investigation into the twice impeached ex-president's handling of government documents at a temporary crossroads. all eyes are on now what prosecutors do next after judge ilene ken nongranted the request for a special master to review the material and barred doj from using its documents for its probe until the special master is done. in a ruling that has been almost universally panned by legal experts, judge cannon expresses deep concern about any potential harm to donald trump that could emerge from the search of his private residence, saying she was mindful of the need to ensure the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances presented. she adds this, as a function of plaintiff's former position as president of the united states, the stigma associated with the search and seizure is in a league of its own. a future indictment based to any

degree on property that ought to be returned would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude. "new york times" points this out, quote, her ruling seemed to carve out a special exception to the normal legal process for the former president and reject the justice department's implicit argument that trump be treated like any other investigative subject. there are significant questions on how her new ruling will work, especially since the special master is permitted to review documents based on trump's claims of executive privilege. they're claims that have been rejected by the current head of the executive branch, that would be president joe biden. from the times reporting, quote, after trying for months to get the documents back from trump, the national archives, the agency that safeguards presidential records told his lawyers in a letter in may that both the justice department and the biden white house did not believe the former president's executive privilege claims had

merit, at a hearing last week concerning the question, the justice department argued that allowing a special master to conduct an executive privilege review of the seized material would be, quote, unprecedented and legally baseless since trump is no longer in office. "politico" is reporting this on the overall impact of the rules, quote, it seems likely that the process could delay by weeks or months the government's investigation, which a prosecutor recently said is in its early stages but a doj official tells nbc news that it does not halt the probe entirely since investigators still have access to documents reviewed by the ar archives in january or the classified material handed over by trump's attorneys in june. and it does not stop the fbi from talking to witnesses or pursuing the big questions at

hand, including how did the documents end up at mar-a-lago in the first place, and why? why weren't all the documents handed over to the national archives and what was donald trump's involvement in the handling of these records. it's where we start today with some of our most favorite reporters and friends, former u.s. attorney and msnbc legal analyst, joyce vance is here, also joining us, nbc news justice reporter, ryan reilly and with us on set for the hour, former senator claire mccaskill. all three msnbc contributors. how bad is the ruling, ryan reilly? it's so bad bill barr doesn't like it. let me show you that. >> the opinion i think was wrong, and i think the government should peal it. it's deeply flawed in a number of ways. i don't think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up. but even if it does, i don't see it fundamentally chaning the trajectory.

i don't think it changes the ball game except for we'll have a rain delay for a couple of innings. but i think the fundamental dynamics of the case are set, which is the government has very strong evidence of what it really needs to determine whether charges are appropriate, which is government documents were taken, classified information was taken and not handled appropriately, and they're looking into and there's some evidence to suggest that they were deceived, and none of that really relates to the content of documents. it relates to the fact that there were documents there and the fact that they were classified, and the fact that they were subpoenaed and never delivered, but they don't have to show the content, you know, the specific advice given in a memo, for example in order to prevail in this case. so i think it's not really going to change the decision. >> ryan, i start with that because i think it's a baseline. this isn't the left freaking out that there's a delay in the

criminal investigation into a twice impeached ex-president's hoarding and mishandling of classified documents. this is that this judge is so awol bill barr thinks she's nuts. and again, for the second or third time in as many days has reiterated the strength of the government's case. let me just underscore that, that classified information was taken. bill barr says that isn't in dispute. they were not handled appropriately, and they're looking into evidence that they were deceived, that donald trump lied to the government about said documents. that is where we are. >> all right yeah, and i was just on the phone right before we got on the air with an expert in this area of the law. i said is naive the right way to describe this order. they wouldn't quite go as far to say naive, but they would say novel as a way to describe this order. it really does go into an area where there is no road map to this. even in the rudy giuliani case, the special master did not end up looking at questions of

executive privilege. and those questions of executive privilege as donald trump well knows because he sued the january 6th committee and the national archives to try to block them from the january 6th committee from getting material related to that investigation, and the supreme court denied it back in january, the ability for him to block those records from coming over from the national archives. so he knows that this is all supposed to go through d.c. this is not supposed to be something a judge in florida is just sort of writing on a whim necessarily and creating this whole new precedent and this scope of potential special master duties that aren't really -- there's no road map for. there's nothing to follow. it's not as though you can point back to something and be like, hey, here's how this is going to happen because there just isn't an example of a case that's handled like this. they typically look at that more narrow question of attorney/client privilege. had that been handed down yes, i really think that's something the doj ultimately could have lived with.

it might have been that rain delay as bill barr referenced. it might have been a little bit of a setback in that investigation, but that's a matter of a couple of weeks maybe. in this instance when they're looking at questions of executive privilege, it's like the special master is coming into the role of a judge: it would just be really, really bizarre for that to be handled, and setting aside the fact it's going to be very difficult to find anyone that both sides would agree upon being the special master in this case, nicolle. >> and let's drill down on bill barr's statements a little further, said this anchor never, but joyce, let's do that because of the extraordinary nature of a rebuke from someone who was viewed to have largely done donald trump's bidding at his time overseeing the justice department. this is what he said about judge aileen cannon's opinion. the opinion was wrong. the government should appeal it. it's deeply flawed in a number of ways, and then he comes back to as we just played, the fact that they were subpoenaed and never delivered, they don't have to show the content.

specific advice was given in a memo in order to prevail in this case. it's not going to change the decision. you have been scathing in your judgment of this ruling yesterday. tell me where things stand in your view today. >> nicolle, sometimes as a lawyer, as a prosecutor you get rulings from a judge that make you angry, maybe because the judge has misinterpreted the facts or the law. this ruling initially made me angry, but the more that i studied it, it just makes me profoundly sad because this is a judge who does everything that she can to avoid clear law, who does everything that she can do to dismember the facts, to end up in a ruling that creates this sort of a special out for trump because president trump is really the only person to whom a ruling like this could ever apply. i think every criminal defendant who's under investigation would love to be able to file a motion

after a search warrant was executed and put a pause on the investigation, but that's not the way our criminal justice works, and trump has the pert remedy if he's ultimately indicted where he can move to suppress evidence if he thinks it was wrongfully taken. you know, where bill barr i think hits the target here -- and those are not words i thought i would ever say on this show or anywhere else -- >> i feel you. >> we've certainly been critical of him, right? it does mean a lot, though, i think that this shows that the disenchantment with this ruling is really a legal matter, an appellate lawyer sort of thing as opposed to a political matter, there are a lot of flaws with this ruling. but chief among them is the fact that she believes that executive privilege claims can be resolved using a special master. that's not how any of it works, and this process will break down and ultimately, it will just lead to a lot of delay, and doj is sort of damned if they do and damn ed if they don't. filing an appeal in atlanta

takes a good bit of time. maybe they can convince the court of appeals to expedite. there's still time involved. you have to do all these technical things like filing the record from the trial court and briefing can't start until that's done. by the same token, if doj goes ahead with the special master process in this situation that's really not suited to resolve the claims that trump is going to raise here, it creates a mess. so what the judge has done here rather than speeding the administration of justice is to delay it and to interfere with it, and i regretfully agree with the former attorney general in this matter. >> i said this last week, we will all remember where we were when bill barr made one of the more salient points about the special master ploy, and it clearly is that. this is, joyce, what the justice department argued in the hearing on thursday. it falls in line with the points you're making. this is jay bratt said that under the protocols that are

proposed by the plaintiff, they would regain access to those, including potentially the former president. we have no idea where they would be stored, and again, this would be giving access to people, things they do not have the right to have access at this point in time all for what we think is a fanciful view that somehow they would successfully be able to interpose an executive privilege objection that would prohibit the executive branch from reviewing the executive branch materials for core executive branch function. he argues how nonsensical trump's argument is, and yet, she sides with trump. how did that happen in your view? >> well, look, every judge has to be appointed by a president from one of our political parties or the other, right? no one springs onto the federal bench without going through that mechanism, so i always hesitate to criticize judges because of

the party that appointed them. but here one struggles to believe that this judge could possibly not be smart enough to appreciate the issue. she's well-educated. she spent six or seven years in the u.s. attorney's office in the southern district of miami before she went -- in the southern district of florida before she went on the bench as both a trial lawyer and an appellate lawyer, and so, you know, at some point you just have to be willing to call it what it is, and it's a disingenuous opinion, and the problem here that you're identifying is really a significant problem. we have documents that were created in the intelligence community, documents that are classified top secret, revelation of those documents without authorization could do grave damage to our national security. and what is this judge going to do? oversee a process where those are sent back to a former president who's shown he's not trustworthy, who's shown he doesn't care about national security? why would a federal judge put the country at that level of

risk? i think her opinion ultimately raises a lot of questions that we don't yet have answers to, and that may force doj to appeal this issue to the 11th circuit rather than going ahead with the special master process hoping that it would be quicker. there's some real problems here in resolving the executive privilege issues. >> well, and it's not like last week someone pretending to be, who was it, a rothchild, didn't infiltrate mar-a-lago. i mean, it's not like mar-a-lago isn't a flashing yellow soft target for american adversaadve? >> of course. and i got to tell you, it feels like to me that the judge had a pile of legal precedent and legal rules on her desk, and she went like this. wiped them all off the desk and then spit balled how can we give

him a win. >> why? >> i don't know. because the irony is by ignoring -- let me just give you one example. i could get into the weeds of this opinion as joyce could, as many other lawyers that could come on your program and do, but it is all -- it's complicated and you get in the weeds quickly and people will like -- their eyes will roll back in their heads and they'll switch channels so i won't do that. let me give you one example, to adjoin the investigation, the judge has to find that the person of asking this has a high likelihood of prevailing. has trump prevailed in any court on executive privilege? no, he has not. so the idea that this judge would find that trump has a high likelihood of prevailing on executive privilege, which she must find in order to do the injunction, it's bonkers. it's just bonkers. so in this opinion she says she thought the appearance of fairness was very important. i got news for her, she is now the author of an opinion that

just screams this is not fair. screams this is not based on law, totally untethered from precedent and legal precedent, and the law, and so it is -- and she's very early in her career. i don't think she'll ever overcome this opinion in her entire career because it is so bad. i would love to talk to the clerks who work for her because i guarantee you they've had some sleepless nights over the last few nights. >> and again, the disapproval of the opinion spans the ideological spectrum, brian , from all of us to, again, bill barr who has been extremely public in making clear that the government's case is sound. the government's case will likely lead to charges, and the judge's opinion is all the things joyce and claire say it is. and then enter, i guess it's his

son-in-law, jared kushner who seemed incapable of saying anything clear, but didn't exactly exonerate his father-in-law either. let me show you that. >> why did the president take home top secret documents? >> you have to ask him that question, but, you know, what i will say if you look at my book, you'll see that he was under constant attack, impeachment -- >> he took top secret documents home potentially risking the security of the united states. >> yeah, i think that it's something that big -- this seems like it's an issue of paperwork that should have been able to be worked out between doj and him. i don't know what he took or what he didn't take. i think right now we're relying on leaks to the media. >> we've seen in photographs haven't we, where it says top secret. >> i've seen a lot of allegations made by the media over my four years that turned out not to be true, so i think that this whole thing is actually elevated. >> so the facts that we've seen

photographs that say top secret documents, we should wait and see that they were, even though we're being told by the fbi that they were. >> like i said, i go into my book the accusations that were made of trump. >> i just -- if you could answer that question. >> yeah, i mean, first of all, he was the president of the united states. he had the highest clearness in the world. i don't know -- look, this may be a paperwork issue. i don't know. like i said, i haven't been involved in the details of it. >> some paperwork issue. and the farcical nature, let me just talk about my little, little book, jared kushner says the fact that -- she says the fact we've seen photographs that say secret, we should wait and see? >> yeah, if you go to my book, the accusations that were made against trump. trump brings this on by refusing when it was all being done secret -- nobody knew about this. nobody knew they were trying so hard to get classified material back. but he refused to give them to the archives and then he refuses the secret grand jury subpoena, so the only reason any of us

know about this, jared, is because your father-in-law refused to give them back repeatedly. >> that's right. you've really got to appreciate the message disappointment of jared kushner being able to slip in two book plugs to responding to questions about these top secret documents that his father-in-law had. but yeah, it really is -- i mean, there hasn't been a solid explanation coming from the trump camp. we've heard a number of different excuses. it varies by the day what they're choosing as their latest defense, but a lot of these, i think, aren't really necessarily really believable coming from the trump team. the government did give him so many opportunities here. i really think it seems like based on the record we've seen, they were essentially trying to give an off-ramp here. they went in soft at first. they got the records sort of voluntarily. then they toughened up a bit, they said, okay, let's go to this grand jury subpoena. they were given an envelope with some things in them that, you

know, that was nothing in comparison to what they ultimately found when they searched his home in august when they found hundreds of classified documents even after his lawyer signed something saying that he no longer had those documents in his possession. so they really did try to give an off-ramp here, and i don't think we would see -- i don't think that necessarily a case would be guaranteed or even frankly likely had donald trump simply complied with that initial grand jury, returned all these documents at that point. instead of obfuscating and trying to hold on to a bunch of these documents that regardless of classification level weren't his to keep. that's something we should always keep reminds ourselves. all these documents belonged in the hands of the national ar archives not at mar-a-lago. these were the government's documents under the presidential records act, nicolle. >> joyce, we still don't -- we're not any closer to understanding why. not just why he took them, why he hand packed them, why he had a lawyer lie about the fact that

first they were all in the storage room and then second that they'd all been returned. we don't have any of those answers and neither do we have an understanding of what vehicles will exist to get to the truth around those questions. do you agree with bill barr's assessment that this could be a rain delay but we will ultimately learn the truth? >> i don't think i'm prepared to go that far because i think this is the troubling question here. the fact that we don't know, one hopes that doj knows more than what the public knows because these are serious and troubling questions. there's been a lot of suggestion that harms may have already occurred from spillage of these documents. we have absolutely no way of assessing whether or not that's the case. that's now in the hands of the dni and the intelligence community as they try to do both the classification review, seeing whether the documents are

properly classified and determining what if any risks exist to national security. that's a little bit more than a rain delay for a couple of innings in a ball game. that is a matter of serious national gravity, which i think makes it all the more unfortunate that this judge who purports in her opinion to permit that classified review and then the security investigation to proceed without thinking about the fact that there are folks at doj, fbi folks and others who are essential players in that sort of a review. so it all sort of turns back on its head. but one thing that barr really does get right here is his focus on the former president obstructing this investigation. you know, nicolle, we discussed as this news was breaking a fact we haven't heard a lot more about in doj's pleadings which is at this early point in time, late may when folks from doj pay a visit to mar-a-lago to try to obtain some of this information

to shake it loose, they actually spend some brief period of time with the former president where he speaks with doj folks, and it could be that something happened in those conversations that's material on this issue of whether or not trump was in the loop, whether he's involved in the obstruction of justice, and that obstruction may or may not give us an answer to why he took these documents in the first place. why he was so insistent on keeping them, but you know, at the end of the day, i'm not sure it matters because obstructing justice in an investigation like this is enough of a plus factor beyond just retaining the documents for a period of time that it would certainly justify doj if it decides to go ahead with the prosecution. >> and again, across the spectrum ideologically speaking, why believe including from bill barr that on appeal the government will prevail? are you willing to make any

predictions today? >> well, that circuit, joyce may know this better than i do, but i think there are 11 judges, i think six of them were appointed by trump. >> trump, yeah. but let's remind ourselves that there were a lot of election cases that came many front of trump-appointed judges and they followed the law. just because it's a trump judge doesn't mean that they are incapable of following the law. so i think that ultimately the executive privilege thing will fall. and by the way, talk about turn on its head, how can a court say, by the way, the executive branch is enjoined from looking at documents based on executive privilege, oh, but this part of the executive branch can. >> it's nonsensical. >> it's just -- there's no logic to it other than giving trump what he wanted. so it was a sad day, but i do think -- and i do think it helps to remind -- i mean, it's a little bit like us talking about liz cheney, i think if anyone is feeling that this is, oh, the

democrats are -- this judge was right and the democrats are wrong. go back and remind yourself what bill barr was to donald trump. >> right. >> he was his bag man. he overturned guilty pleas of some of the trump inner circle. he intervened and raised politically that attorney generals didn't typically. this was not a guy who played it really close to the middle. he was a partisan attorney general for donald trump. the fact that he is so clear in his legal analysis that this judge is just dead wrong should make everybody on the right scratch their head and realize that this isn't going to have a good ending for donald trump. >> i think those are all really important reminders. joyce and claire stick around, ryan reilly had to run off to do more reporting. our thanks to him for starting us off. when we come back, something that hasn't been done in this country for more than 100 years, removing a public official from his or her job for participating

in an insurrection. it is a first for an elected official for trespassing on the u.s. capitol on january 6th. we'll talk about what that ruling may mean going forward and for others. plus, there are now more women registering to vote every single day than men in some key battleground states shifting the next nine weeks into high gear. the all important midterm race is coming into clearer focus as both parties know the key to november will be what women want. we'll get a state of play as the general election season officially gets underway. and later in the show, adding to their challenges with women voters, there are a growing number of extreme republican candidates on the ballot this november. they're antidemocratic election deniers, and they are no longer on the fringe. they have gone mainstream in the gop. we'll explain. all those stories and more when "deadline white house" continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. k. don't go anywhere. it's nice to unwind

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i would not be honest if i didn't say i think there was a seditious conspiracy against the government of the united states. and that's a crime. >> led by donald trump. >> led by donald trump, encouraged by donald trump. you know i was the secretary of state. i spent, you know, many days on airplanes flying from place to place encouraging people to have a real democracy, and one of the hallmarks of a real democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. was i happy when i beat donald trump by nearly 3 million votes but lost the electoral college is this no, i was not happy.

did i even for a nanosecond think i'm going to claim victory and try to get the democrats to refuse to certify the election? no. >> of course not. and it was a seditious conspiracy led by donald trump. that was hillary clinton reacting to the work of the january 6th committee in revealing a complex coup plot by the disgraced twice impeached ex-president. hillary clinton's comments there are a reminder that accountability for all of the people involved in the deadly capitol insurrection hasn't happened yet. it's an open question at the moment but today there was a potentially significant and important step taken in new mexico on that front. a judge removed a county commissioner from office for participating in the attack on the capitol and the insurrection. from "the new york times" reporting on this, quote, the ruling declared the capitol assault an insurrection and

unseated griffin, a commissioner in new mexico's otero county. he was convicted earlier this year of trespassing when he breached barricades outside the capitol during the attack. we're back with joyce vance and claire mccaskill. claire, this is holding him accountable, keeping him from running for office under the 14th amendment, i believe. why not apply that standard to trump or congressman perry or the guy that wore body armor or any of those other guys? >> i think it's a matter of evidence. that's why all the work that's going on at doj, looking into what trump actually did and when and who he talked to and what he said is so important. there was a lot of evidence here that this man not only was in the capitol but that he was leading people, that he was part of planning, getting people to do this. by the way, this is not the first judge that's found that it was a seditious insurrection. a judge in georgia found that

around marjorie taylor greene but said there wasn't enough evidence to connect her to the actual planning and the actual participation. they had that with this individual. they had just boat loads of evidence. that's why this happened. the question remains, will more evidence develop that will pull more people in to the application of the 14th amendment, which of course came about after the civil war when there was an effort to move those confederate sympathizers out of the government who had fought their government and tried to, in fact, end their government through the civil war. >> joyce, let me read to you some more "the times" great reporting on this. in his decision judge frances j. matthew of the new mexico district court said the insurrection on january 6th included not only the mob violence that unfolded that day but also the surrounding planning, mobilization and incitement that led to it.

mr. griffin, that's the guy that was removed, is constitutionally disqualified from serving the judge wrote. if we're talking about planning mobilization and incitement, i believe the january 6th committee's final hearing put donald trump at the heart of all three of those. why not look at donald trump under the 14th amendment? >> i agree, why not? i think that this may ultimately be one of the most valuable purposes that the january 6th committee serves forcing the country into an examination of who is fit to serve and who it means to stage an insurrection against your own country, particularly for people who have taken an oath to uphold the constitution. but claire makes absolutely the right point here, which is how direct your evidence is, how strong your evidence is, and as long as we have folks -- and trump is a great example, nicolle, there are a lot of people who could ultimately fall within the 14th amendment, he's

a good place to focus as long as he has this distance between himself and the planning on january 6th, then this is more of a nonstarter. it's always going to be politically difficult for something like this to happen. the mechanism in new mexico where we have a state court judge who can make this sort of finding is more direct than what would happen with the former president, but what we need is to see all of the evidence and we still continue to build towards this, right? for instance, we've still got a key player who's missing. mike pence has never testified, and if there's one witness who can nail down the former president's state of mind and direct involvement in affairs like preventing certification of the vote, it would be mike pence. that's why it's essential to consider the -- continue the fact finding mission that congress has undertaken. >> claire, we had congresswoman zoe lofgren on the program last week. she confirmed thereby another

public hearing in september and then the committee indicated when the final report is together there will be another, if not more than one public hearing. what do you make of sort of the opportunity they've had to do this quiet work while the sort the klieg lights are on the investigation into the classified documents mishandled at mar-a-lago. >> i hope a book is written someday about the chicken and the egg, which came first. i've said many times and i've been critical of the department of justice on this program and many others about the slow pace and it felt like watching it that the january 6th committee was the one doing all the heavy lifting on the investigation. they were the ones interviewing all the witnesses. it wasn't really until their body of work came forward that doj seemed to get a pep in their step and started to actually subpoena people and have them in front of the grand jury, but let me volley right back to my friend joyce, she made a really good point.

not just pence but mark meadows, i mean, somebody needs to give these guys immunity and get them in front of a grand jury and get their evidence. i don't think anybody in america cares if -- well, i shouldn't say that. some people would get upset if both of them got immunity, but if they would finally be put in position -- >> your point is if they told doj everything, the truth would be served? >> which department of justice can give them immunity, and then they either have to say everything or they go to jail. they're held in contempt, so i really think it is important that doj -- i mean, they've got a lot of irons in the fire now. they've got the documents, the top secret documents and the obstruction of justice at mar-a-lago, they've got the fake electors, and then they have actual planning around j 6. and i think all of those, i hope they're spending an enormous amount of time trying to make those things move along as

quickly as possible. the country deserves it. >> indeed. joyce vance, thank you so much for starting us off today. claire sticks around a little longer. we'll turn to politics with her. what's behind the incredible surge in women registering to vote this year, and is it enough for democrats to hold on to and potentially grow their senate majority? we'll talk about the political landscape with nine weeks to go. don't go anywhere. i never just d my way; i made it. and did all i could to prevent recurrence. verzenio reduces the risk of recurrence of hr-positive, her2-negative, node-positive, early breast cancer with a high chance of returning,... as determined by your doctor when added to hormone therapy. hormone therapy works outside the cell... ...while verzenio works inside to help stop the growth of cancer cells. diarrhea is common, may be severe, or cause dehydration or infection. at the first sign, call your doctor, start an antidiarrheal, and drink fluids. before taking verzenio, tell your doctor about any fever, chills, or other signs of infection. verzenio may cause low white blood cell counts,

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with exactly nine weeks to go until the midterm elections, strategists continue to point out undeniable signs that the seismic shift in the political landscape following the supreme court's decision to overrule abortion in america is playing out in democrats' favor. what was once expected to potentially be a red wave that could actually -- could actually now become a row wave thanks to the surge of women registering to vote in the weeks after this decision came down. that surge and that issue on the ballot so unprecedented, an election and data analyst writing in the "new york times," predicts we should throw old political assumptions out the window and consider that democrats could buck historic trends thisser yoo. quote, for many americans confronting the loss of abortion right was different from

anticipating it. in my 28 years of analyzing elections, i have never seen anything like what has happened in the past two months in american politics. women are registering to vote in numbers i have never witnessed. i have run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is. joining our conversation former white house press secretary under president barack obama ask msnbc political analyst robert gibbs, claire is still here. i guess part of me wonders if maybe they talked to a woman before they overturned roe versus wade or put into place the laws. i mean, this was a strategy on the right and i've talked about it as the dog catching the car, but the truth is the political consequences, i think, are very small consolation for the death and illness that women will suffer in the time it takes the country to wake up and say, no, i don't want to live out hand maiden's tale. what do you make of the political reality which is with k to anyone who doesn't support living in a

choices are made outside of a family in a doctor's office and the political boom that may be lowered on the republicans that support them. >> one thing the kansas vote showed, not only an amazing turnout, not only a skyrocketing number of women registering to vote after the dobbs decision but a bunch of republicans voted for abortion rights in kansas. there's no other way to do the numbers. the question is will those republicans who feel strongly about abortion rights, will they feel so strongly that they will vote for a democrat in november. that's really what people are struggling with right now that are trying to figure out what's going to happen. i will say this, i think women were startled into a reality, especially younger women that this right had been taken away. you know what the salt in the wound was, nicolle, is that all these republican legislatures across the country that were so

calcified ruby red far right, go donald trump they decided to go one step further and say, oh, the supreme court tells us we can decide? by the way, if your daughter is raped and she's pregnant, you're out of luck. and when women hear that, when they don't have a rape and incest exception, when they don't make it clear that ivf is still going to be fine in america if you're desperate to have a baby, if they don't make it clear that if you're having a miscarriage you're not going to have a doctor that's afraid of going to prison, those are the things that have really amped up women because they see this happening. they're going wait a minute, wait a minute, we've got votes. we've got power. that's where i think really the republicans made the mistake is that they went so extreme in what they've put on the books in so many states, it's really going to make a difference in those swing states. >> before it was overturned, robert gibbs, roe had a 67% approval rate as it was. exceptions for rape and incest,

83%. exceptions for life of the mother, 93%. you're not even talking about democrats. you're talking about 67, 83, and 93% of all americans, and republicans are pushing the other direction. the vigilante laws poll just as terribly. nobody thinks that you should be able to pick up the phone and tell on an uber driver who drives the woman to the ob/gyn. the fact that the republicans have gone this step of such reprehensible policy that their own base doesn't support it, should stop the move towards said reprehensible policies but it hasn't. what do you make of the politics and the policy rush to the extreme right? >> well, nicolle, i think we will look back on the 2022 election and understand that the moment everything changed was may 2nd in the evening when "politico" reported that the leak of the document that showed the supreme court had voted to

overturn roe versus wade. that began the point in which people began to mobilize, even though the decision didn't come for several more weeks. and i absolutely agree with you and claire. i mean, if you talk to any republican pollster, first thing they tell you is there's 90% of the people that support some level of exemptions for life, health of the mother, and for rape and incest, and for this really to be a one-two punch of the supreme court taking away the right and then the state coming in and putting into place something in its stead that is so draconian and so backwards, it's led, quite frankly, a lot of people to your point that wouldn't necessarily vote for a democrat that are now thinking about maybe that's the only outlet i have to save some fundamental aspect of this right that preserves some level of protection. i think it's going to be stunning to watch. i think we all read that op-ed. we've seen these voter numbers.

we've seen what's happened in these special elections. democratic voters because of this decision are singularly galvanized like nothing else that's happened this year. >> claire, it also pulls the curtain back on this really rotten core on the right, that the kinds of people who wrote the vigilante wall in texas, they were skull ing around republican politics for decades, and then they have their moment because the party has pushed out anyone normal and it's totally beholden to the far right extremists, and the legislature there let these people in. the folks writing the laws without exception for rape and life of mother, same thing they've skulked about in the shadows, but people who could articulate the perils of anyone who wanted to take advantage of the incredible science behind ivf or surrogacy said you can't do that. unforeseen consequences. it's like, oh, that's who the

republicans have become. >> yeah, the extremism, and it's on a number of fronts, but abortion, especially when you're talking about rape and incest because, you know, there isn't a mother alive who's not -- doesn't have that fear that one of their daughters -- >> or father. >> or father has a fear and so that becomes real and palpable. but extremism is a thread running through the republican party right now. extreme stuff, breaking of norms, a lack of civility. you know, can you imagine when -- i mean, i'm older -- much older than you are. i can't imagine growing up that there would be a political rally where they would hold up signs that would say the f you word to the sitting president, and they'd all hold them proudly. what is that? republicans who see that, that's not -- they don't like that either. they don't like that kind of

coarseness. they don't like that. and so i really do think that this is going to be an election that is going to judge the passion of the extreme on the right to the mobilization of the rest of the country to say we're going to reject it, and i didn't see it coming, but after dobbs i see it pretty clearly now, and i particularly see it in states where florida, north carolina, pennsylvania, ohio, wisconsin, you know, they thought they could win arizona. well, they've got a guy out there who's scrubbing his website to take abortion off his website, the republican because he knows he's in trouble. >> and anyone tied to trump is tied to overturning roe because trump did it with his three appointees. >> absolutely. and stated clearly that was the deal he made with the devil, even though we all know donald trump is pro-choice. always was. he made a deal with the federalist society that he would publish the name of lists and that is why mitch mcconnell sat

down and quit agitating about it. >> i remember being on "morning joe" and mitch mcconnell pulled out his crumpled piece of paper and that was his rationale for supporting trump. we'll keep this conversation going, claire and robert, stick around. we'll look at how this crop of senate republican candidates arn voters. and we'll talk, as claire just did, about what their extreme measures that they're going to, to try to fix it. we'll be right back. ey're going to, to try to fix it we'll be right back. >> tech: at safelite, we take care of vehicles with the latest technology.

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more on what claire is talking about from politico today on the 11th hour effort by republican senate candidates to appeal to female voters, even some in their own party, who remain deeply skeptical that they'll do them any good once in office. a republican strategist tells politico, "i'm convinced that based on the numbers we have, republicans have to make some kind of leap on the abortion issue, because they're getting killed among women. our problem is particularly white middle-aged women, said another republican working on senate races. we need to soften our guys." we're back with robert gibbs and claire mccaskill. is truth is, they all voted for all of the supreme court nominees who overturned roe vs. wade. robert gibbs, i want to show you -- i want to push behind some of these numbers here. this is the number of change in registration among women after the supreme court voted to overturn roe vs. wade. in kansas, plus 15.9%.

in ohio, plus 6.4%. pennsylvania, plus 6.2%. in idaho, where they pushed a full abortion ban, plus 5.5%. in oklahoma, full abortion ban, plus 3.2%. in alabama, 3%. another full abortion ban state. and kansas, which claire talked about, that amendment to end any protections for abortion was opposed by 60% of all kansans in a state where the registration is 44% republican, 26% democratic. it is a loser with a capital "l" among republicans, but republicans made this moment happen. how do you -- if you're blake masters, take the abortion section of your website with bleach or whatever it is they use and say, no, i didn't do it. they all did it. >> they all did it, nicole, and maybe the only thing dumber than taking a position opposed by 70% or 90% of the american people is unplugging that page in your website and thinking that solves

your problem. it only illuminates the problem that you have. it only draws a brighter line to it. and it's sort of stunning. i mean, look, you're analogy is absolutely correct. the dog caught the car and had no idea what to do with the car. and look, for election after election, you have had democrats go out and talk about the importance of the supreme court and why these justices matter and talking, theoretically, about what could happen if they got control or if they overturned certain, what we thought, were bedrock rights. and nothing really has galvanized people more than that it actually happened. far stronger than anything we could have unwound theoretically. i think this has put it front and center in people's lives. it's why you have democrats and republicans, women who are registering to vote in numbers we've never seen, because this moment has really hit them. it's hit a lot of people, and it's galvanized them into real

action. >> robert gibbs, claire mccaskill, thank you so much for spending time with us today. up next for us, we will speak with a former doj official who led the very unit that is now investigating those missing and hoarded classified white house documents. more after a quick break. don't go anywhere. documents. more after a quick break don't go anywhere. make your home totally you. i did with wayfair. sometimes i'm a homebody. can never have too many pillows. sometimes i'm all business. wooo! i'm a momma 24/7. seriously with the marker? i'm a bit of a foodie. perfect. but not much of a chef. yes! ♪ wayfair you've got just what i need. ♪

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♪♪ every defendant would love a special master. every defendant says they're being unfairly targeted and set up. every defendant says the reputation will be sullied. they never get special masters for these reasons, and they certainly don't get a federal

judge to order not just a special master but that the investigation has to stop. that is something i have not seen in federal law before, and she has no authority whatsoever for doing it, and on top of it, she's a forum-shopped judge. trump was afraid to go to the magistrate judge who authorized the warrant and went shopping for this judge. it's bad, top to bottom. >> hi again, everyone, it's 5:00 in new york. it's bad from top to bottom is how our friend, the former acting solicitor general for the united states, neal katyal, describes yesterday's decision by judge aileen cannon to grant ex-president trump's request for a special master, an independent arbiter to review the documents seized by the government in its august 8th search of mar-a-lago. judge canon's broad ruling means the special master will have the power to look through the documents and decide if they're protected under attorney-client privilege as well as if they're

possibly subject to executive privilege. doj had previously said that claims of executive privilege were not relevant here since trump did not own the documents. the judge's ruling, as you heard neal katyal speak to, also says that the doj's investigation is temporarily halted. it's stopped until the special master is done. specifically, when it comes to the materials seized by the fbi last month. "new york times" writes this, "the justice department is itself part of the executive branch, and a court has never held that a former president can invoke the privilege to keep records from his time in office away from the executive branch itself." the "times" also details just how many legal experts are questioning this judge's intervention in the investigation. "this was an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation." that was steven vladeck.

a specialist in separation of powers, a legal scholar in residence at nyu says there is no basis for judge cannon to extend a special master to screen materials that were also potentially subject to executive privilege. that tool is normally thought of as protecting internal executive branch deliberations from outsiders like congress. both the doj and trump's team have until friday to submit a list of potential special master candidates. we still do not know if the justice department will appeal judge cannon's ruling, which just this afternoon, trump's former attorney general, one bill barr, said it absolutely should do. watch. >> the opinion, i think, was wrong, and i think the government should appeal it. it's deeply flawed in a number of ways. i don't think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up.

the law here, i think, is pretty clear, that the justice department should be able to review these documents. if it got to the point where they wanted to actually put the documents before the grand jury without sanitizing them and protecting the deliberative process, then you would litigate the issue. but for her to come in now and sort of this abstract thing and say, this guy's going to decide what is potentially privileged, dodges the question, which is, does the president have standing to assert the privilege against the existing administration? >> you know what they say. when you've lost bill barr. that's where we start the hour with some of our favorite reporters and friends. charlie savage is here, author of a definitive piece of reporting about this very moment. frank figliuzzi is also here, former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence, both msnbc contributors. charlie, you have the reporting that really, frankly, bill barr makes some of the same points as

some of the experts you talked to, but they don't have any sort of political affiliation or association. take us through your reporting on yesterday's decision. >> sure. well, i called many, many experts in criminal law, white-collar law, who are constitutional law, separation of powers experts, people who have dealt with special masters as former prosecutors, as defense attorneys, and i could not find anyone who was a serious lawyer immersed in this area who thought this was the correct decision. as your intro pointed out, people thought that the extension of a special master to executive privilege was unprecedented and just without legal basis. the justice department is part of the executive branch. a former president, not a current one, is asserting this. the current one is not backing him on that. supreme court rulings from nixon in 1974 and 1977 say that a president cannot use executive privilege to keep information

that is needed from criminal investigators like the watergate prosecutor who wanted nixon's oval office tapes and also undercut a president's ability -- a former president's ability to exert executive privilege successfully when the current one is not backing him, as nixon tried to do in 1977. so the special master has never been used for this purpose before, and this could cause a lot of mischief in the investigation if it goes forward and they do not appeal at least that section of it. one of the problems is, because trump waited a few weeks to even make this request, and then the judge took some time to make her decision, everyone who's working on this investigation has already read or looked at most of these documents, except some of the fbi itself, as a precaution, had used a filter team to prevent the team from looking at it because they might involve attorney-client privilege, which is a much more normal thing for a special master to look at. so, if she comes back now at a special master's recommendation

and says, oh, they should never have seen any of this stuff, because it involves white house deliberations or something like that, even though that's not been found by any court ever until now, as i mentioned, that means all of the people on that investigative team, all the prosecutors, all the agents who have been working on this case are tainted, and she may then say, they all have to be removed and disqualified, and entirely different people need to be brought in who aren't tainted by having seen this material. so, you can see the potential for disruption as well as delays over -- they wait for a special master to be chosen, and then to go through more than 11,000 pages of material and then to have fights over this stuff, and then appeals of those fights, this is a significant snarl. >> frank figliuzzi, i don't mean to be glib about bill barr, but when you have an attorney general who was unprecedented in

his political enthusiasm for an autocratic, impulse-driven president like donald trump, rebuking the decision and the grounds upon which he made this decision, and also being out there publicly on the sort of autocrat-friendly news network, saying, over and over again, the government's case is good. there is no defense for having these documents. and it's clear that trump deceived the government. he's almost reversal himself on his 19-page memo on obstruction that he used to annihilate robert mueller's 23-month investigation into donald trump. but what do you make of the serious concerns, again, charlie's piece and everyone should read it if they've missed it, quotes people without any political affiliation at all. bill barr is the outlier here, completely aligned with the far-right, saying that this is a ruse. he calls it a red herring.

how did we get here, and how did -- one, how did she end up with this case, and two, what do you think happens next? >> yeah, so, charlie has written a really comprehensive piece, and now, just articulated a deep concern of mine, which is the impact on the investigation. i'll get to that in a second. but to the extent that the trump team was shopping for a judge when they chose judge cannon, they clearly got more than they even could have hoped for. they found a two for one deal. they found a judge who was favorably inclined to rule in their favor and they found a judge who was willing to be part of the legal team and give them arguments they haven't even asked for. for example, bringing an essentially a halt to the criminal investigation as it pertains to any use of the documents is something i -- i hadn't even imagined, and i don't think the trump team really thought that this would go there. i know there's a lot of give and take on the various networks and

on social media about, hey, is this investigation really stopped for now? can't they technically go ahead and just not use anything that they seized? so, here's my concern, 25 years with the fbi, on how i know the fbi and doj operates with regard to being very reticent about doing anything at this point that's going to screw up a case or incur the wrath of a judge who already isn't really favorably inclined to be objective. so, by that, i mean, if a judge has said, i don't want you using these documents that you seized, you could play a game. you could. and maybe they should. and say, yeah, okay, great, we're going to continue to do investigations, talk to witnesses and sources, but we're just going to rely on stuff outside of what we seized during the search. the problem is, the trump team is going to then say, you interviewed that person tuesday. prove that that interview was not based on something you seized during the search. they're going to say, yeah, no, we only got this interview

through a source, not through the documents. really? prove that. can we see your source reporting. well, no, you can't. now everybody goes back to the judge and they appeal, and we go back and forth, right? yeah, what did that guy tell you when you interviewed him on tuesday? we tried to constrain the conversation to just the non-search and seizure material, but then he started bringing up the stuff about documents he saw from what we seized before we seized it. >> did you report that separately in a different document? did you have a filter agent with you to start recording that? did you call time-out in the interview? can you prove that? this is a mess. and it only serves to delay, which seems to be precisely what the trump team is looking for. delay, delay, and delay. and i'm really concerned that if we're not careful, you're going to go through the cadre of seasoned counterintelligence agents at washington field office pretty darn quickly if everybody becomes tainted as charlie referred to. >> it's a harrowing scenario that you're both laying out for

us. let me bring into our conversation the former top official in doj's national security division, mary mccord. during her tenure, she supervised the counterintelligence unit that is now leading this mar-a-lago investigation. notably, she supervised jay bratt. in the last hour, i read from his statements. they have now come out from that thursday hearing. it's clear that he thought with all of the legal and substantive arguments that he had against what the ex-president was asking for in front of this judge, and he did not prevail. what should the government do now? >> well, i think the government has to make a decision. i don't think it's as obvious as some people are saying, that they should appeal. no question. i agree that the opinion is not well supported legally. i think it's flawed in many, many respects, which have been documented by others, and i think there are good grounds to appeal. but it's not clear to me that

that's necessarily the decision that the department should take if their paramount interest is to be able to move forward expeditiously with the criminal investigation. and here's why. one is that an appeal takes time. it's going to cause delay as well. you would have to -- in order to continue with the investigation, unimpeded by a special master, you'd have to get a stay from the 11th circuit of the district court's temporary injunction. in other words, a halt to the district court's order halting use of the seized documents in the criminal investigation. it's not clear that they would get that. if they don't get that, there's going to be the briefing time to brief up an appeal, argument time, months are going by, months in which the special master could potentially finish its work -- remember, the department of justice reviewed all these documents within three weeks, so time that could be wasted without the special master doing its work, or time if the special master's going ahead and doing its work would finish its work before you even get to appeal. to charlie's point about things

that might -- negative rulings about applicability of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege, those haven't even begun to be happening yet. we're at the point of time where the special master, if a special master is appointed and there's not a halting of this through a stay, will first just be pulling aside documents that he or she thinks might be privileged or might be purely personal. then, there will be an opportunity to argue about that. these privileges are not privileges like the immunities and self-incrimination privileges that i think my colleagues on this panel were talking about with respect to tainting the prosecution team. attorney-client privilege is not a constitutional privilege. executive privilege, there's no separation of powers argument here. both of these privileges could be outweighed by the government's compelling interest, and if the doj were to lose on that argument with the special master, and take it to judge cannon and lose there, they could then appeal that to the 11th circuit.

so, i think the department has to weigh all of these things. i think the department also will be weighing the fact that there is some inoculation that can take place if you had a special master who was making the decisions about what should be able to be used by the criminal investigative team, and it would -- it puts some distance from criticism, not that i think that should carry the day, but it's one consideration. and then the last thing i'll mention is, there are other intermediate steps that the department could take. they could seek leave from the special master or the judge to use any particular document they might want to use in an interview and says, would you look at this one first? if it's not -- if you don't think there's any privilege attached to it, can we go ahead and use it? can we get things on a rolling basis as the special master is looking at them and, you know, passing things through that filter, and then we can go ahead and use those things in our investigation. so, i think that there are other strategies, other things the department could consider here short of an appeal. >> mary, you're giving us a

master class in the department's capacity for adapting, but do you see any merit to this move, legally, by donald trump in seeking a special master? i mean, the government is looking for its classified material. the national archives started by looking for all of them, but the subpoena was specifically trying to get the classified material back. what possible executive privilege could there be for a classified report on the drone program? >> so, obviously, and i think this is a good point, and i think that's the stuff the special master can give back immediately. if it is original intelligence products, there's no way it's not going -- it's going to be subject to executive privilege. if it's a communication that donald trump had with a top white house aide about classified, that's some place where maybe a special master would flag it. now, put aside that we have issues with the former president asserting executive privilege against the executive, so we don't have a separation of powers issue here. all we have is a presidential communications issue, and we know that even though the supreme court has indicated that

a former president might raise that type of issue, we know that it is diminished when you are a former president. and so, you know, i think there's, even to the extent that there are communications about classified information that maybe a special master would flag, i think the department will have good interest or good arguments why its compelling interest in the investigation outweigh those interests, and not to mention the matter that charlie raised about use in a criminal investigation, even a sitting president has a limited executive privilege when it's for documents used in a criminal investigation. so, all of the case law really bodes against this kind of delay. >> charlie, let me come back to you and ask you if you have any reporting that indicates what this process looks like inside doj. i mean, imagine they're weighing some of the very things mary just educated our viewers about. >> i imagine they are, too, but

they're being quite -- battening down the hatches right now. they're extremely worried about leaks and being accused of leaks and so forth. they have been accused of leaks, maybe, when the sources of information might have come from people who received subpoenas or their lawyers or people that knew them as opposed to the government. nevertheless, they get accused of it. and so, they're not talking right now, but i think -- i do think that there's undoubtedly a lot of anger about the content of the opinion based on what all the outside law professor types and specialists i spoke to yesterday had to say about it. at the same time, i think they're probably thinking about through these very complicated strategic issues that mary just outlined about whether it may be best to just sort of bite their lip and take it so the special master can get going and get done rather than opening the door for infinitely receding series of delays. >> frank, let me show you -- i mean, i think that i played it a

little bit, but bill barr's comments seem to focus on the substance of the case, which is what makes it so shocking, frankly, and the body of public utterances of one bill barr who once likened doj officials to montessori preschoolers, was gleeful in putting his finger on the scale in every phase of the process for trump's allies. but his arguments have been about the strength of the government's case, and they sound very much like former officials we have had here. let me show you what sue gordon said about trump's conduct. >> the first thing i say there is, zero defense. i cannot imagine a defense for the situation in which we find ourselves. there's just -- there's just none. there is no justification. there's no excuse. no defense. zero. from a national security and from a person involved.

motivation is a much harder thing to describe and i'm usually loath to say what i think other people are thinking. my experience is, is that the former president has his agenda, and he will use whatever is at his disposal to advance that. >> so, again, that's the former number two, the office of the director of national intelligence for this country. she was in the room with donald trump as he, shall we say, received intel. it's not clear he processed intel. she seems to believe that he never really comprehended what an intelligence product was made of, what went into it, and maybe that was why he didn't protect it like any other normal policy maker. but what she does put back into

this conversation that i think is important for all three of you, is that time is not our friend from a national security perspective. there have been reports that mar-a-lago is very porous, shall we say. someone pretending to be a rothchild got in and took pictures with trump and lindsey graham playing golf. it's not clear that the trump, whatever they are, legal team or the lawyers around him have been telling the truth about the disposition of any of this classified material. and now, we have this judge's ruling. where is sort of your alarm about the national security implications of a delay? >> well, my alarm -- my national security alarm went off when we first learned of documents at mar-a-lago, and it's still ringing. look, this issue of motivation is interesting, because we will never, as sue gordon said, we'll never quite get inside the head of donald trump as to why those documents even showed up at mar-a-lago, but let's assume,

for the -- just for the sake of argument that he is a hoarder, as many people say, and he just thumbed his nose at regulations and decided, yeah, i'm taking them anyway, and we're going to florida. after that, the motivation seems even clearer to me. it's less murky, which is, i think, as sue gordon referred to, this serves a purpose for him. he's essentially been holding these documents hostage. somewhere along the line, it popped into his head, and this is just me thinking about him, based on his track record, that this is capital. he's got something of value now. and it's of value even politically to him to thumb his nose at the repeated entreaties of doj and the national archives to pretty please give this back, and boy, now we have a subpoena, and we did a site visit, and you know, thanks for the coffee, and can you please make sure this is secure while we're figuring this out? he decided, you know what? it's not too bad if they end up coming down here.

it's not bad. i can make some hay out of this, politically, and so i think he is using it for that agenda. do i think there may be far more nefarious uses that i hope to god haven't come to fruition yet? yeah. yeah. possibly so. but that's where motivation, i think, for me comes in is he want t he's all it's worth. >> mary, for five years, everyone failed to apply the post-9/11 theory of a failure of imagination when it came to donald trump, and i wonder if you could just, as a thought exercise, he's had this big, and it would seem, based on all the reporting, unexpected bonanza in front of the judge in court. what do you think his next legal move would be, and what does the justice department have to prepare to defend against? >> typically, in these types of scenarios, his legal maneuver is delay. i think that was the primary reason that the request for special master was made to begin with. remember, it didn't even come in until two weeks after the

search, and even though there's an indication that from the government that trump's lawyers reached out the day after the search to request it, they didn't hustle into court when doj said no to that. i think they probably thought, this will be a good way to delay things, and i think one thing they're thinking about in terms of if the department does appeal is that if the department appeals and prevails, then they will probably try -- they would probably try to go to the supreme court on a petition, delaying yet again. so, i think that as -- because this delay, first of all, delay is the inevitable, which is the ongoing conclusion of the criminal investigation, possible charges. it also gives the former president constantly something to speak out -- speak about on the campaign trail, and we saw that, sadly, this weekend, him really using this for his own political advantage, and we've seen him also, as we have all seen, attacking the fbi,

attacking the department of justice, and using that to play to his base, and so the legal team, i think, you know, will be constantly looking for ways to thwart the investigation through different types of litigation tactics that delay and that, again, gives the former president something to campaign on. >> mary, just really quickly, is this, in your view, an unprecedented sort of climate for doj to carry out an investigation? i mean, you're talking about the attacks over the weekend. they're unprecedented and shocking at a moment when he knows, because he's been told, that there are threats against the fbi. he hand-picked chris wray to run the fbi. it's not any world in which he can say that these are people he doesn't know or hostile to him. he knows them, he was briefed by them, they protected the country while he was the president. what is it like right now to be inside doj or the fbi with a former president attacking you? >> well, you know, obviously,

i'm not there. i can just say, based on my experience, nothing's ever been quite like this. this is really -- this is a case that stands on its own. we haven't seen this before. but department of lawyers have been under fire in other cases, and department lawyers, first of all, the ones working on this are really, really busy. my guess is they're not looking at twitter. they're not looking at msnbc. they're not looking at much media, right? they are probably working pretty much 24/7, and when i was there, my experience working with others is, you are putting your head down and you're doing your workday in and day out, and you are not worried, overly, about the threats out there. now, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't make people nervous for their families, for their personal safety, and i am sure that there are assessments of that within the department that are going on right now to ensure the safety of all of the lawyers and agents who are working on this. but this m.o. from the former president, i mean, we've seen this over and over again. he will do anything for his own

political gain, no matter who gets hurt. he might be on the side of law and order one day, but when that's not helping him, then law and order is the enemy. and you know, he might be on the side of encouraging people to come to the capitol on january 6th to prevent a fraud in the vote as, you know, as he claimed, disingenuously and without any evidence to back it up, but then he's perfectly happy to see them take the hit, lose their jobs, lose their reputations, and move right on. so, this is part of -- this is part of what he does. >> indeed. charlie savage, frank figliuzzi, mary mccord, thank you so much for starting us off today. when we come back, there are nine weeks to go before the midterm elections. there's some stunning new data about the pervasiveness of the big lie in america. more than half of all americans will have an election denier on the ballot that they receive and

vote on this november. it could spell trouble for republicans at a time when voters say threats to democracy is the biggest issue for them in this coming election. our political panel weighs in next. later in the program, what international experts are calling a sign of russian weakness. moscow is turning to north korea for rockets and artillery as it struggles to resupply its military in the face of crippling global sanctions. it comes as ukraine continues to make gains on the battlefield. "deadline white house" continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. ontinues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. lily! welcome to our third bark-ery. oh, i can tell business is going through the “woof”. but seriously we need a reliable way to help keep everyone connected from wherever we go. well at at&t we'll help you find the right wireless plan for you. so, you can stay connected to all your drivers and stores on america's most reliable 5g network. that sounds just paw-fect. terrier-iffic i labra-dore you round of a-paws at&t 5g is fast, reliable and secure for your business.

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you can be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. so, when i say that democracy's at stake, i mean what i'm saying, literally. >> in terms of existential threats to our american way of life, you might have to go all the way back to the aftermath of september 11th to find anything close to resembling what is in the water in this country right now, the obvious difference is that that assault on our way of life, on our democracy, originated abroad. today, though, the malignant threats we face are so hard to process because they're metastasizing from within, from within our own country. as for the sheer scope of the threat, consider, for instance, the data published today by 538 exactly nine weeks to the midterm elections and more than one in two americans, half of all americans, will have an election denier on their ballot this fall. and that's to say nothing of donald trump and his maga republican allies, as the

president calls them, and their ongoing assault on our nation's rule of law. not only is president joe biden confronting these threats, he's made them the centerpiece of his preelection sales pitch. you just heard him. that was from milwaukee yesterday. here he is hours later near pittsburgh. watch. >> it's clear which way the new maga republicans are. they're extreme. and democracy's really at stake. you can't be a democracy when you support violence, when you don't like the outcome of an election. you can't call yourself a democracy when you don't, in fact, count the votes that people legitimately cast and count that as what you are. you can't be a democracy and call yourself one if you continue to do what they're doing. >> joining our coverage, cornell belcher, pollster and the president of brilliant corners research, plus former republican congressman and msnbc political analyst david jolly is back, and staff writer at the "atlantic,"

author of "thank you for your servitude." mark, i start with you. president joe biden, i think we knew he felt these things but it has not been until the last few days that he has said these things on the campaign trail. what do you make of it as a midterm election strategy? >> it's quite literal. there's all kinds of election deniers on the ballot. many of them could and probably will get elected. we have to sort of step back and realize that the president is talking about the very basics of democracy here, and to say that, you know, when you get more votes than someone else, you win the election or whatever things he was saying yesterday and the day before and over the weekend, i mean, this is a "sky is blue" issue, and again, we sometimes get caught in the weeds of so much of all the cases and all the issues that are coming up and all the noise it's made, but this is so fundamental, and what's interesting is that this is rocketed to the top of the

issue list that people are most concerned about in america right now. so, again, this is not inflation. this is not crime. these are not the issues that republicans, theoretically, should or want to be talking about. these are very basic issues that all go back to the post-election period of two years ago, and ultimately, donald trump's continued hold on the republican party. >> yeah, cornell, mark makes a really smart point. and we -- we're partly to blame for that, right? we cover all the cases, all the individual election deniers running for secretary of state offices but one of the two parties in the grip of the big lie, that is the party pushing 486 voter suppression laws through 48 states, and unfortunately, prevailing in a lot of instances. the driving policy force on the right is the lie about fraud in 2020. and that force has pushed election deniers on to half of all americans' ballots for november. the problem, if you will, for

the right is that it's now very unpopular, and democracy, much to, i think, against what you and i might have predicted a year and a half ago, is now at the top of voters' lists. how do you see these things coming together in november? >> well, i think it's an incredible cross-pressure. we talked about this during the primary season, where, you know, trump-endorsed candidate, time and time again, had a good deal of success coming out of the primary and winning, and mobilizing and energizing that base around the big lie. now, here comes the hard part is that, when you look at the moderate middle swath of america, and you look at these districts and these states where republicans have to win, their candidates have to win, they are dramatically out of line with mainstream values and ways of thinking of the broader electorate. and i think at some point, if

republicans fail to win back the house and the senate, they're going to look back at donald trump and what he was able to do and they're going to be caught in a really tough place of, how do we move forward when we can mobilize and energize a narrow swath of the electorate around this -- these nationalism themes, and by the way, the whole back and forth about the term "semi-fascist" that republicans are so up in arms with, you know, nicole, i looked up the definition of fascism. i don't know what the "semi"part is, quite frankly. but they're so out of step with where mainstream americans are, and democrats would be insane if they did not, in fact, make democracy, which as we've alluded to earlier, is now a top issue going into our elections, make that a central thematic and wedge issue, because like you

said, half the republicans on the ballot, little more than half the republicans on the ballot, don't believe that our -- are election deniers, so why would we not make election and democracy front and center of the fall elections? >> so, david jolly, you know how you know that it's working? the right is melting down in a way that is so unbelievably hysterical. i mean, they are sobbing on their fox news panels. they are literally melting down at the core, and they have their opinion writers pushing these, like, do you believe -- they're not offended by deadly insurrection. they were not offended by grabbing women in the bleep. they were not offended by good people on both sides, but they are freaking the bleep out about donald trump's wing of the party being called out by the current president as maga republicans when president joe biden's going out of his way to say, not all of you. i like so many of you. just not the maga ones. and they are melting down.

>> they are, nicole. the pearl-clutching by republicans is kind of maddening, but also humorous, and look, they are demanding both sides. well, i will tell you this. there might be two sides to a story, but there's only one truth. and that's what joe biden was trying to ask the american people to see when he spoke last thursday in maryland. there is only one truth. and this is important for how the story is reported and covered as well, because to suggest that there is equity between the republican and trump side of the story and the biden democratic side of the story requires suspending history, suspending belief, suspending knowledge, suspending the fact that the threat against democracy is kind of playing out right now at least in 4x. we had the post-november 2020 acts to try to influence the georgia election and the fake electors in other states. we had the violence of january 6th. we had the state legislative sessions that followed in '21

and '22 and now we're seeing the election denier candidates. this is the threat to democracy. joe biden, this is not an easy sell for him, if you will, to the american people. in some ways, you see an incumbent president accepting the burden of calling out his predecessor's movement and saying it is a threat to democracy. joe biden is taking some risk, but what joe biden believes and i think the majority of americans realize, is that joe biden's on the right side of history and his message is the message we need going into november. >> and mark, if you take liz cheney's standard, right? liz cheney has begged her party to come out and use their voices and stand on the side of the constitution. they are all failing not joe biden's test. they're failing the liz cheney standard, and if you go back to the last generation's threat to the country, george w. bush's standard, if you harbor the threats, you are part of the threat. in terms of their numbers, the republican party, in terms of numbers, in quantity, is the

largest pro-authoritarian movement, i think, in the world, in terms of the numbers of people who either vote for or enable or make it easier for anti-democratic politicians in this country to retain or gain power. and i wonder if you sense at the highest levels of the party establishment, any remorse. >> yeah, well, yes, i think so. they would never admit it publicly. i would not overstate how lonely -- i mean, look, liz cheney, i mean, the few people who have spoken up and resisted trumpism at the cost of, you know, their jobs in many cases, yes, everyone says, oh, they're out there. they don't have a constituency. they speak for a lot of people. and i think when biden goes out there and says, you know, takes the democracy message as frontally as he had recently, there's a math calculation, too, which is that, say, conservatively, half the republican party today, and that large number of independents,

are appalled by trump, appalled by this anti-democratic fervor and what's taken hold. he is trying very, very diligently, biden is, to differentiate between the maga republicans and, i hate to say good republicans because it has all kind of historic echos, but basically republicans who know that the sky is blue, right? who know that this is a nuts conversation to be having, and the problem with trump's, you know, putting this on the ballot, essentially, and keeping himself on the ballot is he makes a lot of candidates look like idiots. i mean, dr. oz today was asked very straightforwardly at an event with pat toomey, whom he's replacing, said, would you have voted for joe biden's certification? a sky is blue question. is answer is, in most cases, yes. historically, it would be, yes. he answered, yes. that's going to get him in big trouble with a lot of the maga base and probably hurt his turnout in pennsylvania so there's a lot of downstream damage down to the republican candidates here but it's also a big math problem for republicans who are looking to do well in

the midterms. >> cornell belcher, david jolly, mark leibovich, thank you so much for spending time with us today. to be continued. ahead for us, ukraine is making gains on the ground as they look to take back territory occupied by russia, and it comes as u.s. intelligence is now reporting that moscow has been forced to turn to pariah states like north korea and iran to resupply their military. like north korea and iran to resupply their military. we all have heroes in our lives. someone who cares about other people and gives of themselves. to help others, who can't always help themselves.

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today, we kickstart a large-scale promotion campaign to attract investments, advantage ukraine. we will tell the world why ukraine plays for good investments and financial opportunities. i invite you to ukraine. invest in ukraine. this will be your victory, and a new success story for your companies. start your work. >> that was ukraine's president zelenskyy virtually ringing in the bell at the new york stock exchange this morning. it's part of a clear campaign to promote bringing business back to ukraine. the country is trying to ride a wave of positivity amid its counteroffensive against russia in the south. ukrainian shelling in kherson has caused moscow's sham referendum on joining russia to

be delayed due to a, quote, security situation. that's according to russian state media. president zelenskyy said over the weekend that ukrainian forces have taken three settlements, two in the south, and another in the east in their efforts to regain their territory. this news comes as u.s. intelligence has found that russia is buying millions in artillery and rockets from north korea. another sign that russia is struggling to resupply. all eyes, though, remain on zaporizhzhia, europe's largest nuclear power plant, as the u.n. team arrived last week to survey the damage from strikes there. today, the head of the international atomic energy agency called for a security protection zone to surround the plant with hopes of heading off a nuclear emergency in what has become one of the hot spots in the sixth-month-long war. let's bring into our coverage npr national security correspondent greg myre. greg, it's a great sort of day of headlines to show all of zelenskyy's fronts, right?

trying to make sure that even if they win the war, that russia doesn't succeed in destroying ukraine's economy and democracy by those means. by ringing in the bell, always focused on the external portrait or picture of ukraine to the world. but also making some of its most serious and important gains on the battlefield in ukraine. talk about this moment. >> sure. ukraine has got a lot of things happening now that have some positive energy, and let's look at the battlefield and in the southern city of kherson or the areas around it, ukraine has now been on this, what seems to be, an offensive for the past week. the gains seem to be very, very limited. ukraine is not talking about it very much after telegraphing this plan for weeks and weeks. it seems like they went -- it's just harder to play offense than defense, so it seems they're going slowly. and even today, there was talk about another operation in the north near the city of kharkiv.

so, the ukrainians seem to be interested in making a push. they want to do it in this fall window before the winter sets in and it gets really hard to move, the tree cover is gone, so it seems ukrainians are very worried about losing worried about losing international support, so they want to show some gains on the ground, and they want to keep going with this international support they're getting. >> and the reporting on russia turning to north korea and iran for supplies obviously has a lot of influence of the koind of access they have these days, but also of real serious supply chain issues if you will for the russian military. >> yeah. we've seen this since day one of the war really. and it was quite surprising to hear the russians are turning to north korea. the one thing many people thought russia had in just endless supplies was artillery

and rocket shells and they could keep on going. if this reporting that the intelligence agencies are declassifying and talking about today is true, it just furthers this notion and again, just last week, we were -- or last couple of weeks, we have been hearing about russia getting drones from iran. so a trend line that nobody would have predicted at the beginning of the war. ukraine gets more and more sophisticated, cutting-edge weapons with the united states and nato and is using them effectively on the battlefield. russia turning to north korea, it seems, and iran to bolster its dwindling supply of weapons. >> it is amazing. amazing turn of events. thank you so much for spending some time to talk with us about it. a quick break for us. we will be right back. r us we will be right back.

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we are grateful. the beat starts right now. >> happy to be back. nice to see you, nicole. welcome to the beat. it's great to be back with you on this weeknight after i had a couple of days off, and i can tell you up front, we have one of our special reports tonight about sara pailen losing again after she lost to obama and some lessons about the civil rights legacy of american artists ranging from bob dylan to jay-z. i can also tell you in a first, we have new reaction from jay-z himself to an msnbc beats segment. so you'll hear the audio of him and i talking about that by the end of this hour. also later on, we have a new report on this surveillance video raising questions. the top story right now though is really about the fall. here we are, summer's over, labor day is