membership rallied millions of us on small business saturday to make shopping small, huge. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. happy friday. thanks for being with us tonight on the day that felt like the kind of newsday that only happens in the movies. the first headlines to cross this morning were about a jewel heist in france, specifically at the cannes film festival. hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels all stolen from a hotel safe. there were initial reports that the jewels might have been things that movie stars were planning to wear at the film festival, but now it seems that that is maybe less likely. a professional gang of jewel thieves who actually are known as the pink panthers have hit this area in france in recent years. police say they don't think this

particular heist looks like the work of the pink panthers, but they are not ruling them out yet. and, no, that is not my dog. then this evening, also at cannes, shots of some kind, shots were fired during a live tv broadcast at the festival, which sent the audience and movie stars running for cover. police arrested a man in possession of a fake grenade and a starting pistol. so a thing that looks like a gun and can make a sound like a gun, but it does not fire real bullets. police's initial statement about the guy they arrested is that he seems to be, quote, a crazy guy. don't get mad at me for saying crazy. that's what the police said in france. also today, reports of a video that appears to show the mayor of the fourth largest city in north america smoking crack. this is a photo supplied by the people who are selling the video, gawker.com was the first source to break the news. their editor saying he traveled to toronto after he was approached to buy the crack smoking mayor videotape. the gawker editor said he did

see the tape. he says he is sure that it is the mayor in the tape, but he did not buy the tape. the price was too high. nevertheless, he wants you to know it exists. the news is kind of like that today. even before you get to the details in the silvio berlusconi trial in italy where some of the prostitutes at his bunga bunga party were paid to dress up like barack obama, for whatever reason. it's that kind of day in the news. today is scandal o'clock all day long. we saw the guy forced out of the irs grilled about the tax agency using single key words to skrine out people for scrutiny. he did tell two higher-ups last june that he was going to be doing this investigation into how the conservative groups were treated. he told the deputy treasury

secretary and the general counsel at treasury that he was starting this inquiry as to whether conservatives were being unfairly singled out. he told them he was starting this inquiry but obviously not what the inquiry had found since he hadn't found anything yet since he was just getting started. republicans have seized on this news because of the timing. saying it's important there were administration officials outside just the irs itself who knew before the election that there was at least a potential problem with the irs targeting conservative groups. shouldn't that have been disclosed publicly? could that have become a salient issue in the election had the administration disclosed that investigation was under way before everybody voted? is that's what happened today in today's hearing on the irs scandal. don't worry, in case you missed today's hearing on the irs scandal, there will be many more. there will be endless hearings on this, at least it seems. the next ones are already scheduled for tuesday and wednesday next week. this is the new story that the republicans, and even the

democrats this time, are going to make their obsessive 24-hour a day investigative reason for living from here on out. and they have time to do that in part because the other scandal the republicans have been obsessing on and trying to wring for all its worth for months now has kind of fallen apart the last few days. more specifically, it's taken a really hard turn the past few days. it was this time last week when the benghazi scandal finally crossed over into a mainstream concern, instead of just fueling all caps, exclamation point, mailed fund-raising chain letters. it was last night when nbc news finally blew this story wide open. when they blew this story, i mean, seriously, they totally blew out. >> now to the white house challenged today during a leadership crisis, a crisis about what the president did on benghazi, and we're talking about eight months ago when four americans died.

abc's chief white house correspondent jonathan call broke the story that created a storm today. >> he did create a storm. the abc report on friday caused all three network newscasts to report on the scandal of benghazi. it's not just for fox news anymore and talk radio. it's abc news and cbs news and nbc news. it's all of cable news. that was friday. and then sunday morning, oh, boy, it was all four sunday morning talk shows -- abc and nbc and cbs and fox news sunday all leading with benghazi. thanks, jonathan karl, thanks abc. now it's the story of the country because of the damning e-mails abc news said it had obtained. >> saying in an e-mail obtained by abc. >> obtained by abc. this is ending up being the key point there. e-mail obtained by abc. abc said overtly they had

obtained these damning white house e-mails, and in their reporting, which, again, blew this whole story into a national mainstream news story for the first time ever, which has taken a week to even start to dissipate, abc printed what they said were direct quotations from these e-mails that they said they had obtained. we now know that abc had not obtained e-mails because the e-mails they were supposedly directly quoting from were actually obtained by other reporters and then published publicly as part of a big document dump by the white house. abc bizarrely decided to update their story but not correct it. they decided not to apologize for it or retract this false thing that they published. what turns out to be the most interesting question in all of this, except for when is abc going to correct this, the most interesting question in all of this turns out to be, if abc was not quoting real white house e-mails -- they said they were quoting real white house e-mails. they were not. what were they quoting? and now it turns out we can

piece that together from all of the other news agencies trying to reverse engineer this disaster. this false story that went totally wrong this week. what is now apparent is that the same cooked up, false account of something that was supposedly said and done by white house officials in the aftermath of benghazi, that false account was written by what various reporters describe as congressional and republican sources. hey, i think i found the actual scandal. this is how nbc put it. "congressional sources discussed with nbc news a report compiled by house republicans that examines a series of e-mails concerning when and how talking points were crafted about the benghazi attacks." that itself, "congressional sources discussed with news agencieses a report compiled by house republicans," that kind of sourcing itself is not a scandal. this becomes a scandal when we learn subsequently that report given to reporters was a false

report. it made up something that the white house supposedly did that the white house did not do, and they shopped that false report to abc news, and abc news bought it hook, line, and sinker. they published it as an exclusive, and all the belt way media and all the national media and everybody in politics jumped because now this finally seemed like a scandal. oh, that's what the right has been so upset about. but the scandalous part of it was this idea that the white house got in right after the benghazi attacks happened and started big footing the whole process to make sure the state department would look good. that's the scandal. that's what supposedly was this big scandal that broke on friday. and that scandal that the white house weighed in on the talking points to make the state department look good, that did not happen. that only happened in the cooked up dossier that republicans in congress wrote themselves, that they said was the work of the white house, and then they shopped it to the press.

and, yeah, part of the scandal here is a press scandal. you know what, when you get used like this and you end up publishing false information, false quotes, you have to correct it. but the bigger scandal here is not a process matter. it's not a press matter. it is this very stark fact that somebody in congress right now, or somebody working for somebody in congress right now, a staffer, concocted a big lie to try to make the white house look very desperately bad on this benghazi scandal that they otherwise have not been able to get traction with. who told the lie? i have a note to my journalist pals who got involved in this scandal. if your source lied to you, they are not actually a source. they are a con artist, and you are their victim. it means you don't have to protect them anymore. they're not a source. when you get lied to, when you are a tool of somebody else's deception, when you get lied to, the person lying to you is no longer a source. they are news. their lie to you is itself news, and you can report that news.

republican congressional offices shopped a false dossier as if it was white house e-mails. that is a story. the office and the staffers and the members of congress maybe who did that, that is news. if you know who it is, you can say so. the other thing i would say to my friends in the media on this, it's okay to say that you got something wrong. it sucks to say you're wrong. if you are wrong, it's better to say you're wrong than not say you're wrong and hope it all goes away. it sucks, but you can say you're sorry. okay, department of corrections. i made an error on last night's show. it's very embarrassing. i regret the error. we have a correction to make. i had no idea i made this error because i apparently now am an old person. correction. i screwed up, and i'm sorry. it is awful and horrible, but you can just do it. the show has been on the air for almost five years now, knock on wood, and in that time, we've gotten some stuff wrong. one of those ones that we just played the little clip from was

me screwing up barrels versus gallons when we were doing a story about oil. that was freakin' embarrassing. a barrel is really, really big, a gallon you can pick up with one hand. did i screw that up? yes, i screwed that up. but you know what, you guys screwed up on this republican benghazi scam, abc thing, you screwed up something way bigger than that. you have to fix it. you put it in quotes. it was not a quote. you have to fix it. you have to correct it. so that's the status. that is the state, basically, of washington scandal today. but at times like this in our politics, sometimes it feels the individual circumstances of each individual scandal unfolding through each individual hearing, they feel like the individual circumstances matter less than the overall momentum that comes with washington, you can feel it, clicking over into scandal mode. hold on, we're going into a tunnel. things are about to look very different. once you are in scandal mode, it's like, if you have a

four-wheel drive vehicle -- sometimes in some vehicles you have to click over into locked hub four-wheel drive low, locked hub four-wheel drive low is great for getting yourselves out of really sticky situations, turning through really deep mud on a very slow speed, but if you do actually want to proceed on pavement towards transporting yourself somewhere, four-wheel low is not actually going to get you there. that's kind of where we are right now. we're in scandal mode. does the obama administration have a way of getting itself out of scandal mode, or is this essentially indefinite if not permanent now? does the obama administration need to get washington out of scandal mode, or is there some way in which they might not see this as necessarily all bad for them? and has barack obama, the man, or barack obama, the politician, even before he was president ever been through a period like this in his life? in his personal or political history, has he ever been through this type of trial?

does his past tell us anything about what might happen next? joining us now is david axelrod, former senior presidential adviser to barack obama and now director of the institute for politics and msnbc senior political analyst. thank you for being here. >> i'm all nostalgic listening to this recounting of the week. i'm missing washington so much. >> i bet. you have known president obama for a long time. you've been with him through a lot of his political career. has he ever been through a very difficult, sort of multi-facetted period like this? either personally or politically? have you seen him through perts like this? >> of course. i experienced this with him. first of all, understand we went through a whole campaign in 2007/2008, principally 2007, when the whole campaign was writing us off as incompetents. as i was watching this this

week, i was getting flashbacks to the week in the spring in 2010 when the oil leak erupted in the gulf coast, and you remember it, rachel, it was the president isn't passionate enough, didn't move quickly enough, his staff is all a bunch of idiots, are all a bunch of idiots. he ought to get rid of him. this is obama's katrina. it's the defining event of his presidency. will he ever recover from this? i must say i don't think there was one mention of the oil leak during the whole 2012 campaign. but washington tends to get itself into a tizzy, and every event is treated as if it's the defining event, at least for the number of hours or days that it goes on for, and then the town moves on to its next obsession. and i suspect that that is what's going to happen here. this will play out.

we'll come out of it. i don't think any of these things will have a lasting, defining impact. i think the danger of it is just that it eats up time. when you're in your second term, every day is precious and trying to get some things done. when the town is spinning itself on all of these faux scandals, it takes up time. >> is there anything strategically that you think the administration is likely to do or ought to be doing to try to stop burning up so much time to try to make sure this period is as short as possible? >> i actually think they did some smart things this week. i think getting those e-mails out quickly this week, reintroducing the media shield act, acting quickly in terms of dismissing the director of the internal revenue service and initiating a process of review, i think those things are all important and valuable.

in fact, the thing that is also worth reviewing here is there are serious issues behind each of these questions. it's just not what anybody's talking about. there's no doubt that benghazi was a great tragedy and a tragic series of missteps and errors that led up to it in terms of the safety of those people. nobody ever you dismissed that. in fact, the state department, the review board issued a scathing report on this. and so the question is what can we do? are we going to devote more resources to protecting the embassies on the irs. are we going to examine not just what happened and why, but how are we going to deal with these 501c4s, these entities that are so hard to define as to whether they're political or not. i happen to believe a lot of them are political and don't warrant the treatment they get from the internal revenue service although that should be examined across the board.

i am pleased to see on the ap story that we now have a lot of born again defenders of the freedom of the press, and we'll see if that carries through to actually voting for a media shield law, but if that's what comes from this, that will have been positive. but none of that is what's really being discussed right now. the scandal media is astride washington, and that just has to burn itself out. >> in terms of how quickly it's going to burn itself out and whether or not new revelations are going to continue to keep this going on, today it seems like the most salient thing that emerged from the hearing about the irs scandal was this idea the inspector general had notified higher-ups at treasury, so outside the irs at the treasury agency, that they were looking into this question of whether conservative groups were mistreated in the application process by the irs. they'd known, and they knew before election season. does that not open up you guys from the campaign and the administration to the charge that you should have let that be

publicly known then that that investigation was under way. it might have had a really big effect on the election because it would have upset people, as we know now. >> speaking from someone who was at the campaign, i didn't know anything about that when it was going on, and one of the things about this, rachel, is when you look at how utterly asinine it was that they were doing what they were doing -- i mean, maybe it made sense from a technical standpoint that a lot of these organizations sprung up in the middle of the election, and so it was fair to surmise that perhaps they weren't really social welfare organizations -- but just from a political standpoint, it was ludicrous to do what they did. it's prima fascia evidence that nobody political was involved in there. i assume the people that were told were awaiting the results of the review and were waiting

to act on the review. i don't think it would have had a big impact on the election that these questions were swirling around. maybe it would. i suspect it would have just energized people who were already energized to oppose the president. the truth is, as i move around the country, i don't know that all of this is kitchen table talk for anybody out here in america. it may be in washington. obviously, people are concerned about manipulation of the irs for political purposes if that's what happened. but you have an inspector general who testified today that that's not what happened, that's not what he believe happened. so i do think that, yes, this will churn -- i think there's a danger for the republicans that, if they overplay it, a lot of folks out here for whom this isn't kitchen table talk are going to say, when are we going to get to stuff that actually matters to us? when are they going to deal with things that have some

consequence in our lives? >> weren't we going to get to immigration this time? weren't we going to get to background checks? and, and, and. >> not to mention economic issues like the budget. >> absolutely. david axelrod, former senior presidential adviser to barack obama and msnbc senior political analyst, thanks for being with us. next, i will talk about a man wearing a strange wig in a completely legitimate news context. not because it is friday, but it is friday of this week, and it's the kind of week where wigs in the news ended up being normal. just wanted to check and make sure that we were on schedule. the first technology of its kind... mom and dad, i have great news. is now providing answers families need. siemens. answers.

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this is james traficant. he was a democratic politician, once a member of congress from ohio. he was thrown out of congress after he was convicted of taking bribes, false tax returns, racketeering, all kinds of stuff. james tafraficant is kind of an amazing story for a whole bunch of reasons. let's dispense with artism. obviously, the thing james traficant is remembered for is his hair. look at that amazing hair. nobody else in history has ever had hair like that, except, apparently, this guy. an american named ryan fogel who worked at the u.s. embassy in moscow, who was arrested in moscow earlier this week, apparently while wearing the world's most astonishing and ridiculous wig. that picture of him in the wig is a still picture from the video of ryan fogle's arrest

that was released to the russian media. the video of his arrest and the elaborate perp walk the fsb made him do. they filmed the arrest, filmed him handcuffed still sporting the wig and the hat, filmed him being escorted by two men into the backseat of a car, and filmed him going into the back of a building no longer wearing the wig but carrying it in hand, and waiting to be questioned by the fsb. the fsb is what the kgb used to be. at one point at a table, they lay out and show us all the spy gear they allegedly caught him with. here's the thing. this was the long, oddly transfixing video we got from the russians earlier this week when they arrested ryan fogle. now i want you to watch this. this is an excerpt from a soviet era documentary in 1986 showing a cia operative named michael sellers arrested and interrogated at kgb headquarters in '86.

look at it side by side. we see both men being taken in for questioning, sitting awkwardly at this table, almost from the same angle. in the videos, we can't see the identity of the men who are with them and asking questions, and in both cases, we see this amazing table of spy gear. multiple pairs of eyeglasses, reporting devices, right down to each of them having a light colored wig that fits into a hat. this arrest this week in moscow, this oddly choreographed performance for the cameras of the arrest of the supposed american spy in moscow this week, it's basically an exact replay of the exact thing the russians did to great propaganda effect in 1986. right down to all the retro, cold war era spy gear they say they caught this american spy with this week and they showed off with such pride in the perp walk video. this could mean that maybe the cia still goes to the same wig store and buys the same wigs for their spies decade after decade, or it could conceivably mean

that it is actually the same wig from 1986 that's been in a filing cabinet at the kgb -- i'm sorry, the fsb -- ever since. they dug out the old wig to accomplish this spy versus spy propaganda coup just like it's the cold war over again. there's a lot of fishy details about the russian spy revelation this week. obviously, first, there's the austin powers spy kit they allegedly found on this spy. bad wigs, glasses, a compass, really? a street map, a pocketknife, and a letter that starts with dear friend and starts with $10,000 up to $1 million for the cooperation in spying. if this supposed american spy was arrested while he was supposedly going to meet with his target in person, why would he bother writing down his spy offer on a piece of paper and having is in his pocket so he would have no deniablity at all if he got caught for any weird reason? the weirdness of spying for

money offer comes with the revelation the russians have also just releaseded audiotape that they say is ryan fogle making that very same, up front, cash offer for spying over the phone. [ speaking russian ] >> da or nyet? is that real? the truth is we do not really know what's going on. maybe ryan fogle is a real spy and that's his real wig that he picked for his spy job, but consider the timing here. they arrested this guy on monday night. on tuesday the u.s. ambassador to russia, who the russian government hates, he was scheduled to do a twitter q&a with the public. ask the ambassador anything. he was scheduled to do that on twitter at 2:30 p.m. local time on tuesday, and at 2:30 p.m.

local time on tuesday, that is exactly when the russian government released the news they had arrested this spy, this guy in the terrible wig. hey, here's the pictures. here's the video. "the washington post" pointed out that timing this week. then the day after they announced the arrest, that's when u.s. secretary of state john kerry had his big high profile meeting with his equivalent in the russian government, with the foreign minister. it's a really embarrassing thing to happen before the meeting, right? then today an fsb spokesman ups the ante by reportedly revealing the identity, revealing the name of the american cia station chief in moscow. wow. we do not know if ryan fogle is a spy. we do not know if that was his real spy gear and his real spy wig or if it was all a plant to make the u.s. look stupid. we do not know. until we do know, there's no reason to speculate. but no matter how this saga resolves, i think we can all agree that james traficant should sue to get his hair back,

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one of the biggest, most public vows that president obama made to the public immediately upon taking office in 2009 may actually right now be considerably closer to becoming a reality finally. they said it couldn't be done, but it is maybe about to be done, and that surprising story is next. all stations come over to mission a for a final go.

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i realize it is totally typical to break this kind of news late on a friday night, but it can't be avoided, and it is potentially important. it's about the very first thing that president obama did when he became president in 2009, his first official act as president was to sign a directive ordering the offshore prison we've been maintaining in communist cuba should be shut down. he said it should be shut down within a year. there was a second part to that order, though. the president also ordered at the same time that there be a review of every case of every prisoner at that prison to determine what should happen to them. should they be prosecuted? is should they be set free but sent home to prison? should they just be held onto without trial for a while longer while we pretend they weren't there and the president needed to be explained why they were in cuba. those reviews were all ordered by the president at the same time, as part of that very first thing that he did as a new president. it's interesting, since he has been president, not a single new

person has been sent to that prison that we keep in cuba. there have been no additional prisoners added. obviously, we have not closed it yet either. there were 242 people held in prison there when president obama took office. there are now 166 men there. only 9 of the 166 have been charged or convicted of any crime. the rest are in this limbo, this limbo the administration said it wants to end. of all the guys who are left there, most of them are from one country. when we first opened up this prison in cuba and started sending guys there, a ton of them were from afghanistan, from saudi arabia, but almost all of those folks are gone now. not all of them, but almost all of them are now. the ones who are left are numerically, mostly from this place. there's 166 guys at guantanamo, and 88 of them are from the nation of yemen. of those 88 guys, 59 of them have been cleared by that review process to go home, just like the the saudis did and just like the afghans did and most all the

other people from the other countries that were heavily represented at that prison. these guys from yemen, most of them were cleared. they were set to start going home in december of 2009 until a guy with ties to al qaeda in yemen tried to bomb an american plane with a bomb stuffed in his underpants at christmastime 2009. that put a hold on the plans to send prisoners home to yemen and that eventually led to congressional de facto bans on the u.s. government sending anyone to yemen from guantanamo. so there has been this intractable problem of something president obama wanted to get done, he wanted to closed this prison, but he's been stuck with this prison that congress won't let him close. he's stuck with a roster of mostly yemeni prisoners that are mostly cleared to be released, but he's blocked from releasing them. now a majority of prisoners at guantanamo are refusing food and hunger striking because they think there's no end to any of it. we now know -- at least we can maybe know enough to imagine -- how this might end, at least how

some of it might end. when attorney general eric holder walked into the hearing where he testified for four solid hours this week on scandal-rama, as the attorney general was walking into that hearing room, a protester yelled at him. >> attorney general, when are you going to send a special envoy to guantanamo? >> mr. attorney general, when are you going to appoint a special envoy to guantanamo? the attorney general did not answer. they never do. the protester was thrown out. but then during the hearing, the attorney general did say this. >> there are steps the administration can do and that we will do in an attempt to close that facility. there are a substantial number of people who can, for instance, be moved back to yemen. the president put a hold on that given the situation that we had in yemen at the time, and i think that is something that we have to review. i think the president has indicated that we will be taking renewed action in that regard.

>> attorney general saying we're taking renewed action in that regard. he's not talking specifically about taking renewed action about sending people to yemen, but he did raise sending people to yemen as something they are looking at doing maybe soon. "the l.a. times" has since pulled that thread from that commentary and is positing the fact there's a new government in yemen now might be what's making this previously undoable thing suddenly maybe doable. "of the 86 prisoners approved by a presidential task force six years ago for transfer out of guantanamo, 69 are yemenis, and their country wants them back. they have been lobbying washington to return their countrymen." we don't necessarily want them. they desperately want them. they have been cleared for release. anybody sensing that something may conceivably be about to

happen? joining us now is gregory johnson. he's the author of "the last refuge, yemen and america's war." why would the new government in yemen want these people back? >> the old government wanted them back. abdi ali abdullah wanted them back. he knew how important closing guantanamo bay was to president obama, and he played politics with it. he essentially held the prisoners ransom a second time, trying to get as much from the obama administration as he possibly could. the new government, president mansour hadi in yemen, has very little base of support. so he needs a lot of international support, particularly from the united states, to offset his lack of domestic support. so what he's doing is essentially being a very flexible partner, willing to take these off president obama's hands.

>> is he doing a good job at this diplomacy? is he asking for the right things and making his offers the right way? >> that's a very interesting point. last week, yemen's minister for human rights showed up in washington thinking she was going to lobby for the release of these 59 individuals. her trip was scheduled to be ten days long. she left after three days. she didn't get the meeting she thought she was going to get. she was very upset with the reaction of the americans, very upset with the way her embassy staffed her, and she left washington in a huff. >> does this mean there's a bigger hurdle than we thought there might be based on what's on paper? >> it's guantanamo bay. there's always a hurdle. this is something that president obama has been saying from day two, and from the first week, this is when al qaeda in thearian pearabian peninsula, t same week president obama said he's going to sign the legislation to close guantanamo, they show up with two more detainees, there's the underwear

bomber, every time the president makes a move on this, something from yemen comes up and trips him up. >> in terms of the objections to sending -- whether or not it is safe to send former guantanamo prisoners who have been cleared for release in terms of their raw assessment of dangerousness, however they do that, in terms of whether it's safe to send them to a place like yemen, can this government or the previous government make any meaningful assurances about this? does any of it strike you as substantive or is all of this politics? >> a lot of it is politics. the bush administration sent people back to saudi arabia because it trusted the saudi government. send them back to afghanistan because it trusted, in sort of a way, what the afghan government was. there hasn't been that same amount of trust in yemen, and the real irony is that the group in yemen, al qaeda, the group responsible for these underwear bombs, these cartridge bombs, that group has former guantanamo bay detainees in it, but they're not yemenis, they're saudis. >> why did they end up going to yemen to be operational?

>> right. >> because they had room to maneuver. >> absolutely correct. >> is there anything you see in terms of the operational room to move a group like al qaeda in the arabian peninsula has there? is there any pressure from the u.s. government? will it all be imposed from outside, u.s. military efforts? >> that's a great question. right now the group is under a lot of pressure, but most of it comes from drones. most of it comes from air strikes. but the yemeni government right now, we have to remember the arab spring that overthrew president abdullah, in egypt mubarak goes to prison, and in libya he's killed. but president abdullah stepped down, and he's still a political figure. there's all this behind the scenes maneuvering between the different factions, and the yemeni government doesn't have control over large portions of the country right now. >> i know you're a yemen expert,

not necessarily a guantanamo expert. if something were to be able to be worked out and these 59 guys were shipped from cuba home to yemen, like the yemeni government is searching for, would that be the key to closing guantanamo? >> i think it would be a large step towards closing guantanamo. i think there's a deeper issue here, a bigger issue, and that is keeping people indefinitely detained outside the legal framework. president obama is very clear he wants to close guantanamo bay, but at the same time, his administration appears to want to continue to indefinitely detain many members outside of any sort of a legal framework. so you can sort of get away with the -- with sort of the rhetorical value of closing guantanamo bay while keeping in play the policies in place. >> they say they want it for a small number of people. if you've got extrajudicial attention, you've got it. gregory johnson, great to have you here.

thank you so much. i've been following you from afar for a long time. his book is called "the last refuge, yemen, al qaeda, and america's war in arabiya." [ all ] fort benning, georgia in 1999. [ male announcer ] usaa auto insurance is often handed down from generation to generation. because it offers a superior level of protection and because usaa's commitment to serve military members, veterans, and their families is without equal. begin your legacy, get an auto insurance quote. usaa. we know what it means to serve. a talking car. but i'll tell you what impresses me. a talking train. this ge locomotive can tell you exactly where it is, what it's carrying, while using less fuel. delivering whatever the world needs, when it needs it. ♪ after all, what's the point of talking

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even a person with very, very good eye sight needs a magnifying glass to look at this, the oxford english dictionary, the oed. the oed is for people who love the english language so much, you're willing to devote to us both some serious shelf space and potentially serious eye strain. this is the compact edition. this is the little one, the one that condenses 20 giant volumes of regular sized print into two volumes of impossible to read print. one of the reasons that the oed is really important is that it is a historical dictionary that tells you not only the meaning of the word, it also traces the evolution of that meaning. so when you look through your magnifying glass at whatever it is you're looking up, you can see that it cites for each definition the first few works of literature for which that word appears. it includes sentences or poetic lines in which the word appears. so you can see for yourself

where it came from. let's take the word fringy. according to the oxford english dictionary, one of the meanings of the adjective fringy means furnished or adorned with frin nls, covers with fringes. it and cites a work called "crochet castle" by t.a. peacock. "all that surrounded their eyes fringy portals was radiant as the forehead of the morning sky. thank you, mr. peacock. so it is reasonable to be a total dork with the oed. what other book do you buy comes with a magnifying glass? it is super fascinating and super useful. here's how it was first used lines. it's just an invaluable resource if you're really interested in the word. here's the mystery in today's news. oed editors, oxford english dictionary editors, have been compiling and refining dictionary citations since the late 1800s, and they use thousands of sources. one of those sources that has

been used over and over and over again for dozens of words in the oed maybe doesn't exist. maybe it does, but they can't find it anywhere, and it has oed editors stumped. we're going back to the word fringy. the second documented use of that word to mean covered with fringes, it's from this, an 1852 book called meanderings of memory. the usage is "fluttering as the mantel's fringy rim." all in all, 50 citations in the oed come from this book, this "meanderings of memory." it helps define words like chapeled, clock-a-bondy, a kind of fly for fly fishing. couchward, gigantomachy,

revirginize, sarcophage, wenge. that's one of my favorite british words ever, whinge, but there's a crisis with that word, whinge, and all the other words it came from. they're all sourced to meand meanderings of memory, which presumably was owned by one of the early editors of the oxford english dictionary, which is why it's all throughout this wook. recently, when a modern staffer was working on the entry, revirginize, to render virge cardinal again, to purify anew. it was recorded in meanderings of memory, by an author known only at nightlark. when they went looking, the book is nowhere to be found. the chief bibliographer of oxford english dictionary took up the search.

the only existence we know of is from a book seller's catalog of 1854. they say it was written and published by a well-known connoisseur. that's all we got. 51 words are essentially homeless in history. who is night lark, and what kind of book is meanderings of memory, and how come nobody can find it? according to oxford english dictionary's chief biblographer, one of the theorys at this point is the book is maybe porn, and apparently, if it was 1852 era porn, it wouldn't have been catalogs in the normal way, and it's hard to find. so they have no idea. so the oed is turning to the public to help. they're putting out a call to bibliophiles everywhere to check your shelves, check the google l, check everywhere for this possibly porny and rare book. have you ever seen a copy of this book? can you identify the well-known connoisseur mentioned by the

book seller? it isn't often the dictionary folks come asking us regular people for help. when they do, i feel like we should help if we can. obviously, we really need the help. if you know anything about this, if you have anything to offer, let us know. we'll pass it on. that's your weekend assignment. we're going to see you again monday. "weekends with alex witt" starts now. the outgoing irs commissioner in the hot seat before congress. this morning new reaction. two commuter trains going opposite directions just outside of new york collide at rush hour. in office politics, i talk to richard engel about what was going through his mind when he was kidnapped in syria. powerball mania reaching a fever pitch. the big clamor for the $600 million prize. have you got your tickets yet? good morning, everyone. welcome to weekends with alex witt. let's get to what's happening. first in front page