of thing is happening, they don't know who to trust, what to believe. rumors spread wildly and you have society actually beginning to fray. i mean, fortunately, we're not facing that now. even with misleading information. but that is what got to be like back then. >> john barry, thanks for making time tonight. if you want to hear more about john's expertise in the 1918 flu, you can listen to our conver statico conversation from last night "why is this happening." it's fascinating wherever you get your pod cast. that is "all in" for this evenin evening. "the rachel maddow show" starts now. good evening, rachel. >> chris, thank you for stretching 30 seconds into my hour while i get myself settled. [ laughter ] >> you think anybody else noticed that's what you were

doing? >> i was just like -- i couldn't hear in my ear if she's good or not good. when i threw, i guess we'll see if we're getting an empty shot. [ laughter ] >> i will tell -- i could tell you the backs of the dramatic back story as to why it took me an extra 22 seconds to get here today but it is best shared over a beer on the other side of the curve. i will tell you, my friend. >> have a great weekend. >> all right. >> thanks, chris. much appreciate it. >> thanks to you at home for joining us. i'm super happy to have you here. sorry i was 22 seconds late. long story, i'll tell you some day. i want to tell you about something behind the scenes at the rachel maddow show this week that's been interesting. earlier this week, it happened over the course of a few days but by earlier this week we obtained a bunch of internal emails from a v.a. medical center, specifically from the v.a. medical center in

minneapolis and what was interesting to us about those emails and eye thwhy they were provided to us they showed that the levels of ppe and other necessary supplies for the people that work at that facility, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer, it showed the level of those things in stock at the v.a. facility. show you what i'm talking about. here is an email. this is from this past wednesday. and as you can see, the little graphic here in the email shows the current ppe status of each of these items. face shields, 30-day supply. gloves, 30-day supply. it also looks like they're good in terms of masks needed for general use. 30-day supply. but then look at this. hand sanitizer, zero days of supply on hand. oh. same thing with hydrogen peroxide wipes. bleach wipes, one day.

goggles or safety glasses, that's bad. looks like a total of a four-day supply of those. this is an active v.a. medical center serving loats of covid patients. it's pretty much the same in each i maemail we obtained. very little hand sanitizer and disinfectant biwipes in stock. this varies whether you're looking for april or the beginning of this month or this week. on wednesday of this week, we tried to report on this story in so doing, we reached out to the department of veterans affairs for comment on the ppe supplies and a public affairs officer with the va responded just before we were due to go on the air with this. quote, you're misinterpreting a routine email on supply levels. he added the v.a. medical center in minneapolis is always stocked with hand sanitizer and has always been stocked with hand sanitizer. he said they have dispensers mounted throughout the facility. he also said employees have

access to all the disinfecting products they need. sort of a strong push back from the v.a. on that. that might have been the end of it had that not been for something that happened today because today we received yet another internal email. we received a copy of the new supply email that's being sent out to employees at the v.a. medical center and this is different. as you can see, the old email used to break out the various disinfectant wipes they needed for working at that pa sfacilitt now as of today after that reporting on stuff being out of stock, now the email just says disinfectant wipes. can we drop the bug to see that on the lower right-hand corner of the screen? can we drop that? now they are lumping them all together. thank you. because of course, when you lump them all together and you just pick the one for which you've

got 12 day supply situation, doesn't look that bad. as you can see, the email on wednesday also showed that that v.a. medical center had zero days worth of hand sanitizer but as of today, they obtained a 20-day supply, which is great. good for them. changing what you release in terms of information about how bad things are doesn't actually change how bad things are in real life. and it would be one thing if this was a one off from the v.a. right? if they earned a reputation of giving it to us straight and this is them getting wooly in the one va medical center in the one sore subject. the v.a has not been straight with the american people or employees at any point throughout this crisis. here is another example. the department of veterans affairs is pushing to resume regular operations at the medical centers, expanding medical services and offering certain elective procedures and

a shortage of necessary supplies for health workers at various v.a. facilities around the country, v.a. health care workers are demanding they should get hazard pay given the additional risk they are taking coming into work right now. the v.a. says hazard pay is totally unwarranted. you might expect them to push back. they don't want to spend extra money on employees but look at the statement the department's press secretary put out about it. look at this. quote, hazard pay is to compensate employees when risks cannot be reasonably mitigated and employees cannot be safely protected. that is the opposite of the current environment at v.a. but don't ask us about those germicidal wipes. we'll stop stepping ytelling yo have them anymore. it doesn't seem like the v.a. is getting money's worth in terms

of the spokes people. maybe they are. maybe this is what they going for. baghdad bobbing your way through this part of the crisis is something worse than embarrassing, right? the truth will ultimately learn what is going on and then all your happy talk about it will become at best embarrassing and at worst, indicting. listen, i believe that v.a. medical staff are doing their absolute best. if you meet someone that tells you they work at a v.a. medical center, your instinct should be to buy that person a beer or shake their hand. they are doing a great public service by doing that work but the agenain itself and leadersh are not doing themselves favors by pretending everything is fine in the v.a. right now. this is the largest medical center in the country. it serves vulnerable and valuable population of americans that everything issed theserved

over 65. it's the federal government's direct responsibility. they need to get this right. happy talk that the problems don't exist in the v.a. is not a way to make the actual problems in the v.a. go away. it's not a way to get help for those problems for sure. i mean, hello, v.a. leadership, you're not alone having a hard time handling the challenges of the epidemic including keeping your medical staff protected with hand sanitizer and germicidal wipes and ppe. you're not alone having those problems. it shouldn't be embarrassing to you that you are having these problems if you tell people the truth about what problems you are having, you'll be a heck of a lot more likely to get help to meet the challenges. no one is looking to blame you. we want you to succeed when you lie, you make it hard to help you succeed. but we see this over and over again. this is becoming sort of a character test of various types of leadership and governance.

take the nebraska governor who finally made headline national news this week when he finally hit the front page of the washington post for his remarkable decision to stop reporting coronavirus case numbers from individual meat packing plants in his state just as two big meat packing plants with significant outbreaks were starting to get test results from their workers. that's when the governor decided we won't allow this data out anymore. we decided this data is privacy concern. yeah, heaven forbid people actually know where the problem is. right? heaven forbid the workers and their families know that the communities know where these facilities are and workers go home at the end of the day, maybe if we don't talk about it it won't seem that bad. the problem is not information about the spread of the virus. the problem is the spread of the virus, which you can't stop if you don't have any information about where it is. but still, even so, this week that same governor, pete pic s

ricketts said he'll block the data coming out from certain nursing homes. this is on top of him deciding they will no longer release data about specific meat packing plants. no data about nursing homes released and the way around that if you're concerned is that he told nebraskae people they as individual citizens can call nursing homes one by one and ask if they have a coronavirus outbreak and how many cases and deaths they had. see what they say. that's how we're going to handle the spread of coronavirus in nursing homes in nebraska. individual citizens just calling around and seeing what you can figure out. is that going to help? do you think that's going to make people think nebraska doesn't have people dying in nursing homes? we are far enough into this

we're seeing these kinds of dumb shoot the messenger distortions all over the place now. various leaders in various states are figuring out when their epidemic is bad, people will be able to tell that because the numbers are bad and when the numbers are bad, that makes the graphs look bad so now we got all of this very artful dumb mat lying going on all over about both the numbers and the graphs. this was one of the best ones this week. this is a graph that the georgia state government released ocn monday as brian kemp is trying to justify the radical rip the lid off end the stay-at-home orders approach to what is going on in georgia and his approval rating will be paying the price for it. again, this is released by the state government in georgia. you can see at the top there. this is the top five counties with the greatest number of confirmed covid-19 cases in georgia. top five worst hit counties in georgia and you can tell at a glance from looking at this, even if you don't put on your reading glasses, take a glance.

you can tell this is good news, right? this is a good news chart about the worst hit counties in georgia. you can tell it's good because everything goes down. it's all slumps and slopes generally off to the right until it disappears. the subhead explains the chart below represents the most impacted counties over the past 15 days and the number of cases over time. like i said, i mean, that looks excellent, georgia . i can see why you're opening up with everything dropping to zero but put your readers on. look at the bottom. look at the x axis and what they have done here. look left to right. it goes from april 28th to april 27th ahead to april 29th. ahead to may 1st, back to april 30th. jumps ahead to may 6th. then back to may 4th. then up to may 5th and back to april 25th. then the 2nd of may and 7th of may, 8th of may. what the heck is this? that's how you had to stack it to make it look like it was

sloping down to the right? i mean, this is a graph that was specially created to create the impression of a pretty picture of things going down and getting better over time. when really no, they're not. after the georgia state government tried to pull this over on the people of the state of georgia g, one state legislator from atlanta wrote to the department of public health to say what the heck is this? he called it cuckoo they were trying to do this. this was sustained mockery and wonderment in georgia. you see this is from the atlanta journal constitution, their data interactive. this is the subject of much head scratching. they ultimately tried to make sense of it in the article that tends to follow a public official to the end of his or her career. it's just cuckoo. state's latest mishap causes

critics to cry foul. here is the lead in that piece. this is -- [ laughter ] here is the latest. where does sunday take place twice a week and where does may 2nd come before april 26th? well, that happens in the state of georgia as it provides data on the covid-19 pandemic. quote, in the latest bungling of tracking data for the novel coronavirus, the georgia department of public health's website shows good news new confirmed cases in the county dropped every single day for the past two weeks. in fact, there was no clear downward trend. cases held steady or dropped slightly in the past two weeks. cases in the five worst hit counties were actually flat. ultimately, after being ridiculed for it and questioned about it in ways they couldn't answer, the state changed the graph. the kemp administration apologized for having published that graph. the good news in that bad news

story is that shame and rid kice and push back made them fix it. they are trying to justify the policy he wants which is to say everything is fine and nothing needs to be done to slow the spread anymore and that's his right to try to do that and to try to get away with that as governor, but at least because of the push back on what they tried to get away with this week, at least he now won't have what appears to be public health data backing up that b.s. happy talk he's otherwise trying to get away with. it's one thing to blame the politician for making stuff up when the public health people appear to be on board, that's a much bigger problem. you can still get real data. actually, real data prevented wh -- presented. the real data of what's happening in georgia is not good. i mean, here is georgia deaths

from covid-19 mapped by the georgia department of public health, that's bad. that's particularly bad if you're opening up in the middle of that. here is georgia confirmed cases from covid-19. very similar shape. that's bad. that's not what your state should look like if you're opening upright now. here is georgia cumulative cases from covid over time that's the blue line. that's bad. so yeah, if you want to look at graphs like that and say oh, trust me, everything is fine, don't believe your lying eyes, let's open up. if that's what you had -- if that's the real data in your state, you might want to fudge something that looks better than that which is apparently what they did but they got called on it and caught for it and ultimately took it down. happy talk and hiding the data doesn't make the problem go away. happily right now push back against b.s. happy talk and hiding the data sometimes works to shame the people trying to do

it and it makes them stop. we're seeing that at the national level with investigative reporting by the associated prez ovss over the p two weeks. a.p. reporting the white house shelving the cdc's guidelines how to safely reopen the country and pressuring the cdc not to release guidelines and not let anybody know they existed. it took a couple weeks of sustained attention and investigation by the a.p. and hard questions of people in the administration and leaks of the early drafts of the cdcs work being suppressed but last night finally some of it was finally actually issued by the cdc that wouldn't have happened without the ap investigating it and asking them hard questions about it. but that relationship, the survival and integrity of the cdc, the publishing health part of the u.s. government that we ought to be able to look to enwheven when our politicians are getting it wrong, if that relationship between administration and cdc is being sort of tested now,

just by the misfortune of us having an epidemic this bad while we have a government this terrible, this headline is the last thing you want to see in a country that's got the biggest epidemic on earth with 1.4 million cases now in more than 88,000 americans already dead. this is not what you want to see as the lead headline in the washington post two months into this, growing friction between white house and cdc hobbles pandemic response. but that is what's going on. the post reporting tonight the trump administration inexplicably gave a $10 million no bid contract to a private company to collect a bunch of data about the epidemic that the cdc already collects. well, why would you do that? why would you undermine the c ddc that way? maybe you want an alternate source of da to to trash the reputation and have data you're more comfortable with. keep that in mind when the white house disputes the coronavirus

death toll and saying not that many americans have actually died. keep in mind they have bought and paid for a private source of data to compete with and undermine the cdc's data. the post reporting the cdc is so demoralized and kicked and beaten down, they are no longer trying to play their traditional role of keeping the public informed at the time of a public health crisis. the cdc that has not held a briefing repeatedly asked the white house to resume the sessions for the media according to two senior administration officials but not received permission and the cdc has finally given up. also this, quote, now as trump promised a reignited economy heading into the november election, cdc is in the awkward possession of producing information trump wants least. the death rate plateaued at 2,000 americans dead every day. and if that's not enough of a

test to see whether the trump administration will allow the cdc to do its work unimpeded, the cdc director robert rerd field says the track four different models of possible deaths. as of may 11th, all forecast an increase in deaths in the coming weeks and a cumulative total exceeding 100,000 american deaths by june 1st. june 1st is two weeks away. this is the cdc director saying tonight the best, the rosiest of the dozen forecasting models the cdc is tracking says there will be 100,000 americans dead by then by two weeks from now. and it gets worse from there. that the the best case scenario. and the president, you know, did say at the white house already today when he was asked by a cnn reporter as to whether or not the death toll might be too low, he said actually that the real

death toll is much lower than what the official numbers say. who says they are over stating the death toll? all right. the president really has been saying for a solid week now that the virus will go away on its own without a vaccine. he said it would go away on its own in april because viruses hate months that begin with a or something. he says it will go away without a vaccine. he said this evening today at an event supposed to be hyping how great america is doing in developing a vaccine. the president saying that doesn't really matter. he's there to hype vaccine development but vaccine disappearance magic will fix this problem before we need a vaccine so don't get too hung up on it. most americans should not fear the virus because most americans are probably immune to it, which is a wonderful idea if the only part of wonderful you care about is its root word der.

most americans are immune at the coronavirus? really? the president literally said this last night. he said when you test, you have a case. when you test, you find something is wrong with people. if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. i know you think that i am being hyp making fun of him but i'm serious, he said exactly that. >> when you test, you have a case. when you test, you find something is wrong with people. if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. >> no, actually, if we didn't do any testing, we would have lots of cases. that would be bad. if you're a human being that recognizes people that get this are human beings and choose to avoid unnecessary suffering illness, suffocation, pain, death and mourning.

if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. that's the line from the president right now. that's the way we make our cases go away. we stop testing for them. that's the way we make houses stop burning down, we close the fire department. then the data that says how many fires we've responded to goes to zero 6789 zero. we haven't had any fire responses at all. there is also no more houses left. the president went on to say today, quote, it could be that testing, frankly, is over rated. could that be because they cannot figure out how to get anybody outside the white house freaking tested on a regular basis? this is a terrible time for us to have a terrible government. both in the persona of the president that suggests injecting bleach and that testing is the real problem and viruses magically appear and we don't need vaccines. it's a terrible time to have a terrible government. in the persona of the president

and in terms of what he can do to the rest of the government. and in terms of what he has done already to public health, to the cdc, you should see this editorial that ran today in the revered ancient british medical journal called reviving the u.s. cdc. sometimes people outside our borders can see these things more clearly than we can. the covid-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the u.sa with inconsistent response to the covid-19 crisis there. the u.s. centers for disease control, the flag ship agency seen its role minimized and been an advisor in response to contain the control of the virus. this was regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. in the decades following the founding in 1946, the cdc became a national pillar of public health and globally respected. it trained applied epidemiologist tobs s to be dep

in the usa and discover viruses and develop accurate tests for them. the erosion of the cdc will harm global cooperation and health. a strong cdc is needed to respond domestic and international and help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. the usa is nowhere near able to provide the infrastructure needed to combat the covid-19 pandemic. the administration is obsessed magic bullets, vaccines, medicines or a hope the virus will disappear but only a steadfast reliance on basic health principles like test, trace and isolate will see the emergency brought to an end and thiseffective national health public agency. the cdc needs a director to provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and has the capacity to lead today's complicated effort. americans must put a president in the white house come january 2021 who will understand public health should not be guided

bipartisan politics. when who is the president of the united states is one of the world's biggest public health crisis, that's when you know these are very serious times. that's the lancet today in a scathing editorial, a former star scientist is a dean of the public leading institutions is going to join us here live next for the interview. stay with us. n us here live nex for the interview. stay with us give me your hand! i can save you... lots of money with liberty mutual! we customize your car insurance so you only pay for what you need! only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ we're finally back out in our yard, but so are they. scotts turf builder triple action.

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if you're looking for an american scientific leader who is really, really experienced in finding and fighting and explaining a terrifying, deadly, new mysterious virus, you should get to know dr. james currin all the way back in 1981 before anyone knew what hiv or aids were, he studied what was then a mysterious unknown disease

inexplicable killing mostly young healthy men. before we all learned to live through terrifying projections about the exponential growth in coronavirus cases like we're living through now, dr. curran made those projections for the country about hiv. >> dr. james kurr arcurran proj there will be 350,000 cases by 1992. >> i'm getting a little tired of makes these projections and more tired of having turning out to be right. 28,000 in the past year alone or approximately one case reported in our country every 14 minutes. >> dr. james curran spent 25 years at the cdc and rose to level of assistant surgeon general. he is the working for aids research. it's an honor to have you here with us tonight. thanks for your time.

>> thank you, rachel. >> with what you have lived through and the response that you helped lead to what was then an unknown virus that took a terrible toll in the united states, i wanted to ask you sort of the biggest possible top level question of how you think our country is doing, how you think our federal government is doing at responding to and mounting a fight against this virus now? >> well, rachel, this is the public health crisis of the century. this is something that people haven't seen before and nobody will see again. everyone in public health will just like people did with world war ii say where were we before covid and where were we after covid? the country is overwhelmed by it more so than most other countries and we haven't had a clear messaging or very clear aim at goals. you pointed out, i think, quite clearly in the previous segment

that accurate surveillance is the conscience and guide post for public health. and it was for us with aids. and it's a government responsibility to be interpreted by people who are experts in epidemiolo epidemiology. that's why it has to remain with the cdc and of course, can't be interpreted wrong as it has been in two instances you mentioned previously. >> when it comes to the cdc's particular expertise, of usually, they're supposed to be our guiding light on publishing heal health matters, expert advice how we should live and what to do to protect ourselves but guiding public policy decisions by the rest of the federal government and i know the cdc comes in for a lot of criticism and i know that individual leaders and scientists at cdc had their time in the spotlight, some uncomfortable and some sell

b celebrating and compromised sort of forced to accept political influence and is that a fair assessment? >> i think the editorial pointed out the early problems with the diagnostic testing capacity, which was a major problem and cdc played a role in it. the cdc is the best prevention agency in the entire world. other countries model their public health prevention agencies after the cdc and it's expected that the thousands of epidemiologists there will contribute to what we know about prevention of the new infectious disease. the two goals from the very beginning was to prevent the new virus and to save the lives of the people who were infected. and we could be optimistic about that because of the short duration of the virus.

and if the goal from the very beginning was the identification and isolation of infected people, but because of the scarcity of testing we said well, we don't have enough tests so we will change evour policy toward what our priorities are, saving lives and we'll pretend we don't have to test because we know we can't. that's really unconscionable because then you start to say well, what is testing? making test kits, we need to isolate as many infected people as we can and we still haven't gotten there. >> do you think that the president's sometimes baseless remarks about things like testing. he's calling testing, essentially blaming testing for revealing cases, if we didn't test so much we wouldn't have

cases. the president made some inappropriate things that he imagines might be effective treatments for the disease and talks about it disappearing on its own. i think some of that is baked into the expectations in terms of what we expect from this president's remarks but do you think that it materially sets back our ability to fight this as a country and the ability of the federal government to get its ducks in a row in terms of what it must do to save lives? >> most of us know the only thing that's close to being accurate in surveillance is the number of deaths and the number of hospitalizations. because the only people tested were those who were seriously ill. if you assume that perhaps 1% of people will get covid will die and we have six times that many deaths reported in the u.s., that means that we must under estimating the cases by a huge margin. particularly since the deaths

were infected four weeks ago. so it's very likely that maybe ten to 15 million people have been infected. so if you employ effective prevention measures like testing, isolating and contact tracing, you're going to increase the number of people infected but you will -- i'm sorry, you'll increase the number of people reported while you're reducing the number of people who become infected in the future, which is what we want to do. it seems like you just learn if you increase testing, you're increasing people diagnosed as positive and for some r.eason that's a bad thing and that's exactly what we're trying to do. >> dr. james curran, co-director of the emery centers for aids research. it's a real pleasure to have this much time with you tonight. thanks for making time and thanks for your service. >> thank you, rachel. all right. we got much more ahead tonight, this friday night. do stay with us. ahead tonight, this fridaniy ght. do stay with us. saturdays happen.

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april 2nd, 1992 after years of evading prosecution and becoming very, very, very famous as america's most high-profile gangster. john gotty, the head of the crime family on april 2nd, 1992 he was finally convicted in a brooklyn courtroom. it was murder and racketeering. >> good evening. this time the wise guy smirk disappeared. john gotti, the modern god father, teflon don always escaped the big convictions in the past but not today. guilty of murder and racketeering, 12 counts and now facing a long time in jail. >> in a hushed courtroom, gotti sat and heard the anonymous jury say guilty, gotti and go defendant were charged with being boss of the gambino crime

family. >> in his own mouth over fbi bugs fbi bugs . >> that conviction of john gotti 199 2 was a huge deal. national news and one of the biggest moments in america law enforcement history when it comes to organized crime. "the new york times" called it a scintillating triumph for a team of federal prosecutors who shattered the ora of invincebility of a notorious gangster. the prosecution's most visible member was 38-year-old john gleason who had a calm air and boyish appearance, horn rimmed glass s and earnest voice gleason seemed to enhance the image, a james stewart character

perhaps upholding truth against the mob. >> after six weeks, prosecutor john gleason began by trying to dilute whatever the effect the mob boss image might have had on the jury. he said this is not a media event. this is not a movie. it is not about a movie star. it's not a stage. it's a trial and an american courtroom. gleason went on to read from the transcripts of fbi bugs that detailed the murders and evidence that gotti was the boss of the gambino crime family. >> the prosecutor that got john gotti would serve as a federal judge in the eastern district of new york and retired as a judge in 2016. this week he surfaced again in the news when he wrote an op ed weighing in on the bizarre and absolutely unprecedented decision this past week to simply drop the prosecution of trump national security advisor mike flynn despite the fact

justice department prosecutors already secured a guilty plea from mr. flynn multiple times. retired judge john gleason wrote the handling of the case reeks of improper political influence. two days after he wrote that in the washington post, the judge overseeing the mike flynn case made an extraordinary decision of his own to appoint john gleas gleason, the prosecutor from the trial, to appoint that retired judge to essentially argue against the justice department's decision to drop the case against flynn. of course, the politics around this could not be more valulgar and transparent. said both president obama and joe biden are guilty of a deep state criminal plot to do something to mike flynn and to do something to president trump. the president is making clear that he wants them locked up just like he wanted hillary clinton locked up pofour years

ago. he wants to imprison his immediate predecessor as president. he wants to imprison the person he ran against for president in 2016 and wants to imprison the person he's going to run against for president this year in 2020. what's new now is that the justice department is helmed by bill barr so nobody knows if the justice department might actually try to do that. the president's attacks calling on the imprisonment of obama and biden this week followed the release of audio of former president obama speaking at a private event with members of his administration in which president obama warned of the justice department's intervention to drop this case involving mike flynn. >> that's the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic -- not just institutional norms -- but our basic understanding of rule of

law is at risk. and when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we've seen in other places. >> president obama speaking at what was a private event that was published, though, made public and become sounding board for president trump this week continued to accuse former president obama and former vice president biden of crimes saying that he wants them locked up. former president obama replied to one of the outburst from the president today with a single one-word tweet. simply vote. hold that thought. we'll be right back. vote. hold that thout.gh we'll be right back. okay, where were we? yeah, i'm done after this meeting. we're just going over how people who switch to progressive can save hundreds. hey mara!

- yeah jamie's the guy running it. - mara, you're not on mute. i once had to fake jury duty to get out of talking about his yogurt preferences. mara, you know you're not on mute, right? oh, there's a mute button? yeah, that's flo! the one who looks like she'd smile while she sleeps. flo: i always smile. mara: that's why i said that.

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where you begin to get worried that basic, not just institutional norms, but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. and when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we've seen in other places. whenever i campaigned, i always said the most important election, it's basically obviously when i was on the ballot, that always feels like the most important election. this one, i'm not on the ballot, but i am pretty darn invested. we got to make this happen. >> former president obama on a

private c private conference call talking about the dropping of mike flynn warning pretty stark terms that the justice department under attorney general bill barr has put the rule of law in the united states into question, that that could accelerate quickly and that therefore the november 2020 election is, as he said, the most important we've ever had. joining us is david rode, the author of most recently "in deep, the fbi, the cia and the truth about america's deep state." thank you for taking time to be with us tonight. appreciate you taking the time. >> thank you, thanks for having me. >> so you freaked me out today with what you wrote in "the new yorker" about this. i know that you do not have rose collared glasses with bill barr but you said barr has won, trump has won, the post watergate reforms that stops spy chiefs from using law enforcement and

intelligence agencies for political purposes have been ocho blat rao ocho blat rated, you set me back weeks from sleep again. you think it's done? >> in terms of through the election, yes. it was a wake up call. i, you know, haven't wanted to say that but, you know, let's look at what's happened in terms of the flynn case being dropped. richa richard grenell and john ratcliff is a trump partisan and member of congress and on tuesday will be confirmed by the republican controlled senate intelligence committee. it's partisans running the intelligence community and the justice department and helping the president politically it seems at every turn. >> in the past week we have seen

bill barr or justice department under bill barr drop that of flynn. we don't know how that will play out in judge sullivan's courtroom. it's unprecedented. we have perhaps seen paul ma that for -- manafort sprung from prison. a lot of people are getting sprung from prison because of the risk of coronavirus. he doesn't seem to meet the criteria but he's out. when it comes to favorable treatment of the president's friends, i feel like we've got certain expectations now. i worry more about disfavorable treatment of president's enemies and his threat, his insistence that president obama, vice president biden and hillary clinton should be imprisoned as traitors and enemies of the country. how much of a higher bar is there at the justice department toward punishing the president'sen president

e's enemies rather than rewarding people he sees as allies? >> i hope there is a higher bar. one disturbing thing is he has an on going investigation, a reversal of history. that's an investigation of the investigators of the fbi, officials who looked at the trump russia connections and, you know, john durham is the prosecutor that barr appointed to carry out this investigation and there are very striblct justice department guidelines not announcing results of a criminal investigation close to an election. that happen foued four years ag. these emails on a laptop didn't prove to be new at all but that impacted the election. now barr said he will if he wants to announce the results of this investigation into the fbi and their conduct towards trump just before this election and he

says these guidelines don't apply because jim comey isn't on the ballot and again, it's what struck me to write this piece. it's just, you know, example after example of just using the justice department to help the president politically. >> david rode, david, thank you for being here tonight. you have not made me feel any better. >> i'm sorry. >> in talking about it. thank you, my friend. good to see you. appreciate it. we'll be right back. stay with us. we'll be right back. stay with us and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill, once-a-day treatment used for h-i-v in certain adults. it's not a cure, but with one small pill, biktarvy fights h-i-v to help you get to and stay undetectable. that's when the amount of virus is so low it cannot be measured by a lab test. research shows people who take h-i-v treatment every day and get to and stay undetectable can no longer transmit h-i-v through sex. serious side effects can occur,

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thanks for being with us tonight. i'll see you monday. time for a special hour on msnbc "life in the time of coronavirus." good evening, ali. >> good evening, rachel. have a great weekend. we will see you on monday. we have got a lot to get to this evening including a new $3 trillion plan to get financial aid to americans in pain. the house tonight has just passed this legislation. we're going to talk to a member of the progressive caucus that says the bill needs to be bolder. a lot in play tonight and a lot to talk about. let's get down to business. just a few hours