concerned about and the thing we're worried about is the spiraling effect can take place in which people fight back in ways that end up damaging the democracy. >> steve and daniel, thank you for your tile. fascinating book. before we go, quick reminder, if you can't catch us live, tune into the pod cast and listen to our entire show for free wherever you get your podcast. that's "all in" for this evening. the "rachel maddow" show starts now. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. if you enjoy roller costars. if that makes you feel excited and not just barfey, you've been enjoying this. the time difference means it is tomorrow there already. markets are open and trading, what's happening in the asian markets right now is important news in the united states tonight because the dow jones went off a cliff again today.

it has been a crazy few days in terms of the u.s. stock market. the asian markets now make it look like it might be another bad day tomorrow but who knows. it's been all over the place. friday the dow dropped a beastly 666 points. we had the weekend and on monday the dow was down 1600 points and ended up by the end of the day closing around 1250 points and tuesday was up and wednesday was perfectly flat by the end of the day. but now today it dropped another 1,000 points and, you know, at first it looked like when this started maybe there was a hiccup in the markets. after five days, it's like a violent sneezing fit and nobody knows when it's going to stop or where it's going to stop. so whether or not you personally have got a stake in the stock market, it's unsettling to see

the market like this. this is the dow since november i think we got a shot of that. this is actually this time frame was posted on the front page of the website tonight after the closing. this is what happened since november, gulp. but even more so than just the giant point drops that we had a few times, it's the crazy volatility. down and up and down and down again. big 500, 600, 1,000 point, 1200-point swings can be nauseating in real life and in the markets. as i say, some people like roller costars and if you like them, presumably you're not only enjoying the markets now, you're really much enjoying the american government right now. two weeks ago, we had a federal government shutdown that was the one-year anniversary of the trump administration being sworn in marked at the stroke of midnight with a defendant shutdown, the first ever government shut down while a single party controlled the

white house, house and senate. usa, usa. that was two weeks ago. that shutdown lasted three days and accomplished nothing except for drama and waste. well, tonight looks like we'll have another one. that last one was so awesome. maybe we're going to have another one. kentucky senator rand paul, the republican senator from kentucky is not filibustering tonight but using the senate rules to single handedly threaten a shutdown of the government tonight. he's delaying the vote that would need to happen if we keep the government running. a shutdown will happen at midnight if there is no government funding. that's when the money runs out. senator paul right now is on track to prevent there from being any vote before midnight. why is he doing this? you tell me. technically what he's demanding is a vote on an amendment that relates to the budget. i'm not going to go into that much detail about it because it's moot even if he did get

what he wanted and a vote on the amendment, that amendment would definitely fail, which he knows and everybody knows. so given that nobody -- it really is quite sure what this is about but under the senate rules, he can delay anybody from voting on anything until 1:00 a.m. if he wants to. that will be an hour after the government shuts down and that's what he says his plan is. if at that point if after 1:00 a.m. he wants to stretch it out later and later and later, well, the senate could hold a vote after 1:00 a.m. and senator paul could do more talking if he wants to single handedly, he can shut the entire government down on his own say so for about three hours. he'll exhaust his ability to stop the process of voting to keep the government going. he will exhaust that process at around 3:00 a.m. and at 3:00 a.m., that means senate staffers will be called upon to go crack smelling salts underneath the noses of their elder lly employers to drag the

bosses where they will vote to fund the government without anything having changed going through the wasteful motions of having to shut themselves down for three hours because rand paul can get on tv to accomplish nothing. now if that sounds like an excellent and co-hhaerent way t run the government, i'll have what you're having. the shutdown we're headed towards this evening, i think it's important to see this is not the product of some political strategy one of the two parties. this is not the product of even some coordinated effort by a group of senators who hatched this plan to try to get something done. this really is just one dude shutting down the entire u.s. government because he wants to and because he can. and this is the sort of thing that we're now liable to as a country. this is the thing we have a viability.

this can happen to ya when this is how we fund the government. if every few weeks you leave it to literally the final day and the final few hours before a midnight shutdown arrives, whereupon in that tiny window of time you have to count on a vote in both houses to keep the government going again. if that's the way you run it, one guy can shut it down. the federal government is a big operation. millions of employees, the biggest military on the face of the earth with one party having complete control of the government, of the two branchs of government of congress and both houses of congress and the white house, even with unified republican party control in washington, the way we are choosing to run the giant machine that is the u.s. federal government right now is like, it's like, it's like if let's say we have a giant 747 airliner and we're trying to take it on a very long cross country trip but we refuse to fill up the gas

tanks so we just fill up the tanks until the low fuel warning light goes off and then we stop. and with those little bit of vapors in the tank, we take off and start flying and then when we see the low fuel light come on or start to run out of gas and the engine starts sputtering, we land quickly. we land anywhere we can because it's an emergency and add a couple more gallons of jet fuel, just enough to make the light go off, the low fuel light is off. we're fine. then we take off again and then sure enough, the light comes back on, the engine is sputtering again, another emergency and look for another nearby airport that can land it, which we can land. and you can fly across country that way, eventually you might make it across the country. hopefully you won't run into a problem at a podunk airport where you don't know what facilities they have or if the runway is long enough. that's land paul tonight with the runway too short.

who decided to not help us with this little short hop refueling plan, the means by which we have been limping along for the last few months trying to get to the coast. so we will watch this slow-motion disaster unfold over the entire course of this evening into the wee hours. meanwhile, the white house is reeling rob porter held the top rank of white house staffer, technically an assistant to the president, which is the highest rank you can be in the white house. his departure makes him the most recent name on what is the fairly epic list of high-level trump administration staff departures thus far. look how small the front is

getting. the white house chief of staff, f fbi, and now the staff secretary, the guy who is in every picture of president trump doing anything in the white house. the tremendous amount of senior staff turnover in this white house is just a measure of voluatilit volatility. a lot of the departures we've seen from the white house and upper ranks of the administration, they represent something more than just craziness. a specific failure in the way this president is running the federal government. that problem is they don't appear to vet people. that cabinet secretary tom price, by the time they nominated him to be health secretary, he admitted to using his position in congress for

elicit personal financial gain. he had already admitted he had been trading stock in health care companies while taking action in congress that affected the price of the stocks he was trading. he was already on the record with that. he admitted to that from his time in congress when they decided let's promote that guy and elevate him into the cabinet despite that red flag. well, he did not last long in the cabinet. he quit after surprise, treating the health secretary job like an audition for lifestyles of the rich and famous. the same deal with the cdc director, very powerful, very important job but picked somebody for that job who had financial conflicts of interest for anybody in any significant job at the cdc let alone running it. and further to that, as a require the after offering the job, after they named her to the job a month after she was

appointed, she was making new big investments in tobacco company stocks after appointed. that's a conflict of interest with her job but a conflict she apparently didn't take seriously. why would she? she had the conflicts of interest before they picked her and they didn't care. they picked her anyway. this is a big deal? so one of the hallmarks, one of the more boring hallmarks of this administration is they didn't do a good job for high profile, high government level positions and that results in background steady noise of scandal in this administration. it results in embarrassment and scandal when you install people in high-level jobs and flame out publicly because they never should have been there in the first place. it is also a cause of embarra embarrassment and scandal and a waste of everybody's time when you nominate unvetted people to high level government jobs and they don't make it through the nomination process because of

stuff the world comes to learn about them during the nomination process that you should have figured out first before you put their name forward. that's how you end up pulling the nomination of your labor secretary because hey, there are domestic violation allegations against him and him evading taxes on his house and let's pull the army secretary nominee, too. didn't he punch somebody else at a racetrack? a racetrack? and hey, let's put forward a guy to be a federal judge that considers himself to be an expert ghost hunter, his area of legal specialty is the paranormal and he forgets to mention in his confirmation proceedings that he's married to a white house official, i'm sure that had nothing to do with how he got picked. all white houses, all administrations get the occasional bad apples but in this white house it's a system because they appear to not have had a vetting process. maybe it started on the campaign. but it is wasteful and it makes

for incredible turbulence and volatility and the dangerous part about it, too. a year ago today, february 8th last year an associated press paragrapher stopped this photo in the oval office. nice shot. president trump sitting at his desk wearing a blue and white tie and duedes shaving hands. this is a posed photo op. the president made a remark there about the papers you can see stacked up on his desk there. >> you never seen so much paper on a president's desk. that's because we're negotiating lots of deals for our country that would be tremendous. >> look at all the paper. here is the problem with that photo op and with the lots of paper on the president's desk. look again at the photo. that's -- we've blown up the lower right hand corner there. see that key?

that key is sticking into something that looks like a little cone. what it's sticking into is a lock and that lock is on the corner of a locked bag and that is the keep of lock bag that's used to literally carry around highly classified written material. so the president's got all these business dudes visiting him in the oval office including the ceo of intel standing right next to the locked bag which has the key stuck in the lock hanging out of it, and even though the president is happy to brag about all the paper, you have to only hope none of the papers you can actually see on the desk that photographers are being allowed to take pictures of, you can hope those are documents that came from somewhere other than out of that locked bag but even if those papers that you can see on his desk didn't come out of the locked bag, you're not supposed to leave the key sitting in the lock in the classified lock bag especially not around a whole room full of people with no security

clearance including the guy from intel six inches from it. they tried to alert the white house to what they were doing wrong here, quote, never leave a key in the classified lock bag in the presence of non-clearance people. when this happened a year ago today, this is at a time when the head of the national security division and acting attorney general personally come to the white house to warn them that the national security advisor was compromised and lying. this is a very unusual hair on fire unpersonal warning. how did the white house react? at the time of the loose key sticking out of the lock box, the lock bag, the white house still had no response to the warning. when this photo was taken, make flynn was still there still

serving during the 18-day after the warning when we don't know why they didn't react to the warning and why they kept him on board. they took no action to curtail his access to classified information despite the very serious warning they had just received about him as a counter intelligence risk. a few days after the key in the locked bag photo op, president trump went to mar-a-lago where he hosted abe. rather than getting up, the president decided to review the matter at the dinner table at mar-a-lago. see, there was mood lighting, at the time a little dark so people gathered around with cell phones and they did the president a favor and lit up all the material he was reviewing about the north korean missile launch that night using the flashlights from their cell phones so they

are signing lights onto the cell phones about the security crisis while president trump and his staffers talked about it and figured out what to do about it and it all unfolded at the head table in front of all the other delighted guests present who were all mar-a-lago club members and some posted how neat it was to be in a situation style security crisis while enjoying their dinner. people who posted about this and took these photos and posted on facebook are not people with security clearances. the random people using their phones to illuminate the documents he was reviewing about the north korean missile launch were all those phones definitely secured devices? using the light of the phone, make sure you get the light on there. the wait toers, clearing the dishes, were they cleared to access secret information? the president denied reports he

would seek top level security clearances for his children. he called that a typically false news story that denial was false. he did, in fact, seek top level security clearance for his son-in-law jared kushner. jared kushner's security clearance application is a disaster. he revised the application multiple times, multiple, multiple times. we learned that not only has jared kushner not been able to obtain a permanent security clearance even after more than a year in the white house now, we learned there was a top level warning from the fbi to the white house that a member of the president's family was the target of an on going sophisticated chinese intelligence operation. which is literally a red flag. despite all of those worries, the president had apparently decided to disregard the fact that jared kushner can't get a

security clearance and within a right to disregard the fact. the president can't change the fbi background process but he can choose to disregard the fbi's conclusions about whether somebody deserves security clearance and he has apparently chosen to do so with jared kushner. he's cleared him to see all manner of classified information up to and including the daily brief which is kind of amazing if you don't have a security clearance you're allowed to see the president presidents' daily. put yourself in his mind set. sure, he can't get a clear ranls. su sure, there are problems with the application and there is family being targeted in operations but the president clearly, clearly believes he can trust members of his own family. even when he thinks he can trust no one else and jared kushner is family so he's ignored the problem for kushner and cleared him up to the top levels.

and i can think my way to that. i can understand that. nepotism is weird. it's weird he's got his kids working for him and making decisions like this for them. i can understand it. it's not weird but i can get there. here is where i can't get. now we learned the president made that same kind of decision for this guy. who was not a member of the president's family. and for a very specific reason that decision is not just troubling, it is potentially a big, legal problem for the white house and that is next. hi, i'm bob harper,

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rob porter would normally need a top secret sensitive compartmented information clearance, which has a lot of words in it because it's supposed to be intimidating. very high level security clearance. we know rob porter was not able to get that clearance, he was not able to get a permanent security clearance of any kind because of what his two ex-wives told special agents who

contacted him for porter. porter's ex wives told the fbi about their allegations rob porter was violent toward them in their marriages supporting evidence reportedly included this parotective order in 2010 plus photographs plus what his second wife says was another contact with local police who she called to their home because of his behavior. a third woman who was also involved with porter, though not married to him is reportedly working for the trump administration. she's not been named publicly but multiple news outlets named her going to don mcgahn directly to discuss these concerns about porter. her own concerns about porter and what she knew about porter's ex wives. we should note he denies the allegations and calls them simply not true. but this is not just a dark story about the departure of yet another high-level trump white

house employee. this is also a security story that matters to all of us because this is a security story how donald trump is running this government. they don't get handed security clearances as perks. the fbi has to clear you for one after this rigorous background check process and there are all sorts of ways to fail that process. doesn't mean you're a criminal. some are dramatic. you can fail the fbi background check process for a security clearance because you have undisclosed foreign contacts you've been lying about. those would screw up your chance for a clearance because it should show you could be in cahoots with a foreign government and they could use to the blackmail you. that's what we worry about with jared curb mkushner.

you could be in a lot of debt. being debtly indebted isn't a crime but it might prevent you from getting a security clearance because that might give a foreign intelligence service to get at you. if you're in a lot of debt, they could offer you a lot of money to hand over information that you shouldn't and you might be more vulnerable to that approach than if you weren't in a lot of debt. so could be something like that. it could also be something in your past or something in your personal life that you don't want people to know, whether or not it is a criminal act. and so, white house staff secretary rob porter with credible corroborated allegations of domestic violence against him and police records to back it up, he doesn't get a clearance, now once the fbi makes that determination because of those reasons, they repa reportedly alert the white house to that fact. we know don mcgahn was alerted to the problem here but the

white house counsel and the white house chief of staff don mcgahn and john kelly apparently sat on that information and did nothing about it. they certainly did nothing to get rob porter out of that job or away from classified information that he was explicitly not cleared to see. when president trump decided to ignore the fact jared kushner couldn't get a security clear ranl ing, jared kushner's family, the president felt comfortable blowing off fbi concerns about him and he cleared jared kushner to see everything but with rob porter, the white house is letting us know that the president had no idea that there was any sort of problem with him. and yet, he put him in this job, he allowed him to continue in this job where he saw and handled all the information that passed the president's desk including classified materials. did the president not know, did

the president not know rob porter couldn't get a security clearance? did the president think he had one? the white house chief of staff and the white house counsel knew that rob porter couldn't get a security clearance and they knew why. the white house is putting out word that the president had no idea. so that's legally important. who cleared this young man to see all this stuff that you need a top secret security clearance to see? who cleared him to do it? fbi did not grant him a clearance, did not provide information to the white house that says he deserve as clearance. who cleared him to see all this stuff? it is disturbing and unprecedented enough the president decided to have blind faith in his son-in-law but with this rob porter situation, it's not clear this was his call. this is a problem in the white house for the highest classified information that we've got. this is a system maic problem. if the president didn't know there was a problem with the

clearance, that means somebody provided him with classified information without him being cleared to see it and without the president waving the clearance process. isn't that illegal? joining us now is sean patrick maloney. he once served in the clinton administration in the job rob porter held until yesterday. congressman, really good to have you with us tonight. thatening y . >> good to be with you. >> do you routinely handle highly classified information? >> spot on. there isn't a day that goes on that there aren't a stack of red folders on the desk marked top secret. they are often above that level of secrecy. they go all the way up themselves classified and there is a burn bag because when you describe materials, it will be a special team.

the staff secretary sees everything. the chairman of the point of the chief of staff to the staff secretary manages those documents as they go to the oval office. you see everything. >> in terms of mr. porter, it has emerged as part of the story about his personal difficulties that that information was conveyed to the fbi and that information was conveyed to the white house. even aside from this story about these domestic violence allegations against him, how unusual would it to have somebody out of the staff clearance? >> that blows my mind, rachel. one example, when i was going through this background check, the fbi sent agents from uruguay from their office there to the small peru village where i do work between college and law school. they take this stuff seriously. they go through every address,

every person you've lived with and contact and ask you detailed questions going back to my case when i was 18 years old. the notion you would allow someone to work with no security clearance is nuts. if i may, normally you start and it's a process. so they assume you can do the job and quick while you're on the job. that's normal. in this case, we know that they knew as early as january 2017 right up front that this guy had issues in his background, wife beating credible allegations that would discredit him and why they gave him an initial clearance is beyond me because they must have known he would never have cleared the full background check. >> now, as far as i understand how the security clearance world works, there is the fbi background check process. if you're in the military or some other part of the national security world, you may get your

clearance. if you're just a civilian and working for the white house, the white house grants you your clearance based on this information from the fbi therefore it's the president's decision whether or not to disregard the fbi's advice and clear somebody anyway, is that the way it works? >> yes, and in an extraordinary case and maybe wooed e'd expect. if the president didn't do this, it's nobody else's call. the chief of staff you can imagine the chief of staff making this call without informing the president and there is no way you're going to convince me that somebody said we're going to let the staff secretary to the president do the job without a security cl r clearance and not tell the chief of staff. the chief of staff was up to his neck in this and they would have been the first people to review this and it really blows my mind they would take on to themselves the decision to let a staff secretary work without a security clearance and there is going to be an fbi investigative report that should come out because we ought to know exactly what the fbi told the white

house counsel and chief of staff and when and what they said about it and did about it. >> if there is a -- if there is a potential criminal matter here in terms of mishanding close e classified information, if the president never made the call to waive the process ex cleand cles young man, if that never happened, if the president believed he was operating with a security clearance, if somebody else cleared this to happen and put classified information in his hands, would the fbi investigate that on their own initiative? would there be a congressional inquiry? who looks into that? >> i've written to the chairman of the oversight committee in the house chairman gouty tasked for an investigation of this. that's what they exist for. we know the concern for handling classified information because we were lectured about it through 2016. we ought to get to the bottom of this. you're right to ask ultimately

whether someone broke the law in extending classified information to someone not cleared by the president to see it and who failed their background check but can we also point out that they knew that they had a person in the sensitive position who was credibly accused of beating his not his wife but both of his ex-wives that those people have come forward and there were police reports and made the decision to keep that person on the job knowing those allegations and knowing he couldn't have a security clearance. what the hell is going on? does that say about the value system of this white house and of these officials and that would be terrible and even if you didn't have to add on to it, the fact you then have someone who is imminently blackmailble seeing our nation's top secrets and then as you point out, you may be breaking the law in the process because remember, the

fbi may ask about the allegations and i'd like to know what rob porter said and that's why we need to see the investigative report. >> sean patrick maloney represents the state of new york and served as staff sec cooeret under bill clinton. appreciate your time. thank you. >> my pleasure. >> much more ahead here tonight including, yeah, another government shutdown before you go to bed. all right. sorry. stay with us. oh, you brought butch. yeah! (butch growls at man) he's looking at me right now, isn't he? yup. (butch barks at man) butch is like an old soul that just hates my guts. (laughs) (vo) you can never have too many faithful companions. that's why i got a subaru crosstrek. love is out there. find it in a subaru crosstrek. i was wondering if an electric toothbrusthan a manual.s better and my hygienist says it does but they're not all the same. who knew?

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welcome to the world's most boring government shutdown. it's probably going to out last a few hours. why is this happen? this is the floor of the senate. la rand paul not talking. is that him? no, he's not there. the reason rand paul is about to bring a one-man government shut down without so much as standing up there talking is because he's using the senate rules to stretch it out and delay a vote to keep the government open until after the government runs out of money at midnight. he's doing it in such a way he doesn't have to stand up there and filibuster. with his use of the rules to do this, though, the schedule we're looking at is they won't be able to stop him from doing this delay tactic until 1:00 a.m. they will then start a series of votes at 1:00 a.m. this will result in the senate voting to keep the government open at 3:00 a.m. but then it won't be over because the house has to vote. house leadership advised members to expect a vote between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. maybe so land paul

can do his thing. we'll shut down the government between midnight and 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning. nothing will change but we'll waste a lot of time. what we're looking forward to tonight. stay with us. liberty mutual stood with me when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night. hold on dad... liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn't have that. don't worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad.

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the third largest employer in the world is the chinese army with just over 2 million people. coming in at number two is the walmart army with about 2.3 million employees but the largest employer on planet earth is the united states department of defense with more than 3 million employees. the largest single organization on earth. with all those workers and all those many agencies part of the gigantic u.s. department of defense, they have a lot to keep track of but last year in september made for a particularly bracing headlines when the director of one pentagon agency said quote, i've got murderers who have access to

classified information, rapists, pedophiles, people involved in child porn and all these things at the interim clearance level and i'm pulling their clearances on a weakly basis. january of this year nbc news pulled a report saying 165 contractors had had interim security clear ranlances evoked because of things like questionable financial transactions or being influenced by a foreign government or one person who got an interim security clearance in 2015 was discovered in 2017 to have been found guilty of raping a child. he was found guilty of raping a child before he ever applied for that clearance. think of that. guilty on record as guilty of child rape but nevertheless sailing right through to an interim security clearance. seems like getting an interim security clearance isn't that

hard. for the past several months, democrats have been trying to get answers about the machinery of security clearances inside the defense department and beyond. top democrat is elijah comings that wrote last month quote i have asked you repeatedly to join me in investigating critical failings in our nation's security clearance and troubling irregularliities of senior aids to president donald j trump. today in light of the news going on right now, congressman comings sent the chairman another letter this time asking again for an investigation into the white house's practices around security clear ranlss and now particularly asking for information about former senior aid staff secretary rob porter. quote, if you had agreed to any previous requests for information on these matters, the white house would have been required to answer questikey qus who at the white house was aware of that information and how mr. porter was allowed to remain in

his position. instead, because of your multiple refusals, we did not find out about the issues until they were reported in the press. mr. porter, the white house staff secretary announced he was stepping down yesterday after allegations of abuse from his two former wives. he denies those allegations but the white house reportedly knew about them for months and knew they were stopping him from getting a permanent security clearance and kept him on handling the flow of the documents to the president including super sensitive material while active concerns for blackmail and unsuitable for the clearance that would allow him to see the material. the white house maintains the president had no idea about any of these concerns about rob porter, thus raising the question who exactly cleared rob porter to see that classified information and whether or not the president ever formally waved the clearance process so that he could see those documents without criminally mishandling classified information. joining us now is congressman

conley. congressman, really appreciate you're being here with us tonight. i know it's a busy night in washington. >> actually, not much going on right now. great to be with you. >> before we talk about the security clearance, let me ask you about the shutdown situation. we were told that members of congress and the house have been advised maybe there will be a vote between 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. depending on rand paul's move. >> that was sent out by the majority to his members we get a copy saying be prepared to vote sometime between 3:00 and 6:0 ocho possib0 possibly. >> at that point we expect a government funding bill will pass and the government will be reopened after a few hours of being shut. is that your expectation? >> that's my expectation but a word of caution, the republicans in the house do not have the votes to past that bill. they -- we think they need 60, maybe 70 democrats. given the mood of the democratic

caucus with respect to the dreamer issue and the amount of additional debt being added by this budget agreement, i'm not at all sure that those 60 or 70 votes will be there. >> is it your sense that either your party or the republican party is whipping votes trying to line up the numbers they need for that predawn vote? >> actually, in our party the minority whip is whipping against the bill. >> do you know how you're going to vote? >> i'm going to vote yes. i think it's wrong to shut down the government and i think the link between the dreamers who i fully support and keeping the government open and functioning just isn't there and it's a mistake to link the two. >> congressman, let me ask you about this other matter that is royaling washington right now and obviously a source of great thought, the revelations about the staff secretary, high-ranking white house aid,

somebody that had access to every piece of pipe there crossed the president's desk. it's emerging not only that there were credible domestic violence allegations against rob porter that the white house was aware of while in the senior role, allegations he denies but role but also the allegations were sufficient to deny him a security clearance, as a member of the oversight committee, what exactly are your concerns here and what do you think should happen next? >> one of the biggest concerns i have, rachel, is a conspiracy, if you can put it that way, between the republicans in the house, especially in our committee, and the white house to make sure that nothing is investigated. nothing is pursued. no subpoenas are issued. we're chaired by trey gowdy, who was the head of benghazi. his hand got tired of writing subpoenas. he wrote millions of pages of documents. millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went nowhere.

this from a claude that claimed to be so concerned about the compromise of hillary clinton's e-mails with classified material. here we now have a known wife abuser, violent abuse, as the secretary of the white house staff, given some kind of clearance status, protected at harvard. we wrote the white house, as you pointed out earlier, in june asking about information about security clearances that were provided to people like michael flynn and jared kushner who had issues that were flagged. and interim security clearances being granted to people of questionable character. we asked to follow by the chairman to issue stephen paddock -- subpoenas because we got nothing.

crickets, nothing. we need to have mr. porter's testimony, we need john kelly in front of our committee explaining himself. we need hope hicks who apparently has been dating mr. porter and wrote the white house defense of him when the allegations first surfaced. and maybe the white house counsel who apparently was given some of this information several weeks ago, we don't know what he did with it. there's a lot here going on and this is in the oval office of the white house. >> congressman jerry connelly, thank you for the update in terms of tonight's shutdown and also on this story. >> thank you, rachel, any time. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. with the most lobster dishes of the year. new dueling lobster tails has two tails that'll fight to be your favorite. one topped with creamy shrimp and scallops, the other... steamed with lemon and herbs. and no, you're not dreaming, classics like lobster lover's dream are back too,

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timing is everything. on monday of this week, the house intelligence committee voted unanimously to release a democratic memo. a democratic memo that rebuts republican claims that the fbi and justice department abused their powers when they got a surveillance warrant for former trump campaign aide carter page. that memo went to the white house and that starts a clock ticking. the president has five days to review this democratic memo and determine whether or not he will block its release to the public. that clock started ticking on monday night. tuesday chief of staff john kelly said the president had the memo on his desk but hasn't yet read it because, quote, it's pretty lengthy.

it's ten pages. but that five-day count down clock had been ticking since the night before. what if he doesn't get to the end in five days, it's ten-pages long. there's worry that the president will block it or redact it. tonight twhe wall street journa is saying the white house is likely to release the memo. they're haggling on which parts to redact. think about the timing here. you know how things happen on friday night, tomorrow we could have the government shutdown, the opening ceremony of the winter olympics and the democratic memo unleashed and all the other nonsense that always happens on fridays now. timing is everything. uh oh. well, you know, you're getting older. um, you might be experiencing some, ah, sensations.

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and eat donut holes from a little while because i'm back live at midnight eastern time. you and i together will ring in the second government shutdown in two weeks. i'm delighted. that does it for now. see you in a bit. it's time for the "last word with lawrence o'donnell." p good evening, lawrence. >> good evening, rachel. but what if there's a miracle solution at 10:30 or 11:00? >> then i will go home and walk my dog. >> i'll stick around if you stick around and p if they're still crashing into a government shutdown i guess i'll be here at 1:00? >> 1:00. the problem is this is going to be a government shutdown that probably lasts for a matter of hours which probably means we're covering the entire duration of the shutdown live i guess. >> that could be history making television in its way. >> i know. i have a feeling