a factor in less than five years. and so part of what you heard from the governor was his -- frankly his shame about that history. >> chris, you've not fought this hard if you're weak. they're fighting this hard because a new south is coming. >> reverend dr. william barber, ben jealous, thank you, gentlemen. the rachel maddow show starts right now. thanks for staying with us for the next hour. honestly i'm kind of excited about our show tonight. not because the news itself is exciting and a good news sort of way but because there's a lot of really interesting news going on. and i think this is going to be a good show. anyway, thanks for being here. as we reported last night, it looks like president obama has picked somebody with a remarkable and dramatic political past as his nominee to run the fbi. his name is james comey. he prosecuted the gambino family in new york city. he investigated and brought the indictments in the cobart towers

bombing in saudi arabia in 1996. he's one of the people who helped pick patrick fitzgerald as the special prosecutor who went after the scooter libby, dick cheney, valerie plame outing the cia officer investigation, that bombshell investigation back in 2003. most famously, james comey was the guy who had the car chase to the hospital room and then the middle of the night hospital room stand-off with george w. bush's chief of staff and his white house counsel. when they ambushed john ashcroft who was basically half dead from acute pancreatitis in the hospital and they tried to get him to sign off in the hospital on a surveillance program that he believed to be illegal. that was james comey at the stand-off in the hospital room. and that was him threatening to quit in protest. and that was him then telling the whole sordid story under oath. that was him. in npr last night and "the new york times," they were the first to report it but it looks like james comey will be tapped by

president obama to lead the fbi. yes, that makes him the latest in a long list of republicans who this democratic president has appointed to high-ranking positions in his administration. there's former republican senator chuck hagel leading the defense department. and before chuck hagel, president obama kept on president bush's republican defense secretary, bob gates. former republican governor jon huntsman was brought on as the ambassador to china. former republican congressman john mchugh was brought on. ray lahood the president appointed to be his secretary of transportation. he put former republican congresswoman ann northrop in. former republican congressman jim leech he installed as head of the national endowment for the humanities. you might remember that president obama tried to nominate judd gregg to be commerce secretary but then judd gregg freaked out and changed his mind and said he didn't want it after all and quit the senate and now he's a lobbyist.

class act, judd gregg. who knows how the republicans in the senate are going to react to the james comey nomination when it happens. who knows how republicans in the senate will react to yet another republican being appointed by this democratic president to another high profile administration job. it's interesting, democrats don't seem to much mind their democratic president appointing members of the opposite party. but the opposite party sometimes does seem to mind when republicans are becoming part of this administration. given james comey's reputation, though, i think anybody will find it hard to make an issue out of the fbi nomination. i mean this is the kind of thing that gets thrown into standard news profiles of james comey. comey, age 52, established a reputation as a fierce defender of the law and the integrity of the justice department, regardless of the political pressures of the moment. or this one, same idea. mr. comey was widely praised for putting the law over politics. or this one, comey's reputation

as a principled lawyer who would not bend the law just to please his superiors in the white house. that's the way people talk about this guy who apparently is going to be president obama's nominee to run the fbi. and if you care about integrity in office and you care about guts and all the rest, it is nice to see a guy who has displayed those characteristics in office get rewarded for them and get this big high-profile promotion. it is as nice to see james comey up to the head of the fbi given what he has been through, it is as nice to see him up for that nomination as it was sickening to see president george w. bush pass him over in favor of alberto gonzalez for attorney general. alberto gonzalez, the guy to whom jim comey had to stand up to and physically block from doing wrong in the middle of the night in that hospital room so long ago. president bush rewarded the bad guy in that fight. the guy who showed up at the hospital room to try to get his way with the sick guy.

president bush gave that guy the attorney general job and passed over jim comey. bush rewarded the bad guy in that fight. president obama is now rewarding the good guy in that fight. and right now the fbi, honestly, has a really big mess on its hands, so maybe it is good that the fbi is about to get somebody new in charge for the first time in 12 years. the mess right now is about the boston bombing. and the fbi's mess here is not just about the bombing itself. it's not just that they apparently closed their file on one of the two suspected bombers and then lost track of him before the bombing. the mess for the fbi here is also now about this. this is another young chechen man who was reportedly not linked himself to the bombing or to radical ideology of any kind, but he did know the older of the two boston bombing suspects when he lived for a time and practiced mixed martial arts at the same gym as one of the suspects in boston. after the boston bombing, this young man, ibrajim todashev was

questioned multiple times about his ties to the bombing suspect. last week while being questioned again in florida, something went very, very wrong and he ended up dead. law enforcement including fbi agents were questioning him in his home in orlando last wednesday when something happened, and this 27-year-old, who was being questioned, this ibragim todashev ended up dead. today in moscow that man's family held a press conference in which his father held up and distributed photos. these images are a little graphic. he distributed photos that he said were taken of his son's body after it was autopsied. we are being told that the autopsy report is not likely to be released for months because of this ongoing investigation,

but we now have these photos because he was released from the morgue to the next of kin in florida and his son's friend, the young man you see here who is also russian, who was also questioned by the fbi, he says he took these photos of his friend's body. and he gave those photos to the guy's family in russia. and that led to today's press conference in moscow with the family showing these photos and demanding answers for what happened to their son. now, we have not been able to authenticate these photos, nobody has. and the medical examiner did not confirm to us by the time we went to air that these photos are actually of this guy and that these are real photos. but if these photos, and again these are graphic images, if these photos are him, if these are his post-autopsy photo, if these are him and they are real, then something weird is going on. because they appear to show that he was shot six times in the torso and once in the back of the head. the rear of his head, sort of at the crown of his head. how does that comport with the fbi's story that he was killed during questioning by armed

agents who were only acting in self defense? shot seven times, including in the back of the head? after the boston bombings and the killing of the older of the two suspects in the boston bombings, and the capture of the younger one, after that happened, the one real mystery that emerged in conjunction with this case was about another crime. a crime that happened in 2011. on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, september 11th, 2011, a quiet neighborhood in greater boston that's called waltham suffered a really atypical crime. three young men in waltham, all fit, strong young men were all find in a waltham apartment with their throats slit. their bodies were covered in marijuana, it had been thrown all over the bodies, and $5,000 in cash was left untouched at the scene. after tamerlan tsarnaev was implicated in the boston bombing, that cold case triple murder from 2011 in waltham,

that cold case got hot again when investigators realized that this guy, the bombing suspect, had been very close friends with one of the young men who was killed that night in waltham. people who knew the victims also told local reporters they always thought it was strange that tamerlan tsarnaev didn't attend the funeral of his murdered friend. they thought it was strange he didn't go since they were so close. could the boston bombing suspect have been the perpetrator of that unsolved triple murder as well as the boston bombing? was it just a coincidence that he was a link between these two crimes, or were they connected because he did both of them? that was the remaining mystery, right after the boston bombing suspects, one of them was killed and one of them was arrested. that was the remaining mystery. and then after this other young man was killed last week in florida during questioning by the fbi, unnamed law enforcement sources started leaking an elaborate story that not only made it seem justified for him to have been killed during questioning, but also, drum roll please, it was an elaborate

story that basically solved that unsolved triple murder in waltham. two unnamed law enforcement officials saying the dead man had implicated himself and tamerlan tsarnaev in the waltham murder right before he was fatally shot during questioning. quote, he appeared to be on the verge of signing a confession to those murders. he was about to confess. sources say that todashev snapped as investigators pushed him toward a confession. he lunged at the interrogator with a blade or maybe a knife. he lunged at an fbi agent with a knife. so that was the story that we heard. that's how we learned that the fbi had been questioning this guy in florida and that they had killed him during questioning. that is the story that we were told when we learned that he existed, that they were questioning him and that he was now dead. but since then, in the week since, starting even before the family showed these photos today, saying he was shot in the back of the head and six others times, since the initial story of what happened in orlando when this guy died first came out,

that initial story has fallen apart. within 12 hours of the initial reports, two of the initial three law enforcement sources who had described the dead man as having a knife said they were no longer sure about the knife. so what was three sources is now one source. then yesterday wesh in orlando and the "washington post" both cited multiple law enforcement sources saying in fact the young man was unarmed. then yesterday law enforcement sources says he might have been -- said he might have been lunging for a sword that was in the room where he was being questioned. and that he pushed a table and possibly threw a chair. now, tonight nbc news was told by the fbi that the young man was not unarmed but he didn't have a knife either. he had a metal rod of some kind. and the law enforcement officers shot him because they thought he was reaching for a gun from somewhere. and so they shot him seven

times, including in the back of the head? we do not know precisely that that is the number of times he was shot, but that is what the family is saying based on photos they say were taken of his body post-autopsy. no one will confirm that or deny that officially. whether that is the actual nature of his wounds. and through all of this serial unnamed source leaking, including not just generic law enforcement sources but also fbi sources specifically, but all of this, the fbi's stance here has been privately multiple contradictory but always self exculpatory leaks. officially, publicly, their stance has been basically silence. ongoing investigation, we've sent a review team, there will be no further official comment. meanwhile, the family in russia is holding a press conference, distributing what they say are the death photos, demanding justice, saying no one from the u.s. has contacted them at all since the killing. they say they have no explanation and so they are seeking an explanation by media circus. and in orlando, the widow and

family are holding a press conference saying they do not understand. if you look at their comments at the press conference and other remarks they have made, they're all drifting into conspiracyland in which they think the fbi is the american version of the secret police back home and this must mean there's some bloody conspiracy of american law enforcement to wage unjust war on the chechen people just like they do at home in mother russia, which is ridiculous. but until we hear some real information from law enforcement about what actually happened here, instead of this mess that they're giving us of sometimes false, always anonymous, usually inflammatory, unofficial leaks, with that being the only side of the story we're getting from law enforcement, what we're left with here is a baffling mess, and a story that cannot make sense and a million questions not only about what happened last week in that apartment in orlando, but what happened in that triple murder in waltham?

and are we any closer now to solving it? joining us now is michael rezendes. he's been reporting on the murders in waltham since they took place. thank you for joining us tonight. i appreciate you joining us. what us the status on the waltham murders. as far as we understand it, are we any closer to knowing what happened there? >> officially i don't know that we're any closer. it would seem that we're closer because we have a suspect that's been named at least off the record. but the status of the investigation is ongoing. and there are as many questions about waltham as there are about orlando. there are lots of missing pieces and the stories don't add up for a variety of reasons. so it remains a mystery with coincidence after coincidence after coincidence that lead people to suspect that tamerlan tsarnaev was one of the killers and perhaps ibragim todashev was the other.

>> in the unofficial naming of tamerlan tsarnaev as unofficially a suspect in the crime, do you know from your -- from your reporting on this over the years, do we know if police in massachusetts ever questioned him or interviewed him in conjunction with that murder? did his name ever come up with conjunction with the crime? >> we don't know whether he was ever interviewed. it's probably the most important question to have answered right now if one wants to assess the job that the police did at the time. even that basic fact, we don't know. now, the day after these three gentlemen were murdered, the district attorney said that -- essentially he said there were two suspects. he said there were two people who were in the apartment just before the triple homicide took place, and he promised that there would be more information and there was never any more information. but he did say at the time that there were two, and now we do have two names that are being circulated as suspects and i think surely that they are suspects. whether they did it or not is another question.

>> well, when you heard about the shooting in orlando and the subsequent statements, again all unofficial from law enforcement that this man was on the verge of confessing in writing to the waltham murders and that he had implicated tamerlan tsarnaev, did that -- as somebody who's been covering this, did that development make sense to you given your previous reporting on waltham? did it seem like things were going that direction? >> i had a couple of reactions to it. i guess the first reaction was that someone like ibragim todashev does make sense because one of the mysteries is that two of the three gentlemen who were murdered were experts in the martial arts. they were very fit, they were very strong and it would have taken some expert fighters to be able to overpower them without a single shot being fired and then to kill them. so if you talk about tamerlan, he was a very accomplished amateur boxer, also a mixed martial arts fighter. and you have todashev as also an

accomplished mixed martial arts fighter. suddenly it begins to make some sense. >> michael, can i just ask you in reporting on waltham, i mean trying to get something out of the middlesex county d.a. on this is like trying to crack a safe. there's no official information at all and never really has been. in your reporting on this, have you had to deal with the same kind of unnamed law enforcement leaks of contradictory information that we're seeing coming out of this case in the orlando part of it? how do you handle that when that

is the way that law enforcement is sort of refusing to talk about these stories? >> well, it's very, very frustrating and very, very difficult. and i think part of what's going on here is that there are a lot of reporters dealing with a lot of law enforcement sources. and the thing about law enforcement sources is they're people and they're like everyone else, which is to say they gossip and they speculate. not all of them have access to accurate information obviously. so when you're dealing with a story like this, it's very important to assess the information that comes your way and to try to figure out where it's coming from and to assess the track record of the person that's giving you the information. and it can be a frustrating and time consuming, but it is very important to get it right. >> in this case watching this case run away from the fbi and from american law enforcement even now in an international context with this press conference, this unbelievable press conference with the death photos in moscow makes clear to me that there ought to be some more official information on the record, but we shall see. >> yeah, i would agree with that. >> michael rezendes, thanks for helping us understand this. i appreciate your time. >> my pleasure. so how are your summer plans shaping up thus far? are you thinking about maybe spending some time interrogating your political opponents with the same inane questions that lead nowhere for months at a time? turns out somebody has already beat you to that particular plan and that's coming up. stay with us.

we've got a photo now of the

ricin-laced letter that was sent to mayor bloomberg that we also now know was sent to president obama. it turns out ricin does not look like i think it would in a letter. anyway, we've got that photo and new news on that coming up.

we now have a picture of one of the anonymous ricin-laced letters that was sent to new york city mayor michael bloomberg and to his gun control group, mayors against illegal guns. we've got the shot of the inside letter too. you will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. the right to bear arms is my constitutional god-given right

and i will exercise -- he did not spell that word correctly -- that right until the day i die. what's in this letter is nothing compared to what i've got planned for you, end quote. it's amazing how frequently "i want to kill you" combines with "i can't spell." i don't know if that should be worrying or reassuring. i find it kind of both. we learned about the bloomberg letters yesterday and today we learned an identical letter was sent to president obama. now all the letters have been turned over to the fbi joint terrorism task force for testing and further investigation. there were some early reports tonight from the "new york post" saying there had been an arrest in the case of these ricin-laced letters. the "new york post" appears to be wrong about that, no surprise. nbc news reporting tonight that the reports of an arrest are not true, but the fbi is questioning a man who has connections to both texas and louisiana, to see

if he has any useful information about the ricin letters. the ricin letters appear to have been sent with a shreveport, louisiana, postmark. the shreveport postal center reportedly handles mail from louisiana but also from texas and arkansas. so conceivably the letter might have been mailed in any one of those states. this news, today, of course comes on the heels of the other ricin-laced letters that were sent to president obama and other officials. last month the fbi arrested a mississippi martial arts instructor in connection with those letters. last week a washington state man was charged with threatening to kill a federal judge, also in a letter that was laced with ricin. and while we're on the subject, just yesterday a federal judge sentenced a north carolina man to prison for threatening president obama over twitter during the 2012 democratic national convention. the man admitted to using his twitter account to post five threats to president obama, including this one, plotting president obama's murder. i'm gonna assassinate president obama this evening and the secret service is going to be defenseless once i aim the assault rifle at barack's

forehead. again, the spelling thing, but also according to authorities, the man was super, super high when he made those threats. he did later end up not being as high and he wrote an apology letter to the president. but now high or not, he is going to do six months in jail after today's sentencing for making those threats. and you know what, whether you are super, super high or you're an aggrieved martial arts instructor or you're some gun guy who can't spell who hates new york city's mayor, honestly when you put this many stories in the mix and there are others that we didn't even include here, it's kind of getting out of hand. this intimidation thing, it's ridiculous. we'll be right back.

good news for modesty tonight. and it has to do with radiation. the technology known as back scatter radiation can be used to produce super detailed x-rays of things and of people. it works by shooting low energy x-rays at something and then those x-rays are scattered back into radiation detectors. the result is a very, very, very thorough picture of the object or the person being imaged. this is the kind of x-raying that does not just show like metal, it shows everything. if you have been through airport security and gone through one of those scanning machines where you have to empty absolutely everything out of your pockets and you have to hold your hands above your head and not move, you have experienced back

scatter radiation. and a very, very, detailed image of your body has been created for your friendly neighborhood tsa inspector. well, today the tsa announced that all of the machines that produce the extra revealing images of travelers have been removed from u.s. airports. it's not going to happen anymore. you still may have to stand there with your pockets empty and your hands up holding still, but now apparently tsa screeners will just see an outline of your body instead of every gory detail. so now we can all go back to the old system where if you wanted a tsa officer to know that much about you and your body, you would have to date them and maybe buy them dinner rather than just trying to board your flight. [ male announcer ] this one goes out to all the allergy muddlers.

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behold, the official white house christmas card from 1993. 1993 was the first year of the bill clinton presidency and this year's christmas card featured the president and the first lady and a christmas tree in the state dining room. this christmas card from 1993 was seen by republicans in congress at the time as a scandal, as evidence that bill clinton was corrupt and criminal and was guilty of abusing the office of the presidency.

it was all evident right there in the christmas card, because the way the clinton white house addressed its christmas cards was that they used a computer database. a database set up in the white house social office that included the names of everybody the clintons came in contact with once the clinton presidency started. it was a database of about 350,000 names. if you were on that list, you got a christmas card. and although the white house social office contended that the database was only used to figure out who should get christmas cards, congressional republicans knew it was a scandal. they suspected something nefarious. they thought the christmas card list was somehow corrupt, criminal, it was an abuse of power. so republicans held hearings into the christmas cards. clinton administration officials were hauled before the house government reform and oversight committee to answer for this evil white house christmas card list and explain how it was evidence of improper partisan campaign activity or something. republicans called up 34

witnesses to give depositions about the christmas card list. they demanded more than 40,000 documents about the christmas card list. they held days of hearings on the christmas card list. and, you know, they accused liberals of waging a war on christmas? yes. despite all the hearings and the depositions and all the rest of it, the republican investigations into the white house christmas card turned up nothing. sometimes a christmas card really just is a christmas card. officially that scandal-seeking fishing expedition from the clinton era is known as the investigation of the conversion of the $1.7 million centralized white house computer system known as the white house database and related matters. unofficially, though, it is known as the time that house republicans spent years investigating bill and hillary clinton's christmas card. seriously. the guy who led that committee that investigated the clinton christmas card was this guy. his name is dan burton. he was a republican congressman from the great state of indiana.

and for years dan burton's whole reason for being was to try to find a way to take down the presidency of bill clinton using the powers of his own office in the house. he once described president clinton as a scum bag. he said that on the record. to give you a little taste of the dan burton mindset, he convinced himself that the president and the first lady, bill clinton and hillary clinton were not just bad people, they were killers. he decided that they murdered their deputy white house counsel, a man named vince foster. and to help prove it, dan burton went into his backyard with a gun and shot at either a watermelon or a cantaloupe, depending on who you believe, in order to prove that vince foster's death was a clinton hit. it was a murder and not a suicide. which he could tell because of something about shooting a watermelon. >> we at my house with a homicide detective tried to recreate a head and fired a .38

four-inch barrel into that to see if the sound could be heard from 100 yards away, even though there was an earth mover moving around in the background making all kinds of racket and you could hear the bullet clearly. >> so, obviously, bill clinton is a murderer. dan burton's committee investigated claims that the clintons were traitors, that they were selling information to the chinese government in exchange for money. he held hearings alleging that the clinton administration was selling burial plots in arlington national cemetery in exchange for campaign contributions. he held hearings alleging that the clinton white house was surreptitiously altering videotapes of fund-raisers in order to hide some sort of wrongdoing that dan burton imagined was happening at the fund-raisers. dan burton suggested at one point that he should hire lip readers to examine those tapes to find the photo-shopping. during his tenure as chairman of the government reform and oversight committee dan burton issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to 141 different clintonites. in one case his investigators

even managed to subpoena the wrong man. that one was really embarrassing. his committee was so busy passing out subpoenas like party favors they accidentally subpoenaed the wrong guy by confusing two similar sounding asian names. that was the summer of subpoena. that was 1997. that was how republicans thought they would use control of the house to try to destroy a presidency that they did not like as well as some watermelons. well, now 16 years and one democratic president later, the republican summer of subpoena appears to be back. the republican who has dan burton's old job as chairman of the house government reform and oversight committee is now this man on your right, republican congressman darrell issa of california. but if you saw this whole thing unfold the first time, the plot this time will seem familiar, even if some of the faces are changed. some of the faces are changed. one of the latest targets of the republicans latest round of subpoenas in our new subpoena

summer is hillary clinton's former chief of staff when she was secretary of state, a woman named cheryl mills. cheryl mills it turns out is no stranger to this committee that's now investigating her. here he is in 1997 testifying before the same house committee on the great white house christmas card scandal that was supposed to drive bill clinton out of office once and for all. cheryl mills was bill clinton's white house deputy counsel at the time and now house republicans say they would please like to talk to her again. it's going to be a long, hot, stupid summer. the summer of subpoena is back.

the blisters were oozing, and painful to touch. i woke up to a blistering on my shoulder. i spent 23 years as a deputy united states marshal and i've been pretty well banged up but the worst pain i've experienced was when i had shingles. when i went to the clinic, the nurse told me that it was a result of having had chickenpox.

i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. this isn't the end of the line, this is just the beginning. i've got a good feeling that darrell issa is going to be having quite a summer in reviewing what's been going on here in the white house as far as this scandal is concerned. >> quite a summer. our republican national committee chairman reince priebus on fox yesterday previewing what we are about to experience, another subpoena summer. how did that work out last time? joining us now is steve kornacki, the most of excellent morning show "up with steve kornacki." thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> so the summer of subpoena, you could maybe put it on 1998 too, but 1997, i think it was

really the heyday. how did that work out for republicans last time? >> i think it was part of -- it was a part of a pattern that went back to when clinton took office in 1983. i tell people i can remember a month into his term being a kid even in massachusetts and seeing a bumper sticker in front of us that said impeach clinton and that mindset was there for the entire time he was president. so there was this endless search we're going to get something, we're going to get something, we're going to get something. after the '96 campaign i think it accelerated a bit, a, because clinton had been re-elected so you're not going to be able to beat him at the polls and he's not going to be on the ballot again. b, you had the whitewater independent counsel, they are on their third one at that point, ken starr, and you also had fund-raising controversies that came out of the 1996 campaign about, oh, did china try to influence the election and republicans convinced themselves clinton got re-elected because china put money into the election. so that added oil to the fire or gas to the fire, whatever the expression is. so we got to the summer of '97

and into '98, lewinsky fed off of that. there had been a five-year campaign to find the smoking gun to take clinton out of office. again, i think what really -- it was six months after the summer of '97 when you got the lewinsky thing and that's when it went really berserk. but in the 1998 midterm elections for the first time since james monroe was president, the white house party actually gained seats in a six-year election. nobody saw that coming and it was so shocking to republican that say two days after that election newt gingrich had to step down as speaker. >> so they went completely hog wild. they were presumably encouraged by their base to keep going. in republicanland, which actually was more porous than it is now, now it is even more isolated from the rest of media and the rest of political discussion, there was something going on in the internal republican feedback loop that told them they were both onto something and that this was a good thing to do politically, but the electorate totally disagreed. >> that was it.

i think because that mindset existed from basically the start of the clinton presidency, that this is an illegitimate president, that was basically the mindset on the right, there was this assumption eventually if we keep digging, we'll find something that will make the rest of the country see it. yes, this closed information loop that exists on the right wasn't as developed in the 1990s as it was today, but it was very similar in that you had talk radio, you had rush limbaugh and probably more listeners in the '90s than he had today. if you were a conservative in the 1990s, you were going to be celebrated, raise big money in the grassroots, celebrated on talk radio. you didn't really have fox news until the second term. but that basic problem that i think exists on the right that isolates the right from sort of more mainstream public opinion, that's been amplified today and so it's reached a point today for republicans where either, you know, there's an incentive to cater directly to it. you're going to be a hero within the republican universe. you're going to be safe from a primary challenge if you are actively engaging in this stuff. or if you're a republican and you don't believe in this stuff or don't think this is where the party should be spending its time, you better keep that to yourself.

if you speak up and say that, then it becomes like a tribal thing. that's the mark of a rhino. a rhino would say we shouldn't be looking into this, we should be going after jobs, going after the economy, whatever it is and you're going to be the victory of the primary challenge. >> to republicans have an alternate history of how this turned out? i think that's part of what's going on with democrats when they're looking at the scandal mongering that's going on on the right. nobody outside of the foxverse thinks benghazi is a real scandal. democrats aren't real concerned about republicans trying to make it one because they look back and say '98, they overreached and actually helped us. do republicans not see it that way? do they tell themselves a different story? >> newt gingrich actually gave an interview a week or two ago where he said, yeah, i think we overreached in 1998, how's that for a quote. well, you would know, you lost your job because of it. so there are some people who lived through it and some strategic pragmatic minded people who are trying to put the brakes on this a little bit. but you run the risk the louder

you speak up, it's very easy. one thing i've learned following, living and covering politics for 20 years is it's very easy to revise history. i see it happen all the time. i've seen the history of the 1990s revised where you would never know we had these balanced budgets at the end of the 1990s that was the result of a tax hike, two tax hikes in the start of the 1990s. to listen to any republican, it's because we got a republican congress in '94 and some deal in '97. they forget, no, there were no republicans who voted for it in '93 and it was george bush sr. -- but all this history can be revised so easily. >> it is easier to revise history than it is to stop the mob with the pitchforks when it is happening. steve kornacki of "up with steve kornacki" and a senior writer at "salon," it's great to see you. we'll be right back.

best new thing in the world. ready? of the 8 million people jammed into new york city, 150,000 of them, give or take, live here on that peninsula that is circled in red there. the peninsula at the city's far southern edge. that peninsula is called the rockaways, an 11-mile long atlantic ocean beach peninsula that is part of new york city. and since peninsulas by definition jut out into water and are surrounded on water by three sides, lots of peninsulas are pretty hard to reach. and the rockaways are no exception. in the 1950s in the rockaways, they celebrated and the city finally, finally extended a subway line out there. rockaway, here we come. that subway line, the a-train, is the connection for the rockaways to the rest of the world. and it is the longest subway line in this big, big, big city. the part of that subway trip that goes across jamaica bay, just that one part, takes so long that new york city pigeons

have learned to ride the a-train so they don't have to fly across the bay. they get on the train on one side of the bay, ride the train and get off on the other side, just like normal commuters, except their pigeons. when you ride that train right out over the bay to the rockaways, when you get there, what you find, miraculously, are beaches. new york city's beaches where you can swim and surf on a real beach with real waves and lifeguards and everything. you can chase your mom around the sand. the rockaways are a miraculous urban thing, and they belong to the people of new york. to the people of new york who live there and to the ones who hop on the a-train with their surf boards to go out there and go surfing. and then came hurricane sandy last october. the storm tore up the tracks for the a-train. it tore holes in the rail bed that were three and four feet long. the storm surge wrecked the train's signals and the train

wiring, it dropped boulders and seaweed and gunk of every description on to the tracks that were left. it just tore everything up. when they were done sorting through the debris out there, they found a coke bottle from 1902. 48 separate boats washed up on to the tracks. 48 boats. hurricane sandy was a giant storm. it affected not only a large geographical area, it hit the most densely populated part of our country. sandy killed almost 300 people, disrupted the lives of many millions of people. part of what was clear after the storm left was how hard sandy had hit places where rich and poor and middle class americans all go to play and relax. places like the jersey shore, where the president and the governor of new jersey palled around this week on the boardwalk out there. but sandy also hit places where rich people and poor people and middle class people live. we put a call in this week to the congressman who represents the rockaways, congressman gregory meeks, and his office told us, you have to remember

the rockaways are an enormously diverse place with every income level you can imagine, from the very destitute to millionaires. and when sandy hit, the richer end of the rockaways burned. hundreds of homes were lost to fire when wind and waves knocked houses off their frames and off their foundations, and then cut the gas lines, and then the fumes ignited and there was no way to put out the fire. the poorer end of the rockaways is where the city long ago built nursing homes and housing projects for people who they thought back then could safely be isolated out there, people they thought had no particular need of reaching the rest of the city. and after the storm, the working class rockaways found themselves again cut off from the rest of the world, in a world of their own, with a huge amount of damage over a wide area. and a twisted mess where their train used to run. the a-train was just gone. well, after the storm, the city got workers out there in the middle of the night to hook up new train cars on the part of the tracks that still worked.

they created a new train line called the h line to carry passengers through the rockaways as far as there still was train track, and then they put a shovel bus out there to go around the busted part of the tracks and let you off where you could catch the subway again. so it took forever commuting that way, right? that h train set-up was definitely better than nothing, but you might need an extra three hours to take it from the rockaways to your job. think about that for the kids who live out there, trying to get to school. you live in new york city, you are staying in new york city. but you've got to add three hours each way to how long it takes you to get to school or to get to work? and then another three hours added to the time to get home? think of how your week goes. think of how that works for moms and dads trying to get to their job and then back home again in time for dinner. well, today best new thing in the world. today our nation's largest city announced that six months of the

hardest repair work imaginable, six straight months with workers going seven days a week have brought the a-train back. and now you have to meet this kid. this is rory. he is 5 years old. and rory loves trains! he loves trains so much, he can give fred eaglesmith a run for his money. today, with the big announcement, rory and his mom rushed to the rockaways to catch the last h-train ever. rockaway, here we come, right? and with the last h-train gone, they brought in a vintage train today for the ceremonial first restored a-train trip across. and, of course, all the city dignitaries piled in. but the track workers were there too and clapped and cheered, still wearing their orange safety vests and hard hats. they had just finished rebuilding three-and-a-half miles of track and rewiring everything and totally overhauling and repairing the two stations that had flooded completely. and then here comes the train. the new a-train today. this was shot today. the new a-train comes with a seawall designed to keep a storm

even bigger than sandy from wrecking the tracks again. when they threw open the subway turnstiles today, people were still lining up, actually, for the replacement shuttle buses from the old h line jerry-rigged thing. some of those people told us today that they will miss the weird make shift system, because it had a side effect of giving people a three shuttle bus and train around the rockaways. but a lot of other folks seemed awfully glad their train was back. the a-train is back. and the rockaways are back. but, of course, when places come back, they are never exactly the same. like any place that is rebuilding, whether it's new orleans or moore, oklahoma, the rockaways now have to wrestle with what kind of place they want to rebuild themselves into. almost $2 billion in federal disaster relief is about to come through new york city. some of it for repairs, but some of it to make stronger, more resilient places that can handle extreme weather, since we seem to have more of that now. so they have to decide, do they want more ferry service in the

rockaways, enough to make that a priority, do they want to focus on housing, housing that more people can afford? city councilman donovan richards told us this week, he talked to us about it. he said folks in the rockaways have not always believed that government cared about them. but councilman richardson told us this. at the end of the day, because of the storm, there is light, there is hope that we can change some things. however, that plays out. whatever choices the rockaways are able to make, they have got their train again. it is running, again, full service, as of noon today. but for the workers who should, frankly, go celebrate all night, and then get cranking on the rest of the safety upgrades after that, and for the lifeguard standing guard with ruined houses behind them, and for the nice lady who can now go visit her mom without the trip taking all day, she told us today, and for rory, who loves trains so much, that they let him have the actual official notice that the a-train service was restored, not a copy, he got the real official notice.

and for the rockaways itself, which deserves all the help it can get, that darn train coming back is the best new thing in the world today. i have been looking forward to doing that best new thing in the world for a very long time. not as long as the rockaways waiting for the a-train to come back. official notice, and for the rockaways itself, that darn train coming back is the best new thing in the world today. i have been looking forward to doing that best new thing in the world for a long time. not as long as the rockaways have been waiting to come back, but i was waiting to tell that story. "first look" is up next. good friday morning, right now on "first look," breaking news. the american mom busted in mexico for marijuana has been released. we have the latest. weather continues to be a major concern across the midwest and today is the first day of hurricane season. we got the latest on the slew of ricin-laced letters coming from gun enthusiasts. plus a new spelling bee champ is crowned. jon bon jovi's generous gift to his fans and what are these guys dressed up for? good morning, i'm mara schiavocampo. breaking news overnight, an ara