brakes. >> yeah, that's the big fear. goshing we all feel it during this covid winter. you said bars and restaurants. i was like, gosh, that sounds nice. that's it for "all in" tonight. the rachel maddow show starts now. >> thank you. much appreciated. thanks for joining us this hour. happy to have you hear we have a lot to get to. congresswoman to talk about how much help the american people are going to get from the covid relief bill. the fight is on as to how big they're going go in terms of trying to help people. the congresswoman holds a lot of card ♪ we're going to hear about her strategy and thinking and why she and her colleagues are really insisting that the covid

relief bill is among other things is right place and the right time and the right way to push a raise in the minimum wage. the minimum wage has not gone up in this country in 12 years. president biden says he's committed to raising the minimum wage, but publicly raised doubts if it can be done. this of course is a super consequential issue for the economy as a whole, but more importantly, for millions and millions and millions of americans who would be affected by this. we're going to talk with the congresswoman about that in just a moment. you may have also seen this developing story about sort of a nightmare scenario cyberattack on a water treatment plant at a small community in florida in the tampa bay area. it's a town in florida that's literally 12 miles from the stadium where the super bowl was held. in advance of this wednesday on friday, somebody hacked into a

computer at this town's local treatment facility and used that computer they hacked into to tray to poison the town's water supply. they actually did change the level of one chemical that's supposed to be at 100 parts per million or less. they changed it in the computer system so it would instead be added to the water at more than 11,000 parts per million, which could have been quite catastrophic if not caught. it was caught immediately. a plant employee watched the attack in realtime while somebody hacking from somewhere remotely accessed his computer and changed the settings about the additive. the local sheriff briefed on it today. the national press is starting to pick it up. the fbi and secret service are involve in the seeing what happened. we've got one of the best cybersecurity investigators here tonight. she's been warning about

something like this for years. nicole perl roth has a book coming out tomorrow about this. and of course the trial of former president donald trump starts tomorrow in the united states senate, the only american president to have ever been impeached twice will now start his second impeachment trial. we now know that day one tomorrow is going to be four hours of debate about basically whether or not it's okay for the senate to even be holding that trial given that president trump is no longer in office. if that's ringing a bell you'll remember there was already a vote on this in the senate. 45 senators -- all but five of the republican senators voted on this resolution in such a way that said it wasn't constitutional for the senate to

go ahead with that trial, specifically because trump is no longer in office. essentially they're saying on a technicality, trump shouldn't face a senate trial for this impeachment. what of course was amazing about that at the time they took that vote is that the senate very well could have put donald trump on trial in this second senate impeachment trial while he was still in office. they could have done that if they wanted to. it was republican senate leader mitch mcconnell who refused to do that. mcconnell refused to recall the senate so they could start the senate trial while trump was still president. they didn't start to trial until after trump was gone. and once trump was gone mcconnell voted with all those other republican to say, this trial should have started while he was president and now it's too late. it's like the gym teacher kept makes run laps after the bell

went off and then sent to the principal's office. you were the one making me run laps! the democrats would have had a trial if trump was still president. mitch mcconnell stopped them doing that. mitch mcconnell is saying, it's too late now. he can't be tried while he's president. nor can he be try affidavit he's president. but senator mcconnell wants everyone to know just how much he wants president trump to be held accountable for what he did. anyway, there will be four hours of debate starting at 1:00 tomorrow on the question of whether the senate is allowed under the constitution to hold this impeachment trial for donald trump even though trump is now a former official. the last time they voted on this, when rand paul put this up before the senate, some of the 45 republicans who voted no on that question and said it was unconstitution toll try trump as a president, some of those republicans said they were only voting that way because they

wanted there to be a debate on this issue. the trial will start with that debatele we'll see whether all the republicans who voted that this trial shouldn't happen will still hold to that tomorrow. that vote will be tomorrow before the end of the day. then the next day on wednesday, starting at noon, which is prescribed by the constitution, they will start presenting the case for and against the former president. now, in terms of president trump's -- well, the prosecutors, right, that's the house impeachment managers. there's nine democratic member of congress who are essentially going to be prosecuting the case on behalf of the house, which has already impeached him taxpayer defense team on the president's side has been a little harder to follow. he originally had a team of lawyers from south carolina. then he fired all of them. then he hired a couple of new lawyers. now apparently the president has just gotten himself a new defense lawyer, a third defense

lawyer as of today. we know this because his name appear on the do you means that were filed. he's a personal injury attorney so maybe there's a whiplash component or a slip and fall. perhaps there was an unknown fender bender on january 6th the president wants you to know he didn't do. i don't know, he's got a third defense lawyer which, i kid you not, is a personal injury lawyer. one of the his three lores, mr. doug schoen last week asked the senate if they would please change the trial to observe his schedule. he's jewish. it's kind of a big deal to change the schedule for an impeachment trial since these

things are actually laid out in the constitution, but senator schumer for the democrats, who's the first jewish majority leader, and senate mcconnell for the republicans agreed that they would accommodate mr. schoen's request and therefore even though it's an unusual accommodation, they would recess at 5:00 p.m. eastern time on friday and wouldn't reconvene at all on saturday. they would not reconvene until sunday afternoon. that's a very unusual schedule, but agreed to it at the request of mr. schoen, the president's attorney. they announced it today formally they'll go ahead with the no trail on saturday. they released the written resolution that formalizes it and everything. but tonight after the resolution was released, mr. schoen touchdown president's lawyer, decided that he didn't want that accommodation after all. he sent this letter saying, never mind. he really appreciates it. thanks for accommodation, but he

doesn't need it anymore. it is now cool for them to hold the trial on saturday. he just won't participate. it's totally unclear why mr. schoen asked for that big change in the senate trial schedule if he didn't actually want them to do it. they said yes, and he said, no, i don't care. i don't want it. it's unclear as to whether or not this means they're going to change the schedule back to the original plan. that means they'll is to change the written resolution laying out the trial rules and schedule they were going to vote on tomorrow. it's just a bizarre turn and the timing of it is bizarre, but that is just one of the strange things that is unfolding in the news tonight. and on the eve of that trial starting tomorrow, the idea that you hear in conservative media, and the idea that you hear among some republicans that the events of january 6th are so far behind us and trump's gone and this

whole thing ought to be put out of our minds so we can move forward, that argument, that mind set, is very much undermined by the current news cycle. and not just current events but new revelations in the news. for example there was reporting in "the new york times" this weekend that after trump's disgraced national security adviser mike flynn started advocating after the election publicly that trump should impose martial law. after flynn started advocating that trump should order the u.s. military into the streets to, in his words, rerun the election in states that trump lost. after flynn started making that public case about what trump should do, according to "the new york times" this weekend, quote, trump raised the idea of putting mr. flynn in charge of the fbi and later suggested making him chief of staff, meaning white house chief of staff for the final weeks of his administration. so here's the impeachment trial starting with president trump's

new lawyers claiming that everything trump said leading up to january 6th was just hyperbole, typical politics and rhetorical flourishes and he didn't mean what he said literally and didn't have any aim to overturn the election by force -- that's what they're going to be arguing, right? but there was that guy suggesting that trump should use the military to use force to undo the election and trump wanted to put him in the white house to make him chief of staff or maybe head of fbi. maybe he could do it from there. trump's reaction to flynn suggesting he has the military takeover to undo the election was to try to put flynn operationally in charge of the white house. and if you -- you know, if you think that this is all in the past -- oh, it's ancient history. it was all a month ago.

today in arizona, absolutely remarkable story. republicans in the state senate? arizona today held a vote that would have allowed them to lock up the county elections board in a county that voted for biden instead of trump. this vote in the arizona senate would have declared the maricopa county elections board in contempt which means they could have been arrested at the discretion of the arizona state republican senate. we're going to have more on this later on in the show. but apparently arizona's republican party is demanding that this county that voted for biden, maricopa county, needs to hand over its ballots, individual voters' ballots to the republicans in the state senate. and the county says, we can't do that without a judicial order to hand those ballots over to anyone. and the arizona senate republicans came within one vote today of threatening to lock up the members of that county

elections board in order to get those ballots. because they, what, were going to use the ballots to prove the steal! #stop the steal or whatever. they're still fighting that war. arizona republicans censured the republican governor of arizona for having to temerity to certify the election results in that state, and they are still tonight trying to overthrough the election results in arizona by trying to overthrow the election results in maricopa county in part by threatening this imprison the election officials in the county. trump refuses to let anyone refer to him as a former president and arizona republicans are saying trump won their state and is still therefore the president. this is tonight. we'll have more on that later. that story took an uglier turn tonight before we got on the air. we're trying to turn around the tape as to what happened at the

end of the senate in this debate. you should hear it. it's eh. i mentioned there was only one vote that stopped them trying to lock up the elections board today. you might remember in the more immediate aftermath of the november election it was only one vote on the state elections board in michigan, one republican member of that board, who stood up and said that he had read the constitution, read the rules and actually he wasn't going to go along with the republican plan in figure to try to block biden's win there. it was just one vote, one guy who stood in the way of that republican plot there to undo the election result in michigan. while republicans in michigan have now removed that guy from the state elections board, so he won't be there anymore to stand up and do the legal thing. this weekend michigan republicans chose a new vice chair for their state party, someone who actually personally participate in the street protests outside the vote

tallying site in michigan, demanding to be let in because somehow trump must have won and it was all being stolen. that's who will be the number two person statewide in the republican party in michigan. that's happening now. these decisions are being made now. republicans are not moving on. republicans in washington are like, you know, democrats, we understand you're a very -- you were all upset about this but you ned to grow up, pull your your socks and move on meanwhile, republicans in the stays are not moving on from what trump tried to pull off with the attack on the capitol january 6th. they're keeping on with it. and all the people who are start of the whole stop the steal, biden isn't really the president thing, they're all getting elevate in the state parties. people who stood with the election results and said, we shouldn't try to overturn the election by force, those are the people getting censured and thrown out of the party. who's not moving on here? but the impeachment trial of

president trump for his role in the january 6th attack, that starts tomorrow. in the great state of georgia tonight, the secretary of state's office is announcing they're opening a formal investigation into president trump calling state officials to telling them to change the vote tally so it would look like he won the state instead of biden. the president told the secretary of state to recalculate the state results and quote, find enough votes to make trump the winner. that call to the secretary of state is lesser noticed part of the impeachment article that was passed in the house that will be the basis for his trial starting tomorrow. but in georgia they're not only investigating that call to the secretary of state as a potentially criminal matter. they're also going to apparently investigate trump's other menacing calls to other state officials, including the governor and a lower level employee in the secretary of state's office who the president personally called. all of these different attempts by the president personally to get georgia election officials to overturn the rightful

election results so that trump could stay in office. i mean, it would truly be something for republicans in the u.s. senate to blow off and excuse president trump's actions in this trial starting tomorrow, to say it's no big dealleware moving on. we don't think what he did is that much of a problem. it would be a big deal for them to say that while at the same time the president could be facing prison time in georgia for those actions. in georgia it is a serious crime to solicit. it's a crime in georgia, one for which you can be convicted and punished, especially one for which you have the great wisdom do outen tape. republicans don't like any of it. they don't want to trial to

happen, but they're going to have start casting ayes and nays tomorrow. for his part president biden has been asked directly and indirectly through the press secretary if he wants to weigh in on the former president's fate on this trial, whether he'd vote to convict trump if we were in the senate. president biden has refused to be drawn into these situations, saying it's only a matter for the senate and not him to say. what he keeps reiterating is what he's solely focused on now is covid relief, fighting the pandemic and passing the covid relief bill, the american rescue plan. on that relief plan, the one part of it that remains an object of absolute fixation for the press is whether republicans will vote for it as well as democrats. and certainly for the purposes of score keeping and, you know,

partisan competition as a televised sport, that is an interesting question. i myself will be interested to see if any republicans vote for it. but on the other hand, who cares, right? it's called the american rescue plan for a reason -- this is a thing the country really needs, something that new polling shows 9 out of 10 americans are in support of. 9 out of 10 americans support a new covid rescue plan. maybe republicans will vote for it. maybe not. what's perhaps of more consequence is what's going to be in this, whether or not there are republican votes to the bill. frankly it's up to the democrats to decide whether this things president biden says he wants in the bill are going to be in it. because while republicans are fre to vote for this bill, they don't need to in order to pass. so it really is up to the democrats to decide, will there be $1,400 stimulus checks to bring the amount of stimulus up

to that $2,000 level that even president trump was demanding before he left office and senators like raphael warnock and jon ossoff campaigned on. will everyone was eligible for previous covid relief payments still be eligible for these next ones, or will democrats cut a bunch of middle class people off from those covid relief checks? in previous relief agreed to by democrats and republicans, the income threshold for getting covid relief was $75,000. anybody who's making $75,000 a year or less got a covid relief check. if they drop that threshold a lot, drop it down to $50,000, that would mean there are something like 40 million american who is got checks last time who went get them again. and why would democrats want to do that? i mean, to be blunt about it, democrats are planning on

campaigning against republicans who vote against this thing. they're planning on campaigning against republicans who vote against this thing by saying, hey, look, the republicans busted the budget to give tax breaks to the richest in the country, but when it came time to give out covid relief, they stiffed you. that's what democrats want to use to pressure the republicans on this thing. but then when the at democrats are in charge and they can write the bill, they decide to cut 40 million americans off from relief? 40 million middle class americans who got help while the republicans were in control? the democrats cut them off? why would you do that? that's a lot of things. great politics is not one of them. in this case the progressive caucus would argue the quality of politics and quality of -- go hand in hand.

pramila jayapal is the chair. her and her colleagues are arguing not only should they not cut the tens of millions of americans out, but they are arguing for a hike in the minimum wage for the first time in 1 years. that would give 27 million americans a permanent raise. joining us now is congressman jayapal of washington. she's the chair of the progressive caucus. great to see you. this can for join using. >> it is great to be with you, rachel. >> let me ask you first at a personal level, i know you have been contending with covid. i want to ask how you are and your family. >> i'm almost 100% and my husband is almost 100%. my heart goes out to people across this country -- 450,000 who have died and people dealing with it. because the effects do go on. and we were two of the lucky

ones to have as short of a recovery we have had. so we're doing well. >> thank you. >> good. i'm glad to hear it. we have had challenges in our family and i know those long consequences are a real thing. let me ask you about this plan for relief for the american public on covid. i think i laid out some of -- at least the way i understand the discussion, as far as i can tell, it's a point of interest, particularly to the press, as so whether or not a few or a lot or no republicans are going to join with democrats in passing this thing. but as a matter of content, it doesn't much matter. it's up to democrats who have the votes just in the democratic caucus to pass this thing to decide what's going to be in it and you and your colleagues in the progressive caucus are really leading to make sure the benefits are not cut down from what they were in terms of relief under president trump and that important economic measures hike the rise in the minimum

wage are included. is that fair? >> that is totally fair, and you are right on when you said we shouldn't care whether republicans are going to vote for this or not, because the vast majority of the american people support this package, republicans and democrats. if we want to talk about unifying proposals, a big bold stimulus package that raises the wage and gets checks out to people, puts hundred in people's pockets, deals with all of the issues that families and small businesses are facing, that is the unifying proposal. republicans, if they don't want to go along with it, that's up to them. but we now control -- democrats now control the house the senate, and the white house. i grant you it's a thin majority in both chambers, but the reality is we've got to do what we promised. we've got to get the $202,000 checks -- $1,400 in addition to the $600 without to people we should not be cutting thresholds. that makes no political sense. you outlined that.

but it also makes no policy sense. because we are looking at 2019 numbers to determine this eligibility. everybody understands that tense of millions of people lost their jobs or had reduced income in 2020. so if you look at an income threshold from 2019, it is not relevant to what we're trying to do. and this idea of targeting -- i just call it restricting for no good reason. if you really wanted to target, you would need to look at the most recent data on income, which is not what we're using in this bill. so let's just get these checks out to everybody. and we did score a victory after a lot of pushing that the progressive caucus did over the weekend. we were able to secure at least the initial victory of keeping these thresholds the same. but we just have to be really clear, there are a lot of people hurting over this country.

and reducing thresholds and talking about some fake targeting is not going to get relief to people, on top of not being what we campaigned on. so that's the first thing. and the second thing on minimum wage, i represent the city that was the first major city in the country to pass the $15 minimum wage. i was on the committee that helped draft that proposal when we passed it back in 2014, and that's seattle of course. and so this has been such a big priority for progressives for a decade, led by fast food workers across this country. and just over the weekend we were starting to hear all the reasons why we shouldn't put $15 into the bill, and frankly, we had to push back very, very hard. we were able to work with leadership, with the chairman of the education and labor committee, and yesterday there was to $15 bell in the education and labor markup, and today, rachel, there is. what does that mean?

$330 billion in wages will flow to workers over the next ten years. 27 million workers will get a raise. and 1 million workers will be lifted out of poverty. this is a core important issue and structural reform that will also persist past covid. so it is one of the most important things we can do. i just got a smile from ear to ear, but i want to make sure people understand we've got to get it across the finish line. it's got to stay in the bill. the thresholds have to stay in the bill through the house and into the senate. and democrats have to fight. we have to fight with everything we've got for these progressive, bold ideas that are going to bring relief to people. >> congresswoman pramila jayapal. chairman of the progressive caucus. i'm not sure people knew the $15

minimum wage wasn't going to be in the bill until you told us. laying the stakes out as clearly as possible. good to see you. good wishes on a good recovery. >> good to see you, rh and to you and your family as well. i followed that. it was heartbreaking and i appreciate you bringing that to the forefront. >> you this, so kind to hear you say. much more to get to tonight. stay with us. ith us minerals to actively repair and strengthen enamel. so you don't just brush to clean, you brush to build. pronamel intensive enamel repair.

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oldsmar is a city on the west side of florida, about 15,000 people live there. it's about a half hour from pam pa. the stadium where the super bowl was played this weekend is about 12 miles away. as we were heading into this weekend, this friday afternoon, somebody tampered with the drinking water in the city of tampa, florida.

before the water leaves the treatment facility -- they've got a town water treatment facility. before it leave there is and flows into people's taps, separate chemicals and additives get added to make it safe to drink. at 1:30 p.m. this past friday, an employee at the treatment plan noticed the cursor on his screen started moving around on its own. the cursor pulled up the control for a chemical called sodium hydroxide is known as lye. it's added to potable water in small amounts to regulate the ph of the water. in high doses lye can be dangerous. profoundly so. it's the same chemical that's used in liquid drain cleaners. typically they add lye into their water in 100 parts per million or less. but on friday morning, that water treatment employee watched that phantom cursor move the

controls in the water treatment software to increase the amount of lye being added into oldsmar's water to over 11,000 parts per million. it was obvious to this employee right away that his computer was being hacked. he immediately took control of the machine, undid what the hacker had just done before the water could be significantly -- the sheriff said it was unlawfully hacked. he said the fbi and secret service are involve in the an investigation. as of now, there are no suspects. it's unknown whether the hacker was located overseas or in the united states. city officials made it clear even if that water treatment employee hadn't been so -- and seen the hack happen in realtime it would have taken a day before water hit the people's taps. there are other safeguards in

place that would have detected the strong change in the ph of the water, the contame nation before then. so they're saying this kind of attack on the city's water supply would have been caught some other way if it wasn't caught the way it was. which i guess is comforting in a sense. but until we know more about this hack, including how hard it was to pull off, it really does raise all sorts of questions about, you know, how secure all of those safeguards really were. if you can hack the computer that add the lye to the water could you have hacked the alarms that alert there's too much lye in the water. an attack on our critical infrastructure, our hospitals, the water we drink, that is the nightmare for cyberwarfare leaving the conceptual realm to the terrorism realm that a lo of us think about all the time.

that has never been fully realized but in oldsmar florida we got one step closer. nicole perlroth is a reporter for "the new york times." she's really good. this is what she had to say tonight after hearing the news. quo, i always put water treatment plants in my line of stories of remotely hackable infrastructure. it's because this is the attack scenario that freaks me out the most. today these hacks have been near misses yet we continue to see them hack and poke. water contamination is a silent, though no less deadly threat. she has a brand new book out called "this is how they tell me the word ends, the cyberweapons arms race. she joins us here next.

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journalist nicole perlroth has been covering cyberfor the "the new york times," covering everything from russia's hacking targeting federal agencies in u.s. elections and the ukrainian gas agency at the center of trump's first impeachment to iran's attacks on oil companies and also on banks. she's also on the byline tonight on a story that feels unsetingly closer to home. the hacking of the town water treatment plant in a city called oldsmar, florida. that attempted poisoning, she calls that the scenario, long feared by cybersecurity experts. tomorrow, this barn burning culmination of nicole's years of reporting on cybersecurity is about to hit book shelves.

it reads like a novel. sit not. it's called "this is huh they tell me the world ends." in it she lays out how the u.s. has gone from leading the world in cyberhacking expertise to be being quite vulnerable to tacks from lots of places. she said, the analogy to pearl harbor is a flawed one. they didn't see that coming. we have seen the cyberattack coming for a decade. a plague invisible to the naked eye that ripples crass our country at an extraordinary rate, reaching ever deep entire our freedom and psyche with no end in site. american computers are attacked every 30 seconds. only when there are highly visible mishaps do we pause for reflection. the most destructive tend to go

quickly. joining us now is nicole perlroth, the author of the new book "this is how they tell me the world ends". congratulations on the book. thanks for being here on the eve of publication. >> thanks so much for having me, rachel. >> so i read everything that you write, and i find your beat fascinating. and i also am not the kind of person who wraps my mind easily around the technical details but you explain them in a way i can understand. given that i have that trust in you as an explainer of these sort of things, can you tell me how many alarms this water treatment plant in florida set off for you? >> like i said -- you did a great job explaining it. like i said, this is the attack i have been worried about for a long time. whenever i talk about the event hitting the united states the one that freaked me out the most was the hack on a water treatment facility, because this

is not something where an explosion would go off or a bomb. this is something, someone getting into the controls like friday, they could contaminate the population. oldsmar's population is 15 knew, but we should look at the attack carefully. we should look at how they got in. we should try to understand what sort of mitigations would have been put in place if someone happened to not be sitting at their computer and watch their cursor moved around. sounds like that contaminated water wouldn't have gotten into the supply, but i thought you made a great point. if they could get into the systems and access the controls what was to stop them from mucking the up the controls themselves to make sure the last-minute mitigations wouldn't work? as you read from my book, we

just continue to see the escalating cyberattacks. and the one that really brought this to mind was this attack in 2017 that russia pulled off on a saudi pet ro chemical plant where they dismantled the safety locks at that plant. the very last mitigation in a long line of mitigations that is in mace to prevent an explosion. and they were actually able to essentially neutralize the safety locks. we don't know what could have happened if somebody wasn't sitting at their computer, but we continue to have the near misses and it seems like each one just gets closer and closer and closer. >> i feel like the thing i learned from your reporting and particularly from the book is that my initial instinct on this as a consumer of news is sort of wrong, or at least it's beside the point. my initial instinct is, how hard is it to do this?

does that limit the number of suspects? how long is it going to take to figure out who did this and therefore what their intent was? i feel like from our reporting i've learned basically everyone can do this. if it can be done there's lots of skilled act force around the world and a lot of our lack of defenses as a country is because we came to believe we were the only ones working on this with any level of expertise so we never built defenses into our own systems. now that everybody has the tools we have -- i mean even in a hyper bollic sense. thinking about the individual suspects list maybe isn't the right approach. >> just like you said, anybody could have done this. could have been a bored teenager, a disgruntled employee. could have been a nation state. most of my reporting has focused on the nation state but this is not that difficult to pull off. many people i talked to today

called it a pretty simplistic attack. so, one of the things people highlighted was this was on a really small facility. when you're talking about a giant critical infrastructure operator, like a pg&e they're going to have a lot of mitigations and security measures in place. but where we're vulnerable is with these smaller utilities, small water treatment plants in small towns and cities, the smaller dams that hackers can get inside their control system, dismantle the locks in these dams and essentially cause this cyberinduced tsunami. we have seen these. 2013 we caught iranian hackers inside the bowman avenue dam, about 30 miles north of new york. it keeps back a babbling brook, and it wouldn't have done that much damage if they actually pulled it off, but i remember the day that happened, michael

daniel, the when white house security coordinator got this 3:00 a.m. phone call, the famed 3:00 a.m. phone call from john brennan freaked out because they thought it was the arthur j. bowman dam in oregon, which the iranian hackers got inside that dam and messed with the locks that hold its water back they really could have caused the equivalent of a terrorist attack. so we keep seeing sort of the capabilities -- keep getting better and better and we keep seeing more and more adversaries probing at our critical infrastructure. there were more attacks on american critical infrastructure in the second half of last year than we have seen in the previous between years combined. so the threat is getting more frequent. and you know, here's the bigger thought, though, is the united states still is the world's top cybersuperpower. we have the best offensive

capabilities when it comes to cyberattacks. there's a reason you keep seeing me report on russian attacks and iranian attacks and chinese attacks. it's not because i'm ignoring what the msa or cybercommand does. it's just their attacks are much more difficult to detect because they're better and sophisticated and stealthy. the problem is over the last ten years the united states' lead in this area has been slipping. we are now the most targeted, if not among the most targeted countries in the world by hackers. and we are also the most vulnerable because we're so digitized. you know, we've sort of made this decision as a society a long time ago that we wanted as much convenience and access as possible. first it was uber. then we developed the uber of this, the uber of that. we wanted to control our whole lives via remote control, and that's also true for our

critical infrastructure. we wanted to make it possible for software engineers to measure the temperature and pressure and chemical levels at our water treatment facilities from afar, but that same access makes us more vulnerable vulnerr nation state states out there. we have a big problem here when it comes to defense. >> yeah. all these things we think of as advances and creating all new vulnerabilities in their wake. nicole, author of the new book that comes out tomorrow "this is how they tell me the world ends." fantastic title. cyber weapons. again, congratulations on that achievement. thank you for helping us tonight. >> thank you. thank you for continuing to raise these issues. i'm sure i'll be talking to you soon. >> i hear you. all right. we'll be right back. stay with us. all right. we'll be right back. stay with us

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today in arizona, the republican-controlled state senate took a vote on whether they should have the elected leader of arizona's largest county arrested. they took an vote on whether they should have all five maricopa county supervisors locked up because the five-member board had the nerve to declare that bide hn won their county fair and square in the election. republicans are so sure there have been massive fraud that stole the election from donald trump in maricopa county that they subpoenaed the board of directors and demanded they hand over the county's voting machines and the county's ballots. state senate republicans said they would look at the ballot themselves and find the fraud themselves. the board said they can't do it. voters ballots are secret by law. in response, senate republicans moved to hold the entire board of directors in contempt which would have authorized the arrest of all of them. well, tonight the supervisors can breathe a sigh of relief. barely. the contempt vote failed bay

single vote. one single republican broke with his party. when it became clear the vote would fail, one republican senator issue what sounded like threat. this is republican arizona senator kelly townsend. her virtual background is a little bit distracting but listen to what she says here. >> now have to go into the hands of the public and right now the last place this needs to be is in a place where the public is so lathered up over all of this. we need to do this in a way that is professional, legal, and proper not that the publics' not, but they shouldn't have to do this on our behalf. so, public, do what you got to do. >> so, public, do what you got to do. the public has to take care of this on their own because we didn't do it here. that lathered up public. do what you got to do? what do you want the public to

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thanks for being with us tonight. special coverage of president trump's senate impeach trial begins at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow on msnbc and throughout the day and i'll be back here tomorrow night at the usual time. tonight my colleague lawrence o'donnell will have a special hour about tomorrow's impeachment trial. it's called "trump on trial" and that begins now. good evening. >> good evening. we're going to begin with the world's leading expert on senate impeachment trials. that is, of course, congressman adam schiff, who was the lead prosecutor