♪♪ hello. hi. namaste, everyone. i'm 4:00 p.m. in new york city in for nicole wallace. we still don't know about donald trump's mar-a-lago estate, but we do know a heck of a lot more than we did yesterday thanks to fabulous new reporting from tremendous journalists and it comes with a time line of events that have been going on behind the scenes in trump world and the doj for months. trump attorney christina bob confirming to nbc news that the former president's legal team was in discussions with the department of justice as recently as june about records stored at mar-a-lago. remember, many months prior back in january, national archives official flew down to florida and retrieved 15 boxes of documents and gifts. keep in in mind. 15 boxes. it didn't end there, listen to this from "the washington post," two people familiar with the

initial recovery on mar-a-lago said that archives officials believed that more records were missing and were skeptical that trump had handed over everything. as the investigation gained steam, some trump advisors have sought to steer away from the issue according to people who were speaking under anonymity. now you have to fast forward to june 3rd, bob, the trump attorney says the trump's team met with a doj official after they cooperated with presidential records in a storage wear and handed over, quote, a few pages to the doj. multiple sources have confirmed to nbc news that monday's unprecedented search was related, classified material that trump brought with limb to florida after he left the white house. two sources say the search went from 9:00 a.m. to half past 6:00 and that the fbi took about a

dozen, a dozen more boxes with emthis. a lot of boxes. think, as much as we've learned there are still major questions outstanding, for instance, what exactly what was the fbi looking for on monday? did they find it? did they find anything that they weren't expecting and more fundamentally, what was in all those boxes? meanwhile, on another trump legal front in gotham city the disgraced, twice-impeached coup attempting yks-president spent a good portion of his wednesday talking to new york attorney general letitia james as part of a civil probe into the trump organization's business practices. irony? thank god, he's not dead, mr. if you're innocent, why are you taking the fifth, took the fifth today. more on that coming up, but first joining us now, jackie alemany, washington post congressional investigations reporter and msnbc contributor, msnbc legal analyst, current law professor in the university of alabama and joyce vance is here and another friend at this table, best-selling author kurt anderson, his most recent chart

topper, co-creator of studio 360 who is making a very important movie right now with a famous director. we'll talk more about that throughout the day. jackie, you're among those journalists that i touted before in doing great work today in understanding what happened. you are on the byline of this washington post piece we read from and you're all over the story. give us as much detail as possible about that june 3rd meeting between the members of trump's legal team and the justice department. it seems pretty important. >> yeah. so what we know about that meeting is that officials finally traveled down to mar-a-lago to meet with members of trump's legal team to go discuss and figure out what other materials might remain despite all of the extensive back and forth over the course of the entire year, really, not just between the fbi and trump's legal team and the national archives. these were efforts that were

being made to retrieve the classified materials since host inauguration after trump left the white house, but it was after or potentially in between these meetings and now where officials felt like the trump team was being untruthful that they were not being completely honest about in terms of answering some of the questions of the materials of where they were living and what they might have still had and that they had not in fact returned the documents and the other materials that were government property. this is a feeling that officials at the national archives held as well before they handed over the -- the issue to the national archives inspector general and to the fbi once they found classified information. that being said, we still don't know exactly what these officials were looking for when

they executed this search warrant on monday or what they took with them, exactly, but we do know it does relate to classified information and presidential records. >> jackie, one of the things we talked about yesterday a fair amount on the show with the lawyers that we'd like to have here including andrew weissmann was the normal way that this would happen if there were things that were still left outstanding either through negotiation through the doj or the trump people or through subpoena you'd be able to get those documents and that the move to do a search, to ask for a search warrant from a federal judge must have reflected some sense that a subpoena would be complied with if they were sent -- if it was delivered to donald trump. do you have a sense of -- that is a pretty extreme place to get to if you've been having ongoing discussions over the course of many months. do you have any sense of what it was that made -- a, whether it's true and what it was that made the doj come to the conclusion

that even a subpoena would not be enough to get what they wanted? >> yeah. so -- this at this point is speculation and we have not been able to confirm exactly what aggravated the situation that led officials to skip over a subpoena and go straight for a search warrant, but there are certain types of things that would aggravate such a situation and such as deleting items, destroying items and inappropriately sharing items either classified information or sharing things that potentially were presidential records that the former president might have already claimed to have returned and given back, things that belonged to the american people. there are a handful of things that do go into the calculous of issuing a subpoena versus we're just going to go in and get it ourselves. there's also a potential thing that could again escalate the situation is the former

president using these things for personal gain. say there's something of particular interest that investigators have identified to be looking for, that could be it, as well or there is concern about obstruction or there has been previous obstruction like in the case of as we've seen already trump's lawyers being untruthful and not being fully transparent or providing -- or providing the full scope of answers to investigators in the prior back and forth that they were having. >> so, joyce, i want to start with the thing that to me, maybe i'm just a simpleton, but man, 12 boxes, i don't know if i'm supposed to read from them. there were 15 boxes that weren't supposed to be there earlier this year. i said man, that's a lot of

boxes. does 12 mean that they're looking for a lot of stuff or is it that they suggest that they did the search quickly or so quickly that we're not looking for one thing and it could be in 12 different places. i'm just not clear whether we should be stunned by it's 12 more boxes or does that not surprise you at all? >> well, i think you're right, john, when you say it's not clear because the reality is that it's not at all certain about what to read in that and one way to look at this that's helpful is there are two primary concerns about classified documents and those are spills and spoilation, and what that means is you're worried about spills of classified information when important material that could impact the national security is not just, let's just say lost euphemistically down here in mar-a-lago, but if it were transferred in other lands and that's the sort of thing that might lead you to search

and the risk of spoilation of evidence being destroyed and that's the sort of thing that will get folks jumping pretty quickly to execute a search warrant, but we don't have a basis here for understanding this is a national security exercise or part of a criminal investigation maybe down the road of criminal prosecution. 12 boxes of that reporting holds up as an awful lot of documents for someone to have held on to after they've been in conversations with doj for a long period of time about the need to return classified material. >> right. i mean, it's like this thing of the trump kids are on tv saying, our dad loved to have newspaper clippings and he had a great scrapbook. i don't know why they're asking him for anything, and it seems like with 12 boxes they may be looking for more than one thing. joyce, sticking with you. this is the thing because of your back ground that i've been eager to talk to you about all day, there are all these people out there, some in bad faith and some in good faith saying the doj needs to be more

transparent. this is a historic thing. it's unprecedented and there are conspiracy theories whipping around that the right is fuelling and there are people of good will that understand what is the basis of this, right? the doj needs to come clean. tell us why they're doing this and what the investigation is about and what evidence they have, et cetera, et cetera, and i find myself saying that's not doj policy. we got mad at james comey for talking about the investigation. the doj says don't talk about it. i'm curious, about your thought about it or do you think they should stick to the policy of keeping their mouths shut unless they charge donald trump. >> it's frustrating. it would be great if merrick garland would come out and take a podium this afternoon and tell us exactly what's going on, but there are good reasons, solid reasons behind doj's policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations and that involves protecting criminal defendants. that involves this notion that

in our country everyone is innocent until they're proven guilty, so i was really taken aback by the people especially the political folks who wanted to know, you know, what's going on here? tell us the details. can you image knowledge inif at this stage doj said we're not sure if we're going to charge anyone, but here is details that the former president was involved in criminal conduct and we found evidence of those crimes in the home. as a prosecutor i call dirtying somebody up in the press and that's what happens in countries that are failed democracies or countries who don't aspire to democracy. here doj charges people in charging documents and it puts out evidence in a court of law about what evidence is admessible against someone who is charged in crime. they're very important and if we'll put that on the way side in the sense of protecting the

former president, we'd hear a lot about the complains, and being, there's no reason to abandon it, merrick garland does a good job of that explaining how he investigates cases without talking about the substance of a specific case. >> you know, kurt, you wrote about trump, a short-fingered bulgarian called him yesterday the doj did not make this public. they did not publicize this -- this search of mar-a-lago, donald trump did, and it seems to me for the reasons that joyce is implying that that's what this is all about. trump took this public because he thought it was in his interest to not just spur the conspiracy theories and there was nothing they could say that i wouldn't, that donald trump and the right wouldn't make part of their narrative.

they'd be attacked for breaking with policy and they'd be attacked for dirtying donald trump no matter what the words out were? >> he had all day to discuss, consider how best to exploit, and i believe as well as all of the reasons you gave, to monetize this. by the end of the day, he -- he was raising money off of this. so it took him all day, perhaps, to figure out how best to exploit this and as you say, put the government in this terrible position of accusing them along with the right-wing talking points that were distributed to what is this all about? this is wrong. they're smearing him by even going in there all day, but then as joyce says, the smear would be if they gave their evidence. i have one question for joyce if you don't mind. they were there for ten hours. they got 12 boxes. doesn't that -- i've never been

at a day-long search warrant execution. does that mean they looked through the boxes or just pointed at boxes and grabbed them? >> joyce, go ahead. >> yeah. so some of it will depend on what they were authorized to do in the search warrant, but typically the reasons these searches take a while is that you'll go in. the agents running the search will talk to fix on the ground so showing what's there and assuming that there's some level of cooperation in the folks involved and it enables them to take what they're, looking for. it takes a lot of time to go through 12 boxes and documents and i don't think that's something you can do even in a 10-hour search and mostly what you want to do in a case like this is secure the materials and then take them off-site so that

you can have any sort of filter review that you need to have before agents and prosecutors involved in the case itself for taking a look at them and think, here there's an additional layer of national security concerns. so my suspicion would be that in charge part the time that they spent involved identifying likely materials and then removing them. >> jackie, i just want to do a fact check with you because you're covering this more than anybody else in the panel with the second by second and moment by moment. has anybody on donald trump's team come out and said in an emphatic, clear way there were no classified documents at mar-a-lago since this happened? >> no. not at all, and we know that not to be true. we also know that we've asked many of his advisors and people who were at mar-a-lago in present or the execution of this search warrant for the actual copy of that request.

as of just a few hours ago, maybe not even an hour ago the magistrate judge reinhardt who is the judge that signed off on the search warrant is asking for the doj to unseal the request for the mar-a-lago warrant by august 15th and that could also provide some transparency into the process here. there was also a detailed inventory that should have been left behind with former president trump by investigators, although the problem there is that if there was classified information taken which is likely to have happened since we know that was part of the reason why they executed the search, investigators wouldn't even be allowed to in some cases write down very specific words or descriptions of these items taken because of their classification. i think it's helpful to think about the first loop or the first tranche of boxes and those

1 boxes that were taken in january of this year by the national archives and what we know about those, in those boxes again, 15 were taken. we know that the inventory that was created of those boxes in one of the inventories of the unclassified items, it was over 100 pages long and we know that the inventory of classified items was roughly three pages long and some of those items were the highest classification, top secret and actually required special handling. again, even in that version of the inventory that our sources warned us about, they were vague in order to protect the secrecy. >> i just want to point out for the nincompoops out there like me it continues to be the case that the easiest thing in the world for the trump people who have said everything, they talk about things being planted there and they're talking about how this is all illegitimate and

everything that donald trump says and everything his acolytes say, and no one will simply say on the record there were no classified documents there. jackie's right. of course, we know there were. it's got a separate point if they wanted to knock this down they could try. joyce, was there a story in "the new york times" how chaotic things were. i'll read it to you here, fbi's here's what i found most interesting. for many months he left office, mr. trump would ask aides to bring documents to him and they complied meaning officials whose job it was to keep track of paperwork did not exactly know exactly what had gone up to people according to the events. by the end of the presidency and as mr. trump was fighting to overturn election laws some of his aides were concerned about the preserving the office itself. it was around cardboard boxes with either a valet, but the contents were not always clear.

there was a reporting in the times that he definitely took the letter from kim jong-un and the former sharpiegate map of the path of the hurricane. how do you know how strict the rules are about paperwork preservation, about classified information? you read that and you think when it came to this, it was just as much of a -- i don't think i can say the word that i want to say, but it starts with "s" and ends with show as with the rest of the trump administration. the legal concerns here have got to be huge, right? >> they are huge, and the red flags here actually function as noticed to the former president of his obligations. there's been a lot of reporting suggesting that the white house counsel's office grew increasingly worried about shabby practices, particularly destroying documents and they repeatedly advised the former prd about his responsibilities

and be on lications and that becomes increasingly difficult for him, and he's not a professional, political guy. he doesn't know the rules. those excuses never rang rr true for, we have this entire trajectory, and taking the step fwlg to to mar-a-lago saying it wants its documents back and it becomes more difficult for trump to say that he thought he was entitled to those documents when everyone was telling him he wasn't. let me say one thing about all of the cries that we're hearing from people saying the fbi was at fault, they're planting evidence and overstepping and it was a witch hunt. i spent 25 years at doj and you saw patterns develop. when people under investigation

and criminal defendants, when the facts were on their side, they would come to you and explain to you factualily not guilty. what people would do when they were out of options and they were desperate is they would try to prosecute the police and they would put the police on trial and that's what we're seeing here. >> going back to your other point, joyce, donald trump may not have had any political experience, but now he's flushing stuff down the toilet and throwing things in the fireplace, the least sophisticated person shouldn't be shoving stuff down the toilet. papers, that is. stick around. when we come back, the legal walls closing in on donald trump as we told you before he was ordered to appear under oath today in the new york fraud case against his firm and donald j. trump chose to take the fifth, something he once said was the

favorite recourse of mobsters. what trump's decision, keep his mouth shut may mean and call it the big lie 2.0 and the ex-president's lawyers and acolytes and the latest attempt to smear federal law enforcement and prop up the dear leader. we'll talk to people about when "deadline: white house" continues after this. please do not go anywhere. afr ts please do not go anywhere.

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after months of repeated attempts at delay, donald trump

finally sat down to be deposed by lawyers from new york attorney general letitia james' office today in that civil suit he's facing. he says he invoked his fifth amendment right in the organization, of best business practices. the former president who has previously attacked those who used their fifth amendment rights. i once asked if you're innocent, why are you taking the fifth amendment? now i know the answer, when you and your family, and all of the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated witch hunt, and letitia james has said that her office has uncovered substantial evidence establishing numerous misrepresentations with banks, insurers and the irs, notably, trump's two oldest children, don junior and ivanka did not take the fifth in that same investigation.

we are bringing back joyce and kurt. >> joyce, and it's such a basic thing, but a lot of people don't know. in a criminal case if you plead the fifth the jury is not allowed to infer anything to that. civil cases are different. if you take the fifth jurors are allowed to infer things and the distinction between sichl and criminal and invocations of the fifth is not necessarily no. >> right. that's a really good assessment, john, and we give people -- we afford people this right to assert the fifth amendment even in a civil case if they have reason to believe that they could be at risk of prosecution because their answers might tend to incriminate them, but civil cases are different than criminal cases. in the civil case a jury hears nothing about the defendant's silence and it can cause a

mistrial. in a civil case the prosecution or plaintiffs are entitled to ask the judge to give the jury an instruction if there were, down the road here to be some sort of a civil case before a jury, the judge could instruct them that they could draw a negative inference if they drew the fifth amendment. it's not like people are condemned by their silence and we've seen trump make a start on combatting that sort of an instruction and inference today by saying, i had to take the fifth because no matter what i said they would have found a way to use it against me. and look, far be it from me to take the former president's side on just about anything, but here we do have this right for people who face the prospect of criminal investigation and whether it's legit for him to use it here or not and to be

precisely what happens and it's not out of the ballpark for trump to take the fifth here. >> i think everyone is entitled to take the fifth and that's a right we all have, but i will not back away from pointing out that there's hypocrisy on display and let's get into that a little bit because back in 2016, we have donald trump talk about hillary and the fifth amendment and let's play that and you'd like to say about the fifth amendment. >> her staffers taking the fifth amendment, how about that? and her ringleaders getting immunity. here's people taking the fifth amendment. so there are five people taking the fifth amendment like you see on the mob, right? you see the mob take the fifth. if you're innocent why are you taking the fifth amendment? >> kurt, i just -- like in volleyball, i'm just going to pitch the ball over the net and allow you to spike it. >> among the other things about

him admitting that he once said only the mob takes the fifth amendment and you should infer guilt from taking the fifth amendment not very many years ago, i don't think he -- it's a first for him in that he actually did 180, as mitted he did 180 and tried to give it coherence and logical consistency. it's almost as if his lawyers made him do it. i've never seen him do this. even quoting himself accurately. absolutely accurately. it's really not a trumpian thing he did today in explaining why he took the fifth so perhaps he's getting careful and to joyce's point and your points in civil cases, you know, inferences can be drawn, if you do take the fifth. this is the only civil case that we know about in the galaxy of judicial proceedings he faces

and the other one in new york state and the one in georgia is a criminal one and the potential criminal cases in which he's at least a subject on the federal level are criminal cases. >> joyce, do you think that it's significant that don junior and ivanka did not take the fifth and that he did take the fifth? what are the inferences to be drawn? what inference, if any, can be drawn from that? >> it is really interesting and of course, you're not responsible for your co-defendant's conduct in a case, but if, for instance, they gave answers that indicated that their dad would have been the one with the final authority to make decisions and that he knew about certain instances where values were inflated and then he took the fifth amendment, well, that's the time where if there was a civil case down the road, you might really, as a lawyer see if you can convince the judge to let you play that tape of trump saying only the mob takes the fifth and then you could say to the jury you don't really have to draw the

inference. donald trump has already drawn it for you. >> we have a little reporting, a new reporting related to this at nbc news. here's the headline, trump real estate appraiser hands over thousands -- thousands of documents, more than even the 12 boxes to the new york attorney general and civil probe. here's what it says, new york's supreme court justice arthur engoron had found cushman and wakefield in con term. for the trump organization's business practices and ordered the firm to pay a $10,000 fine until they complied. in a later to the judge on friday, it has received cushman's production which amounts to about 35,867 documents since entry of this court's contempt order. the new york attorney general's office was joining with cushman and asking the judge to hold the contempt order without any fines due or owing. kurt, i guess this is just

another piece of the walls closing in on trump. as you kind of survey the way seeing him take the fifth and seeing that the lawyers have had to cough up to more documents and letitia james seems to be focused on making the case. in the constellation of things that he's facing, how important do you think the new york civil suit is. >> it doesn't seem important because you can't lock him up, depending on the report. it's a civil case. i think it's important because i think if, you know, they find reason to carry it out other than letitia james has political persecution. i think it's not unimportant, but the other thing about the deposition that he gave in the -- in the new york civil case, he has, as tim o'brien and others who have been involved in litigation with him have noted, when it gets to being deposed he does get more serious and a little more careful and when they said, did you lie?

no, it's truthful hyperbole and all those types of things. i'm beginning to see the old trump that still has the ability to know when to play it more carefully. as a matter of fact, i just found some documents in my own basement. as you know, i moved recently and found a trove of correspondents with donald trump. >> oh, come on. >> come on. when i was editor of "new york" magazine. >> i'll depose you on those documents. >> we had done a story in "new york" magazine on mar-a-lago after he opened it and bought it and he wrote me personally and said he was threatening to sue me and he was upset. i middle, but donald, it was verbatim quotes, was theren't any kind of q and a and he wrote me back, yeah, i know, and it was again, the fact that he

could even admit he was just blustering, but the facts we had him on the facts was an interesting backward view of donald trump when he perhaps was -- was less mentally impaired, but i still think he has that ability and i think that's what we may see, for instance taking the fifth in the new york state case. >> it is an interesting question and joyce vance, we've got to go, but it is an interesting question whether they always say that nothing concentrates the mind like hanging a dot, and maybe nothing reverses mental infirmity like the prospect of a criminal prosecution at dawn. anyway, that's probably what you've seen in your life, joyce, as a lawyer. thank you for coming on today. coming up, we've got a dangerous new set of baseless claims from the right that the fbi planted evidence at mar-a-lago, a distraction game they're playing and how can people forget about the real why and the real what,

what donald trump took from the white house. stay with us for that. e white house. stay with us for that. the next, camels. - llamas. - llamas. so save money shopping back to school on amazon. you sure that's not a camel? yeah. whatever you say. i love all types of dancing... salsa, and even belly dancing! i am a triathlete. i've always been into health, and wellness, and fitness... i tried everything with diet and exercise, and nothing worked. there was just kinda this stubborn area on my stomach.

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knocking. >> they're coming for you. >> but who leaked? who sold you out? was it jared? >> ungrateful. >> ivanka. >> backing away from you. >> don junior. >> your own sewn. >> melania. >> she wants to escape. >> mark meadows. who did it? >> all of your old friends are talking to the 1/6 committee. >> they weren't your friends. >> maybe someone closer. someone you trust period upon now you're the first president to have his home raided by the fbi. >> this is your legacy. >> it's bad, donald. >> your father would be a shamed. >> and there's no one you can trust. >> it's like 2020 redux, 2020 all over again and the lincoln project's latest ad, a minutes-long of very high-end psy-ops trying to get into donald's head playing at bedminster and it's great at knowing where to target its ads

and it's targeting donald trump's psyche and speaking of the lincoln project, former strategist and co-founder of the aforementioned lincoln projects and the axios political reporter, kurt still with us. rick, i start with you just because, you know, i don't want to call it your latest masterpiece. it certainly is a piece of high-grade, high octane psy-ops. i like particularly the little whispers and the one whisper when you mentioned eric, do you even care? and his wife, she wants to escape. anyway, tell me the origin for this ad, what made you think of it and explain the incredible psycho dynamics in play? >> we knew that donald trump would try to gaslight the entire country the minute this raid happened. we knew he would immediately start lying and they would immediately try to tell an also nat narrative of why it's happening and why it's really

happening and we wanted to push back and something we're good at getting inside his cycle and getting inside his head space and pushing become in a way that we've been very, very successful in in the past. >> yeah. alexa, these guys, at the lincoln projects have a decent sense of trump is not exactly unpredictable in terms of where he's going to go on the playing field when he's under pressure and they're anticipating the reporting that they see in axios. trump world speculates after flipped aid after an fbi search. trump world is curious about which aide and aides flipped. sources tell axios trump's orbit is always an environment rife with mistrust and paranoia and now that's intensified. give us a sense, if you would of just how bonkers are in trump world with the paranoia that drives these kinds of stories? >> well, thanks for having me

and it's good to see you in the anchor chair. as michaelen reported for axios, trump world is abuzz with the worries about who among them to the ad that you just played from the lincoln project might have been the person to tip off the folks, the fbi who went to mar-a-lago. that's obvious in contrast, though, with the republicans here in washington on the hill who immediately started coalescing around him and the republican candidates and nominees for statewide races, governor and senate across the country who started coalescing around him and started showing a sign of strength who the folks in the inner circle are turning against him. we've seen in the last several weeks the number of trump aides who have testified publicly and privately, and it's happening all around him and that's obviously in contrast with the broader support from the party which clearly he's still controlling to a certain degree. >> we talked to kurt and the

lincoln project specializes in psy-ops and you said yeah, at this moment psy-ops might be pretty effective. talk about that. >> any way you look at it, he's in a lot of corners legally and otherwise and a court deciding if and how and whether to announce his presidential candidacy. so if -- if you're the lincoln project and your goal is to throw him off balance and discombobulate him some more this seems like a very apt moment to do it. the other thing is it all comes out of the fact that we presume that this search wouldn't have been okay by the super judicious merrick garland if not for an informant and if not for information saying you have to find this and i think that's a fair, speculative assumption, therefore trump world and the

rest of us naturally imagine that somebody as the mob would say is a snitch. >> rick, you are not only an ad maker and a practitioner of the dark earth of psy-ops and you are a plugged in republican strategist who hears a lot of things out there and you point your fingers at a lot of potential snitches. what's your sense on the basis of what you know or have heard. who is the likeliest person who has flipped? >> i think there were a lot of stories about jared and ivanka trying to break off from trump and pulling away from the trump orbit. i think jared kushner has a great paranoia for reasons to do with his family's past. he doesn't want to ever go to jail. i suspect that the fbi and folks have a persuasive argument there that he should talk. the other people that involved around him, there are a lot of potential suspects because he treats his people so terribly,

and he knows that -- they know they're imminently ready to be thrown under the bus, so it could be any one of them, donald, which is the point they were making and we would have told a more complete story and they're always like crabs in a bucket down there in mar-a-lago. they're always fighting with each other. they're always competing with each other and they're always looking to protect themselves. so someone is protecting themselves in a pool right now. >> they're like scorpions in a sock. >> everyone's sticking around. when we come back, the next big lie being pushed by trump's allies. by trump's allies

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so you can still count on those safety features. all right, we're all finished. >> customer: thank you so much. >> tech: thank you. don't wait--schedule now. >> singers: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace. ♪ #. what the fbi's probably doing is planting evidence, which is what they did during the russia hoax.in we also have a hunch they doctored evidence to get the warrant, again what they did during the russian hoax. >> when i took my oath of office i believed in people, like the fbi, the doj would be there to protect us, defend us, especially a former president. i haven't seen anybody else be treated like this in my life. >> that was jesse waters and a trump lawyer on television last night introduing fox news to their latest fraudulent, phony, manure covered narrative, backed of course by the twice impeached utterly disgraced, pathological

liar, coup attempting ex-president that surely the fbi mustly have framed him, a lie based on less than zero evidence, just a bad faith hunch. these new unfounded allegations against the federal government follow in the foot stepsth of trump's other big lie, the one about election fraud, same deal, muddy the water as much as you can, push as much crap into the system as steve bannon liked to say and enough people would believe something or be too confused to believe anything. we're back with our panel, alexi, i start with you. here's whatit trump said on tru social. i want you to comment on this. he says the fbi and others from the federal government would no let anyone including my lawyers be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on mar-a-lago. everyone was asked to leave the premise. they wanted to be leftd ed alon without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking, or hopefully not planting.

why did theyy strongly insist having nobody watching them, everybody out, obama and clinton were never raided despite big disputes. i don't generally like to quote donald trump, but because this is fueling so much discussion in the right wingmu echo chamber, d it's so dangerous, i think it's worth quoting. talk a littlet' bit about what you're seeing out there in those -- in that echo chamber and where it might head. >> yeah, i mean, kudos to you for being able to read through that with a straight face. i mean, it's been like crazy online, benzy collins of nbc ha been doing a really good job of documenting the insane vitriol coming from these right wing folksri online, literally issui calls to arms telling people it's going to be a civil war. and byo the way, john, it's no just people online. the nominee for secretary of state in nevada is talking about a call to arms, inspiring people, maga supporters to show up in places in vegas to fight against this fbi raid as they're calling it.

so you know, we saw clearly on january 6th how this, i don't know, arinsanity online can mov offline and become really dangerous and deadly, and i fear that's exactly what's happening now, and you know, the other thing i'll sayw, quickly is tha all of this is laying the groundwork for exactly what we have reported at "axios," thanks to jonathan swan, which is trump's intention to implement schedule f, which is a mechanism that he implemented when he was president, an executive order that essentially allowed him to purge up to 50,000 federal workers to install loyalists to himself and tos his maga agend. so when fox news is parroting his talking points, when republicans across the country are supporting him after this situation with the fbi, it is laying the groundwork for the next republican president if it's donald trump or anyone like him to really remake the federal government as we know it. >> rick, there's a fox news story, i'm not going to read the whole thing, but it reports

about how merrick garland, christopher wray, the head of the fbi, and fbi agents in general arebi experiencing an uptick in death threats in the wake of the what they call a raid, it was not a raid, it was a search of mar-a-lago. what the biden administration did today was a shot between the eyes of this republic. you got matt sh lap who runs that thing called cpac as the fbi shows that we've become a third world country. bernie kerik told news max the democrats are trying assassinate trump. >> right. >> this really is a big lie>> 2, and it strikes me as arguably more incendiary and more dangerous in the moment like you really are striking the match right next to a house that's already been soaked in kerosene. >> i think that's right, john. the termst, they're using that this was an assassination, this was a hit, this was a raid, all

these things are doing, they're trying to frame this out as something that's outside the bounds, that has nothing to do with trump's long consistent t pattern of illegality. merrick garland is a guy who never once in his life has yelled hold my s beer. this was a careful warrant. it wasth issued by a judge.ss it was done with all the review. they knew this would have those political impacts and it was done in a very careful scope and manner, and of course trump is going to lie about it. of course his people are going to lie about it. this also is a real sign that all the flirtation with ron desantis and ted cruz and anybody else who thought they were going to run t inz '24 wi fox, they're all back on board now with k trump, they're all bk in bed with him, and i think you're going to see that trump's going to try to lever this experience into his next pain into disrupting the country as much as he can. the schedule f idea, basically burning down the government and throwing it with little clones like steve bannon is

extraordinarily dangerous. their relying on rhetoric and communications and narratives right now that are encouraging a base of people who have already demonstrated that they can be motivated toed violence without much effort. >> real quick as we got to get to the 5:00, nicolle always cautions me, she's like i don't like to reduce allhe these thin to a politics, but rick makes t right point here, i think, and i'm not talking about political gain in the sense of, donald trump canga get a few more poin in the polls. thent notion that this event ca reconsolidates the right around trump and fires them up, that's a place where it's in his political interest and something we shouldca all be deeply concerned about.nc it seems to be given the uptick of political violence, we are really playing with fire. >> i don't want to be the one who isays, oh, don't worry. last night there were a few dozen old people outside mar-a-lago supporting him. i mean, we'll see. he's not presidentme anymore. he's the ex-president, and so as much as ron desantis feels

obliged to pay his obey sans to the maga base, and i understand it can become horrible and you'll play this back to show how i wasn't taking it seriously, but i'm not -- yet i amri not worried. i think -- i think donald trump is done and i don't think that he's going to have armies of magaites taking to the are streets. if i believed in god, kurt, i'd say from your lips to god's t ears. you're sticking around -- no, you're -leaving. everybody's leaving me, they're all leaving me, thank you for spending time with us.en it was great to have you. up next g for the show -- ne of those people just me and more on thee fbi search of the sear of mar-a-lago, whether or not we will soon hear from the doj. we'll be right back after this quick break.ar eak.

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. president trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything had did while he was in office. didn't get away with anything yet. yet. we have a criminal justice system in this country. we have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one. >> namaste again, everyone, it

is 5:00 p.m. here in new york city. i'm john heilemann in for nicolle wallace, speaking senate majority leader at the time mitch mcconnell was very clear, donald trump was not protected from any potential criminal liability. in fact, there were mechanisms in this country that could hold him accountable. those comments now more relevant than ever as we see the disgraced twice impeached former president staring down a seemingly endless list of legal crises just two days after his south florida estate was searched by the fbi as part of a probe looking into his mishandling of classified documents. trump appeared told in the -- the former president pleaded the fifth calling the investigation a politically motivated witch hunt. last night we also learned the fbi had seized the phone of close trump ally pennsylvania congressman scott perry.

perry, you will recall certainly, was the one who pushed donald trump to install conspiracy theorist jeffrey clark as his attorney general late in his first term and who was among those who contacted the white house about receiving a pardon after the insurrection on january 6th. and that is not all. yesterday a federal appeals court ruled that the house ways and means committee can obtain trump's tax returns, although that's a decision that trump can still appeal, and then there's the ongoing fulton county, georgia, investigation into the former president's pressuring of election officials and, yes, there's more, the big kahuna, the federal investigation looking into donald trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. that's like a lot of walls seemingly closing in on the former president, and on the other hand you've got a republican party that's totally completely devoted to defending him. what comes next, a question asked by tim alberta in a new piece in the atlantic that came

out last nigh pointing out how january 6th showed us how dangerous the former president's lies and the fuels of dis distrust can be. we don't know exactly what the fbi was looking for at mar-a-lago. we don't know what was found. what we must acknowledge, even those of us who believe trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so and deserves full prosecution under the law is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences. is that justice worth the associated risks? yesterday the nation's top law enforcement officers decided that it was. we can only hope that they were correct. joining us now, my old friend, professor laurence tribe, the man who basically dominated constitutional law, he has argued and won 35 cases in front of the united states supreme court. it's great to see you here today. i want to start with the question that tim alberta asked, was it worth it what the doj and

fbi did yesterday, and is it worth pursuing trump, even though you think he committed crimes and even though you think he should be prosecuted in principle, is it worth it given the potential political costs? >> well, it's good to see you, jim, and i think the answer is compared to what? you know, if we don't hold him accountable, if we say that you can take classified material and use it for your own benefit, you can foment a riot, give aid and comfort to an insurrection, you know, insist on holding onto office no matter whether you win or lose, if we say that a coup is okay, insurrections are okay, crimes are okay if you're a former president, then we have really given up the american experiment. we have given up the rule of law. i think that is the highest

price of all. that's what we cannot afford to do, and i'm glad that somebody as calm and centered as merrick garland has set aside the question are they going to carry out their threats? are they going to use even more violence? he's not asking himself that question. he's asking do we have the goods. has this guy committed crimes? can we convince a federal judge that there is evidence of those crimes at mar-a-lago? if there is, and if any other citizen would be subjected to exactly this kind of treatment, can we afford a country in which we say we look the other way because it's donald trump, because he has led a cult, and because he has convinced lots of people, many of whom are armed and dangerous, to take his side against the side of law and democracy.

if we do that, we are lost. so i think it's worth it, although i do not underestimate. i'm really not with kurt anderson in saying all is well. there were only 12 old people gathered around mar-a-lago yesterday. i'm not willing to assume that these people don't mean what they say, but i think we cannot afford to give up. if lincoln had given up, we would have had a nation half slave and half free. we just cannot afford to give up, even if the price is high, so i think -- >> you talked about garland here, and it's a question -- you know, you said what he's done here is put aside those questions and just stayed focused on the law, and that i think is what we've been talking about for the last couple of days and trying to assess what he did here. i found it very frustraing when you would hear people, mostly people on the left who were, you know, kind of impatient with garland and his kind of delfic utterances about what he was

going to do about january 6th. they're not doing anything, the man, why won't he do more, why e won't he move faster. that goes up not just the activist left but the biden white house. right now in the context of what he did yesterday, it just -- it helps his credibility enormously to have been judicious and have been patient and have taken his time when he takes a step like this. that's not going to placate people on the right, but for people of goodwill in the country, it seems to me that having been as i said patient and methodical, that can only help when you decide to take a step like this? >> well, i think that's true, but i would certainly lose credibility if i hid the fact that i was among the people who expressed impatience. i knew that merrick garland was a man of principle, having known him for 50 years, helped him select clerks when he was a judge, i knew that he was not going to look the other way. but on the other hand, i'm a human being too, and i was damn

frustrated. i thought why the hell can't he show some thigh here, can't he show some leg, show us that he's doing something. i'm glad i was wrong to be impatience. i'm glad that as you say his methodical patience, the fact that he doesn't show his passion, show his anger about the violation of the laws of the country but simply proceeds to find the evidence and see where it leads, i think, you know, i'm glad that that adds to his credibility now because when you have the propagators of the big lie making up stuff about how the fbi must have planted evidence here, it's like that claim that it was really the liberals and nancy pelosi who planned to have the january 6th insurrection and endanger their own lives and the lives of the capitol police, i'm glad that all those people are losing

credibility. of course to the extent they're talking just to one another, there's nothing we can do to overcome it. that's why the death of truth is in some ways the most dangerous problem that we face now. people can just, you know, tell lies and there are millions of people who are ready to believe them no matter what, but we have to proceed on the premise that truth will in the end prevail. i have to believe that. otherwise, you know, i would have wasted my life, and i don't want to believe i have. >> neither do i. so here's my question i asked joyce vance in the last hour, and i want you to -- i want to hear what you have to say about it. there's been a lot of discussion today about given the unprecedented nature of what happened yesterday and about -- and given the firestorm that it ignited that, yeah, people who are -- people of goodwill looking at the justice department and saying we must have transparency. the justice department needs to explain what this is all about, what are they looking for? what was the basis for this search warrant?

they needed a merrick garland press conference, and there's another group of people who say, no, that's not how it works. there's a reason why the justice department shouldn't talk about ongoing investigations. charge somebody, decline to charge somebody. if they charge, talk about it. if they don't charge, don't talk about it. but there's -- the people wanting transparency are coming from in some cases the right place. i'm not talking about people on the right who are making that argument in a bad faith way. what's your view about what the doj should do in terms of transparency and explaining what happened yesterday? >> i think joyce advance got it exactly right. it's not just a matter of, you know, following doj routine, burying your head in the sand and saying we don't care about the public hunger for transparency. there are good reasons. we saw in the case of jim comey and the trouble he understandably and rightly got into for violating those rules and telling all kinds of stuff about hillary clinton and how she perhaps wasn't chargeable

but was grossly negligent, it's not what we should do. if we did that, then trump and his colytes would have a legitimate gripe. they would say you haven't given us our day in court yet, you're trying us through press conferences. you shouldn't say what the basis of these searches was because we haven't had our day in court. the fact is is that under the rules that we've got, trump has the inventory of the search. if he wanted to, he could basically say here's the stuff they grab. here are the 12 boxes. there's nothing in there that's dangerous or classified, and as some people have said, he should put up or shut up, but i think for merrick garland to satisfy the public thirst at this point, he would be pulling a comey, i think that would be wrong. it would lead to justifiable complaints by trump and really

everybody in the country who cares about fairness and justice. >> well, of course, mitch mcconnell was saying yesterday, merrick garland explain yourself, and the minute merrick garland explained himself, mitch mcconnell would say you should stay quiet. i want to ask one question, professor tribe. there was a lot of discussion about this provision in the federal code. the disqualification provision, which basically said, you know, that trump if he were convicted of mishandling classified information, that he would be automatically disqualified for running for office. some people said that's what this is all about, other people would say that wouldn't apply. people fell over themselves interpreting that provision in the code one way or another. you a different point of view, i think for clarity's sake it would be good for you to talk about that. >> sure, i think both sides are wrong. the people who say that was the

point of this raid are certainly wrong because there's at least a constitutional question of whether that disqualification could apply. it puts the cart before the horse to think that that's what merrick garland had in mind. it would only apply in very limited circumstances, and that's definitely not the point of this search. but the people who say, oh, no, you cannot add qualifications to the presidency, the constitution says that all you need to do is be a resident, be a natural born citizen, be 35 years old. they are assuming that when somebody commits a particular kind of crime that congress says is very special and disqualifies you, that that's like adding a qualification, but it isn't. it's not like saying, well, we're going to now say you have to have a college degree or you have to, you know, you have to have a record of having paid your taxes in order to run for president. this isn't adding a

qualification. it's saying that certain people otherwise qualified lose it if they commit a crime. after all, take the example of treason. can you imagine that congress wouldn't have the power to say that somebody that was convicted of treason but then gets out after serving 20 years, 30 years, can you imagine that the framers would have thought, congress has no power to say that a traitor cannot run for president. of course they have power. jefferson in 1814 wrote a letter giving that example saying the list of qualifications doesn't mean that the legislature doesn't have the power to say there are certain limited circumstances in which somebody gets disqualified. so it's a close question, and people who assume that you can't do that i think are making a mistake. >> well, there's nothing i love more than introducing a little bit of nuance and some actual legal expertise into a discussion that's been dominated by cable tv talking heads like

me. i made the mistake yesterday that you're talking about just now. laurence tribe, it's always my pleasure to see you. thank you for starting us off this hour. joining our coverage, phil rucker, and "new york times" justice department reporter and david plouffe, former obama campaign manager. they are all msnbc contributors, and katie, i want to start with you because some of the stuff that tribe talked about and some of the stuff we talked about earlier on the show goes right in the middle of some reporting that you did in the story in "the times" that's about what merrick garland learned from robert mueller's investigation. garland becomes trump's target after fbi's mar-a-lago search. here's the piece i wanted to get at, but people close to mr. garland say while his team respects mr. muller they have learned from his mistakes. mr. garland despite his silence this week has made a point of talking publicly about the investigation on many occasions

even if it's only been to explain why he cannot talk publicly about the investigation. say a little more about what merrick garland learned from muller and how it applies for this particular question that we're all facing right now, which is the call for transparency on the part of the doj in terms of what it did yesterday. >> yeah, so in terms of the moeller investigation we saw that the special counsel and his team, they were silent for two years of the investigation, and donald trump used that say lens to frame the entire investigation on his own terms so even people who disagreed with him were still talking about the investigation in terms of whether or not it was a witch hunt. i mean, we were really speaking trump's language for that two years. now, what the justice department today is trying to do is they are trying to put out as much information as possible in legal documents and in court filings where they think it's appropriate and have the attorney general speak about loftier concepts like the rule of law, like why we do not talk about ongoing investigations.

and why it's important to do that in order to preserve fairness for people who have not been charged with crimes. if nothing else, then to show that there was a reason for these norms, particularly after an era in which they were completely shattered. now, whether or not garland's strategy will work, whether or not trying to lay out why norms exist and why it's important for the rule of law, whether or not the public actually takes those things seriously is to be seen, but it is something that the department seems to have decided is necessary to speak about in order to combat what they know is going to happen, which is sort of an asymmetric rhetorical warfare where trump is going to speak and the prosecutors are not. >> david plouffe, you sat in the white house, at that time right on the brink of re-election campaign and had to confront dicey situations. this is a situation where joe biden has done an incredible run recently. on monday he took a big victory

lap and then this thing took place. it's a thing that many people in the white house have been impatient, just like a lot of democrats with merrick garland, this thing happens not at the time he necessarily wanted it to if you were a democrat. from sitting in that place in the big chair, the second biggest chair right down the hall from the oval office, what would you be thinking right now in terms of how the politics of this are unfolding and what the white house and democrats more broadly need to do. >> well, john, you quickly learn in the white house to basically divide things into two categories, things you can control and things you can't control, and having worked in the building, the things you can't control is actually a much bigger plot. this falls into that. i mean, they obviously had the appropriate independent relationship with the department of justice that will continue, and so all you can do is execute the things you can control. you know, story telling about the inflation reduction act and health care and prescription drug pieces of that, the tax

pieces of that, and continue to talk about the infrastructure. you can't really worry about this in the white house. i do think it's an interesting question which you're posing to us and you did to professor tribe. i've worked with a lot of lawyers through my life in politics and outside of politics, and i think it is important to have a communication strategy. not all lawyers understand it. your strategy can be to say nothing, but you have to put that, you know, particularly in today's world where we have disinformation and social media, and so i'm not sure what they're going to end up doing here. it may be to do nothing and wait until they ultimately have a decision about whether to charge or not. maybe it's to simply talk about why they can't talk about it. but i do think in your previous discussion with laurence tribe, you talked about fair minded people. people who are going to be open to the facts and open to information. my sense is they're going to be a little more patient than partisans on both sides. this was an unprecedented event, and i'm sure even they would like to know a little bit more about why did this search have to take place. i think, again, the communication strategy can be to

say nothing ever until you have something more meaningful to say. you have to give it the same care as you do your legal strategy. >> phil, you've written books about donald trump and one o. things that came up in the last hour is the question of whether at this moment when the walls seem to be by all, you know, by all objective metrics, the walls seem to be closing in on him, is that at this moment making him likely to make him crazier or likely to make him saner? because the behavior we've seen, taking the fifth today and some of the things he did suggest that maybe the prospect of imminent criminal vulnerability, facing charges is maybe somehow making trump more sane rather than nuttier, which is not necessarily what we all thought would happen. >> well, john, i certainly think the threat that he's under, the legal jeopardy that he appears to be under on a number of fronts doesn't make him act like a more rationale person, you

know, pleading the fifth. we've seen this in his history, moments where he's up against the wall he can sometimes act at least temporarily rationally. but the other thing we've seen in the past and what we're seeing right now is that it brings out sort of the political attack mode from him so we're seeing a deliberate attempt by former president trump to imply things that we did, but there's no evidence to support. for example, his statement this morning that he believes there might have been fbi agents planting evidence at mar-a-lago when his lawyers weren't looking. there's simply no evidence to support that. that, as far as we know publicly, is not true. there's nothing to say it is true, and yet the former president and his allies are out there parroting that talking point to stir up misinformation and galvanize their supporters. i think we're going to continue to see that, when he feels under threat and under siege, we see

him lash out, and we see him resort to these sort of rapid fire political communications, instincts with misinformation to try to win the messaging war. >> yeah, i would say when i say that i think what i suggest the possibility that facing imminent prosecution might make him saner, it doesn't make him any less poisonous. that was not my implication. saner means he's even more dangerous. we'll keep the conversation going on what's next for the ex-president, the republican party and the country in the wake of that unprecedented raid on trump's residence in florida. plus, the gop once again choosing a trump-backed big lie peddling conspiracy theorist to be their candidate for governor in one of a handful of states that could determine the winner of the next presidential election. ask a triumphant moment at the white house as president biden signs into law a sweeping bill expanding health care for veterans. it's just the latest in a sears of wins on the scoreboard for this president. "deadline white house" continues

after the break, so don't go anywhere.

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. our answer is and will continue to be the same answer we would give with respect to any ongoing investigation. as long as it takes and whatever it takes for justice to be done consistent with the facts and the law. i understand that this may not be the answer some are looking for, but we will and we must speak through our work. anything else jeopardizes the viability of our investigations

and the civil liberties of our citizens. >> that was attorney general merrick garland, speaking one day before the anniversary of january 6th reassuring the doj's dedication to the rule of law was total, and we're back with our panel. and katie benner, we talked about what lessons merrick garland might have learned from bob mueller. there's another set of lessons you might want to learn from jim comey, something who in the middle of a presidential campaign was struggling constantly with conducting an investigation, whatever you think of comey where he ended up, he was engaged in this tormented struggle of trying to serve the public interests, trying to not seem like an idiot and deny things that were apparent to everyone and grappling with doj policy.

how much do you think garland has thought about that? donald trump's likely to be a candidate and with all these investigations going on, it's a thing that garland and the doj and all of his aides are going to have to cope with in the high stakes, high pressure environment that a campaign provides. >> of course, you know, in interviews with top officials, people close to garland, he has thought a lot about the rule of law full stop. you know, he's thought about the rules that were put into place after watergate, as a very young lawyer himself, he worked at the justice department under former attorney general ben civil let tee, and was one of the lawyers who helped implement these post-watergate changes, that talk about why you treat people in criminal investigations the way that you do, why you do not speak about criminal investigations. why there are strong walls between the white house and the justice department, and why most of all the justice department cannot be used as a political tool. this is something he has been obsessed with since the '70s. certainly he has thought about jim comey.

one of the interesting things you talked about is comey's stru struggle. merrick garland doesn't seem to have those kinds of struggles. his egois very different. he wants to follow the rules because he believes the rules serve a purpose to uphold the law and prevent the department from being taken over by politics and being politicized. it's a very important difference between he and comey, and an important difference between he and donald trump and it's to be seen how the public ultimately comes down on whether or not they believe that what merrick garland is doing is right. >> david, one of the things that -- i'm going to stick with comey for a second here because what's your view very quickly? do you think trump's going to run again? you think he's going to run again, right? >> i'm in the distinct minority that i don't think he will. now, this may change it, but listen, our democracy's hanging by a thread because of his small brittle ego because he lost to joe biden.

he's the front runner but it's not implausible he could lose the republican nomination. what do you think that would do to his addled brain? so you know, listen, i understand those are long odds that i'm taking. i still think there's a chance he doesn't run. right now everyone's rallying around the corrupt cult leader. i'm not sure how much impact this has in '22. but i think it could have an impact in '24 negatively for him. i do think at the end of the ta day, republicans almost all of them want to win back the white house. there's probably 20% of them that don't really care about that, it's about reinstalling trump. if he does look like damaged goods. there's a lot of people that say you can get all the maga policy without the trump baggage. i know i'm in a distinct minority. he could announce tomorrow, tonight. i also think this is going to be a much different campaign and he knows it. he walked all over that field in 2016. he walked all over that republican field. anybody who runs right now, the only question is are you willing to take a punch and throw it back at this guy?

it's going to be a much different race. i think he's got to understand that. we'll see at the end of the day. i'm sure this fuels him to some extent, but you know, listen, he's deep on the back nine of life, you know. i don't know if he's on hole 18, hole 15, hole 16. and to your previous question to phil, i mean, he wants to stay out of jail, so you know, maybe he's going to act a little bit more if not, you know, intelligently, listen a little bit more. so that's the other question here is, you know, this is maybe his last act. if he runs and he doesn't win, i think it's just fascinating. this doesn't matter what anybody says to him as we know. he's not going to accept counsel. he's not going to listen to counsel. it's all about him and that's what i think is fascinating. can he endure another loss? it may not be a general election loss. he could very well lose the primary, and my guess is that's a price that's too high for him to pay. i will live to eat these words

i'm sure any day soon now, but that's kind of how i see it. >> david plouffe, you are always willing to like go all the way there, you know. you were the one who back in 2016 told me that hillary clinton who had a 99% chance of winning the election all the way in october, you had to eat those words. david made the point the party is coalesing around trump. here are the potential 2024 candidates who have defended trump, former president mike pence, florida governor ron desantis, former secretary of state mike pompeo, senator josh hawley, the bird fisted insurrectionist, senator marco rubio, christie, what happened in mar-a-lago handed trump a lifeline. here's a quote from john thomas, a republican political strategist who had been organizing a pac to support

desantis. it couldn't be clearer, if trump wants it at this point i don't see how it's not his. it will be a coronation at this point, not a primary. so david plouffe's one of the smartest people i know in politics, i always take him seriously, but there's a view on the republican side that's what this guy is saying that like the people who are thinking about running against trump are looking at the way the party's coalesing around him in this moment and saying, i don't know, i mean, it was always going to be a long shot. maybe there's no shot now. is that what you're hearing in your reporting on the republican field? >> well, certainly, john, the party's coalesced around trump in this moment in the last, you know, 48 hours but the election, the beginning of the presidential nomination process is more than a year away. that's a really long time and a lot more information can come out between in addition, there's no contest. there's no choice right now, so voters when they're asked by pollsters who do they support for the republican nomination,

you know, trump is getting a majority, but he's not getting necessarily an overwhelming majority in those polls and there's also no real campaign. you don't have, for example, governor desantis as a presidential candidate lobbing attacks at his opponent donald trump and really drawing contrast between his record in florida and the record that trump had in office as president. now, we don't know if desantis is going to run either. if you actually have a primary contest with actual candidates who declare and engaged and debating one another with money behind their messages, it really can change the political dynamic in a way that we can't quite see today. >> so phil, you're saying it's a long time before the republican nomination starts and if donald trump is in leg irons and behind bars, there's a chance ron desantis will run against him. that's what you're saying. >> i'm saying there's a chance of a real primary here and there's a chance trump actually does not become the nominee. >> okay. i knew that's what you were

saying. i was just trying to make a little joke at ron desantis's expense. phil rucker, katie benner, david plouffe. it's been nearly two years since the 2020 election, and yet republicans in wisconsin just picked a guy to be their candidate for governor who said he tried to overturn the win in biden's state even now. the big lie republicans are inches one step closer to holding office, that is next. int hide my skin? not me. dupixent helps keep you one step ahead of eczema, with clearer skin and less itch. serious allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. tell your doctor about new or worsening eye problems such as eye pain or vision changes, including blurred vision, joint aches and pain, or a parasitic infection. don't change or stop asthma medicines without talking to your doctor. ask your doctor about dupixent. love you. have a good day, behave yourself. like she goes to work at three in the afternoon and sometimes gets off at midnight.

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midterm elections are just getting higher and higher rising into the sky as more trump-backed election deniers win key primaries in key battleground states. last night trump endorsed tim michaels, construction magnate won the republican nomination for governor for wisconsin. michaels has pledged to abolish the wisconsin elections commission, the agency that runs state and local elections. it was an agency that was established by republicans, by the way, and michaels has entertained the idea of decertifying the 2020 election results in wisconsin, something that just happens to be legally impossible. michaels, as we all know is part of a trend, trump backed election deniers have clinched republican nominations for governor, secretary of state or attorney general in five of the six key battleground states of michigan, pennsylvania, arizona, nevada, georgia, and wisconsin. and one of them, pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee doug mastriano has faced scrutiny for the january 6th select committee for his role in the fake elector

scheme in his home state in 2020. mastriano appeared tuesday before the select committee, but cut his appearance short after just 15 minutes before answering a signal question. joining us now, "politico" strategist matthew dowd, great to see you mad, cornell belcher, as well as the president of brilliant corners research, and always good to see maria theresa kumar, what an awesome panel, all of them msnbc contributors. matthew, you went up on medium. you put a post up there called democracy watch. top ten candidates who threatened our democracy. i love a top ten list. let's start there. go. >> well, it's my way -- it's a three-pillar test that i put together, which is the three pillars are that make part of this test, one, how crazy they are in their words and actions. two, how much of a danger by the office they hold or what they might do are they to democracy, and three, just as important is what are the chances that they

could win this election, and so as you'll see across the board, it's almost all by and large i think something we need to focus on statewide, not federal offices. there's two u.s. senate candidates there that i think could be determinative of who holds the united states senate, which is important but at the top of the list is kari lake running for governor of arizona, a swing state. next is mark finch running for secretary of state. two of the ten are are arizona, but three of the ten are in michigan. so it just highlights, john, the dangers that are at play with people that are not only unhinged but could pose a threat to democracy in their state and what happens in 2024, but also have a legitimate shot at winning these elections, and that's why i did the list. the list will adjust, i think, as we go forward depending on people's chances and what crazy stuff people say, but right now it's a ten for ten gop list. >> now, look, matthew, when i look at this list, i see a top

ten, sometimes people are like -- they're all listed one to ten, but then you look at the top two, and the top two are kind of in like a sort of different league and they're both in arizona, kari lake and mark fincham. maria theresa kumar, there's a lot of black and hispanic voters in arizona. it's not really been a swing state until this last election. talk about the threat that these two individuals, kari lake and mark fincham pose to our democracy and how they might change the whole makeup of the presidential map if the biden -- if they were to win biden campaign might not have a play in arizona. >> so i mean, i think biden absolutely -- he won by 12,000 votes in arizona, so talk about margin thing election where is every single vote counts. the challenge with lake and the challenge with the secretary of state is that they are the antithesis, actually represent why arizona is a battleground.

they are anti-immigrant, so anti-semitic, down the list. those are the issues that actually mobilize the latino community, the native american community, the african american community and the young community in arizona and get this john, since the last election, we're expecting 80,000 latino youth to turn 18 years old in arizona. so nothing galvanizes young latinos more who has blatantly been anti-immigrant. i think part of the danger we're seeing with matthew dowd's list is to ask ourselves the question how many of those individuals on the top ten list have been supported by the dark money and the dark operations of the democrats hoping to make really extreme individuals on top of the ticket so that the democrat has a shoe-in. i think the governor want to be in pennsylvania is a perfect example. he wouldn't have been where he was had the democrats not purched in so much money to help elevate his name in that.

now, shapiro is absolutely leading by seven points but is that still going to be the case come november. >> cornell, i want to talk to you about wisconsin because having been involved in the obama campaigns back when you were still focused on the old swing states like wisconsin and michigan and pennsylvania, not thinking about arizona and georgia back in those days. you know a fair amount about the blue wall that joe biden rebuilt. we've got this republican candidate, mr. michaels who won the gubernatorial primary last night. here's what the "new york times" says about this. wisconsin republicans embraced trump in a race defined by 2020 grievances. mr. michaels subscribed to mr. trump's outlandish conspiracy theories, he would draw the state's electoral votes. a move that would have no basis in federal law. on tuesday night mr. michaels

did not mention the 2020 election or the state's voting laws and last week he was very, very fired up about it. the little bit we've seen suggests it could be a single-digit race between him and tony evers in wisconsin, and that guy sounds like a guy who's going to be running like from the play book of someone who's not going to be crazy like the republicans are in arizona. someone who's going to try to find a more middle ground. how dangerous is he this fall? >> well, i think there's a larger question. one is he's not going to be able to escape his record and the campaign's not going to allow him to backtrack and escape on his record. here is sort of the broader problem, you know, i think you see not only in wisconsin, but you see in some of those other states. take a state like wisconsin, a sort of old battleground state of wisconsin where joe biden was able to flip that state back blue, quite frankly by being

able to compete and dominate in the moderate -- in 2020, a plurality of voters in wisconsin identified themselves as moderate. joe biden carried those voters by 21, 22 points. and independent voters he carried there also in wisconsin. so what does not animate moderates and independent voters is the ideal that, one, that the election was stolen and that you're going to overturn that election for donald trump, so you know, and that's not only true of wisconsin, but if you look at the trump candidates that trump has backed over some of the more establishment candidates, and let's be clear, you know, pence and former governor walker were backing another -- a different candidate in that race. you look at some of these states and you go, you know, has trump's candidates made those races more or less competitive. i've got to look at a state like wisconsin and you look at how

you win wisconsin, you've got to be able to dominate that plurality of voters in a moderate middle of the state, and he is out of touch with those voters. so i think when you look at the overall, and that's not just true of wisconsin, that's true of a lot of these other states, you know, arizona. these voters are -- i mean these candidates are far outside the mainstream of those electorates, at least when you think about how you win those states statewide, you've got to be able to win moderates and i don't think they're the best able to compete and win moderates. >> i'm going to ask matthew dowd about that in a second. we're going to take a little break, so everyone here, all this incredible political panel sticking around: we're going to talk about that but more importantly we're going to get some highlighted time to joe biden's streak of legislative wins that continues with a bill that has personal significance for this president. stay with us for that. for that.

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i know you miss your daddy, but he's with you all the time. he's inside you. you see the little guy your sitting right next to you? that's my grandson. his daddy was lost to the same burn pits and he knows what you're going through. but guess what? you're going to do this and be really, really strong. and it's hard taking care of mommy and your grandma, but you've got to do it. >> president biden speaking to

briana robinson. the bill that president biden signed today provides more services to veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in iraq and afghanistan, and the passage of that bill marks yet another in a string of legislative victories for the president. of late the greatest of which will be the likely passage of the inflation act coming up. back to our panel, joe biden has been on a hell of a run and made people that said he was wrong to compare himself earlier in the administration with lbj and fdr, he didn't have margins, he wouldn't get this done. this passage of the version of build back better would make people say maybe it wasn't wiz to say those things. is that going to translate for

democrats in the mid-terms? >> well, i think that things have fundamentally changes, john, from where they were in may and early june in the national environment. what's the national environment? is there a red wave? where is this headed? and the quality of the candidates and what they run on and their messaging. and i think what's happened is a combination of things what joe biden has done demonstrated competency of the democratic party, so they can run on a contrast message of competency and we get stuff done versus crazy and the other side off the deep end. that's one thing gas prices have dropped. roe v. wade has entered into the environment that's going to benefit democrat, and add to that january 6th commission. all of those things are going to make it better for democrats in november. >> i want to put up a headline here, just a very simple thing.

here's a headline you'd love to see if you're in the white house. inflation drops to zero in july due to falling gas prices. inflation drops to zero. maria theresa is that a -- is that an augury of an economy that's turning in a way that's not too late and that democrats might just be able -- might just be able to go you know what it was bad for a while with inflation but we're on the right track now and could do better than people imagine in these mid-terms? >> well, john, when we used to play hardball we would say who won the week and who lost the week. donald trump has lost the week and it's only one say because of all the receipts people are starting to see from the justice department. but who has won the week has been joe biden. and i do believe with the reduction inflation act he's going to get a boost come september.

one of the challenges with democrats oftentimes has been how do you message? build back better was too complicated for people to understand, the infrastructure bill people didn't understand how it would land in their every day life. inflation reduction act is incredible and as a result i think when everybody is reporting on it, people are going to say that's right my gas is going down,. it doesn't feel right that the republicans are doing wrong by our democracy. >> i'm going to have to ask you for a do over, take a rain check because we're out of time. and matthew dowd, who's always responsible for any bad thing responsible on this show, matthew dowd just chew up all your minutes. maria theresa is brilliant. next time won't have you on with matthew because he's such a minute eater. all you guys, dowd, belcher,

kumar, thank you. a quick break for us. we'll be right back. break for us we'll be right back.

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thank you all for being with us this wednesday and now in the immortal words of the gogos we've got the beat with ari melber right now. welcome to the beat. i am ari melber. we're tracking new breaking news about donald trump's unprecedented legal problems. today, august 10, 2022, a former united states president pleaded the fifth, raising the topic of his own criminal culpability in a legal proceeding. donald trump spent six hours dodging questions at a deposition. you could see him leaving there in new york