that coverage is back. and so in a weird way, i actually think it's in her interest. two of our draft card contestants, we will give you an update soon. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. >> thank you, chris, my friend. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. happy monday. there's lots of news going on today including a lot of stuff that has been breaking late in the day and into this evening. we're keeping an eye on president obama's historic trip to alaska. the president is in alaska right now. he's going to be there today, tomorrow and wednesday. he's giving remarks tonight on the issue of climate change. which is obviously a big part of the reason he's in alaska and a big question mark over how he will deal with him green lighting arctic oil drilling by shell oil. the president making those remarks tonight. he spent a big portion meeting with native alaskan groups. it's late in the day.

there's new news happening that probably means it's going to be a bit of a rollicking show tonight which is always fun. we start with some legitimately new news hot off the presses. what i have in my hot little hand here is new national polling. new national -- a new national poll on the presidential race. we have this exclusively tonight. you have not heard about this anywhere else. we're breaking this news here. this is a new national poll on the presidential race from public policy polling. they have polled republican voters nationwide on the race for the republican nomination. and what they have found is a mix of good news including some surprisingly good news for the few folks who find themselves towards the top of these poll results, but what they have also found is just some astonishingly bad news for the folks who find themselves at the bottom of the list. and some of the people at the very bottom of the list will

surprise you. the top tiered, national politicians in the republican field are not just polling at the bottom of the field nationally right now, they're like below the bottom of the field, like you thought you were on the ground floor and, hey look, turns out there's a basement. this new ppp poll which we have exclusively tonight and we are breaking news of right now, it is very good news for some candidates but very bad news for others. so it's monday. do you want the good news first or do you want the bad news first? all right. let's do the good news first. thank you. you didn't think you could hear you. the good news is, as you might expect, for the unquestioned, unchallenged republican front-runner, new york real estate developer mr. donald trump. he has led in every poll in every one of the state polls for more than a month now. the closest anybody has come to knocking on his door is one iowa poll.

iowa specific poll that came out today from monmouth which showed donald trump tied with ben carson for first place in that one poll. even that doesn't show ben carson beating donald trump. no one beats donald trump anymore anywhere. this new national poll from ppp tonight also has donald trump in first place, winning by a mile, at 29%. ben carson in second place in this new national poll. ben carson at 15% which means donald trump is almost doubling ben carson's level of support. still, though, those are the only two people in double digits. those are the two guys coming in first and second. this new national poll from ppp obviously very good news for both donald trump and ben carson. this new national ppp poll actually means that donald trump and ben carson are the number one and number two choices of republicans nationwide in three of the last four national polls. that top tier is really getting to be very clear.

donald trump and ben carson clearly sitting on top of the republican field as we head toward labor day and this new ppp poll just underscoring their dominance. this poll also has relatively good news, though, for jeb bush. jeb bush, he does only place third in this new ppp poll, and he can't get out of single digits but, still, 9% and coming in third, constitutes really good news for jeb bush right now the way things have been going for him recently. he's not only been sliding nationally but in the early states so jeb bush coming in third tonight in the new national poll that constitutes probably reason for celebration in kennebunkport or miami or houston. i don't know. where do the bushes summer these days? i don't know. the other person who truly does have reason to celebrate in this new national ppp poll is the candidate who comes in only one point behind jeb bush for a strong fourth place finish, and

that candidate is carly fiorina, polling at 8% nationwide. that is good for fourth place. that is good for her. but that is not a fluke. she's been polling very well over the last few weeks. in this new national ppp poll, look at it, carly fiorina polls better than rand paul and chris christie and mike huckabee and ted cruz and marco rubio and scott walker. she beats all of them. all of them, of course, were allowed into the first presidential debate by fox news and the rnc while carly fiorina was not. because cnn has decided to stick with that terrible idea of having one real debate and one lesser event for some other candidates, and they've decided they're going to use some polling algorithm to divide the candidates, we are in a situation now, thank you cnn, where carly fiorina is beating handily in poll after poll after poll both nationally and in the early states, she's beating lots of other candidates who are on track to be let into the second

debate, but cnn is still not planning on letting her in. they're planning on sticking with this kids table debate plan. which makes no sense and is a disservice to lots of candidates throughout the various tiers of the giant republican field. carly fiorina's campaign sending out this sort of fake petition thing, a way to get your e-mail address, sending out this petition to pressure cnn and the rnc into abandoning their debate plans which are going to keep her out of the next debate. finally some of the other candidates are starting to speak publicly about how bad this cnn debate plan is, this plan for cnn to follow what fox news did in the debates. ben carson's campaign manager came out and complained about the debate plans to politico.com, which is nice especially given ben carson is for sure going to be on the main debate stage. his campaign saying other

candidates were set to be excluded shouldn't be excluded. that's a generous thing for the carson campaign to be doing. also on the other end of the spectrum, rick perry, god bless him, yesterday on fox news rick perry also stepped up and said that debate plan needs to be changed if only so carly fiorina can be on that debate stage. >> carly fiorina, i negotiated with carly before bringing hewlett-packard to houston, i think carly needs to be on that debate stage. this is a class act, an extraordinary individual. >> that's nice of rick perry, right, to say about one of his competitor particularly when there's absolutely no chance that he himself will be allowed on the debate stage as long as this kids table idea is still the plan. so good for the ben carson campaign for their generous statement. good for rick perry for that selfless statement there. and of course the whole idea of rick perry brings us to the republican field for whom this new national poll out tonight from ppp is absolutely terrible and may be even devastating

news. let's look at the bottom tier of this poll. look at the people who are getting 2% or less. tied for tenth place at 2% of the vote right now are rick santorum, which is where you would expect him to be. but who is rick santorum tied with? chris christie. chris christie was supposed to be a top tier national contender, right? chris christie tied with rick santorum for tenth place and 2% of the vote nationally right now. and if you think that is bad, chris christie is actually sitting pretty compared to rand paul. rand paul does even worse. rand paul right now in this new national poll out from ppp is tied with jim gilmore. at 1% in the polls. rand paul, jim gilmore and the aforementioned rick perry. i mean, rick perry is down to one campaign staffer in iowa. he was staking his whole

presidential campaign on iowa, his iowa campaign chairman left and went to work for donald trump. his co-chair in iowa, who just a couple weeks ago spent an hour with hand-in-hand, literally holding hands, walking around the iowa state fair with his iowa co-chair. she just left him, too. and she didn't even leave him to go work for the front-runner. she left him to work for rick santorum. rick perry is dead in the water. he's down to one last staffer in iowa. his presidential campaign is no longer really a campaign. it's like a voluntary club where they want to use your name but you don't really have to do anything. the only suspense is whether or not there will be a t-shirt for you at the end of it. rick perry is over. he is at 1% in the polls. jim gilmore, i'm sure, is delighted. they have no idea who he is and that he's running for president. but rand paul is tied with those guys. at 1%. which does mean he's sitting pretty compared to lindsey graham and bobby jindal polling at zero.

sometimes it's easier to say they scratched. and maybe we expect that now. maybe we expect bobby jindal and lindsey graham to scratch, right, to poll at zero percent. we now ought to expect donald trump and ben carson to be leading in every poll. but who expected chris christie to be tied with rick santorum and rand paul to be tied with jim gilmore? right? at 2% and 1% respectively. this is just disastrous news for them. and this new ppp poll we've got exclusively tonight, that we are breaking news about right here tonight, this is a national poll. but the bad news part of these findings especially for the candidates who are supposed to be contenders, top tier guys, from ppp and their national poll tonight, those bad news findings are replicated in the early state polls that are out today and yesterday as well.

i mentioned earlier that monmouth, iowa, poll which has an interesting finding right at the top with donald trump and ben carson tied, well, down at the bottom end of that poll, looks familiar. chris christie up at 1% of the vote, in a three-way tie for 12th place along with jindal and rick perry. the monmouth, iowa, poll out today. the gold standard iowa poll still considered to be the one done by the "des moines register." that poll came out yesterday. it's also a grim picture in the small numbers. chris christie in a three-way tie for tenth place with 2% of the vote. rand paul tied for eighth place with 4% of the vote. the real problem for these campaigns, though, as we head towards labor day and that psychological political barrier, the real problem for these campaigns right now is that none of this seems like a fluke anymore. donald trump really is at a resilient and now pretty long-standing secure position at

the top of the polls. this is not one of those weeklong flirtations like a few candidates had in '08 or even in 2012. this isn't newt gingrich's mini surge after that one good debate, right? this isn't the brief 999 madness of herman cain presidential runner. donald trump is at the top and appears to be staying at the top. and just as indelibly it looks like now guys like chris christie and rick perry and bobby jindal but particularly guys who are supposed to be real contenders, they're also really not moving anymore and it's one thing to survive a brief plunge in the polls, to rocket down to the small single digits, because you're a low spot. it's another thing to become a permanent part of this distant third tier of candidates that regularly polls at 2% or less. these irrelevant rounding candidates that are undeniably ignorable. if you want to be seen and treated as a viable presidential

contender, it is one thing to visit that tier occasionally. when you start to live there, it's over for you. for those candidates, though, who are being just roundly and now consistently rejected by republican voters this year, i will say one little happy thing. this new ppp poll has one ray of sunshine for the losers. maybe not a ray of sunshine. more like a reason to laugh mirthlessly into your beer. it is the same ppp poll, we have exclusively tonight, in addition to asking who these republican voters wanted to be the nominee for president, it asked republican voters some of their other views and i can't help but think this has to be a comfort to some of the people who believed the hype, right, who

believed their own press. some of the people who really thought they would be real contenders for the presidency but can't get any traction with real republican voters. i have to think that the answers to these polling questions tonight have got to be a comfort to guys like chris christie, guys like bobby jindal, guys like rick perry, people who just can't get anywhere. this question was asked of all the voters in the ppp poll. quote, do you think barack obama is a christian or a muslim or are you not sure? 14% of republican voters say president obama is a christian. 14%. the percentage of republican voters who say he's a muslim, 54%. and the percentage of republican voters who say they aren't sure whether or not president obama is a christian, that is 32%. president obama is, in fact, a christian, but 86% of the republican electorate either doesn't believe that or they're not sure. similarly this was question 28 in the new poll. dear republican voters, do you

think barack obama, president of the united states, was born in the united states? the proportion of republican voters who say, yes, president obama was born in the u.s. is 29%. the proportion who say, no, he wasn't born in the united states is 44%. and another 26% aren't sure. in fact, president obama was born in the united states. do i have to say it. but fully 70% of the republican electorate doesn't believe that or they say they don't know. only 29% of republican voters think president obama is actually president. because if he was secretly foreign, he couldn't be, right? 29% of republicans think president obama was born in the u.s. 29%. ppp then asked the world's most perfect follow-up question, the same voters, 29% -- only 29% of you believe president obama was born in the united states. do you guys think ted cruz was born in the united states?

even though only 29% of americans think that president obama was born in the u.s., 40% of them think that ted cruz was. ted cruz was not born in the united states. he was born in canada. but more republicans think that he was born in the u.s. than think that of our own president. by a big double digit margin. so, you know, you're bobby jindal, you're looking at these numbers, you're chris christie, poor rick perry, you're looking at these numbers. you cannot get a vote or a poll number out of the republican electorate to save your political life. republican voters just cannot stand you and they're not budging. i have to think that for those candidates it has to be some small comfort that republican voters also have no freaking idea what they're talking about. joining us now is tom jensen, director of public policy polling. thank you for being here, for giving us access to this new national poll.

>> it's great to be with you, rachel. >> i have to ask you, i know that the top line here is the republican presidential results. i have to ask you if you were surprised by the birther numbers among the republican electorate, that so few of them believe president obama was born in the u.s. >> i would be surprised if it hadn't been what we've been finding in the polling for the last six years, and it's consistent with what we found over time. i think what this poll is really illuminate something who donald trump supporters are. more than 60% of donald trump supporters believe barack obama is a muslim. more than 60% of them want to deport children. and i think that these are attitudes that republican voters and the country have had a long time, but they're kind of things you weren't allowed to talk about in public. and now you have the republican front-runner talking about all of these things in public and not apologizing for it one little bit. it's not surprising that these kinds of voters are really gravitating towards mr. trump.

>> are you finding in terms of the minority of republicans who believe president obama was born in the united states, who believe president obama is a christian, who don't want to deport children, are you finding that republicans who have more centrist views or more rational views on these things, are you finding they're gravitating toward any particular candidate in the republican field, or are they such a small number that their influence doesn't show up? >> well, here is what we found. there's only three republican candidates who supporters think barack obama was born in the united states and that he's a christian. those were jeb bush, john kasich and chris christie. obviously having the support of those kind of people is only good enough to get chris christie to 1%. john kasich at least has a little bit of momentum. what i think is really interesting is jeb bush. he is in third place at 9%. but when you look at his favorability numbers, overall more republican voters nationally have a negative opinion of jeb bush than a positive one. what's really driving down those

numbers is when you look at very conservative voters, they have quite an unfavorable opinion of jeb bush. i think the lesson you take from that with a republican electorate this extreme, even when you're not that moderate -- i mean, you're the brother of one of the most conservative presidents in the history of the country -- that's still not enough to please this dominant right wing of the republican party. >> the other thing that is, i think, striking here in these numbers is the combined performance of the three high-profile candidates who have no political experience whatsoever, donald trump, ben carson and carly fiorina placing first, second and fourth in your poll. combining that with the monmouth poll that has ben carson and donald trump tied in iowa, has me wondering about the particularities. are you finding any distinguishable differences between a donald trump and ben carson supporter? >> no. ben carson is tapping into the same sort of conservative

outrage that donald trump is. what's interesting about carson's numbers is we're actually now consistently finding him to be the most broadly popular candidate in the republican field even though donald trump had the most people who said he was their first choice on this poll, carson had the highest favorability rating. and when you look at trump supporters, they say carson is their second choice. if at some point trump does implode as he's long been expected to but hasn't yet, carson may be a beneficiary. >> tom jensen, director of public policy polling. thanks for being here. thanks for sharing this new national poll. it's great to break this news. >> thank you so much, rachel. >> the top line here will be who is at the top of the polls. donald trump at 29% in the new ppp national poll. second place the only other candidate with double digits in the national poll is ben carson at 15%. everybody else is in single digits. but as far as i'm concerned the big news here is what's happening at the very bottom of the republican race for president.

at 2% and tied with rick santorum, new jersey governor chris christie. and at 1%, tied with rick perry and jim gilmore, is kentucky senator rand paul. the beltway keeps saying is the most intriguing man in politics. 1% and tied with jim gilmore. that is intriguing. stay with us. i'm caridee. i've had moderate to severe plaque psoriasis most of my life. but that hasn't stopped me from modeling. my doctor told me about stelara® it helps keep my skin clearer. with only 4 doses a year after 2 starter doses... ...stelara® helps me be in season. stelara® may lower your ability to fight infections and increase your risk of infections. some serious infections require hospitalization. before starting stelara® your doctor should test for tuberculosis. stelara® may increase your risk of cancer. always tell your doctor if you have any sign of infection, have had cancer, or if you develop any new skin growths. do not take stelara® if you are allergic to stelara® or any of its ingredients. alert your doctor of new or worsening problems

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we have an expose coming up about the future. it turns out i can tell you tonight what your angry great uncle who watches fox news all day is going to be angry about tomorrow. i can tell you tonight what he is going to be sending you a misspelled, all capital letters e-mail about this time tomorrow. what your uncle timmy is going to be very mad about tomorrow. i will explain tonight coming up.

hey, so just a few minutes ago more than 7,000 pages of hillary clinton's e-mails were released by the state department of this is the largest batch of secretary clinton's e-mails to be made public so far. though the e-mails were just released within the last few minutes we have one headline getting some attention and that is, as you see here, of the 7,000 e-mails, about 150 of them have been partially or entirely censored because the state department says they contain classified information. that headline comes with a big caveat which is the information was not marked classified at the time the information was sent several years ago. so these e-mails are being

treated as confidential now but were not at the time secretary clinton sent or received them on her private e-mail account. the reason these documents are attracting so much attention is they were housed on a private server mrs. clinton used as secretary of state late last year. she gave the state department tens of thousands of e-mails from that server that she said were not -- that she said were work related. this past may a judge ordered that those e-mails should be released on a rolling monthly basis. so what that means is once a month there's a big news dump of these documents, thousands of them every month now, and we as journalists, scramble to figure out what they are and to read what's in them. that is what the staff of this show is doing literally right now. the documents came out at 9:00 p.m. eastern. this is one of our producers, jen, printing out and going through the 7,000 e-mails as they came out. if you need an idea just how big

that heap of e-mails would be if we printed them all out, well then, voila, that right there is roughly 7,000 pages worth of messages. it is a stack big enough that our big, strong, manly producer nick still needs a hand truck to wheel them in. we tried to have him pick them up but nick toppled over. we could have unwrapped the paper to make it look pretty but it was so dauntingly wasteful to do that that we decided not to. thank you, nick. with today's release we have about a quarter of secretary clinton's work e-mails that have been gone through and cleared for public release. today 7,000 pages come on top of the other 6,000 or so that have already been made public since may. out of those e-mails, there has been no news of any significant import. and it may be that there's incredibly important and significant news buried in the new 7,000 pages that just came out tonight but it will take us a while to figure that out.

and if past is any prologue, what this is going to amount to is us feeling really guilty and wanting to plant a tree in your name but that will pretty much be it. for my frequent heartburn. because it gives me... zero heartburn! prilosec otc. the number 1 doctor-recommended frequent heartburn medicine for 9 straight years. one pill each morning. 24 hours. zero heartburn.

sometimes when you're doing a live tv program on the tv machine, mistakes can happen. like, for example, let's say you mean to be talking about pennsylvania congressman pat meehan but in looking up file photos you accidentally show a picture of pennsylvania

congressman mike kelly. you can see how that mistake might happen, right? for the record congressman meehan is on the left. congressman kelly is on the right. that's a hard one. but, you know, we hate making mistakes. it's embarrassing. each individual mistake is avoidable in itself even if you know it's impossible to get everything right all the time. ultimately if you do this sort of thing long enough you will screw up. say you're sorry, explain what was wrong, and correcting it. sometimes you make a mistake, you make a visual mistake on television that is so wrong, it is hard to even know how to start to correct it. with this many people in the running, honestly right now no one knows who to poll on. should they be polling on carly fiorina? on donald trump? should they be polling on -- what was that? that was hilarious. having a hard time keeping track

of all the republican candidates? let me sprinkle in a little kanye west to keep you on your toes. i did that on live tv. i was expecting to see jim gilmore and carly fiorina and donald trump and there's kanye west on the screen of all people. why did we even have a picture of kanye west in the system? do we have a code for that? that is by far my favorite visual mistake i have ever made on the show. and of course it turns out that was not a mistake at all. it turns out it was just i was very mistakenly ahead of my time. stay with us. i hate cleaning the gutters. have you touched the stuff? it's evil.

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if you happened to be near a tv or computer or a phone or radio or fax machine or telegraph machine, if you were near anything that beeps, whirs or whistles, chances are you could not escape hearing something about this. >> in the small box that we are as the entertainers of the evening -- >> i'm not no politician, bro. i still don't understand award shows. you all might be thinking right now i wonder did he smoke something before he came out

here? the answer is, yes, i knocked the edge off. i'm confident. i believe in myself because it ain't about me. it's about ideas, bro'. new ideas. people with ideas. and, yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, i have decided in 2020 to run for president. >> we do not usually cover musicians and their awards show speeches especially when they admit to having taken the edge off before giving that speech, we do not usually cover kanye west unless i mistakenly show a picture of him, which is a thing that happened live on the show. i was expecting to be showing carly fiorina, jim gilmore and up popped a picture of kanye west and kim kardashian. i almost died.

that was so random. at that speech at the awards show, mr. kanye west's announcement of his run for presidency in 2020 momentarily took over the world. twitter exploded. the world en masse trying to make sense what the heck he was talking about and for better or worse, i think probably for better, this is what the whole western world was talking about last night. the whole western world minus these guys. these are some of the members of ohio's congressional delegation. these guys were all over social media last night outraged. just outraged about president william mckinley, our country's 25th president. the members of the ohio congressional delegation including the top republican in the house, john boehner, what they wanted to talk about was how terrible it was, what a tragedy it is that the obama administration has decided to let the name of the tallest

mountain in north america revert to its originative alaskan name denali. it was only in the late 1800s when a random gold prospector from new hampshire decided to declare a new name for denali in honor of the news he had just heard that william mckinley won the republican nomination for president. william mckinley had nothing to do with that prospector or with that mountain. he never set foot on denali. never set foot in alaska. he was from ohio. even though alaska proudly speaking has long wanted to change the name back, and they even did officially at the state level in the 1970s, the federal name mt. mckinley stuck mostly because ohio republicans insisted that it not be changed for years now. so now that president obama has gone ahead and changed it, ohio republican and house speaker john boehner says he is deeply disappointed president obama has decided to take away william mckinley's random tribute and restore the name that have mountain to denali.

the national park service is so excited they already printed new maps with the new name and everything. again, william mckinley never set foot on the mountain. never saw alaska. the first to travel to alaska was warren harding. he went in 1923. we do not have video of his 1923 trip for obvious reasons. we do know, though, when he was there, the u.s. navy ship on which he was traveling, shot mortar rounds into glaciers while they were up there so the president could see the glaciers blow up for fun. why not? they'll always be there, right? shoot that glacier. well, president obama is in alaska today. this is the first day of his three-day trip to the state. he has not yet asked the navy to blow up glaciers for his amusement. president obama spoke in anchorage on the topic of climate change.

in the speech tonight he said definitively he recognizes america's role in having created this problem. >> the fact is that climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it. that, ladies and gentlemen, must change. we're not acting fast enough. i've come here today as the leader of the world's largest economy and its second largest emitter to say that the united states recognizes our role in creating this problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it. and i believe we can solve it. >> the world's largest economy and the world's second largest emitter. president obama speaking tonight in anchorage on day one of a three day trip set to highlight

his commitment to fighting climate change. his environmental legacy will include a lot of different efforts to combat climate change and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. that legacy will include his decision weeks ago to give shell oil the go and ahead. something that nobody knows who to you clean up if it goes wrong and if it goes right, it's a whole new world of fossil fuels that wouldn't otherwise be burned that are going to be burned for fuel. and what's that he said about emitters? the race to succeed president obama is in full swing and donald trump is swallowing it up. kanye west making his 2020 presidential announcement last night. there's a lot of news every day about who will replace this president, but this president is very much still president and he is trying to make a forceful case now with this trip that nobody can write the history of his environmental records yet. he's making the case when it is written it should be seen as

more than just drill, baby, drill, with a kinder, gentler attitude about it.

we do nothing to keep glaciers from melting faster and oceans from rising faster and storms from growing stronger. we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair. submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing. any leader willing to take a gamble on a future like that? any so-called leader who does not take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke is not fit to lead. >> joining us now from anchorage, alaska, nbc news senior white house correspondent chris jansing following the president on his trip to alaska. you're in a beautiful spot up there, chris. it's great to see you there. thanks for being with us tonight. >> reporter: my pleasure. >> the white house on the

occasion of this trip, this isn't the most important thing about the president being there, but they unveiled this name change, the name unchanging of denali/mt. mckinley. is that actually going to be the big change, the big news announced on this trip or are we expecting other changes, other policies to be announced by the president? >> reporter: you always get right to the heart of it, don't you? look, this announcement before the president got here did send an important message. it sent an important message to the natives here, and i've spoken to some of the indigenous people. i spoke to a tribal leader today. this matters to them deeply. we can say it's not important but to them this is something they have been fighting for for decades. to them it really speaks to american imperialism. i don't want to be dismissive of that, but those same people have also been concerned for economic reasons that the president was going to come here and announce

sweeping changes, that there would be executive orders that would hurt their ability to revive this economy, an economy which is largely built on oil, fossil fuel, two-thirds of the budget in this state is derived from oil. and so you have almost this classic push and pull between environmental protection and economic development, and that's a very fine line the president is walking here, rachel. >> on that point about those fears and what the president is basically trying to line up in terms of his environmental legacy, i mean, it is hard to square the president talking about climate change in these very aggressive terms, talking about leadership, about the climate, it's hard to square that with the green light he gave to drill the arctic for oil up there giving shell that green light despite their, frankly, really bad safety record in terms of trying to do this up there. does the white house think that is something people should overlook when it comes to the president's legacy on climate

change, or are they making a case for it not being as bad as it seems? >> reporter: they're making a case. and i have to say that some of the environmental leaders and groups i talked to out and out called him a hypocrite for deciding to go ahead with the shell lease which started in the bush administration, to be fair. then to come here and say that this is the defining issue of our time, that climate change and what we do about it is going to determine the future of this century, a defining moment for this century, what happens in paris. here is what the president says about this. he said, look, we are trying to go to more sustainable fuels but we're not there yet. in the meantime the reality is we have to have an energy driven economy and the thing that they have done with these oil leases is they have made the protections stronger than any leases that have ever been seen before. having said that, it's hard to

find a major environmentalist or major environmental group who doesn't look at the president's statement and he felt so strongly about it. he knew the push back was so great. he made a video that he put online before he came here that those groups aren't terribly disappointed and are watching closely to what happens next. >> because you're traveling with the president, i do have to ask you about another topic that's not directly about his alaska trip but a big ripple of news today when the president of columbia university in new york city said at a freshman convocation that he looked forward to president obama being back at his alma mater, back at columbia university, once he leaves office in 2017. the president's office at columbia has since sort of clarified, walked that back. do you have any sense what that was about? is the white house confirming any of that? >> reporter: the white house is not confirming any of that. the white house is saying the

president is -- has not made any decision about his post presidential life. the truth of the matter is that the president's alma mater desperately wanted his presidential library. they didn't get it, as you know. it's going to chicago. i think the presumption has always been that there will be this tie between columbia and its most famous alum. so i don't think it would be surprising to see that he had some things going on with columbia, starting in 2017. he's going to go there, do a full professorship and give up a public life? no. i think there's a little tease there, that a, helped do a little push maybe, but also it doesn't help when you're standing in front of all these incoming freshman and parents and saying, oh, i know you're paying a lot of money for tuition, but guess who's going to be here during the first four or five years you're going to be here. >> telling them when

something amazing's going to happen. it's always great to see you, chris, thanks for being with us. and you, chris joining us from anchorage, alaska. such a beautiful place. i was up in anchorage to cover the crazy lisa murkowski senate campaign. i came back not having learned a lot about the campaign but really wanting to spend more time in alaska. they get stains like you wouldn't believe. this tide ultra stain release and zap!cap helps me get out pretty much any stain. can i help? aww helps remove 99% of everyday stains tide, america's #1 detergent

we here at the rachel maddow show don't fear the future. we see the future and we raise you one e-mail from your crazy uncle who watches fox news all days. and even though he hasn't finished typing that message with that one angry finger, we are ready to share that e-mail with you. magically, stay right there.

it took joel silverman years to become a master dog trainer. but only a few commands to

master depositing checks at if you're going to trick someone, one piece of advice, do not send them your fake alias in an e-mail under the heading, hey, my falsified information is -- that's just not a good way to trick someone, don't blow your own cover. but that e-mail was sent to a hillary clinton volunteer. asking her if she could bring some things to the event. she attached, hey, my falsified information is this. see that on the right hand of the screen there? the clinton campaign responded by asking for more details, more names, addresses and e-mails. in response, that woman sent that same e mail again that she had called, my falsified info. so the clinton campaign said they thought something was going on. they notified their offices that at least two women had been posing as supporters, but something was fishy about them. they didn't know their exact motivations, but it seemed like maybe this was one of those conservative fake sting videos where they go after liberals and democrats and try to trap them into saying something that looks terribly incriminating and awful and it's taken out of context and played on fox news channel

for months on end. even if it wasn't incriminating in the first place. the group who did these things, they wouldn't confirm if they were mounting one of their hidden video entrapment things against the clinton campaign, but the clinton campaign was pretty sure they were. they released the sketchy e-mails to buzz feed.com. they released photos of the fake volunteers. they told "time", magazine that the women were engaged in several efforts to entrap clinton supporters. clinton campaign did all of that first before their conservative activist group would admit what they had been doing. but now, sure enough here it comes. late last week, this conservative group released a teaser video showing a clinton campaign staffer encouraging a volunteer who are asking people to register to vote who they are supporting for president.

they are accusing them as being criminals and outlaws. even the field staffer the are willing to admit to the press that what's in that video is, quote, standard operating procedure across field campaigns. that won't stop, say, our friends at the fox news channel and conservative media more broadly from going wild about this anyway, probably if the real press probably won't touch this one. but now the conservative group who did the first video, they say more is coming. tomorrow morning at 10:00, they will release a new video -- hillary caught red handed. and maybe, maybe they caught her red-handed. giving the history of this particular group, probably nobody was caught red-handed. but if you are looking to see what they're going to go crazy about, you can set your clock for 10:00. your uncle who watches fox news

all day is due to send you an all capitals e-mail about this one in three, two, one -- that details surrounding the suspected killer in the death of texas officer. president obama warns act now. street's wild ride i may not be a thing of the past. all that and much more. "first look" starts right now. good morning everybody. the state department