their membership, and it affects big states like new york and california. >> were you offering some non-trump news there? >> i was. i was. >> there's a novelty in this day and age. thanks to all of you for joining us. that is "hardball" for now. thank you for being with us. the rachel maddow show starts right now. >> in middle school there's a thing called model u.n. it's an educational thing. they do it for college kids, kids in high school, kids in middle school. it's a cool idea. you get assigned to represent a country, and then as the delegate for that country, you learn about diplomacy and international relations and the workings of international institutions by you acting out your assigned country's best interests along with all the other kids that are assigned to be all the other countries in this mock u.n. environment.

last march when he was zipping his way through the republican primaries on his way to the nomination to be the candidate in 2016. he sat down with the editorial board in the washington post, and in that meeting he finally answered a question that reporters had been bugging him about for weeks. he was becoming the frontrunner for the republican nomination for president, but despite having made it that far politically, nobody really knew where to place him on the number line of republican politics people kept saying mr. trump, mr. trump, who is your foreign policy team? people have been asking that for weeks, and they started to make fun of the fact that he didn't seem to have one.

in a dramatic flourish, he produced a piece of paper that had a list of five names on it. he made a big show out of getting the paper from one of his aides. then he spread it out, and he read off the paper to the washington post editorial board, and in so doing, he announced his list of five people who he said were his foreign policy advisors, and nobody had ever heard of any of them. as a whole, they have turned out to be very strange choices. for example, one of them turned out to be a guy named carter page. a small time business guy who had worked for merrill lynch in russia for a while. he had also turned up in an fbi investigation of a russian spy ring that was operating out of a new york bank. he turned up in that investigation as somebody who had provided information to the russian agents. another person on the list was a guy who said on his resume that he had taught for years at the

national defense university when, in fact, he had not taught for years at the national defense university. another one of the five people on this list listed on his resume that among his awards and honors, not only had he participated in model u.n., he had been the representative for the united states. if you are going to advise an actual u.s. president someday, that's probably pretty good practice, right? what luck. presumably if that kid had been assigned for the delegation of lichtenstein, he wouldn't have shown up as a policy advisor years later down the road. trump with this flourish pulls out his list of five names. he unveils his five person foreign policy team, and it was a weird thing. it continued to be a weird thipg. carter page ended up under

scrutiny for his travels to russia and his meetings in russia in the middle of the presidential campaign, which is now under scrutiny for its contacts with russia during that time. the kid who listed model u.n. on his resume to be a trump foreign policy advisor, he made the news this week because among the 20,000 pages of documents, the trump campaign has now handed over to congressional committees investigating the russia issue, there are records of at least a half dozen times when the model u.n. kid wrote to other people on the trump campaign insisting that he was able to get them all meetings with high level russians, including his efforts to set up a meeting with putin himself. where do these guys come from? how did they end up as part of trump's campaign? i mean, trump doesn't seem to have known george poppenopolous, or carter page. he doesn't seem to have known

these guys before he was running this campaign for president. how do they end up on his presidential campaign in what the candidate described as these senior very important roles roles as his foreign policy team? the same question applies to the guy who ran his campaign for a while. paul man manafort. he wasn't connected to donald trump until he mysteriously ended up running the trump campaign. it has been confirmed to us that paul manafort and donald trump had no relationship but by march of last year paul mania forte was running donald trump's convention operation, and he was running the whole campaign. where did he come from? out of all of the people in the country, out of all the republicans in the country, why did trump peck thick this guy w didn't know, who had been out of american politics for decades while instead he was doing business and political work for putin connected dictators. why pick him of all people?

then once trump won the election, why did he end up with this guy in charge of foreign policy running the state department? rex tillerson had never met donald trump before the presidential election. rex tillerson's selection as secretary of state is explained now as having been a recommendation to trump from condoleezza rice and from obama's defense secretary bob gates. as if trump was taking tons of advice from people like that when he was setting up his cabinet. i mean, remember, trump installed his bankruptcy lawyer as ambassador to israel. he put his top fundraiser in as treasury secretary. he put his son's wedding plan r planner -- he made his bodyguard the director of oval office operations. he put newt gingrich's wife in rome as the ambassador to the vatican. you really think he held out on the job of secretary of state until he found someone

condoleezza rice approved of? i mean, it remains a strange thing that donald trump picked rex tillerson to be secretary of state. tillerson did have decades of experience with vladimir putin. he is thought to be closer to putin than almost any other american. putin pinged russia's highest civilian hosh on tillerson's lapel around the time that his company and russia complete the largest oil deal in the history of the world. a half trillion dollar oil deal between russia and exxon that is off now, but could be back on in an instant if only those u.s. sanctions on russia could be rolled back. this is this thing that naigs a me and be that keeping me awake on and off for, like, more than a year now. where did these folks come from? how did these people find their way into that inner circle? there had been a whole bunch of

people in the trump campaign and in the trump administration who are, forgive me, weird choices for the jobs that they have had and for the roles that they have played. in terms of my sleep schedule, it's almost comforting now -- it's at least clarifying now to look at those weird choices and realize that some inexplicable connection to russia and russian interests appears to be the common denominator in all of those weird choices. there's at least a theme, right? with this one other die guy, though, he doesn't fit the theme. he was an equally weird choice, but he doesn't fit that same theme. you can't explain him the same way. this is the trailer for the val kilmer movie he once produced about a mad scientist who lox people in a steam room and holds them hostage there while the girls hold each other and take off their bikini tops at random times. sounds kind of corny. it is.

the message of the movie is about the mad scientist's murderous crazy scheme which is to convince people through this hostage crisis in the bikini sauna that there is a such thing as global warming. >> why are you here? >> hundreds of millions of people are going to die. that's a fact. >> hundreds of millions of people will die how? >> global warming. >> that's how you know he is crazy. this one guy who doesn't fit the sort of pattern of a weird choice for the trump campaign and the trump administration, he produced the mad scientist kills people because he believes in global warming sexy sauna scene horror movie. he also produced a movie that is supposed to be nonfiction, a documentary, that shows and proves in a one of the guys from duck dynasty isn't just a guy who has an amazing beard and sells duck calls, but he is a living prophet here on earth. he is the torch bearer sent here

from heaven to show humanity the way. that one -- that movie, that documentary of his actually has so much footage of people being actually killed and stabbed and run over by tanks and stuff that i can't show you the trailer for that film. i can only show you the stuff from the main part of the movie that really does make a case that maybe the duck dynasty guy is the next jesus. the same guy from the administration and the campaign is the one who worked for a time at biosphere 2. that was a texas billionaire's experiment in the 1990s trying to get humans to live for years in giant terrariums. steve bannon's time running biosphere 2. he was accused of screaming at a woman living there that he would take her safety concerns and ram them down your [ bleep ] throat. bannon actually admitted to

saying exactly that in the court case. thafts just a couple of years before he was charged with assault and battery, and he was found to be interfering with his wife's ability to testify against him. his wife didn't turn up to court to testify about the charges. that was also before we learned about the reported meth house that he rented and where he received his mail in florida and now that you mention it, that was before we learned about him being registered to vote in multiple states at the same time while also leading a crusade in the trump white house against supposed voter fraud. there are a lot of people who were weird choices in the trump campaign, and in the trump administration once they won. people who just don't make sense in terms of where they came from and where they ended up. at least with most of them there's this common thread that they all have unusual ties to russia, and we're working on unraveling that one and explaining it all in the end.

with steve bannon, he is the weird tie himself. one year ago yesterday steve bannon was brought on board to replace paul manafort at the head of the trump campaign. he and kellyanne conway came on as a package deal. both of them have been working for pro-touchdown outlets of different times? it was the single largest donor overall to elect trump president. even though bannon was taking over the campaign chairman role from paul manafort, he insisted instead on being called the campaign ceo, okay? once he was installed as senior white house strategist, steve bannon insisted that if he made publicly known that his chief strategist role was of equal rank to being white house chief of staff. he then named himself to the white house national security council before that national security advisor, the first one got fired, and the new one kicked him out of there.

well, now as of today he is gone from the white house altogether with a flourish of random contradictory information about how exactly he left. how much he jumped and how much he was pushed. the line there trying to sell now from the bannon side is that it was an orderly good-bye, that it was on his terms, that he filed his notice that he would leave two weeks ago or maybe it was ten days ago or maybe it was a week ago. he at least definitely had already decided to leave on his own terms a long time ago, and everybody knew he was leaving, including him. that's all fine if you are going to try to sell that line. except for the fact that three nights ago he made an unsolicited call to brag about all the people in the administration to "the american prospect" who he is about to fire. that he, steve bannon, will be firing very soon. none of those people are fired, but bannon is. declaring victory all the way.

obviously this is another landmark moment in the disillusion of the trump administration, but we'll be talking about that over the course of the next hour, and i just want to focus on a few things that we're chewing on right now and trying to answer. stuff that hasn't been answered yet that i'm hoping we might get answered over the course of this evening. number one, when do we get normal sleepy fridays back? when can we have a slow news day, particularly on a friday? never? ever. okay. that's fine. two, carl icahn just left the administration tonight as well. he left the administration, quit his job literally moments before the new yorker magazine published this piece about billionaire carl icahn using his position in the trump administration to make potentially hundreds of millions

of dollars for his own compan s companies. moments before that was published, carl icahn resigned. is that resignation by carl icahn a stand-alone carl icahn potential corruption story, or is his resignation tonight tied in any way to the steve bannon departure earlier today? also, who else is leaving the administration right away? either just to take advantage of the smoke screen created by steve bannon's departure, or because they were tied to bannon and now that bannon is gone, they don't have any political means of staying. >> number three, eric prince, the brother of betsy devoss and the founder of blackwater. politico.com reports that that big meeting on afghanistan today, which was the supposed reason mike pence had to fly home early from his overseas trip, politico reports now that eric prince, the blackwater guy, was due to be at that

afghanistan pleating to hitch his idea in person that the trump administration should pay him $10 billion a year to run the afghanistan war from here on out as eric prince's own for profit private enterprise instead of being run by the u.s. military. steve bannon was the one who was eric prince's chief ally in fare of this idea. once steve bannon got fired today, eric prince was blocked from attending that afghanistan meeting at camp david that he was otherwise going to be at. the person who blocked him reportedly was national security advisor h.r. mcmaster. is that true? are there other schemes the administration was rolling along with under bannon's leadership that will now change course or stop because he is gone? sort of chewing on all of that tonight. here's my big question tonight, which i think we actually might be able to figure out with the right reporting in just a

moment. >> bannon came on a year ago despite the fact that with his personal background, he truly couldn't get a commercial driver's license, let alone control of a major party presidential campaign. he got that gig specifically because the people who funded bannon at breitbart and who funded all of his other ventures, including his insane movies, by that point those same people had become the single largest funders of the trump

campaign. those are the people who are -- who installed him on top of the campaign a year ago. and who ultimately got him into the white house. why did they want him there? did he accomplish what he was supposed to do? we have excellent reporting on that next. stay with us. that's next. relief. flonase outperforms the #1 non-drowsy allergy pill. when we breathe in allergens, our bodies react by overproducing 6 key inflammatory substances that cause our symptoms. flonase helps block 6. most allergy pills only block one and 6 is greater than 1. with more complete relief you can enjoy every beautiful moment to the fullest.

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>> when it was announced one year ago yesterday that steve bannon was taking over the trump campaign, the announcement was weird for a few reasons. first, new campaign chief at a weird late time in the campaign. the third person running that campaign in a very small number of months, that itself was weird. second, he was announced as part of a package deal where he and kellyanne conway both got installed at the top of the campaign at the same time amid the strange and still unexplained departure of paul manafort as the previous campaign chair. kellyanne conway was named campaign manager. steve bannon was named campaign ceo, which is weird in itself. campaigns don't have ceo's. you know, they seemed like this kind of odd couple politically speaking. kellyanne conway is this personalable polished based on the rest of her career, you could say, sort of a normal republican who went on tv and

talked about donald trump as though he were a normal republican. steve bannon, on the other hand, was not that. really not. despite their very distinct differences, both of them came from the same place. both had made a very good living off of one reclusive conservative hedge fund billionaire. before becoming donald trump's manager, kellyanne conway ran a super pact. a super pact that supported ted cruz in the republican presidential primary. that pact was almost entirely funded by new york city hedge fund billionaire robert mercer. then once trump won and cruz dropped out, that billionaire, robert mercer, and kellyanne conway who worked for him, they decided they would switch horses. conway stayed in charge of mercer's pact, but they changed its name, and they started running anti-clinton ads to help trump instead of running anti-trump ads to help ted cruz.

robert mercer put many millions of dollars into that effort. it became the largest known single donor to the effort to elect donald trump president. at the same time robert mercer was also reportedly the single larnlest funder of breitbart.com, which steve bannon ran before he signed on with the trump campaign and where he has apparently returned tonight already after his seven months in the white house. steve bannon was a strange pick, right, as we have been talking about. a strange pick to run a campaign. a strange pick for a very high profile political job given his past. a strange pick to run the campaign of the republican presidential nominee given that in his previous job he had done everything humanly possible to unseat the republican majority leader, eric cantor who, in fact, was primaried out of his job. he did everything humanly possible to kick the republican house speaker john boehner out of his job. in fact, john boehner did leave his job as house speaker.

that's what the mercer family had bannon using breitbart to do before they took him away from breitbart and sent him over to the trump campaign and the trump administration. now that he is done with the administration and back at breitbart as of tonight, is he going back to that war he was waging on the republican party, or is there some new idea? what happens with the secretive billionaire mercer family as a factor now, now that they're back to paying steve bannon's salary instead of us taxpayers? joining us now is jane mayer. her article earlier this year, the reclusive hedge fund tycoon behind the trump presidency. it was just an incredible piece of reporting that i'm sure puts you on the mercer family christmas list forever.

jane, thank you very much for being with us tonight. i really appreciate your time. >> glad to be with you. >> from what you understand about the mercer family and their intentions why they funded trump to the degree that they did, why they facilitated the movement of steve bannon and kellyanne conway over to the campaign, why they've supported breitbart all these years. given your understanding of all those things, do you have a sense of what their role will be now that bannon is out? >> well, first of all, what their intentions were in the campaign was bob mercer is a kind of, as you say, very reclusive koof cooky political conspiracy theoryist who was driven by hatred of hillary clinton during the campaign. i mean, he literally believed that the clintons had murder the people and was susceptible to all right wing cooky theories.

when he -- at this particular point he is now playing both an inside game and an outside game. they are planning life after the white house with bannon where bannon will be captain of this movement that is to push the republican party in a more sort of nationalist populist direction. the next night bannon -- excuse me -- mercer had dinner with trump and plenled support so he is both an inside supporter but also going to be funding this hugely powerful outside movement to pressure trump to go in the direction that he and bannon wanted to go into. it's a very strange role. he is an incredibly wealthy man with an unusual amount of power over this white house. >> is the goal to try to continue to shape the white house in bannon's image, his

sort of nationalist image despite the fact that bannon is not in it anymore? is that the idea to try to get the other people who are opposed to bannon's vegs out of there and to get more people like bannon close to trump now that bannon is out? you can see why it seems sort of backwards. >> one way to look at this is bannon did all he could as he sees it inside the white house. he didn't get his way on an awful lot of things. particularly having to do with economic nationalism, you know, all kinds of things having to do with trade policy. the mercer fortune will be behind him. one of the things we're going to see in the fall will be over funding that wall and i can imagine -- i think you're going to see probably breitbart which

is largely owned by the mercers and bannon, which is an incredible propagandaist pushing to get funding for that wall. if they don't get it, i think they'll probably see if they can shut down the government or do -- you know, play hardball the way they did with boehner before and eric cantor. >> thinking about the role of breitbart and the decision by the mercers not just to fund that, but then to take bannon out of there and move him over to the trump campaign when they felt like the time was right. you know, there are a lot of idealogical news outlets out there in the world that are fund and supported by rich people who want to use them for crusading and stuff. i mean, breitbart has been pretty effective, but i wouldn't describe them as a juggernaut in terms of being able to dominate the media landscape. they're one factor among a fractured media landscape that's changing all the time. do you expect that that sort of outside game even if it does

involve bright barred will also involve new efforts, new types of media, new types of influence operations besides that one complication? >> i think i have heard that there is some interest by bannon and seeing if they can kind of launch bright barred tv of some sort. they certainly won't be alone in this. i think, you know, the thing that's interesting about bannon is he is -- he is a political pugelist. he is a very powerful pr propagandaist when he gets going. i think he added a lot of anger and edge to trump, and it gave

him a kind of -- cast him as a coherent political figure that really i'm not sure that trump is at all. what bannon sees ats globalist and the empire builders. >> his targets will now be inside the administration that he just left to a significant degree. >> absolutely. of course, he made -- i mean, he made a big mistake. if he thought that he could cross the children -- the family, the trump family, i mean, he was at war with jared kushner and with ivanka trump, and that was not going to be a winning game. bannon has said he would be out

in august. whatever the final game plan was in the end and who said get out or whether he said you can't fire me, i quit. either way, i think he knew he wasn't going to be lasting as an insider for the long-term. >> actually, good stylistic for all of us. whenever you leave anything under any circumstances, always declare victory as you are walking out the door, even if somebody is pushing you while you're going. jane mayer, staff writer for "the new yorker." i really appreciate your time. >> gr >> glad to be with you. >> in weeks ahead when i am here again on a friday night when i'm expecting it to be sleepy and stuff is as crazy as it has been, you will be able to look back at this night and say, you know what, jane mayer said the night they fired steve bannon that things were going to get less coherent from here on out. let's just stick a pin in that. we will need to come back to that in the future. less coherence coming up. stay with us. but if that's not enough, we offer our price match guarantee too. and if that's not enough...

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in addition to steve bannon leaving today as white house chief strategist, today one of his breitbart hires, a special

assistant to the president julia hahn, she also hit the exits and left the white house. also out today, the white house's director of public liaison, which is a title that sounds like it means nothing, but for reference, in the obama white house that was the position held by valerie jarrett. that guy left today too. then carl icahn left as well. carl icahn, billionaire investor, will no longer serve as a special advisor to the president on regulatory reform, though this blistering long piece in "the new yorker" tonight suggests that carl icahn may have some criminal legal concerns that follow him home from that job that he quit tonight. okay. that's who has left the trump administration. anybody else? where is my phone? before tonight in addition to losing his national security advisor and his chief of staff and his press secretary and his chief strategist, the president also saw the departure of not one, but two communications

directors and his deputy white house chief of staff and his deputy national security advisor, and the deputy chief of staff at the national security council and his assistant press secretary. the president has also replaced the top lawyer on his private legal defense team. he has seen the spokesman for that legal team resign. this is in addition to all of the staffers and cabinet nominees who withdrew in the face of various controversies before ever even formally joining the administration. all of these people have fled before labor day. i mean, what started as a shoestring campaign run by family members and people who worked at his business seems to be reverting back to just that now. in addition to the administration hollowing out like a dead tree that's being picked clean by wood peckers, there is one other piece of staffing news that for me really sticks out right now. it's a staffing story that is

actually not from inside the administration technically. it's from inside the special council's office. on wednesday this week abc news published a provocative report that the fbi's top counter esspeen auj official had become not only the first investigator to be removed from the robert mueller investigation, but according to abc news, he had also been busted down the ranks of the fbi. peter struck had been the lead supervisor on the investigation into the russia attack. that investigation was rolled up into the robert mueller special counsel inquiry, and so peter struck moved over to the special counsel's office to become part of that investigation. abc reported this week that he is not only out of the mueller investigation now. in addition to that, he is no longer running the counter espionage section of the fbi. he is now reportedly working in the fbi's human resources department, which is really different than running the counter espionage section of the

fbi. that provocative news on wednesday. no other news organization has matched that rofgt over the course of this week until today when we managed to confirm that, in fact, peter is now working at human resources at the fbi now. don't ask me how we confirmed it. i will tell you over a beer sometime, but we did confirm it. he is out. he is in human resources now. the question remains why? the well-sourced reporter natasha bertrand at "business insider" she raises two interesting possibilities about this. the first is that question about the ongoing justice about the justice department's inspector general, which is looking into how the fbi handled hillary clinton's emails, and that investigation during the election. there's an inspector general investigation of how that was handled. peter was the fbi official who oversaw the fbi investigation into clinton's emails. is it possible that peter got caught up in the finding says of that inspector general

investigation about the clinton e-mail stuff? we don't know. second possibility is that struck's departure may have had something to do with the lightning washington post report recently that the fbi had raided former trump campaign chairman paul manafort. specifically, there's this question of whether somebody in robert mueller's team might have leaked the details of that search to reporters. if so, did somebody get a really big demotion because they got caught doing that leak? >> the future of our country depends on the quality of that inquiry. is something wrong at the bob

mueller inquiry? this is the first sign of anything seeming hinky, so we want to understand how serious it is, and we want to know an answer to the broader question of whether the mueller inquiry is having any serious problems. we don't know. we only have this provocative piece of staffing information. if are you out there and you know and you want to communicate with us anonymously, please do so. www.send it to rachel.com. just saying. un-stop right there!

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you know who i want to talk to tonight? i want to talk to nbc news presidential historian michael beschloff. he is here in person. thank you for being here. >> i'm deleted. thank you for having me. >> this is disorienting news today. i think that steve bannon has been a disorienting figure for those of us who look at presidential politics in terms of things that have happened before in presidential politics. >> right. >> he seems like an ahistorical figure already. his departure now seems like both a shock and also something that is sort of hard to conte contextualize. historically speaking, has it ever been a landmark moment -- has there ever been a key turning point when a white house staffer left? >> almost never. that's why i think this is a really big deal tonight. the one moment i think would

qualify would be in 1985 when jim bakker left as ronald reagan's chief of staff. very competent. really helped reagan deal especially with congress and knew washington the way that reagan had not and gave way to donald regan who had been secretary of the treasury. he was domineering. he called himself reagan's prime minister. he screwed up that staff. to some extent regan's changes led to the iran-contra scandal and that almost led to reagan's impeachment. if you look at other white house staffs, washington -- you always hear it's so important. you know, this guy is leading or this person is leading or this person is coming. they usually don't amount to very much. i think the departure of bannon is going to turn out to be a very big deal. >> why do you think that it's potentially a stand-out moment like that change for reagan? what is it about bannon that tells you that his departure is going to be a big deal? >> because this is a guy who had his own constituency and his own public profile. you almost never see that in a

top place on a white house staff. we never saw a president chose a chief strategist. you don't see that job title in any other administration. most of all donald trump was able to sort of bridge this gap between, you know, the globalists and the nationalists, if you want to call them that, economic nationalists, and perhaps white nationalists represented by bannon. as long as he was inside the white house, he could bridge those two because he didn't have to worry about bannon denouncing him to the public. it's sort of like what l.b.j. said about j. edgar hoover. i'll clean this up for our gentle audience. better to have him inside the tent than outside the tent. >> right, yes. >> someone who might differ with you can do a president a lot of damage. for the for the first time donald trump has to deal with the very real possibility that steve bannon will go out and use breitbart and, you know, his other -- the other institutions that he helps to command to put real pressure on the trump

presidency and perhaps try to break off certain parts of the people who support donald trump. >> that's such an interesting idea about him having his own constituency and that being a unique kind of form -- a unique power, but also a unique form of leverage on the president. something that made it difficult for him to be in that sort of senior role. i guess that leads to the question of whether he will be replaced. it also for me seems important to note that nobody knew who he was a year ago. >> that's exactly right. donald trump sort of made him. >> yeah. >> and he is now a huge figure. especially in that movement. he is in a position, if he is angry at donald trump, you know, either because trump fired him or because he is angry that trump seems to have sided with new york globalists, so-called, he is in a position to do trump real damage. just like out of a novel. >> you know, this is what sarah palin wanted. sarah palin quit as alaska governor. she thought she could have a bigger impact on politics by

leaving politics, and she quickly dissolved into the comments section of facebook. >> right. >> you know, bannon has more juice than she did, even having been a vice presidential candidate, and we now we will b carefully. >> nbc presidential historian, michael, it's great you have to here, my friend. >> you're welcome. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. ♪ hey, is this our turn? honey...our turn? yeah, we go left right here. (woman vo) great adventures are still out there. we'll find them in our subaru outback. (avo) love. it's what makes a subaru, a subaru. get 0% apr financing for 63 months on all new 2017 subaru outback models. now through august 31. this timyou haveis turn. 4.3 minutes to yourself. this calls for a taste of cheesecake. new philadelphia cheesecake cups. rich, creamy cheesecake with real strawberries.

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hey, so the last word is live tonight after we wrap up here this hour. and then at 11:00 p.m. eastern time, brian williams is here live on "the 11th hour" tonight.

this is obviously a huge day in american politics. there's a lot going on right now. of course as we get later into the evening, everybody is wondering who else might quit the white house tonight if there's anybody else left to quit who is not a member of the trump family. presumably we'll know that by the end of brian's show maybe. so there's plenty of reason to stick with us here at msnbc tonight. i will tell you that we have one more story before we go tonight, and it's the best new thing in the world. and that's next. stay with us. shawn evans: it's 6 am.

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march 27th, 1961, a young man named joseph jackson jr. walked into the local library, the jackson municipal library in jackson, mississippi, and he asked to check out a book. he was there with eight friends from the local college. they walked into that library. you can see mr. jackson there all the way on the left in the glasses. he went up to the circulation desk. he asked to check out a philosophy book that he needed for class at college. and joseph jackson jr. was told no. he was told he could not check out that book. the woman working at the library told him to use the city's other library down the street because the jackson municipal library was the white library for white people only. and if joseph jackson and his friends wanted to check out a book, they should check out the librarian for colored people. joseph jackson jr. and those other eight students from the college, they did not leave.

they stayed in that whites only library. they held a read-in. they sat silently reading, refusing to go anywhere unless joseph jackson was allowed to check out that philosophy book he had come for. eventually the staff, the all-white staff of that all-white library called the police. the police came into the library. they walked the students out the front door. they put them into squad cars, and they drove them to jail for reading in the library. those nine kids from the college were arrested and charged with breach of the peace. they were jailed for two days. this was 1961, a time when challenging racial law meant risking your life. joseph jackson, the one who asked to check out the library book, says he remembers being scared those two nights in jail. he and the rest of those students were worried that somebody, the klan or somebody would come after them once they got out. that was 56 years ago in jackson, mississippi. at the time it was a catalyzing

event for other students to join the civil rights movement. but the read-in itself, that event, has been almost forgotten. but as of now, if you visit the old jackson municipal library, you will see this. it's a new marker funded by the jackson library board in honor of the tougaloo nine. at the bottom, it says the -- this has been a tough last few days in terms of our national conscience and dignity on very difficult issues related to race. but this new marker in mississippi, which the library raised the money to put up, and this new recognition of what those nine kids did that day in that library for themselves, come on. best new thing in the world today. and you know you needed it. it's true that what happens in national politics affects the whole country. that's why it's national.

but it's not just the stuff that happens in the white house that happens everywhere. sometimes what happens in little corners of the country affects all of us too. best new thing in the world tonight. that does it for us tonight. we'll see you again monday. msnbc live is next. good morning. i'm page hopkins in new york at ms nbc world headquarters. it's day 212 of the trump administration. the city of boston bracing for a day of protests, including a right wing rally. after what happened in charlottesville, big questions about how many will show up and what will happen if anything gets out of hand. steve banyan, jacked up, out of the white house and back at breitbart. in a new interview, he's promising a wide ranging fight. plus, what this resignation means for president trump. is he now a lame duck en