody knows your name ♪ ♪ ♪ and they're always glad you came ♪

♪ you wanna be where you can see(ah-ah) ♪ ♪ our troubles are all the same (ah-ah) ♪ ♪ you wanna be where everybody knows your name ♪ ♪ you wanna go where people know ♪ welcome back, america. it sure is good to see you.

i will be back tomorrow. join me tomorrow @smerconish. "don lemon tonight" with laura coates is taking over. >> i know, i love it. that's a little before voting. i get a couple of days off until my next show and i am so glad to be with you and certainly in the house tonight. thank you very much, michael. great to see you. >> thank you. >> this is "don lemon tonight," i am laura coates in for don lemon. a commission to investigate the insurrection at the capitol on january 6th. the riot in which five people died. the final vote, 54-35.