will you turn to cold washing in tide. unsubscribe. wait, wait, wait this helps the environment. it saves you money. i will take that money. for the environment. ♪♪ welcome to friday. it's a special edition of "meet the press daily." i'm chuck todd. we want to take a deep dive into a near death experience that our democracy suffered at the end of the trump administration. the situation was far more dire than we thought. if that's even possible. this week thanks to new recording, we now have a clearest picture of what was happening inside the trump

administration leading up to the january 6 attack on the capitol. i'm going to take you inside what we now know about this stunning 24-day period between the electoral college vote and the january 6 certification of that vote. when our democracy, yes, was hanging on by a thread. i want to start on the day of the electoral college vote, december 14. that's when the deputy attorney general at the time, jeffrey rosen, gets an email from the white house with the subject line, from potus. attached to the email are materials alleging that voter fraud in michigan, where trump lost, with talking points alleging a coverup there. that email hits rosen's in box right before the president announces that bill barr is out as attorney general and that rosen will now be the acting attorney general at doj. bill barr leaves officially on december 23rd, putting rosen in charge of the department on that day. i want to go a few days later.

six day of him acting attorney general. he gets another email from trump's white house assistance. copies are the solicitor general and acting deputy attorney general. it's an ask from the president to review a draft complaint to take to the supreme court to overturn the results in six states of the battleground states where trump lost. the pressure from the white house and doj keeps coming and keeps getting more unhinged. let me go two days later. i want to take you to january 1st. this is the day when some people are waking up with hangovers. others are getting ready to watch football. white house chief of staff that day, mark meadows, has emails to rosen. three emails that day. he asks him to look into so-called election anomalies, including the bizarre conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from trump by italian satellites. you heard that right. the white house chief of staff wanted the department of justice to look into an italian

satellite conspiracy theory. rosen's deputy calls this insanity. rosen himself asks, can you believe this? he says he is going to ignore white house's request. think about that moment on january 1st, rosen may have been one of the last remaining guardrails for our democracy. remember, as this is all unraveling, the white house isn't only pushing department of justice. no satisfaction on january 1st. what happens the next day? january 2nd, the infamous phone call with george george -- georgia's secretary of state. go find the votes. the secretary of state tells the president, we believe the data you have is wrong. he bluntly tells him this. now when you look back on that second day of the year, the georgia secretary of state may have been one of the last remaining guardrails for our democracy. january 3rd, this is the

culmination of the stunning episode where trump purportedly tries to oust rosen since he won't do his bidding and install jeffrey clark. this was the lone doj official who had demonstrated a willingness to pursue trump's conspiracy theories. trump does stand down. why? because a group of doj officials threatened to resign if he goes through with it. think nixon, if you will. it prompts a sigh of relief from one doj official who tells his colleagues, the cause of justice won. after all these efforts behind the scenes basically to topple our democracy failed, brings us to january 6. president goes to the elipse. we know what happens after that. senator graham describes it, they could have killed all of us. at nearly 4:00 in the morning, congress does count the electoral college votes. they certify joe biden as the winner and democracy survives. as you can see, it nearly

didn't. trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election was just tweets. he really tried. a handful of people at the department of justice basically held strong. it hung on by a thread. let's dig deeper. joining me on this is andrew weissmann, a member of robert mueller's special council team and an msnbc news contributor, matt miller, msnbc contributor and roselyn helderman who has done key reporting. we leaned on much of the reporting you and others have had. i feel like we are trying to show you the instant replay, the slow motion train wreck that almost happened at the department of justice. is this the way to look at it, that basically a couple of unknown people at justice saved us from a constitutional crisis?

>> yeah. i think that's exactly the way to look at it. it's even worse, on that january 1st day you are describing, where meadows is emailing over and over again, they are trying to get jeffrey rosen to set up meetings at the fbi, the nation's premiere investigative unit, to explore that italian satellite theory. the pressure was just intense. it was relentless. they were threatening -- the president was threatening to fire him and replace him. it was really that group of justice department leaders who said that they would resign in a repeat but really a more dramatic repeat of the saturday night massacre that stopped the president that day from taking that move and stopped this, at least for a day. >> matt, what's the lesson learned about the department of justice? you look at this and say, well, it's a good thing there was this

sort of -- i don't know if you call it non-partisan. but there's this clearly many justice department veterans have some sort of spine here that perhaps a weaker politically minded person would not have. >> you know, i have mixed feelings about this. it's right, there are a number of people with whom i thought acted completely inappropriately at times at the justice department. bill barr and jeffrey rosen, chief among them, who acted with great integrity at this juncture. the question i wondered -- it's not just the people at the justice department. it's people at different levels of the republican party. would they have behaved differently had the arguments been less laughable? i think the people at doj held up well. i think they didn't do the president's bidding largely for the right reasons. you wonder if the arguments hadn't been about italian satellites and one state trying to overturn instead of three

states. they had more of a chance of succeeding, would they have pushed the way the president wanted to? it's a hard question to answer. i think what all the rest of us are to look at going forward is what kind of reforms we would put in place, internal doj reforms and changes to the law we need to make sure that a justice department isn't put under this type of pressure by a president ever again. >> andrew, i'm very -- i feel like we don't know the full extent of bill barr's decision making here. you think he resigned, or do you think he was asked to resign? i can't figure out if whether he decided he was a coward and didn't want to deal with this and walk away, or whether if he hadn't resigned, he was going to get fired and he chose resignation. >> we don't know the answer to that. i suspect that if he really wanted to do right thing, he could have -- he thought this was so outrageous, he could have

stay and done what jeffrey rosen did. it's hard for me, given his history, to really give a lot of credit to bill barr. i don't think we know the answer. i think matt hit the nail on the head saying that the real issue here is what kind of reforms we're going to have and what kind of transparency we're going to have. one of the things that your question raises is, a, we don't know the facts yet and all of them. and it really is for garland to step up and for congress to step up, because the public is entitled to know. the second is, everything you are describing is something that is permissible under the executive theory. meaning that the white house can control the department of justice. it's only the norm that this current president has re-established which is that the white house is not going to be dictating who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.

we really need to have better guardrails that congress enforces in order to see this not repeat itself. because there will be another trump if it's not trump himself it will be somebody else who tries to emulate what he did. >> roselyn, when you go through the emails -- we noticed this. it feels as if many of the doj officials -- it's almost that they knew we would be looking at these emails within six months to a year or certainly they would be more public than they were. did you get that sense going through all this? >> yeah. i think that there was some conversation, particularly by rosen, at the end that had a bit of an eye to history there. i mean, these are people who are certainly familiar with how situations like this unfold, with the power of congress to obtain documents, with the power. i think they were speaking not just to each other but also a little bit to history there.

>> matt, let's go into what there is -- a lot of people say garland has work to do. what does that mean? what is it that he can do that would somehow protect the justice department from interference from a future president trump? is there anything he can do? is it really just disclosure of what happened during the trump years that is really the best sunshine that could be -- the best sort of disinfectant you can hand to try to publically shame folks about what happened with justice in the trump years? >> disclosure is very important. the justice department has gotten a lot of criticism lately for not discloing certain things we want to see. they should get credit for turning over the emails to congress and letting this story come forward. there's going to be more they will have to share in the coming months. so we know everything that happened. that's the first heart. when we see the full facts -- we

need to make decisions about what the reforms ought to be. as a starting point, reforms at the justice department when doj should get involved in election contests that need to be considered. we need stronger rules about the contacts between the white house and justice department. there's a memo on that it's binding policy. but it tells you who can talk to who at each building. it doesn't tell you what they can and can't talk about. we should look at trying to wall some of those off. all the strongest intentional reforms in the world at doj won't stop a future president or future officials at the justice department from acting in bad faith. a rule promulgated by an attorney general can be rescinded by future attorneys general. this does fall to congress to look at things like, are there ways of criminalizing interference of an election that would be binding on officials in the justice department and on a president? if we find ourselves in this position, we are not just resting on the good gases of people inside the executive

branch doing the right thing, but those people knowing if they do the wrong thing, there could be criminal sanctions for them after they leave office. >> i put this by matt once before. should we change the way the top officials at justice are appointed and go the federal reserve route? five-year terms, stagger them, hope that you sort of make it so that just like the federal reserve board, always happens to have people from multiple administrations in the leadership. yes, the head of the federal reserve certainly has one appointment. do we need to try to depoliticize the appointment process of the top officials at justice? >> well, once you said you ran this by matt, i'm, of course, totally curious as to know what he said. >> i don't think he was a fan.

>> never go wrong by endorsing what he said. i have two thoughts. one, it's really a shame when the idea is, is there a way to make something less responsive to democracy? >> yes. >> it's terrible to think that that's the route. the other is that already the appointment process could be changed, remember, whoever is appointed is serving at the pleasure of the president, just like the fbi director has a ten-year term. that didn't stop -- there's political consequences, but it doesn't stop the president from removing that person. yes, you could change the appointment process. i do think that you do want the justice department to be reflective of the policy choices of the electorate and the white house. because there is a lot of policy. what you don't want is what you

have in what used to be foreign countries with no rule of law where the white house is dictating who gets prosecuted and who doesn't get prosecuted. to me, the kinds of reforms that matt mentioned about criminalizing issues, having much greater transparency in reporting to congress, would be i think a better way to go about it. >> roselyn, would you say we know a lion's share of what happened between december 14 and january 20th, or do you think this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg? >> maybe someone in between those two. we know quite a bit. but i think that there is a lot left to learn. we don't know that much about what mr. clark, the one department of justice official who seemed to be sympathetic to the president's view, what he was up to. we have not yet seen his emails. there's a lot still coming out

about what the white house was doing outside of the pressure on the department of justice. we just had a big story recently about an informal, off the books effort to get local counties in pennsylvania to audit their election results in the same time frame, last weeks of december. no one knew anything about that just until the last couple of weeks here. i think there's quite a bit more to be learned about what exactly donald trump did in this period of history. >> matt, this screams to me for a special counsel. any other administration where you have something like this happen, you know, congress has ever right to do this and judiciary committee should look into this in both houses. but this to me screams special counsel. >> you know, the reason why you may not see a special counsel is it's a lot like when you look at financial crimes. the problem is what's legal.

the president very much tried to steal an election. that's without a doubt. there were people, jeffrey clark we know of, inside the justice department who tried to help them and people who held the line. it's not at all clear that what they did was illegal. i think we need to have full transparency about this. if congress doesn't -- if congress finds that they don't have the full ability either because people won't show up for interviews. they can get documents but people won't show up and former employees won't talk to the department of justice inspector general, which they don't have to do, then i think we need to consider whether there's some sort of person with expanded subpoena power, you would think of this as a commission. but again, we have seen a commission fall apart in congress. it's a difficult problem to try to solve. >> i was going to say, andrew, could you depp u deputize a u.s attorney if you were garland? it feels like an inspector general isn't enough here.

>> i have no doubt that the old route of saying the inspector general is going to look at something, which is -- that's a good step. but that's really not the answer here. first of all, the inspector general, god rest his soul, his office is not exactly fast. there isn't going to be an answer for some time. as matt notes, there is limited jurisdiction and ability. the answer here to me is congress. merritt garland can do more publically to report what he is doing, what vetting is being done to determine what we learned about subpoenas to the media, subpoenas to -- for congressional information, what happened in the john bolton situation. in other words, it's not typical

for the department of justice to be so transparent. but i think given last four years that they really need to change the way they're doing business to be much more responsive to information that would be important for the public to have so we don't see a repeat of this going forward. >> there's no doubt that president biden believed he had to put the most credible person he could find, respected federal judge like merritt garland, brought instant credibility. there's no accusation that this place has been politicized. i do wonder, he has been a judge for 20 years. his job was not to talk to the public. not to be in the media. you do wonder if just on that front, that probably -- the federal bench is there sort of keeping him from feeling like, i shouldn't tell the public -- i shouldn't be out there in public all the time. i think you are right. the public needs to hear more.

thank you all for helping unpack this alarming story that i think you have to sort of see in full to fully grasp how close of a call this was. up next, we continue this special "meet the press daily" looking at democracy's near-death experience. we now know that the trump department of justice was engaging in other truly nixon nixonian behavior. i will speak with someone who was in the midst of the watergate scandal. the midst of watergate scandal. ♪ when technology is easier to use... ♪ barriers don't stand a chance. ♪ that's why we'll stop at nothing to deliver our technology as-a-service. ♪ this is the epson ecotank color printer.

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we can't allow the department of justice to become weaponized by a president who has an enemy list. this takes us back in time to richard nixon and others who given the abuse, given the opportunity to abuse their power, they did. >> it's beyond nixon, yes. it's nixon on stilts and

steroids. >> it's a page out of richard nixon's book. right? >> welcome back. with me now, ari melber and jill millbanks. ari, nixonian gets thrown around in this town. we give a gate to everything. the most remarkable thing i think we are learning about the trump justice department years is that the only different between what john mitchell and nixon did and i guess what trump tried do is trump did it in plain sight. we are finding everything out faster rather than leaks to a couple of reporters. is that the best way to look at this? >> that's exactly right, chuck. as you say, because we are all human beings and respond to stories, the fact it wasn't some single reveal like the secret tapes may change the way people look at this. substantively, it doesn't make a darn difference. it's as bad or worse.

it was demanded on twitter. we know people like congressman schiff were swept up in the surveillance, as you and your guests were discussing in the previous segment. more investigation needs to be done to get all the details. schiff was being called out in hundreds of public tweets. these requests basically got their result. more investigation to know if people met at the justice department and said, let's respond to the tweet or find a back door in. he got what he wanted. >> jill, we learned from watergate what nixon tried to do. we learned this because there ended up being a special prosecutor. right now we are learning more of this because essentially, i think, you have some people unloading material. we are learning more. there's more disclosures. some obviously -- some gag orders have been listed when it comesapple was able to tell us about.

that's my concern here. we don't have a special prosecutor that's trying to go through all of this. we're sort of at the -- i guess we are hoping more people disclose stuff so we can figure out what happened. how concerned are you we're not going to know everything? >> i don't think we're going to know everything, at least not right away. i suspect there are going to be many more revelations of wrongdoing, because the way the white house worked under the trump administration is one where you had a lot of wrongdoing happening. you are right when you say that it was done openly. so people didn't always identify it. not all of it was done openly. some of it was secret. some of it was under gag order. a lot of that is going to come forward very quickly. i do think that you are right, that a special prosecutor would be a good idea. or at least a select committee

within the congress to actually go after this in the way that the committee went after the evidence in watergate and cox and jaworski went after it. we need accountability. >> let's dig into the comparisons. is don mcgahn john dean, ari? >> no. i think john dean was more pulled into the plot, which was why he was so vulnerable,flippe fashion. because he was willing to put his neck on the line with his self-interest involved, it was more powerful and useful. people interview john bolton these days, you have, but it's late. it wasn't when they wanted it in

pursuant to the impeachment proceeding. mr. mcgahn went into private testimony. he complied legally. but we never got that public video. that was part of the negotiation with the house testimony. in ways both stylistic and substantive, i think mcgahn cuts a figure of much more historical complexity. he did ultimately cooperate. of course, that's the minimum in law with mueller. did he resist the demands, as you were discussing. what does it mean when people do that for a mix of patriotism and self-interest? he went along for a lot of this ride. >> jill, bill barr, john mitchell. >> let me first say that a degree with ari on the comparison. dean lost his job before he cooperated. mcgahn somehow managed to keep his and he also never has fully divulged what he knows. his public testimony was only very limited. as to barr and mitchell, mitchell went to jail for what

he did. i think that there is some chance that if we fully investigate what happened during the barr administration at the department of justice, that he, too, will either be disbarred or he could end up with felony charges. he seems to me to have been clearly involved in coverup, starting with his audition memo to get the job and his total mismanagement of the release of the mueller report and his characterization of it before it was released in a way that said, no obstruction, no nothing here, no collusion. it's very hard to change first impressions. that sold before it got released. we saw that there was obstruction clearly shown in the mueller report. i think he has done a very bad job. merritt garland has a really hard job in trying to remake the department of justice and get americans to trust our system of

justice again and to get the people within the department of justice to trust that they can do an honest job and do justice without fear of favor. he has a really tough job, as did edward levy. the two were picked for the same reasons. they are very credible people. >> ari, barr fascinates me. it fascinates me when he chose to resign. i understand jill's point. i think barr might argue, he is the executive. he can call the shots here. does barr think that anything he did was illegal? that in the -- going back to barr's theory of executive power here, trump ultimately is the justice department. >> yeah, i think that's a fair question. i think you are giving it its maximal intellectual benefit of

the doubt. >> generous there, i admit. >> as devil's advocate. i do agree with what you are gesturing at. between a general counsel who decides to just become a criminal, which is worse given their deep knowledge of where the lines are, with regard to their intent, and someone who can continues to skirt up to the end, even if critics and many doj veterans say he debuted him as going over the line and should be out of the office. i think he was careful throughout. if you look at the letter we discussed, it was misleading. a judge has castigated it. it was by any stretch of law school standard very bad lawyering. i'm not familiar with many experts saying that all of that forms a crime or a mitch level conspiracy. that's where he is. i also think for trump fans who exist, they lost the election,

bill barr is the example of what they wanted out of the government, this concept of people who as you said are more loyal to the executive, whether that's trump or a strong man or woman. it's someone who backs up the executive at all cost. they see what has been set up as guardrails, they see as deep state. they may be wrong about that. that's where barr also has almost a cheney quality. >> again, i'm just fascinated on why he exited. did he exit or was he asked to exit? ari, jill, thank you both for being part of the special "meet thedadaily" look at what we are calling the near-death democracy. cases of the delta variant are on the rise. vaccinations are low and the variant is spreading fast in one

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traction here in the united states. this morning, dr. walensky, projected that the delta variant will be the dominant strain in the u.s., as it is in the uk, within a month or two. ellison barber is at a wastewater facility in missouri where the delta variant was first detected last month. this is a community where a third of the population is vaccinated. ellison, there's such a direct correlation between being vaccinated and being vulnerable to this variant. >> reporter: yeah. that's what officials are warning residents of. let me show you a graph to give you a sense of what they are seeing in this community. this is a graph that shows the rate or the detection of covid-19 in the wastewater at the treatment facility. you can see at one point, mid to the end of april, they had no cases here on april 11th. then you see it stayed low. then about may 11th you start to see it spike. all of this, they say that is

the delta variant that's detect detected at wastewater here. experts say it has been spreading across the state. particularly in north central and southwest missouri. listen to what the ceo of one hospital told us. >> a month ago, we had one admission a day. now we are averaging 18. we went from 14 patients in-house to 73 covid positive patients in less than a month. it appears to be the delta variant. our health department is looking at data that looks like about 90% of the new cases are delta variants. it's taking over at a rate more rapidly than i would have anticipated. >> reporter: the state health department is working with the

university of missouri. they are having water treatment plants pull samples across the state. not only can they detect whether or not covid-19 is in wastewater and identify what communities are seeing an uptick in covid-19, but they can see what variants are there. they say that they are seeing the delta variant across this state. they are particularly finding it in smaller, more rural communities where the vaccination rate is really low. in this county, only a third of people are fully vaccinated. chuck? >> ellison barber, we have tremendous technology now. we are able to identify this stuff fast in the wastewater. if the public will just listen, the vaccines work. thank you. the co-chairs of the problem solver's caucus, they have gotten briefed on this new deal. they join me next. they join me . so through ancestry, i discovered my great aunt ruth signed up as a nursing cadet

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welcome back. in the seemingly never ending infrastructure negotiations, here is what we know. 21 senators have signed on to an infrastructure plan. here is what we don't know. everything else. including whether president biden would accept this later bipartisan plan. the bipartisan co-chairs of the problem solver's caucus in the house were briefed this morning. congressman josh gottheimer and congressman brian fitzpatrick are back to join me on this. let's begin with you, congressman gottheimer. you have gotten briefed more. what can you tell us? are you on board? >> thanks, chuck, for having us. as you probably know, about two weeks ago, the problem solver's caucus, we put out a package called building bridges, about $1.25 trillion over eight years on the physical infrastructure

side. we have been working with our senate colleagues, including the ones you mentioned a second ago and work closely with them. we met this morning with sinema and portman. this builds on plans that are both very similar and we are eager to move the ball forward in a bipartisan way. >> congressman fitzpatrick, what's moving the ball forward? what does that look like now? >> moving the ball forward is good people on both sides of the aisle committed to making the most bipartisan issue we deal with, which is infrastructure, a bipartisan solution. josh and i mentioned our caucus has done its work. we got 75% threshold, which means we endorsed the definition and the scope. our good friends in the senate, they are addressing it. we are on the doorstep. we feel good about it. the president looks like he will have a bipartisan option to go

with. >> what's the time line, congressman gottheimer? where do we go next? we heard the white house is -- before he left -- before the president left overseas, he heard this seven to ten-day window that would make it seem as if we only have two or three days left. i'm sure that's not the window. what do you sense is the time line to sort of decide whether this is a go or not? >> i think it's always good to keep the pressure on. right? the fact is, we're all still at the table, all still working in a bipartisan way. it's good the white house keeps us pushing, is pushing us. we are getting positive feedback from the white house. that's all -- those are good signs. chuck, this is really what the president talked about in terms of physical infrastructure. roads, bridges, rail, water, energy, electric vehicles, transit, safety. all of the core things in a key bipartisan plan. i think we keep working at it.

if the talks get stuck, we reconsider. right now, we are making good progress. there's no reason why we should walk away from the table right now. >> congressman fitzpatrick, does it matter to you if this deal comes together only if sinema and manchin pledge to biden that they will make an attempt to do a reconciliation part two? does that dissuade you from doing this deal if that's the sort of -- the parlor game that has to happen to move this ball forward, does that bother you? >> no. all we're dealing with is what's in front of us. that's all we can do. we have a good package. i will tell you, chuck, the point of compromise, nobody is totally in love with the plan. but everyone is okay with it. that's the point of our group. it looks like we are going to do that. what comes next, that's for every representative, every

house member, every senator to consider that bill and mac a decision. >> congressman gottheimer, i'm cynical about the pay for here. a lot of accounting maneuvers. it doesn't look like a clean, this is how we're paying for it. >> we are considering a significant list of pay fors. we have been working on this together with them for months. you are talking a lot of things about infrastructure bank, repurposing some of the resources the president had from the covidpackages, closing the tax gap, there's a lot of support for that. this will add up in the end. that's how we're going to get there. the bottom line is, this takes a lot of work. it takes a lot of agreement. brian said it best. not everyone will be thrilled. as long as we get 80%, it's better than nothing. i feel the same thing about the pay for it. >> before i let you go, you are

the -- the caucus is the problem solver's caucus. we have disagreement on voting rules. what did you make the manchin's blueprint he put out? was that something -- i know where mitch mcconnell stands on it and where they will be on it. do you think that was a building block? stacey abrams called it a building block. joe manchin is okay for it. it struck me as something you could perhaps start with. did it strike you as that? >> i haven't seen it. i will let you know once i do. i introduced my own -- i call it the non-partisan bill for the people. it took a lot of the very good, needed provisions that were included, and cut out things we disagreed with. transparency, full disclosure, dealing with gerrymandering, all those things that i have individual bills that are bipartisan in the house, but i have not seen senator manchin's proposal. he is a good man. i'm sure he put a lot of work

into it. i'm happy to look at it. >> his propoal would create a minimum number of early voting days, having the -- trying to tackle gerrymandering. it got out of the other stuff. didn't touch dark money. didn't try to do that. is that where you would begin to try to find a compromise? >> it depends on what's included in it. we should rally around two principals. we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. we want every person in this country to vote and participate in the process. we also want people to have faith and confidence in the outcome. we should want that. any proposal that goes down that path, i will very, very much look into and work into whoever is doing that. >> congressman gottheimer, can nancy pelosi count on you if -- for a bigger infrastructure bill, if they have a one party bill down the road, assuming this bipartisan deal happens? >> it depends what's in it.

the same answer brian gave on joe's bill, it depends what's in it. i will look at it and take it seriously. i have said publically that the tax reduction is important to me. otherwise i'm open to looking at anything, bottom line i have to see at details and what's best for my district. >> josh gottheimer and brian fitzpatrick, thank you both. this will be the topic i'm discussing with senator bernie sanders on the left and rob portman who is part of that bipartisan group on the right. up next, a closer look at juneteenth as the historical day officially becomes a federal holiday.

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ just two pills for all day pain relief. aleve it, and see what's possible. welcome back for the first time in nearly 40 years, america has a new federal holiday on the books. the purpose of federal holidays are for never forgetting. president biden signed the juneteenth law into a federal holiday to celebrate the end of slavery. we go back to its roots, galveston, texas. >> reporter: chuck, this is a celebration of freedom and really honoring a history that a lot of people don't honestly know much about. so we went down to galveston, texas which is the exact spot

that federal troops came in to let the last slaves know they were in fact free. one man is trying to share the legacy of that day not only with other texans but with the world. >> reporter: this year reginald adams wanted to do something special for juneteenth. >> it's absolutely critical that these moments in time are spoken out loud. >> reporter: he created the mural when the last american slaves were freed more than 150 years ago right here in galveston, texas. why now? why is the message of this mural so important to share? >> i say why not now? for decades people in galveston didn't even know about the history of their own city. >> reporter: he even created an interactive digital code that visitors can scan to learn more. >> we really looked at this project as an outdoor classroom. >> reporter: and got students involved in the project.

even now, many say, what is this? this is a historian with the galveston pier project. where are we right now? >> we're at pier 21 where many slaves would have arrived in galveston. >> reporter: he said in 1865 admirals rolled in and said they had to honor the emancipation proclamation that was signed two years earlier. >> if they hadn't come to galveston, i don't think they would have enforced it to this day. that's why he says this history still matters. one thing that was fascinating about the project was the community aspect. they even held a contest to get local students involved in painting that mural, and the winner there was a young woman we interviewed, and she actually received a small college scholarship to go towards her college tuition fees this fall. chuck? >> morgan radford, much

appreciated on that. thank you all for being with us this hour. we'll be back monday with more "meet the press daily." and remember, if it's sunday, "meet the press" on your local n nbc station. we have a good one for you. geoff bennet will take over after this break. r this break hi, i'm debra. i'm from colorado. i've been married to my high school sweetheart for 35 years. i'm a mother of four-- always busy. i was starting to feel a little foggy. just didn't feel like things were as sharp as i knew they once were. i heard about prevagen and then i started taking it about two years now. started noticing things a little sharper, a little clearer. i feel like it's kept me on my game. i'm able to remember things. i'd say give it a try. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. [lazer beam and sizzling sounds]

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it's great to see you. i'm geoff bennet. as we come on the air, we're about to hear from president joe biden. he's going to speak live from the white house and he'll address what continues to be the most urgent life or death issue that could also define the biden presidency more than any other. more than 600,000 americans have now died from covid-19, a number once thought to be unfathomable. people are still dying from covid every day, and as we approach the president's goal of at least 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated by july 4th, we and he are perilously close to falling short. the cdc says about 65% of adults have gotten at least one