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tv   The Reid Out  MSNBC  November 22, 2024 4:00pm-5:00pm PST

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♪ ♪ ♪ something has changed within me ♪ ♪ it's time to try defying gravity ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪♪
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tonight on "the reidout" -- >> did su say fake ballots? >> there could be. that's the problem. if they are letting -- >> do you have have any -- have heard stories of, you know, ballots that are fake and if so just tell us what you know. >> well, we know that ballots have been dumped. there were ballots found early on. >> pam bondi, trump's new pick for attorney general after the gaetz implosion, was at the forefront of pushing donald trump's 2020 election lies. and there is new reporting tonight that he is still not ready to let 2020 go. and how many times did trump claim he never even heard of the extreme and very unpopular project 2025? surprise. turns out project 2025 is a very big part of trump's agenda the next four years after all. tonight with the latest
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grift from donald trump to milk his followers out of their hard-earned savings, this time he is hawking a line of branded acoustic and electric guitars that along with his signature come with a prays tag of more than $10,000. just add to the pile of bibles, sneakers, watches, other things trump has been convincing his easy marks to shell out for. this of course is nothing new for trump. he has a long history of grifting. one of biggest scams was trump university. do you remember that one? >> at trump university we teach success. that's what it's all about. success. it's going to happen to you. honestly, if you don't learn from them, if you don't learn from me, if our don't learn from the people that we are going to be putting forward, people that are handpicked by me, then you are not going to make it in terms of the world of success. i think the biggest step towards
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success is going to be sign up at trump university. >> yep. just a year after "the apprentice" appeared on televisions across the country, trump opened the doors to the sham university basically promising if you signed up for his courses which with could run as much as $35,000, you could learn to be rich just like him. a lot of people took the bait. thousands of people bought that the scam across multiple states. in 2013, new york attorney general eric schneiderman filed a civil lawsuit against trump. other states weighing whether to join the lawsuit, including florida, second among states with people buying in the con. florida's attorney general at that time was pam bondi. trump's latest pick to become u.s. attorney general following matt gaetz's disastrous short run for the position. well, just four days after reports surfaced that florida could join in the lawsuit, a
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donation of $25,000 was made from the donald trump foundation to a pack supporting bondi's 2014 re-election bid. that must have been a coincidence, right? first off, i should add it is highly illegal for a foundation to make political contributions which this clearly was. wouldn't you know it a few weeks later bondi's office announced it two not take legal action against trump university. who could have guessed that? and ever since then bondi has been by trump's side. in fact, she was floated as attorney general in his first administration after trump fired jeff sessions. she served on trump's legal team during his impeachment trial in 2020. her performance was less than stellar. >> he remained on the board until april of 2019.
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>> oh, honey. you wouldn't know it from that, but she has made countless appearances on tv, especially fox, showing her loyalty, including pushing his big lie following the 2020 election. >> we do have evidence of cheating and i'll talk about that in a minute. we are still on the ground in pennsylvania. i am here right now and we are not going anywhere until they declare that we won pennsylvania. >> yeah, no, no, no. trump did not win pennsylvania in 2020. she also made sure to be by his side during his criminal trials here in new york city. >> listen, all the rights here, i am a prosecutor. former prosecutor. yeah, all the rights here go to the defendant because it's his liberty at stake and that has not been happening in this courtroom. this case should have never, ever been brought. >> one might that it is dubious
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ethically to bring one's own lawyers in to lead the department of justice. trump already announced two of his other lawyers to top doj positions. so, you know, what's one more? and sadly given some of trump's other cabinet picks she may easily sail through simple lay because to our knowledge she has not faced any allegation of sexual misconduct because that apparently is where the bar is being set. joining me is tristan snell, former assist attorney general for new york state who prosecuted trump university and ruth, history professor at new york university. thank you both for being here. tristan, the trump university scam was the start to what turned into the pam bondi scandal at the time. talk a little bit about the trump university, what was, what it did, why it wound up being dissolved. >> it was a scam. it was a wealth creation seminar
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bait-and-switch scheme wrapped in the gold veneer of the trump brand. the clip that you played a if you minutes ago had a big lie in there saying trump handpicked all of the instructors. . he never met any of them. so the whole thing, go on and on, but they promised that people would learn everything they needed to know to invest in real estate and never delivered on any of it. >> and it also in a sense led to the second trial that donald trump faced in new york, which was his charity. >> right. >> being delisted. talk about that. the actual donation to pam bondi's pac came from the charity. >> it was the source of the bondi scandal and then led to the trump foundation. my colleagues in the charities bureau at the time at the new york attorney general's office brought that case focusing on that illegality and other fraud that occurred and shut down the foundation and managed to get a
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$2 million victory. >> so people understand where we are in terms of the corruption, and letitia james took over in the state of new york, wasn't just fishing after trump. things led to her going after donald trump's companies and his charities. >> trump was already a recidivist before letitia james came into office. the notion that she was somehow looking for targeting trump, that's crazy. it's like, okay, we have a list of all of the people who have been climbing and he is on it, maybe we should keep on looking into those people who have been crime-ing. >> the reason i wanted to start here is because corruption is sort of the coin of the realm in autocratic governments. we talked about kakistocracy, one of my favorite words. it's not just government by the worst people, but people who are willing to do corruption. pam bondi as a lobbyist had clients, you know, big clients. amazon, gm, uber, the nation of
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qatar. she comes in with a history and that history includes a very dubious tie to donald trump. what do you make of the idea of her being the highest law enforcement officer in the country? >> i mean, she has the quality that he wants far more than expertise or professionalism. she is loyal. and this autocratic models of loyalty, the loyalty can have no bounds. you have to do whatever the leader asks you to do. and she has worked long and hard to get to this nomination. she has been a true believer, you know, forever. she also, like in 2016 at the republican national committee people started chanting "lock her up" about clinton and she said, yes, lock her up, i love that. and so she has been stumping for him. she showed up at the criminal trial. she has done all of the loyalty
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performances and he watches who comes out in support of him at his moments of duress, and he had many because of his own corruption, the impeachments, et cetera, and she has been there every time. so this is the reward. and he knows he can count on her to do whatever he asks her to do. so he used to call william barr my attorney general. will be double the case now if she becomes the attorney general. she'll certainly be his attorney general. >> right. i mean, and donald trump always said he wants his roy cohn. he is stacking the doj with roy cohn. cassidy hutchinson was the star witness in the january 6th hearings house hearings. she says that trump figures sought to influence her testimony and she names pam bondi. pam bondi, florida's former attorney general, even let hutchinson know one night in march she had been the topic of conversation with a job working with the republican heavyweight was discussed. pam texted me that night and
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said something, susie, we had dinner with potus at mar-a-lago tonight. call matt next week. he has a job for you that we think you would be great at, we think you would be great in. you are the best. keep up the good work. love and miss you. so that is on the record things that she allegedly did as sort of muscle cassidy hutchinson. now listen to in 2023 what she said she would like to do to people in the department of justice. >> when republicans take back the white house, and we will, you know what's gonna happen? the department of justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted. the bad ones. the investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for president trump, they were hiding in the shadows. now they have a spotlight on them. and they can all be investigated. >> that is on the menu now to go after people who investigated donald trump for various alleged crimes.
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>> and investigating the investigators is a classic of authoritarianism because what the leader wants more than anything is to be safe, to feel safe, to feel untouchable. and so anybody prosecutors, judges, investigative journalists, anybody who has the facts and the empirical proof to harm them have to be investigated themselves. so the wheel of justice turns into -- i call this the upside down world of authoritarianism. many of the nominations like the director of national intelligence who may compromise our national security, the health and human services, you know, nomination that would spread -- who would spread disease because he doesn't believe in vaccines. and so the, you know, the a.g. who would have investigators investigated, this is classic authoritarian dynamics. >> yeah. and the other thing that donald trump seems to want done,
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tristan, is to relitigate for the umpteenth time, he did 60 court cases to prove that he actually won the 2020 election joe biden, got beat soundly by joe biden, wants to fire jack smith's team according to "the washington post" and reinvestigate 2020 again because the other thing that this particular autocrat wants psychologically, emotionally to prove he is going into his third term that he really won in 2020. apparently he will have pam bondi do that, too. >> isn't this is the guy who wants to had have a department of government efficiency? >> correct. >> and that has two people running it? nothing says having a department of government efficiency like then relitigating something that you won. you won the election. that should have been enough to say, you know what? i put that to bed whatever i felt about 2020. but no. we are going to go back and relitigate that. i mean -- >> but, ruth, it strikes me as, you know, it's -- this is an
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obsession for donald trump and it doesn't surprise me at all that he is going to work this obsession forever. he will never stop until someone in authority tells him that he beat joe biden. >> yeah. and this is the authoritarian personality. the more power they get, the more they become paranoid and more vindictive, if that's possible. so there are so many examples of this, you know, even when they force people into exile, they come and sometimes they harm them even when they have left the country, or harm the family whose stayed behind of the political exile. so they don't stop when other people with less megalomania, less paranoia stop and move on. they don't know how to move on. they relitigate, they bring up ancient histories of humiliation. they always have to be the victim. it never stops. i can tell you even those who
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will, you know, for two decades, it never stops. >> and there are people in the doj now, people that you know, that are on jack smith's team doing the work of the people trying to determine whether donald trump stole classified data and took it home and put it in his bathroom. if you are jack smith you have to think there is a target on you. if you work for jack smith, you are probably going to be unemployed soon. >> these are career prosecutors. jack smith is, too. these are not partisan people. a solid half of the people i know who have never gone into government enforcement rules are boy supreme court, girl scout republicans. they believe in flag and faith and country. and they believe in the rule of law. and that's a lot of who was in these roles and they are supposed to prosecute regardless who it is. and these are people that are now going to potentially lose their jobs because they dared to investigate the dear leader. >> at the same time though, you know, i wonder for those folks which would have been worse. working for matt gaetz with the
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accusations that are facing him and the fact that he could persecute the people who testified against him, including a young woman at the time was a 17-year-old child, and all of these other witnesses, he would have all of the details about what they said about him. there is a "new york times" piece in which they said in a sense though he -- his exit served a purpose for trump intended or not. it's made other trump choices for cabinet picks appear more reasonable by comparison. there has been very little attention given to the fact that trump intends to nominate his personal lawyer as deputy attorney general not just pam bondi and todd blanche, but emil bove who you might remember from the trial with stormy daniels having been bought off. he will also get a job as principal associate deputy attorney general. he is stacking the department of justice with his people. and what could go wrong? tristan and ruth, thank you both. coming up, trump prepares to hand over the reins to the
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project 2025 authors. so much for his disavowal of project praun during the campaign. we will get into the implications next. we will get into the implications next.
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in the months leading up to the election, donald trump and his campaign tried their best to distance themselves from the 900 page conservative manifesto known as project 2025. claiming that he knew nothing
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about it. >> i have nothing to do with project 2025. that's out there. i haven't read it. i don't want to read it. this is a document i know nothing about. it's called project 2025. i heard about it a week ago. it has nothing to do with me whatsoever. i don't know what the hell it is, it's project 2025. he is involved in project 2025 -- and then they read some of the things and they are extreme. i mean, they are seriously extreme. but i don't know anything about it. i don't want to know anything about it. >> well, most of us immediately called that out as b.s. not just because trump lies like he breathes, but one of the authors was caught on hidden camera saying this was all part of the plan. >> i expect to hear ten more times from the president distancing himself from the left's boogeyman of project 2025. >> and you are not worried about that? >> no.
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he is running against the brand. he is not running against people. he is not running against any institutions. it's interesting he's in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy. >> well, here we are. two weeks post-election and what do you know, turns out he was right. trump is now choosing several people connected to project 2025 for key roles in his new administration. including that guy that you just saw in the video there, russ vought, who trump announced as pick to lead the office of management and budget. as nbc is reporting today, the transition team is taking suggestions for potential hires from the personnel database create by project 2025. joining me is angela, president and ceo of media matters. voila. it turns out that the trump administration is full of project 2025 people. thomas homan, border czar, was a contributor.
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john ratcliffe, nominee for cia director. carr, contributor. the fcc. pete hoekstra, his pick for ambassador to canada contributor and steven miller pick for deputy chief of staff for policy contributor and russ vought, obviously, and i will add the person who put together this personnel date base that he is putting together john mcactee also tied to it. your thoughts? >> yeah, i mean, i think part of the reason it's important to note that their denials didn't hold up and they are beginning to imp implement this, it's bigger than that policy book. project 2025 was the professionalization of maga and designed to squeeze as much out of the orange in the first year not to implement the policies but to shock the am system so that they have smooth runway to basically subdue all -- and eliminate all of the safeguards and norms that would typically prevent or slow down or be speed
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bumps in undermining democracy, other things. this latest example you had the policy book, which is all of the ideas. the aspirations of project 2025. now we can use the validation that they are moving forward with to figure out where they are going. here's where they are of the other part is the personal database. it's going to be hundreds or thousands of individuals, and that was really always the tell is it doesn't matter whether they disavowed project 2025. the fact is all the personnel that trump could have hired were part of that project that been prevetted, determined where they would be slotted in. personnel is policy and those will be the people that implement it. the news about russ vought it's worth noting he wrote of piece of project 2025 called the playbook designed to be private. the first 180 days look like, compilation of the executive orders, instructions or agencies, legal memos required to validate instructions.
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it is going to be full scale implementation of what everybody was talking about in the summer. >> and what it means in a sense is that donald trump has a plug-and-play presidency. he doesn't have to do a lot. it's already all written down. he will with the people in place. he is going to move out the career people who would stand in the way of some of the things that are outright illegal or institutional he will just have his loyalists to get rid of 50,000 some odd career employees. who would be in charge of the list of who they would replace -- this is john mcactee, some of you might have known from his frequent tiktok videos in which he mocks women who can no longer get abortions. he is the co-founder of the conservative dating app the right stuff. and he jokes about only men being able to vote. that guy is once again going to be this charge of personnel and he wrote the list.
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he helped create the list, right, of the new employees. >> that's right. he oversaw the database, the part that is going to implement it. they replace individuals or restaff the government or staff the government like any new administration does. these individuals are not just a repository of resumes. they vetted them to make sure they never said anything opposed to trump, there was full loyalty. why that matters, especially in what they are planning to do, one of the things russ vought is advocating is to weaponize the doj. he also is somebody that is advocating for deploying the military against u.s. citizens to quelch dissent or protest. a guy like john mcactee and that database, they check off all the boxes in terms of professional skills. oh, they are sufficiently loyal they will allow us to do all these things otherwise would be illegal or not allowed to be done. >> and you can't say that -- i want you to say more about that
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because you are talking about deemploying the u.s. military. remember mark esper, donald trump's secretary of defense for a while, said you can't shoot american citizens. he is going to replace people in the department of defense who say you can. and that you can deploy the military against protesters, that you can arrest journalists for reporting things that donald trump doesn't like. that sort of thing, right? >> that's exactly right. one of the things that russ vought did after he left this administration and has ban referenced with that agenda is they have been building out the legal documentation to justify internally the deployment of the military. it sounds hysterical. this sounds outrageous. no. this is part of the plan. they literally wrote a plan down and then prepared all of the supporting documentation so they could check off that box and then this where the personnel piece comes in.
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they are making sure they have the right people to implement it. russ vought gave a speech where he talked about the fact that he was planning on doing this or have the resources ready to so that if there was a sufficient blow back they could deploy it. i want to put a bow on it. one of the through lines here why they want to sort of -- not just revenge against political opponents. that gets a lot of fear. the part that sounds out to me the rationale why they need to do these things end multiculturich in america. that's what russ vought said. go after immigrants first, implement these big radical changes this is the beginning of the end of multiculturism in america. >> and what is is the opposite of multiculturism? >> america. diversity. sorry. the opposite is what they want, which is ethno nationalist state. >> correct. google those two things and you will understand what the end game is. thank you very much. scaring is caring as we say on
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the show? coming up, trump's quest to rebuild the country into one of the billionaires into one of the billionaires by the billionaires and for the billionaires continues at full speed. that's next. eed. that's next. do your dry eyes still feel gritty, rough, or tired? with miebo, eyes can feel ♪ miebo ohh yeah ♪ miebo is the only prescription dry eye drop that forms a protective layer for the number one cause of dry eye:
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it is inevitable. chloe! hey dad. they will grow up. [cheering] silly face, ready? discover who they are. [playing music] what they want from this world. and how they will make it better. and while parenting has changed, how much you care has not. that's why instagram is introducing teen accounts. automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. ♪♪ ♪♪ the greatest trick donald trump has pulled on the middle class is convincing them that he is somehow fighting for them. when he is really just fighting
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for the billionaire class. look at the people he hired and nominated and you will realize how anti-worker he is. lawyers for billionaire sugar daddy elon musk and jeff bezos are currently trying to get the conservative fifth circuit court of appeals to declare the national labor relations board is unconstitutional. a long sought after goal of republicans who want to drive t drive a stake through the heart of unions across the country. a trump appointed federal judge in texas reversed a biden rule that would have expanded overtime pay to roughly 4 million low wage workers. guess who that judge sided with? a group of business organizations who didn't like paying workers a fair wage, which tracks for a judge appointed by a scab who said this. >> i used to hate to pay overtime. when i was in the private sector they say, oh, i don't want -- you know, i shouldn't tell you this. i would get other people and let
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them work regular time. that's terrible. no, get me ten other guys. i don't want to have time and a half. i don't want to have -- >> joining me now is democratic strategist and msnbc political analyst basal, and christine gear, author of how to build a democracy. christina, this is an incredible trick that the republican and that the right in general played of getting working class non-college voters particularly to side wholesale with the republican party which is literally against fair wages, against overtime, and in favor of everything that billionaires want and voila. how have they been able to do that? >> well, joy, i have quoted lbj on the show several times. to paraphrase, if you give the poorest of the white man someone to look down on you can pick his pockets all day long. if you convince him long enough,
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it's what they have done it for decades. you are going to union workers and saying i don't support unions, i support scabs, i don't like paying overtime. i am going to bust up the framework of the american economy and people still vote for him. they are voting against their interests consistently pause they are not looking at donald trump and his best friend billionaire standing next to him. he says you don't have it because immigrants took it, because barack obama and his fancy educated black friends took it. he said thisst consistent consi. they say it's all about economic anxiety which we know that african americans understand especially african american women understand the brunt of economic anxiety because we are paid 66 -- >> yeah,yeah, basal we, talked this in the break. i mean, you literally had, you know, donald trump promise tariffs which will raise prices on everyone to christina's
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point, he is anti-union, hates paying overtime, he hates paying overtime, his judge has overturned an overtime rule that would have helped millions of people. his economic -- actually, kamala harris closed with him on the economy at the end. they were polling evenly. trump squeaked through a win. and i have seen some of the interviews with people, even union people, who voted for this anti-union person. they didn't mention tariffs or any -- they mentioned trans kids playing sports. so he is able to get them to pivot their focus to immigrants and trans kids and ignore the economy. >> you know, he talked about ending civil service protection for federal workers. i talked to national labor leaders before the election and they had said that in the biden administration through that infrastructure bill in many other policies, they got better pro-union policy than they have seen since the national labor relations act.
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and that's stunning when you think about it. and you add to that the fact that there were labor unions out there organizing nail salon workers, workers at mcdonald's, amazon, starbucks. so this activity is happening. parts of that older democratic coalition are working for the working class. but there are so many voters as you acknowledged as christina said that voted against their own interests because donald trump got people to say it's the economy, but what it really is this anger and validation of it their feelings against things like rights for the transgender community, black lives matter, dei, ruchtive rights, on and on and on. >> and angelo made the point, it's really important, the through line in project 2025 isn't about the economy either. it's deconstructing the administrative state and ending multiculturalism throughout the 900 some odd pages. in every field ensuring that there is no multiculturalism and the opposite of multiculturalism of course is ethnonationalism.
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and i want to go through one other thing because we have the house and we were controlled by republicans. they passed this bill that would allow the treasury department to target non-profits that it has decided support terrorism. first of all, it's against the law to support terrorist groups. and what this bill would do, it would allow any nonprofit that is disfavored to be label terrorist supporting them also mention unions and being able to go after union organizing. so, you know, the aclu is mentioned. and so this is in a tremendous power it would give donald trump's treasury secretary. >> yes. and i'm trying not to have apiary anxiety. theong thing that i say is republicans tend to overplay their hand. so many of the donald trump policies and project 2025 are reductive. it is all about starving the american economy, starving american people and dismantling
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hard-fought battles that built up institutions and infrastructure in this country. so in the next two years if they succeed in dismantling some of this -- and lots of universities are nonprofits as well. how you define terrorism can be quite willy-nilly compared -- very broad. but what i'm hoping is that the american people have spoken, right. i tell my students, everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten and can learn from hip-hop, right. don't save her, she doesn't want to be saved. we are in a moment with america where they spoke and said they want these reductive policies. once they get them i honestly feel that so many americans whether recognize the mistake that they have made that kamala harris dutifully laid out for them consistently. we shall see. >> and a couple other things quickly. north carolina republicans because -- people don't believe in democracy, have voted to strip the power from the newly elected statewide democratic
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governor and attorney general. so they are saying we won't let you govern in the state. i want to put a pin in that. i want to play this because the idea that we are not going to allow you to do progressive policy that helps people and women of color here is the ei bill. >> the bill says ban anything that acknowledges racism. a few pages later in the same bill there are multiple provisions discussing the presence of racicism. this is as predictable as it is nonsensable. they say racism does not exist. on the other hand they are saying there is ramp pant reverse race imp. how do you reverse something that never existed in the first place? riddle me that. >> indeed. >> this is an attempt to literally cut people off at the knees. it's to take away all of their -- not only their legislative power but their intellectual power. it's startling it's happening, but we have seen it happen many, many times to not just in north
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carolina. if you back to florida, the bills considered in florida to take all of their kind of instruction even the work that d 9 get more inclusive curriculum, all of that being taken out of everything that happens in schools. this is a way to cut the intellectual power or political power, social economic power of people of color. >> before we about, we are out of time, i want to give you good news. if you missed matt gaetz, you can find him now on cameo and pay him $500 to send you a birthday greeting. look how far he has fallen. laughing right now in -- he is on cameo. i thought that would be a good laugh for folks. it's friday. thank you very much. former speaker of house is giggling about that right now. how repressive regimes are not alone in using spyware to hack into citizens' cellphones. scary stuff. stay with us. s' cellphones.
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in total prizes won. so now the easiest way to enjoy the lottery is right in your pocket. jackpocket. download america's number one lottery app today. my friend ronan farrow has spent years digging into the ways even democratic small d governments with spy on citizens through the use of commercial spyware. it is far from some dark dystopian future. this week in "the new yorker" farrow reports on how immigration and customs enforcement or i.c.e. signed a comfort for a spyware technology that is the agency that will be involved in executing the trump
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administration's promises of mass deportation. in his documentary surveilled, farrow travels around the world to expose the dark multibillion-dollar commercial spyware industry, including this interview with a former employee of one of the most prominent companies the israeli company nso group and its spyware pegasus. how they turn your phone into a spy in your pocket. >> what was the pitch that were offering these governments? >> usually we have one iphone, one android device. we used to demonstrate how we can exfiltrate data from those devices and take snapshots of the screen or pictures from camera. that could be forwarded. >> what should the average citizen in any country in the world know about this company and this technology? >> it's very powerful. it's very intrusive. >> should people be concerned? >> yeah. >> ronan farrow joins me now,
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surveilled is now available to stream on max. ronan, always good to see you. terrifying to see you. talk about this technology and how it theoretically could be used not just by bad guy governments but any government. >> i think in some ways it's a hard issue to sell people on caring about because you think, a, i'm not maybe an activist or a journalist or a political dissident, you know, who is going to care about my nudes? it's the reaction i get a lot. but i think no matter what category of american you are, if you are watching this and you care about any issue the government makes rules on, anything that government power might affect, you also need to care about the space for private communications about that issue. the space for activists to say, hey wait a second, we object. the space for opposition politicians to make the case that they could provide different leadership and the space for reporters to talk to sources who might produce the next watergate, the next pentagon papers. and what this film follows is
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how around the world in places where people said it could never happen here, in poland, greece, spain, a lot of this film is set there where i talk to one peaceful politician or activist after another who has been hacked. in all these places it's happening. the government is buying and overusing commercial spyware that is increasingly cheap, increasingly accessible and increasingly intrusive and it's shrinking the space for democratic expression. >> and i think about maduro in venezuela who i listened to an npr piece. people say if you get pulled by the police they want to see your phone and go on your whatsapp and see if you are talking bad about the government and if you are you will get arrested. donald trump using law enforcement to stop-and-frisk people, they could go in your phone and using this spyware invade it. >> that's exactly right. what we have seen over and over again, and what data privacy law experts are warning me about in
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this new piece i have out this week, is that time and tame again even in countries where the constitution is supposed to protect against this, the moment you have a law enforcement agency like i.c.e., for instance, buying this kind of technology, you very quickly see the overreach, abuses, the ways in which perhaps, yes, with a however thin law enforcement rationale suddenly it's appearing on the phones of political opposition members. >> and the idea then would be constant surveillance because we have our phones with us all the time. how powerful, what can this -- is there any app that we have that we try to fun communicate with private conversations that is not susceptible to this intrusion? >> unfortunately, the answer is really no. signal is one of the best bets of the encrypted messaging apps. it's one that these companies struggle to crack most. but some of these companies do specifically sell their services on the promise that their coders are going to drill down on that
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problem. >> we know that jamal khashoggi was killed because people got into his whatsapp and found out where he was. >> that's allegations that they denied. but the preponderance of the reporting does suggest that's the case, that there was at least one significant contact he was communicating to, criticizing the saudi government who had a pegasus infection. around the world we have seen hundreds of cases of violence linked to spyware. >> and not even necessarily government violence, but government surveillance. this is a surveillance tool theoretically. >> it's a surveillance tool and government surveillance overreaching is a classic part of an authoritarian playbook. we are now seeing it show up in the playbooks of democratic leaderships, small d democratic leadership around the western world. we should be worried about this. this is not a donald trump problem. it's not a right wing problem. these kinds of technologies and overreaches into breaches of privacy rights have been purchased and have been
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perpetrated under both parties. but right now you have these very extreme campaign promises that could be reshaped bit technology this government is increasingly acquiring. >> and including cracking down on leaks. donald trump has -- maybe he quipped or i don't know if he was serious, said prison rate might be a way to threaten journalists to give up sources if they are leaking about his administration. now there is a way to find out. >> exactly right. wherever you fall on the problems in the media, a free press, always a lot to self-police and improve, you should be worried about the way in which journalism going away in the space for us to talk to sources going away inevitably comes before the fall of more of our basic rights. >> indeed. ronan farrow, excellent journalism. check it out. thank you very much. and he is going to stick around. we will have fun, stick around and play who won the weak. tomorrow night a special two night event, the sing sing
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chronicles. be sure so catch the premiere tomorrow night at 9:00 p.m. eastern right here on msnbc. we'll be right back. during the. power's out! power's out! -power's out! power's out! -power's out comcast business has you covered, with wifi backup to help keep you up and running. wifi's up. let's power on! let's power on! let's power on! -let's power on! it's from the company with 99.9% network reliability. plus advanced security. let's power on! power on with the leader in connectivity. powering possibilities. comcast business. power's out.
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[ screeching ] [ chuckling ] [ vocalizing ] that's a choice. [ vocalizing ] think of what we could do together. we made it to the end of another week it is time to play our game. who won the week? >> hello, joy. >> hello. i picked this week the
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astronomers in chile. it is a red giant, in the process of dying, about to go super nova. it is funded by european governments lesson for governments to keep funding the science. >> i thought you were saying it was a planet to move to. >> we will look into that. my pick is not a planetary resource but earth resource. shaboozey, he is it. tipsy, a bar song, number one hit country song ever in the world but he was dissed by the cmas. we love your name shaboozey. thank you very much. that is

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