it's a good day when somebody who's been on a ventilator not breathing on their own for a week and who's been very sick can finally be off a ventilator. different hospitals have different things. here they have clapping and you can see around the wards that just gives people hope. >> bye! [ cheers and applause ] >> i call the doctors, the

nurses, everybody. they're excellent. [ cheers and applause ] >> i want people to know if your loved one's in the hospital, we're holding their hand. we're celebrating the little things with them. we're making sure they get to facetime you. nobody is alone in this. >> we start the show tonight with more uplifting moments from medical workers. not just telling you about the tough times on the front lines, but some of the uplifting moments where patients get out and survive. and hopefully thrive. welcome to friday. it is "mtp daily." we are in what you might call opening weekend in america. roughly 20 states have begun to ease some restrictions. some more quickly than others. several more states are planning to begin easing restrictions soon. of course it raises two major questions. are we ready? and if not, what are we willing to tolerate as a society? some of these states have seen a

decline in cases but others have their single largest day of confirmed cases just yesterday. it's worth noting in addition to minnesota and kansas, arizona, virginia, wisconsin also recorded their single biggest day of cases just yesterday. and new jersey, south carolina, and iowa all had their deadliest days yesterday. now, we are at the beginning of a national experiment where lives and livelihoods are both at stake. but the curve of new cases on your screen right now show us what a precarious point we're in. especially given the lack of adequate testing in this country. shutting down the economy for six straight weeks has threatened the curve. but the number of new cases is still hovering around 30,000 per day. it's not a plateau. we've not bent it downward. there are 2200 confirmed deaths just yesterday. when you look at the seven-day average of new cases, we have yet to see a downward trajectory

which is more worrisome when you factor in the declining numbers at this country's epicenter in new york. because as their death rate has trended down, the death rate everywhere else in this country appears to be trending up. but economic survival and quarantine fatigue are putting an enormous amount of pressure on leaders everywhere in this country to balance the economic cost with the public health risks of opening up. you are looking at scenes from a smattering of demonstrations today in this country where protesters want to reopen. hundreds descended on michigan's capitol yesterday some legally carrying firearms to lobby against the governor's emergency measures there. the picture was kind of ugly for a lot of people. at the white house today, the press secretary held her first formal briefing with reporters in over a year. she says the president is resolute that governors should take the lead in how and when to

reopen even though the president has been a vocal critic of some of the actions of governors in places like michigan where he thought she was being too strict. or georgia where he thought he was opening up too quick. but the fact is so much remains unknown right now. perhaps the scariest part of all of the states starting to reopen now is because of this virus's long incubation period, we may not know whether we're moving too fast or too slow for not many days but it may take us weeks to know if we got this right. joining me now from the midwest where he's been keeping an eye on the reopenings and the protests in this region shaquille brewster. shaq, i want to begin with the situation generally in the midwest where we've seen both the protest situation. we had the president tweeted about it in michigan saying he wants to see -- put that tweet up. he wants to see the governor put out this fire. essentially negotiate with the

protesters in some form. then we saw in wisconsin a huge spike in cases. >> reporter: that's right. you saw that spike here in illinois as well. on the protest front, this one has wrapped up for today. what you saw, yes, they do have that partisan tinge to them. they're wearing their make america great again hats or the trump flags you see out there. you also hear from the business owners who have been impacted by the shutdown and this economic shutdown. i was in wisconsin last week where you saw a protest there. a business owner was in near taers because of the impact it was having on her business. i spoke to a hairdresser earlier today. listen to what she told me about why she was here and supporting the state reopening. >> i'm losing a lot of money. i need to feed my family. i have people that i have to take care of. and that's why i am very much for opening while still maintaining social distancing and safe sanitation.

>> reporter: and to be clear, chuck, and to put this in full context, illinois today announced 105 additional coronavirus related deaths. and 3100 new cases. that was a record that you heard in this state. i'll tell you who are here at this protest at its peak it reached 20% of that number. when you put it in bigger context, yes, people are opposed to what's going on and opposed to the extensions you're seeing of the stay-at-home orders. when you put it in the larger context of how many people are still getting sick and contracting this virus, those numbers don't compare. chuck? >> yeah. let me ask you about wisconsin. here we are, we're about three weeks removed now. three and a half weeks removed from the wisconsin primary. and they have their highest case day yesterday. do officials there believe this is basically related?

>> reporter: another spike in wisconsin. what officials are not saying, they're not making the connection with the election that you had on april 7th. they're saying because the -- because of the long incubation period which you were talking about earlier, it's hard to make that direct connection. they don't know when people contracted the virus. the latest number that the state released was about 51 people who went out and voted or were poll workers, did end up contracting the coronavirus. but one thing that you're also seeing in wisconsin that you're seeing here in illinois and michigan is the republican-led legislature not in illinois because this is democratic run legislature. but republican run legislatures are pushing back and threatening to sue. wisconsin is an active lawsuit with the supreme court trying to block that extension of the stay-at-home order. chuck? >> all right. shaquille brewster starting us off on the streets of chicago there. let me go to bring you in here, peter baker. peter, it's sort of a -- we're

living an interesting experiment here. we're going to find out. what i also find interesting is the role the president both wants to play here. he doesn't want to -- he wants the country to reopen, but he doesn't want to own any individual decision. >> right. that's exactly right. so he wants -- he's sort of had it both ways. he's talked about the need to, you know, not do too quickly as you pointed out. georgia even at the same time seems more sympathetic to the protesters, the people who are couped up. sympathetic to the people whose businesses have been shuttered and whose jobs have been closed down for the moment. he wants the country to get back going again. obviously he feels that this has come along and knocked out the economy that he created or he built or he fostered or he encouraged, whatever word you want to use. that he was going to take into the fall as his main selling point. and there's a lot of impatience

at this point. app lot of frustration, a lot of people hurt. the equivalent of every single worker in 27 states, imagine that. so there are a lot of reasons why there's this pent up demand to try to reopen as quickly as possible. the danger, of course, as you pointed out is if we do it so fast it simply allowed the second wave to come back that it won't have made the difference that the president would like it to make. and we don't know the answer to that. >> i want to get at the economic situation a bit here. because one of the sort of head scratchers to me with the president, we talked about it before when it came to responding to the pandemic itself. he did not want the federal government to play point on any of this stuff. right? he wanted the states, the governors to take the lead whether it was on testing. and he's not wanted to take the lead on the economic recovery here. i don't hear him proposing ideas. he's letting steve mnuchin

handle it. letting some republican allies sort of present some positions that he will take. is he fully aware of how bad this economic outlook is? >> well, i think he is absolutely. he's keenly aware of that. his own economist kevin hassett who has come back to the white house to help him out has talked about catastrophic number ace kin to the great depression. that is a terrible position to be in. as much as the president says we're going to come right back like a rocket, that flies in the face of what most think at the moment. that it won't be that quick or that easy. it's not fundamentally broken, this economy. it's in hibernation because of the virus. but until people feel confident that that virus is under control, that virus won't come back. that will hinter as well.

might not open at the same level they had before. if you're a restaurant, you have a pretty thin margin to begin with. if you're opening with only half the seats, that doesn't help the same way -- you're not in the same position you were in february. >> very quickly can be kayleigh mcenany had her first press briefing today. she seemed to be courteous, prepared on that front. and inserted politics when she wanted to do it. i found nobody wanted to ask about mike flynn and she wanted to bring it up anyway. i found that to be the most precarious subject matter she decided to wade into. >> yeah. the president had been focused on this the last few days, his former national security adviser mike flynn, looking at the new documents coming out and make the case flynn was entrapped, if you will, by the fbi.

but the president hasn't explained whether he regrets having fired mike flynn. he was the first person to take action against mike flynn. he said he did it because he lied to the vice president about his contacts with russia. he hasn't explain fire department he changed his mind about that or why mike flynn deserved to be fired then if he hasn't. so nobody made mike flynn go and lie to the vice president or the fbi, but what the trump side is trying to point out is the fbi didn't have clean hands in their view going into this. >> right. peter baker and before that shaquille brewster for starting us off, thank you, both. now i want to go to the medical side of this debate. joining me now is the director of security at the johns hopkins school of health. let me ask you this sort of big picture question.

if so how would you prove it? >> what i would say to that is that if you look around the world at places which were earlier than us in this epidemic, we're really in the middle of se vaer crisis and put social distancing into place. that's happened in country after country around the world. there have been few exceptions to that. in our country what we saw was a rapid rise of cases. and then a plateauing at weeks after social distancing began. the same pattern as in other countries. so we know this virus spreads from person to person. we know we basically shut down personal interaction with very serious social distancing measures around the country.

we believe all public health evidence points to being the only intervention we made. and it made a huge difference. >> where would you put us right now? it is -- i sometimes am wondering if the public perception isn't really matching the picture of what we've been so focused on what happened in new york and new jersey. and as the picture gets better there, it's perhaps presenting a false positive of the nation's picture. how would you describe where we are and do you think we're -- you know, the success happening in the northeast is making people feel better than they should right now? >> what you said earlier is exactly right. the average for the country is around 30,000 cases a day. but that doesn't tell the whole story about a third or a little more than a third of the

country. states are still rising day-to-day. and another third are about even day-to-day and there are another third going down in numbers day-to-day. and that's only part of the story. many states have really ramped up their diagnostic testing capabilities. they've ramped up their public health trace and quarantine capabilities. and that's going to make them much better prepared to deal with any rising cases that comes when we lift social distancing. so it's really like we have a quilt of different epidemics at this point. we've got 50 different epidemics. if you look across the states. and depending on where you live, you may be in pretty good shape. the numbers may be very low in your state. your state may have built good capacity. in other places, the numbers are high and are still going up. and we need to learn more about the state's capacity to deal with it. we don't really have public information on a lot of these things. >> i'm curious if you were a governor in a state not in

wisconsin and you saw that wisconsin just had their highest case total day, about three and a half weeks removed from a very public event, an election. would that give you pause? >> yeah, i think what your reporter said was right. it's hard to tie those particular -- the rise we're seeing today in cases to that event, but it would give me pause to be thinking about a dramatic reopening, a quick reopening when we're having that kind of rise within the state. i'd be worried -- i'd want to know a lot about our health care capacity and the ability to absorb more sick people and our ability to be able to trace that number of new cases. that's the key to getting control of this epidemic is being able to isolate cases and trace the contacts of these

cases. and if you think about hundreds of new cases appearing within a state every day, that's difficult to get your arms around. you're going to need a very strong public health response to that. we need to get those kinds of capacities in place around the country quickly. >> there's another pattern and i think if we plotted this, it feels as if a majority of states, their biggest hot spot is either one of sort of it's either a food processing plant, a prison, a nursing home. now, what is that and how -- on the one hand we know why that is, the density and things like that. given that now we see that, it's plain as day. how should that affect our planning for the fall and our mitigation plans for the next six months? >> the first thing i'll say is it's good to think about the

fall. especially with the overlap of covid and influenza where they'll both be putting pressure on our hospitals and causing people to get sick and some unfortunately to be in intensive care units. but we're going to have rolling waves across the country between now and the fall. so we shouldn't look too far ahead, because we're going to have our own challenges in the next couple of months as the numbers rise and fall around the country. but i think it's going to be important for us to think about the measures we have in place to help businesses reopen. we need to give businesses enough guidance. we're hoping the cdc will respond so they can reduce their risk. as all these big institutions are opening. we need to do that. but you're right despite all of that, there are going to be large outbreaks in place where is they work closely together.

and we need to do everything we can in those facilities with masks and spacing and perhaps testing -- earlier testing, earlier tracing to try and get control of these outbreaks. they are going to be a big driver of cases. >> doctor, always a very sober and important voice to have on the air. thanks for coming on and sharing your expertise with us. much appreciated. >> thanks so much, chuck. up ahead, a disturbing new report on the number of workers in meat prosing plants that have tested positive for coronavirus. and later, joe biden denies the sexual assault allegation against him. denies the sexu aalssault allegation against him. it's best we stay apart for a bit, but that doesn't mean you're in this alone. we're automatically refunding our customers a portion of their personal auto premiums. we're also offering flexible payment options for those who've been financially affected by the crisis. we look forward to returning to something that feels a little closer to life as we knew it,

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welcome back. it isn't just states that are opening up. multiple meat packing plants that were shuttered are now beginning to reopen as well. this comes as the cdc today

released its findings on the coronavirus outkbraeks in meat and poultry processing facilities. nearly 5,000 employees tested positive. 20 of them have died. these numbers are believed to be an underrepresentation because not every state is required to share its data. and it doesn't account for all of the cases connected to the plants in the surrounding communities. my msnbc news colleagues have more on this. steve patterson is at a grocery store with more on the meat packing outbreaks. and garrett haake is in dallas where a lot are trying to reopen their doors today. but steve, this is a food supply chain issue. and that tension is creating even more nervousness. >> reporter: the crisis is on the health and safety issue. that's because of the nature of the business. you have to get into the

mind-set of what a food processing plant looks like. these are not vast warehouses with just workers operating some machinery in some mechanical elements. these are labor intensive lines at maximum capacity at maximum speed where it is hard to social distance let alone not bump elbows with a guy works next to you. on top of that, these are obviously low paid workers. they're incentivized to come in when sick and disabled. when they go home because of the socioeconomics of the situation, a lot of times it's family situations in communal settings. so the virus spreads further. on top of all of this, the meat processing is consolidated to three or four or five companies with the lion's share of the work. that creates a ripple effect that spreads everywhere. one of those places is right here. and really grocery stores across the country. but the owner here says he's seen a 30% increase in beef

prices which means he has to charge customers more. he's thinking of limiting the amount of meat customers carry out of the store. something he's never done. here's what he said about the unprecedented nature of what's happening. >> prices will be higher. hope that it'll never get to the point that i can't get it. i've not started limiting people, but i may have to. it's just a fact of life. i've never seen this in my life. i've been in the business over 50 years. >> reporter: despite all of the experts watching, want to make sure the food supply chain is not broken. you won't be able to walk in any local store and not find the cut of meat you're looking for. you're just going to pay a higher price, frankly. chuck, baa tok you. >> thank you, steve. we are seeing some evidence on the chicken front there's

definitely at least a slowdown in deliveries and there's a possibility that some people are hoarding which i know is something there's a concern about. let's move over to texas, garrett haake, where there's been a beginning of an opening of restaurants there. luckily it's a sunny day because i'm guessing a lot of restaurants are hoping to expand outdoor seating, mr. haake. >> reporter: that's exactly right. having a patio is a great thing in texas. my sort of informal survey of restaurants around the neighborhood, places with patios did a good deal of business outside for lunch. they seem to be doing just fine as we enter the happy hour period. a lot of social distancing. but one of the open questions had been is there going to be demand in the face of ongoing case numbers, big case numbers. better than high test days.

the answer to the demand question is yes. there are people who are ready to get back out and experience something close to normalcy. one of the two restaurants over my shoulder are at 25% of capacity. the other said he's going to wait a week to figure out whether or not this makes sense for them to come back. but you do see some of these businesses getting life. >> you talk to some of these business owners and i think the question is can they afford a lower -- to run their restaurants at a quarter capacity. some are wondering if they can or some want to see what the demand really is. >> reporter: if you stayed in business doing takeout, delivery to go, your vendors are still coming every day, right? it's a lot easier for you to get back up on your feet and probably maintain more of your staff.

if you sent your staff home and your vendors took you off your daily route, it's harder to get back up. nobody's making money at 25%, but it does give them a running start into a fuller reopening perhaps a few weeks down the line. >> garrett haake in dallas, before that steve patterson in southern california, thank you, both. up ahead, the challenge many of america's mayors are facing. kp they safely open up their cities even as their states lift restrictions? we're going to talk to the mayor of birmingham, alabama, next. mr of birmingham, alabama, next e 1e has been on your side. we've been there in person, during trying times. today, being on your side means staying home... "nationwide office of customer advocacy." ...but we can still support you and the heroes who are with you. we're giving refunds on auto insurance premiums, assisting customers with financial hardships, and our foundation is contributing millions of dollars to charities helping with covid-19 relief. keeping our promise to be on your side.

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welcome back. we continue our open question series with a quandary facing cities in this country. can they safely open back up even as their states may be scaling back restrictions? take alabama governor kay ivy went into relaxing some restrictions and allowing others to open under social distancing guidelines. the city of birmingham is keeping up their nightly cur few and a new order that residents must wear masks when they're out in public. joining me now is the mayor of birmingham, alabama. one of the things i've learned about alabama is that i believe your county jefferson county and mobile county, you don't necessarily operate under your own orders on this. the governor's orders would not

supersede in this. so you constitutionally call your own shots over and above the state. is that correct, mr. mayor? >> that's correct, chuck. i think it's important that as elected officials whether as mayors, county commissioners, or governors, as elected officials we should shut up and do more listening and we should be listening to our health experts and those in the medical field in our local areas. when they make suggestions to us in this pandemic and health crisis, we should follow them and take their recommendation. >> you're six weeks into this. what do you feel like you've learned about this virus, what you've learned about the balance between life and livelihoods? >> we are in the middle of two crises. we have a health crisis and an economic crisis. and as it relates to the health crisis, there's still a lot who need to know around data.

they are around the number of symptoms, cases, hospitalization as well as testing availability and tracking. of those five things, here at the local level, the only thing that is satisfactory is hospitalization. but there is so much more to learn as it relates to making a data driven decision around hospital tracking and tracing. we still have a lot more to learn. what i can tell you in the economic crisis, there's a lot of resilience here and innovation for how our small business owners have found unique ways to engage their customers to make sure the majority of businesses are closed. those who have to open up and engage customers in a different way, they found a way to continue to thrive. and so i'm happy for the resilience here at the local level here in birmingham. >> you issued the order that everybody has to wear masks in

public. at what -- what do you want to see next before you decide how much of the business community you allow to open up? >> again, continue to listen to the health experts. you know, the white house all the mayors across the nation. all the governors across the nation. what's satisfying before you talked about phase one. and so we have this new order in place that talks about wearing face covers because we have not satisfied all of those requirements from a health standpoint. so the things i would like to see is more data on continuing to see cases go down. more data on tracking and tracing and more testing available to make sure we're in a position from a data driven standpoint to look our residents in the face and say it is safe to go out. it's safe not to be six feet

apart. it's safe not to wear face coverings. >> how concerned are you about your city's finances and what -- you know, what are some of the bad choices you fear you're going to have to make soon? >> well, listen. like many cities across the nation, we have a heavy dependence on sales tax, use tax, lodging taxes, and occupational taxes. all of these things have take an major hit over the last six, seven weeks while a lot of these businesses have had to be shut down. and so my number one priority is to keep all of our city employees employed. but tough decision wills have to be made. i just have to find the balance on how we make these decisions on delivering services and other issues we have to make. but i am confident working with

our council we'll find creative ways to strike the balance of keeping our employees employed as well as continuing to deliver city services the way we know how to. >> when do you expect birmingham to be fully open? >> you know, that's a great question. i can tell you as having the most populated county, birmingham being in jefferson county, largest county in the state. when you have one out of five people over the age of 60. when you have a high african-american population. and unfortunately when you have so many people with pre-existing underlying health conditions. i am not sure when we open based on not having the data to track and show the residents most vulnerable it's safe now. i am hoping we continue to drive the point home that we need our health officers and health

experts to continue to make wise decisions and we'll listen to those decisions. so we're not necessarily waiting on the dates as much more we're waiting on data to provide to our residents that it's safe. >> you've made one thing clear. data, data, data. it's as fundamental as anything in this crisis. you can't make any of these decisions without a better understanding of where this virus is, where it's headed. anyway, you made it strongly. thanks for sharing your views with us. i appreciate it. >> chuck, thank you for having me. >> you got it. up next, joe biden speaks out about a former senate aide's sexual assault allegation. a fors sexual assault allegation. ing pd and overcoming challenges. usaa has been standing with them for nearly a hundred years. and we'll be here to serve you for a hundred more. ♪

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welcome back. some breaking news from capitol hill. moments ago a house committee told nbc news that an administration official told him

the white house was blocking dr. anthony fauci from testifying next week at an appropriations committee hearing on the coronavirus. we don't know the full story yet as to why dr. fauci was allegedly blocked or if it might be something as simple as a scheduling issue. we'll bring you more developments as we get them. but as you know, the intrigue around anthony fauci always seems to raise the antenna of some. and this one raised the antenna of congress. turning to the 2020 race, joe biden is unequivocally denying a former staffer's allegation he sexually assaulted her. the former vice president said today he believes all women should be heard and their claims should be investigated. he said this accusation, though, just isn't true. >> would you please go on the record with the american people. did you sexual assault tara reade? >> no. it is not true. i'm saying unequivocally it

never, never happened. and it didn't. it never happened. >> why not release any complaints that may had been made against you during your senate career? >> i'm prepared to do that. the best of my knowledge there's been no complaints to me in terms of my senate career and office and way things have been run. it's an open book. there's nothing for me to hide. nothing at all. >> you were unequivocal, mr. president, back in 2008 during the kavanaugh controversy and hearings. and you said that women should be believed. >> look, from the very beginning i've said believing women means taking the woman's claims seriously. when she steps forward and then vetted. look into it. that's true in this case as well. women have a right to be heard and the press should rigorously investigate claims they make. i'll always uphold that principle.

but in the end the truth is what matters. in this case the truth is the claims are false. i'm not going to question her motive. i'm not going to get into that at all. i don't know why she's saying this. i don't know why after 27 years all of a sudden that gets raised. i don't understand it. but i'm not going to go in and question her motive. i'm not going to attack her. she has a right to say whatever she wants to say. but i have a right to say what are the facts? check it out. >> are women to be believed? are women to be believed unless it pertains to you? >> look. women are to be believed given the benefit of the doubt if they come forward and say something that is -- they said happened to them. they should start off with the presumption they're telling the truth. then you have to look at the sirks and the facts. and the facts in this case do not exist. they never happened. and there's so many

inconsistencies in what has been said in this case. so yes, look at the facts. and i assure you it did not happen. period. period. >> the former staffer tara reade success she filed a a complaint at the time she faced harassment in biden's office. her complaint did not specifically accuse biden of swault, she said. today they're asking the national archives to search for any record of that complaint. reade's public account has changed. last year she accused him of inappropriate but not sexual touching. now she's saying he assaulted her in a corridor. she said she didn't talk about it earlier because she wasn't ready at the time. nbc news has spoken to reade multiple times. we reached out to five people reade said she told people about varying degrees. three of them said they did not

recall having any such conversation with reade. a fourth who wishes to remain anonymous told nbc news that reade did tell her about an assault. and a fifth said she talked about inappropriate touching but not assault. nbc news has reached out but have yet to hear back. we'll have much more on this story right after this commercial break. .

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denial of the sexual assault allegations against him. "the washington post" editorial page editor and msnbc contributor. her editorial page called on the former vice president to do what he did this morning. what he did this morning in an editorial earlier this week. mike, i want to start with the former vice president formally now has asked the secretary of senate to search for this record, but he is not offering access to the papers that are at the university of delaware. is that a -- is that going to hold, or are they going to relent on the papers at delaware? >> yeah, chuck, in talking with the biden campaign as we got to this point today, i think the outcome they were sort of hoping for today was a headline that sort of essentially biden calls reade's bluff. and the back story here is tara

read has told ali vitali, my colleague doing reporting on this is she did file a complaint at the time with a senate personnel office and unfortunately that only dealt with harassment, not necessarily the allegation of assault, which she is now making. and so what biden wanted to do today, especially as there was increasingly some focus on his senate papers was to make two things clear. one, that as he put it, the papers that he has donated to the university of delaware, which are still being curated and by the archivists there would not have included these kind of personnel records. but what he did do this morning was say he would direct the senate -- the secretary of the senate to petition for the national archives to search for this document and to obtain it. now i'm not an archivist. i'm not a linebackbrarian. but there is confusion whether the national archives had it. they said they were not in control of it. this new letter we just received from biden in the last few

minutes here said essentially, whoever has this document, please find it, if it exists and any documents related to it. that's a new piece, if there are any related documents as well and put it out. but of course the contention from biden and his campaign is that no such document exists. >> ruth marcus, before you were on the editorial page, you certainly spent a long time covering capitol hill. you know that place in and out you. think if this exist, we'll find it? >> i think if it -- thing is a really interesting question about whether records from this office, from this period in general have been retained. if they have been retained, if they're available some place, if this document is not among them, i think that's probative, as the lawyers would say. if it is among them, i think that will be really interesting, and it will be part of the continuing set of questions that the vice president has to answer, because there are -- and

i've covered these things going back to anita hill and clarence thomas before then judiciary committee chairman joe biden. there are a number of inconsistencies in tara reade's story, and there are a number of people who contemporaneously or near contemporaneously she told that something had happened. so there is every reason to go forward with a serious look. i thought the vice president's team did a smart thing today in asking for these records. i don't think it's hugely tenable -- it's going to be tenable not to go look in the archives at the university of delaware, even if we're looking for something that is probably not there and not going to be found. >> yeah, i was just going to say, mike, the drum -- i've talked to some who think that the real goal here of trump world is to make the release the papers sort of a drumbeat type

of situation here. biden campaign aware of that kind of drumbeat that's likely to develop? >> absolutely. chuck, i think one of the lessons they've learned today is there is no reward for taking steps for transparency. you can never provide enough transparency to satisfy your political opponents, and that's what they're discovering here. and chuck, i was actually at the event in 2011 when joe biden came to the university of delaware to sign the agreement to donate his papers. a curious footnote here which speaks to the unexpected fact that joe biden is running now and did not in 2016. the original language with the agreement with the university is that his papers would become public two years after he left public office. now in 2011, joe biden had not ruled out running for president in 2016. and i think the expectation on the part of biden if he were to run for president, it would be in immediate succession to president obama's term, not the

position we're in now four years later in 2020. so they had to revise the language there. but clearly, yes, as a lot of people are saying, there is a lot of feelings of hillary's emails all over again, and it's not a good place for the biden campaign to be in at the moment. >> ruth marcus, do you think joe biden did enough today to make advocates for women to be heard and to speak up who have been shall we say been uncomfortable in this whole story? did he do enough to those activists today? >> i thought he did a very good job of threading that needle of sounding and being respectful of a woman who comes forward and also at the same time being very assertive that this did not happen, period, period. but to go back to what mike said, i do think he is going to get some credit. i think he'll get some credit

from "the washington post" editorial board to the extent that that matters for asking for these papers. and i think it would be a little rich for the trump campaign and president trump of all people to start complaining about lack of transparency from joe biden. >> right. >> and i don't think anybody reasonably thinks we should be tromping through all of his papers there. but looking for one specific thing does seem like a reasonable request. >> right. well, as anything, the what about is something i think that's the case where the biden campaign thinks they benefit on that front when it comes to this and what aboutism as compared to trump we shall see what the voters think. mike memoli, ruth marcus, thank you both. and thank you all for being with us today and all week long. thank you for ling us in your living rooms or wherever you are holding up. we'll be back monday with more "meet the press daily." and if it's sunday, it's "meet the press." we'll will looking at life and

livelihoods. are we opening too soon? or have we been a bit too lax? i'll talk to an oxford scientist on progress that may have been made on what may be the leading vaccine being developed. msnbc's news coverage continues after this short break. erage co after this short break only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪

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good evening. welcome to "the beat." we have a lot to cover on this, the very first day of may, a day when rent checks are due for so many people who may or may not have jobs. and with states beginning to reopen amidst this entire political and medical debate. more than a dozen states are reopening businesses as of today. more are set to open early next week. but none of them actually meet the guidelines from the trump administration that are supposed to govern reopening. that includes, for example, a two-week downward trend in cases. so this is a reminder for those of you who have been following all this that what the president said about telling states 20 do wasn't very