numbers. stay tuned to find out what republican governors are doing and then let's mail them all some common sense. "velshi" starts now. good morning. it is sunday, may 9th. happy mother's day. i'm ali velshi. as we begin the show this morning with a sentence that has never before been uttered in human history but it's real news relating to the anti-democratic effort to overturn last year's election results. the foam pillow guy is holding a frank rally tomorrow at the corn palace. yes, mike lindell, who advised the president to overturn the election is holding a rally in support of frank who is not a person or a hot dog, but is instead an online platform that

lindell created to push his conspiratorial beliefs which include but are not limited to the election being stolen and covid-19 vaccines being a, quote, depopulation bioweapon. that's pretty much the message you can expect to hear during the foam pillow guy's hour and a half long speech. 90 minutes of conspiratorial pillow talk, if you will, if you show up to the frank rally which is being held in the town of mitchell which is in south dakota and just so happens to be the home of the corn palace. which bills itself as the world's only palace dedicated to corn. luckily for the pillow guy, the corn palace has rented for as little as $1,750. money is something he doesn't want to be wasting since he's being sued for $1.3 billion by dominion voting systems for spreading lies about the election. and also because lindell reportedly helped fund the arizona gop's ongoing and

possibly illegal sham audit recount, which is being conducted by something called the cyber ninjas, all in furtherance of the big election lie. lindell's dear leader, donald trump, is reportedly obsessed with this latest anti-democratic attempt to overturn last year's election results and the former insurrectionist in chief is also reportedly paying close attention to what seems in some states to be the gop's main strategy right now. suppressing the vote. as "the new york times" notes this morning, lawmakers in florida and texas have advanced sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional narrative from the former president and his allies that the electoral system was rigged against him. yesterday a major voting rights rally took place at the steps of the texas state capitol building in austin protesting new measures that would make it harder to vote, greatly empower partisan poll watchers and make it a felony and other strict punishments for election

officials or others to mail absentee ballot applications to people who did not request them. speakers at the rally included former hud secretary julian castro and former texas congressman beto o'rourke. ellison barber spoke with o'rourke yesterday. >> we really need the biden administration to step up and those of us in georgia, in texas, in arizona, in kansas, across the country fighting these voter suppression bills and offer us some protection and ensure that every eligible voter can cast their ballot. we need federal action and we need the for the people act to pass the senate. >> for even more proof of the party of lincoln and reagan now becoming firmly the party of trump look no further than the gop's effort to oust its third-highest ranking republican in the house. this woman, congresswoman liz cheney, from her leadership position all for the crime of denouncing the former president's election lie. this party, this version of the

gop engulfed in intraparty turmoil and swept up in an obvious lie, this is who president biden is negotiating with to get his policies enacted. it's going to be a rough road ahead. even so, even up against these odds and work with a party that is a shell of its former self, there appears to be the potential for progress on one crucial problem facing the country today. "the wall street journal" reports there appears to be bipartisan agreement on several key pieces of police reform legislation, including limiting the transfer of some military equipment to local dental, banning the use of chokeholds except in life-threatening situations, and setting federal standards for so-called no-knock warrants. this comes as a federal grand jury has indicted former minneapolis police officer and convicted murderer derek chauvin along with three other police officers on charges that they violated george floyd's constitutional rights. and now maryland's republican

governor, larry hogan, has granted post-humous pardons for 34 black victims of lynchings who were denied due process in the state. including a 15-year-old who was lynched back in 1885, and a 13-year-old named frederick whose last name has been lost to history. joining me now, boston globe columnist kimberly atkins, an msnbc contributor and co-host of the sisters-in-law podcast and is a self-described recovering lawyer. in her latest piece she dives into parts of police reform for which there is no agreement on ending something called qualified immunity for police officers. kimberly, good morning to you. thank you for being with us. i looked at this "wall street journal" reporting about the possible compromises being made on the police reform bill as some encouragement in these bleak political days. but the problem is they're not getting to agreement on this idea that police who are involved in use of force can be

immune toward -- immune from lawsuit. you write in your latest article, bipartisanship at the cost of true policing reform is no real victory, saying legislation could preserve the very thing that has shielded officers from accountability, qualified immunity. you don't like this progress at the moment. >> i don't, and thank you, ali. this is something that we are seeing not just at the federal level but at the state level in states, including massachusetts, that have passed policing reform bill. this issue of qualified immunity, eliminating it, always remains on the cutting room floor. you have to think about what qualified immunity is. back in 1871 as part of the ku klux klan act to sought to give redress for black folks being brutalized by white supremacy, it gave americans the ability to seek civil redress if their constitutional rights were violated under color of law, which is exactly what happens when it is done by a police

officer. so over time this was a judicially created defense for police officers. it was made up by the u.s. supreme court, this idea that a police officer doing his work on the job cannot be sued. it goes directly against what this law was meant to do over 100 years ago and it's been kept in place by lawmakers who refuse to pass laws to eliminate it or who in the interest of trying to seek compromise back down from it. what it does, it prevents -- it's one of the key things that prevents things from changing. police unions protect police officers. even if they are fired, they are often reinstated, they are transferred to other departments, they continue their careers, while the people whose rights were violated, who were harmed or killed, their families can really get nothing back. i can't see how true reform happens while qualified immunity continues to exist.

>> let me just read something from your article, which i think is interesting. it puts this whole concept in perspective for us. you said lawyers and doctors can be held personally liable for malpractice which is why they carry malpractice insurance. there are also state licensing authorities which can take disciplinary action against doctors and lawyers for misconduct, including ordering them to pay restitution and stripping them of their ability to practice altogether. if their conduct rises to criminality, they can be prosecuted and generally speaking doctors and lawyers don't carry guns. you're saying we accept this elsewhere in society, but not for police. >> right. one of the people leading the negotiations, senator tim scott of south carolina made the point that we should treat police officers and make police departments take qualified immunity away from them but not individual officers saying in most cases it's the employers that deal with this. that's absolutely not true. if i was a lawyer and committed

malpractice, somebody could sue me and get a judgment against me. and, yes, i carried malpractice insurance for that very reason. we should hold police officers to at least that standard. they carry guns. this is life and death. if i didn't get a client as much money as he deserved, nobody was going to die because of that but i was held to that responsibility. i think it's fair to say that police officers should be held at least to that responsibility. >> kimberly, thank you for your analysis of this as always and for joining us so early this morning. kimberly atkins, boston globe columnist and the first of two co-hosts of the sisters-in-law podcast who we are going to have on the show today. joining me is democratic congressman jim clyburn of south carolina. he's the chair of the house select committee on the coronavirus crisis. congressman, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for joining us. before we get on to other political matters, i want to pick up where i left off with kimberly about this idea there

seems to be bipartisan movement on the george floyd justice and policing act but for this issue of qualified immunity. your colleague, tim scott, in the senate seems to be the one negotiating on the part of the republicans on this. what is your take? >> well, thank you very much for having me, ali. i agree with ms. atkins. i've been arguing for a long time about qualified immunity and about holding everybody accountable. i have just not been able to do it as eloquently as she's done it this morning, but i agree with her. we just cannot have any kind of insulation from responsibility, which qualified immunity gives to police officers. i'm very proud of police officers. i have family members who are police officers. so i'm not against the police. i do believe, though, that every

profession ought to have built into it ways in which we ought to be able to police ourselves. we do it for doctors, we do it for lawyers, we do it for almost even profession. even school teachers don't have qualified immunity so why not give it to police officers, so i agree with her 100%. >> congressman, let's talk about covid. this is something that you have been very involved in. you are the chair of the house select committee on the coronavirus. we have a situation now where the white house is aiming to get 70% to 75% of americans vaccinated by july 4th. we have some states giving up their allotments of vaccine because they're up against everybody that wants to be vaccinated getting there. what do we do now? we're not at the level of vaccination that we need. it's not a vaccine supply problem anymore. >> well, as you know, this is a classic case of low-hanging fruit. we've gone out there, we have made the vaccine available,

we've done things that we think are just necessary to get people connected. now it's time for us to drill down a bit. and i've been encouraging people to really go into local communities and get in contact with local people who's got credibility in those communities and get them involved in this. this whole notion that you've got to have a star attraction, that's not what it takes in rural communities, in hard-to-drill down into communities. you have to have local people who have relationships with people down there and these people are trusted. they're the ones that we need to enlist in this. so i would much rather some of the money we're spending on these ads to really hire local people in local communities so we can help to get the word out. it's a credibility problem now.

you've got to have people who are trusted in order for this to work. >> congressman, on friday we had a jobs number that was a little bit disappointing. it does work against those who have been arguing that the government doesn't need to spend more money on infrastructure, on jobs, on families because the economy is coming back on its own. this is the hottest discussion in washington right now. do we need the infrastructure and the family spending that the biden administration is proposing? >> absolutely. and we need to up our game, so to speak. the fact of the matter is that the rescue act did its job. we are now trying to build upon that so we can sustain things. this whole notion as soon as something begins to look up, you start looking away. we have to stay engaged in this. and the president is right, this is not a sprint. this is a long distance run.

and we need to stay in it for the distance. let's not give up now. these job numbers, it's very clear to me, that the president's plan means that there are a lot of people who are not going back to work because they cannot find care for their children. that's why he has in his program a way for us to take care of children and senior citizens. all that is a part of what keeps people off the job. i just talked to a person yesterday who came back home, short circuited a professional career so they could come home and take care of a parent, especially in covid-19. these are the kinds of things that multiply in communities, especially in communities of color where people are not able to work long distance online and

we don't have broadband in a lot of these communities for people to go online. i had that experience two days ago in the part of our district. i'm on the phone talking to the leadership and nancy pelosi thought i hung up on her. i didn't hang up on her, i just got into a part of our district where there's no broadband. >> yeah. it's an issue a lot of people in washington don't understand. in tennessee, north carolina, arkansas, mississippi, there's a lot of places where it's common not to have high-speed broadband internet. congressman, good to see you as always, thanks for joining us. jim clyburn, the democratic congresswoman from south carolina and the house majority whip. meanwhile, the main fuel supply line for the east coast of the country, traveling from refineries in the gulf coast to a gas station near you has been shut down indefinitely by the pipeline's operator, colonial

pipeline following a massive ransomware attacks. it appears they may have shut down the 5, 500-mile pipeline which carries 45% of the east coast's supply of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. as "the new york times" notes for fear that the hackers might have obtained information to enable them to attack susceptible parts of the pipeline. so the hackers haven't shut down the pipeline, the company has. but you know in bad weather to the coast, damage to these pipelines affects prices and supply to the northeast. the united states was believed to be the single most equipped country to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. spoiler alert, that didn't pan out. coming up i'll speak to michael lewis that examines the botched covid response. and we are learning new information about who is funding and who is recruiting for the republican-backed arizona ballot

recount. you may or may not be surprised. but first, the republican party as we know it is imploding because of its loyalty to a man who only joined the grand old party when it was convenient to him. what the gop needs to do and why it should matter to you regardless of your party affiliation. u regardless of your party affiliation. ♪ it's grilled cheese time. ♪ ♪ yeah, it's time for grilled cheese. ♪ ♪ after we make grilled cheese, ♪ ♪ then we're eating grilled cheese. ♪ ♪ because it's time. ♪ ♪ yeah. ♪ ♪ time for grilled cheese. ♪

if you stand for nothing, what will you fall for is the famous line from lin-manuel miranda's hit from "hamilton." it is the sentiment that without knowing who you are and what you believe in, you are doomed to be manipulated and that's the situation in which today's republican party finds itself. remember when the gop was the party of lincoln, a party whose very existence owed itself to the opposition of slavery? i know that was a long time ago but more recently republicans have been partisans of law and order, free trade, small government and low taxes. no more.

today it is somewhere between a party of trump, a party of no ideas or policies of their own except the big lie that the election was stolen and obstructing the biden administration. this week republican senator lindsey graham of south carolina, previously someone so artful in the articulation of his disdain for donald trump said, quote, i would just say to my republican colleagues can we move forward without president trump? the answer is no, end quote. wow. a 158-year-old party can't move forward without donald trump, a guy who wasn't even a republican before he ran for office. there was a big clue last august just ahead of the republican national convention when the gop decided it would not pick a policy platform but rather a person. a person who became the greatest liability to the party's future. as strange as that seems, all that happened before trump started his nonsense about election fraud, denied the outcome of the election and fomented an actual insurrection. you'd think that after all that, republicans would turn away, but

they can't. donald trump is their own personal train wreck. the gop has right now the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, recalibrate the party, find its way back to true conservatism. it will help the country to have strong parties with opposing ideas, parties that stand for something. because as the real alexander hamilton is believed to have said, those who stand for nothing fall for everything. y , with glucerna. it's the number one doctor recommended brand that is scientifically designed to help manage your blood sugar. live every moment. glucerna.

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(snap) fine jewelry for every day, minus the traditional markups. ♪♪ the coronavirus has killed more than 3 million people worldwide, almost a fifth of those deaths come from the united states. the country believed to have been the most equipped to handle a crisis like this. last march covid-19 was silently spreading throughout our country gearing up to take more lives than we could have ever imagined. we were told to remain calm. little did we know that there was a small underground network of medical professionals who

knew that there was great cause for alarm. the author, michael lewis, writes about america's botched coronavirus response through the accounts of several characters from the inside, and he said president trump's own administration knew its response was weak. at one point acting dhs deputy secretary ken cuccinelli revealed the white house's desperation on a call with california's deputy public health officer, dr. charity dean. dr. dean did not know the white house was listening in on her call. she's quoted in lewis' new book, saying he wasn't pleading with me had to do the right thing, he was yelling at me. he was basically implying that the white house is not going to do the right thing. the white house is not going to protect the country. so california needs to take the lead. that was the moment she learned that the white house was listening in on calls, and also the moment when she realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were, end quote. joining me now is the

aforementioned author, michael lewis. thank you for being with us and congratulations on your new book. i have to say, i always wonder to myself what could this have been like. we have almost 600,000 people dead in the united states. what if we did this right from the beginning. there's one line from your book that stands out. none of the people who had been involved in the last 15 years of thinking about pandemics were in the conversation. they were deep state. meaning trump and the administration thought of them as deep state so they didn't do the obvious thing and bring the right people into the conversation from the beginning. >> that's true. and it's stranger than that because in the very beginning of the trump administration, tom bossert, who was his homeland security advisor, he knew those people. he had worked with them in the bush white house. he had actually called them, carter mesher and richard

hatcher in particular and said i want to badge you in now in case there's a pandemic so we don't have to wait a day to get you in here to run it. and when john bolton appears in the trump white house, the first thick he does is fire tom bossert. from that moment the link is severed between the people in the white house and the knowledge outside of the white house. and so you have this very strange situation. carter mesher who is like a pandemic savant who helped invent the idea of pandemic strategy is sort of sitting in his underwear at his desk in atlanta writing emails in january explaining exactly what's going on. >> amazing. >> yeah, no, it's just shocking. it just speaks to like a broader mismanagement. the right people weren't in the right places. >> but boy, michael, you and i have talked about finance for a long time. mismanagement in finance, mismanagement in wall street, mismanagement of the economy. none of it has the consequences of this one. we are looking at 32 million

infections, 33 million infections in the united states, almost 600,000 dead. when you spoke to the medical experts, the public health experts that you did for the book, what would success have looked like to them, knowing that people had worked actually on coronavirus in the past, knowing that we have pandemic experts in the united states. if this had gone right, what could have happened? >> you know, it is a great question. it's a -- they would have been difficult to contain but they think possible. so containment looks like australia, right, where the country is going about its business pretty much in an ordinary way except that they're incredibly vigilant about any cases of the virus. other countries have contained it. we're a tough country to contain it in. but even if you didn't contain it, what you'd have gotten is far more successful mitigation up front. if we had just performed like

the average of the g-7 countries, we would have a couple of hundred thousand people alive today who aren't alive, so certainly that. >> it's unbelievable. >> and the great irony is we invented the strategy used by other countries to contain this thing. so, you know, carter mesher and this group of medical professionals, they have saved lots of lives just not here. at least not to the degree they could have. >> so we think of -- we've all learned the word comorbidity to be something else that could affect your health or the outcome of the disease on you. in your book, donald trump is described as a comorbidity, a reason more people died than they should have. >> yes. with a particular twist there and it's that these doctors, these medical professionals, they aren't ideologues, they're

just trying to save lives. and they had been engaged with the public health system for years before donald trump. and they had seen the weaknesses. weaknesses in the cdc's willingness to respond to disease on the ground in particular, but they had seen the weaknesses in the system and they were already -- and also seen the corrosion in government so they had a sense this might not go great anyway and that donald trump made it worse. so it was -- to me the story is trump is obviously part of the story, it was a catastrophe. but the bigger part of the story is there's a system that enabled donald trump. the system -- the system was not equipped to manage this risk. and if our system for risk management is not able to -- up to the job, we're doomed. disease is only one of the risks that the federal government has to manage. and i do think that maybe wall

street aside, anybody who managed a risk in the private sector the way this risk was managed by our society would be out of a job in a week. it made no sense at all. >> oh, my goodness, yeah. michael i want to read another excerpt from your book talking about conflict and authority. the people who presided in times of peace tended to have a gift for avoiding or at least sgiegz conflict. people made for battlefield command did not find their way into positions of authority, at least not until the general public sensed existential risk. what do you mean by that? >> well, it's chamberlin and churchill, right? you can try to pacify hitler until you realize -- and everybody is happy with that until you realize that he's going to come after you. that's the exact analogy that one of the characters uses. the kind of person who is willing to embrace conflict.

the kind of conflict that's kind of required to prevent disease from spreading. it's not an uncontroversial act, right? you might shut down a business. you might close a school. you might do something that bothers people because they can't see the prevention. they can see the disease in the end but they don't see the prevention. because they don't see the prevention, they're not as alarmed as they should be. so you kind of need someone who knows they're fighting a war that no one else can see. it is a war that is a matter of life and death. and what was interesting about these characters to me is they all had that quality. they were all brave. they were all sometimes ridiculously brave. all willing to do stuff that was unpopular for the greater good. it was obvious to them. and i think the problem is how do you explain to the public what they're doing, lead the public in a way that enables them to do it. that's what was missing.

the local public health officers in this country who behaved bravely and saved lives had their heads chopped off. there was a massacre of the very best. there was a kind of selective pressure on the occupation to select four. do little, don't do the thing that you really know you need to do because everybody is going to be angry. >> in a moment where we needed the opposite. >> yes. >> you call it "the premonition" but it's almost foresight that these experts have. you now have a first draft of history in the middle of an historical event that we are not at the end of. i thank you for that as always. michael lewis is the author of "the premonition, a pandemic story. ". well, we survived the out of control rocket hurtling toward earth and now we're getting a first glimpse of the chinese spacecraft breaking the earth's

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the runaway rocket has finally returned. china's wayward spacecraft re-entered the earth's atmosphere and came crashing down a little after 10:00 p.m. eastern last night. this is new video of the said rocket. you see that little dot moving in the darkness? it's going to lighten up in a moment. it had been hurtling toward our planet in speeds of 1700 miles an hour leaving many worried about a potential doomsday scenario. now, this is video from when it originally launched back on april 29th. its mission was sending a piece of new chinese space station into orbit. when intact it was 108-feet

tall. overnight debris likely plunged into the indian ocean just west of the maldives. it came into thearabian peninsu is unknown if the debris impacted land or water. it was a pretty decent threat to populated areas, but fortunately the vast majority of the world's surface is made up of ocean so the odds of a land-bound catastrophe were small but still possible. well, the justice department is signaling new priorities after charging all four former minneapolis police officers in george floyd's death. what that says about the future of the justice department next. first, we got some sad news this morning. bo, the family dog of the obamas, has died after a battle with cancer. he was 12 years old. the former president made the announcement yesterday. bo is a portugese water dog

given to sasha and malia by the late senator ted kennedy and his wife, victoria. malia is allergic to dogs and bo's breed is hypoallergenic. he lived a life full of snuggles and loved lying on the couch. former president obama tweeted bo was exactly what we needed and more than we ever expected. we will miss him dearly. we wil l miss h im dearly. net, punatural teeth at risk. new polident propartial helps purify your partial and strengthens and protects natural teeth. so, are you gonna lose another tooth? not on my watch!

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it's a new day at the department of justice. after four years of failed leadership, the doj is sending a signal that defending americans' civil rights is once again a priority and it will intervene in some of the highest profile cases to do so. the justice department made public that it brought civil rights charges against all four former minneapolis police officers who were involved in the death of george floyd. chauvin was also indicted for civil rights abuses in an entirely separate case for his actions during the arrest of a 14-year-old back in 2017. on top of all that, justice has also opened civil rights investigations into the minneapolis police department and the louisville, kentucky, police department, which was responsible for the death of breonna taylor. the fbi opened a civil rights probe into the police killing of andrew brown jr. in elizabeth city, north carolina. for more on what all this means, i'm joined by joyce vance, a former u.s. attorney in alabama, a law professor and msnbc contributor. we cannot forget that she is a co-host of the ost oisters-in-l

podcast. joyce, good morning, welcome to the show. i've been hearing stuff about the department of justice civil rights division for a few weeks now, certainly much more than we probably heard in the four years of the obama administration. the civil rights division is involved in the recount in arizona, saying they have concerns about the validity and legality of that. what's going on in the civil rights division of the department of justice? >> so this week there should be a vote in the senate to confirm the assistant attorney general who will run the civil rights division for merrick garland. her name is kristin clark. she is someone who has experience inside of doj. most recently she's run a group called the lawyers committee for civil rights that conducts civil rights litigation nationwide. and putting kristin, who will be the first black woman to lead that department, in charge signifies that the civil rights division will have strong leadership, but they haven't waited for her. the civil rights division has already been hard at work, as

you point out, with new consent decrees, really hitting the ground running. it's important to remember that the civil rights division is often very often referred to as the crown jewel of the justice department. what it does is it fulfills the promise of protecting all americans' civil rights. it's an incredibly important part of the justice department. >> yeah, and you talk about consent decrees, these things having to do with police and civil rights. that was a position that the trump administration and the leadership of the department of justice actively decided they were not going to pursue under barr. >> absolutely. and as early as jeff sessions' tenure, one of the policy changes that attorney general sessions made was to end the use essentially of these sorts of consent decrees. these are civil vehicles. this is not the criminal prosecution of an officer who engages in wrongdoing.

this process is used for police departments that have a systemic history of excessively animated their police work. so it's an important tool that doj uses to force these departments to engage in constitutional policing. >> i want to ask you about the department of justice grounds for commencing or declining prosecution as it relates to these civil rights cases like in minneapolis. it says no prosecution should be initiated against any person unless the attorney for the government believes that the admissible evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain a guilty verdict by an unbiased trier of fact. you were one of those people who had to make those decisions. so the idea that you may want to prosecute something because it feels like the right thing to do isn't enough for the department of justice to open a prosecution. >> that's right, and it's not always popular.

a lot of the time as a prosecutor, you have situations that are just so horrible that people want some sort of legal vengeance. your job as a prosecutor is to look only at the law and the facts when you make a decision about whether you have sufficient evidence, that means proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of proof we use in our legal system, that you believe will let you not only get a conviction at trial, but also uphold that verdict on appeal. in other words, there are no legal problems with your case that would cause an appellate court to reverse. and that's really the prosecutor's bible, the principles of federal prosecution, the calculus that you have to engage in before indicting any case. >> i would say, though, as a former department of justice person, you like the energy coming out of the department of justice right now. cynthia described it as rising from the ashes. >> doj, i think, is one of the success stories of the trump

administration because although the leadership was problematic and cynthia is absolutely right that this new leadership is strong, the career people at doj across the country kept their heads down and did their work. morale was low, the president was calling them and the law enforcement folks they worked with out by name, but those career people are the folks who kept everything going during those four years. >> joyce, good to see you as always. thanks for joining us this morning. joyce vance is a former united states attorney in alabama and an msnbc contributor. the so-called cyber ninjas are still hard at work recounting those 2020 election ballots in arizona. we now know that many of the volunteers were recruited specifically for their political views. i'll talk to one of the first reporters who was allowed inside the recount facility, next. the recount facility, next od w us or floss can be a sign of early gum damage. new parodontax active gum repair kills plaque bacteria at the gum line to help keep the gum seal tight. new parodontax active gum repair toothpaste.

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mind numbingly, reckless and irresponsible, that's what the maricopa county sheriff is calling the state senate's latest demand for its 2020 ballot audit. the republican-led body asked the sheriff's department to hand over routers and administrative passwords to voting machines but the sheriff says providing the routers could compromise confidential, sensitive law enforcement data and equipment. that happens as a company with no expertise runs a republican-ordered audit of the 2020 election results with

volunteers being charged with recounting 2.1 million votes from the county. some of these observers were hand picked for their political views by recruiters who have far-right ties themselves. the arizona republic reports that recruiters targeted retired police officers, veterans and republican groups. it also says someone, quote, involved in recruitment used her brief stint as the county republican party chairwoman to try to, quote, get trump back in office by protesting the results of one of the county's prior audits. now let's follow some of the money in this recount. the arizona state senate hired the private firm cyber ninjas for the audit. let's be clear, they didn't pay for this all by themselves. according to the arizona mirror, the former ceo of overstock.com, patrick byrne, helped to raise $1.2 million through a nonprofit he started called the america project. an anchor at one america news,

christina bobb helped raise $150,000 through a nonprofit she started called voices and votes. and lynn wood, tied to trump, who openly promotes qanon, has openly donated $50,000. here's a shred of morally good news. the state senate informed the department of justice that it would drop its plan to go door-to-door to ask local folks their voting history amid concerns of voter intimidation. this story gets wilder by the minute. joining me now is jen fifield, a reporter covering phoenix and maricopa county. jen, you were actually one of the few people who actually got close to this actual audit. it really does get weirder by the day, and there are legitimate concerns that have now been cited in a letter from the attorney general's office to the arizona state senate to say we're concerned about whether the law is being followed here, whether the ballots themselves are endangered so that if ever a

real audit needs to take place after this, the information, the underlying information may be sullied. >> yes. just to catch you up a little bit, a coalition of news organizations worked with a lawyer in order to get better access to the audit and so one of the things that we were able o is get pool access where we can watch from the bleachers that you see there to see what's going on. and one of the things that you mentioned was the right-wing ties that we've developed. part of that was possible because we noticed that a former state lawmaker, anthony kern, who was on the steps of the u.s. capitol on january 6th during the insurrection and is part of the stop the steal movement was there counting the ballots. so we started to look into with robert england, a former -- current investigative reporter with the republic, started to look into who was involved counting the ballots, who was involved recruiting. we found recruiting pitches

targeting right-wing ties. >> i saw an exchange about bamboo ballots. i read concerns in your article about marxists influencing the outcome of the election and the islamic movement. what's going on here? >> right. well, from the start nonpartisan election consultants from across the country have been concerned about this audit, the lack of bipartisan oversight, the lack of transparency. but as more details have emerged, it's increasingly clear that some of the auditors are doing are focused at dispelling conspiracy theories with no basis. one of those is inspecting the ballots for bamboo fibers. i'm not sure if that's what they're doing, it's just one of those rumors going around about what they're looking at when they look at the ballots. the theory is that ballots were

shipped here from china and so those ballots would have bamboo fibers. of course not all paper in china has bamboo. and, you know, i talked to the paper -- the company that actually gets the paper for the ballots. they said that this is a completely unfounded theory, that there's no way that ballots could -- 40,000 ballots could come in on a plane and be put into the ballot supply that they provide to the county. so more and more like that every day is concerning to not just these election consultants but also the democratic party and others in arizona. >> what do they want from maricopa county, the sheriff's office, the routers. what do they need for that? >> i'm not sure what they wanted the routers for. they had produced subpoenas for a slew of information, i'm talking pages and pages of what they wanted. voter data, election logs.

one of those things was the actual county routers. now that, like you brought up, the sheriff here says that would pose a major security risk. they would be able to see detailed information about how our law enforcement works. they would be able to get private information from people living in the county, social security numbers. this is what the county is saying. now, this is a political fight a little bit at this point, so it's unclear what exactly the routers would give them access to. they want passwords that would give them administrative access to the voting machines. the county doesn't even have that so they would have to work with dominion, the private character that's come up a lot in this election, to try to get that information. >> very strange story, but we thank you for continuing to cover it for us. jen fifield is a reporter for the arizona republic. if you don't follow her, you should, because this is crazy stuff. we have much more "velshi"

ahead. a new york congresswoman has a plan to help mothers return to the workforce. a quick reminder, velshi is available as a podcast. you can listen to the show on the go any time. subscribe and listen for me anywhere you get your podcasts. the next hour of velshi begins now. good morning again. it is sunday, may 9th, happy mother's day. i'm ali velshi. president biden wakes up with a big, new test of his new presidency. the main fuel supply line for the east coast has been shut down indefinitely by the pipeline's operator, colonial pipeline, following a massive ransomware cyberattack. the company says the attack hit its corporate computer networks. it appears the company has shut down the 5,500 mile pipeline which carries 45% of the east coast's supply of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. take a look at that map, from

texas, louisiana, mississippi, alabama, georgia, south carolina, north carolina, virginia, maryland, pennsylvania, and new jersey. the hackers obtained information that could allow them to attack parts of the pipeline. the cyberattack comes on the heels of other recent cyberattacks on u.s. companies and government. the attack highlights the urgent need for legislation addressing the nation's aging infrastructure. as "the new york times" noted, cyberattack is a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of infrastructure to cyberattacks. the shutdown of such a vital pipeline, one that has served the east coast since the 1960s, highlights the vulnerability of aging infrastructure that has been connected directly or indirectly to the internet. as for the future of biden's multi trillion infrastructure