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tv   The Rachel Maddow Show  MSNBC  January 23, 2017 6:00pm-7:01pm PST

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feminist without being an anti-racist and vice versa. >> all right. those images we saw were amazing. it is really an amazing thing that happened from just a news -- >> i want to say i'm a supporter. i was not an organizer. linda -- >> right, very clear about who is organizers are. that is all for this evening. the rachel maddow shows starts now. good evening. >> thanks, my friend. thanks to you at hope for joining us. happy monday. in 2008 at anderson air force base in g juan there was a military training flight that went bad and we have footage of it. it is a strange looking plane. it is a b-2 stealth bomber. you see it goes down the runway and takes off and all is -- all is well with that initial plane, that initial takeoff. that is what it is supposed to look like. but then immediately thereafter there's a second b-2 bomber that
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will be taking part in the same training exercise. the second follows, makes its way down the runway, starts off fine. is as soon as it is airborne you can tell, even if you don't know anything about airplanes, you can tell having seen the previous plane take off normally with the second one the takeoff trajectory seems wrong. the plane pulls up at what is clearly a wrong angle. the pilot tries to correct but the plane starts to come back down and boom, ultimately the plane drags its wing and you see it explode. this was a b-2 bomber. a b-2 has a crew of just two people. these are big planes but they just have two crew members. incredibly in the case of this crash, this fire ball, both of the crew members on board that b-2 survived. when the the plane started to crash, when its wing went down as it was trying to take off, the two crew members of that plane were able to eject out of the plane. thankfully they got out. they survived. thankfully also, the air force says there were no live bombs on
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board that b-2 bomber when it crashed. that of course could have been catastrophic given the fire ball, the impact you saw there. so that crash of that b-2 bomber, that was a big deal. for one thing, that crash was a billion dollar crash. billion with a b. each one of these planes costs well over $1 billion. think about that for a second. i mean just for perspective, you've heard how they're going to cut the entire budget for the national endowment for the arts, got to slim down, can't afford it anymore. one of these planes is ten times the annual budget of the national endowment for the arts, one plane. in part because of that enormous cost, there are n many of these planes. our entire national fleet of them consists of 21 planes, and then that one crashed in 2008 and that means we're down to 20 of them in total in the whole
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country. no other country on earth has anything like this. this is not an all-purpose vehicle. this is a very unusual plane. it has very unusual capabilities and capacities. for one thing, this plane can carry a huge payload in terms of its munitions. the plane itself -- it has this unusual bat wing design. we think of it like a sleek arrowhead in the sky but, a, it is huge and, b, it can carry a huge payload of bombs. let's say you want to drop a 500 pound bomb on this earth somewhere, this plane can hold 80 of them, 8500 pound bombs. it has a 40,000 pound payload capacity for bombs. it can also fly really high, and it can fly really, really fa. it has a huge range. this thing can fly 6,000 miles on one tank of gas, and it can be refuelled in the air. of course, the reason it looks so unusual is that it's got
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stealth technology who help it evade radar. you put all of those things together and you can kind of reverse engineer the whole idea for this plane in the first place. this plane was designed to be a cold war, deep penetration nuclear bomber. the idea for this plane, the reason they spent so many billions of dollars developing this plane is that it could drop nuclear bombs really far inside russia. the idea was it could beat radar for at least a while before it was detected. it could be deep inside soviet airspace where it could drop nuclear bombs on the interior of the soviet union. that's why they made this plane. and as exciting as that might sound for an end-of-the-world nuclear doomsday mission, missions like that don't come up very often in real life. the b-2 bomber was obviously never used for a mission like that in real life. i mean the b-2 bomber does have
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these fantastic, mind bending capabilities, but the missions it was designed for don't really occur in nature. they don't occur in modern warfare. so the b-2 doesn't get used very much in modern warfare. in fact, believe it or not, the b-2 bomber has been used in actual combat a total of five times. five times. you can list them on one hand. in 1999 they uses the b-2 to bomb serbian targets in the war in bosnia. right after 9/11 they used them at the start of the war in afghanistan. then they used them at the start of the iraq war. they used them to take out the parked planes of the libyan air force when gadhafi was over thrown in 2011. that's it. that's the exhaustive list of this plane used in combat. that's four of the five times one of these billion dollar planes has been used in combat.
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the fifth time this plane has ever been used in combat was last week. this is whiteman air force base in missouri. if you look at it on the map, it is like geography ad library. whiteman is just south of number noster, just north of tight wad, just east of turtle springs and just west of dresden. all of those places existed, and whiteman air force base is right in the middle of them. whiteman, it is the home of our b-2 bombers. on wednesday of last week, two of our b-2 bombers -- remember, we only have 20 in total, only 20 exist, but two of them last week, the spirit of pennsylvania and the spirit of georgia -- they're all named after states -- two b-2 bombers took off from whiteman air force base in missouri with full pay loads.
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40,000 pounds of 500-pound bombs, and those two planes flew all the way across the world from missouri to libya. and when they got to libya, between them those two planes dropped about 100 500-pound bombs on two isis camps in the desert. now, the city of sirte in libya was controlled by isis until recently. libyan ground forces retook the city last month. the u.s. military says isis fighters who escaped the ground offensive that retook the city, the isis fighters flew to the two camps in the desert. the u.s. african command put in a request to strike them, and president obama approved the mission. in a globe-circling feat, four americans took off from missouri, they flew 34 hours round trip. they had 15 separate inflight
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refuellings and they completed that mission. defense secretary ash carter announced it at the pentagon once the the bombers and the pilots were back home safe on thursday. >> first in libya, our africa command conducted air strikes against two isil camps south of sirte. initial estimates indicate the air strikes killed more than 80 isil fighters, many of whom converged there after fleeing from local partner forces who had cleared sirte last month with our help. >> with our help. so u.s. military force helped clear isis out of the city of sirte in libya, and when the u.s. military was convinced that isis fighters who escaped that had regrouped in the desert, u.s. military pilots flew this remarkable mission from all the way around the world. it cost $130,000 an hour to fly one of these planes.
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these billion dollar planes. and they're almost never used in real, live fire military missions, but the military deci decided in this case the b-2 stealth bomber was the best plane for the job, and the mission was considered to be a success. honestly, i have no idea why they picked these very unusual, very expensive planes to fly this particular mission from so far away, but it is hard not to note the incidental effect that former president barack obama left office as president of the united states with this as one of his last acts, with this demonstration to any country or any u.s. adversary anywhere in the world that there are sucht pilots and planes that can start the day just north of tight wad, missouri and end up at your house anywhere on earth if need be that same day. so, again, this happened on wednesday. it was announced by the pentagon on thursday. you know, it was a busy time.
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a lot going on at the end of the week last week in terms of the last days of the obama administration, preparations for na inauguration of the new president, so this remarkable military offensive didn't get that much attention. military.com wrote, this lead about the mission, quote, the rarely used b-2 stealth bomber carried out massive strikes against two isis camps in libya on wednesday in what was almost certainly the last combat mission specifically authorized by president barack obama. this is from military.com. published that on thursday, the last full day of the obama administration. but it turns out that b-2 stealth bomber run around the world and into libya, that might not have been the last combat mission ordered by president obama because those b-2s flew on wednesday. the next day on thursday, u.s. planes were flying a major series of strikes in syria.
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again, targeting isis. in this case targeting al qaeda. in this case they used a b-52 bomber and drones and the u.s. says it struck a long-standing militant training camp west of aleppo near the turkish border. so right up until the moment he left office on wednesday with those b-2 strikes, on thursday in syria with the b-52, president obama up until the moment he left office he was ordering aggressive u.s. military strikes against al qaeda and isis targets in countries like libya and syria. and there are american pilots who are carrying out these strikes, but there are also ground forces, u.s. ground forces in all of these places. that's part of what makes these strikes possible. in iraq, in afghanistan, in libya, in syria. the weekend before last u.s. special operations troops in syria apparently did one of these super daring helicopter
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raise deep inside isis-held territory in syria. it was u.s. special operations in multiple choppers. they went in deep into isis controlled territory in syria. they were going after one specific isis commander. they spent 90 minutes on the ground. they apparently got their target and they got back out. this is, again, u.s. special forces. u.s. troops. there on the ground in considerable numbers, not just in afghanistan and iraq but in libya, in syria, and in almost all cases they are working with local forces against isis and al qaeda and the taliban. that is -- you know, that's worth knowing on its own terms. we as a country are quietly fighting this war without paying too much attention to it, and that itself is worth fixing. but it is also worth knowing that u.s. forces are on the ground fighting, putting themselves in danger in all of these places right now. it is worth knowing that right now, because right now there is a new problem for those american soldiers. there's a new problem for
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americans who are serving in these dangerous places. especially where they are partnering with friendly, local troops for the mutual fight against isis and al qaeda. they have a new problem, and the the new problem is that this is now on television. >> the old expression to the victor belong the spoils. you remember i always used to say keep the oil. i wasn't a fan of iraq, i don't want to go into iraq. but i will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. i always said in addition to that, keep the oil. now, i said it for economic reasons. but if you think about it, mike, if we kept the oil you probably wouldn't have isis because that's where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil. but okay. maybe you'll have another chance. but the fact is we should have kept the oil. >> maybe you will have another chance. it is worth being really specific about this. because it is one thing to campaign for president by saying
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you wish the u.s. military wrote have rooted, would have, you know, pillaged, would have stolen resources from a country that we were occupying. it is one thing to run for office saying you wish that u.s. forces had committed, incidentally, that war crime and pillaged the countries we became responsible for as an occupying force once we toppled their government. it is one thing to say it as a candidate. but once you are saying that as the commander in chief of the u.s. military, once you are saying as commander in chief that the u.s. military should steal the oil from countries where our military is operating and that we might have a chance again to do that in the future, think about what that means for u.s. troops who are on the ground right now. working with local forces in all of these countries, where we haven't stolen the oil, where we never said before that we were going to steal the oil, where there were lots of local suspicions that we might and we had to defeat those local
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suspicions. and, presumably, those local forces would feel very strongly about us not stealing the oil. think about what that means for u.s. forces serving in those countries abroad right now. >> a statement that the president made on saturday, can you -- i want to clarify here. can you unequivocally state this administration will not send more troops into iraq to, as the president has put it, take the oil? >> i'm not going to talk about what we may or may not do. i think the president has been very clear he doesn't telegraph forward what taking options off the table. that's not a good negotiating skill. that's not how he works. those are reasons he's been successful at negotiating, because he does it in a way that doesn't telegraph to people what he's going to take on or off the table. >> whether or not you are going to talk about what we may or may not do, the fact that that is on the table makes this actually not a hypothetical scenario anymore because that's policy. that's now policy. the white house, president of the united states has just communicated to the american people and to the world that u.s. troops in oil-producing
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regions around the world might be there to take the oil from these countries. that very well could be why they're there. the u.s. reserves the right to do that. is a great reporter, long-time middle east correspondent, now for ""buzzfeed"." after the president made his take the oil remarks this weekend at the cia, borzu in iraq interviewed some militia fighters and iraqi security officials who right now are working with u.s. troops on the ground in iraq in the fight against isis where, again, u.s. forces are partnered with iraqi forces to fight against isis. i mean u.s. forces spent part of last week blowing up dozens of boats on the tigris river outside of mosul to stop isis fighters from using those boats to get away from mosul as iraqi ground troops continued to clear isis fighters out of mosul. there are 5,000 u.s. troops in iraq who are engaged in the
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fight alongside iraqi forces. except now the new president of the united states says the reason u.s. troops might be there is to get our hands on iraq's oil. borzu agahi talks to iraqi fighters to get reaction from this, and they tell him exactly what you think they would say, they say what you or i would say if we found out a foreign country here to help us was actually here to steal america's natural resources. quote, he cannot do it, he cannot succeed, of course i would fight the americans if they came for the oil. quote, there's no way trump could take the oil unless he launched a new military front, and then it would be a new world war. says these folks right now fighting with u.s. troops. the senate foreign relations committee tonight approved the ceo of exxon to be america's new secretary of state.
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it was a pure party line vote. senator marco rubio, florida, soaked up a bunch of good press about his hypothetical courage and his hypothetical non-partisan patriotism when he said that he might vote against the exxon ceo to be secretary of state because he had real concerns. but, of course, naturally marco rubio cast a yes vote for the exxon ceo. the vote was a party line vote, and the exxon ceo, rex tillerson, now has no barrier to being approved for that position. his vote -- his nomination will pass on the floor as well. simply putting an oil company ceo in charge of american foreign policy would be enough to make this a problem, right? it would be enough to ignite suspicions and re-crim nations worldwide maybe american troops weren't there to help, that maybe american foreign policy is designed to steal oil from other countries, that the american military is being used as
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essentially a capitalist tool, as a looting tool, as a pillaging tool to steal the natural resources from other countries. having an oil company ceo in charge of our foreign policy is enough to create those worries. you're not hitting at it anymore. when the president says, yes, that's our policy and the white house spokesman backs it up, it was dangerous to u.s. interest when it was a hypothetical, when it was a conspiracy theory, but now it is u.s. policy. and the people who are going to face the threat from it are american troops who are already in harm's way in libya, in iraq, in syria. gordon troebridge was deputy press secretary last week. today he is no longer is. today he said this, white house spokesman needed to clearly say u.s. is not going the take
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iraq's oil. every moment that statement stands puts our troops at greater risk. if you are a military family, if you have friends in the military, if you know somebody who is deployed or is deploying, we're going to take your oil, that's american policy now, we're going to take your oil, that has just shifted the ground underneath your boot. our military takes an incredible risk, but we support our troops and respect their sacrifice and worry about the dangers they face. we do not want them to face unnecessary danger, and we rarely have to worry that the danger that they face emanates from our own government. but until they fix this, until the new administration fixes this, they have created a daily,
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clear and present big new danger for every american who is spevispe serving in an oil-producing country abroad, as if their mission wasn't dangerous enough already. i'll be right back. liberty mutual stood with me when i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. i just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. my insurance company definitely doesn't have that...
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call today. comcast business. built for business. breaking news we are following this evening, the senate this hour confirmed mike pompeo to be the next director of the cia. under the new president, director pompeo represented kansas's fourth congressional district. he was confirmed by a vote of 66-32. interesting thing about the numbers, in the 32 no votes includes -- excuse me, in the 66 yes votes, that number includes 15 democrats who voted yes on his nomination. of the 32 no votes, that number includes one republican who voted no. the one republican who voted against the pompeo nomination
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was kentucky senator rand paul. after the confirmation vote this evening, mike pompeo moments ago was sworn into his new job by vice president mike pence. mike pompeo becomes the third of the president's new nominees to be confirmed. after general mattis was confirmed at defense and general kelly was confirmed at homeland security. more ahead, stay with us.
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ooh! ufo! false alarm, eyelash! so with a lot of things, one of the things i think it inarguably was was weird and rambling and super inappropriate for the setting in which he spoke. >> now i know a lot about west point, and it took me one year -- ip'm a person that strongly believes in academics. every time i say i had an uncle that was a great professor at mit for 35 years that did a fantastic job in so many different ways academically, he was an academic genius, and then they say, is donald trump an intellectual?
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trust me, aim lii'm like a smar person. i feel like i'm 35, 39. somebody said, are you young? i said, i think i'm young, and i had been on the cover like 14 or 15 times. i think we have the all-time record in the history of "time" magazine. if tom brady is on the cover, it is one time because he won the super bowl or something, right? i've been on 15 times this year. i don't think that's a record, mike, that can ever be broken. do you agree with that? what do you think? i am coming back. we will have to get you a larger room. we may have to get you a larger room. [ applause ] >> you know? >> and maybe, maybe it will be built by somebody that knows how to build and we won't have columns. do you understand that? [ cheers and applause ] >> we get rid of the columns. but, no, i just wanted to really say that i love you.
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>> that's the way the president talks now. even when he's standing in front of a memorial wall carved with the names of cia officers who have died in service to their country. he also at that setting said for the first time as president that sucht poli u.s. policy in the middle east should be to take oil from other countries. >> we should have kept the oil, but okay. maybe you'll have another chance. but the fact is we should have kept the oil. >> what does he mean by maybe you'll have another chance? and if the commander in chief pro claims it is now u.s. policy to take the oil from oil-producing country, what does it mean for the thousands of u.s. troops now deployed in middle eastern countries that produce oil? and i have no interest in the united states getting our mitts
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on it. joining us is national security correspondent for the "new york times" mark mazetti. thanks for being with us. >> thanks for having me on. >> what was your -- blaudlroadl what was your impression of the president's appearance and speech at the cia? >> well, bizarre is one way to put it. it went in all sorts of different directions. it was meant to be an attempt to sort of heal the wounds that had been accumulating over the last few weeks between the president and the intelligence community. he could have easily done it with a private meeting with -- at cia headquarters. i mean news travels fast there. if you wanted to convey a message of support you could have done it privately without cameras. and, certainly, the beginning of the speech was, you know, to convey that message. then as we saw and as you pointed out, it went off in all sorts of different directions. it was sort of one-part
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political rally, one part campaign speech and then, you know, raised a number of different things including the oitangen tha he went off on. so, you know, i've certainly been hearing from a lot of people, current and former intelligence officials since the speech, and i think for the most part they were fairly just shocked at what they saw on saturday. >> we've had, including on this show, i had a conversation with senator chuck schumer, now the top democrat in the senate, in which he said half jokingly like, you don't want to get on the wrong side of these people, they have nine ways to sunday to get at you. there's a lot of hints about what it means politically to have a good or bad relationship with the intelligence community, that politicians, even high-ranking politicians like maybe even the president of the united states, need to be careful of their relationship with the intelligence community because they have so much unspoken power. they have so many ways to act we wouldn't necessarily know about from a layman's understanding. do you think that is hyperbole
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or do you think it is something that is real and something the administration is aware of? >> they would follow orders and be low to try to take direct opposition to the president's agenda. that being said, the cia is a political institution. it may be non-partisan, but it is political in the sense that it operates in the political ecosystem of washington, and it does have sometimes agendas that it does want to advance. and so it is also an organization that very, very deeply needs to have a good relationship with the president. they pride themselves on having a direct -- they report directly to the president. the president gives them orders directly. so the relationship between the cia and the white house through history has always been very important. so it was really striking, of course, in the weeks that preceded the inauguration to see then president-elect trump take so many direct shots at the intelligence agencies.
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but that's in the past. now we have to the see what happens, what the relationship is now that he is president. you know, you could certainly see relations getting better. you could certainly see the cia presenting president trump with some of the clan destin things that they to, and you can see president trump liking some of those things. but that's to be seen. the other question is, of course, the analysis that he gets from analysts. does he believe it? does he respect it? does he get his daily brief? that's where i think there could be more tension, just in the daily analysis not just on russia but other things, and whether there's sort of a relationship with the president and his intelligence analyst advisers. >> i think on the issue of saying we ought to take the oil and now declaring that that is u.s. policy and so therefore it is because he said it, it will be interesting to see how public that fight becomes if it does at all, there's pressure and push back from either the military or intelligence community on that as well. mark mazetti, correspondent for
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the "new york times." appreciate your time. thank you. >> thank you. >> this thing happened this weekend much perhaps you went to a march this weekend, perhaps you are now on the couch soaking your feet. what i can tell you though is that the marching is not over. we got a new sighting today, big surprise. that story is next. stay with us. wow. nice. strength and style. which one's your favorite? (laughter) come home with me! trade up to the silverado all star edition and get an average total value of eight thousand one hundred fifty dollars when you find your tag. find new roads at your local chevy dealer.
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but, look, these signs made it. this is the state capital in utah this afternoon. today. today thousands of people turned out in the snow and sleet for a march today on the first day of utah's legislative session. some of the signs at that utah march literally made it all the way back home to utah after they did a tour around d.c. on saturday. a bunch of women from utah went to drpt c. on saturday, marched there, and then decided they were not going to wait to take their next step back at home. signs are already made, we're headed home anyway, let's do it. they marched in d.c. on saturday, and then on monday morning they were marching at their own state capital for the first day of the legislative session in the pouring, pouring snow. did it themselves. presto. the women's marches across the country on saturday were freaking huge. record demonstrations in cities
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like new york, d.c. of course, chicago, l.a., atlanta, seattle. notably, no arrests that we heard of anywhere. it was the biggest single day of protest and demonstrations in the united states in years, maybe in decades. the crowds were huge. the crowds were loud. in new york it was fun to watch the crowds drown out reporters on the ground into well into the evening. and you might expect that in very big and very blue cities, but check this out. it wasn't just big, blue cities, this was jackson, mississippi on saturday. nearly 1,000 people in the streets of jackson, mississippi. same in little doylestown, pennsylvania. over 2,000 people about marched in doylestown, pennsylvania. in beautiful oklahoma city, 7,000 people turned out. in fair banks, alaska, red state alaska, almost 2,000 people turned out, in the blinding snow. and now today, today in salt
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lake city, one of the organizers told reporters, the big marches are amazing but we need specific special help here and one march wasn't enough. so there's a new movement in american politics and maybe it is the conglomeration of a bunch of movements that existed in other ways, maybe it is brand-new, maybe it is a combination of the two of the things. in the long run we don't know what it is going to look like, how it is going to be organized and what the effect will be, but it has been galvanized by donald trump being inaugurated. that movement is taking shape now. it turns out it started off way bigger than anybody expected. what is going to happen next? what's the impact going to be on american politics, on american culture, on what's possible in american news? all right. we've seen these marches over the weekend and then today in salt lake city. some of e national organizers of the women's marches told chris hayes last hour that those
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national organizers are convening themselves tomorrow to plan their next follow-up action after the women's marches. also tomorrow the people organizing using the indivisible guide, they have called their own day of action for tomorrow. as you know, the core idea behind the indivisible guide is to the stay focused on your own representatives and your own senators, to be essentially a constituent activist wherever you live for your own elected officials. so tomorrow's day of action will mean a lot of folks will go to the district offices of their u.s. senators and tell them what they think about the confirmation votes for the new cabinet members. you will see groups of two or three or 15 or one nice person and a dead plant. the idea is to show up, to just be there. so that's one thing to watch for as we try to get a handle on what this is. you will see more people sitting by their lawmaker's potted dead plant all day tomorrow making their point for democracy.
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we should also be watching to see what happens to established institutions that see themselves as defenders of the constitution and minority rights. right? those existing institutions, those existing movements are likely now to be getting a new influx of support and volunteers and money. whether it is a big organization like planned parenthood, which followed the women's march on saturday with a training session on sunday, that thousands of volunteers went to across the united states, you see that, or you see one local organizer trying to get back to her home state with her sign and megaphone in time to attend her own march in her own state after going to the national march two days before. this is happening at a lot of different levels, and you can feel it knitting together, but it did start off bigger than anybody thought it would. tonight we're going to hear from the head of one of the biggest players in this new fight, anthony romero of the aclu joins us next. coming up.
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welcome to washington, mr. president-elect. quote, see you in court. love the aclu. that was the aclu's message to the new president the day after the election. it is now three days into the trump presidency, and we are seeing the aclu already making good on that promise. joining us now is anthony romero, executive director of the american civil liberties union. mr. romero, thank you for joining us. nice to have you here tonight. >> hi, rachel. thrilled to be with you, of course. >> i was thinking of you this weekend watching the coverage of all of the marches around the country. i know you're in san francisco tonight. we saw huge marches in san francisco, los angeles. >> amazing. >> chicago. >> not just in blue states and big cities, but red states, everywhere. i wonder how it translates as far as you're concerned that the work that the aclu does. you have been around for a long time, how do things change for you in the new environment? >> look, it is our bread and
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butter. the freedom of speech and freedom of association, free of assembly is really a critical part of making sure we put the pressure on our government to do what we want it to do. that's why we've always defended the right of protesters and individuals who want to petition their government, and that's why it was so heart warming. i was in san francisco for a board meeting and we got to take a break and marched in the rain. it was just remarkable to see the outreach of support. at the same time we have to use the court .so f the court. so for us the two pinchers we will use during the trump administration will be the citizen power, the citizen mobilization and litigation, and to use the courts as a place to bring some of the basic questions about the unconstitutional policies of donald trump to our court. >> i know that -- >> that's why we filed our first action on day one. >> i was just going to ask you about it. you filed on day one this freedom of information act ask. >> day one. >> what are you requesting and will you get it? >> we are using a 50-year old
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statute, democracy's x-ray, a way to extract from the government information, documents, memoranda that the public needs to know, the press needs to know and the congress should discuss about the actions that are often hidden behind closed doors. so we used foia to request any and all documents, legal memoranda, advisories, communications on the various agencies on the conflicts of interest posed by president trump and his family businesses and his family's financial interest. the emoluments clause of the constitution, we think he might be in violation of it on day one. so we want a and all documents thatelate to those set of questions, and then that could lead to further litigation and further advocacy down the line. >> i was looking last week back at the first few days of the obama administration and the executive orders that he signed when he first became president. >> yeah. >> and i had hnot focused on it for a while, but he signed a
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number of orders right off the bat. >> right off the bat. >> basically toward government freedom of information act requests and toward openness, trying to establish that the federal government under president obama would be more open to requests like that. did the obama administration actually follow through on that promise, and could the trump administration clamp down on what they release in response to a request like yours? >> yeah. well, foia is a long-established process. it is 50 years we've had this law, and different presidents have played harder or softball on foia. president obama was pretty good, not great on some things. he fought us tooth and nail on some documents around drones. but what i think is important to underscore is we used foia even in the bush years, some of the most important litigation we did was foia litigation. we requested all of the documents relating to the torture, the authorization and use of torture and enhanced interrogation techniques, and we
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extracted 150,000 pages of u.s. government documents on the use of torture, given to us during the bush administration. foia officers are often civil servants. they're folks who are doing their jobs in the agencies, and when they get a foia request, many of them go through the process, try to figure out what they can release, how they redact it. and if we don't get the information we want, then we jump into court and we litigate over those documents that are not totally released. it is the beginning of a fight. what we want to demonstrate and what is important to us is the emoluments clause is part of the constitution. president trump put profits over the constitution on day one. when he didn't disgorge his business interest, when he didn't create a blind trust, when he pretended to be concerned about the emoluments clause and pretended to be concerned about the conflicts of interest, he disregarded the law and the constitution. we want any and all documents and we will follow that on, both
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in this context and other context, immigration and abortion rights, freedom of speech and civil rights. we're ready. we have to be. >> anthony romero, executive director of the aclu. nice to see you. thank you. >> always
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there's some concerning breaking news out of saint paul, minnesota, and it concerns that state's governor. governor dayton, democratic governor of the state was delivering his state of the state address there. he collapsed toward the end of his speech. the governor slured his words before appearing to faint and hit his head on the -- i will read this from the minneapolis star tribune. governor dayton slurred his word and appeared to faint monday night at the capital. those nearby, including lieutenant governor tina smith caught him as he lurched forward, struck his forehead on the left turn and sank toward the floor in the house chambers. legislators immediately adjourned the gathering. dayton appeared to be seated
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upright and aware shortly after the incident occurred and he was escorted out of the room. he is 69 years old, serving his second term. the governor's son said he was with his father and he is doing great. thanked everyone for their well wishes and words of concern. in terms of what happened since this, the governor was taken to a nearby hospital. apparently they will hold him overnight for observation, but this is governor mark dayton of minnesota. this just happened this evening. we will let you know more as we learn more. america's beverage companies have come together to bring you more ways to help reduce calories from sugar. with more great tasting beverages with less sugar or no sugar at all, smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and signs reminding everyone to think balance before choosing their beverages. we know you care about reducing the sugar in your family's diet, and we're working to support your efforts. more beverage choices. smaller portions. less sugar. balanceus.org.
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this is not usually how it goes when the white house press secretary turns things over to the white house press corps. this isn't what it usually sounds leak off the top. >> with that, i look forward to taking your questions. daniel halpern, new york post. >> are you enforcing the mandate or not. >> first question goes to the pro donald trump new york post. a local tabloid. specifically with their reporter who wrote this book "clinton incorporated, the audacious rebuilding of a political machine." trashing the clintons before the election is who gets the first question? that guy goes first? the first question of the trump era goes to "the new york post."
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the second question of the president trump era went to the christian broadcasting network. [ inaudible ] what message is he sending here? does he see the eliminion, reduction of abortions as an american value and here at home can americans expect his signature on legislation that will be -- >> the first four questions of the trump presidency just for the record, let's just note on day one, is he going to build that wall? how exactly is he going to gut the affordable care act? what about banning abortion and we are going to defund planned parenthood, right? they planned all the hits. the white house press secretary got around to taking questions from the mainstream outlets from nbc, cnn, but the symbolism was
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clear as a baseball bat to the cheek. it's a new day. outlets owned by one man, rupert murdoch alone accounted for three of the first seven reporters that were called on, pro trump tabloids and anti-abortion, religious channels go first. new day. at godaddy, our goal is to make you look awesome online. let's chat in football terms. this is the goal post. the end zone. the goal of every team. we know you have goals.
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i mentioned in the show the democratic governor of minnesota
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mark dayton fainted tonight during his state of the state address in saint paul, minnesota. we have just gotten in the videotape of that happening, i believe. obviously concerned tonight for governor mark dayton. some of his staffers said the room was very warm. this was the end of a 45-minute speech. one of his staff speculated that this may have been caused by dehydration. the governor has been hospitalized tonight and will be held overnight for observation. he is 69 yea old. obviously our thoughts and prayers are with him. his son tweeted shortly after it happened the governor is fine and they appreciate the statements of concern, but obviously never want to see that. governor dayton of minnesota hitting his head and falling at the end of the state of the state. we will keep you posted as we learn more abo