bob kincaid from the appalachian community health emergency campaign, and don blankenship, former chairman and ceo of massey energy. thank you both for joining us. that's "all in" for this evening. "the rachel maddow show" begins now. that was riveting. thanks to you at home for joining us the next hour. the great steve kornacki sitting in for chris hayes for the last hour because chris hayes is at home with his adorable new baby boy. and in a heartless and shameless act, because chris is home with his new baby boy, i'm going to take advantage of the fact that chris is not here in the building by stealing from him the greatest piece of tape, the greatest assemblage of visual evidence that anybody has ever put together on the subject of obamacare. oh, yes, chris hayes. you may be a brand new father and everybody think it's adorable and i do, too, but good evening from new york. i'm steve kornacki in for chris

hayes tonight. we begin with news about the man who was identified as a key independent eyewitness into the investigation of chris christie that we saw last week.

period of months now these confident no doubt claims of certainty that obamacare would die. that obamacare would become nonviable in numerical terms because americans would refuse to sign up for health insurance under the new guidelines under the affordable care act. when obamacare, therefore, died in a death spiral, fox news has been saying over and over and over again health reform would go down in history as not just a great policy failure but as a towering act of political foley. democrats would spiral to their political deaths, alongside the policy, itself. republicans would laugh all the way to the ballot box. that's been the story. that is not only the way that republicans and conservatives have been talking with each other about this policy issue on fox news and on every other republican circle.

it's also in some ways the sum total of the whole republican electoral strategy for this year's midterm elections and beyond. the supposed death spiral, the expected death spiral, it has been everything to them. they have been banking on these spectacular and obvious failure of obamacare due to americans not signing up for health insurance. that is not the way it has turned out. >> what number are you? >> it's been a rush going into this last day. lines around the block at enrollment centers. >> find out the most affordable coverage for you. >> reporter: the administration reports 2.5 million calls last week to its hotline, more than the entire month of february, and nearly 9 million hits last week on healthcare.gov. >> if yesterday's events were any indication of the crowds you will see today, you just might be in for a long wait. >> you're seeing a huge uptick in the amount of people who are coming out. >> i went to several other

locations and they was overcrowded. >> abc's chief white house correspondent jonathan carl now on the serge and the sprint to the finish. >> reporter: dallas today, hundreds of people waited if line to sign up for health care. >> we will be here until 9:00 or until the last person leaves today. >> reporter: long lines in miami, too, and san antonio. people started lining up at this mall in miami at 3:30 this morning. by noon, more than 1,000 had come here to try to sign up for obamacare. in san antonio, long lines filled the alamo dome. tampa, they crammed community center hallways. administration officials say this has been their biggest enrollment day since signups began last october, three types their previous record. >> it's not a totally hard and fast deadline today because lots of people will be granted extensions including anybody who tried to sign up by today but had technical troubles for whatever reason. but on paper, at least, today is the day, the deadline, by which you were supposed to have signed up for health insurance directly

with an insurance company or through the health exchange websites that were set up by the new law or through a government insurance program like medicaid. today is the day. and the congressional budget office had projected initially that by today, 7 million people would have enrolled for health insurance through the exchanges. they revised that down to 6 million people when the federal website and a bunch of state websites had a super glitchy launch. but only was there no death spiral, that projected 6 million people, that 6 million expected to sign up, that projection was hit and surpassed even before the deadline. the white house announced last week that they were already at 6 million signups. they were at that threshold four days ahead of today's deadline. and then by all accounts, over this past weekend, and through today, including through tonight, right now, the last-minute surge of people trying to enroll, trying to get themselves health insurance, has been a substantial surge.

the healthcare.gov website, that's the federal website that works in 36 states that don't have their own websites, healthcare.gov has been running pretty well over the past few months since they fixed the initial glitches. this morning, though, it went down for a few hours, again, because of a software glitch that they found overnight. they apparently fixed that glitch by this morning and had the website back up and running today, but then just after lunchtime, in the early afternoon today, the healthcare.gov website crashed, again, and this time it wasn't a glitch. this time it was just overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who were trying to sign up for health insurance all at once. the administration said they were dealing with more than 100,000 people all on the same website all simultaneously trying to enroll, and the site just got overwhelmed. they did get the website back up and running for a second time today, but throughout today, and into tonight, they say the volume is very, very high on the website. volume is also high at the call centers where people have been trying to phone in in order to sign up that way.

at the federal exchange and the call centers, they're now saying that anybody who essentially gets in line between now and midnight, anybody who at least tries to get themselves signed up today will have the deadline stretched for them so they can at least try to finish the process. if you put it off until the last day and you are trying to sign up for health insurance before the midnight deadline tonight, yeah, the fact that all the call centers are really crowded and there's long lines and it's taking a long time to get through the website because it's really overwhelmed it's annoying to do that at the last minute. that annoyance is not a death spiral problem. this is the opposite of that kind of problem. this is not too few people signing up. this is too many people trying to sign up. if the health of our newly reformed health care system in this country depends on people agreeing to participate in the system, people agreeing to get health insurance when this is exactly the right kind of problem that you want to have. it may be annoying, but this is

the type of difficulty that they dreamt of. it's too popular. we'll get to some of what that means for the policy in just a moment with an expert guest who's going to be here in just a second. but in terms of the politics here, what does this mean for the republican party? i mean, as far as anyone can tell, the whole republican plan for the elections this november is that republicans plan to crow about the obvious failure of health reform, right? well, now that health reform isn't failing, what are they going to do this year? turns out that their plan is to switch metaphorical birds. turns out their plan now is less crow, less crowing, and more of the ostrich, sticking their heads in the sand. the republican view of dealing with the real reality on the ground is republicans are going to pretend it's not happening. la, la, la, la, la. >> the white house announced this week more than 6 million

people now total have signed up for private health insurance on the exchanges including 1.8 million so far just in march. but they still have no numbers for how many people have paid for coverage, how many so-called young invincibles have signed up, nor how many people have signed up who were previously uninsured. senator barrasso, given that, how much does this 6 million number actually mean? >> i don't think it means anything, chris. i think they're cooking the books on this. >> they're cooking the books. really? you are forgiven if you do not know who the man is who was speaking there. he is not contrary to popular impression, he is not a stephen colbert impersonator. in fact, that is a united states senator from the great state of wyoming. it's not like he's brand new. i don't know why no one can ever pick john barrasso out of a lineup. that, however, is u.s. senator john barrasso, and he is not the only u.s. senator who thinks that maybe the obamacare numbers

are all fake. maybe it just can't be true that this many million people have signed up for health insurance under obamacare. >> your colleague, senator barrasso, says the white house is actually fixing the books. >> totally they are. >> you agree with that? you have any facts to back that up? >> no, lindsey graham does not have any facts to back that up, but this is proving to be one of the more entertaining instincts that high-ranking republicans have developed in the obama era. you think they might have learned a lesson about publicly denying the numbers during the great obama re-election great conservative punditry fail of 2012, right? i mean, you'd think they would be embarrassed about ignoring the numbers, right? they were embarrassed by that episode. weren't they? >> i believe the minimum result will be 53-47, romney over 300 electoral votes, and the republicans will pick up the senate.

i base that on just years and years of experience. >> the wildcard in what i've projected is i'm projecting minnesota to go to romney. >> i think ohioans vote with their wallets. that's why i think romney is going to win on tuesday. >> i think ohio is going to be a squeaker, maybe 80, 100, 110-vote margin. i think the republicans are likely to take it. >> who's going to win this election? charles krauthammer, your best prediction? >> romney, very close, but he'll win the popular by i think about half a point. electoral college, probably very narrow margin. >> it will be the biggest surprise in recent american political history. it will rekindle a whole question as to why the media played this race as a nail biter. where, in fact, i think romney is going to win by quite a bit. >> i'm now predicting a 330 electoral vote landslide. yes, that's right, 330 electoral votes. >> yeah. you guys, no one was skewing the polls. nobody was cooking the books to

make it look like president obama was going to get elected when, in fact, mitt romney was going to get elected and by a lot and was going to win ohio and minnesota and it was going to be beautiful -- you know what, it was a conservative fantasy. and a very embarrassing one because it was conducted in public and that tape exists forever. also the department of labor did not cook the books and make up new unemployment numbers before the election to help the president. those really were the real unemployment numbers. and the idea that they were fake numbers that were made up, they were cooking the books. that was a conservative fantasy, and, again, an embarrassing one. now, obamacare. the affordable care act has hit its projected numbers as well. they're not cooking the books. there's not going to be a death spiral where the law dies under its own actuarial weight because people have refused to sign up. in fact, people are signing up at exactly the rate they were expected to sign up at, if not a little faster. republican politicians really do hate this law, but it is doing what it was supposed it do. the number of uninsured people

in our country has dropped by 9.5 million people because of this law. and the new political reality of obamacare is that wishing for obamacare to go away can go longer be a wish that exists in an ideological vacuum. the policy exists now. wishing for it to go away means now that you're wishing that 9.5 million americans who just got health insurance, you're wishing that they would go back to being uninsured. but perhaps the biggest political news of all about health reform right now, and if you are sick of people talking about health reform, this is definitely the most joyful piece of news for you. the most important thing probably to know about obamacare and the way it affects our national politics from here on out is that today is probably the last day ever that obamacare will be a big national news story. paul walden wrote about this today in the "washington post" and i think he's right about this. "today is the last of the law's key dates when everyone's attention turns to it. this is the end of major

obamacare-related news events. no big nationwide thing is ever going to happen again on obamacare. it will, therefore, stop being a politics story and start basically just being a health care policy story." which means after today, in political terms, it's okay for this subject to go back to being boring. from a personal perspective, i got to tell you, i have a degree in health care policy. that is what i did my undergraduate college degree in and i had a choice. i picked that. if anybody should find this stuff fascinating, i should. but after today, we can all agree to go back to this being the story of how annoying it is to have to deal with your health insurer and sometimes you have good experiences at the doctor, and sometimes you have annoying experiences at the doctor, and dealing with the private health insurance company is an annoying bureaucracy but better than not having health insurance where you go bankrupt and have to go live in a trailer. if you want those kind of regular everyday frustrations with health insurance, which those of us who were lucky

enough to have health insurance have long dealt with and been bored by. if you want that to be the hook in which you hang your whole congressional midterm election strategy, then good -- good luck. but after today, it is starting to look like anybody who was trying to say that they had real fire in the belly on this issue, it's starting to look like it's fizzling out. i mean, a death spiral would have been so cool. but that is not at all what happened. joining us now is dr. zeke emanuel, former white house health policy adviser, currently chair of medical ethics and health policy at the university of pennsylvania. dr. emanuel, i'm sorry that i said your field is boring. >> yeah, you're going to make me unemployed. nobody is going to want to hear my boring things anymore. that's, like, terrible. rachel, you'll have to have me on, nonetheless. you have to promise that. otherwise, you know. >> you have to start coming up with health policy terms that are as cool sounding as death spiral. when this was going to be a huge conflagration, it was very, very exciting. now it feels like less people

being uninsured. >> yes, we're about to go further into the weeds of how do you design a really good website, what do you have to do to make sure it's vibrant and people want to come and shop? what do you have to do to get cost control to work? those tend to be in the weeds and can even bore my children. i think you're right. >> were the republicans right to say that if -- and the conservatives more broadly -- were they right to say that if people didn't sign up, that if the numbers stayed as bad as they were when the websites didn't work and the first couple weeks when nobody was really signing up. if those numbers stayed terrible, in actuarial terms the whole system wouldn't work. the whole idea of obamacare would fall apart? were they right to warn about that? >> yes. that is true. if you don't have enough people in the system, it will collapse of its own weight and other exchanges and other places did collapse and, you know,

fortunately the 7 million which was as you point out the original projection without the two months of screwed up website will be reached by the end here pretty comfortably, and i think that shows it's been a major -- there's some really pent-up demand. people really want insurance and they want affordable insurance. when offered that possibility, they'll come out of the woodwork. of course they're going to delay until the end. we're all procrastinators. that's big demand and that is the bottom line here. >> the 7 million number was never, as far as i understand it, correct me if i'm wrong, as far as i understand it it was never set as an explicit policy goal. if we get that number, then this thing will work. that was essentially the projected number for how many people they thought would sign up. in policy terms, is that enough people signed up to basically guarantee that it is going to work at least in a macro sense? >> well, again, partly because the exchanges are state-by-state, you have to dissect each state, but certainly overall as an aggregate, it's enough.

places like connecticut have seen more than twice the estimated number. california's well over a million. new york's done extremely well. so you will see in these major pockets of where the uninsured are a very stable platform. but, again, you want a stable platform going forward, so god forbid someone loses a job or god forbid employers decide they're not going to offer insurance, you actually have a place you can get affordable coverage, and so we really do need functioning vibrant exchanges in every state of the country. >> as we move forward and as the implementation of this law shows things that need to be fixed, shows things that aren't working, do you have faith, and we've talked about this earlier in the process, too. do you have faith that those are things that can be fixed at the administrative level, at the executive branch level? do you think some of the fixes that are inevitably needed for this law are going to go to go through congress which, of course, is still sort of a wasteland? >> there are some things that

really do need legislation, but there's a lot of things that can be done administratively. remember, in massachusetts, after they passed their bill, they had six more subsequent legislative revisions and they don't think they're finished with it. so there are things that everyone agrees, and, again, here the funny thing is if you talk to a policymakers on the right, conservatives, they agree with me about 70% of the time about things that we ought to be doing to improve the american health care system. changing off the fee for service payment system, getting more competitive on government provision of services so you can bring the prices down. having more administrative simplification so there's not so much paperwork and you can save money that way. there are a number of things. again, this is bipartisan once we get past the election or whenever the republicans are going to say, all right, we're going to move off health care and on to something else. the fact of the matter is we can do things to improve the health care system and improve this affordable care act and how the whole system functions.

and we should get on with it already. >> dr. zeke emanuel, former white house health policy adviser. and a good -- >> soon to be irrelevant. >> hopefully. if all goes well. thank you very much, zeke. nice to see you. >> take care. >> thanks a lot. all right. and i quote, "i could claw his eyes out." that was something that i did not think had been publicly released last week, but it turns out it had. not only did i think i want to claw his eyes out, i want to pour gasoline in his eye sockets and light them on fire. this is a new form of political insult and threat that i did not even know new jersey was capable of, but they are. stay with us. that story's coming up. [ male announcer ] this is joe woods' first day of work.

and his new boss told him two things -- cook what you love, and save your money. joe doesn't know it yet, but he'll work his way up from busser to waiter to chef before opening a restaurant specializing in fish and game from the great northwest. he'll start investing early, he'll find some good people to help guide him, and he'll set money aside from his first day of work to his last, which isn't rocket science. it's just common sense. from td ameritrade.

it is bear o'clock all over the country. whether you live out in the country or in the suburbs that are maybe adjacent to the country, heck, even if you live in the glendale neighborhood of los angeles, this is the time of year that you might run into a bear. waking up from a long winter's nap. obviously looking for something to eat. look at the guy, here comes the bear. oh, geez, there's a bear. this is the time to take in your bird feeders, lest they end up twisted into gnarled handfuls of wires and mess like the one in our front yard that susan and i forgot to take down this weekend. last fall we had on this show a nebraska state senator named ken hare who invented something designed to foil the bear in your life, bear hooks.

two grappling hooks with a line between them. put the hooks way up in a tree and use them to hoist your food or trash in the air away from your campsites so you're not tempting bears to tear your stuff apart. the senator was here on the show last fall because in addition to inventing bear hooks, he wrote legislation to get his state to look into how climate change was effecting nebraska and what they should do to plan for those effects. this was not an an exercise nebraska or anywhere else. nebraska had drought conditions, historic flooding conditions and experienced both of those things not that far apart. when senator bear hooks put forward his idea to study climate change in the state, conservatives in the nebraska state government blocked what he wanted to do. they said they would only let that climate change study go ahead if it did not study the fact that the climate was

changing. one republican state senator said, "i don't subscribe to global warming." he wrote an amendment to the legislation insisting it not study anything that might have been caused by humans. so the nebraska legislature voted that the study of the climate change problem should not really study the problem and all the state's major scientists said they wanted nothing to do with it so the whole thing got canceled in nebraska. this is called the see no evil, hear no evil approach to scary public policy problems. it's a little like what we described with republicans denying the obamacare signup numbers. the technical term in political silence is la, la, la, la, la, i don't want to know. the same thing happened in virginia in 2012. the idea was floated, get it, floated for the study of effects on climate change and sea level rise on the coastal portion. the hampton roads area is considered the highest major flood risk zone in the country after new orleans.

the republican state delegate from virginia beach at the time insisted virginia should not study the effect of sea level rise on coastal virginia because he said the term sea level rise is a left wing term. and so virginia is not allowed to study it. la, la, la, la, la. same thing happened in north carolina recently where republicans in the state legislature there set a ban on any decisions or any planning being based on estimates from a state-appointed panel of scientific experts which predicted how much sea levels might rise on the north carolina coast over the next few decades. those estimates exist. they were produced by a state-appointed commission of scientific experts, but the prediction they made for what was going to happen on the coast of north carolina, those predictions were scary. and so north carolina republicans decided to ban the state, ban the state by law from paying attention to those scary predictions. la, la, la, la, la. if you stick your head in the

sand this way, do you drown when the tide rushes up and covers the beach? we're all about to find out. all of us. because tomorrow in the united states congress, the republican-controlled house is about to take up a bill to have the whole country go la, la, la, la, la, when it comes to understanding what's happening to the planet right now and how we might plan to survive it. today the intergovernmental panel on climate change released its latest international consensus scientific report saying, in effect, that the effects of climate change are already being felt around the globe. everything from droughts in the mediterranean, to sea ice collapsing in the far north which is eroding the coastline. adaptations around the world include everything from needing to raise flood walls already and sea barriers, it some coastal communities moving themselves away from the sea or at least making plans to move away from the sea soon. so that international report came out today and it is scary stuff. the effects of global warming and climate change have already started.

what hope to we have of reversing these changes? what hope do we have of adapting to deal with them if we can't reverse them? this is keep you up at night kind of stuff. unless you are a member of the republican-controlled house of representatives. because the plan in congress tomorrow, tomorrow, the day after this big scary international report came out, what they're going to do in congress tomorrow is that they're going to debate a new republican idea that the united states government should stop working on this issue so much. we should at least stop studying it so we know less about it. republican congressman jim bridenstine of oklahoma is due to get a floor vote tomorrow, as early as tomorrow, on his bill that would instruct the national oceanic and atmospheric administration to stop studying climate change so darn much. >> mr. speaker, global temperatures stopped rising ten years ago. global temperature changes when they exist correlate with sun

output and ocean cycles. >> congressman sun output says it is a scandal that u.s. government scientists spend time studying the impact of climate change. in fact, he says the people of oklahoma are ready for an apology from president obama because government scientists have been studying climate change. this is what the republicans did in nebraska. this is what the republicans did in virginia. this is what they did in north carolina. now under john boehner in washington, they are trying to take national this patented approach to worrying about climate change. don't worry about it. in fact, don't study it. keep your heads in the sand. congressman bridenstine's la, la, la, la, la, bill is due up as early as tomorrow. we got word tonight from house democrats they're trying to at least change the language in the bill to soften it up because they believe the republicans in the house will pass it. but we'll let you know how this thing goes tomorrow. watch this space. [ grunting ]

i'm taking off, but, uh, don't worry.

i'm gonna leave the tv on for you. and if anything happens, don't forget about the new xfinity my account app. you can troubleshoot technical issues here. if you make an appointment, you can check out the status here. you can pay the bill, too. but don't worry about that right now. okay. how do i look? ♪ thanks. [ male announcer ] troubleshoot, manage appointments, and bill pay from your phone. introducing the xfinity my account app. we have some breaking news posted by the "washington post." it's about the senate intelligence committee's report on the cia. their interrogation and detention practices after 9/11. you know that this report is still classified, but this new reporting from the "washington post" tonight says officials familiar with the report are now describing its conclusions. they say the report concludes that the cia misled both the department of justice and congress. the report says, reportedly,

that the cia concealed some of their torture techniques, overstated the effectiveness of their torture methods and claimed that torturing prisoners got them critical intelligence that actually was gathered by other agencies without the use of torture. one u.s. official telling the "post" tonight, "the cia described its program repeatedly to both the justice department and eventually to congress as getting unique otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives." "was that actually true, the official says? the answer is no." senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote on thursday whether or not to submit this report to president obama for declassification. we have been waiting to get public access to it for years. this is a major leak tonight about what is reportedly in the conclusions of that report. if this is what the report is, you can understand why the cia has been fighting so hard to keep it out of the public wry. much more to come about this bombshell reporting undoubtedly in days to come.

we'll let you know as we learn more. we'll be right back. i procrastinated on... buying a car because i knew... it would be a scary process. truecar made it very easy... for me to negotiate, because i didn't really need to do any negotiating at all. save time, save money, and never overpay. visit truecar.com

when you are an embattled governor, when you're a governor known as a formerly rising star but now known as the governor who's been under siege for six straight months with poll ratings gone upsidedown and the rest of it and just spent $1 million in taxpayer money on an internal investigation into yourself, and that report on behalf of your own office determines that you had not one thing to do with this big

terrible mess in your state, but still the questions about whether you were involved keep right on coming. when you're a governor and you just can't seem to get this thing put to bed, no matter how much you keep trying to put it to bed, there's just one thing left to do. release the surrogates. >> you're a former u.s. attorney. if somebody came to you with an investigation that came to a conclusion like the one that christie's investigation did, but it did not interview the five most important players in the investigation including bridget kelly, bill stepien, david wildstein, david samson, bill baroni, all these people all involved in it, would you accept that as a complete investigation as a former u.s. attorney? >> no, no, i would not accept it as a complete investigation, but i would accept it for what it's worth. in other words, i would go through it in great detail because it can give you a tremendous amount of information. >> governor chris christie is having a hard time in the press. look very shortly thereafter for

rudy giuliani on tv defending him. to the extent that governor chris christie has traceable political dna, that political dna goes right back to rudy giuliani. rudy giuliani's top political strategist when he ran for president, mike duhaime. mike duhaime became the top political strategist for chris christie. bill stepien then went on to become chris christie's campaign manager. the rudy giuliani for president deputy communications chief was a woman named maria comella, went on to become communications chief for chris christie. and when chris christie picked a lawyer to do a supposedly impartial and independent investigation of whether chris christie did anything wrong when those lanes on the world's busiest bridge for shut down on orders from at least one person working in his own office, chris christie picked a lawyer who happens to have been a deputy mayor to rudy giuliani. and then this weekend, mayor giuliani once again stood up for chris christie and stood up for his former deputy mayor's report

saying that that gushing over the top total exoneration of governor christie which most other people are treating as suspect if not a laughingstock, he rudy giuliani says he sees that report as something that should be gone over in great detail because he says it can give you a tremendous amount of information. if you have got a case of brand new highlighters, and several boxes of binder clips, this report from the chris christie lawyers is, in fact, fascinating reading. it is filled with documents that we haven't seen before. last week, i mistakenly said that attorney randy mastro, the guy who did this report, didn't include the raw e-mails or raw text messages when he published the results of his investigation. that was wrong on my part. the report and the exhibits supporting the report went out separately that morning, and in fact, in the exhibits, there's the raw stuff. as you can see. this is, for example, the raw text message in which the christie deputy chief of staff

who ordered traffic problems for the town of ft. lee, this is the text message in which she apologizes to her staffer. bridget kelly apologizing right after she has been fired. she writes, "i'm sorry to tarnish the office." her staffer replies, "we did amazing things to be proud of for four years. never forget that." then she says, "hang in there, b.k." raw stuff. some of the report's conclusions have become more curious as we've gotten new clues about them. the port authority official who arranged for the bridge lanes to be closed and ft. lee to choke on traffic for a week is this guy, david wildstein. according to the report, david wildstein says he told governor christie about the lanes being closed while they were still closed. he says he told them at a 9/11 memorial service on day three of the traffic jam. if that was true, that would mean governor christie learned about the traffic lanes being shut down and about ft. lee's nightmare while it was still going on. the authors of the report, chris christie's lawyers spent a lot of ink playing that down.

iterating and reiterating that governor christie remembers nothing about that conversation. "whatever brief exchange they had occurred in a public setting where they were surrounded by many including other port authority officials and the governor's wife and a steady stream of spectators requesting photographs and handshakes with the governor. governor christie has no recollection of such an exchange. since the report was first published, wnbc here in new york has obtained these new pictures of governor christie and david wildstein together at that memorial that day. although we cannot hear what they are talking about by looking at these pictures, they do not appear to be interrupted by a steady stream of spectators requesting photographs and handshakes with the governor. it's not like david wildstein was on a receiving line. they hung out. also in this report, the sort of astounding e-mail from governor christie, himself, in which he edits the press statement about david wildstein's resignation. this happened back in december.

you can see here, the statement as proposed by governor christie's spokesman, mr. christie writes back personally adding a line, thanking david wildstein for his service to the people of new jersey and the region. governor christie's tried to keep his distance from this story from the beginning, but you can see him wading in to these particular details himself, directly and personally. both david wildstein and bridget kelly have indicated now that they are willing to testify. they are willing to talk and explain everything they know if they get immunity from prosecution. on friday, lawyers for bridget kelly said if she gets immunity, "she will be fully cooperative and provide true and complete answers to any questions asked of her by the appropriate law enforcement authorities." well, today the democratic co-chair of new jersey legislative committee that's investigating the scandal said his committee is going to subpoena the notes and the records and the transcripts of interviews that were used in making the christie internal investigation. assemblyman john wisniewski telling reporters today if this

report is "truly an unbiased report, then the governor should have no problem turning over that raw material." the lead investigator responded to assemblyman wisniewski today by saying basically, yeah, send us the subpoena and we'll think about it. assemblyman john wisniewski joins us live, next. stay with us.

you have time to shop for car insurance today? yeah. i heard about progressive's "name your price" tool? i guess you can tell them how much you want to pay and it gives you a range of options to choose from. huh? i'm looking at it right now. oh, yeah? yeah. what's the... guest room situation? the "name your price" tool, making the world a little more progressive.

final quick question. are you confident that your report will not be contradicted by the u.s. attorney? >> george, we are because we have no incentive to do anything other than to get to the truth. i have to say this, for the skeptics out there, there are some who have a visceral reaction to this bridge controversy. reminds me of the movie line, they can't handle the truth. we believe we got to the truth, george. >> could this story get any more new jersey? yes, it could. that's attorney randy mastro, former deputy mayor to rudolph giuliani. that was him speaking on abc's "this week" inserting his internal investigation into this scandal got to the truth and nothing but the truth. joining us now for the interview tonight is new jersey assemblyman john wisniewski, co-chair of the legislative panel that's been investigating these lane closures from the start. mr. wisniewski, thank you for being here. >> good to be here, rachel. >> you said you're not satisfied essentially with this report on behalf of the christie

administration. why not? >> there are no significant support for the arguments that are made in the entire report. he's the man who the christie interview notes. if there's a transcript the committee ought to see the transcript of the interview. so we hear a lot of conclusions, we hear a lot of summary, but we don't see any support for that. >> when you said today that you would like to see those interview transcripts and in fact that you will subpoena them under the subpoena power that you have in the legislature, what did you make of the response from mr. mastro, and do you think you're going to get those documents? >> i certainly hope we will, but i was disappointed by the response. the governor started this whole process when this issue first

became known, that he was going to cooperate fully with all of the investigations. i think cooperating fully means turning over the material that the internal investigation developed and used during their preparation of this report. to have anything short of that means the governor's backing away from his commitment to fully cooperate. >> are there particular sort of dark spots in the record that were either highlighted by this report or alluded to by this report that you're focusing on, that you'd really like to -- if you had to prioritize what you'd like to get that you found out exists from this report, are there specific things? >> well, i know what is not in this report, and that is any substantive interview with bridget kelly or bill stepien or david samson or bill baroni or mr. wildstein. and these are the key actors in this entire episode. and so how you come to a conclusion that the governor had no knowledge, in fact he may not have, but how you come to that conclusion without actually having the opportunity to

interview these people, without having the opportunity to look at the documents they have, just seems like an incredible rush to a conclusion without all the facts. >> what's the status of your investigation right now? i know you said that a lot of the documents that you subpoenaed you expected to come in on a rolling basis and that there would be thousands of them and it would take a long time to go through them. what's the status and the sort of overall timeline on what you're doing? >> well, obviously we're waiting for judge jacobson's decision on bridget kelly and bill stepien's production of documents. we don't know when that will come. we're hoping it will come soon. we just received thousands of pages of documents from randy mastro as a precursor to the delivery of this report. we haven't gone through them all, but clearly we're getting a lot of press summaries in the documents we're getting from the governor's office. that's not relevant to the inquiry of the committee. we want to know what people are saying to one another. we want to know what they were communicating to one another. we don't want to know the summary of what the bergen record and the "wall street journal" and "new york times" had on these stories. but that's what we're getting a lot of.

so we need to get a lot more documents. we're ultimately going to have to take testimony. there's some very fundamental questions about why people were compelled or felt compelled to close these lanes even though they're internal e-mails and you've seen them that said this is not going to end well, this is a big mistake, why are we doing this. but they went ahead and did it anyway. >> do you believe that governor christie will be one of the people who will have to testify in this matter? you're your co-chair loretta weinberg suggested as much this weekend. >> i think we may ultimately need to ask the governor to come and answer questions. we need to have his full cooperation. we need to know what randy mastro knows in preparing this report. we need to know what the governor said as part of his interview with randy mastro. that may involve having the governor come before our committee. >> new jersey assemblyman john wisniewski, thank you very much for keeping us up to speed. nice to see you. >> good to see you, rachel. >> all right. we'll be right back.

so i missed friday night's show. i had a thing to do. missed the show. it's great to have a day off. except if you work in the news business and your news show is at night and the day you get to take off is a friday. and the reason that's bad is because every freaking friday, it seems like, there is now a friday night news dump of some magnitude. including this past friday, when i was not here. after the close of business on friday night north carolina, the state government in north carolina dumped a huge trove of documents, 13,000 pages, 900 different documents, all released in response to public records requests, all posted online without comment after the close of business on friday. there are so many documents that when the local cbs station, wral, posted them on their website they essentially tried to crowd-source them. they called on their viewers to search through the files themselves and flag anything

that might be newsworthy. the agency in question here is the north carolina department of the environment. they're the state agency where more than a dozen of their employees have received federal criminal grand jury subpoenas and the u.s. attorney's investigation into the recent giant coal ash spill in north carolina and the relationship between the company responsible for that spill, duke energy, and the state government. the administration of north carolina governor pat mccrory. pat mccrory happens to have worked at duke energy for 30 years before he became the state's governor and before duke energy's toxic gunk pouring into the dan river became the third largest coal ash spill in the history of this country. on friday the state posted those 13,000 pages related to duke energy's coal ash all across the state. also on friday that same state agency announced that they'd found poison, a poison called thallium, in surface water at two of duke's other coal ash sites across the state. this is not them finding toxic chemicals at dan river, at the place that had the spill. this is them finding this poison

at these other sites where there hasn't been a spill with the implication that even in the absence of a catastrophic breach like they had at dan river the intact coal ash dumps that duke has around the state, the intact ones are themselves leaching highly toxic metals into north carolina rivers. at the cliffside plant in gaston county. at the asheville plant that drains into the french broad river, they found levels of thallium above what the federal government says are safe. wail helpfully noting that thallium "was commonly used as a rat poison until the u.s. banned it for consumer use in 1975 due to its high toxicity." so it's too toxic to be used as rat poison but not too toxic to be dumped into north carolina rivers by duke energy. i'm not sure if the people of north carolina knew that this is what they were going to get when they hired a nearly 30-year duke energy employee as their new governor, but this is what they got. and if you want to help with the

crowd-sourced efforts on those documents, there's a link to the documents posted at maddowblog.com right now. and the hashtag for posting on twitter what you find in those documents is hashtag coalashdocs. are back in action. good morning i'm francis. general motors announced late monday it is expanded yet again. the number of vehicles it's