today. as soon as he was able to make words, he canceled their final debate which was scheduled for sunday. and that is our broadcast on this thursday night. we're getting there. we sure appreciate you spending this time with us every night. on behalf of all my colleagues at the networks of nbc news, good night. voting is happening all night tonight in harris county, texas. texas, as a state, is set to surpass already the total number of votes that were cast in texas in the whole election in 2016. and just so i'm clear here, i don't mean like there's more early votes being cast in texas this year compared to the early votes cast in texas in 2016. i mean the early vote right now in texas is about to pass all the votes that were cast in texas in 2016. this far before election day. early voting isn't over until

7:00 p.m. tomorrow night, 7:00 p.m. friday. that makes tonight the last night of early voting in texas, and that's why harris county, texas, has some voting locations open overnight, 24 hours tonight. they're open 24 hours so they can stay open every minute until early voting is done tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. in texas. we're keeping an eye on those overnights tonight in texas this evening. up in minnesota, a new court ruling tonight says the state will not be allowed to count any ballots that arrive in the mail after election day, even if they are postmarked before election day. now, that is a last-minute really consequential rule change. minnesotans had previously been told that their votes would count if they were received up to a week after election day. but now at the very last minute, this appeals court ruling tonight has changed that, and

you can limit what that means in terms of this court decision. but bottom line, what it means for you if you are in minnesota and you have your ballot at home, what this means for real is that you really, truly should not trust your ballot to the mail. you have to bring it in, in person. drop it off yourself, seriously. again, minnesota, as of a court ruling tonight, changing the rules and no longer planning to accept any ballots that arrive after the polls close on election day. control of the united states senate, of course, is very much on the table right now. the endangered incumbent republican senator david perdue in georgia may very well lose his seat to his democratic challenger jon ossoff, especially after a debate performance last night in which ossoff just wiped the floor with perdue and then left him laying there wet. i know you might have seen the one clip where ossoff tells david perdue to his face, it's not just that you're a crook, senator. that moment will live forever in

senate debate history. but it wasn't just that. it was more than that. >> this is so beneath the office of a u.s. senator. you've continued to demean yourself throughout this campaign with your conduct. first you were lengthening my nose in attack ads to remind everybody that i'm jewish. then when that didn't work, you started calling me some kind of islamic terrorist. and then when that didn't work, you started calling me a chinese communist. it's ridiculous, and you shouldn't do everything that your handlers in washington tell you to because you'll lose your soul along the way, senator. what the people of georgia deserve is a serious discussion of economic relief for georgia families and how we're going to protect coverage for pre-existing conditions. >> thank you for your -- >> well, perhaps senator perdue would have been able to respond properly to the covid-19 pandemic if you hadn't been fending off multiple federal investigations for insider

trading. it's not just that you're a crook, senator. it's that you're attacking the health of the people that you represent. you did say covid-19 was no deadlier than the flu. you did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. all the while you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio, and you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions. four times. >> that was the georgia senate debate last night. now, tonight, incumbent republican senator david perdue, the man who you can see here carved out of soft soap on the left side of your screen, senator david perdue has announced tonight that he would please not like to debate democrat jon ossoff anymore. the candidates had a third and final debate scheduled for this weekend, but republican senator

david perdue is now bailing on that for all the obvious reasons. now, what does this mean in terms of senate control? well, it's not a good sign for david perdue. that said, look at this. there have been, i think, 11 polls in that senate race conducted this month, in the month of october. of those 11 polls, 5 of them show david perdue ahead. 5 of them show jon ossoff ahead. and the 11th one was a tie. so, yeah, georgia, oh, my lord, does your vote count this year. georgia residents, get thee to the polls. again, it is too late to trust your ballot to the u.s. mail service. if you've got a ballot at home, bring it in. whether or not you were planning on voting early, vote early. just in case you didn't think it was high drama enough already around this election, right -- i mean it's the presidential race, it's the senate races, it's everything, right, with huge numbers of early votes, and the u.s. mail no longer being a

reliable way to get your ballot it in at this late date. so everybody who has a ballot now has to hand-deliver it and nobody knows how many people are going to be voting on election day. really, truly nobody knows that. and the courts all over the country are still changing the rules even now about what's going to be counted and what won't. i mean, man, just get your vote in now. get it done. honestly, i personally can't take the stress. just get it done. and meanwhile, meanwhile, here's the new crash point in today's news between two of the major sources of our national anxiety right now. the safety and security of our election and the safety and health of us. >> tuesday at noon, this is what the sign-in screen at canton-potsdam hospital looked like. sign-in service is unavailable. and over at gouverneur hospital, systems are down. officials say massena memorial was targeted too. they say hackers were using a new type of ransomware unknown to antivirus software companies. after it learned of the cyber

attack, st. lawrence health system has disconnected all of its computer systems and shut down the affected network to prevent even more problems. for a portion of tuesday, canton-potsdam was asking ambulances to bring patients elsewhere. gouverneur remains on ambulance diversion health system investigative teams are working with the fbi and homeland security to provide them more information about the ransomware attack. >> that's local news from wwny tv in upstate new york. you heard that part about ambulance diversion, asking ambulance to take patients elsewhere. three of st. lawrence counties hospitals have been hit by a cyberattack. st. lawrence county, new york, it's up against the canadian border. three of the hospitals in that county have been hit by a cyberattack that has shut down hospital computer systems. that has already meant in those hospitals, among other things, diverting patients to other

places that are not being hit by this attack that's locking up their computers. now, st. lawrence county in new york is not, in case you're wondering, a covid hot spot. the latest data from the state of new york says the st. lawrence county has less than 400 covid cases in the whole county, which is good. particularly for new york, that's good. but imagine this happening in one of the many places where the hospitals are already stressed to the max by the coronavirus surge. well, yesterday the fbi put out a joint alert with the homeland security department cybersecurity agency alerting hospitals across the country to get ready for this kind of an attack, to prepare themselves and to make changes now to try to fend it off. here's from that alert. quote, cisa, fbi, and hhs have incredible information of an increased and imminent cyber crime threat to u.s. hospitals and health care providers. sics, fbi and hhs assess malicious cyber actors are targeting the hph sector with trickbot and bazarloader

malware, often leading to ransomeware attacks, data theft, and the disruption of health care services. now, outside of st. lawrence county, that northern new york county where we just saw that local news report, other hospitals that have apparently been hit by the attack so far include the sky lakes medical center all the way across the country in klamath falls, oregon. this is from "the washington post" report on that attack. quote, the hospital is unable to offer cancer treatments that are computer-controlled, and the attack has curbed some diagnostic imaging as well. the hospital spokesman in klamath falls says doctors and nurses have turned to paper for patient records with the electronic system offline. "the new york times" reporting that the efforts to try to protect the hospital in klamath falls, oregon, once it came under attack were pretty blunt and simple. quote, employees at the hospital were told, if it's a p.c., shut it down. "the times" is also reporting that another hospital that was hit is in california. sonoma valley hospital in sonoma, california.

they were also -- they were apparently hit several days ago. as of today they are still reportedly trying to restore their computer systems. now, tonight nbc news is reporting on yet more. the university of vermont has also reportedly been hit, and that includes facilities both in the state of vermont and also hospitals across the vermont border into new york state. and these are new york state hospitals other than the ones in st. lawrence county that we were just talking about. so beyond this number of hospitals that have been hit with this cyberattack thus far, nicole perlroth reporting at "the new york times" that the hackers behind these attacks, hackers believed to be based in moscow and st. petersburg in russia, these hackers, quote, have been trading a list of more than 400 u.s. hospitals they plan to target. and if this is causing you to get a little pit in your stomach, you are not alone. cybersecurity people are kind of freaking out about this.

here's from the associated press, which did a really good roundup on this today. quote, the offensive by a russian-speaking criminal gang coincides with the u.s. presidential election, although there is no immediate indication they were motivated by anything but profit. charles charles carmakal, chief technical officer of cybersecurity firm mandiant, said in a statement, quote, we are experiencing the most significant cybersecurity threat we have ever seen in the united states. alex holden, ceo of hold security, which has been closely tracking the ransomware in question for more than a year, agreed that the unfolding offensive is unprecedented in magnitude for the u.s. given its timing in the heat of a contentious presidential election and the worst global pandemic in a century. all right. so just in case having the worst and worst managed epidemic on earth wasn't enough, with a national government that's pretending it's not happening, with something on the order of

47 states getting worse right now, with 229,000 of us dead already and 9 million of us infected as of tonight, and no cure and no treatment in sight, and no vaccine and a president who mocks and undermines efforts to fight it and slow its spread, just in case that's not enough, now we have russian criminal hackers from moscow and st. petersburg freezing the computer systems at our hospitals, in the middle of it, demanding money or else. it seems like it's a handful of hospitals already. this vermont information tonight reported by nbc news plus the five or six other hospitals that were already reported by this afternoon. 400 hospitals potentially on deck in terms of how the hackers have been discussing this amongst themselves online. and the story gets worse and weirder. if you are not usually into news like this, if you don't follow things like cybersecurity all that closely, you might still have heard this term "ransomware" recently in the news.

that's because it was only about 2 1/2 weeks ago, and we covered this on the show at the time -- when we got this sort of odd announcement from microsoft, of all entities, in which microsoft said they were going on offense to take out a threat to our elections this year that was the kind of threat most of us didn't even know about, most of us who are not all that tech-minded wouldn't have known to conceive of it. but what microsoft announced a couple of weeks ago was that they were taking out servers used by something -- a big network called trickbot. they described trickbot as a gigantic net work of computers hijacked by russian-speaking criminal hackers to carry out ransomware attacks. ransomware attacks are where you lock up somebody's computers or their data and you say you won't release the stuff unless they send you money. ransomware, that is a crime and an increasingly common one. but it's interesting.

the reason this made news beyond cybersecurity and beyond computer-related news is because microsoft said two weeks ago now that it was taking action against trickbot. it was taking out their servers. now, specifically, because trickbot was the kind of weapon that could be used to take out our election systems catastrophically just in time for the presidential election. it's the type of weapon that could be used to lock up voter registration systems or vote tabulation systems or the means by which people access the vote count as the votes are counted on election night and beyond. so a couple of weeks ago, right, this was good news. microsoft figuring out a way, involving the courts of all things, figuring out a way to monkey wrench trickbot and seize their servers. trickbot, this russian criminal ransomware scheme, microsoft said they were taking them out because they were worried in part that although they've been used to commit all sorts of crimes, the new and present danger was that they could be used against our elections. "the new york times" then reported once microsoft started acting against trickbot, they

also found that u.s. cyber command was already in there. u.s. cyber command headed by general paul nakasone, they found, was also taking offensive operations against trickbot to take them out ahead of the elections, and for the same kind of reasons. "the new york times" reporting at the time, quote, so far trickbot has not been directed at voting infrastructure, officials say, but it would be well suited to turn against the offices of the secretaries of state who certify tallies, vulnerable voter registration systems, or electronic poll books, the records that allow people to vote. trickbot would be an excellent weapon to use against systems like that. so it's not just private industry. it's not just the u.s. government. it's both, cyber command and microsoft acting a couple of weeks ago to take this trickbot net work out, to eliminate that threat to our elections. good. all good. great news -- until now. because who is this hospitals attack, this current hospital attack being attributed to? trickbot.

ah, turns out they haven't been taken out. the same big sophisticated russian criminal scheme that everybody worried was the kind of weapon that would be ideally suited for the russians to use against our elections infrastructure, so thank god they were being taken out, turns out they weren't taken out. microsoft and u.s. cyber command went after them, but they're back, and they have responded to the fact that the u.s. government and microsoft came at them. they have responded to that by locking up multiple u.s. hospitals' computer systems so that multiple u.s. hospitals tonight cannot take patients, and they can't give computer-driven cancer treatments, and they can't access online patient documents or electronic patient records or anything else that happens on a computer. and they have done this while we are in the middle of a huge third surge of an infectious

viral disease that is completely out of control in our country right now and that has put americans in the hospital by the tens of thousands. this isn't good, and it comes alongside a bunch of other smaller but still worrying reports. there's a county in north georgia called hall county. it's where gainesville, georgia, is. earlier this month we learned that hall county had been hit with a ransomware attack. its computer systems were infiltrated. the county was threatened that they had to pay up or else. we don't know if any paid up or not. hall county, georgia, has been very, very tight lipped about how they're dealing with this, including this their local press. but today "the wall street journal" reports that apparently the "or else" part is starting in hall county, georgia, with the hackers that attacked the county now posting online sensitive elections data that was stolen from the county's computer systems, including things like named individual

voters in hall county who have submitted provisional ballots that have been flagged for signatures not matching. also voter names and voter registration numbers and an inventory of hall county's elections equipment. all this sensitive stuff the hackers have stolen from the county and are now posting online after having threatened hall county at the beginning of this month that they had infiltrated the county's systems and would start attacking them if the county didn't pay. now, georgia, of course, is a swing state and a very important one both for the presidential race and for the senate. hall county, that said, is not a particularly swingy county. hall county, georgia, went for trump in 2016 by i think about almost like -- yeah, okay, 50 points, right? but who's attacking them and infiltrating their election-related computer networks and now posting sensitive election related records online while publicly

gloating about how much damage they can do because hall county isn't paying up. that's happening in hall county, georgia, tonight right now. where else could that happen? is that the same ransomware hackers that we are seeing hitting the hospitals and that all these elections experts were telling us were potentially going to target the election with this russian criminal bot network that would be ideally suited to locking us up on election night. it was a week ago tonight that the fbi and cisa, the cybersecurity agency at homeland security -- it was a week ago tonight that they warned that russian hackers, state hackers had accessed dozens of state and local governments and oddly aviation networks in the united states starting last month. "the washington post" later reported that among the known successful russian incursions were elections systems in california and indiana. and, again, california and indiana, not the swingiest states in the world. but still what are russian state

hackers doing inside election software in california and indiana? no, literally, what are they doing there? if u.s. officials know they're in there, know enough for somebody to tell it to "the washington post," can we, the people, know? and not for nothing, but who did this to the trump campaign website this week? this was the trump campaign website earlier this week. this was the homescreen. it lasted about half an hour before they got it back. but the official trump campaign website was taken over by hackers unknown, who changed the website to this. they said they, you know, had broken into it and had stolen important data and put forward competing ransom demands to either release the data they'd stolen or keep it hidden. and the trump campaign denied that anything was taken. but this really was a sitting president's re-election campaign home page taken over, and that's not right. i mean the way these things are supposed to work their malign magic, the way these things are

supposed to work is they're supposed to work on us. yes, they're designed to wreak havoc or threaten to wreak havoc with computer systems, but most of all they're supposed to freak us out whether or not the actual technical harm is actually caused. in the case of the hospitals being attacked, the risk of real physical harm to patients is high and urgent. we've got hospitals already hit by this ransomware attack turning away patients, right? that is dangerous in those individual hospitals. it's potentially deadly, particularly in places where hospitals are already overtapped, right? so that's one thing. the risk, the physical risk to patients there, is high and urgent when it comes to the hospital attacks. when it comes to election systems being attacked, the highest and urgent risk there is that, yeah, maybe they can shut some of that stuff down or corrupt it or change it or lock it up or deface it. but the highest and urgent risk there in terms of harm to our country is that these kind of

things, even if they are wrought in a small-scale way, they will make us, we, the people, not trust that our election is real, that the results are real, and that we should trust and abide by the results because our democracy is sound. so there is a balance here of which i am exquisitely cognizant. i believe that it is not an option to pretend this stuff isn't happening, particularly when it's happening like this. but the best way i know to not help them do their work of freaking us out is to make sure that even the not very tech-minded among us understands realistically what this is, that we understand realistically how this stuff works, what the real risks are, and what we can do about it. in other words, i think the best defense here is to aim at keeping calm, defending the election, and carrying on. but we need to talk to people

who know these things, who can explain it in clear terms in order to have our feet on the ground while we confront these very real risks. joining us now is clint watts. he's a senior fellow with the foreign policy research institute and the alliance for securing democracy. clint, it's really nice to see you. thanks for making time to be here tonight. >> thanks for having me, rachel. >> first let me just ask you if anything in the way that i've described this either seems wrong to you or if you feel like i'm putting the wrong emphasis or not enough emphasis on any one part of this. >> so, rachel, i think you're putting the right emphasis on one thing in particular, which is this is a lot of cyber activity going on at one time right now. i mean we're looking at significant amounts of cyber activity from the criminal space. we're already worried about it from the state actor space, both in terms of russia and iran. if you remember back just a week

or so ago, we were looking at proud boys impersonation emails focused on voters in florida. so i think a way to think about this is primarily as cyber criminals saw that one of their networks, this trickbot network, was being disrupted, and they started to move aggressively to try and use that tool at a time when covid, means that the premiums to get access to health information are extremely high. i think the second part of it, a second sort of way to think about it, is we know that the russian criminal groups can be a proxy for the russian state, meaning that should the russian state want to have some sort of plausible deniability or someone mess around in terms of cyber infrastructure, that is an avenue with which they can do it, and we've seen that in the past as well. i think what you're doing is right to alert people, and i think the reason we need to alert people to this, that, one, there is a threat that's out there. two, we do see actors doing something this time. four years ago, if i had talked to you, we wouldn't have known

about this at all. we wouldn't have even been dealing with it. we didn't even know infrastructure was being hit. so this time we have defenders out there doing it, but at the same time there is an ongoing, everyday cyber battlefield that we don't really see that is occurring. and now we've got covid-19 and the election at the same time, battleground states, voter suppression. when you bring all of these together, that's a powder keg in cyberspace, and it really comes down to will we trust the results of the election? and i think we can as long as we reinforce the american public that it's going to take patience starting next tuesday. we won't know the results on election night. and if there is a cyber attack, we've got to be patient with our defenders to find out where the truth is. >> to that point about the defenders, i think that's a really, really important point. and i'm struck by how much of this we can see in real time. we got the initial fbi alert from fbi, cisa, and hhs yesterday.

and then they put out an update on it earlier today. just as we were getting on the air, i think they put out another update with lots and lots of new technical in each update, advising the kinds of people who do cyber defense, cybersecurity at hospital systems in this case how they can defend and what to watch for and how they can protect their hospitals and their systems for this once imminent, now ongoing attack. that is reassuring to me even if i don't know what all those lines of code mean. does it make sense to you that these updates are made available to us, the public, that we're sort of allowed to see how much hand-to-hand combat there is here between u.s. cyber command, between our defenders, as you put it, and between these russian state slash criminal actors who appear to have these hospitals in their grip and have our election infrastructure in their sights? >> so it's a double-edged sword, rachel. when we put this out, it alerts

everybody like us in the media, people that watch this space, to say, wow, this is incredible. look at all the activity that's going on. however, when i was working cybersecurity five, six years ago, it was like pulling teeth to get this kind of information out of the u.s. government. that has changed. and when that changes, what it does is it enables all the private sector cybersecurity defenders that are out there, many of them who are extremely capable, have great technical systems, to know what to look for and what to defend against. so it is a rapid way to disseminate from the public sector, from the u.s. government, out into the private sector so we can enable them to help defend themselves. for the most part in the private sector -- and health care is the weakest sector in terms of cybersecurity by and large. it's pretty notorious over the last couple years that they were the place to target. if we can help them get the right information, then we can help them defend themselves. i think that's the approach that they're trying to use. also with the general idea that any vulnerability to infrastructure when it comes to cyberspace, when it comes to voting machines, this might help hatch that as well. you're giving people information so they can act on their own

defense and helping them defend the country in doing that. >> that's right. i think that applies to the public too in terms of understanding it as best we can, bracing ourselves for this potential impact and knowing to anticipate it and keep calm about it rather than overreacting out of ignorance if it does happen in a way that is visible in the middle of our election. clint watts, senior fellow with the foreign policy research institute and the alliance for securing democracy. clint, thank you for helping us. i know this is a really difficult topic for a lot of people and raises a lot of fear. thanks for helping us be straight about it. >> it is. thanks, rachel. >> all right. much more ahead tonight. stay with us. stay with us better? unlike ordinary memory supplements- neuriva has clinically proven ingredients that fuel 5 indicators of brain performance. memory, focus, accuracy, learning, and concentration. try our new gummies for 30 days and see the difference.

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that's what we do, so you can do you. new chapter wellness, well done. gimme five, good job! all right! isaac, good to see you. how are you, man? nice to meet you mr. vice president. god love you, i just wanted to say hi. well i can't preach like you guys can. america is a place for everyone. those who chose this country, those who fought for it. some republicans, some democrats, and most just somewhere in between. all looking for the same thing, someone who understands their hopes, their dreams, their pain: to listen. to bring people together. to get up every day and work to make life better for families like yours. to look you in the eye, treat you with respect, and tell you the truth. to work just as hard for the people who voted for him as those who didn't. to be a president for all americans.

i'm joe biden, and i approve this message. scott wiener immediately went to work, making sure families could put food on their tables, defending renters facing eviction, securing unemployment benefits, helping neighborhood businesses survive. scott wiener will never stop working until california emerges from this crisis. the bay area needs scott's continued leadership

in sacramento. because we know scott is fighting for all of us. re-elect scott wiener for state senate. in the summer of 2016, then-vice president joe biden made a one-day visit to the nation of turkey. politico did a preview of his trip at the time. they framed it this way. biden's nearly impossible task in turkey. u.s./turkish relations were at a

real low. turkey hated the fact the fact the u.s. was supporting the kurds and syria. then there was this more immediate and more bizarre tension, which is that turkey's president was demanding that the u.s. go get a turkish cleric who lives in pennsylvania, and they wanted the cleric picked up in the poconos in pennsylvania and sent back to turkey to be put on trial. now, this cleric is a legal u.s. resident. the u.s. had already said no to extraditing him. but the turkish president is completely obsessed with this guy, and they were constantly pressuring the u.s. government about it. so we knew all that at the time. biden's nearly impossible task in turkey. well, today "the new york times" reports on another very specific difficult part of that trip, which we've never known about before now. at one point on that trip, the turkish president reportedly pulled vice president biden aside under a tree for a one-on-one private conversation. erdogan asked biden to remove preet bharara, then the u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york, whose

office was in the early stages of an investigation into a state-owned turkish bank called halkbank. halkbank was suspected of violating u.s. sanctions by funneling gold and cash to iran. the investigation led by preet bharara's office threatened not only the bank but potentially members of erdogan's family and his political party. so erdogan told biden that day under the tree, quote, that if the u.s. really meant what it said about repairing u.s./turkish relations, the case needed to go away. incidentally, erdogan also told biden under the tree not only did he want him to get rid of preet bharara, the prosecutor, the u.s. attorney, he also wanted biden to get rid of the judge handling the case. he wanted the prosecutor and the judge taken out. standing there with erdogan and with the world's press watching,

biden made clear that no one, no one, not even the u.s. president meddles in judicial affairs in the united states. >> i know it's hard -- i don't know. i suspect it's hard for people to understand that as powerful as my country is, as powerful as barack obama is as president, he has no authority under our constitution to extradite anyone. only a federal court can do that. nobody else can do that. if a president were to take this into his own hands, what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers. >> biden gets asked, hey, get rid of this investigation. get rid of the prosecutors leading this investigation. get rid of the judge in this case. i'm the president of turkey. you're the vice president of the united states. get rid of that for me. biden responds and says, we

don't do it this way in the united states. law enforcement is apolitical in the united states. the president doesn't tell some prosecutor or judge what to do in some criminal case. that's not how it works. he'd be impeached. turns out we now know the turkish president didn't give up on those demands, but he found a far more willing partner with the next president. "the new york times" details that in this blockbuster story today. headline is "turkish bank case showed erdogan's influence with trump." talk about understating it in the headline. this is the iran-contra scandal updated for the 21st century and on steroids. this is just astonishing. president trump, you'll remember, has business interests in turkey himself. he has prided himself also on his relationship with authoritarian leaders the world over. he was more amenable to the turkish leader's pressure on this, and he, in fact, instructed his justice department to back off in a way that biden and obama had balked at. trump's pressure, his acceding to erdogan's pressure, alarmed even some of his own closest aides. quote, trump's sympathetic

response to erdogan was especially jarring, former white house officials said they came to fear the president was open to swaying the criminal justice system to advance a transactional and ill-defined agenda of his own. after trump fired preet bharara, geoffrey berman was picked as the new u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york. by 2018, geoffrey berman and his team of prosecutors had already indicted nine people in this sanctions scheme involving this turkish bank. one witness had even testified that the operation was done with the direct knowledge of president erdogan and erdogan's son-in-law. but here's the thing. when those prosecutors in sdny were ready to file charges against the bank, they were prevented from doing so. as "the times" reports today, trump's acting attorney general at the time, matt whitaker -- remember him, the bald guy? he explicitly, quote, rejected a request from berman for permission to file criminal

charges against the bank. in a separate meeting, whitaker made clear, quote, that he did not want the case to move forward, that he wanted the matter shut down. berman was also pressured into dropping the case by whitaker's successor, attorney general bill barr. according to "the times" at a meeting in june 2019, bill barr pressed geoffrey berman to allow the bank to avoid an indictment by paying a fine and acknowledging some wrongdoing. in addition, the justice department would agree under barr's proposal, would agree to end investigations in criminal cases involving turkish and bank officials who are allied with erdogan. so exactly what erdogan had been pressing biden and obama for, biden responding by saying no, that would be improper and unethical. trump does it. tells whitaker to do it. whitaker does it. tells barr to do it. barr does it. barr leans on geoffrey berman at sdny and geoffrey berman says no. as he argued, quote, the suggestion that the justice

department would offer turkish officials protection from criminal charges even without their agreement to assist in the investigation is unacceptable and unethical. justice department policy specifically says criminal conduct by individuals doesn't get resolved when a company admits wrongdoing. berman told barr, quote, this is not how we do things in the southern district. adding that he would not agree to such a move and that his office would not be part of it. as "the times" reports, the administration's bitterness over geoffrey berman's unwillingness to go along with barr's proposal would linger and would ultimately contribute to his dismissal as u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york. that turkish bank, it was eventually charged by sdny prosecutors after they were given permission to do so by bill barr, not because of any change in evidence or circumstances surrounding the case, nothing that should be within the four corners of a prosecution. ultimately they got permission to go ahead with charges against the bank because of a dustup between trump and erdogan over syria last year. they got into a personal fight, and so the president green lit the charges apparently. trump had initially given erdogan the green light to send troops into syria.

he faced an intense bipartisan backlash leading him within days to take a tougher line with turkey, threatening economic reprisals, and that's why the prosecutors were essentially told, okay, now you can go ahead and indict that bank. as if the prosecutors are just servants who work for the president in order to meet his personal needs. i mean it's just a terrible piece of news in terms of what the president has been able to do and how two of his attorney generals have been operating under his orders. what does that mean for the independence and the operations of the justice department as we head into what is very likely going to be a hotly contested election? stay with us.

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a thursday. but this remarkable reporting in "the new york times" today tells the previously unknown story of the president apparently intervening relentlessly in criminal prosecutions, unrelenting pressure from trump's justice department on federal prosecutors in new york to stop proceeding with an important criminal case after a foreign dictator told trump that's what he wanted. i should mention this is a foreign dictator in whose country the president has multi-million dollar business interests. joining us now is daniel goldman, former assistant u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york. he served as majority counsel in the impeachment inquiry against trump. he was staff counsel to the house managers in the subsequent impeachment trial of the president. mr. goldman, thanks for making time tonight. >> great to be with you, rachel. >> so i am not a lawyer. i have become an increasingly obsessed observer of the legal process, particularly the criminal legal process over the course of this president because

there's been a lot of criminal law in this presidency. i personally was shocked by this, even at this late date, that the president was asked by a dictator to drop a criminal prosecution, that the president said, okay, i will, and that not one but two of his appointed attorneys general tried to make it happen and leaned on sdny to do it. did this shock you in the same way that it shocked me? >> it did shock me, but it did not surprise me unfortunately because we are in an age that this country has not seen in modern history. we saw donald trump intervene in the case of michael flynn, his political ally. we saw donald trump intervene in the case of roger stone in order to prevent him from cooperating against donald trump. and now we have donald trump intervening for the benefit of a foreign dictator in whose country donald trump has business interests. and i think what is so clear and troubling about this is donald

trump, we now know, i think pretty much unequivocally, operates solely in his personal interests. but what is scary to me as a former department of justice employee for ten years is that bill barr would go along with all of these things and that the notion that because donald trump suggested to bill barr that this significant, significant investigation and prosecution of sanctions violations against iran -- and let's remember donald trump's policy towards iran is to pull us out of the jcpoa and implement sanctions. this prosecution was designed to prevent foreign entities from doing an end run around those sanctions. that is donald trump's policy. he should be happy with it. but he wasn't, and bill barr

actually suggested to the prosecutors that they should drop the cases, already charged cases, that they should just drop them. that almost never happens generally, and it certainly never happens because of political reasons. it is just another demonstration of how far in the gutter we have gone and how the rule of law has just been trampled during this administration. >> dan, again, i'm outside of this looking in. but from what i understand of justice department policy, when attorney general bill barr went to sdny and told them to drop these charges, drop the investigations of all the individuals connected to this case, which is what this foreign dictator was after, as far as i understand it, that not only is wildly unethical, totally violative of our understanding of the impartial rule of law and all these other things, but it's directly against explicit justice department policy in terms of whether or not individuals are charged versus something like a bank is

charged. i mean he was violating the policies of his own department. does that matter? are there any consequences for that if he -- if trump gets re-elected and barr stays on as attorney general? does he ever have to account for this in some way? >> well, there's always the possibility of impeachment of bill barr as well, and i think that there have been a number of different instances that would be grounds for an impeachment of bill barr. we are so close to the election that sort of the first way to deal with this kind of corruption is to vote them out. but if there is another trump term and bill barr remains there, that would be the only real avenue to keep him in check and to limit the effect of this -- this type of corruption. in the obama administration, the department of justice strengthened its policies against corporations and made it very clear that individual prosecutions should also be valued.

and what you're referring to is a policy that really does separate indictments or charges against corporations and entities and the individuals who are working for those. and what he correctly objected to is bill barr was proposed some kind of global settlement for the bank and all its employees. but that's not how it work and that's what department of justice policy is, and that's part of the reason why this smells so bad and why it's so clearly not because of any kind of luegitimate reason why you would want to dismiss the case. that's not how justice system has traditionally run and it's not how it should run. >> it's not the way it runs or should run even if a foreign

dictator asks for it as a favor or perhaps especially. it's just incredible. daniel goldman, former assistant attorney in the southern district of new york. thank you for making the time tonight. >> you too, thanks so much. we've got a lot more tonight. stay with us. > we've got a lot e tonight. stay with us abreva can get you back to being you in just 2 and a half days. be kinder to yourself and tougher on your cold sores.

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the u.s. elections project reports that in the great state of hawaii the number of voters who have already cast their ballots this year is over 457,000. now what's important about that is that that's the more than the number of people who have voted in any election in hawaii ever. and i don't mean that is more than the number of people who have voted early in any hawaii election. i mean theinable of hawaii residents who have already voted this year is more than the total number of hawaii residents who have voted in any previous election since hawaii became a state. oh, my. in texas about 8.9 million people voted in 2016. already in this election this year more than 8.5 million

texans have voted, which means texas is more than 95% of the way to matching the total state turnout from 2016. and they're still early voting. early voting still goes there. doesn't end until tomorrow 7:00 p.m. harris county where houston is planning to keep some polling locations open all night tonight so everybody who wants to can get a chance to vote early before tomorrow's 7:00 p.m. deadline. right now of course we're used to hearing every 4 years or maybe every 2 years all these election year fantasies from democrats how texas might finally start turning blue and how that would change everything from the democratic party. i don't know if democratic fantasies are anymore real this year than they usually are, but it is a real thing that vice presidential nominee kamala harris has scheduled not one, not two but three campaign stops in texas tomorrow while texas is absolutely voting its socks off. watch this space. s socks off. watch this space it's moving day. and while her friends

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these tax cheats avoid millions in taxes on vacation homes and coastal mansions depriving our schools. prop 19 closes this unfair loophole that's been exploited by an elite few and helps our schools, firefighters, and seniors. vote 'yes' on prop 19. tell them [record scratch] the party's over. what do you think the odds are that this time next week i not only will still be on tv, but i will still be on tv from when i sat down on tuesday night? i have to get more comfortable pants. oh look, there you are. that does it for us tonight. we'll see you again tomorrow. it's time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." good evening, lawrence. >> i don't know what the odds are, rachel, i really don't. my record time, my record time in