also department of justice declines to press charges in a case that galvanized the black lives matter movement but ca fornia lawmakers try tothe new standards for police use of force. chevron comes under fire for state regulators for its handle of a massive oil spill in the valley. we begin our show withthe ongoing debates over immigration and race but and how it's already shaping the president donald trump e ntinues to crackdown and immigration at ore the border this week announcing a new assignment policy that stands to leave thousands of

immigrants in limbo. of all womecolor. in response to that rhetoric the house voted to state one thrty wants to condem president's remarks as racist. the back-and-forth this week between trump and the democrats is likely a pview of what e 2020 presidential race a setting. the present is expected to double down on his divisive message frm 2016. joining me now to discuss is a republican consultant and senior contributory the work, silar and allie times melanie mason, she joins us via skype from los angeles. thank you for being here. melanie, before the president street last week t started off a fight between democrats the progressives were clashing with house speaker pelosi, the squat these four fresher members one of them even accused her of singling out women of color in the democratic caucus. it was d.not looking g did trump help them iby

what he did with the streets? >> i think he absolutely building nancy pelosi out because i think there was a real point of tension of ipuse leaderalienates ese uprising freshman members, these women of color and it was a really uncomfortable situation fornancy pelosi and there's trump inserting himself nto this conversation and that gave democrats aout. it gave them a common person to focus on tonight around and i think he will put the key off of her which is a fraca decision within her caucus. >> clearly truonce to tie these four members and their very progressive positions to a the entire ies hanging around whoever ends up being the nominee. is there any danger in him and that or do nkyou ththat's a smart calculation? >> a calculation on tom's part?

i think we know what trump is trying to do. he's playing to a space and this is the same song he's played in 2016. he played in 28 and think the question is are there diminishing returns for the strategy? two people become numb or near to it? i think the real question is is this for nancy pelosi to fully embrace these four members becse remember what led her to recapturing the house in 2018 it was really a more moderate district of the freshman class is likely much more moderate or much more purple, i think, thanehat four women really represent. i think by having alexandria causey over cortez and others be the face atof the demo party the question is what does that mean to the other freshman? > i want to get that in the second but tim, i want to talk to. i think the most shocking moment iwhat happened in north carolina trump rally where attendees chanted send her back as the president was talking about representative omar. she was born in somalia but as an american citizen and member you do not mince on words on twitter as you watch this, he

put up the street you said i did to my friends in dc go along with trump imagine how this video the president leading the ite mud in e center back channel targeting a black rafiti is going to look in your kids high school ssgovernment history cl. the hatred has got to be stopped. talk about rbc u have been a critic of trumpet i think this was a very strong statement and something we did hear from some corners of the republican party. >> bare . i found f in a fit of pique it seemed to resonate with some people but that's how i felt. i looked at video was really jarring. it felt like some of the worst he would see in france or victor or one rally in hungary. it was on american at its co is idea of chantingsend her back to a refugee. you have all of the underlying istorical racial underton without. but then just like this anti- immigrant sentiments, this is not what the republican party has been about historically. the's always been made of the

but if within the party you look at the president and leader of the party, reagan and announcement speech was at the statue of liberty. about welcoming imms. his final speech in the white house has felt farewell address about the country being welcoming to immigrants. that's how he book ended his presidency. that patriotim used to be ingrained and being welcoming to immtrrants are now p is trying to take that word and make it more about hatred of the other come hatred of immigrants and the rally which he in y extremely jarring and i felt like the responses from the s republic washington were pretty ep. >> muted at best. most condemning the chant but not wanting to insult the president and an ay. >> behie scenes they know it's wrong. so that's the frustrating part. how can you watch that video and not saying this needs to be a moment where we stand out and speak out.? there's a political fear for

trump has a hold on the party. party. entire and polling we've done about 20% of the parties against him. is not enough to win any elections but it is 20-30 million people in the country and i also think there's a group thing that happens. you wach fox, you hear from your friends about l the most extreme things happening on the left and no doubt there's a lot of extreme things happening it left. can you talk about how the 2020 candidates have responded to this? have they? >> there's bl n this gene sense of disgust and condemnation but i think that's kind of what we would expect from democrats. i do think that this is an portunity for them to continue their criticism of the president but i think the n questi does any of that really move the needle or breakthrough? i think to tim's point the intesting thing is what are

the reactions within the president's own party because we would expect democrats to say this is wrong e suugh, that's what they are saying but is truly the question of what are his own republican compaouiots saying that or the lack thereof that i think is the dynamic really worth watching. >> tim, you are on thcampaign trail 2016 with jeb bush. he sought trump use a lot of this language, anti-immigrant language, what do you see thming in 2020? what does tell you about how similar this next election trump isand what angling for their? >> is going to be more of the same nd probably worse in 2016. you have to get inside trump said on this. 2016 he went with his gut. this was not a strategic ploy. it work for him but his gut feeling was to go after the cultural fiss es and it wou work and ended up attracting some of these blue-collar obama voters. so all along the way everybody on tv come all of the republican elites said this is wrong, the muslim man is wrong.

access hollywood is goin to kiu. you have no chance of winning like this. and he won anyway. if you are donald trump why you're going to listen to any people that tell you that you suburban ach out to voters are more diverse voters when that's what they all told you in 2016 and they were wrong? i what he's going to do is use his gut and double down on this native a strategy and inflaming racial grievance because he tnks it's a winner whether it is or not. >> melanie, what do you think? even out on the camp campaign trail but republic independence. do you think this is a potent message? >> i do think that for the base it is a no-brainer for him but i guess he question is that base going to be enough to get you intellectual votes to win? i'm not sure the case or not. y i think the big difference between what we saw in 2016 where trump was really hypothetical, everyone didn't really know what he would do asi

prnt. now in 2019 going to into 2020 where he's not hypothetical anymore, we know what he would pursuis a big fference in the minds of voters. we can't forget that what happened in the middle with ie2018. he this in 2018 but the caravan he tried to juice up his base and it didn't work. midterm elections are different than presidential elections and also this is much more ing to be about key swing states as naopposed to a natelectric move. but i think at adamic i see that stuff and now ispeople aren't wondering what trump would do an office. they know. i think you really beneted and 2016rom the lack of the known. spin i would chime in though and i think in a particular the democratic bubble, democrats i talked to e appreciate the fact that there were a lot of voters who actually thought trump would be worse than he is. s a big portion of the third party vote out there of this anti-trump, anti-hillary voter who tended to be conservative but just couldn't bring them to do it. they voted for gary johnson or

evan mcmullen. i oink the democrats d be concerned those third-party voters go back to trump next election because like yours income he's done it on the issue and while the trees have been bad, while they don't love everything he saying on foreign policy, it's like every time he goes g up to the line of what feels like it's going to be an absolute catastrophe come he backs off a little bit. i don't think any of them have his like any of controversies have been disqualifying with the democrats believe that were not, that is notsomething believe but it's a common view among these johnson and mcmullen the learners and democrats need to talk to them they can't expect everybody's going to watch thiswith the same horror they did. >> melanie, what do you think the message needs to be for democrats in 2020 for the house members and presidential candidate whoever that is? >> if you talk to nancy pelosi s or house leap is doing you did in 2018 and focus on the bread-and-butter issues come healthcare, p althcare, tr a sideshow and talk

about what democrats can do when they deliver when they're in office. that i dthink thatone of the things that will be difficult for the freshman members trying to recapture their seats in 2020 as they enormously from voters wanting to change wanted to see what n the house democrats in the truth is it's really hard to deliver when you only have f one halfone branch of government but that still hard arguments make voters. you going to see them talking a lot about is gues but ng to be hard for them to show what they can deliver when they don't capture other levels of power. >> especially given the president democrat this week attorney general william barr declined to pursue federal charges against a fi police r involved in the death of eric garner. bystander video of the fatal police encounter from 2014 galvanize the black lives matter movement in his ongoing use of to highlight the

excessive force. meanwhile california lawmakers are nearing has of a bill they could set stricter standards in g the nation governe use of deadly force. this is a response to reports of police misconduct that continues to comeo light through a new law that requires law enforcement agencies to release records and misconduct. to an email to discuss is our remote just as editor alex e insd criminal justice reporter suki lewis. welcome to both. you botorhave beening on policing issues for a long time and as we know it was five years ago th summer that just a month after eric garner stepped the protest and ferguson missouri over the death of another unarmedblack man, michael brown set ofa national debate. alex, how much would you say has changed in the last five years in california? quite a bit and it goes back further, 10 years to the fatal shooting of oscar grant in likland at a bar station by a bar e officer. in that case i like the ones you mentioned another arts of the country did result in criminal charges. but also really started a movement in california fo

transparency and accountability particularly around the use of deadly force by police officers. now, it takes a while for somhing like that to catch on so around 2014 when this issue was becoming a major idea in the public consciousness, state supreme court case opened up some information about officer involved shootings. the public for the first time in many decades was allowed learn the names of officers who had shot and many times killed members of the public. since then i think there's been a lot of philosophical change around policies within individual police departments. we've seen bands on shooting at moving vehicles which is a high proportion of the use of deadly orce by police officers. opinions on use choke holds or sleeper holds which is a similar maneuver to what d to air gartner's death. >> and we've also seen political movement after years of there not being any ability

in sacramento totackle this issue. one of the major changes we've seen was the law that took effect in january opening up is thenduct record and you and alex have been part of the team working to obtain as many of them as posible. now there's been a fight in itself. you publish tenses of stories already in suki, you broke the disturbing case eas involving a mentally ill man. officer jonathan silva was responding to a call from the san josstate university library reporting a man was looking at pornography potentially masturbating. he wouldn't answer the officer's questions and we have the clip you guys obtained of what happened and we should for one of you is, it's very vi graphic andent. >> what's your birthday? >> i can change it. >> no, give me your real birthday. >> i don't have one, i swear to god >> standup. stand up. >> stand up.

>> roll over on your stomach. you're going to get tased. >> very disturbing e. it goes on for several more minutes. suki, where the officer and this man now? the man in thevideo philip truong was very badly injured. his ribs were broken, collapsed lungs. he did receive a ttlement from the university for that $950,000. for the officer the case really s interesting to show this kind of divide between how the university and how polfie als viewed his use of force. the university hired an outside investigator to come in ooand at it. they found it was excessive and they try to discipline the officer, fire the officer and t he appealthe state personnel board. the state personnel board basically said it was police officials and said you didn't

do anything wrong. so he followed the police chief who was chief at the university to los gatos and he's now a police officer there. >> isy not the oone. you broke another story involving a domestic violence victim whose attacker, her boyfriend, was a police ficer was repeatedly not arrested because of those connections to the force to the people who would be investigating these what do these cases tell you broadly about how hard it is for an ofcer to really held responsible once they've done something violent? >> and that case the officer was eventually criminally charged, took plea deal. he was taken off the force. eventually. this was after two internal affairs investigations, however. i think what we are seng which is again it's part of the nature of the records that we are getting so i don't want to mischaracterize this and say every officer gets away with

misconduct or every officer about officer. the majority are not. the majority are doing their jobs and doing them well. because of the records were getting where they show actual d cipline for miscondu think there is a pattern we are seeing where this very serious behavior. sexual assault we are talking about dishonesty, very serious misconduct that you would expect to have a ery serious result. in some situations we are seeing thispattern where there are no criminal charges filed. lose their they will jobs or there will be charges lat even there will lose an employment at once of business and at another and get rehired at another agency. >> alex, wmentioned the eric garner case. this was a case where man died after being put in a chokhold nd scuffling with police. are you surprised at the officer in the case was not charged? >> no, r ese days i'm ne really surprised at a police officer not being criminally

charged forn on-duty use of force. i know that that case has been investigated on multiple levels and the latest was the federal investigion into whether it s violations. g those kinds of investigations themselves are pretty rare to have charges come out of the rare still so now. >> but authat is be of the standard that exists, around when an officer can be charged. the legislature is going to already a bill tha passed one house per that will make it harder for police work and make it harder for police to justify the use of force to its result of a very hard- fought compromise. we have seen police officers who have opposed this or police chiefs say they're not posting it now. ith the bill do whit promises to at all? >> i think it's kind of unclear ght now. s more straightforward before some amendments at that people who are now who were supporting it and who now aren'say that real watered

it down. i think that it's going to take a particular type of case that has some circumstances where maybe the oicer maybe an officer escalates the situation to an extreme degree. then to have a prosecutor want to file charges out of that t see if this new law is actually going to change that calculus. for right now ind of hard to tell. >> you mentioned folks in black lives matter and that the folks drop off of it. ki, there'sa companion bill that would require more training for police. is this something that police officers have push, will that make a difference? >> i'm hopeful that it will. i think it's really interesting, it's going to give more mor training and also especially for de- techniques so i think especially for places around the state that don't have those kind of resource libig city, this will give them an avenue to get training and de-escalation techniques, to access to some of these

tools that they wt otherwise have. it's also going to raise the bar on what is required when they review use of force incidents. i do think atthat cg more of these policies and more uniformity across the state could create a safer and more stable working experience for offices and also for e public. >> suki lewis, alex, thank you guys so much. last friday kqed news 800,000 gallons of water in crude oil into a dry creek bed in the central lley. st weeks havrted and stopped since made from oil site roughly 35 miles west of bakersfield. anyone appeared just teis week. stregulators or the company last friday to take all measures to stop the flows and said safran hasn't donand enough to prevent future leaks enut with no coand claimant poses no threat to waterways or wildlife. 20 men now is mourning news editor t goldberg broke the story, ted, thanks for coming

in. incredibly when y there have been no public accounting of the massive spill. ho you find out about it and why didn't we know about it sooner? it is found out about quite boring. i was monitoring database that's on the tao oh, yes office of emeweency services ite for another story. i'd been reporting it in the chevron refinery in richmond and i wanted to see if there were any updates we put the word chevron in the database and i ticed this other incident in cook county. at the time i ticed it wasn't as big as it is now. but i started asking questions about it and little by little the new notations in the database started increasing the amound of oil water that had come out of the ground. by thursday night a week ago at number was a very high. that's when we learned it was actually a much bigger deal. >> do we have any sense by the

skete government didn't this public? >> did not respond to the questions and lawmakers are nterested to find out why it wasn't publicizch a state lawmakers but yesterday senator dianne feinstein issued a statement about that. they did send out notices to the appropriate government agencies. chevron reported the incident like i said in the agency that regulates oil and gas operations in california had done some work on it, stit wasn't widely known. >> what we know about what caused the spill and what o mistakes chemade perhaps after it started? >> what we are reporting today is that siobhan has revealed a little bit about what may have caused the initial spill. ty were doing some maintenance work on an old well had been plucked up they had been damaged but we don't know exactly why or when you wanted treplug the piping in the well so they took out that was in the pipe to put in new concrete to plug it up again. apparently when they pulled

that concrete out that's when oil and water started flowing up from the ground. >> there's been a couple of different k lepoints. we heard earlier the state officials are saying the public is not a risk, the ennoironment isa risk, do environmental agree with that assessment? >> no. right when the whole thing started coming out a week ago wais day and chevron emphasized that no drinkinr would be affected by this. the nearest farm i think is six miles away so from their epoint of no problem for the cultural community in that area. but environmentalists say at some point there could be g drinkter that we may need here and the damage that's bng done to the ound area in this portion of this very huge oil fid can be lasting a long time. >> this is a lot of oil we are talking about. it's med with water t can you put in context how does this compare to other oil spills we've seen in california? e before i do that i want to mention they atrying to get a much more precise amount of oil.

right now they estimate that is 800,000 gallons of ure of oil and water and that about a 20 rd of that which is about 55,000 gallons is crude oil. but they are in the process of getting a much more refined measurement of that we may see a new number in the coming days. but to answer your other question, at this point comparing many of th environmentalists are to a major disaster that took place on the central coast 2005, you may remember at particular incident with the all planes pipeline company that was actually less oil but in a much e different area and cofrom a pipeline this is clt as e to residential areas in urban areas. >> one of the things that happened as these revelations came out was that governor the n newsom moved to fire head of the state division of oil gas and geothermal resources to oversee thpee types ofmits and regulations.

can you talk about why this man was fired, anything to do with this spell? en >> it ha around the same time. last week the governor had gotten word from news reports that had gotten information from a number of consumer groups that revealed two things. one of them was that employees in this particular agency that regulates this industry had investments and the companies they were regulating obat was ously a conflict of interest and then they rebuild a very large number of hydraulic fracturing lig nses, frackirmits had been given to companies. the governor then ordered the firing of the head of the agency comhe replaced that persona somebody else in the same day the person had the new job that's when he issued a new order tochevron on the incident we've been talking up. >> a lot moving around. you have been reporting on other problems that refineries for example in the east bay baa area, talk about it seems like i thinliin rnia with think of ourselves as a very progressive and moving away from oil but is still a huge

industry and one that's caused problems in other communities, >> without a doubt. in the bay area there are a handful of refineries and one in sauna county wral refiner that we've done reporting on you mentioned chevron and richmond. en a number of accidents in the last years that we reported on officer the biggest one to place a chevron re years ago than that but but the chevron refinery and valero refinery had significant number of problems. we reported on them and reported on the that goes from the bay area down to a simmer area where the oil wells n there's ba number of pipeline brakes on a major pipeline that's actually up for sale right now. > a lot goinon in this industry. i know you reported yesterday that there's some political fallout already. f give me a sense out what's happening in that an investigation into the spill. >> the chairman of the senate natural resources committee and its counterpart in the assembly will told is e plan to call for hearings both in the deep oil spill and also into the conflicts of intereat we talked about before. at this point the chairman henry stern of rn

california says he wants to get a timeline from the agency incident ulates this when did they learn about what happened with the chevron oi well and what kind of information they learned. he wants to find out why we didn't all learn about in advance. >> same questions we have. ted goldberg, editor, thank you so much for breaking the story and coming in. >> thank you. that will do it for us. as always you can find more coverage at kqed.org/newsfoom. thingsjoining us. >>

robert: a reckoning on race and president trump. i'm robert costa, welcome to "washington week." president trump: when you see the four congresswomen, if they don't like it, let them leave. robert: president trump inflames racial tensions, criticizing four minority women who serve in the house. after republicans voice concerns, he backs away from the chant. but defends his supporters. president trump: those are incredible people. those are incredible patriots. robert: democrats and just a few republicans rebuke him in the house. i know racism when i see it. i know racism when i feel it. robert: we discuss another turbulent week next.