unfair. it is going to hurt tens and tens of millions of people. i think the best that we can do now is hold the line. i think we've got to go to the american people, and say -- and get a new congress out there that will do what the american people want, which is to protect social security, medicare, education, and medicaid, and ask the wealthy and large corporations to begin paying their fair share. >> senator bernie sanders, thank you very much for joining us tonight. >> my pleasure. "the rachel maddow show" is up next. >> lawrence, your standing ovation for chris christie's comments in your "rewrite" tonight itself earned a standing ovation. it was so perfectly done. >> hey, the guy deserves it. i'm not expecting him to get another one any time soon, but this was the night. >> well done, my friend. thank you. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. today was one of those days when even people who do not pay attention to business news and economics news were forced to pay attention to those things. today was a day that every tv network became a business news

network. >> take a look now, down 407. 407. massive plunge. >> red across the board. the dow jones industrial average down more than 400 points. >> the dow jones industrial down more than 450 points. nasdaq down right now 117 points. >> down nine of 10 days. >> we have the s&p 500 down more than 4%. our biggest loss since 2009. >> hearing words like alarming, panic, devastating. >> rather panic-stricken selloff continues. look at that. 476.54 down, and going further down. >> now the dow is down more than 500 points. on this session alone. the s&p 500 and the nasdaq down similar percentage points. wow. >> we're down now more than 500. >> the market is now down 503. >> what a day. and you will see the headlines tomorrow. there is no positive way of spinning this.

the dow jones industrial is down 512 points. >> stocks dropping 4% on the day, concluding their worst nine-day decline in two years' time. >> since december 1 of 2008 was the last time we were down more than 400 points. >> blue chip suffering the 10th biggest drop on record today, down 513 points at 11,384. >> you can't say you can't be worried. that's a big number to lose in a day. more than 10% in the last 10 days or so. that's worrisome. >> and it is 4:00 on wall street. do you know where your money is? >> the dow fell nearly 513 points today. 155 of those points in the final very dramatic hour of trading. some of which you saw there. that's a drop of 4.3% in one day. the market's worst day since december 2008. and yes, december 2008 is when we were still in end of the world territory. the nasdaq and the s&p 500 did even worse than the dow did today. why is this happening? why is the stock market doing this again?

it's not because of one policy fight or some vote in washington. this is not even mostly a united states story. the markets here are global. italy now said to be in danger of defaulting on its debt and taking out the euro with it. and the spanish capital of madrid, people are protesting austerity matters there much like they have been doing in greece, which is still in trouble and at risk of default. the european stock market today, all of them hitting their lowest levels in over a year. down an average of 3.4%. even in an environment of global markets, why couldn't the united states be more insulated from this if this was not primarily an american problem? after all, we decided not to default on our debt on purpose this week. even if greece or italy might be forced to. it is starting to look like there are two american messages here. one of them is just that our economy is bad. the united states may be about to head into a double dip

recession. our economy, which has been coming back from the horrible wall street disaster since early 2009, may be now starting to crater again. eek. the other message here that this dow disaster may have been for us today is not just that the united states isn't an exception to bad economic news around the world, that we're in bad shape too, it's that we're not likely to get out of our bad shape anytime soon. at least not if action in washington is part of what we need to do to get out of our bad shape. in a global economy, when all of the industrialized economies are really linked, the world frankly needs a leader. the world needs a big economy to have a big strong recovery to help buoy markets in other countries right now. and that apparently is not going to be us. at least that is the judgment of us right now. and part of the reason why is that if there were any big policy solutions needed to turn the american economy around, to bring down unemployment, nobody can really imagine washington

today as capable of enacting those needed policies. joining us now is msnbc policy analyst ezra klein, columnist for "the washington post" and also for bloomberg. hello, ezra of many new titles. congratulations on all of that. >> good evening. >> how strong of a connection is there between the american economy, american economic policy, and what we saw in the market today? is this mostly international news that is driving this sort of thing? >> this is everything. and this is really the problem with it. you heard in your intro there that we didn't just lose 5% or 4% today. we have lost about 10% over the last 10 days. and the reason is that the market cannot find anything to tell a story of hope, of recovery. it isn't going to be europe. europe is in worse shape than we are. it isn't necessarily going to be china and the emerging markets, which there had been some hope for, because it looks like china is slowing down. and now there's a question of how the government can deal with a slowdown in growth. and as we've seen in the last

couple of weeks here, it's not going to be us either, because not only is our economy in much worse shape than we realized it was even three or four weeks ago when we got the new commerce department numbers showing that our gdp losses over the last couple of years have been massively understated, but our political system is deeply broken. the markets are wondering how we're going to get out of this hole after we finish playing our games. >> is there anything that washington could do, if washington was a more functional place, that might be reassuring to the markets, that might offer the kind of hope that would make america seem like a way out of this mess and not just somebody else who was in the mire? >> i think there are things we can do that would be reassuring. i don't know there's a lot we can do that would show we are the way out. for instance, reassuring would be that we don't continue having unnecessary arguments about whether or not we will pay back our bills. that would be a good thing to do. reassuring would be that we understand the severity of the global crisis and we're going to do the clear things we need to do as a country to recover. we do have a deficit problem that is true.

we need a long-term deficit reduction. it's good to get started on that. on the other hand, we have a huge short-term growth problem. we have no growth. very high unemployment. and we have all of these things we can do. there was a bloomberg story, one of my employers, who said -- and this was fascinating. our yields on the treasury, which is how much the market charges us to borrow, are lower than they have been at any point since eisenhower's administration. what that means is that the market cannot borrow from us quickly enough. we are still the safest thing to do out there, and they want more of our debt. as they beg us to borrow, and we could use that money to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, to pass a large payroll tax cut, pass a hiring tax credit, we are saying no. no matter how good of a deal you give us, we refuse to take your money and try and speed a recovery in this country. and no matter whether or not that would make us the hope for the world, it would certainly make our economy better off. >> ezra, you know as well as anybody that washington is not a unilateral thing or monolithic thing. and when people look at there

being stasis in washington, what is happening is that nothing can get through congress. we see a white house that says they are reinvigorated in terms of focusing on jobs. is there anything that the white house can do that would have a meaningful effect in terms of the kind of reassurance that you're talking about and a meaningful effect on jobs? >> there isn't a lot of things they can do. they could do something on housing recovery and push harder on jobs. it's obviously not the case they have a lot of control over the congress. who could do something is the federal reserve. they could do a quantitative easing that goes further into real assets as opposed to simply buying treasuries. and many respected economic conservatives have been pushing for this thing, such as christina roamer. but they appear to be pulling back somewhat. they appear to be trying to exit the building.

the federal reserve has been under a lot of criticism particularly in the republican party lately, and it has shocked them a little bit. they don't want to necessarily lose their political independence. so they are not doing nearly as much as they could be or frankly should be doing, and that's a problem because when congress gridlocks, they become our only hope. >> ezra klein. and tomorrow, the host of "the martin bashir show." ezra, thank you so much for helping us. i appreciate it. >> thank you. now we turn to robert frank. thanks for coming in. i really appreciate it. >> my pleasure, rachel. >> let me ask you if you agree with ezra's assessment that while this may not be an american problem that the markets were responding to in total, there are things that the u.s. government could do to make america a more reassuring place right now in the markets. >> absolutely we could. i think ezra is right that the political prospects for that happening are dim, but i think

it's very important to keep explaining to people that the problem we face is not really a very complicated one. we don't have enough demand to put people to work. businesses aren't spending. why should they spend? they have already got enough capacity to produce more than consumers want to buy. consumers are worried they are about to lose their jobs, if they haven't already. they are worried too that the price of goods and services may rise at some point, although there's no evidence of that. they are holding back. they have got debt to service. consumers won't lead the way. businesses won't. that leaves government. and we've known for over 60 years that in a situation that we're in now, where there's persistent shortfall of demand, government can invest in public works projects and other things that will get the economy back on its feet. it could be done. it's quite easy to do. the workers are there who know how to do the jobs. the market's happy to lend us the money, as ezra said.

they are eager to loan us more money at very low interest rates. the cost of debt compared to the cost of unemployment is incredibly low. a $1 trillion deficit costs us $25 billion a year to pay the interest on that. if we have an extra 10 million unemployed, that's $250 million lost forever each year. and so it's a 10-1 tradeoff. we're focusing on deficit reduction when we really ought to be focused on job creation. and we know how to do it. >> even if we all we care about is the deficit, still jobs creation is the answer. >> what we're doing now is just unimaginably stupid. >> right now, it seems to me like -- well, i'll just say it this way. we are not a show that very often leads with, what happened on the stock market today. i at least look at the landscape of american news and think that. i very rarely think that's the most important thing. i also spend a lot of time talking about what's politically realistic in america.

so now we've got this combination where i have a 500 point drop of the dow at the top of the show, and we're talking about the things that america needs to do to deal with our economy not being politically realistic. at what point does the economy become shocking enough, a 500-point drop on the dow, becomes shocking enough that it changes what's politically realistic? how do we understand the magnitude of a day like today on the dow? >> maybe there's a ray of hope there. if it were going to lose 500 points, better to lose them in an afternoon than over the course of two months. people i think are jolted into recognizing that there is a problem. it's time to discuss these issues, because, again, there really are simple solutions. a payroll tax holiday. that would put extra money into workers' pockets. the problem is not enough demand. they'll have more money, they'll spend more. give the employers a break for

the next year on the payroll tax for newly hired workers. that would make it cheaper to hire new people. there are thousands of projects, bridges that are collapsing that need to be fixed. people available to fix them. people are happy to lend us money to finance the jobs. materials cheapen world markets. machines sitting idle in the yards. this is all quite doable, and politically that's the road block, as you point out. but people shouldn't get a free pass just by being the road block. people should continue to point out that we could be doing something about this, and the road blocks had better get out of the way. >> and a sharp shock like we saw today may be what gets the road blocks out of the way. >> we can hope. >> we called you on short notice today, and i know you cancelled other plans to be here. i'm really grateful. thank you. >> always a pleasure. for his 50th birthday, i'm sure that president obama did not ask for the stock market to fall like wile e. coyote going off a cliff. i bet he also didn't ask for republicans for three years asking to see random forms of

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the biggest story in the presidential politics of the day, mitt romney and the magical $1 million donation to him that nobody is owning up to. that story is coming up. being your average bears... we know how to tighten our purse strings. sugar salmon flakes! sorry buddy. even with bath tissue. that's why i buy new charmin basic. it's very reasonably priced. and it holds up so much better than the leading competitive brand. new charmin basic has a duraflex texture... that's soft and durable. plus, it's two times stronger when wet versus the leading competitive brand. new charmin basic works for my bottom line.

and my bottom. we all go. why not enjoy the go with new charmin basic? ok. it was february 1961. an 18-year-old girl from kansas named anne dunham got married against her parent's wishes. she got married to a kenyan man five years older than she was. their marriage took place on the island of maui in hawaii, and was three months pregnant at the time of the wedding. sometime between her wedding and

when the child was born, in that six-month period, ann dunham decided to fly halfway around the world to kenya to give birth to the couple's son there. the plan this young couple was hatching at the time was that their baby, this terror baby, if you will, would become the president of the united states in about 50 years. why give birth to him then in kenya instead of just staying in hawaii? i don't know. and you don't either. but they had to know in advance that he was going to run for president 50 years later, because within days of giving birth to him in kenya, the 18-year-old ann dunham, or perhaps a co-conspirator, paid a newspaper in honolulu, hawaii, to run this false birth announcement saying that dunham's son was not born in kenya, which of course he was, but rather that he was born in honolulu. now, you don't have to be born

in the united states to be a governor or a senator or any other thing, it's just president. so ann dunham, 18 years old, or her co-conspirators, knew in 1961 that this baby would specifically be president one day, which is why they had to pay for the fraudulent birth announcement in 1961. knowing he would be president is also presumably why they named him barack hussein obama. so as to arouse no suspicion whatsoever of his maybe foreign-born nature. so now we have a foreign-born president-to-be terror baby, presumably indoctrinated for his eventual covert ascendance to free leader of the world, lead to one of the few unanswered questions in this very clear story, which is over and above the fake birth announcement in the newspaper, who arranged for the fake birth certificate? the fake birth certificate? the fake birth certificate to be put on file in the department of health in hawaii?

was it barack obama's 18-year-old mother? his 23-year-old father? was it some of their unnamed co-conspirators? could it have been the terror baby himself? the governor of hawaii at the time was this man, william francis quinn. i'm just saying. where was he at the time? as part of their plan to make young barack look like he was american, which of course he was not, they brought him from kenya to hawaii, where they made sure he gained a little weight, becomes a huskie boy for a little while. that looks more american. and then he is put through american-seeming education at places like occidental college, although that still sounds foreign. and also harvard law school. and with only the fake birth announcement and the forged birth certificate, the american government stumbles into allowing a secret foreign-born terror baby to run for president of the united states. and now 50 years later exactly, maybe, the plan has worked. i think there are a few

different varieties of that story, but broadly speaking, that is the story. that is the theory to which 13 members of congress, 13 elected members of congress have signed onto, the co-signors of the birther bill to demand birth certificates and not like that probably forged one from anyone running for president, like, say, a certain someone who will have to run for re-election next year, so we as a country don't get duped again. >> so you believe the president is a u.s. citizen? >> you know, i don't know. i have never seen him produce documents that would say one way or the other. >> you think he is an american citizen? >> i'm not going to get involved in that. what -- i'm talking about -- >> you can't say that he's an american citizen? >> well -- >> you can't say the president is an american citizen? >> i don't know. >> what is your position on barack obama if he is in fact a kenyan born, indonesian muslim?

>> he himself raises the greatest questions. i think that those questions need to be answered. >> my question is, do you believe that this president was born in america? because i have not seen enough evidence to say that he is an american citizen. do you believe he is a muslim? >> you know, i don't know. i really don't know. >> is he a citizen? i don't know. there's this other theory which seems so plausible. it's that theory, the whole like flying to kenya to give birth to the baby and the fake announcement -- yeah. it's that theory that led republican lawmakers in at least 10 states across the country to introduce birther bills, requiring more birth certificate proof before anybody allows another terror baby on the ballot in any of those great states. republicans in arizona went so far as to actually pass the bill. it was later vote owed by arizona's governor, jan brewer. come to think of it, where was jan brewer in 1961? even republicans laying the groundwork for presidential election ran with the birther

certificate theory from the get-go. >> this is the easiest problem to solve. all the president has to do is show it, and all i'm saying is there's only one person who can attest to the authenticity, and that's the clerk of court where he was born. >> one presidential run this year actually seemed to be based entirely on the kenya conspiracy theory as its whole platform. >> why doesn't he show his birth certificate? and you know what? i wish he would, because i think it's a terrible pall that's hanging over him. if you are going to be the president of the united states, you have to be born in this country. and there is a doubt. >> come on. >> why doesn't he show his birth certificate? why has he spent over $2 million in legal fees to keep this quiet and to keep this is a lent? >> the white house decided to end all of that by producing further proof to obscure the true reality of his birth. >> no one is happier or prouder

to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the donald. and that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. like did we fake the moon landing. what really happened in roswell? and where are biggie and tupak? michele bachmann is here, though, i understand, and she is thinking about running for president, which is weird because i hear she was born in canada. yes, michele, this is how it starts.

>> while those jokes at michele bachmann and donald trump's expense were sort of devastating, it was really the most devastating thing about that whole thing in american politics is that why the president was taking the hide off of donald trump, at that very moment in time what was he also doing? he was also killing osama bin laden. so, yeah, this whole thing is over. it's really -- it's just the dead enders now. the website worldnetdaily, you might remember their where's the birth certificate merchandise page, they made a ton of money off of this, they have now had to revise all of their merchandise, saying where's the real birth certificate? they are still trying to eke a few bucks out of this thing. you may remember orly tates still trying to make a go of it as well. it's reported that ms. tates is now asking her followers for, quote, information about hawaiians or leftists who in theory could have aided the

obama majorities in a massive conspiracy. so, yeah, in other words, it's over. i will say -- i thought at the seem when president obama released the second form of the birth certificate that that would not put this thing to rest. that it wasn't fact-based and giving more facts wouldn't help. but it did put it to rest. i was wrong. it put it to rest. on the president's 50th birthday today, it is now just the dead enders and the propheteers at this point who is plugging this thing. nobody who has any pull at all in conservative politics or republican politics at all who has -- seriously? are you sure? are you sure this is not from last -- this is this week? this is from yesterday? ok. play it. >> tomorrow is obama's birthday. not that we've seen any proof of that. we haven't seen any proof of that. they tell us august 4 is the birthday. but we haven't seen any proof of it. sorry.

>> sorry. apparently, it's not over. joining us now is david corn, washington bureau chief for mother jones and an msnbc political analyst. david, good to see you. thank you for being here. >> good to be with you, rachel. and happy birthday, mr. president. >> happy birthday, mr. president. rush limbaugh is still a birther? isn't birtherism over now? >> well, you know, you do think that birtherism is over. i think you put it well a few moments ago when you said it was really relegated to this realm of dead enders and people who just are, you know, one step away from area 54 roswell conspiracy theoryism. but while birthism is dead, otherism isn't dead. and you see in the republican presidential field, you see the conservatives, they are still out there trying to promote the notion that obama is really not quite american. which is a more subtle version of birtherism. and i think in some ways more insidious.

and if you want examples, i can give you some. >> tell me some examples, otherism, go. >> mitt romney when he was talking about health care a couple of months ago, actually after the long form birth certificate came out and he said that he didn't question obama's citizenship, what did he say? he said -- i'm going to read this here. the obama administration fundamentally doesn't believe in the american experiment. hmm. doesn't believe in the american experiment. sarah palin just this week said that american ideals are foreign to barack obama. they are foreign. he doesn't believe in america either. and today, you played rush yesterday, but today what did he do? he compared barack obama to robert mugabe of zimbabwe. he said he is his new role model. and why? because he took away white people's farms. i don't know how he does it.

>> repeatedly veiled attacks on the president like we saw late breaking in the 2008 campaign. do you think this stuff is going to be just as bad? >> i think you will see it in the republican primary. in general, the public don't care about this and aren't susceptible i think to these types of arguments. but in the republican field, you have voters in the gop electorate who want to bash obama as some sort of foreign subversive element who is trying to turn america into a muslim socialist country. i don't know. it's kind of confusing to me too. and so candidates who want to get those votes, republican candidates, are going to have to

play to those fears and paranoid sentiments. and that's what i think you have seen with mitt romney, michele bachmann, and others, and they are going to find other ways of doing that in the months ahead to get that nomination. >> david corn, msnbc political analyst and washington bureau chief for "mother jones." thank you for dipping into the madness with me. i appreciate it. >> thank you, rachel. as michele bachmann gets mainstreamed from the far wing nut of republican politics into a supposed presidential candidate, it will be fascinating to see whether or not her past embrace of birtherism will be held against her being taken seriously. it's going to be a potpouri of things to choose from. all right. biggest scoop in american political news today was thanks to dogged following the money reporting by david isikoff. he will join us next. e the best toffee in the world. it's delicious. so now we've turned her toffee into a business. my goal was to take an idea and make it happen.

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another day, another deal. another day, another deal, over something that was not a crisis until congressional republicans made it one. congratulations, america, we once again have a federal aviation administration. hurray! the faa has been partially shut down for almost two weeks ago. 4,000 workers furloughed. hundreds of construction projects on hold. tens of thousands of construction workers out of work. all because house republicans held up reauthorization of the faa to try to force democrats

into letting them strip union rights from people who work for airlines and railroads. the democrats did not cave on that. the deal reached today provides for no change in union rights. but it's only a very, very short-term deal. the senate will approve it tomorrow. president obama says he'll sign it immediately. but then we get to have this fight all over again when this short-term authorization runs out in just over a month. meanwhile, though, those 4,000 furloughed faa workers will be back at work as of the stroke of pen tomorrow. as for the construction projects and those tens of thousands of construction workers, they will take a bit longer to fire up again. a lot of those workers took other jobs if they could find them, while the agency shut down, so it's now a matter of waiting to get all of those crews back together again. before the shutdown, they were working on improvement projects at more than 250 american airports. working on runway lighting systems and airport surface radar systems to prevent collisions at airports. restarting those projects after

they were stopped by congress will cost a ton of money, a ton of money that would not otherwise have had to be spent. the partial shutdown itself has been costing the government $30 million a day in lost tax revenue. had it remain unresolved until congress returned from recess, the cost would have been well over $1 billion. local communities have been figuring out what it cost them as well. local press reports on this issue show worries over 1,200 jobs on the line in minnesota and millions of dollars worth of projects of grant money in maryland. $16 million at the memphis airport. an aviation school in fort wayne, indiana. two projects at the peoria, illinois, airport in jeopardy. they will all theoretically restart now. that is the cost incurred. already. in this particular hostage standoff over republican efforts to strip union rights.

after the debt ceiling deal was agreed to, finally, senate republican leader mitch mcconnell told "the washington post" i think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. most of us didn't think that. what we did learn is this. it's a hostage that's worth ransoming. and it focusing the congress on something that must be done. so it's the full faith and credit of the united states of america that makes for a hostage worth ransoming or it's the federal aviation administration. that apparently makes for a hostage worth ransoming. this is how republicans plan to work apparently from here on out. hostages. they're not saying don't call us hostage takers. they are saying, yeah, we're

taking hostages, causing real harm to the country to try to get by force what they do not have the votes to get. that is how republicans say they are going to handle the responsibility of governing from here on out. flotation devices are beneath your seat. [ male announcer ] in america, we believe anyone can be a hero. kraft singles. we're rich in calcium to help build 'em up strong. ooh, watch out, bad guys. kraft singles. the american cheese.

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one of the stranger half secret little twists this year's presidential politics is that the presumed republican front-runner, the candidate who says he is the one to beat, actually has a lot of people on his own side who do not like him. in south carolina, one group of republicans responded to news of mitt romney the front-runner by trying to draft new jersey governor chris christie to run against him. freedom works says it will fund an effort to block mr. romney from becoming the nominee. another group has a stop romney campaign. also the club for growth, a heavyweight these days in

republican fiscal policy, calls mr. romney a flip flopper. and those are just the folks on the right, his own side, who do not like mitt romney for his politics or the way he combs his hair or whatever. this guy, fred karger, is completing against mitt romney for the republican nomination. he is a little known candidate, which is a polite way of saying he doesn't really have a chance. but he has made what seems to be a substantive legal complaint about mitt romney. in june, he wrote to state officials in massachusetts saying he thinks mr. romney may have violated massachusetts voting laws in 2009 and 2010 when he voted in the special election for ted kennedy's old senate seat won by republican senator scott brown. mr. romney voted once in the primary and once in the general election in massachusetts. at the time that he cast those ballots, he claimed he was living in his son's basement in belmont, massachusetts, having sold his own multimillion dollar estate there in april 2009. his son's basement at the time was an unfinished space. meaning that mitt romney, a multimillionaire, was claiming himself to be the legal resident

of his son's unfinished basement. he is claiming under massachusetts law that his son's unfinished basement was the center of his domestic, social, and civic life. massachusetts officials told us when we asked there would be no investigation into the claims made by mr. karger. but despite having a number of people on his own side who really do not like him and are willing to say so out loud, mitt romney of course also has his fans. people who do like him and write rather large checks to further his political career. he has powerful and wealthy people who really like him, want him to run and want him to win. we're just not necessarily allowed to know who those people are. in march of this year, the "wall street journal" reported that the romney campaign had begun a 15-city tour for big donations, as in $50,000 big donations. the campaign set a goal of $50 million to be raised by early summer, saying they thought that would be enough to scare off

anybody thinking of wondering into mitt romney's race. we know now from campaign records that some of his rich friends got out their fancy checkbooks and started inking zeros, even though they didn't make their 50 million goal. one of the big donations he got was from w. spann llc. now, that is a little mysterious. its headquarters are listed as being on madison avenue in new york city. but this group, this spann company, was only created when it was registered with the state of delaware, land of mysterious corporations, back in march. the incorporation papers were filed by this young boston lawyer. we don't know who her client was or what this new corporation planned to do as a business. we do know that this particular lawyer specializes in something called wealth transfer strategies. and the very next month, after she filed the incorporation papers for w. spann llc, they did in fact transfer a whole bunch of wealth. in april, w. spann transferred

$1 million. not to mr. romney's campaign directly, but to a pac being run for his benefit. there's a giant contribute button and some boilerplate comments about candidates. but it's really all about mitt romney. it is run by mitt romney's backers. they have had mitt romney solicit donations. it's a mitt romney gig. they raised more than $12 million in the first half of the year. and 1/3 of what they raised came in million dollar chunks from four sources. including the aforementioned mysterious w. spann llc, a company that seems to have done pretty much nothing besides give $1 million on april 28 for the better. of mitt romney's political career. on july 11, two weeks before this mitt romney pac had to file its report with federal elections officials, two weeks before that pac was to reveal

its donors, this company shut down. its wealth transfer specialist lawyer filed this certificate of cancellation with the state of delaware. so whatever this company was supposed to be, whatever it was, after founding itself, submitting a single $1 million check on mitt romney's behalf, the mysterious w. spann llc was officially desolved. >> lawrence, your standing ovation for chris christie's comments in your "rewrite" tonight itself earned a standing ovation. it was so perfectly done. mr. romney's old investment firm, bain capital, says w spann was not affiliated with them or anybody that works for them. next guess, anyone? was it a girl scout troop maybe?

cookie sales this year i hear were great. could it have been the government of china maybe? how about a mexican drug cartel? how about mitt romney himself? we do not know. we just do not know. joining us now is the investigative reporter who got everybody asking these questions today by putting these dots together. michael isikoff, nbc news national investigative correspondent. michael, congratulations on breaking this story. appreciate having you here. >> well, thank you, rachel. good to be with you. >> do we know whose money this is? is there any way to find out? could it be foreign money? could it be romney's own money? is there any way to know? >> it certainly could be anything. it's a rather intriguing washington mystery. you know, you certainly laid out a -- one scenario that people have speculated about, the bain capital collection. ropes & gray, the law firm that cameron casey works for, has long represented bain capital, the firm that mitt romney once headed. bain capital does have an office in that 590 madison avenue skyscraper that w spann listed its address as. but bain capital's spokesman in a rather emphatic denial to me said nobody at the firm is part

of this entity. now, that does raise the question, could it be clients of the firm or could it be somebody else in 590 madison avenue? there's ubs. there's bank of america. there's cemex. there's a lot of other blue chip firms that have this address. what we do know is i spoke to the management company at 590 madison avenue. they say they never heard of w spann and have no such tenant. >> why did you figure this out. why did you start chasing the w spann connection in the first place? what about it stood out to you? >> well, first of all, the million dollars. you don't see that every day. and when you see a huge check like that, it does kind of raise your eyebrows. and i saw this was filed in the restore our future filings with the f.e.c. late on friday. there were a couple stories over the weekend that said people couldn't explain where this was. and that got my juices going.

we did a full lexisnexis search, database search on monday, and found the delaware corp. papers. i called the delaware secretary of state's office. i ordered the incorporation and dissolution papers, saw the dates, saw the name cameron casey, and was able to sort of piece what we've gotten so far together. >> is there any evidence that this company ever did anything other than form, give a million dollars to mitt romney, and disband? is there any evidence they did anything else? >> not in the public record. and that's precisely the question. and that's why there's going to be calls tomorrow from some campaign finance reform groups for a justice department and federal election commission investigation into this. look, it is a federal crime to give money in the name of another. that's called a straw donation. the justice department has made vigorous prosecutions of this over the years. this is sort of can be a form of this.

if w spann had no other purpose but was only set up for -- to funnel money to restore our future, the pac, then it is arguably a straw donation. somebody is trying to conceal their identity by using this arguably sham company to make this donation. >> michael isikoff, nbc news national investigative correspondent. michael, i love the way you think. i love this work. and the way you do it on this. thank you for following this trailing and thanks for joining us. >> thanks, rachel. >> the big recall election in wisconsin is tuesday. i have big news about that. ed schultz is going to be doing his show in madison starting on monday. tonight, all the latest in the big money fight over governor scott walker's union-busting play in wisconsin. that's coming up on "the ed show." and here the best new thing in the world today is great news for american soldiers. and american soldiers have had a best new thing coming to them for a really, really long time, frankly. news i'm really happy to report. coming up. [ male announcer ] these are volunteers...

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in the decade since 9/11 about 2 million americans have fought in our wars in iraq and afghanistan. 2 million americans is a lot of people. it is also, however, less than 1% of the u.s. population. our iraq and afghanistan veterans have borne a hugely disproportionate burden as the 1% that's them have done deployment after deployment after deployment in the name of the 99% of the rest of us who have not done these things. in 2007, having that tiny proportion of our population fighting two of the longest wars in our history simultaneously meant that combat deployments were lengthened to 15 months. 15 months at a stretch in the war zone.

and the bush administration's shortened the troops' minimum guarantee of how much time they would have at home before being deployed at home. today nbc news has learned that finally that is about to change in the united states army. tomorrow the army is expected to announce that most combat deployments will decrease to nine months total time on the ground in the war zone. the announcement is also expected to include an increase in dwell time, which is the time troops have at home between their deployments. to have been a soldier this decade for the united states of america has meant two, three, six, eight deployments to war. we have never before as a country asked this much of our men and women in uniform for this long. shortening these deployments, increasing their guaranteed time at home, frankly, it is the best new thing in the world today. it's due to be announced tomorrow. it's not everything, but it is a very, very welcome start. that does it for us tonight. now it's time for "the ed show." have a good night.