ago, tracking this by telephone polls that it was a third, a third, a third, republicans, democrats, independents. so a lot more independents. a lot more for young people. what does that mean for the parties? i talked to john dell volpe, what does this mean for both parties, democrats need people to trust their party. republicans need to show young people they share some of their values. >> mike allen, fascinating stuff, thank you, we'll see you on "morning joe" in a moment. thank you for getting up "way too early" with us on this monday morning. "morning joe" starts right now. well, i don't know what will happen now. we've got some difficult days ahead. but it really doesn't matter with me now because i've been to the mountain top. i don't mind, like anybody, i

would like to live a long life, longevity has its place, but i'm not concerned about that now. i just want to do god's will. and he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and i've looked over, and i've seen the promised land. i may not get there with you but i want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. a haunting speech from reverend martin luther king jr. delivered the night before he was assassinated in memphis. we'll be honoring dr. king this morning and exploring his legacy

throughout the morning on "morning joe." also ahead this hour, we'll have the latest developments on the classified documents found at president biden's home, and the gop's false equivalency when it comes to this discovery. hundreds of files of donald trump tried to stash away at mar-a-lago, to equate is a little tough. congress is on the clock to raise the country's debt limit. it comes after a dire warning from treasury secretary janet yellen. plus, we'll get a live report from ukraine following a deadly weekend in dnipro. there's a desperate search for survivors underway right now after a russian strike on an apartment building. and among those killed, small children. good morning, and welcome to "morning joe." it is monday, january 16th, martin luther king jr. day. with us, we have the host of msnbc's politics nation and president of the national action network, reverend al sharpton.

founder of the conservative web site, the bulwark, and jon meacham, author of "and there was light" abraham lincoln and the american struggle. good to have you all with us this morning. >> jon meacham, i have always been, like everybody, haunted by this speech, and the words that rang out. i remember the first time hearing it was at first baptist church in i think it was dorville, georgia, they played it for us. but i've always been haunted by him talking about, haunted by the mountain top and the imagery of -- the imagery that he gave.

moses, not getting to the promised land, but seeing the promised land. and knowing that his people were going to get to the promised land. what was so remarkable about him talking about how longevity had a place and he would hope for longevity, saying it the night before he was assassinated. as you said, he almost didn't give this speech. it was raining outside. it was miserable. talk about the lead up to what you consider, and i think what most of us consider one of the great speeches in american history. >> as you say it was storming in memphis, and he wasn't all that excited about going to the

church of god headquarters there to deliver this speech. deliver this sermon. ralph abernathy said they're here for you. dr. king went, and we have these indelible words. the words are indelible because of what happened the next day, but they're also -- it's important i think when you look at the whole speech, it's a speech about economic justice. it's a speech about why he's in memphis. he's in memphis to support striking sanitation workers. he is trying to take the dream to the next step. he's trying to get from opening access to making sure there's a path to prosperity for everyone. and the moses imagery, as you note, is so amazing. part of the song of moses in

deuteronomy, remember the days of old, remember the years of many generations, ask thy fathers, they will tell thee, and they will show you. remembrance, not just as a passive act. today is not about, dr. king is not about contemplating a statue and then going back to what we're doing anyway. it's remembrance in a biblical sense. it's an action to remind us why we do what we do and what it should be. >> and reverend al sharpton, you remember and yet you move forward and push forward the legacy. you're doing it today. later on this morning with the president of the united states, civil rights leaders. i'm curious your thoughts as we play them out in top speech from memphis where we were, where we

are, and where we still need to go on this martin luther king jr. day. >> i was 13 years old when dr. king made that speech. i had just become youth director of his new york chapter because i grew up in new york, i was appointed youth director by reverend william jones and reverend jesse jackson, and jesse was there that night, and i remember when the next day when we heard dr. king was killed over the news, my mother who was born and raised in alabama, started crying like it was a member of our family, and though i had seen dr. king twice, and had become part of the organization, i didn't understand why she was taking it like it was a cousin or uncle, and she said you would have had to grow up where you had to sit in the back of the bus like i did or not drink out of the water fountain to understand what dr. king did. and i began understanding that

what he saw from that mountaintop was an america that many of us didn't see as bad as our parents, but still saw from our parts being unequal, and he was saying, he left message for us to keep going until we got to the promised land. you must remember, joe, in those days, the battle was there was some in the black community that were saying dr. king had out run his relevance, and the black power advocates were denouncing him. he remained steady that i believe we can make it in america. we can do it nonviolently, we can change laws, and you have to stay the course. as i told you many times, his wife has had to kind of keep me on that path. martin iii who will be with us cochairing and his wife has always reminded me, mrs. king kept us that were younger, next

generation, that martin not only believed in america but believed in the way we should change america, and that's what we're going to be talking about today, and that's what people ought to deal with on martin luther king day. it's not a day to take off. it's a day to take on and turn america on to finishing the road for equal opportunity and equal protection under the law. >> you know, jon meacham, i remember quite a few years ago, tavis smiley came on with his book "death of a king," and i was shocked. he laid it all out. story many of us know, but many of us forget how unpopular king was in his final years with many on the radical left and many inside the civil rights movement who didn't believe in moving forward peacefully. who believed there needed to be violence, there needed to be

agitation. he was taking it from all sides. being critical of the vietnam war, taking it from the right, not being violent enough, taking it from the far left. and yet, he kept his head down, moved forward, kept talking about nonviolence resistance. history, of course, proved him to be right. proved him to be the indispensable man in the civil rights movement. the great figure that did more to move this country forward than, my god, anyone in american history when it came to civil rights. >> right. and, you know, the danger is when you become a holiday, you become a homily. you become at least in the popular vine a simpler story than you really were.

and martin luther king jr. was this, you know, one referred to him as a second founding father that what he did on wednesday, august 28th, 1963, in the march on washington was he redefined for us american scripture that if you look around the monumental ball, jefferson had started, lincoln had improved on and conditioning argued for its full application. by the way, is there anything more american in monumental terms than martin luther king, that image right there, stares and perpetuity across thomas jefferson, across the title basin, and jefferson stares back, and that's in many ways, the tension and the promise of the country. >> it's interesting, when you say that, jon, it's also interesting and it's perfect in that king quite aware of

jefferson's many failings, and quite aware that jefferson was a slaveholder, king would use, just like abolitionists would use jefferson's words constantly. king throughout his lifetime would use thomas jefferson's words as both a sword and a shield to move the civil rights movement forward. it's just remarkable. >> that's well put. yes, i mean, that's the central claim of the movement was grounded in both sacred scripture and secular scripture. it was love thy neighbor as thy self and it was that we should be the good samaritan. you help, not least because it's the right thing to do but because you might need help, and it was jefferson's words from the summer of 1776. what king was saying to white america was we didn't make this promise. you did.

live up to your promise. that was the claim. and it felt, to go to your question, it felt a little soft to people. the reverend knows this far better than i do, but by the mid 1960s, '65, '66, you have this sense that dr. king, john lewis, they're the sunday school version of the movement. right? it was sweet. it was, you know, it did what it could. but nobody wanted to get hit in the head anymore. and, in fact, john lewis loses the chairman ship of the student nonviolent coordinating committee in 1966. because john lewis who bore the scars of the movement was seen as too accommodationist. and the complexity of king, it

seems to me is that he remained devoted to nonviolence, not only as a tactic but as a way of life. but let's be very clear. the claims in 1968 was not simply about, hey, let's all get along. it was about economic justice. it was about creating genuine reform, and genuine reform is not easy. it requires sacrifice. it requires a sense that we are, in fact, all in this together. and if you read that speech from april 3rd, you will see him calling out companies that he thinks should be boycotted. you see him talking about hard, hard things. which is what profits joe. >> rev? >> i think meacham hit it correctly. the tension and, again, i would just enter in my team, and i'm in the north.

the tension in the movement was it was not popular in new york to be with dr. king's movement because those that were more strident and more for violence or self-defense were saying that has run its course, and dr. king's position was a real prophet stands up even to his own. you're not tested until you can be ridiculed by your own and sand up anyhow. when you talk about moses, moses at the banks of the red sea, it was the children of israel that turned on him and said did you bring us out here to die, and that's when the miracle of the red sea opening happened. if you can't move on, and this is what mrs. king tried to teach me f you can't take the heckles of the crowd, if you can't take you will never be what you should be in terms of moving the country forward, it's easy to fight your adversary.

it is more difficult to withstand the attacks of those that are your allies and stay the course any way, and dr. king exemplified that. >> rev and jon meacham, we're going to pause this conversation and take a break. we're going to go to news and then also ahead on "morning joe," we'll have much more. we'll continue this conversation on the life and legacy of reverend martin luther king jr. on this mlk day. we'll be joined by martin luther king iii and his wife, andrea waters king, and we'll take a look at the treasury secretary's new warning, and how republicans are vowing not to budge on demands for spending cuts. also this morning, the latest in the ongoing saga surrounding republican congressman george santos. democrats are questioning how long republicans have known about his quote web of lies. he is not okay. when we come back, we're going to be talking about the

latest in the biden documents case, and the additional documents found this weekend. what it means for the white house, what it means for trump. house, what it means for trump

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attorneys discovered the initial documents, sauber says they stopped searching because they lacked the security clearance needed to handle classified material. when the lawyer returned the next day with department of justice officials, he says he discovered the five additional documents in the same box. those files are separate from the two other batches we reported on last week. one found inside president biden's wilmington garage and another found inside an office he previously used at the penn biden center in washington, d.c. sources tell nbc news that one of those documents was marked with the highest security classification, but the level of all of the others is unknown. >> so, jonathan lemire, what's going on here? the stumbling and bumbling around over the past month or so has been pretty extraordinary. >> been a couple of weeks. >> well, since november when they first started discovering

these documents, and they keep, you know -- they'll have a press conference and say, well, we think that's it. we don't think there are anymore. they don't know. they haven't known. what's happened here? i guess, again, transparency, i think, works best for the biden administration, and works best for biden himself because they find the documents, they report it immediately, a far different situation than donald trump's. anybody who says it's not is a political hack. it's very clear to see politically and legally that there is a huge difference in the two cases. and yet the biden's own worst enemy is the way biden's staff and the way the biden team has run this. what's going on? >> yeah, it's an important place to start just to underscore the differences between the biden and trump cases. there's real frustration among democrats, and the frustration predates novp. -- november.

as soon as the mar-a-lago search happened and the fbi went there, and the idea of former president trump and his classified documents took the national stage, democrats are wondering to me, why didn't the biden people search right then. like, hey, let's just make sure we don't have a similar issue. let's make sure we don't have any stray documents laying around, you know, inadvertently, and no searches done then, and it wasn't until november when a staffer inadvertently, just simply cleaning out the office at the biden penn center found the documents and suddenly we may have an issue here. and even more, why did it take so long. if that's the first week in november, how are we now in mid january and we just learned about more documents on saturday? it's the drip, drip, drip that's the problem right now. it's a story they can't totally seem to get their arms around. they used at the end of last week, they used the word complete, the search of the biden properties was complete, and two days later they found

more documents. that has been a concern here. and it's giving republicans ammunition, we're going to go through that in a moment. and a lot of it is a whataboutism, a lot of it is false equivalencies, but there's no doubt the white house has made missteps in handling this, and that has helped muddy the waters. >> and also when you look at the briefings. you know, there have been a lot of republicans who have been critical of karine jean-pierre, of course they have been from the beginning. i'll let people draw their own conclusions as to why, it seems pretty obvious to me, but in this case, you have an admiral who has worked at the pentagon around national security issues and certainly has had to know the ins and outs of classified documents, why have they not been having him out there briefing. >> kirby. >> admiral john kirby who has known this. where is admiral kirby? if you have somebody on your staff, why are they not using somebody, jonathan lemire.

>> who's more comfortable with material. >> that's grown up with this, who's lived with this his entire career. what are they doing? >> that's a fine question, joe. i mean, right now the way it's worked since kirby moved from the pentagon to the white house is he simply handles the foreign policy issues. and anything domestic is still white house, purview of the white house press secretary ka -- karine jean-pierre. >> why are they not putting him out there? it's his entire professional life he has had to deal with classified materials. they have him in the building, why are they not using them? >> they haven't provided an answer to this point, and it's also been their public relations face on this has not been terrific. karine jean-pierre has spoken about it in the briefing room a couple of times but falls back on the same sort of line saying she's limited to what she can

say. that may be true, they're getting advice from lawyers, but it doesn't satisfy the need for answers here. and the president, as you said, opening this block has been his own worst enemy. his comment about the garage and the corvette was seen as flippant among some that maybe he's not taking this as seriously as he should, and, again, this is not saying these situations are the same as with the mar-a-lago, they're not, but this is a white house that simply could be, democrats are saying, handling this better. they have given away now a political tool in which they were using to damage trump and republicans, and they've given republicans, certainly a false equivalency in some ways, arm them in order to take shots at the biden white house. they have not had a good answer. instead it's the drip drip drip of e-mailed statements seemingly every third day saying actually, we found a few more documents. >> reverend al, by stumbling around on this and not doing it

in a straightforward way, they have created political space for republicans to demagogue this issue. republicans who just, you know, used to say they didn't care at all about these issues. so these issues weren't important. now suddenly they're the most important issues in america. but by stumbling and bumbling around, by not getting their time line right, by still saying, we just showed a congratulate that says an unknown number of documents found in biden's garage, no, no more unknown. no more unknown. at this stage, we're two months in. they need to clean this up. they need to get, you know, amateur hour is over. they need complete transparency, and they just mishandled it from day one, because again, i'm only saying it because it's true. the difference in the biden document situation and the trump

biden -- and the trump situation, night and day. if they're transparent. if they don't give republicans political space, then at the end of the day, i believe like mika said the other day, this is going to end up hurting donald trump more pause now republicans are talking about finally how important these classified documents are. >> funny how that happens. >> and that at the end of the day is going to end up damaging donald trump politically more than joe biden. >> no, i think the handling of it is the real concern. and i think that they make something even worse than it really is in reality compared to donald trump, there is no comparison. but if you act as though you have some reason to hedge and duck, people start thinking there's something there. the republicans ought to be careful because as we saw when they went after benghazi or when

they went after bill clinton in the '90s, you can end up energizing the democratic base, and i'm beginning to hear the last day or so a lot of people saying, wait a minute, there's no comparison, and they will rally up a lot of biden's people. so i think both sides ought to be very careful. they have definitely given political space to the republicans but if they over use it, they will end up waking up a lot of people that may not have been as strident for biden as they have been saying this is totally unfair, and they will rally up the democratic base and particularly those that have been to the far left saying we're not going to let them do this because it's an inaccurate comparison between what trump did intentionally, and what biden inadvertently has found out was in his possession. >> charlie sykes, it certainly left some space for grand standing and opportunism, house oversight committee chairman

james comer is criticizing biden's handling of the document situation and demanding more information from the white house. in an interview on cnn yesterday, he was confronted with a clip where he previously said investigating trump's mishandling of classified documents would not be a priority for his committee. take a look. >> i don't know much about that, that's not something that we have requested information just to see what was going on because i don't know what documents were at mar-a-lago. so, you know, that's something that we're just waiting to see what comes out of that. >> but is it fair to say that investigation won't be a priority? >> that will not be a priority. >> so what are you saying to viewers who don't understand why president biden's documents seem like a big priority for you but president trump, who took hundreds more documents did not comply with the subpoena, did not reach out to the national archives or the justice department to say, hey, we found these documents, it's not a priority.

do you only care about classified documents being mishandled when democrats do the mishandling? >> absolutely not. look, we still don't know what type of documents president trump had. that's one of the questions we've asked the national archives, just because joe biden's lawyers said they turned over five documents doesn't mean they just turned over five documents. they could have turned over 500 documents. i'm sorry, but i don't have a lot of confidence in president biden's personal lawyers. we don't know exactly what trump has versus what biden has. at the end of the day, my biggest concern isn't the classified documents. my biggest concern is there's a discrepancy in how former president trump was treated by raiding mar-a-lago, but getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through melania's closet. >> i mean, come on. >> again, this guy, he's lying, first of all, they didn't raid. >> shamelessness. >> secondly, there was an attempt to get the documents from donald trump.

there were requests. they were refused. there was a subpoena, it was ignored and then they peacefully entered and took them. it has to be said, when someone boldfaced lies. >> and a shamelessness to it, charlie, and again, the reason donald trump is in trouble it seems from everything we have seen is not just because he took the documents. it's because he lied about having them. he wouldn't return them, and his lawyers even signed documents saying we have returned all of these documents. we have no more? >> three things are true at once. there is a false equivalency here. there is no comparison between the two cases, they're dramatically different. that's number one. number two, we're about to enter a full fledged festival of hypocrisy and whataboutism. you're going to have people basically flip the position that they took before about the seriousness of the classified documents. but number three, this is not

good for the biden administration. they have not handled this well. this has been an unforced error. it is a gift to donald trump and to the house republicans. and i think that right now, you know, we could spend the entire hour laying out all the ways in which these cases are different, but the political reality is that it has muddied the water and that is what donald trump and the republicans needed. they needed to be able to play the whataboutism card, the everybody does it card, the whole idea of contradictory approaches to all of this. and as jonathan was talking about before, unfortunately, rather than emphasizing the, you know, the dramatic difference between these cases, you have had the stumbling and bumbling from the white house, and democrats are right to be frustrated about. there's got to be a reality

check here. >> and, charlie, again, i just don't understand it. i will say, it's far different legally, and we will find out. i'm a big believer, i love the transparency. i'm glad they have special counsels on both. that's great. investigate it. and where the chips fall, the chips fall. that's fine. at the same time, another truth is you don't take top secret documents out of government buildings. the same thing that was true in trump's case is true in biden's case, whether it was trump who obviously guided it or whether it was biden's staff who guided it when they were clearing out his offices as vice president. you don't do it. i just, i don't understand it. i have been around classified documents. i've been to the armed services committee. it's very clear. you don't take them out of government buildings, out of where they're supposed to be.

so that to me is just, in both cases it's mind boggling and i think what's so shocking is biden's staff understood or should have understood how serious this was. why didn't biden's staff, date the press conference about mar-a-lago documents break, this is what i keep going back to because i know in my little world as a member of congress, my chief of staff would have said, hey, guy next door, he just got busted for x, y and z. go through all of our offices, make sure we're clean on x, y, and z. everybody would do that. >> is it possible that happened? >> why didn't biden's staff do that? >> well, i can't answer that. it is obviously the unforced error. but, you know, joe, the reality is, you know, there are some things that are shocking about this. and there are some things that are not shocking about this. i mean, i thought that the clips you played from representative comber were, you know, very

illustrative of the world we live in right now, a guy who is basically willing to go on national television and say that the taking of the classified documents was a nothing burger, nothing to see here. not a priority for our committee when it was donald trump, but now suddenly, the same people who described taking the classified documents as absolutely nothing are now in full deep breathing mode, and again, this is part of the political world that we live in. you pick up whatever cudgel is at hand, and to your question, how did the biden white house not know this was a cudgel lying there. how did they not protect themselves from this sort of thing? in many ways, given this particular story, this is the worst case scenario for them. now you have two special counsel who seem to now -- it has now become pretty much close to mutually assured destruction.

i don't know whether it neutralizes the criminal investigation. i'm not going to be able to speak to the legal issues but as a political matter, they've handed it off. at a time when quite frankly things had been going pretty well for the biden folks. his poll numbers are up. you had republicans in disarray. he was about to announce for reelection, and now this almost inexplicable blunder has changed the dynamic. >> i will say, charlie sykes is frozen, thank you so much for being with us, charlie. charlie's signal froze there, but there are two different things, the politics of it, not good for either side, and there's the legal side of it. should be completely different. if justice is blind, if no man or woman is above the law, this will work out perfectly fine for joe biden most likely based on everything we know right now, and not so for donald trump. if you have a justice department

that's focused on applying the law fairly and equally. and not worried about the political dimension of it, which they shouldn't worry about. mike allen, feel free to jump in here. i want to ask you about something you were talking about on "way too early" with jonathan lemire, a big election result that a lot of people may not have been paying attention to in a swing district in virginia, a republican-held district in a state senate race that's not only going to cause more problems and headaches for the virginia governor glenn youngkin , but also is a continuation of this winning streak of democrats winning in swing districts most likely because of abortion. >> joe, that's exactly right, and virginia governor glenn youngkin who's one of the most likely 2024 republican candidates, you talk about donald trump who's announced and of course florida governor ron desantis, who's right up there.

but then after that, republicans are very excited about the idea of glenn youngkin who won in a non-trump lane. but you're right, last week in virginia where i live across the bridge in arlington, there was a senate special election in a classic swing district, and it was won by the democrat. why does this matter. the virginia legislature just like the congress down in richmond is right tipping on the edge, very close, and so this one seat makes a difference in abortion legislation that glenn youngkin could get past, and of course he's in a very short time trying to build a national record in the state. so virginia has this quirk that the governor cannot get reelected. you only have four years, so just right to jam everything in at the same time that he has his eye on a national race. so last week in his state of the commonwealth address, it sounded

very much like some of the things you would talk about in a national campaign. he was talking about empowering parents. tax relief for small businesses, and families. safer communities, but that plan could be in trouble because of this one seat that you mentioned. >> mike allen, thank you very much for joining us this morning. >> thank you. >> and again, this is a swing district that as mike pointed out was held by a republican and now democrats controlling with anti-abortion legislation coming up that's not going to get passed because, again, republicans keep losing on this issue. >> the abortion issue is going to continue to haunt the republicans. coming up we'll turn back to our conversation reflecting on the life and legacy of martin luther king jr. also this morning, the very latest from ukraine, following a russian missile strike on an apartment building. rescue workers are still digging through the rubble this morning. we'll go live to the war torn

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martin luther king jr. was killed tonight in memphis, tennessee, shot in the face as he stood alone on the balcony of his hotel room. he died in a hospital an hour later. last night, he said this. >> i don't know what will happen now. we've got some difficult days ahead. but it really doesn't matter with me now because i've been to the mountain top. >> for those of you who are black and are attempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act against all white people, i would only say that i can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.

i had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. we have to make an effort in the united states. we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond or go beyond these rather difficult times. my favorite poem, my favorite poet was escalis, and he once wrote even in our sleep pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of god. >> joining us now, martin luther king iii and arndrea king. martin is chairman of the board of the drum major institute, and arndrea is president of the

organization. the drum major institute is a nonprofit committee action group founded by dr. king and today it carries on his legacy by convening leaders and organizations to identify common sense solutions to the world's most pressing problems. >> martin, your thoughts this morning. >> well, my thoughts are that every year we have an opportunity to ask and evaluate whether we've achieved the dream that martin luther king jr. envisioned for our nation. and unfortunately every year we come up short. it does not mean we're not making progress. but if we look at the areas he focused on and talked about, the eradication of poverty, racism and violence in our nation, then we have to say we're coming up short. so i think about this every holiday, but what is wonderful about it is every january we have the opportunity to start anew.

so we must quadruple our efforts to one day actually realize the dream that my dad and mom envisioned. >> so arndrea, i'm wondering if you can assess where we are in achieving the dream, and what you hope people will think about today and every day about your father-in-law's legacy. >> well, one thing that -- the first thing that comes to my mind as we're talking about achieving the dream is as martin said, every year when we come to the king holiday, and we assess where we are, we seem to always fall a bit short. but i think now we're at an alarming place in our society because not only are befalling -- we falling short but now there are laws being put in place that in a very real sense are rolling back the wheels of time. you know, we should be going forward, and what i mean by that, for example, is our daughter, martin and i's daughter, dr. king's only

grandchild, at 14 years old, she's sitting with less rights than the day that she was born. she has less voting rights than the day that she was born. she has less rights over her body than the day that she was born, and i can't imagine that that was the dream that martin luther king jr. when he talked about that that he would imagine not only for his grandchild but for all of her peers. >> arndrea and martin, i want to raise this to both of you based on what you said. first, arndrea, is that later today, this morning at the breakfast we're honoring you and nancy pelosi, and the president is going to speak. we're also going to announce that we're calling for a march with drum major institute and national action network in washington to bring all of these groups together in the spirit of dr. king and dealing with this rise of hate crimes and bringing things back.

talk about, arndrea, why that's important that people across different racial lines and other lines of division come together in all of this to realize what dr. king was about. and, martin, we couldn't celebrate dr. king day without talking about your mother who really not only kept the movement going but made this day possible. if it wasn't for coretta scott king, we would not have a federal holiday, and i don't think people know that. the leadership of your mother, which i always say, arndrea reminds me much of your mother, and your mother, i tell joe scarborough all the time, worked on my rough edges and the leadership of your mother should not be forgotten on king holiday. arndrea. >> absolutely. it's one thing of course that we talk about in our house all the time. and, you know, there wouldn't be a martin luther king jr. holiday

if it weren't for coretta scott king and that story still has not been told, and we cannot say it enough, her strength, her courage, her wisdom, her intelligence, her perseverance. as it relates to this year, there are a number of anniversaries in the year 2023. this year would be 55 years since martin's father was assassinated. it will be 60 years from the birmingham movement and letter from a birmingham jail, and of course it will be 60 years from the march on washington and deliverance of "i have a dream", and we are extraordinarily i'm not sure if excited is the word but because we feel an obligation as i know you do, rev, and you know, so the drum major institute and nan to come together and really let the nation and world see, we're going to come back to washington with a renewed vigor in our heart and souls to renew ourselves to really fully come

together and realize the dream. i can imagine all of us standing together no matter our sexuality, no matter our gender, our race, how we worship, who we choose to love, and boldly proclaim that we are the dream. that we are going to make the ideals of democracy real in this society. and so we're coming together. and we are going to once and for all truly realize the dream. >> you know, years after the salma to montgomery marches, dr. king spoke to nbc news on the topic of genuine equality. take a listen. >> many of the people who supported us in selma, and birmingham were outraged at the treatment of negros, but they were not at that moment and committed now to genuine

equality for negros. it's easier to integrate a lunch counter, than it is to guarantee an annual income to eliminate poverty to negros. it's easier to integrate a bus than to make genuine integration a reality, and quality education a reality in our schools. it's much easier to integrate even a public park than it is to get rid of slums and i think we're in a new era, a new phase of the struggle where we have moved from a struggle for decency, which characterized our struggle for ten or twelve years to a struggle for genuine equality. >> reverend king, i wanted to ask you, we all hear our parents' voices. you have a particular voice in your heart and head. and i wonder as you get up every day to do this hard work, what

is -- does your father's voice say to you? >> do justly, and love mercy, and always try to walk more humbly with your god, and that perhaps was his creed. the interesting thing about him being prophetic is that the message, what he just said about guaranteeing genuine equality unfortunately is still true today 56, 57 years later. and we have to find a way to achieve that quest. and what i do know is part of what we hope to do in august is to bring together a vast coalition, as we always did, because when people come together and coalesce, then progress can be made. we have to also find ways to encourage our republican friends to do justly and love mercy. and, you know, we have been restricted.

our courts for the first time with women's rights and reproductive rights have reduced. historically, the court was used to expand. we've got to go back to a phase of how do we expand so that no one is excluded. we are a country that is constantly evolving. we're at each other's neck's today, but somehow we got to get above that and say we're going to move our nation forward but we're going to move it forward in a way where we can disagree, dad taught us, without being disagreeable. >> martin luther king iii, and arndrea waters king, thank you very much for being on with us this morning, and joining us now, senator and reverend, raphael warnock. senator warnock serves as senior pastor at ebenezer baptist church in atlanta, the former pulpit of dr. martin luther king jr. bringing special perspective to the table. >> special perspective, and i

understand the wright reverend joe biden came to the church yesterday. how did they do? did any of the congregation start to nod off or sneak off before the president was done or did he hold the audience? >> we were honored to host the president yesterday, and i've got breaking news here, he clapped not on the one and the three but the two and the four. he understands the tradition. >> thank god, and all the people said amen. you have been with politicians before i'm sure that have clapped on the one and the three, and all you can do is just kind of shake your head. so obviously you have such a unique view, vantage point, not only of what this day means but also just of the king legacy. you have had the great

responsibility of carrying that on your shoulder every sunday when you get behind the pulpit. tell us as someone with that unique legacy and also on the front lines in the fight for civil rights in the united states senate. tell us where we are. tell us because we know we have a long way to go as a nation, tell us how far king has gotten us over the past 50 years or so and what we still have to do as a nation. >> listen, there's no question i live in a world very different from what my parents experienced as a result of dr. king's work. i was born in 1969 one year after dr. king's death. i never drank from a colored water fountain. i never sat on the back of a because as my dad did, who was a world war ii veteran, asked to give up his seat to a white teenager while wearing his

soldier's uniform, and so there's no question about the impact of dr. king's ministry and his work on american life, and yet as martin iii said earlier, we still have a lot of work to do, and i'm honored to do that work every single day, both as a pastor and now in the united states senate. >> reverend warnock, one of the things that struck me as i was watching some of what president biden did yesterday. as you know, speaking at our breakfast in washington this morning, people don't know that you are not only a pastor and senator, you were an activist. i remember, and you wrote this in your book, when we were protesting a police killing in new york, you actually submitted to nonviolent arrest that i was leading with dr. mike, and dr. jane forbes, and you always would say, as long as it's

nonviolent and church-based you're there. but part of your legacy is the night that barack obama and joe biden were elected, the first black president of the united states, you opened your church doors and let us have what we called a watch night service to watch that election and i have that picture of dr. king's sister, christine, and you and i sitting there, and she broke down and cried as they announced obama as the president. and this kind of your evolving is also part of the story of our struggle. and you bring that kind of history to the senate. >> well, i think, as you point out reverend sharpton, what dr. king taught us is that leadership is not about an office. it's about an orientation. and i've been trying to do this work long before i came to the united states senate, as you pointed out. i was arrested, i guess, 20 years ago or so in the wake of the killing of an african

immigrant who was shot and killed while standing on his own porch. five years ago i was arrested in the united states capitol fighting for health care and challenging the fact that in the farm bill, they were going to take away important benefits for nutritional and food security. well, five years later, i sit in the senate. i'm on the agriculture committee, so i get to help write the farm bill, and what i hear on this martin luther king jr. day is martin luther king jr. saying to all of us that we need leaders who are not, he said, in love with money, but in love with justice. not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity, leaders who can subject their own ego to the pressing issues of the calls of freedom. the united states senate, the united states congress could benefit from hearing that message right now. centering the people rather than the politicians. >> senator warnock, good

morning, jonathan lemire, you and others have said these days that one of the defining battles in civil rights is that for voting rights. you have spoken very passionately on this issue. about a year ago president biden came to atlanta, spoke about the need for federal voting rights legislation. that didn't go anywhere. as it turned out. you know, his administration have said they still want to move on the effort but now of course there are republicans controlling the house, making it that much more complicated. where do you think as we sit here on this martin luther king holiday, 2023, where do you think things stand right now in the battle for voting rights in this country? >> we've got to keep fighting, and we cannot afford to give up. and as you point out, we didn't get the result we wanted in the last congress. i pressed very hard to get this done. but who am i to give up? i was john lewis's pastor, and i think about him crossing that edmund pettus bridge with nothing but a backpack and a trench coat. he had no reason to think that

he could win, but he stood up for what's right because it's right, and somehow by some stroke of destiny, and human resilience, he was able to bend the arc a little bit closer toward justice. fact of the matter is the last time we passed a voting rights law, it passed the senate 98-07 under a republican president. there's no reason why we can't get this done. and i'm not about to give up until we get it done. voting rights is not just some other issue alongside other rights. it's the very framework in which we get to fight for all the things we care about. i'm proud of what we have been able to do here in georgia in spite of barriers erected. i ran in my last runoff, there were folks who said we couldn't vote on the saturday, the first saturday of the runoff because of a holiday that used to honor robert e. lee, and we took them

to court. we took the secretary of state to court. and we won. and the people of georgia were able to exercise their right to vote. college students could vote. and we will continue to press. just because we were able to push through the barriers, doesn't mean the barriers don't exist. nobody is going to silence me on the voting rights issue. i won't rest until it gets done. i want to ask you about news of the day. president biden came to visit you yesterday amid a flurry of questions about documents being found in the penn biden center, as well as in his home in wilmington, delaware, and then word of more documents over the weekend. the white house has always said that it believes in full transparency, but transparency can't be when you want it to be transparent. i'm curious, do you think it would have been better politically especially if they had just opened up about this in

november or when these documents were first discovered? >> listen, let's be clear, classified documents need to be handled with a great deal of care, and it's important that the justice department do its work relative to what we are learning. i think the administration is cooperating. they need to continue to cooperate. and i think the most important thing, mika is that we put processes in place so that this doesn't happen again. clearly there were some lapses, and at the end of the day, we're talking about the security of the country, and i think the president and his administration are cooperating and i'll trust they will continue to cooperate. let's talk about the debt ceiling. we've had the treasury secretary talk about extraordinary measures that need to be taken if a deal is not done. do you think that the democrats in the senate and the republicans in the house are going to be able to come up with

some agreement? obviously there are five, six republicans in the house that want to slow the whole thing down and want the whole world to come to them. that's obviously not going to happen. should we be worried that the united states could fault and the economy would be damaged severely because of five or six members in the house? >> we should not be playing chicken with the full faith and credit of the united states government. and this would mean a great deal of pain for a lot of people but especially the people that dr. king cared about so deeply, the folks who are on the margins. it's ordinary people, the people that these five or six representatives actually represent who would be hurt the most if we were to default on our obligations. look, the people sitting at home don't understand this. this is the kind of thing that only happens in washington.

the rest of us know that when we get bills, we have to pay our bills. people sitting around their kitchen tables right now, they know they have to pay their bills, and so there are things that we have to negotiate. there's work that we have to do, but we shouldn't be playing chicken with the full faith and credit of the united states government period. >> so senator warnock, that's just one area of course where the republican house is talking. this is going to be a new era in washington. they have opened up a lot of investigations into a variety of things about the administration including members of the president's own family. they're also really sending signals they're going to curtail dramatically funding to ukraine, even though as we have seen just over the weekend, a terrible strike killed more than 30 civilians at an apartment building in ukraine. what is the tactic there? as you and your democratic colleagues, both your chamber of the senator, but also your colleagues in the house, what's the approach to talk to this new republican majority in the house, which right now seems to be advocating some pretty

radical ideas? >> well, i understand all of that, and maybe because i'm a pastor, i remain hopeful. i'm the 18th most bipartisan senator in the senate. i have already found ways to work with people with whom i disagree with most of the time. we certainly have to check russian aggression. this is about ukraine, but it's about more than ukraine. it's really about the world order. it's about nato, and we can't play around with this. and i think at the end of the day, hopefully cooler heads will prevail, but we have to center the concerns of ordinary people. i think we run into real problems, we lose our way when the politics becomes about the politicians, and when you do that, you're willing to negotiate and to play games with anything, including the non-violent transfer of power as we saw with january 6th. and now this talk about playing

with the debt ceiling. let's center the concerns of ordinary people and if we do that, i think we always have a shot at getting the public policy right. >> all right. senator warnock, thank you. just curious, would you ever consider running for president some day? >> listen, i serve as pastor of ebenezer church, i'm the senator of georgia, i've got a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. i'm a little bit busy now. >> too busy. okay. thank you very much for joining us. we appreciate it. >> where did that come from? >> i'm just curious. >> we going to ask everybody. >> i like asking people that question. >> because he would be historic. listen, i grew up in baptist churches. >> yeah. >> if you can be a baptist preacher, and you can handle your congregation and deacons. >> just not a 4-year-old and 6-year-old. that's the part. still ahead on "morning

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cars built with safety in mind, even for those guys. the volkswagen atlas with standard front assist. ♪ ♪ earlier this week, the biden administration announced plans to ban gas stoves. >> i just want to, you know, make it clear to everybody, you know, when we say don't tread on florida or let us alone, we mean that, including on your gas stoves. you're not taking our gas stoves away from us. that is your choice. >> to try and ban natural gas and force homeowners to convert their home from gas to electric, the average homeowner will pay $35,000 to do that. >> this is going to be a huge burden for lower and middle class folks. there's 187 million people in the country that have gas stoes

stoves in their home. it's 40% of the population. people can't go in, tear the stoves out, convert what they have and put a new electric stove in. it's insanely expensive. >> the president does not support banning gas stores and the consumer product safety commission is not banning gas stoves. i want to be very clear on that. >> oh, my god. oh, my god. this is an issue that you look and you want to see how politics gets crazy. one side gets like a small kernel of something. >> half a kernel. >> and they put it in the ground, and they water it, water it, try to get it to grow, and so this gas stove thing, it gets some bureaucrats saying something that has no power, and then suddenly, you have ron

desantis, i'm going to protect your gas. everybody talking about gas stoves. it's so stupid. jonathan lemire is with us, reverend al sharpton, let's bring in nbc news national analyst, executive editor of the recount, john heilemann. people were tweeting at me this weekend that i don't understand the dangers of gas stoves, and they're going to protect my gas stoves. and ron desantis is going to protect my gas stove, but the sheer stupidity of it, and if it were just bloggers, that would be one thing, but when you have kevin mccarthy going out and other people talking about gas stoves, i mean, i just believe that whoever is polling this issue and telling republicans to obsess over it, they just need to stop. as i said, it makes trump

republicans look even dumber. >> oh, my god. >> and it really is. it's as if -- and this has been my theory for a long time. i think democratic operatives, spies have infiltrated the republican party, the rnc over the last six years and they keep whispering their ears, convincing them to drive over the cliff, thelma and louise style because they keep getting dumber and dumber and dumber. politically, if you look at the things they're holding press conferences about, it's mind blowing. it's just mind blowing. it is all gesture, and they have a chance to push issues and talk issues. they just don't want to. so now they're talking about gas stoves instead of vladimir putin threatening nuclear war, instead of china threatening to go into taiwan, instead of north korea focusing on building a nuclear program that can launch nuclear weapons that hit america's mainland. they're worried about gas

stoves. >> happy martin luther king holiday, joe, mika, everyone else. it's good to see you guys here on this monday morning. trying to maintain our bearings here on a day of secular holiness. joe, the thing is that there's a number of things that are going on here and i think they're all worth noting. one of which is the republican party has become addicted to this culture of lies and conspiracy theories that they have fomented, right? and so they know that there is a substantial number of people in the country, in their party, who they can convince that this is true. and that it will enrage those people. this is the economy of and the culture of conspiracy theories, right? there are, i'm certain, you and i will be able to drive through parts of the country ten years from now, and people will be saying do you remember back when joe biden was in office and they

tried to take away our gas stoves. there's a market for it, right? >> the thing is, john heilemann, it does not work. it didn't work in 2017, it didn't work in 2018, it didn't work in 2019. it didn't work in 2020, it didn't work in 2022. it won't work in 2024. this is my point, though, they keep doing these stupid things. they keep failing. i don't understand it, john. it would be one thing if they won one of these elections where they talk about caravans coming up filled with leprosy riddled immigrants. it always fails. they always lose. it's always linus waiting for the great pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch in the east. >> that was going to be the second part of my point, and you as usual made it with great

verve and energy. this is what i mean by the addiction to this culture. they have created this culture that's receptive to these lies. obviously it's not enough to win national elections. it's not enough to win local elections. we saw it in the 2022 midterms, people like chuck grassley who should know better, you know, wandering around iowa talking about how the irs was going to come bursting through the doors of small businesses across iowa like gestapo agents, you know, because there had been some discussion about increasing the irs's budget a little bit. it's great politics if all you care about is feeding your base. it's not great politics if what you care about is becoming a national governing majority. but that is the sugar high, you know, but political parties get addicted to sugar highs. it just happens that the sugar high that the republican party is addicted to is bad bathtub

meth. they're high on that sugar. it's not just rotting their teeth. it's rotting their brains at the same time, and it's rotting their ability to be competitive outside this very narrow piece of the electorate that's willing to believe this bull shit, as i will call it even on this most holy of secular holy days. it is the worst. >> i had to apologize to reverend. >> reverend al sharpton has never heard that word before in his life. >> no, no, and he's curious why you're talking about bad bathtub meth. >> speaking of the word you used. >> let's go to lemire about that. maybe lemire would like to comment on this. >> lemire, go. >> i want nothing to say about the bathtub meth, but in terms of this, it's the limits of the own the libs strategy, which seems all the republicans can do these days. a little fact checking, this controversy which seems to have come out of nowhere dates from about a week or so back when the head of the consumer product safety commission simply

expressed the view that there should be perhaps new regulations on gas stoves. the biden administration was quick to say, we didn't back that. we're not planning any sort of ban here, but it has become the cause of the moment for many on the right, and to be fair, there are some jurisdictions, new york city among them n new construction, we should use electric stoves, not gas stoves for environmental concerns. the other subplot to this beyond the headlines and nonsense of playing to the base is that some republicans think and we'll see if it's working, they think this is a moment where they can also put focus back on the biden administration's energy policies because they had such success, they think, doing so with gas prices last year, but of course gas prices have fallen. that issue is gone. and now they've turned to this. >> but they lost the election. they lost the election. >> it has to stop. >> they got beaten in the senate. >> we know that. >> instead of kevin mccarthy's

prediction of 60 house seats. >> the red wave. >> they didn't get the red wave. you look at how every governor in biden's party, i mean, you have to go back to 1934 for a party to do as badly as the republican party did here across the nation. and they keep trying this stuff. i'm here as a friend telling them. >> you're no friend. >> grow the blank up. >> to these people. >> grow up. you need to start winning elections again. grow up. >> they can't hear you. >> i know they can't. >> they have these little ear muffs on. >> i'm like horton. >> little munchkins with ear muffs. they squeeze the ears really hard. >> i want one person to hear a who out there, john heilemann, but they just don't hear it. >> no. >> when does wendy hulu or whoever was in horton hears a who, when does one of them hear it and say, wait, maybe we should start focusing on winning elections instead of owning the

libs? >> you know, joe, this has been one of the great conundrums that we have been discussing, as we all have been discussing this for the totality of what we could call the trump era and post trump era, you know, at what point does the negative feedback loop of, hey, you know what, like, we understand the power of any party's base. we understand why people in both parties are always afraid of their base because the base is what can take them out in a primary election. so everybody caters to the base, to some extent. the republican party has catered only to the base especially in support of donald trump, and the own the libs strategy more broadly, now for the past six years with devastatingly negative consequences for it across the country, including and up to the midterm election. the question has been all along, rationalists more or less have said at some point, the pain level is going to be so great, they're going to lose enough elections, they're going to come

to their senses. so far we have not gotten to that point. >> it hasn't happened, no. >> and i would have thought 2022 would be the moment, right, that would be the thing. this midterm election would be the moment. it doesn't turn out to be the case. they're still addicted to that bad bathtub meth. on "meet the press" yesterday to continue on this, republican senator ron johnson expressed his outrage about president biden's documents, the case with the documents that were found -- >> if you look back to ron. ron was also really upset about trump's documents, right? >> no, no. >> did he not -- >> they wanted to like -- >> but trump had a lot more and he took them. >> right. >> and the fbi and doj was asking for them, and he lied and said he wasn't going to give them back. he said they were his documents, and then lied said they had given them all back. ron was upset about that, right? >> when you express concern about biden's you prove that trump's is a big issue. it's kind of a conundrum for

them. >> it's so hard. >> hunter biden's business dealings. chuck todd asked the republican why he wasn't just as outraged about the business dealings of former president donald trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, jared kushner? here's part of the exchange. >> senate democrats want to investigate jared kushner's loan from the qatar government when he was working with the government negotiating many things in the middle east. are you not as concerned about -- are you not concerned about that? i say that because it seems to me if you're concerned about what hunter biden did, you should be equally outraged about what jared kushner did? >> i'm concerned about getting the truth. i don't target individuals. >> you're targeting hunter biden, senator. you're targeting an individual. >> chuck, my -- you know, chuck, you know, part of the problem, and this is pretty obvious to

anybody watching. you don't invite me on to interview me, you invite me on to argue with me. i'm trying to lay out the facts. >> reverend sharpton, senator ron johnson just wants the truth, but he only wants the truth of course about certain individuals from certain parties, and he wants to ignore the truth from others. we know that our friend joe scarborough has compared ron johnson to someone who has rocks in his head. >> never. >> joe, you did. >> maybe once. >> several times. this is something that we know that has become a blinders on party, the republican party, and it seems to me, though, that this is setting a tone for what these next couple of years are going to look like, that the republicans in the house are going to go after just what they want and how they want, and they're just going to try to ignore the rest. >> and i think that what we -- that trying to get some things done have to do is prepare

ourselves for this is how the next two years are going to be with them, and, you know, an old mentor of mine once told me, when you're flying and the pilot hits turbulence, he tries to go above the turbulence, not fly into it. we've got to try to keep raising the attention of the american public above the turbulence that the republicans are going to keep throwing. so they're going to keep trying to bait us with hunter biden and ignore jared kushner who was in government, in fact, or they're going to try to bait us with biden having a few sheets that maybe a staffer misplaced of classified documents, and ignore the hundreds of documents that donald trump refused to give and it took a raid to get some of them, and even then it was at a storage house. we can't get caught up in the noise. there are real things that the american people are concerned about, and i think that the people that keep their eye on

the prize as martin luther king would say, encouraged that on king day, keep your eye on the prize, and don't go for the turbulence, try to find smooth air that will bring us where we need to as a country, and that's what i'm going to remain focused on, even though i know a lot about baptismal pools and nothing about bathtub meth. >> yes, and of course the question that a lot of people would like to ask, john heilemann, is whether republicans went from bad bathroom meth to good, would it make a difference, but since i'm not qualified to answer that because i don't even know what you're talking about, i'm not going to -- i ask that question, i do, why don't we ask another question, john heilemann, instead. and amen on baptismal waters, i'm with you, rev, this heilemann thing, this guy's all brooklyn. i don't know what part of brooklyn that would be.

i'm such a dumb country lawyer. but john heilemann, there are two questions that i would love to ask you, neither one involving meth. and it has to do with conversations i've had over the past week with a lot of democratic insiders. and other, just, politicos in washington. the first is do you think that these biden documents will stop the justice department from prosecuting donald trump for his far more egregious misuse, mishandling of classified documents? that's question number one. and question number two, and this chatter as i'm sure in your circles, too, has become really loud over the last week or two, do you think this document dust up on the bidens' side is going

to make him think twice about running for reelection when word was he was ramping up to make an announcement soon? >> wow, those are two big questions. >> good ones. >> and both grand invitations to speculate. i guess i'll say a couple of things. one is, the answers to those questions lie in the minds of two men that none of us have access to, at least to my knowledge. one of whom is merrick garland, the other of whom is joe biden. on the basis of what reporting and now having watched garland on the first question operate over the last couple of years, it strikes me that, a, we have seen that his degree of caution continues to be beyond the bound of most of our abilities to imagine. he is proving to be an extraordinarily cautious. i would also say, much more political in the sense not that

he's open to political influence but he's very attune to both of, i think, these independent council appointments in the trump case and biden case, both driven by a desire to get the law right but also very much a desire and understanding of what the political parameters he's operating in. i think it's very hard to judge what garland will do. i will say, i think by appointing the special counsel in the biden case, it is a sign, i think, that garland wants to leave open the door to doing -- by treating them equally in terms of perception and politics, it leaves open the door for him to go down different paths. if the biden thing turns out to be no legal merit, trump clearly has legal consequence, the department can on the law make the case that trump needs to be indicted. i think that garland has set himself up in his mind to the extent he can control politics to be able to do that. i think he has left himself that

ability. i think that's a lot of, at least part of what this appointment in the biden case was was allowing garland ultimately to make the decision on the basis of the law. on the question of biden running again, i mean, everything i have been told by everybody close to joe biden has been he was inclined to run for reelection in 2024 before the midterms. he's ten times more inclined to run for reelection in the wake of the results of the midterms. we don't know enough. we have no idea how these documents got where they got to. we have no idea what's in these documents. we do know that they are being -- unlike trump they are cooperating wholly with the justice department. not knowing how they got there or why they got there, only joe biden knows that, or maybe joe biden doesn't even know that. it's hard to judge what effect it might have on his considerations for running for reelection until we know more about the facts in that case.

all right. coming up, more untruths from republican congressman george santos. >> this poor guy, i don't know if you know about it, but, i mean, he talks about what his grandparents went through, but he had knee replacement. did you know he had knee replacements because of his years playing volleyball? >> all lies. >> they whipped yale, whipped harvard, and this poor guy, he's walking around, he doesn't even show the pain he's enduring every second, two knee replacements. >> he claims to have a double knee replacement. >> that has to really hurt, right? >> i don't know where other people are. certainly joe would suggest that this situation is making me very nervous. we're going to go live to capitol hill. >> he got knee replacements, you got to run. boom. just fall down. >> amid a new looming fight over the debt ceiling as well. also this morning, the winners and losers from an exciing nfl wild card weekend.

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39 past the hour. over 30 civilians were killed on saturday in ukraine when a missile launched by russia struck an apartment building in the ukrainian city of dnipro. emergency crews worked to rescue as many as possible from the rubble of a building that was home to about 1,700 people. nbc news foreign correspondent matt bradley has more from kyiv. >> reporter: ukrainian rescue workers still racing against the clock, struggling to reach the last wounded survivors of this terrifying attack. is there anybody alive this man shouts? this was what was left after a russian missile slammed into this apartment building saturday in the central city of dnipro.

killing 40 people and injured 75 more, including 14 children. a government adviser sharing what he says is the grief of a sister whose sibling was killed in the attack. my 15-year-old super smart, super talented and super funny sister is gone. rescue workers say some 46 people remain missing. this woman stricken by grief told ukraine's channel 11, may you be cursed by all mothers' tears. incredibly some survivors were still being pulled out of the wreckage as recently as yesterday, fueling hopes that more can be found, but now nearly 48 hours after the air strike, dnipro's mayor says the time for hope may be over. >> translator: i think the chances of saving people are minimal, he said. may god help us find several of them. >> reporter: on saturday, britain became the first country to announce it will give western battle tanks to ukraine. they could be crucial as russia ekes out its first real victory

in months. russia said it had finally taken the eastern ukrainian town of solidar, but the brutal assault has left it in ruins. the russian attacks remain relentless, all of this as this war is close to entering its second year. >> nbc's matt bradley reporting for us from ukraine. joining us now, senior coalitions adviser for concerned veterans for america, retired master sergeant jason beardsley, a decorated combat veteran and intelligence officer. so many different moving parts here. as matt bradley talked about britain sending in tanks, the u.s. is expanding training of ukrainian forces, and yet there also is warning that there would be a horrific strike by russia, and here we are facing it. how do you -- what do you make of the battlefield at this point, and ukraine's ability to continue holding the russians off? >> yeah, this is tragic to watch

this. we're a year into this conflict, and it really doesn't have an end in sight. i think it's important to point out that both sides in this conflict are unable to achieve their maximal objectives. for ukraine, it looks like taking back crimea and donetsk and luhansk province. those are unlikely. what you're looking at is we're going to see more of this type of tragedy if we don't look for an off ramp. that's where the administration of the united states has to be very careful and helpful in subtly behind the scenes, working to convince the parties at bay that that off ramp is our best chance of not continuing this for ten years. >> that's one of the real points of tension right now. i think a lot of european countries are nudging ukraine to the off ramp, bearing the brunt of the economic toll. the u.s. to this point has very much said, hey, the ukrainians, we're going to leave it up to them. they have to decide. maybe that tone will change. we're about to, as you say, hit

the second year mark, president zelenskyy will speak about this. this is a conflict, we shouldn't be thinking about it in terms of months but years. how do you nudge, how do you, if you're the biden administration, subtly nudge the ukrainians to accept a deal when they can look around and say why shouldn't we fight for every inch, considering the atrocities we have suffered and the victories on the battlefield that we have accomplished? >> this is very hard, and i think ukraine has to be commended for holding the ground, defending their terrain that they have, and remember, offensive campaigns are so much different, and projecting into luhansk and donetsk, those are going to require a conventional mindset. the challenge to help nudge is to explain the max objectives are impossible for both sides. the longer this protracts, the

more they have to face is a crushing or obliterating waste of resources. their best means to get to the table and negotiate is to leverage everything they have gained so far for what they can get, not what they maxmally want. that's going to put us here for a long time. >> president putin isn't facing internal pressure to wrap this up. it's been a disaster. he feels like he needs to stay with it, to show some sign of victory. give us your assessment of the russian forces. there have been a lot of warnings from the ukrainians, saying they believe russia is trying to mount another offensive in the next month or two. from what you see from the russians do they have the ability to do that? >> they'll mount what they consider an offensive. they haven't been very disciplined about that. they have disparate command and control. they have changed their leadership on the ground, and we have seen that they haven't had the real sort of spirit to fight this at the ground level. a campaign for them that looks successful is very difficult, and that's, again, another reason why the biden

administration wants to be smart, work with the european allies. you had clint watt on earlier, and great news that europeans are starting to kick in or see the relevance of being more of the share partner here, tanks, antiaircraft missiles, things like that, the weapons. that's the right way to do it. again, it's tricky. the president has got to balance between over estimating his hand, and negotiating behind the scenes. that's why it's important to keep dialogue open with moscow, and important to keep dialogue open with zelenskyy. >> sergeant, with the reports of atrocities we're hearing about, sexual attacks, the fresh attack, just cruelty beyond belief. what if there is no off ramp? there are some in military circles very high up who say vladimir putin seems different? >> i think that the end of this is going to be an off ramp. it doesn't necessarily matter whether we get there in a year or ten years, except to the

people of ukraine. the point is, yeah, vladimir putin, he's got something else going on in his mind. he's calculating how long he can stay there. don't forget, the united states was in iraq and afghanistan for 20 years, what gains we had there were questionable, and we will the largest conventional force in our history, so ukraine being able to sustain what russia is able to sustain over the next three, four, five years if it goes that long is a dire condition for ukraine. and my recommendation will be, and i think the administration has been smart about this, limiting how much the u.s. is involved, but it's got to get involved in using its weight. it's cache with the europeans to make sure putin doesn't see any way to get to those objectives. that's the best way of doing this. >> retired master sergeant jason beardsley, thank you very much for coming on this morning, and coming up, "the washington post" carol leonnig joins us with her latest report of president biden's handling of classified

documents. and up next, we'll have the highlights from the nfl's wild card weekend, including the incredible comeback by the jacksonville jaguars. "morning joe" is coming right back. jaguars "morning joe" is coming right back next on behind the series... let me tell you about the greatest roster ever assembled. the monster, the outlaw... and you can't forget about the boss. it wasn't just a roster. it was a menu. the subway series. the greatest menu of all time.

steadying the ship. second and goal here. he fakes. he looks. he is in trouble but keeps it alive and find mitchell! improvisation. leaps to a touchdown. >> let him throw again. wide open. samuel with a block from kittle. samuel! there he goes!

foot on the gas all the way! touchdown, san francisco. a 74-yarder. >> going for two. and lawrence reaches over and scores. >> three backs behind them. to the outside. first down and a ton more and stays inbounds to the 15 yard line. sets their sights likely on kansas city. here we go for the win. got it but there's a flag down. there's a flag down as everybody's running out on to the field but there's a penalty marker. >> offsides, defense number 26. >> they call it on the defense. >> throwing the ball. come down. should get the ball again. >> on first and ten to the end zone. it's davis! did he get the feet down? yes, he did. >> tyreek hill in the slot. >> rushing forward.

thompson. has to run away from the pressure. >> throws. incomplete! broken up by elam. >> jones quarterback sneak gets smashed but he's got it. oh, he took a shot but that was well after he got the first down. barclay muscling forward. he is in! touchdown, new york! fourth and eight. game on the line. he is -- not going do get there! and the giants will take over! >> that man. >> i tell you what. we had -- there were some huge moments this weekend. >> hard to keep up. >> you look at -- so many story lines. top story line has to be the historic collapse of the chargers. just absolutely inexcusable. about the same time earlier that

day. you just look at the fact that trevor had one of the worst first halves i have ever seen in playoff history. the chargers had nothing to respond to. earlier in the day you had the niners tied up or close with the seahawks in halftime. that locked like it would be a great game. the niners decided to absolutely -- again, just looking extraordinarily composed. still can't believe how well he is doing. what a great running back. what a great player. so they won that one. but let's go ahead. let's talk about the giants. briefly say the dolphins went from playing one of the worst

nfl games a week ago against the jets to a great one. but the giants. this is my kind of team. i love teams to win running but also got jones. he finds the pass route. short pass routes. he takes what they give him. he does the play actions. bootlegs. keeps the defense on their toes. you talk about a group of overachievers. i love the giants team and i'm not a giants team. >> brings me no pleasure to report the giants are good. jones with so many doubts in recent years, had a terrific season. this giants team and fans we know and sort of tolerate think this could be a resemblance to the 2007 or 2011 team that got hot at the right time.

look. i think giants fans feel good about the chance to philadelphia this weekend. the eagles are banged up. that will be a terrific game. credit to the seahawks and dolphin that is did lose. also i don't know how to kirk cousins throws short of the sticks on the final play. >> come on, man. >> the biggest headline is what happened to the chargers. i don't know how the head coach is still the head coach after that loss and trevor lawrence four first half interceptions and came back to win. >> let's go to cincinnati for the night cap in yesterday's action. >> reaches -- throws the ball. it's live! the other way. hubbard has a convoy. chased by andrews.

at the 30. the 20! he will score! >> oh my god. >> a play to be the game winner for the cincinnati bengals. instead of touchdown for bengal. the quarterback fumbled the ball and hubbard took it. heaved into the end zone. deflected by the bengals defender. almost landed in the hands of the ravens receiver. right there. but he couldn't haul it in. he heaves it. the hail mary. oh my lord. so close. they will be relieving this one and the fumble on the 1 yard

line. jonathan, from this game, and the game that cincinnati played against the ravens last week, two of the ugliest game. my big takeaway from yesterday's action is cincinnati doesn't look like a super bowl team. they're struggling against a ravens team missing a great quarterback and still struggling to win in the playoffs. secondly, i'll be honest with you. i love josh allen who can't be rooting for the bills but he has brett favre fever. he throws interceptions at the worst time. like you go throughout playoff history the guy with 19 touchdown passes to 1 interception. yesterday heaving interceptions left and right. he is not as sharp as he was

last year. the bills had to struggle against a praet bad dolphins team that could barely beat the jets last week. i love the bills. we want to see them go all the way for 1,000 different reasons. i don't see it happening. like buffalo and cincinnati are underachievers. they don't look like san francisco or the chiefs or like a team to go all the way. >> the favre comparison is a good one. they play the bengals next week. bills, bengals will be a terrific one.

we mentioned giants-eagles a classic. 49ers await tonight's winner between the cowboys and buccaneers. >> brady is undefeated against cowboys and dallas did not play a road playoff game since 1993. they are just better top to bottom than the tampa bay buccaneers. i think it's a 2.5-point spread cowboys a favorite. there's no way i would ever bet against tom brady, especially tonight in tampa, especially against the cowboys team. again, another group of understood achievers. they looked horrible at washington last week. >> nothing to play for. the cowboys did and laid a complete egg.

terrible. questions about dak prescott finishing the season. it's january. it's playoff time. it's tom brady time. i'm picking the bucs. >> starts at 8:15. not happening. >> 8:00 a.m. we have a lot to talk to you guys about but we need to talk about the other football fist. let's bring in analyst roger bennett! >> what are you wearing? >> when we talk about football, we are torn asunder by the divisions that split us right down merseyside. we are both mourning this monday morn jeff gordon a bleak, bleak merseyside weekend for liverpool and everton. a love point for both the teams

quite sometime. >> let's get into it. this weekend was derby weekend in the premier league. the entire cities cleave into two. roll the action. fans ride or die behind the club. quirk of fate. foerged the family's very sense of being. united playing city. it was city who took the lead. caught jack going big air and did something good. manchester united this season a resilient collective. controversial and stunned city. 3:47 later marcus rashford, the last sensible person left in the united kingdom. united beat city 2-1.

shocking to witness. clipped omar in the wire. to north london for the 193rd north london derby. surprised league leaders. arsenal football club owned by l.a. rams. they despise each other. blew them away in the first half. hold me closer tiny dancer banged the ball in. double doink. nobel prize for physics. splash brothers. thrash the ball from distance with the anger only known by shakira. deliver pool shock of the weekend. that bright and cuddily sea

gulls humiliated your guys. scoop. there it is. the liverpool worse than the new twitter update. it is dark days for the teams. everton with a mash-up of tracy chapman's "fast car" at the molt. thank god it's only sports. >> what's going on with liverpool? this was a team chasing four titles. here we are eight months later they have just collapsed. what's the talk? >> there's a life lesson. when you strap on wax wings and go to the sun it does not end

well. my sweater, mika, a tribute to the craze from the jail. will we be extremists for hate or love? we should always choose love. big love to you all today. courage. >> thank you very much. love the sweat we are the heart. >> won't talk about everton. news five minutes late. >> terrible. >> the latest on the investigation of president biden's classified material handling. the white house responded to mounting pressure with new information about additional material found in the president's dell wash home. white house propt monica alba has the latest. >> reporter: frustration growing this morning in the white house o thing on backlash of discovery of documents in president biden's office and delaware home.

including from the president himself according to three sources familiar with the matter. >> the battle for the soul of this nation is perennial. it's a constant struggle. >> reporter: the president in atlanta sunday celebrating the life of martin luther king jr. in the church he once led. while staying silent on the latest developments, including revelations over the weekend that more classified material was found at mr. biden's wilmington home, adding to growing questions about how the sensitive records ended up in his possession after leaving the vice presidency. mr. biden's personal attorney arguing they can't release certain details quote, relevant to the investigation while it is on going. the total number of pages recovered is uncleared. documents have been identified in multiple locations. less than a dozen at the penn biden center in washington, d.c., back in november while the rest were unearthed in the president's wilmington residence in the last month. found in a locked garage and adjacent room. the white house admitting saturday that more classified material than previously known

had been examined and handed over to the department of justice. as some democrats concede the communication misstep, especially given the president's past criticism of donald trump's handling of classified information. >> it is 'em bar raszing. >> reporter: while defending key differences in the cases. more than 300 classified records seized by the fbi at mar-a-lago after the former president refused to hand them over to the national archives. >> apples and oranges. we should keep a sense of proportion and measure. >> reporter: but that hasn't stopped house republicans from already launching several investigations. >> what's real concerning to me is how justice is applied and is it applied equally. >> oh god. >> if it is -- >> yes it is. >> here's the great news. it is applied equally and if it is applied equally that's bad news for donald trump and everybody trying to protect him and polishing his shoes as kevin

mccarthy has -- >> that was nbc's reporter. >> joining us is matt lewis and host of on brand with donny deutsch the podcast donny deutsch and ceo of all in together is lauren leader. >> donny deutsch, go to you as the branding expert. i remain baffled as to how much the biden team has mishandled this. the last of transparency, the drip-drip-drip. would have been very easy to say -- first of all, the first mistake is the second mar-a-lago investigation starts i can tell you what chief of staff of might be in a small matter in congress would have said to me if somebody else is in trouble.

hey, let's check everything. make sure their problem is not our problem. everybody in congress would do that. make sure that we didn't do that. i had no idea why they waited until november and stumbled on to this. and then drip by drip by drip. instead of sending admiral kirby out the first day saying we just found this and a surprise to us. we are going to immediately send it back. we are going to immediately check out biden premises to see if there's more documents. could be. but we are going to get on it immediately and going to give you the information as soon as we can give you the information and going to be coordinating

with justice department. we still are hearing there's an unspecified number of documents at biden's house. come on. what's going on? this is really sloppy staff work. really sloppy communications. >> democrats have a real problem here. it is apples and oranges of severity and motive and legality but we live in a headline culture. you understand and embrace the differences. for the majority of the people in this country the headlines are two guys taking classified dockmenteds. it is unfortunate. this is the area to have trump and obstruction of justice and the documents. it really, really clouds the issue. i hate to say it. you know the team i root for but this is a real, real problem for the democrats. i don't know if this is how off the table.

we can talk about -- they are extreme differences but to most of the country and talking to moderate democrats over the weekend this is an example to carry on. we lost this thing. to the independents there is a real murky water and unfortunate situation. >> this is a political problem because of political mishandling of this. there shouldn't be a legal problem. the biden team found the documents, immediately turned them in unlike donald trump who took them purposefully, held them, lied to the doj. >> defied a subpoena. >> lawyers defied to the doj. has long-term negotiations and trump people find out the doj is looking the next day trump sends

people in and having a move of the documents. completely different but politically murky. not legally from what we know but police cli it is. >> seems avoidable. i have a few questions i can't figure out. matt, the new piece is "democrats quickly got tired of appearing competent." the streak was bound to screech to a halt. after a year dems are in disarray again. these sins may seem small when compared to republican dysfunction and weirdness but the goal isn't to be slightly more competent than the other side. if democrats are smart they show political courage, get ahead of

the problems and cooperate with appropriate investigations, realize that some conservative concerns like the border crisis is valid and serious. i think they do. 2022 is not a popular mandate but a desperate cry far political party that is not crazy or evil. zero days without an accident. this is where i wonder if there's more to it. discovering the documents they should have been transparent. why wasn't there transparency? did the doj or nation ail archives or a concern to do a full search and see what they have and then share it? i think it's a mistake but why was that decision made from the get-go not to say something? >> i don't understand. that's why i'm asking why the

staff did what the staff did. this isn't like donald trump putting the arms around this going mine, mine, mine. >> and eating them. >> flushing them down the toilet. >> weirdo. >> this is joe biden and papers got in different places. that said, the lack of transparency from november on. and the fact that they keep discovering documents. come on! come on! this is amateur hour. why did they keep discovering documents? why don't they put out admiral kirby who has dealt with classified documents -- >> comfortable with this information. >> and have him go out and a complete run down top to bottom.

i love transparency. investigate trump and biden. i'm quite confident that ends badly for donald trump. >> yeah. i think so, joe. look. since it's nfl -- was nfl wild card weekend, i'll use this football analogy. momentum swings. i think they're real. psychological, supernatural. they matter. once a team can be on defense for half the game and then something happens and it shifts the momentum and happens in politics. remember the afghanistan withdrawal i think set off a chain reaction democrats on the heels and then they got the mojo back and the democrats established the brand as being the sane, decent party and lasted through the midterms and

culminated with this republican sort of displaying the dysfunction with that very chaotic election of kevin mccarthy as speaker and now the momentum shift. i think it is very, very damaging again. what happened with the classified documents erodes and undermines the momentum and the brand democrats building of being not only the competent party but the decent, honest party. it looks like they were trying to hide that and cover that up until after the midterms so i think we'll see if this is a momentum shift that lasts well into 2023 but after stringing together several very, very good months. they're off to a bad, bad start in 2023. >> john heilemann, take matt lewis' theory to you.

finger pointing. democrats frustrated at the unforced errors bety white house as it pales comparison to the mar-a-lago saga but democrats did have momentum. what do you think? is this going to disrupt that? is this story going to fade from the headlines? have things reset now entering a new era in washington? >> you know, i think it's -- i totally accept the notion of matt lewis of momentum in politics. the former chairman of the national republican committee hayley barbour used to say good gets better and bad gets worse. i agree but i would pause saying there's no doubt that this is a fumble, the democrats and white house in particular i would say

coughed up the ball and unforced error. but your question, lemire, the right question. the republicans have thrown interception after interception. this is the point of joe. throwing interceptions on every possession for six years. my question is, it is true. democrats fumbled the ball on this possession. the question is what happens now? we are going to head into -- we have the challenges of kevin mccarthy of keeping that party together, that caucus and the house. trying to govern ungovernable a republican party internally. we have the debt ceiling coming up. government funding coming up. the state of the union coming

up. the questions about what will happen, if this is a fumble or the beginning of a series of fumbles to approach the devastating consequences that republicans suffered after interceptions. that's the question. the white house and the democrats can put it together if they get back on track. if this is the beginning of the pattern they have a problem. >> they need to be competent, transparent. they need to get -- they need -- it is -- again, finishing the football metaphor. it's basically blocking and tackling. get the facts out there. get it behind you. let the doj investigate it and things will be fine. not so for donald trump most likely. >> right. >> but if they do that, if they do that starting today, no more questions. no more questions and answer

every question today that you can answer. get it out there. make sure there are no surprises like on saturday. this will become an old story. it will. until -- until the special counsel comes forward with whatever recommendations there are. but yeah. jonathan's right. republicans have been throwing interceptions for six years. that should be the focus of the white house. get this behind them to focus on the fumbles, the interceptions. >> that's what made the democrats win in many cases. lauren, your latest piece is entitled "democrats' 2024 prospects rise thanks to gp extremism." voters have made clear their views on the most extreme

candidates for office. candidates on either side that are extremes lost more than they won. they prefer stability. democrats to retake the house majority in 2024 they need to learn from the three biggest mistakes in 2020. turn around weak state party infrastructure in key states such as new york. invest heavily in the closest purple states and districts. lay the groundwork for a coalition of democrats to select moderate candidates. nationally republicans outperformed democrats in the midterms by more than 3 million votes. democrats never expected to do as well as they did. national democrats focused on defending vulnerabilities than

opportunities. with the country so closely divided democrats can afford no unforced errors. the work must begin now to plan for investments in the right places. joe, bringing us back to matt's piece, the mid terms were a big victory for democrats but that's because it was a desperate cry for a party that's not necessarily evil or crazy. not necessarily for the democrats. >> you know, you look at new york. you look at florida. the failings of the democratic party in both states monumental. my god, they loued george santos to win. >> whoa. >> if they handled new york correctly, akeem jeffries would

be speaker of the house. if they had actually organized in florida democrats would have picked up one or two house seats in florida. you are so right. the entire political world would look differently if they had organized not great. if they just organized in new york and florida. >> if you look at the closest five congressional seat it is combined number of votes that separate democrats from the majority is les than 7,000 votes. colorado 560 votes. look at how many votes maloney lost by. 1,800 votes. a seat in california less than 600 votes. another seat in colorado less than 1,000 votes. when you look at how close we were it is hard to feel about

new york is political malpractice. not just the george santos but shawn patrick. total screw-up after redistricting process that left candidates to run for ten weeks. the point is you think of places like new york. the infrastructure for democrats in the state of new york is a mess. it is a very weak state party. long island democrats have no infrastructure. so like you look at the map for '24 seeing how close democrats were and then the extent to which the majority of republicans have is a chance to completely own the national narrative, to gaslight on issues, to kick members of congress off the intel committee on fake news and with momentum that's why they have the

momentum in the news cycle in the majority. look at '24. look at michigan. it's a huge opportunity for democrats but look at the places where democrats lost by the thin margins. a point about the congressional seat in colorado which you will appreciate. adam frisch, a reason he lost is left leaning democrats in his own district thought he was too moderate and didn't turn out. democrats did as well as they did with the moderate candidates in purple districts. the left flank has to supporter candidates that aren't as left leaning but if the alternative is an anti-democracy on the right the left leaning democrats if they don't turn out it is a

huge disadvantage. >> he's not progressive enough? >> exactly. >> wow. >> wow. >> you mentioned george santos. >> very sad story. his knees? no. i look at him now walking and i hurt. >> nope. nope. don't do it. >> two knee replacements. praet young. >> it is too easy. >> "washington post," santos -- we'll dig into this when we understand the story better. which usually doesn't stop it. he has connections. i kid you not. with the sanctioned russian oligarch. >> okay. let's turn to the ongoing saga of republican congressman george santos. he made this claim back in 2020 on a new york radio show.

>> i actually went to school on a volleyball scholarship. >> you did? >> i did. yeah. when i was in baruch we were the number one volleyball team. >> did you graduate from baruch? >> great. so did i. >> thank you don't show the bias which is very interesting but another conversation but we went to play against harvard, yale and we slayed them. we slayed them. we were champions across the entire northeast corridor. every school that came up against us shaking at the time. i'm the smallest guys and i'm 6'2". i got knee replacements playing volleyball. that's how serious i took the game. >> remember this name, folks. george santos. >> i remember it. i got to remember it.

>> so he wept to baruch. i know that the professors are glad, very glad that he is talking about how good they are. >> okay. >> not biassed. >> all right. this whole thing is -- >> slayed harvard and yale. >> santos claiming that -- >> it is sad. two knee replacements. >> he didn't have -- >> two. sad! >> he didn't have knee replacements. he did not play volleyball. this guy is a pathological liar. it is a really -- it is troubling. he is not fit to serve. what should be done? blah blah blah. also not well. new reporting indicates that some republicans knew about santos' lies. "the new york post" interview with santos first called the lies a running joke among republicans. and "the new york times" article goes into detail quoting in late 2021 preparing to make a second

run for a new york city house seat george santos gave permission for the cam pinto routine a routine background study on him and the vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late november of 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. when mr. santos disputed the key finds and vowed to continue running members of the campaign team quit according to three of the four people "the new york times" spoke to with knowledge of the study. the times requested responses from santos' lawyer saying a comment would be inappropriate given the investigations. his congressional spokeswoman did not respond. never seen anything like this. >> breath taking.

the knees, the professors. >> i don't know. it is not good. >> slaying harvard and yale. donny deutsch? wow. >> yeah. wow. >> republican party needs to do something here. >> it keeps going. >> he is obviously not well. i root the republican party to keep him along. they're crazy, liars. you can brand the party. keep him around, republicans. we love it. that's who you are. you are george santos, the party of untruths. good for the democrats. >> matt lewis, what a clown show. >> you have to wonder what it is like to be a republican staffer in 2023. you have conservative leaders

allegedly groping you in cars. saying they're jew-ish. interesting time to be a mainstream republican operative and leaving. maybe what they should do is come forward and leak the information. i have to think to a certain degree donald trump was a magnet for this, that people like george santos in the past might have concluded i'll run a different drift but maybe not politics and the republican party is an appealing place for joernl santos. i don't think it's a coincidence he chose this moment in time and the career to go into. >> yeah. >> hmm. >> truth is so devalued in the republican party. i think it is a great point.

we are talking about george santos. why i make light about him talking about knee replacements and lying about being a volleyball player is because i find it far more concerned that kevin mccarthy talked about how donald trump was a threat to american democracy and responsible for january 6 and kevin mccarthy had said donald trump was running that he believed donald trump was taking money from vladimir putin then speaker of the house ryan, paul ryan told him to be quiet. he believed trump was taking money from vladimir putin. then kevin mccarthy said on january 6 what he said and then tries to completely wash that to the side. and then take lindsay graham.

he say it is same thing about donald trump and then sucks up to donald trump. says one thing trying to deep six merrick garland's nomination and different trying to get amy coney barrett to the supreme court. they lie every day. we could say the same thing about the documents. the classified documents don't matter. and then suddenly classified documents are the most important thing. this guy sa clown. it is one seat. the real disease is the leaders in the senate and the house just lying to the american people and the coincidences are huge to american democracy. >> kevin mccarthy is not

condemning george santos. >> why should he? >> i don't think he recognizes the problem. >> when american democracy is on the line! >> yep. >> he lies about that later. so yeah. that versus a clown from long island talking about knee replacements? what kevin mccarthy is doing, what lindsey graham is doing is far worse than what this clown is doing. >> yeah. he does seem to be the natural revolution of the trump republican party in many ways. lauren, 2009 volleyball team did win the title. george santos wasn't on the team. when he is running away from reporters in the capitol hallways he looks good for a guy with two knee replacements. this idea is that he is a fraud but he is more symbolic of a

deeper rot within the republican party and willing to lie and accept lies in the name of power. do you see any way that this is -- santos we should think is the bottom or won't be and where the republican party is going? >> didn't we give up on trying to call the bottom a few years ago. the loser here is democracy. the more we normalize these kinds of people the more acceptable it becomes to do the other-ism. liars on the democratic and republican side and hurling that. debases the institutions and that debasing ultimately is part of the emotion of democracy. americans are smart and been rejecting this stuff. voters on long island are upset. they are the big losers here. we all need to be rooting for strong institutions with good

people working in them because it is in all of our interest. >> all right. lauren, matt, thank you both very much for insights this morning. donny deutsch, that is. you will be back in the next hour. brand up and brand down. i'm excited. >> i came home last night and nasa scientists watching this. we'll have it ready for you. >> okay. still ahead on "morning joe" we are reflecting on the life of martin luther king. please stop misplacing classified material. former cia officer joins us with

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martin luther king jr. was killed tonight at memphis, tennessee. he died in a hospital an hour later. last night he said this. >> i don't know what will happen now. we've got some difficult days ahead. but it really doesn't matter with me now because i've been to the mountaintop. >> i've always been like everybody haunted by this speech and the words that rang out. i remember the first time hearing it at first baptist church in -- i think it was doorville, georgia, they played it for us. but i have been haunted by him

talking about the mountaintop and the imagery that he gave. moses not getting to the promised land but seeing the promised land. and knowing that his people were going to get to the promised land. what was so remarkable about him talking about how longevity had a place and he said it before the night he was assassinated. as you said, he almost didn't give this speech. it was raining outside. it was miserable. talk about the lead-up to one of the -- what you consider and i think what most of us consider one of the great speeches in

american history. >> it really is. it was storming in memphis and he wasn't all that excited about going to the church of god headquarters there to deliver this speech. deliver this sermon. ralph aber that -- abernathy talked him into it. the words are indelible because of what happened the next day but they're also -- it is important when you look at the whole speech, it is about economic justice, why he is in memphis. he is in memphis to support striking sanitation workers. he is trying to take the dream to the next step. he is trying to get from opening access to making sure there's a path to prosperity for everyone

and the moses imagery as you note is so amazing. part of the song of moses in deuteronomy is moses says remember the days of old. ask the fathers and they will tell you and show you. that's what the king cannon is. remembrance not as a passive day. he is not about contemplating a statue and go back to what we do anyway. it is an action to remind us why we do what we do and what it should be. >> reverend al sharpton, you remember and you move forward and push forward the legacy. later on this morning with the president of the united states

and civil rights leaders. i'm curious your thoughts where we were, where we need to go on this martin luther king jr. day. >> i was 13 years old and i became youth director of the new york chapter and appointed by reverend william jones and jesse jackson and jesse was there. my mother born and raised in alabama started crying like it was a member of our family. i was part of the organization but i didn't know why my mother was talking it like a cousin orr

an uncle. she said you had to grow up like i did to understand. i began understanding that what he saw from that mountaintop was an america that many of us didn't see as bad as our parents but still saw from our parts being unequal and he was saying he left a message to keep going until we got to the promised land. in those days the battle was there was some in the black community saying dr. king outran the relevance. he remained steady that i believe we can make it in america, we can do it nonviolently and change laws and stay the course. his wife had to kind of keep me on that path.

martin luther iii and his wife has always reminded me and she kept us younger in the next generation martin believed in america and the way to change america and that's what we will talk about today. it's not a day to take off but to take on and turn america on to finishing the road for equal opportunity. we go live to capitol hill where congress has days left to deal with the debt ceiling. can they get it dub? we kick off the week in washington straight ahead on "morning joe." hello, world. or is it goodbye? you know, it seems like hope and trust are in short supply.

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if our democracy was settled not for african americans but democracy is an institutional structure was settled, but it's not. it's not. we have to choose community over chaos or we, the people, are going to choose love over hate. these are the vital questions of our time, and the reason i'm here as your president. i believe dr. king's life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention. >> joining us now, senator and reverend raphael warnock. he serves as senior pastor at ebenezer baptist church in atlanta, the former pulpit of reverend dr. martin luther king jr., bringing special perspective to the table. >> special perspective. reverend, i understand that the right reverend joe biden came to the church yesterday. >> that's nice.

>> how did they do? did the congregation start to nod off or sneak out before the president was done or did he hold the audience? >> we were honored to host the president yesterday, and i've got breaking news here. he clapped bob arnot on the one and the three but on the two and the four. he understands the tradition. >> thank god. all the people said amen. >> amen. >> you have been with politicians before i'm sure that have clapped on the one and the three and ul you can do is shake your head. so, obviously, you have such a unique view, vantage point not only of what this day means but also just of to king legacy. you have had the great responsibility of carrying that on your shoulder every sunday when you get behind the pulpit. so, tell us, someone with that

unique legacy who's also on the front lines in the fight for civil rights in the united states senate, tell us where we are, tell us -- because we know we have a long way to go as a nation -- tell us how far king has gotten us over the past 50 years or so and what we still have to do as a nation. >> listen, there's no question that i live in a world very different from what my parents experienced as a result of dr. king's work. i was born in 1969, one year after dr. king's death. i never drank from a colored water fountain. i never sat on the back of a bus as my dad did, who was a world war ii veteran, asked to give up his seat to a white teenager while wearing his soldier's uniform. >> oh, god. >> so there's no question about the impact of dr. king's

ministry and his work on american life, and yet as martin iii said earlier, we still have a lot of work to do, and i'm honored to do that work every single day, both as a pastor and now in the united states senate. >> reverend warnock, one of things that struck me as i was watching some of what president did yesterday, as you know speaking at our breakfast in washington this morning, is people don't know that you are not only a pastor and senator, you were an activist. i remember, and you wrote this in your book, when we were protesting a police killing in new york, you actually submitted to nonviolent arrest with diallo with dr. dizon and dr. james forbes, and you would always say as long as it's nonviolent and church based, you're there. but part of your legacy is the

night that barack obama and joe biden were elected the first black president of the united states, you opened your church doors and let us have what we call the knight service and i have that picture of dr. king's sister, christine, and you and i broke down and cried when they announced obama as the president. this kind of your evolving is also the part of our struggle and you bring that history to the senate. >> look, i think as you point out, reverend sharpton, what dr. king taught us is that leadership is not about an office, it's about an orientation. and i've been trying to do this work long before i came to the united states senate, as you pointed out. i was arrested i guess 20 years ago or so in the wake of the killing of amadou diallo, an african immigrant who was shot and killed while standing on his own porch. five years ago i was arrested in

the united states capitol fighting for health care and challenging the fact that in the farm bill they were going to take away important benefits for nutritional and food security. well, five years later i'm in the senate and get to write the bill. and what i hear on this day is martin luther king jr. saying to all of us that we need leaders who are not, he said, in love with money but in love with justice, not in love with publicity but in love with humanity, leaders who can subject their own ego to the pressing issues of the cause of freedom. the united states senate and united states congress could benefit from hearing that message right now, centering the people rather than the politicians. coming up, is there a mishandled message about the mishandled documents? how the white house is facing the fallout surrounding president biden and classified

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it is exactly the top of the fourth hour of"morning joe," 6:00 on the west coast. a foggy l.a. this morning.

it's 9:00 a.m. on the east coast. jonathan lemire and john heilemann are back with us for the hour. we have a lot to get to including millions in california are under flood alerts after bands of thunderstorms battered the state this weekend. we'll have the latest for you. also ahead, at least 68 people have died in nepal after a plane making a 27-minute flight crashed into a gorge. it is the country's deadliest airplane accident in three decades. we'll have the details for you. plus, the latest from the war in ukraine, where a missile struck an apartment building in the city of dnipro. emergency crews worked around the clock to rescue as many as possible. and later this hour, buffalo's safety damar hamlin was remarkably cheering on his team from the comfort of his own home as a wild weekend in the nfl playoffs had fans on the edge of their seats. we'll have the highlights for you as well this hour.

we begin with the new developments around classified documents found in president joe biden's personal collection. on saturday, white house lawyer richard sauber revealed he had found five more classified pages from the biden administration inside biden's wilmington, delaware home. files were discovered on thursday in a room adjacent to president biden's garage. in the same box a single other document was found the previous day. when the president's personal attorneys discovered the initial documents sauber said they stopped searching because they lacked the security clearance needed to handle classified material. when he returned the next day with the department of justice officials, he says he discovered the five additional pages in the same box. those files are separate from the two other batches we reported on last week, one found inside president biden's

wilmington garage and another document found inside an office he previously used at the pen biden center in washington, d.c. sources tell nbc news that one of those documents was marked with the highest security classification, but the level of all of the others is still unknown. house oversight committee chairman james comber is criticizing president biden's handling of classified documents and demanding more information from the white house. in an interview on cnn yesterday, he was confronted with a clip where he previously said investigating trump's mishandling of classified documents would not be a priority for his committee. take a look. >> i don't know much about that. that's not something that we've requested information just to see what was going on because i don't know what documents were at mar-a-lago. so that's something we're just waiting to see what comes out of that. >> but is it fair to say that

investigation will be a priority? >> that will not be a priority. >> so what are you saying to viewers who don't understand why president biden's documents seem like a big priority for you but president trump, who took hundreds more documents, did not comply with the subpoena, did not reach out to the national archives or the justice department to say, hey, we found these documents, it's not a priority? do you only care about classified documents being mishanded when democrats do the mishand snlg. >> absolutely not. we still don't know what type of documents he had. just because they turned over five documents, they could have turned over 500 documents. i'm sorry, but i don't have a lot of confidence in president biden's personal lawyers. we don't know exactly what trump had versus what biden had. at the end of the day, my biggest concern isn't the classified documents to be honest with you. my concern is how there's such a

discrepancy in how former president trump was treated by raiding mar-a-lago, by getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor, by going through melania's closets. >> oh, yes, there was a discrepancy. it could have been a lot more aggressive, actually. by the way, if republicans go after this ferociously, number one they've revealed their blatant hypocrisy as you saw there, and two they pointed out the mar-a-lago case is indeed a big issue. let's bring in nbc news capitol correspondent ali vitali. what are you hearing on capitol about how republicans are going to continue to handle this situation, which is clearly politically perilous for the biden administration? it's not good, but it's nothing like the mar-a-lago documents. >> yeah. i'm glad you point that out, mika, because of course the immediate parallels that all of us are rightly are talking about

is regarding what happened mar-a-lago versus what's going on with president biden. politically, you're right that this is a gift to republicans. they were looking to go aggressively after the biden administration anyway on everything from covid funding to the afghanistan withdrawal to the more controversial investigations into hunter biden's laptop. so now we're seeing them being able to tangibly latch on to something. but talking about the ways these cases are different, it's different in terms of number of documents, hundreds at mar-a-lago versus roughly a dozen at this point regarding president biden, but also the level of cooperation between the biden team immediately reaching out to doj versus the trump team stone walling and obstructing. all of those are really important. and i think for republicans here, the goal is really going to be to muddy the waters on this as they move forward with their investigation. that's at least true on the house side. i think the difference, mika, is what's happening on the senate side.

we've seen them be pretty consistent in terms of what democrats and republicans alike have asked for on the senate side after the mar-a-lago documents became public, they wanted a damage assessment at that point from the director of national intelligence, and now after the biden documents have become public, they've asked for the same kind of assessment. of course when special counsel get involved, it becomes that much more difficult for these briefings to occur, but i think the differences will come between the houses of congress on these issues. >> then there's the debt ceiling, which we're supposedly going to hit on thursday. what's the possibility of negotiations culminating in some sort of deal? >> reporter: we'll see the debt ceiling hit on thursday. yellen said last week she'll take the extraordinary measures to keep spending and funding through potentially early june is where she puts that. that's the coming point is summer and that's where we've seen the fruits of the concessions that mccarthy has laid out to the rightward flank

of his party on government spending. that's when this will come to roost. mccarthy has floated this idea maybe they could cap discretionary spending and do a temporary halt on the debt ceiling. democrats want to continue to raise the debt ceiling and not allow the u.s. to default on its credit. that would be catastrophic for the economy. congress loves a deadline and it looks like summer so we're early in this. but yellen is establishing the time line. at the end of last year, while democrats had control of the house and senate, there was a lot of conversation about whether or not while they had the majority they should try to raise the debt limit because the known quantity of knowing they had the votes to do that was better than being thrown into chaos once republicans took control of the house. that didn't happen and this is the circumstance we're dealing

with now. we'll see the way it moves forward. but i wouldn't be surprised if this took a while for republicans and democrats alike to come to some kind of agreement on. >> and you will be watching and reporting. nbc's ali vitali, thank you very much. let's bring in "washington post" national investigative report carol lenig and former cia officer and nbc news security and intelligence analyst mark. i feel like the malpractice here on the biden documents is actually in the messaging, because the cases between biden and trump-mar-a-lago are very different. but why the gaps in transparency? why the nonmessaging at all to the american people when this started? were there opportunities along the way to share with the american people what was going on? what prevented them and why?

>> it's such an important point because in the biden white house -- and even among biden's personal lawyers -- there is no concern that the president of the united states has any criminal or legal liability here, no concern. we don't know all the facts and we have to be careful about, that but that's what i'm hearing from sources. there is a concern, however, with thousand this is drip, drip, drichdripping out of the white house and makes it look like they're hiding something because it did not share the november discovery, did not reveal the december discovery. >> right. why? >> in fact, this idea that the biden white house disclosed these additional -- okay, the why. the why is because the justice department was conducting an investigation to quickly review essentially what the totality of the records were and how they were mishandled. how did they get to biden's home and to his office at the penn

biden center? and the white house folks and his personal lawyers, i'm told, believe it feels best to let the, department of justice do its work quickly, expeditiously, and without any interruption or sharing of details of the probe with the public. there's one big problem there, mika. this isn't just any old person with classified records in their garage. it's the president of the united states. and so the idea of letting the department of justice do its work quietly doesn't work because, as you know, reporters have one by one been disclosing, revealing, uncovering these facts, and it's going to keep happening. the white house i think is starting to get its arms around the idea that it has to tell its story itself as it began to do on saturday. >> yes, but i'm not sure i heard what you just said, which was, listen, the department of justice, we immediately turned what we had over to the national archives, immediately self-reported, and the

department of justice and lawyers wanted to do a broad sweep of everything, make sure we've gotten every document, do a clean sweep to get a real handle on what the situation is, and then from there -- and that's why there's the gap. they wanted to really get a sense of what the entire situation was so they could fully report this to the american people. i haven't heard that. have you? >> yes, yes. and they also, i have to say, were afraid i'm told by sources, they were afraid about the idea they might be tampering with the investigation, and tampering is a very big word, right, but they were afraid they would be interfering with it. if they say so-and-so found these records, x number of records, the fear inside the white house was, okay, well, the department of justice doesn't want us sharing the details of potential witnesses, and we don't know the full account because we didn't look at every record, so we can't say there are seven that were classified as secret and two that were

classified as top secret. again, as a comparison, mika, i would just say this is not good for the biden white house because it would have been better for them politically, optics-wise, for them to share the full account. but compare once again to the trump administration. when trump was no longer president, he fought for months to avoid turning over the records. he had a lawyer. he urged a lawyer to say that they turned over everything when he knew they had not. and then his lawyer did assert that they had turned over everything when they had not. there were still many, many classified records in his possession. none of that was disclosed to the press until various reporters were able to figure out what exactly was going on at mar-a-lago, and later more records were searched for at other locations. so it's really apples and bananas to use another person's descriptions.

but this is not good for the biden white house because he's the president. he has to be able to give a full accounting of what happened. and right now his team feels he can only give a partial account. >> "washington post" national investigative reporter carol leoning, thank you. i see a way forward saying we're following the department of justice's advice and investigation. they fully want to look into this and they don't want people scrambling all over biden's documents. they want to take a look at this and find every single document and see the extent of the problem here, we're self-reporting, we're cooperating, and, yes, we held up from saying anything because the department of justice asked us to temporarily so they could get a handle on the situation. we were cooperating with the law. that would have been something. but, mark, you have a better solution for this, and i like it a lot. it's entitled "dear politicians,

stop misplacing classified material." you write in part, "those of us who were vocal about former president donald trump's hoarding of classified documents at mar-a-lago cannot shrink from our responsibility to speak out now that president joe biden is embroiled in a related scandal. the appointment of a special prosecutor by attorney general merrick garland is important. we need to ensure total fairness and objectivity from the department of justice when it comes to investigating the mishandling of classified information, which is just flatout wrong, whoever does it. whether inadvertent or deliberate, leaving classified documents in unsecured spaces is dangerous. it risks the exposure of sources and methods. an unsecured document that maintains information from a human source can get that person killed. it can dissuade others from taking grave risks so to share exceptionally valuable information in the future. a clear and robust apolitical

message should be sent to the political world -- tighten up, everyone -- lives and america's security are at stake." couldn't agree more. but i'm curious with you, mark, if there were the discovery of a document in joe biden's garage or in the penn biden center, because of the risk that you just laid out in your article, wouldn't it make sense that the department of justice and investigators who have, you know, the ability to access classified documents and touch them, get in there, and check everything out before they let the world know, because you don't want to let the world know and have any documents that may be out there getting in inappropriate hands. what am i missing here? >> you're right. in a crisis situation like this,

there are three things that are important that would not only help the biden administration but would also be the right thing. first, president biden has to come out and own this. the buck stops with him. there's accountability here. even if it's inadvertent, it was on my watch and i accept accountability. then you explain it. instead of this drip, drip, drip of information, which of course makes the administration look like they're hiding something, you know, explain exactly what's happening. the last point is you fix it. yesterday former deputy director of the cia came out with what i call is a smart proposal, create a bipartisan commission, a task force on presidential transitions on how to get this right. own it, explain it, fix it. it's the right thing to do and it will help the administration in the long run. right now it didn't look good for them. >> john heilemann is very good at owning it and pushing for

transparency. i think the explaining is where things got weak, honestly. there was a lot of defensiveness from the white house podium, a lot of pushing back, a lot of hedging, and this is not the kind of situation where you can hedge for a second. you have to know your stuff. you have to understand it. and quite frankly, it might have been good to bring in someone who understands the handling of classified material and also at what stage in the investigation they were in so they could be fully transparent about what they know and what they don't know and why they didn't share initially. >> yeah, mika. i think you're punting your finger on something important, which is that, you know, ron klain, the white house chief of staff, is a lawyer and a smart lawyer, and it seems like in how they've dealt with this they have handled in terms of ethics, in terms of transparency

internally to the justice department, in terms of responsiveness, in terms of straightforwardness, on all legal fronts, they have handled this extraordinarily well. the public facing parts of this, the communication parts of this -- and we talk in our business all the time, we say it's a communications problem, often it's not, it's a policy problem. in this case, it seems like the biden administration, to the extent that we know, has been handling this by the book legally, but it's done a very poor job up to now in communicating with the american people. and given, you know, the politics surrounding this, because of the trump parallels, even if they are as we've said a million times totally dissimilar in almost every important way, the fact is it's a classified document. we now know two classified documents to, a former president, a sitting president,

both having special counsels looking at them, those present serious political challenges, and to address them, to minimize them, a strong, transparent, clear, forthcoming communications strategy is required. and i have a lot of sympathy for someone like karine jean-pierre who is out there -- every time a white house spokesman has to talk about things related to special counsels, historically it's always a problem because they don't know as much as they should know, et cetera, et cetera. i really do agree with you 1,000% that this is a thing they've not handled well in terms of communication so far. they must start to handle it better going forward if they're going to minimize the political risks involved and synchronize with how well they're handling it so far on the legal side getting their political communications house in order in the same way. >> so, marc -- totally agree there. i think many democrats are

nodding their heads along with john heilemann right there. marc, while we have you, we want to shift to the war in europe and get your take on some developments there. the weekend marked another escalation in russia's assault on ukraine. at least 40 civilians were killed on saturday when a missile launched by russia struck an apartment building in the ukrainian city of dnipro. emergency crews worked throughout the evening and then the following day to rescue as many as possible from the rubble of the building that was home to about 1,700 people. russia also launched a series of missiles at the cities of kyiv and kharkiv. 21 of the 33 launched cruise missiles were shot down according to the ukrainian defense ministry. russia acknowledged the missiles but stopped short of mentioning that apartment building that was devastated. at least 75 people were injured in the apartment attack, including 14 children, about 46 civilians are still missing, and we have horrible images of people being pulled from the rubble, some alive, some not

over the last couple of days. so it seems as if with the fighting frozen right to now on the actual front -- russia is only picking up the pace of these attacks on nonmilitary targets of civilians, which are described as terror strikes, but it would seem -- and please give us your analysis here -- that this is only going to harden not just ukrainian resolve, the resolve of the allies, of the west. i know there's been a lot of nerves about europe, heading into winter, recession on the horizon, how much longer will they support kyiv. they see 11-year-old girls clutching their stuffed animals being pulled out of their devastated home, doesn't that make them want to help that much more? >> exactly right. february 25th, we're coming up to the one-year anniversary of the invasion, february 24th. but february 25th if you asked american policymakers what assistance you would give ukraine, i don't think think would have sent a carton of

mres. the reason why assistance has increased to the point of patriot missile system, russian atrocity, not only ukrainian resolve gets hardened but also the willingness of the west to send tanks now. i'm hoping we'll send this attack of long-range missiles. ultimately, the way i look at this, yes, the conflict is frozen but it doesn't have to be, and the u.s. and the west has to push more for increased assistance to ukraine. lives are at stake. this was a terrorist attack in central ukraine. the carnage was horrific. but if we had provided things earlier such as more proper air defense, perhaps this doesn't happen. i think that time is of the essence. i do think they're going to see the national security council shift focus a little bit and send more advanced systems and that's the right thing to do. guy back to what ronald reagan said before he took office about the cold war. he said it's simple -- we win and they lose. i think that has to be the biden administration mantra going

forward. >> all right. former cia officer marc polymeropoulos, thank you very much for your insight this morning on both issues. up to 7 million people across california are under flood watches this morning after the state was hit with days of rain, hail, and severe winds. on saturday, president biden approved a disaster declaration to help with recovery as another wave of rain drenches the state. nbc news correspondent dana griffin has the latest. >> reporter: another atmospheric river battering the golden state, in the mountains, whiteout conditions where up to three more feet of snow the expected to bury the sierra nevada. at the same time, heavy rain is falling in places that have been soaked for weeks putting 7 million under flood alerts. some areas could see up to half an inch of rain per hour. >> it's like a freaking monsoon out there. >> reporter: with ten storms since christmas, the rain and

highly saturated soil may do more damage. this section of highway 9 closed for several weeks because, as you can see, so much heavy debris has fallen, and this is an active mudslide. they now believe the road below is compromised. president biden has approved a disaster declaration for this county as well as merced and sacramento, all to help the regions rebuild from the unrelenting deluge that's caused millions if not billions of dollars in damage. already powerful winds have toppled trees onto cars, and even blew this semi truck on its side, shutting down san francisco's golden gate bridge. this family having to use a zip line to bring food and supplies to their neighbors after a bridge washed away, cutting off access to their community. >> we're hoar! >> oh, my god. get away. >> reporter: near santa barbara, onlookers capturing this dangerously close call as one street crumbles. further south in orange county, one woman had to be rescued from

a tree as floodwaters rose around her. the wrath of these storms has killed at least 22 people, more than any single wildfire since 2018. severe storms have also ravaged the southeast, where more than a dozen tornadoes barreled through parts of georgia and alabama, killing at least 9 people. back out west, an already drenched california now hoping these latest storms don't take conditions from bad to worse. >> nbc's dana griffin with that report. coming up on "morning joe," a terrifying near miss between passenger jets at new york's jfk airport. it had one delta flight slams on its brakes with just 1,000 feet to spare. now the faa is investigating what went wrong. we'll have the details for you. also ahead, what do congress, in-n-out burger, and saks 5th avenue have in common?

"brand up, brand down" ahead in this fourth hour of "morning joe."

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at least 68 people have died in nepal after a passenger jet crashed into a gorge yesterday. while the cause of the crash is still unknown, the prime minister of nepal has set up a panel to investigate the accident. nbc news foreign correspondent molly hunter has the latest. >> reporter: overnight, investigators recovering the black boxes from flight 691, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder intact, and will help explain what caused the twin-engine atr-71 aircraft to go down on a sunny, clear day. looking out the window, this facebook live stream video shows the plane coming in for landing. it was supposed to be just a 27-minute flight, seen here in its final seconds, banking hard

to the left, rolling 90 degrees, then flying out of the shot, then you hear the terrifying impact. "a loud, thunderous crash. we saw a lot of smoke and rushed to the site." >> having that abrupt roll tells me that there's something potentially going on aerodynamically. perhaps it was a lower-than-prescribed air speed that caused one of the wings to aerodynamically stall. >> reporter: a routine trip from kathmandu to the himalayan city of pohkara. there's no word on any survivors. in contact with the airport just before crashing about a mile short of its final destination, the plane breaking apart in this steep ravine, crowds of people rushing to help, the thick, black smoke billowing, evidence the plane had plenty of fuel. it's now the scene of nepal's

deadliest aviation accident in 30 years. the high altitude, the mountains, difficult runways, and the weather all historic contributors to nepal's spotty aviation safety record but don't appear to be factors. at the airport and the hospital, relatives waiting for news. this morning the focus returns to recovery and the investigation. >> nbc's molly hunter with that report. and the faa is investigating after a near collision at john f. kennedy international airport on friday. the administration says a delta boeing 737 stopped its takeoff just before 9:00 p.m. when air-traffic controllers noticed another aircraft crossing the runway. this animation showings just how close the planes came. an american airlines plane crossed over from an adjacent taxiway and into the path of the

departing delta flight. air-traffic controllers were able to get the delta flight to slam on the brakes with just 1,000 feet to spare. take a listen. >> american. [ bleep ] >> delta 1943, cancel takeoff plans. delta 1943, cancel takeoff plans. delta 1943, can you taxi? >> yeah, we can get up the runway. delta 1943. >> delta says it's working with authorities to review the incident. american airlines deferred to the faa for comment. we'll be following that. still ahead, some of the stories making headlines in newspapers across the country, including a concerning new report on vaccination rates.

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38 past the hour. in san francisco, that is 6:38 a.m., and it's still dark out. time to get up, everybody. returning now to football and the big start to the nfl postseason. the buffalo bills earned a playoff win yesterday over the miami dolphins just weeks after safety damar hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a game. nbc news correspondent jesse kirsch has the latest. >> there it is. >> reporter: this morning the buffalo bills celebrating a wild-card win. >> buffalo is still here. >> reporter: and more progress for damar hamlin. the bills safety visiting teammates this weekend for the first time since he got out of a buffalo hospital following his onfield cardiac arrest earlier this month. >> it brought smiles and happy

tears to everybody in the building. >> reporter: while some fans hoped hamlin would make a game-day appearance in person, he tweeted, "supporting from home as i focus on my recovery. nothing i want more than to be out there with them." number 3 still remitted from the sidelines to the stands. if he's watching from home, he's here. >> he's here with us. >> reporter: live tweeting as his teammates held off the miami dolphins. >> the bengals survive! >> reporter: next up, the bills host the cincinnati bengals who beat the ravens sunday after sam hubbard recovered a goal-line fumble taking it in for a stunning 98-yard touchdown. >> he will score! >> reporter: fans in buffalo ready for the two squads to face each other once again after their regular-season meeting was called off because of hamlin's emergency. >> after what this team and the bengals went through on that monday night game, especially for all the fan, it would be special. >> reporter: in other action, the new york giants upset the minnesota vikings with this fourth quarter touchdown to put

them ahead 31-24. >> touchdown, new york! >> reporter: the giants the only underdog to win this weekend, getting their first postseason victory in more than a decade. >> for the win. >> reporter: but the wildest of the wild-card games this weekend may have been this historic comeback. >> lawrence throws. and again it's intercepted! >> reporter: the jacksonville jaguars young quarterback trevor lawrence threw four first-half interception, at one point trailing the los angeles chargers by 27 points. >> lawrence fires. into the end zone, caught! touchdown! >> reporter: but somehow the jaguars clawed back to win 31-30 on this game-winning field goal. >> keep battling. didn't matter what the score was. >> reporter: after the victory, jacksonville's qb celebrating with a late-night trip to a local waffle house. >> nbc's jesse kirsch with that report. that brings us to "brand up, brand down" with donny deutsch. number one on your list, donny,

is football. >> james earl jones gave a speech in "field of dreams" about baseball. we need a speech about football because football is america's sport. 82 of the top 100 broadcast shows last year were football, nfl football. 87 for football in total. that is staggering to think about. and really football is holding up the broadcast networks. i don't know how they would do without them. football 87 of the top 100 rated shows last year were actually football. >> i'm going to get a personal brand down the giants being good again. but we'll set aside to football for the time being. another institution that always seems to have its brand playing in the same direction, congress. >> yeah. congress. this is for congressmen and women, not necessarily the institution but the individuals themselves. gallup did a poll of what are the professions you can trust the least, that have the lease amount of ethics. basically congressmen and women

were 17 out of 18. the only profession they were ahead of, telemarketers. behind car salesmen. think about that. they rated from low to high and only 9% basically gave them a positive -- we give them a high rating in trust and believability and ethics. this is really kind of scary. >> if we go past the debt ceiling, i think the telemarketers have a chance to pass congress. congress is down, but a certain type of politician, liberals, are up. >> liberal is a world that democrats shy away from in elections far lot of reasons that seems too extreme. but 54% of democrats identify themselves as liberal. that's up dramatically from 50% in 2017 from 40% in 2010, and in 1994, only 25% of democrats called themselves liberals. interesting trend happening there. >> okay. and i see that another brand up has to do with women, women ceos. are there more of them finally. yeah, mika, this one is for you.

fortune 500 has been doing a fortune 500 for 68 years, and for the first time over 10% of ceos of fortune 500 companies are women. that happened because five new women took over as of january 1, tipping it. a long ways to go but finally above 10%, which is good news for all the good guys and women in the world. >> we need a little balance. that's all we're asking for. brand down you say worker retention. and i think i know what you're talk about. it's tough to find, well, tough to find people who really want to work or even come in sometimes. >> well, it's tough to keep them. that's what this is about. monster.com, 96% of people say they will be looking for new jobs this year. i want to say that again. 96%. of course this does not apply to staff at "morning joe," who are the happiest workers anywhere, but 96% -- giggles in the background -- 96% of people said they would be looking for a new job. the main reason is there's lack

of growth, but the main, main reason is they want higher wages. each b though wages have gone up 6.5% this year, it's not keeping up with inflation, and the average person that moved a job had a 7.7% wage increase. they're look for more money, it's that simple. look over your shoulders because your employees will be looking for jobs this year, except for "morning joe." >> brand up, models in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. i love this. >> yeah. this is a special "brand up, brand down" for mika. a lot in there for you. l'oreal has 85-year-old jane fonda as a spokesperson, 77-year-old helen mirren as a spokesperson, 57-year-old iola davis. a resurgence of models in their 60s, 70s, 80s. prada for men, you have a lot of '90s supermodels, cindy crawford, coming back.

advertisers are waking up that people over the age of 18 buy their products. >> at the 30/50 summit in abu dhabi, the first one last march on and around international women's day, and we're having it again this march. we had a fashion show, we had models ranging in age from 30 to 75, and this march, porizkova is coming. it's all about diversity and different sizes, different body types, different ages, all beautiful. >> i just interviewed paulina for my podcast. >> she's amazing. >> incredible, incredible woman and how she's evolved in beauty and what not. fantastic. >> donny, a couple more. "m3gan" online. >> a funny movie. the main villain is an android

female doll that on tiktok is starting to do all these dance, and it's kind of helped promote the movie. i think kind of the interesting side bar here is will movies going forward kind of have components in them that they know are going to be social media friendly? because this is kind of a chicken and egg situation and it's been a real phenomenon. >> donny, one last one. i know anytime i'm in california i make a stop at in-n-out burger. and now i won't have to fly as far. not coming to new york yet, but we're ready, guys, anytime, but tennessee. tell us about it. >> in-n-out burger, which is this iconic brand, you had to go to california. they finally moved to nevada and arizona, now coming east of mississippi, setting up a corporate headquarters in tennessee. maybe they'll come for new york. good news for joe, my uncle, and anyone who loves in-n-out burger. >> ew. okay. lots of brand ups this morning. donny deutsch, thank you. >> one more time, i had such a nice moment over the weekend. i was at popeye's. a family from chile came up to

me, and they had a twin boy and girl, but the mother said she's a teacher and in school in santiago now they bring every monday "brand up, brand down" to teach current events to the children of santiago. once again, a nice story. >> how long do you make me sit here listening to this? donny deutsch, thank you. god. coming up, a radical theory on elections maemd it before the supreme court last month in a case that could give state legislatures certain powers. when you need some of the brightest minds in medicine. this is a leading healthcare system with five nationally ranked hospitals, including two world-renowned academic medical centers. in boston, where biotech innovates daily and our doctors teach at harvard medical school and the physicians doing the world-changing research are the ones providing care. ♪♪ there's only one mass general brigham.

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rates dropping among kids. 2% drop from before the pandemic started. experts say misinformation about the covid vaccine may have influenced parents' decisions. the gazette require teens in colorado to take a driver's education course before getting a license. a 30-hour course and receive at least 6 hours of behind the wheel training, opponents say this will impact low-income families who can't afford to spend money on these programs. and the daily times that new mexico is mandating a 30-minute recess for kindergartens through

3rd grade. they need to get one-on-one with each other and actually communicate. the supreme court is preparing to rule on a case that could transform elections across the country, if the republicans who brought moore versus harper prevail, state legislatures will be allowed to determine how elections potentially weakening the power of ballots. let's bring in newsweek editor at large, tom rogers. how could this actually turn on its head for republicans in. >> well, good morning, mika. the last two weeks on capitol hill has been all the republicans taking control of the house, and in the last hour you talked about how close it came for democrats to retain control and what they need to do

to retain control and in the middle of that is this supreme court case, the big maga legal theory known as the understood pen dense legislation theory, how that might affect the presidential elections. but the immediate case is really about gerrymandering and allowing states to draw districts. as much as the maga republican legal theorists want this case there just not much left that the republicans can do in terms of creating more gerrymandered opportunity for them in terms of house districts, this is how democrats can flip the script on republicans. to populist republican states

have pretty extreme gerrymandered states already. not enough districts that are already republican not enough districts in those states to deprive democrats of anything, the southern states with republican legislatures have no democratic representation for the most part anyway, so the real opportunity is for democrats in the populist states they have, california, new york, michigan, just those three states alone have 29 republican districts, and if the supreme court gives states this power, well, the democratic legislatures in those states can go to town which could really increase the number of democratic districts. new york was did this and was overturned by the state's courts. as you know, the control of the house of representatives as you were discussing last hour came

down to republicans being elected in new york which probably wouldn't have happened if the original plan had gone through. real opportunity here for the democrats to flip the script. roe v. wade which the republican extremists wanted badly overturned got overturned but in so doing handed the democrats a huge election issue which allowed them to do damn well in the midterm elections, this could be one where the republicans end up getting what they want or at least a compromise ruling out of the supreme court and the democrats are the ones who take advantage of it, so be careful what you wish for, maga republicans. >> tom, it's jonathan. lot of democrats are hoping that the decision doesn't come down that way. you mentioned new york, california, michigan, states that the democrats could theoretically use these increased powers, do you think that this is something they've

shown an appetite to do? >> well, i don't think that the democratic legislatures have this view that the political process should be tilted in this way, california is run by an independent state commission which draws these congressional districts, something that would be much more in keeping with good governance, but if you end up in this situation, republicans have so gerrymandered their states, democrats in those populist democratic states are going to have to think long and hard about whether or not they're really going allow one party to play one set of rules while they play by another. in so doing allow the house of representatives to be controlled by extreme practices.

democratic states are going to have to say, hey, maybe we can play that game too. >> tom rogers, thank you so much. the new piece is for news week, online now. thank you for the food for thought there. so before we go, jonathan, what are you look at today? >> well, mika, certainly is the story about the classified documents found in the collection of president biden will dominate a lot of this week in washington. we should think about martin luther king jr. and his legacy. some guests have noted the remarkable progress that the country has made. to note, we've come a long way but a long way to go but let's make this year enbetter. that's the legacy for today. >> that does it for us today. jose diaz-balart picks up the

coverage right now. good morning. 10:00 a.m. eastern. 7:00 p.m. pacific. i'm jose diaz-balart. severe weather pounding california once again, 7 million are under flood alerts right now as another round of rain drenches the already-saturated state. pressure on the white house to be more. transparent after announcing this weekend that more classified pages were found at the president biden's home. in ukraine the number of dead continues to rise as rescue workers race against the clock to find any more survivors of a terrifying attack on an apartment building. on this martin luther king jr. day, remembrances are being held across the country. also, a preview of msnbc special. we begin with the growing