if it is these three in terms of the substance, the policies that are gonna be are geared? >> well, i know for a fact. that the state has a huge homeless crisis. that's gonna be one of the top issues that voters are thinking about on a day-to-day basis. so, i'd expect to see some of that -- take top attention. that a national issues like protecting roe, codifying roe, and things like that. >> california needs more housing. it really, really, really do. katie hill -- >> climate. change >> katie hill and christina greer, thank you very much. that's all in on this thursday night. alice wagner tonight starts right. i don't know. climate change. >> that is "all in" on this thursday night. alex wagner tonight begins right now. california has a lot on its plate right now, chris.

>> but housing, they really need to build a lot more housing in that state. >> yes. and given where they are -- >> it's complicated. >> yes. thanks to you at home for being here tonight. tonight we start with merrick garland. it's no surprise that republicans are not fans of the attorney general. ever since he arrived at the justice department, republicans have repeatedly accused garland of weaponizing the doj and going after trump. here he is in 2021 where the republican senators had their say about garland's memo on protecting school board members. just to be clear, yes, that was a memo of protecting school board members. take a listen. >> i'll leave it at this, general garland. you have weaponized the fbi and the department of justice. it is wrong, it is unprecedented

to this history in our country, and i call on you to resign. >> thank god you're not on the supreme court. you should resign as a disgraced judge. >> then in august of this year when the fbi executed a search warrant on mar-a-lago because the judge agreed with the doj that crimes, plural, could potentially be found there, this is what happened. >> it just shows how bad things have gotten at the fbi and doj. it's all driven by politics there. >> you can see they've weaponized the doj. >> joe biden has turned the department of justice and the fbi and the irs and the federal government into machinery to target their political enemies. >> he has now used the doj to target president trump and chairman perry under garland's watch. the gop resembles thees go

stopple. >> this is a serious, serious breach. he ought to go. if he won't resign, he ought to be impeached. kevin mccarthy warned, i've seen enough. attorney general garland, secure your documents and clear your calendar. in the view of these republicans, the department of justice cannot be trusted. merrick garland must resign or he should be impeached because he only goes after biden's so-called political enemies except today merrick garland did something today that doesn't quite fit that narrative. the attorney general announced he appointed robert hur as the special counsel to investigate documents found at president biden's former office and his home.

extraordinary circumstances called for the appointment of a special counsel. robert hur who was appointed by president trump said today in a statement, i will conduct the assigned investigation with fair, impartial, and dispassionate judgment. i intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service. the attorney general's announcement came after we learned that another set of classified documents from president joe biden's time as vice president, that another set was found in his garage in wilmington, delaware, this after a dozen documents were found at the dc think tank. they alerted the justice department about the discovery of the documents on december 20th. the white house then alerted the doj this morning of a single classified document found in an adjacent room in biden's wilmington home. biden reiterated today he and his office are fully cooperated with the doj.

that now makes two special counsels conducting investigations into both president trump and -- president biden and former president trump over their handling of classified documents. setting aside the fact that these circumstances in these two cases are wildly different, the fact of the matter is that both presidents had classified documents in their possession, and merrick garland, the ag, has done something he maybe had to do regarding the politically treacherous territory he now finds himself having to navigate. hopefully robert hur will conduct himself with that dispassionate judgment and get to the truth here. but in the meantime, the republicans who have been railing against merrick garland for roughly two years now, they have a different tune to sing today. senator lindsey graham is happy about it and appreciate's garland's decision to appoint a special counsel and it's in the

best interest of the country. the speaker of the house, kevin mccarthy has mixed feelings about this. on the one hand, throwing president biden under the microscope was exactly what he wanted to do, but on the other hand, he wanted to do it with his committee and his people. here was kevin mccarthy this morning. >> i think congress has to investigate this. >> in the end it's kind of awkward to claim the federal government is weaponized against you when it's simultaneously announcing a criminal investigation into your political opponent. joining us now is charlie savage covering the story for "the new york times" and matt miller for the justice department. thank you both for being here. charlie, i wonder if you can tell us at all from your reporting the degree to which garland was making a political calculation among other things here, the degree to which the pressure that the right wing had been -- the campaign, i will say, that they had been waging

against merrick garland for two years has had its effect inside the doj. >> well, he would never admit that's the case, but, of course, he's part of the real world. he sees it, he feels it. one of the interesting things i learned today was about the more recent pressure put on merrick garland, thens someone who leaked the fact being found to cbs news on monday, which brought this to public attention. there's been a tremendous call on merrick garland do just this notwithstanding kevin mccarthy's reluctance. and then someone leaks to nbc on wednesday the second set had been found and the call redoubles and he appoints a special counsel. one of the interesting things he said, the recommendation to him, the decision to appoint special counsel had been last week before any of this became public and the calls began. if that's right, and i have no

reason to doubt that's right, it mean as what looks like a pressure campaign on him was already beside the point. >> matt, you've logged some time at the doj. how do you read this decision on the part of garland and the timetable, as charlie points out? >> i think this is a decision that merrick garland basically pressured himself into. i think if you look at the decision in isolation, this isn't one where a special counsel was necessarily want order required. i don't think you need to appoint one any time it touches on the president or they could make it clear that's what's required rather than leave it to the discretion of the attorney general. i think by appointing a special counsel to investigate former president trump and declaring by doing that that this is not the kind of investigation that can be handled in the normal course of business by career prosecutors and u.s. attorneys in the department of justice, he

didn't basically box himself in and leave himself no choice. if there was a conflict of interest in the trump came, that case is more acute in the irn involvement of the president. it's really a decision he's forced on himself. >> matt, you've tweeted you think special counsel can lead to all sorts of bad places. can you enumerate what those bad places are and what the potential risk here is? >> well, i think there are two things. one, i think that when attorneys general start to go outside the normal process and make a decision that you can't count on the career men and women in the regular order and the u.s. attorneys who have been confirmed by the senate to handle sensitive cases and you have to appoint a special prosecutor for every one of them, you then leave yours to appointing special counsels when it's not needed. for example, in this one. as i said, having appointed one in the first case, you're necessarily required to appoint wasn't in the second.

history shows that oftentimes they tend to go in all kinds of places you don't expect. this is different than the situation in the 1990s when there were independent counsels that weren't account tobl the attorney general. if he wants to pursue something that isn't necessarily in his current mandate, there'll be a lot of pressure on the sitting attorney general to do so. and this is someone who i have no reason to doubt his integrity, but he was a political appointee in the previous administration, so it is outsourcing a lot of the attorney general's responsibility to someone who has not come up inside the normal regular doj order. >> that's, charlie, to you -- the fact that robert hur, the special counsel here, was a political appointee in the trump administration, what do we know about him? his choice seems to be greeted with some consternation among certain parts of the biden administration and beyond given the fact that he is someone that

donated to republican campaigns. as matt said, he's an appointee during the trump administration. what do we know about robert hur? >> well, he had been a career prosecutor in maryland. he had worked for chris wray, now the fbi director, in the bush administration when chris wray was the head of the criminal investigation for the justice department. he worked for then chief justice william lindquist after law school, so he's clearly a republican. then he took on political appointments first as a very powerful official in the attorney general's office under rod rosenstein and then as the u.s. attorney in maryland. this is merrick garland trying to handle a sensitive case as a matter of obviously a political

shielding himself of bias accusations. he's got a trump appointed attorney. that stands in sharp contract with the style of his predecessor bill barr in the trump administration who when he had very politically contentious cases was reaching to fellow trump appointed republican u.s. tones to look at things like allegations that the obama people had improperly unmasked, intelligence reports, certainly taking another look at the russian investigation and cases that spun off of that. all of those were fellow republicans looking at that as opposed to merrick garland who's looking for the other party to handle these matters. >> yeah. and you can read into that something, right? first of all the irony that merrick garland is in some

respect extending an olive branch or trying to convince skeptical republicans that the attorney general is fair. matt, do you see a calculation here being made about a potential criminal indictment for mar-a-lago, the fact that merrick garland is making sure everything is treated in an above board fashion on the classified biden documents in preparation for something even more controversial as it pertains to mar-a-lago, or am i getting ahead of myself? >> no, i think that's certainly part of it. he's looking at the two cases. except for the fact that they involve at the first instance classified documents being in a place they're not supposed to be, in every other way they look different. you have one that biden turned

the documents over voluntarily versus the way the former president handled them. i think he looked at it and said if one case is headed for indictment, i have to make sure that the decision in the biden case, which looks to be routine investigation, based on what we know now, there could be facts we don't know. but if the facts we know turn out to be the only facts, it is a case that's very unlikely to end in any criminal indictment, i have to give the confidence that both cases are treated fairly. i have two special counsels, one knowing the recommendation, and that will give further credibility to possibility further indict president trump. >> charlie, what does special counsel do on a classic level? there doesn't seem to be as much here. there are questions about the timetable and when these announcements were made and when the biden administration chose to acknowledge that these

documents were in the precedent's possession, but beyond that, the administration has been pretty forthcoming with the doj and the national archives. do you have a sense of what the special counsel will be investigating now that he's been appointed? >> well, he'll have to come in and look at what his predecessor, mr. lausch out of chicago, has already conducted. he'll want to hire some staff and get an office set up as a routine course of things. but you're right. this doesn't look like, based on what we know now, like there's that much to investigate. we don't know exactly who packed up those boxes. we don't know, were those documents accessed? did anyone go in that closet and rifle through the documents? they're going to be asking questions like that to the extent that lausch hasn't already established it. again, we don't know what his findings are. there doesn't seem to be nearly the complexity of the mar-a-lago documents matter to examine. one question in my mind is how

long this possibly could last. >> maybe it won't last that long. maybe it will be a pro forma exercise. we'll see. charlie savage and matt miller, thank you both for joining me tonight, guys. >> thank you. the special counsel appointed today is the fourth one in the last six years, so what does that statistic tell us about the state of american democracy? plus, the talented mr. santos and the origin of his riches. we'll talk to "the new york times" reporter who's been doing all the digging, and there is quite a bit to unpack. stay with us. e a bit to unpack. stay with us are prostate concerns keeping you awake? force factor prostate helps reduce nighttime bathroom trips and promote a normal prostate size. "i feel like myself again." rush to walmart for force factor prostate, from the #1 fastest-growing men's health brand in america.

just look around. this digital age we're living in, it's pretty unbelievable. problem is, not everyone's fully living in it. nobody should have to take a class or fill out a medical form on public wifi with a screen the size of your hand. home internet shouldn't be a luxury.

everyone should have it and now a lot more people can. so let's go. the digital age is waiting. just look around. this digital age we're living in, it's pretty unbelievable. problem is, not everyone's fully living in it. nobody should have to take a class or fill out a medical form on public wifi with a screen the size of your hand. home internet shouldn't be a luxury. everyone should have it and now a lot more people can. so let's go. the digital age is waiting.

were just two independent counts appointed to look into the conduct of the president of the united states, one investigating richard nixon and the other bill clinton. but now in just the last six years, we have had not one, not two, not three, but four what we now call special counsel investigations probing the conduct of presidents and the law enforcement officials serving them. it started with the muller investigation and the russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election.

then attorney general bill barr gave in to trump's demands and appointed john durham to investigate the investigators. tit for tat. that ended with a whimper than a bang. at the time trump got what he wanted, a second investigation to muddy the waters surrounding his own conduct. then last year trump once again found himself to be the subject of a special counsel investigation after merrick garland appointed jack smith to oversee parallel investigations into trump's potential mishandling of classified documents and his role in stoking the violence on january 6th and halting the transfer of peaceful power. now today merrick garland has appointed a special counsel, this time to appoint a special counsel to address mishandled documents. as david rohde writes, it

appears unlikely that president biden will be prosecuted because it does not seem that he intentionally mishandled documents, but if he isn't, republicans will argue that trump should not be charged either. joining us now is the author himself, david rohde who covers the justice department and serves as the expectation tissue editor of the newyorker.com. is that the end here? when republicans heard the special counsel announcement they thought, here's our get-out-of-jail-free card? politically, yes. trump had more documents. he and his lawyers lied about how many documents they had. they didn't turn them over for months. they defied a subpoena. but you have a situation where it's very different politically. you know we're going to criminally prosecute donald trump, but joe biden had some documents next to his corvette and that's okay. >> and here we are.

he reminds us he's not a political actor, but this seems like an explicitly political move, one taking the temperature in the room and understands hi had to do this. do you think it was the right decision? >> i do, and i'm a bit of an idealist. >> that's why we love you, david. >> he's trying to get people to believe in the justice department, that the idea -- we've talked about this before, of nonpartisan public service is possible and the special prosecutors are going to follow the facts where they lead and not allow politics to influence their decision about how to deliver justice. so i think he did the right thing here. it's a mess. it's unfortunate but a way you hope the country can normalize and maybe some of these people, you know, the hyperbole of republicans, that that is hot air, that that's political posturing, and that garland is trying to do his best to get to

the facts and be fair. >> it's a totally inconvenient time for kevin mccarthy to be launching an inquiry when the federal government is doing something kevin mccarthy would like them doing. >> again, looking at the midterms, it was a vote against this kind of extremism and conspiracy theories, and right now that's the strange thing about kevin mccarthy's house. he's got to rely on the freedom caucus. they have come out charging with these conspiracy theories that have been unproven over and over again. >> i mean i understand what you're saying about this as a bid to get people back on board with institutional integrity, although, i'm skeptical a lot of people on the right can be convinced about anything other than the government is out to get them. but i think the frequency of these special counsel appointments as we outlined at the top of this block is indicative of a country that no longer can referee its own fights, right?

like the partisan divide has become so deep that even merrick garland who's pretty much in the center, i've got to outsource this to someone else because i'm too hot for them to handle. that to me does not seem very good that there are four special counsels in six years compared to where we've been in decades past. >> i agree. a lot of that has to do, i think, with donald trump's behavior and that you see, you know, russia finding emails. i think the investigation into trump in this campaign with russia was legitimate and it had to happen. then there's pressure when durham is looking into that russian investigation. to durham's credit, he had two low-level cases and he lost those at trial. durham has not been a ken staar.

ken staar investigated clinton a that went on for years and accused him of going on with an affair with monica lewinsky. special counsels aren't perfect, but they can work. robert mueller, i think, generally did a good job. he came up with the conclusion there was not collusion between trump and russia and liberals didn't like that, but he did his job. >> that came out by the way the findings were determined by attorney general bill barr. it will be interesting to see how trump's posture is affected by the appointment of this new special counsel given where he is on jack smith, the special counsel looking into hit actions around january 6th and the documents. this is what trump had to say about jack smith. jack smith is a trooper-hating thug whose wife is a serial and open trump hater whose friends and other family members are

even worse. i mean the man has not -- it's maybe worse than the behavior during the mueller investigation. it's immediately personal, immediately baseless, immediately a new level of low in terms of former presidents and their public narratives. >> i don't think this is working politically. we saw that in 2020. we saw that in the 2022 midterms. he's exaggerating, he's lying, it's hyperbole, it's nasty. i think it's exhausting. i could be wrong. the most important thing is to defeat donald trump politically. that is sort of slowly happening. and then he should be careful because the more important investigation in terms of, you know, the gravity of what has been alleged is january 6th. there are new subpoenas put out by jack smith, the special counsel there, looking at fund-raising and did the trump campaign know that he's mostly claiming the machines secretly

changed votes, and it's a subpoena looking for information that did they know those were fake claims and essentially were they committing fraud by raising all this money, you know, to stop the steal. that's very serious stuff. there's no indication there's overwhelming evidence of that yet. and, frankly, if trump is going to be prosecuted for anything, it should be january 6th. >> yes. >> unprecedented for a president to do this. no president should do that again. you want to deter that kind of behavior. it's an astonishing and historic crime. >> it will be interesting to see what happens with mar-a-lago in the context of all this, whether the appointment of the new special counsel to examine biden's retention of documents in any way affect as what happens at mar-a-lago. all i do know is january 6th and a potential indictment seems a long way away. david rohde, executive editor of the newyorker.com. it's great to see you, david.

>> thank you. still to come tonight, the seditious conspiracy trial with members of the proud boys got underway with the prosecutors arguing the proud boys were emboldened by the words of president trump. the defense team, meanwhile, argued something very different. we'll bring the latest from the courtroom. and republican george santos somehow, somehow had $700,000 to run his campaign, but where did that money come from? we have some new reporting. that's next. have some new repog that's next.

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duckduckgo, privacy simplified. newly elected congressman george santos' resume was filled with all sorts of things that were not real. there were the two colleges he did not graduate from and the multiple sector jobs he did not have. but notably absent from santos' resume was his actual most recent job. >> right before you decided to go into politics, what were you doing? >> well, i still actually -- up until august 1st when i initiated my leave of absence, i'm the regional director for harbor regional capital. we're within the fortune 500 private equity firms globally.

i manage all of our assets with arbitrage here in new york. i'm harbor city capital's head guy for new york city. >> harbor city capital has never been listed in the fortune 500, but a few months after that interview the company did get some recognition in the form of a complaint filed by the fcc. they argued that it was a fraudulent ponzi scheme that had hundreds of victims who were investors. george santos claims that he was as distraught and disturbed as everyone else to learn about the allegations against harbor city capital. santos himself was not named in that s.e.c. complaint and has denied any malfeasance at the firm. he did not allegedly have an alleged ponzi scheme, but george

santos went from earning $55,000 a year to earning an annual salary of $750,000 a year plus dividends, enough money that he had enough money that he had the ability to lend his campaign $700,000. the question is where did george santos get all of that money. weeks after the complaint against harbor city capital, he organized a new organization in florida, devolder corporation. that was his mother's maiden name. it's unclear if he included himself in that group. santos lists devolder as the source of the bulk of his recent financial windfall. here's the thing. we really have no idea what devolder actually does. we know money came out of devolder, but we don't know how money got in there. we know that a super pac called

redstone strategies which claimed to have the singular purpose of electing george santos, that super pac was raising money but did not appear to be spending it. the fact -- in fact, the fec has no record of redstone's strategies at all and there do not appear to be any records documenting its donors. "the new york times" spoke with them. the times found no record of redstone making any ad buys on santos' behalf. now, redstone claimed to have raised at least $800,000, which is slightly more than what santos personally lent his campaign. and the source was that mystery company devolder. to recap, redstone is hauling in serious cash, and we don't know where it ultimately went. and another company devolder is

flush with cash, and we don't know where it came from. and the amount of money coming in and going out is almost the same. now, those numbers could be coincidental. maybe this is santos' team not filing paperwork correctly, who knows. but check this out. as of last month, both santos' company defolder and redstone strategies list the same penthouse apartment condo in florida as their address. both companies have the same address. they show the address of the home of one jason benoit, one of santos' former colleagues at the alleged ponzi scheme harbor city capital. there's a lot to unpack here. joining me now is a pulitzer prize-winning reporter and one of the reporters behind today's story. alexandra, thanks so much for joining us. what a serious interest of facts. do you see a connection between devolder and redstone the way i see a connection between

devolder and redstone? >> well, devolder organization is actually a manager in redstone strategy's llc. now, redstone llc is this florida company he has a partnership in. there seems to be a clear santos connection. there's this thing called redstone strategies that was also raising money during 2022. they were saying, looking we want to raise all this money to do this big media thing. we need $1.5 million. the donors gave the maximum amount they were allowed to give. they went to them and asked them if they could give more. santos seemed to be the person who was directly soliciting the donor, which is another potential issue in what they

were doing. we were not able to find any records of any actual advertising spending. so it is -- you know, we're not completely certain whether this redstone strategy raising the money is the same redstone strategies llc that devolder is a partner in. but certainly there are these potential connections and a lot of mystery surrounding the finances for sure. >> who was giving money? i know you can't divulge your sources, but do we have any idea about the sales pitch george santos was making here? i mean these are big quantities of money, and apparently nobody at the time was asking for proof that the money was spent on the thing they thought it was going to be spent on. >> yeah. we have seen the sales pitch, and it basically says we are redstone strategies where one of the most notable things about it, we have the singular purpose of electing george santos.

now, you're allowed to raise unlimited amount of money if you're a super pac, but there's certain things that you still have to do in order to do. that one, you have to register with the fec, which they do not appear to have done. you have to disclose the donors which they had not done. they also said they were a 501(c)(4). the other thing is you're not supposed to coordinate with the candidate, which it clearly appears that santos had some involvement in raising the money for redstone stratstrategies. the other thing is you need to spend the money on the actual purpose. if you say you're going to make ad buy and do all this to elect the person, you should be doing that. as i mentioned, we have not found records they were doing any advertising as they said they were going to.

>> it really seems like this is a matter for the fec and potentially i know we know the new york ag is looking into this. there are a lot of question marks about this influx and outflow of money, a lot of it which ended up being used on george santos' personal expenses. alexandra berzon, investigative reporter for "the new york times." thanks so much for your reporting. >> thanks so much. we have so much. the proud boys went to trial for conspiracy. new details of an arrest to make the governor look tough. that is coming up. the governorh that is coming up. g but normal. ♪ ♪ it was time for a nunormal with nucala. nucala is a once-monthly add-on treatment for severe eosinophilic asthma that can mean less oral steroids. not for sudden breathing problems.

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today the government made opening statements in the high-profile seditious conspiracy case against five prominent proud boys for their actions in the capital attack. they were cited for text messages they sent each other before, during, and after the riot. they write, the exclusive chat that the crux of the government's argument appears to rely upon was a private telegram group for a special proud boy chapter called ministry of

self-defense. one writes, make no mistake. we did this. another one posted on the internet, a third gang member zachary rehl added i'm proud as eff at what we accomplished yesterday. i mean, okay. and also they recorded their conference calls. oof. taken together, the videos, the text, the audio, all of that is part of the evidence the jurors will consider in deciding whether these five defendants are guilty of conspiring to interfere with the transfer of peaceful power. meanwhile inside the courtroom, they have their own plan. joining us, our guest was inside the courtroom watching the trial unfold. judging by your twitter feed, it was an interesting time in that courtroom. can you tell us how the defense is mounting its case? i mean specifically dominic pa

zola, one of the proud boys, his lawyer sounded like he had an interesting argument to make in terms of defending his client. >> hi, alex. thanks so much for having me. yes, indeed. as you said, we've got five defendants, each with their own legal team, and, you know, as a result, you know, it's a crowded courtroom and there are some real characters in the mix which makes for entertaining viewing but was also coming out as a patchwork of legal arguments they're using to defend their individual clients. we have tar owe's lawyer, ricky tarrio who says his climate was scapegoated by the government and they're going after him because he was an easy target because they can't go after the big whale, which is donald trump. or they're trying to use the old line that the proud boys are just a drinking club. they're trying to downply the physical violence aspect of

things. pazzola's lawyer tried to say the riot was essentially a six-hour inconvenience for congress and that, you know, the halls are often so crowded and noisy there's nothing different than usual. but to me i think the biggest asset for defense lawyers is what they say will be testimony from government informants, and these government informants, they say, had infiltrated the proud boys prior to january 6th, were privy to some of their chats, marched with them on the day, and they say that these informants will claim there was no plan, this was a spontaneous eruption of violence. now, it depends how these testimonies will hold up under cross-examination, what chats they were actually privy to. to me, anyway, this is a very interesting nugget that the defense has in their court. >> i just want to -- for people who missed what you said, which is very key, one of the proud

boys' lawyers is saying the riot on the capital was essentially a six-hour inconvenience as far as the work of congress. i think you also tweeted when they showed the clip of pazzola smashing the windows of the capital, the damage wasn't that bad because the windows don't look expensive, according to the lawyer. these are not $1,000 windows. tess, what was the reaction in the courtroom when that argument was made? >> i mean there were giggles for sure. he was replaying these iconic videos of pezzola using a stolen riot shield to smash the window, and this was the first breach of the capital. you know, it doesn't look any better, the third or fourth or fifth time you've seen it. so it was kind of hard to understand what this lawyer's line of thinking was. he also played repeatedly the

video of pezzola smoking a cigar inside the capitol saying something like we took the mother thing and claiming victory for it. he said this is going to exonerate pezzola because he sort of defines what victory means for the moment, and victory means standing in the capitol. some lawyers' arguments seemed to be more tenuous than others. >> you mentioned the defense is going to be using some government informants who were with the proud boys. and they're going to have other proud boys testify against the proud boys on trial, and that sounds like it will certainly be interesting. do you have any intel on what that might look like. >> it's going to come down to two main things. first the testimony of the proud

boys, one who is particularly prominent, jeremy bretino, he's a major witness in this case. the other part is what you mentioned earlier, these encrypted telegram chats and video and audio, and this is from a chapter that tarrio formed in late december called the ministry of self-defense, and what the purpose of this group was for, the attorneys will be arguing over this in the coming weeks, the government said this is where they plotted their conspiracy and that these messages -- we've seen kind of snippets of court documents, but that in full we'll see, you know, what happened before, what happened during, and what they were saying after, that these will kind of expose their plots. these are two major pieces of evidence that the government is going to use to build their case. >> we'll be watching. tess owen. thank you.

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back in august of last year governor desantis held a press meeting. in a new video published today by the guardian newspaper, body cam footage of officers making arrests in miami-dade county, they revealed how that operation came together. it was just ahead of governor desantis's performative press conference. many were understandably confused when officers showed up at their front doors. they felt they had the right to vote after they passed an amendment. the amendment, however, made exceptions for those convicted of murder or felony sex offenses, but for those

arrested, their ineligibility was not made clear to them. even more chilling the video published today shows heavily armed officers arresting two men. you can see in this video, one man was forced out of his home only in his underwear. he walked out of the front door to face officers on the front lawn holding automatic weapons. another was handcuffed in his underwear by armed officers after being awoken from sleep. the two men had their cases dismissed last year, but state prosecutors plan to appeal those rulings. regardless of whether any of those cases will ultimately stick, governor desantis got what he wanted out of the whole situation, namely confusion and fear out of ex-felons who want to vote. and, of, a press conference. that's all. way too early with jonathan lemire is coming up next. >>