tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC October 30, 2020 1:00am-2:00am PDT
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the rachel maddow show starts right now. >> good evening, my friend. much appreciated. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. voting is happening all night tonight in harris county, texas. texas as a state is set to surpass already the 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.
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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 says the state will not be allowed to count any ballots that arrive in the mail after election day, even if they are po postmarked before election day. now, that is a last-minute, really consequential rule change. minnesotans had previously been told 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 lament 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
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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
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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 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 23for your -- >> perhaps senator perdue would have been able to respond effectively to the covid-19 pandemic if you hadn't been pending off allegations of 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.
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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.
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of those 11 polls, five of them show david perdue ahead, five 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 in at this late date, so everybody who still 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.
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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 gouffonor hospital, systems are down. messina memorial was hacked too. they were using ransomware unknown to cybersecurity companies. st. lawrence health system has disconnected 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.
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gouvernor remains on diversion. health investigative teams are working with the fbi and homeland security to provide them more information about the ransomware attack. >> it's local news from wwny tv in upstate new york. hear that part about ambulance diversion, asking ambulance to take patients elsewhere? three of st. lawrence county's hospitals have been hit by a cyber attack. st. lawrence county, new york. it's up against the canadian border. three of the hospitals in that county have been hit by a cyber attack that has shut down hospital computer systems, and 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 hotspot. the latest data from the state of new york says st. lawrence county has less than 400 covid cases in the whole county, which is good, and particularly for
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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's cybersecurity agency, cesa, alerting hospitals across the country to get ready for this kind of attack, to prepare themselves and to make changes now to try to fend it off. here's from that alert -- "cisa, fbi and hhs have credible information of an increase in imminent cybercrime threat to u.s. hospitals and health care providers. cisa, fbi and hhs assess malicious cyber actors are targeting the health care and public health sector with trickbot malware, often leading to ransomware attacks, data theft and the disruption of health care services. now, outside of st. lawrence county where we saw that report, other hospitals that have
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apparently been hit by the attack 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 -- the hospital is unable to offer cancer treatments that are computer controlled and the attack has curbed some diagnostic imaging as well. a 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 -- "employees at the hospital were told, if it's a pc, 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 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
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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. louis county that we were just talking about. so, beyond this number of hospitals that have been hit with this cyber attack thus far, nicole perloff reporting at "the new york times" that the hackers behind these attacks, believed to be based in moscow and st. petersburg in russia, these hackers, "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. this is from the "associated press" -- "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
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but profit. charles carmakal, chief technical officer of cybersecurity firm mandian, said in a statement, 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 the 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,
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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, and that's because it was only about 2 1/2 weeks ago. and we covered this on the show at the time. 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
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even know about, most of us who aren't all that tech-minded wouldn't have even known to conceive of it. but what microsoft announced a couple weeks ago was they were taking out servers used by a big network called trickbot. they described it as a gigantic network of computers hijacked by russian-speaking criminal hackers to carry out ransomware attacks. ransomware attacks are where you lock up computers or data and 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, you know, 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
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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'd 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 had further good news. "the new york times" then reported that 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 -- "so far, trickbot
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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. and 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 network 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
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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
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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 they paid up or not. hall county, georgia, has been very, very tight-lipped about how they're dealing with this, including to 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 that hackers have stolen from the county and are now posting online, after having threatened
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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, okay, 50 points. 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
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botnet work that would be ideally suited to locking us up on election night? it was a week ago tonight that the fbi and cisa, that 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 election 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 elections 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?
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this was the trump campaign website earlier this week. this was the home screen. it lasted about half an hour before they got it back. but the official trump campaign website was taken over by hackers who changed the website to this. they said they had broken into it and stolen important data and put forward competing ransom demands to either release the data they had 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 technical harm is ever really caused.
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right now, 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
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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, even to the not-tech-minded among us, 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
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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 criminals' case. we're already worried about it from the state actor space, both in terms of russia and iran. if you remember just a week or so ago, we were looking at proud boys impersonation emails focused on voters in florida. and so, i think a way to think about this is, primarily, is cyber criminals saw that one of their networks, the trickbot network was being disrupted and they started to move aggressively to try and use that
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tool at a time when covid, when we have a covid problem in the u.s., means that the premiums to get access to health information are extremely high. i think the second part of it, the 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 needed 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.
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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 to 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 try and find out what the truth is, where the ballots have been counted and how we can ensure the integrity of the vote. >> 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. goat the initial fbi alert from fbi, cisa, and hhs yesterday, and then they put out an update today and i think while on air, they've put out a new update with lots of information in each update, advising the people who do cyber defense, cybersecurity, at hospital systems in this case, how they can defend and
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what to watch for and how to protect their hospitals and their systems from this, well, 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/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 of 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 of the private-sector cybersecurity defenders that are out there,
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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 that 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 could help them get the right information, then we can help them defend themselves. and 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 patch that as well. you're giving people information so they can act on their own defense and you are helping them defend the country in doing that. >> that's right. and i think that applies to the public, too, in terms of understanding it as best we can, sort of bracing ourselves for this potential impact and knowing to anticipate it and keep calm about it, rather than overreacting out of ignorance,
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if it does happen in a way that is visible in the middle of our election. clint watt, senior fellow with the foreign policy research institute and alliance for securing democracy. clint, thank you for helping us. i know this is a difficult topic for a lot 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 us. >> all right, much more ahead tonight. stay us. (brad) apartments-dot-com makes getting into a new home easier than ever. (woman 1) how hot do you think it is? (woman 2) a million. it's so hot the bugs can't even sleep. if only we had a/c. i'm so happy. (brad) apartments-dot-com. the most popular place to find a place.
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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 that the u.s. was supporting the kurds in syria. turkey wanted everybody to be against the kurds and hated that we were on their side. 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
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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 hawkbank, which 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. and 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.
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incidentally, erdogan also told biden under the tree that 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 your 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 the president were to take this into his own hands, what
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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 that way in the united states. law enforcement is apolitical in the united states. the president doesn't tell some prosecutor or some 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," yet 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
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in turkey himself. he has prided himself also on his relationship with authoritarian leaders the world over. he was much 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 aseeding to erdogan's pressure alarmed even some of his own closest aides. "trump's sympathetic response to erdogan was especially jarring, former white house officials said. they came to fear that 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 even testified that the operation was done with the
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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 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 here, would agree to end investigations in criminal cases involving turkish and bank officials who were allied with erdogan and
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suspected of participating in this scheme. so, biden responded saying no, that would be improper and unethical, the president would be impeached for doing that. trump does it, tells whitaker to do it, whitaker does it. tells barr to do it, barr does it. barr leans on geoffrey berman in sdny and berman says no. as he argued, "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, "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 the proposal would linger and 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
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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 dust-up 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 seyria and faced an intense bipartisan backlash that led him to threaten 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 attorneys general 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
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in california, we're the only state where wealthy trust fund heirs get their own tax loophole. 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.
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in any other presidency, even in the week before an election, maybe especially in the week before an election, this would be an absolutely show-stopping scandal -- drop everything. in this administration, eh, it's 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 multimillion 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
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the impeachment trial against trump and was staff counsel to the managers in the subsequent imimpeachment trial of the president. mr. goldman, it's really nice to see you. 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
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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
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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
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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 those 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 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
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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 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 geoffrey berman correctly objected to is that bill barr was proposing some kind of a global settlement for the bank and all of its employees. but that's not how it works. and that's not what department of justice policy is. and that's part of the reason why this smells so bad and why
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it's so clearly not because of any kind of legitimate reason why you would want to dismiss a case, but instead of shameful and illegitimate political interference, which is just as joe biden pointed out in 2016, that's not how our justice system traditionally has run, and it's not how it should run. >> yeah, it's not the way it runs or should run, even if a foreign dictator asks for it as a favor, or perhaps especially. that's just incredible. daniel goldman, former u.s. district attorney in the southern district of new york. nice to see you. thank you for making time tonight. >> you, too. thanks so much. >> all right, we've got a lot more ahead tonight. stay with us. a lot more ahead tonight stay with us
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and i don't mean that that is more than the number of people who have voted early in any hawaii election. i mean, the number 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 there's still early voting. early voting doesn't end until tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. harris county, where houston is, 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. by now, of course, we are used to hearing every four years, or maybe every two years, all these election-year fantasies from democrats about how texas might finally start turning blue and
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how that would change everything for the democratic party. i don't know if democratic fantasies are any more 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. ng its socks off. watch this space
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not only will i 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. look, that does it for us tonight. we'll see you again tomorrow. "way too early with kasie hunt" is up next. i say it all the time, because we've liked ronald reagan. we've liked most people. generally, they're stiffs, don't do the job, but ronald reagan is the one i think about. but nobody ever chanted -- first of all, he'd never get a crowd like this. he'd have 200 or 300 people in a ballroom. that was the norm. you should have seen yesterday, we had 35,000, 40,000 people. >> president trump bragging about the size of his campaign crowds as he hops from state to state. and it's no longer just covid causing major health concerns. question is, why is the president's campaign making
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