years ago, it's natural they are ahead. it's the structural impulses around gender and race that make voters and media comfortable covering white men. >> all right. thank you so much for joining us. the rachel maddow show is on before. pete buttigieg is on your show. >> i never met him before. someone said, i would like to introduce you to mayor pete. i said, hi. now i'm nervous. thanks for joining us this hour. as chris mentioned, in a few minutes, sitting at this desk with me will be democratic presidential candidate pete buttigieg. i never met him before. i'm looking forward to that. tonight, all eyes remain on paris. the historic cathedral of notre

dame is still smoldering at this hour. the fire that broke out there today horrified the world as it burned through this 850-year-old world landmark, gutting the spire, which you see falling there, reaching one of the iconic towers of the cathedral. paris firefighters were able to contain the fire, contain it after six hours, even though they weren't able to completely put it out. they say they were able to save the cathedral's facade and bell towers. the ap reports paris prosecutors ruled out arson. they are treating it as an accident. they can't say much more than that. a major renovation, multimillion dollar had started to repair water damage to the spire. it is possible that that construction renovation is part of what happened here. as yet, the cause remains unknown. seeing notre dame burn during holy week in particular is as

painful as it is unimaginable for the world's catholics. the cathedral is just as much as it means to catholics worldwide, the cathedral is just as much a symbol of france, just as much a symbol of europe. it's a world landmark. notre dame was there during the crusades. it survived long rage bombardment during world war ii -- excuse me, world war i. it's a miracle it was spared during world war ii. after the fire was contained, the french president vowed to rebuild. he announced a fund-raising campaign toward that end will begin tomorrow to restore it. we will continue to monitor the situation in paris tonight. we will keep you updated. as i said, it appears at this point still be smoldering. it's 3:00 a.m. firefighters say they have it contained. here at home, it has been a busy news day.

inside a newsrooms today, today has been a notable day. the 2019 pulitzer prizes were awarded. for public service journalism, considered the most prestigious of all the pulitzers, it went this year to the south florida sun sentinel for its coverage of the school shooting in parkland, florida, last february. for exposing failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the deadly shooting rampage. the national reporting medal went to the staff of "the wall street journal" for uncovering president trump's secret hush money payments during his campaign to two women who claimed to have had affairs with him. that reporting ultimately led to a federal prison sentence for the president's longtime lawyer michael cohen and it led to the president himself being named by federal prosecutors as individual one, responsible for the commission of those two

felonies for which cohen is being jailed. of course, michael cohen's plea deal and cooperation in that case ultimately led to him testifying before congress and the many alleged financial improprieties by trump and his company that cohen laid out in that testimony have become fodder for multiple aggressive congressional investigations. today being tax day though, perhaps the most fitting pulitzer prize went to david barstow and russ butener for an exhaustive 18 month investigation of president trump's finances which debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges. this was the incredibly detailed "new york times" investigation published in october. this was the first sentence of that. quote, president trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright

fraud which greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents. an investigation by "the new york times" has found. that investigation has earned a pulitzer prize. this was the story that among other things laid out a simple fraud scheme that trump and his siblings ran for years through a fake building supply and maintenance company. it was tax evasion essentially accomplished via money laundering. that is just one of the schemes unearthed by the reporting. within the past week, two of the reporters who received this price today were able to further report that the president's older sister, a federal appellate court judge, resigned from the judiciary, retired from the bench just after she was informed that she would be the subject of a judicial conduct review for her alleged participation in those tax schemes. retiring from the bench after being notified that judicial conduct investigation had begun was her only sure fire get out

of jail free end -- get out of jail free card to end that investigation. judicial conduct investigations can only happen for people who are serving as judges. when she gave up her seat and her robe, she got out of that. i know this goes without saying. the reason we need 18 month long investigations by teams of journalists at "the new york times" into the tax history of the sitting president of the united states is not because they do that for every one. the reason that's happening in this presidency is because donald trump really is the first president in four decades, the first president in the whole post-watergate era to refuse to release his tax returns as a candidate or as president. the president has now hired a brand-new team of lawyers whose job specifically is to keep the president's tax returns secret. any related financial information as well, we learned today. here is the latest letter from

trump's secrecy lawyers sent to the general counsel of the treasury department which oversees the irs in this latest letter. they believe the request for six years of the president's taxes from the chairman of the house ways and means committee is an illegal request. never mind, they say, that the language of the law is plain as day. the law says, black letter law, it says that the irs shall furnish the chairman of the ways and means committee with any tax return he requests. never mind that say trump's new lawyers. the treasury department should view that as an illegal request, refuse to hand over trump's tax returns. they say the reason he shouldn't get the president's tax returns despite the letter of the law is because that chairman of the ways and means committee is a liar. nobody believes him when he says he wants the president's tax returns for legitimate congressional oversight. if you won't take our word for it, well, here are some

republicans in congress who also think that he is a liar. that's their argument. as i have noted frequently, i am not a lawyer. but i am really sure that it is not a hugely compelling legal argument to block a congressional request depending on black letter statute to just say, liar, liar, pants on fire, everybody knows that guy sucks. i mean, i understand these new lawyers gotta make their billable hours, but i don't know -- i really don't know what leg they are standing on. the same lawyers today have also sent a letter to trump's accounting firm. they should not comply with a subpoena from the house oversight committee, which has demanded ten years of trump's financial records. trump's attorneys said they were formally putting them on notice, which they describe as a threat

of legal action. elijah cummings said this accounting firm expressed a willingness to hanovd over the material. they didn't want to just hand it over on the basis of a document request. they wanted to be legally required. chairman cummings' office tells us he has sent that subpoena. as the president's newly hired tax secrecy lawyers tell them not to respond to that subpoena. also tonight, "the new york times" is inintelligence committee issued subpoenaed to deutsche bank and other banks seeking information about president trump's finances and the lenders' business dealings with russians. they made clear deutsche bank is one of the top investigative

priorities as they follow the money around various trump scandals. they want to figure out why that bank, which has a long, rich history of russian money lau laundering, why that bank was the only bank willing to do business on any scale with donald trump, even as he repeatedly defaulted on their loans and even occasionally sued them instead of paying them back. deutsche bank's spokeswoman says the company is engaged in a productive dialogue with the committees. quote, we remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations in a manner consistent with our legal obligations. because of that presumably deutsche bank and these other banks that have received congressional subpoenaed, presumably they will also now receive letters from trump's new lawyers hired specifically to keep his taxes secret, presumably those lawyers will be writing to the banks any minute as well telling them, don't respond, it's a subpoena, but don't do it. this is those tax secrecy

lawyers' time to shine. speaking of things being kept secret, to benefit the president, today the justice department announced william barr will be finished making all of his redactions from special counsel robert mueller's report as of thursday morning. on thursday morning, that is when he will finally release his version of mueller's report, complete with the redactions decided on by his redaction team. because attorney general william barr said in congress that the redaction team is working night and day on cutting all these various elements out of mueller's report, these four different areas of redactions, which he insists must be in the report, there's a redaction team working on that. he says it involves staff from the special counsel's office as well as other justice department staff. today we asked the justice department and the special counsel's office if they would tell us who is on this redaction team deciding what will be cut

out of mueller's report. both the justice department and the special counsel's office declined to comment, which is the sort of thing we're getting used to. on thursday, we will get something. we do not know what is going to be cut out of mueller's report. we don't know how much of mueller's report will survive this redaction team treatment. we know that bill barr says the redacting is four broad areas, including grand jury material which could only be released by court order. bill barr won't ask a court to issue that order. thursday morning will be the first time we read any of robert mueller's actual words except for the sentence fragments barr gave us in his summary of mueller's findings three weeks ago. that was the letter in which he assured everyone while he couldn't show us really any of the mueller report, he could offer us his own summary of the report's principle conclusions. those conclusions were, no crime in here. everything is fine.

nothing to see. return to your hopes. we will have this cleaned up in a minute. that is why what is redacted from the report and how much will be redacted from the report is going to be so important to see. thursday will be our first chance to see how bill barr's representation of what mueller found stacks up against what mueller actually found. we will get this mueller report thursday morning, minus whatever is still being blacked out by barr. going into this past weekend, a lot of people thought the mueller report might get dropped saturday or sunday of this weekend. i didn't want that to happen. you think, i didn't want that to happen. the people who didn't want that to happen is people announcing the start of their presidential bids this week. pete buttigieg announced his candidacy in south bend. to underscore the mayor theme,

he had three other mayors on hand to introduce him. may e they were there to vouch for why the experience of being an american mayor makes someone well equipped for the u.s. presidency. senator cory booker kicked off his campaign officially this weekend in newark, new jersey, where he served as mayor for seven years before going to the united states senate. we also had congressman eric swalwell announce this weekend in dublin, california, where he launched his political career as a city counselor less than a decade ago. not a mayor but another 2020 candidate touting their experience at the city level. of course, all of those candidates who launched formally this weekend join castro who did serve as a cabinet secretary under president obama. his political experience prior to that was being the dynamic young mayor of san antonio,

texas. you are seeing there's a little bit of a theme for at least one slice of the candidates in this year's 2020 field. i should mention while we are humming this tune, that people in vermont still identify as bernie sanders not just with his time in the senate or congress but with eight years as the mayor of burlington, vermont. he released ten years of his tax returns today after a few months of saying, soon, soon, soon, i will do it soon. the returns show that senator sanders' income shot up after his last presidential bid thanks in large part to a book he pub lired sho published after the election. today was the deadline to file first quarter fund-raising reports with the fec. it's early. i know. if you are in the habit of parsing these numbers, i think there's a couple of different ways to look at them, depending on if you are a glass half full

or glass half empty person. on one hand, we have seen a lot made of the fact that nobody in the race right now is matching the kind of totals that we saw in 2007 from the democratic field. that year, hillary clinton brought in $26 million in the first quarter with obama stunning the political world by raising nearly as much, $25 million. neither of them is an incumbent, raising 26 and $25 million in the first quarter. yeah. john edwards and bill richardson brought in respectable hauls. that last time, democrats were running without a democratic incumbent. here is the equivalent numbers from this year. bernie sanders has raked in over $18 million. that puts him ahead of what john edwards had this time in 2007. even with that, you can see none of the democratic candidates is hitting the types of numbers that the candidates hit in 2007.

that said, in 2007, the donations to democratic candidates weren't being split up 5 million ways among the different people running on the democratic side. when there are fewer candidates, maybe each of them gets a bigger piece of the pie. that said, if any democrat is going to beat trump, you want the whole democratic pie to be higher as george w. bush might say. you want the whole democratic pie to be really big. you want fund-raising numbers that represent democratic engagement and interest and commitment. on that point, there are some really encouraging numbers for democrats. when it comes to -- you look not just as the size of the piles of money that each candidate has put together. look at the number of people who are making donations to democratic candidates this year. for example, go back to 2007. in the first quarter of 2007, obama had 104,000 donors, which astronomical. hillary clinton had a very large

number herself. over 60,000 donors. obama blew everybody away with getting more than 100,000 in the first quarter. look at this year. apples to apples comparison. first quarter of the year before the election. in the first quarter, 525,000 people have donated to bernie sanders alone. o'rourke, buttigieg, harris, warren, over 130,000 people to donate to their campaign. they have all got more donors tapped than obama had at this time in that legendary race in 2008. do donors are giving smaller amounts, which is a good thing. everybody -- i'm sure every candidate likes big checks. if you get small checks early, that means the campaigns can go back to the small donors again and again and again for more small donations without worrying that those donors will max out or that they need to expand their mailing list. that's good news in terms of the number of donors who are giving

to democratic candidates. we got one final metric this weekend that i think is -- it's its own kind of thing. buttigieg raised $7 million in his first quarter, which is pretty impressive for somebody who had no name recognition as recently as a couple of months ago and still has a lot of name pronunciation trouble among people who like him. after that $7 million, on top of that he raised in the first quarter, buttigieg's campaign reports that he added another million dollars in donations yesterday. actually, just yesterday afternoon. actually, just yesterday over the course of four hours. within four hours of officially launching his campaign yesterday in south bend, he added another million dollars to what he raised. that's more than some candidates have brought in this whole first

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i'm pleased to say joining us is pete buttigieg, the mayor of south bend, indiana and a candidate for president. your speech this weekend was very moving. >> thank you. >> your husband says you wrote it yourself that morning. >> i'd been working on it a little more than that. >> when you think about big moments like this in your life, are you a guy who likes to work alone or do you like to work with a team? are you a collaborative person? are you a hermit? >> i have a great team. i love collaborating with them to get things set up. there's a line of poetry, i can't remember where it's from, the final decisions are made in silent rooms. when i have a big decision or

big body of work, once i consulted and gotten advice, that's when i spend time with myself and put my head down, think, reflect and often that or sometimes in the shower when i'm thinking to myself in more laid back fashion or when a lot of best ideas come. >> 90% of my best ideas have come in the shower. that's why i spend too much time in the shower. in terms of how things have gone so far, you have had a lot of very good press early on in this run. in our you are getting good press about getting good press. you are polling very well. your fund-raising numbers are really big. the response according to your campaign in terms what the fund-raising response was yesterday to your formal announcement is very impressive. is this what you planned? are you surprising yourself? >> the trajectory is faster than what we expected. we're pleased. we believed and hoped the message would land, that we would get traction, people would be excited about the idea of a new generation of leadership and somebody coming from a different

background like a mayor. all of that is as we hoped. the pace of it has been extraordinary. at the same time, i'm trying not to fool myself. obviously, it's no small thing to find yourself third in the polls related to the american presidency. on the other hand, when i go out on the street after this, the majority of people who pass by will not recognize me. it's april. we have a very long way to go in the process. >> how do you scale up? how do you learn how to scale up to running a national level campaign? you have do that not just for the general but in order to win the primary. i know you have worked on presidential campaigns before. kerry, obama. you have seen them in operation from a ground level perspective. how do you learn how to run when you have never done anything remotely like this before? >> we're conscious of what we don't know. we're trying to take on advice from people who have seen some version of this movie before from people who were involved in the obama campaign to people involved in the gary hart campaign to learn how this

works. recognize that each cycle is different. it has different dynamics and we're determined. somebody like me shouldn't do something like this unless we're prepared to do it in a novel way, an original way. we want to make sure we're writing our own playbook. organizationally, some thing u.s. have things you have to get muscle memory. organizing in different constituencies. there are other things the playbook is changing. digital is a good example. we democrats like to think of ourselves as the sophisticated ones. we got outclassed on digital persuasion in 2016. i'm not just talking about the cheating and nefarious stuff. i'm just saying if you look at how much we spent on deaigital,n so many races it was the republicans who were seeing more of what could be done with digital involvement. from a tactical perspective, you don't have the firms that you have around tv organized in the same way in the digital space.

we have to build up some of the talent and capacity in house. it's a mix of building a great organization that you think can power you through in those early states and listening to people who have insights. as you said, we have never been doing something like this in this way. we need to learn from those who have seen these things before. >> on policy, you have floated some big idea policies. yet when you go to your website and go to the issue section, you compare the way you are running to somebody like elizabeth warren is running, you have been less specific on policy matters. are you doing that because you have some idea of all the policies you want to roll out, you want to do it later? are you trying to avoid being pinned down? >> part of it is sequencing. i want everybody to understand where i stand on any important policy issue. we tried to make that clear in interviews, statements. you will see more of a web presence that will make that clear. i think as democrats, we sometimes have a tendency to lead with the policy minutia.

it's important for people to know where we stand. but i think one thing conservatives did effectively was they claimed the idea space. they talked about values. won a lot of the arguments or won the media space for their values, beginning with the reagan administration, in such a way that even democrats were compelled to do what i would consider largely conservative things. when they took office, at any time in my lifetime. so it's important to me to make sure that we're winning a values argument. that's why i talk about freedom and why freedom can't just be property of the conservative movement to the republicans. that means constructive freedom. to me something like the work that goes on on consumer financial protection is freedom. you are not free if you are prevented from suing a credit card company after they rip you off. health care is freedom. it secures our freedom to have access to healthcalalth care. also, i believe that politicians

who talk about things like medicare for all should have some account of the glide path to get there. that's why i described how i think if we design it in the right way, making a version of medicare available on the exchanges for people to buy into as an option will be the pathway to get there. i feel i have been specific about the goals and about the outlines of the policy design i think helps us get there. i also am looking forward to a process where we continue to find the best way to articulate some of these and have humility about what happens when all of your campaign statements collide with the reality of governing. look at something like the new deal. that didn't happen because it was completely formulated by fdr as a campaign promise, brought in in a briefcase and deployed. it happened because there was a set of values and priorities that encountered the reality on the ground. when we think about the green new deal, which i think we should admit, even though it's attractive, i think we should admit it's more a set of goals

right now than a fully ar tk la articulated policy. we need to lay down boundaries but recognize that that's going to evolve when we actually hit the ground in the policy context, hopefully, after a democrat comes into power in 2020. >> i think one of the values that americans are talking about more and realizing we have more of an emotional attachment than we thought was the idea of oufr c our constitutional norms about how we govern. because this president has been radically dismissive of so many of them. in that context in which we have a president who is revoking security clearances against his political enemies, he is talking about banning muslims from the united states and campaigning on that, doing things that are unimaginable even in a fiction, i think the idea of radically changing structural things in the american government,

especially when the republican party is now led by donald trump and his supporters, that is -- that feels different than it might coming out of president obama or it might at any other recent time. the idea of ee boliabolishing t electoral college, expanding the supreme court with a different method of picking judges. those are bold ideas, bold structural ideas about protecting our democracy. it also feels like we're balanced on tiptoe right now in terms of our constitutional inherry tai inheritance. >> it's at moments when the soundness of our democratic setup, especially at its seams, moments when it's being tested that we need to pay the most attention to the structure. a presidency like the one we are living through wouldn't have even by possible unless there were structural problems in our economy and in our democracy that a candidate like he was was able to exploit.

i think this is actually the exact moment where we have to look at how we shore up our democracy. you think about some of the concern and anxiety and grief over the stra buiability of ourm in the '07s which l70s. look at various seasons for structural improvement. they aren't the most stable or easy times for our country. the question before us is, can our democracy accommodate the forces that are hitting us through the 21st century? i think it can. to get there, we have to use some of the most elegant features built into the constitution like the ability to amend it to make our country stronger. i think we ought to have that level of ambition. the difference between us and this president is we're proposing using the constitution's processes for a kind of self-healing. if we realize that this would be a fairer place if everyone's vote counted the same and if the way we picked our president was to tally the votes and give it

to the person who got the most votes, then now is a moment to make that change through a process that is deliberate. >> are you worried you are giving the trump era republican party an idea that they should start amending the constitution or they should start changing the structure of the supreme court? >> they have. the republicans in the senate changed the numbers of justices on the supreme court to eight. until they took power. then they changed it back to nine. a lot of what we're talking about is no less a shattering of norms than what the other side has done. we're proposing it to do it in a way that's more inclusive. i would say more constitutionally sound, more appropriate. will by the nature of the checks and balances in our system, have to go through a thoughtful and rigorous process. i think that if they try tinkering with the system -- they are doing it under the table in so many ways. if they tried doing it more nak nakedly, they will encounter

resistance. most americans don't want this. it's precisely for that reason that they have to interfere with democracy with voter suppression or clinging on an electoral college that overrules the will of the american people. it's because the american people by and large don't want what they are selling that they are relying on manipulations of our political structure in order to keep their agenda in play. >> mayor pete buttigieg, will you stay here? >> i would love to. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. we'll be right bak stay with us or to carry on a legacy? its show of strength... or its sign of intelligence? in crossing harsh terrain... or breaking new ground? this is the mercedes-benz suv family. if you've never seen yourself in a mercedes, you've never seen these offers. lease the gla 250 for just $379 a month at the mercedes-benz spring event. hurry in before april 30th.

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background that is rare. there's this gigantic field of democratic candidates. it's like two baseball teams. you could play each other. besides you and gabbard, there aren't candidates who were in the military. can you talk about your decision why you picked the navy. >> there had been a family military tradition. i had some excuse for not serving at any particular moment when i was in college. when i got the chance to study overseas, i was tied up in that. there were several americans at oxford who were in my class who were graduates of the naval academy. i admired those people. the thing that put me over the edge was a campaign visit. i was knocking on doors as a volunteer for obama and was blown away by how many times i would talk to a young person who was on their way to basic

training or into recruitment. i began to realize just how stark the class and regional divides had become. i could count on one hand the number of people i knew at a place like harvard who had gone on to serve. i began to feel like i was part of a problem. i grew up on the tradition of people like john f. kennedy. experienced in military service the most racially integrated environment that he could have been in at the time, found himself on owe kwaequal terms w sons of farmers. george h.w. bush. it was expected they would serve. it helped them get to know people of different backgrounds. i was not from a wealthy or powerful family. had the privilege of this amazing education. began to think, maybe that's a reason i should be contributing as should be as liable to getting called up rather than one more thing that separates me from other people i knew from my region or hometown who served. i went in for the commission in

intelligence in 2009. i studied arabic. it came back the recruiter wrote down i studied aerobics. >> which would be useful. >> i wound up as a command fitness instructor. it helped me connect with different americans, especially when i was deployed to afghanistan. i had almost nothing in common with them, different politics, generation, racially, regionally. you learn to trust each other. that's what the job requires. i want more americans to have that. i don't want you to go to war to get it. that's why i think national service will become a theme of the 2020 campaign. we really want to talk about the threat to social cohesion that helps characterize this presidency but also just this era. one thing we could do that would change that would be to make it if not legally obligatory but a social norm that anybody after

18 spends a year in national service. afterwards, whether it's civilian or military, it's the first question on your college application if you are applying for college or the first question when you are being interviewed for a job if you go right into the work force. we will have to create more service opportunities and find a way to fund it. i think it's worth approaching. >> i feel like that point and you discussing those difficulties with it sort of strikes me on that. it has resonated the civilian and military divide is something i have been interested about. it's something that i have struggled with because the easy answer is that there should be a draft. the easy answer that there should be a draft is easy and sounds like a great solution to everybody except the military who doesn't want to deal with a lot of people who don't want to be there. it's a high skills, high tech environment. voluntary service, professionals. this idea of national service

that's not necessarily a draft, i heard so many smart people left, right and center talk about that for the last 15 years. i feel like it's this constant drawing board idea. nobody ever -- somebody pilots a thing here or there. there doesn't seem to be any appetite to make it happen because it will involve some level of raising expectations if not creating a mandate. we seem wired to reject that at every level. i don't have faith that something like that gets off the drawing board. >> i think it's like some of the democratic reforms we were talking about earlier. it's one of the ideas that everybody likes. it was always important and never urgent. how would that ever kind of hold its own in a policy debate where we deal with kids in cages and we have to deal with climate change and all these pressing, burning issues? one of the things i'm trying to have us have a conversation about is what are the conditions that made this moment, this presidency possible? one of the them i think is a fraying in the social cohesion we experience.

some of that stewardship of our society, i think requires policy intervention that makes something like what national service could bring us a little more urgent than we maybe have given it credit for. i get it would be challenging. if we made it more of a priority, i think we could establish that as a norm by the time my kids are going to college. >> are you going to have kids? >> i hope so. don't have any yet. >> do you have plans? >> this running for president has slowed down the path. >> you are talking about it? >> my husband -- he is made for a lot of things. he is a great educator. he has become a great public figure, coming out of the gate. he is going to be an amazing father. i can't wait to see -- i hope i will be good at it, too. i can't wait to see him have that chance. >> i want to talk about a lot of these things in more depth. on that point, actually, let me ask you -- i will acknowledge that this is an awkward question.

i was a rhodes scholar. i went up in 1995. you went up a decade later. i was the first openly gay american rhodes scholar. i got there and i had come out in college. i applied for the scholarship as an openly gay person. came up in the collection process process. i learned i was the first american that ever came out. that was a decade before you. you went through college and then the rhodes scholarship process and the getting the rhodes scholarship and going to work for mckenzie and joining the navy and deploying to afghanistan and coming home and running for mayor and getting elected before you came out at the age of 33. i bring this up. i acknowledge it's a difficult question because it's bad you didn't come out until you were 33, but i think it would have killed me to be closeted that long. i think about what it takes as a human being to know something and to have to bifurcate your public life. for you to have had all of those

difficult transitions and experiences and aiming as high as you were and not coming out until your early 30s, i wonder if that was hurtful to you. if it hurt you. >> it was hard. it was really hard. >> coming out is hard, but being in the closet is harder. >> yeah. that's what i mean. it was and it wasn't. it took me plenty of time to come out to myself. i did not the way you did or the way my husband did figure out at such an early age -- i should have. there are certain -- plenty of indications by the time i was 15 na i cou that i could say, this kid is gay. i guess i needed to not be. there's this war that breaks out inside a lot of people. when they realize that they might be something they are afraid of. it took me a very long time to resolve that. i did make sure as a final way of coming out to myself to come out to at least a couple of people my life before i took office. i knew that i didn't want that psychological pressure, at least

not being out to somebody. >> you swore them to secrecy? >> they understood this was a sensitive thing. they pointed out as your friends do, patting you on the back, that i hadn't made it easy on myself. at that point, professionally i had two things that mattered to me. one was being an officer in the military, in the reserve. the other was being an elected official, in indiana. neither of which is exactly lgbt friendly. both of which i assumed were totally incompatible with being out. both of which were meaningful. one of the risks that i think people with meaningful jobs have -- especially people in politics -- is because your job is meaningful, a lot of the meaning in your life comes from your job, which is a problem. part of what is needed to be good at your job is to have something worth more to you than winning. you have to be ready to walk away in order to deserve it. i did get a lot of meaning from that work. in some ways because it was so

demanding, i almost didn't mind for a long time that i didn't have much of a personal life. i did not have a dating life while i was closeted or anything like that. the city was a jealous bride for a long time and kept me busy. it was the deployment that put me over the top. you get to be one person. you don't know how long you have on this earth. by the time i came back, i realized, i gotta do something. >> were you sure when you came out it would cost you reelection? >> i was pretty sure it was going to be a big complication. i had no idea -- i felt like things were going well in the city. i had done a good job by the people of south bend. i had some level of trust that i would be rewarded for that with a reelection. there's no way to know. no executive in indiana had been out. it was kind of a leap of faith. i just -- i had -- i rowrote it down, dropped into the south bend tribune and saw what would happen. >> and got re-elected with 80%

of the vote. >> there you go. you trust people and in this case they reciprocated that trust. that was more than i got elected in the first place. i guess gives me encouragement. don't get me wrong, as you know, there's plenty of ugliness from all over the place. most people i think are either supportive or even enthusiastic about the idea of the first out person going this far. or they find a way to let me know they don't care. that's historic, too. one day the way this will work is if a mayor is trying to figure out how to come out, you go to the next rubber chicken dinner you're going to and your date's the same sex, that's that. people figure it out and get on with the evening. it didn't feel that way in indiana in 2015. one of the things i think i can do before the first vote is cast is maybe make it a little easier by being here for the next person who comes along. >> you've written the history in some ways about how to do it and the next person gets to live it.

a couple more questions for you. will you stay? >> please. >> mayor pete buttigieg is running for president. stay with us. or pete buttigieg s running for president. stay with us fisher investments tailors portfolios to your goals and needs. some only call when they have something to sell. fisher calls regularly so you stay informed. and while some advisors are happy to earn commissions whether you do well or not. fisher investments fees are structured so we do better when you do better. maybe that's why most of our clients come from other money managers. fisher investments. clearly better money management. (speaking in foreign language) i'm sorry i don't understand... ♪ help! i need somebody ♪ help! not just anybody ♪ help! you know i need someone it's kind of unfair that safe drivers have to pay as much for insurance... as not safe drivers! ah! that was a stunt driver. that's why esurance has this drivesense® app.

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back with us for the interview is pete beauuttigieg. mr. mayor, thank you for sticking with us. this administration has embraced dictators and strong men in a way we haven't seen before this in this country. i'm thinking about president trump's failure to rebuke the saudis for killing jamal khashoggi, the declarations of love for kim jong-un. what would your posture be towards those types of world leaders that this president has embraced? would you meet with people like that, not meet with people like that. >> i actually think the emergency emergence or reinforcement of figures like that are an example why it's so important to have america be credibly defending our values.

right now we're not credibly doing anything in the international scene. i still believe in american values. anytime we as a countries have tried to do something that was in our interests but went against our values it caught up to us. the core of american foreign policy in the future as the next president tries to re-establish u.s. credibility and make clear what the standards will be for the commitment of u.s. troops in unilateral military action in the future which i hope is a much higher bar going forward but as any of that is resolved, it has to begin with the idea of american interests and val ruse inseparable. when we're encountering competitors or adversaries we have to recognize the american model is not viewed as convincing as it used to be because of instability here at home and spacemeembarrassments the white house. a lot of people around the world might say the chinese model is

not looking so bad right now. the russian model and that's why we need american values out there. you have to have a u.s. leader willing to draw lines and hold leaders accountable when they do murderous things and who is extremely selective with when you use the prestige and power of the presidency either through a meeting or through a favorable comment to elevator lift up a leader of any other country. >> the relationship between this president and putin in particular has its own dynamics. the redacted version of robert mueller's report is going to be released to the public on thursday according to justice department. do you have expectations what's going to be in it? >> i have expectations that we'll be frustrated because of the redactions and because you know, so often we're i think we still have this instinct as democrats horrified by the abuses and the failures and the character of this presidency that there will be some kind of piece of evidence out there that demonstrates conclusively to

everybody he's not a good guy. and what i hope we can remember is that there are a lot of people certainly in the industrial midwest where i live who already know that he's not a good guy. they didn't vote for him because they think he's a good guy. they voted for him for a different set of reasons. this isn't going to change that. we need to separate the importance of the mueller report for our country and cleaarifyin what happened to the extent that it will with what we wish it would do politically. on the political side, i think the only pathway to getting to be a better country is to decisively defeat trump and trumpism at the ballot box. as for the report, that's for congress and the american people to figure out once we've gotten a look at it. >> in terms of what's going to happen over the course of your campaign for president, what's going to happen between now and 2020, one of the ways democrats will make national news every day is by pursuing various investigations of this president including a whole bunch of subpoenas that wen out to deutsche bank, a fight whether the president should be handing

over his tax returns, the chairman of the ways and means committee. do you think that dras in congress are doing the right thing by pursuing that course of action? >> yes, the american people need to know what's going on. we can't confuse that with the message. that's part of our oversight responsibility to ensure good government. we also need a message that will make sense as i often say in 2030, 2040, or 205 had when i'm the same age as the president is now. a message would not resolve around the deficiencies of the current person in the white house. >> am i right you won an essay contest for writing about bernie sanders? >> profiles in courage essay contest. i was 18. >> the world spins faster every year. thank you for being here. first time we've had you on the show. i hope you come back. >> that does it for us tonight. we'll see you again tomorrow.

it is time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." good evening. >> that was an extraordinary interview. i want to get your reaction to the discussion you started which is a discussion i believe we have never seen before in presidential campaign history about the challenge of coming out and what that -- what was your reaction to pete buttigieg's plains to you about why it was so much slower a process for him than it was for you. >> it's weird because he's sitting right here. i'll give you my response as if that's not true. you know, i think that there is a conversation that happens among gay people that is different than a conversation that happens among straight people when it comes to people coming out. it's not about homophobia. it's that gay people, for straight people, gay people have nothing interesting going on in terms of their sexual orientation till they come out. then the act of coming out is a notable th