that does it for me on this pretty stressful monday night. for now, i'm signing off, but i wish you a very good night. from all of our colleagues across the networks of nbc news, thanks for staying up late! we'll see you tomorrow. see you thanks for you at home joining us this hour, really happy to have you here. speaking of holidays, two

years ago on thanksgiving day 2022 the leader of one of the world's highest profile car companies made a surprise thanksgiving day announcement. he told people who owned his company's cars that as of that day, they no longer had to drive their cars. starting that day, thanksgiving day, the cars would be able to drive themselves from here on out. "tesla full self-driving beta is now available to anyone in north america who requests it from their car screen, assuming you have bought this option. congratulations to tesla autopilot/a.i. team on achieving a major milestone." so this is two years ago, again, 2022 thanksgiving day, not really any warning this was coming, just hey, if you bought

a tesla if you had the option when you bought it to pay a little bit extra so it would be capable of driving itself someday if that day ever came, well, that day has come. happy thanksgiving. tesla, like lots of cars now, they send software updates over the air to their cars. so your car gets its operating system updated while it's parked in your driveway. what the company's ceo was announcing that day in 2022 was hey, while you've been inside enjoying turkey and stuffing and six to eight glasses of wine with your family, lucky you, your car out there in the driveway has just been upgraded to one that can drive itself. so if you want, feel free to give it a go. just click the switch on the screen, on your dashboard, and the car henceforth will drive you wherever you want to go. thanksgiving day the company's ceo put up that announcement. within a few hours it had led

to some news. >> now at 5:00, 16 people, including eight kids, were part of a multicar crash on the bay bridge causing some major traffic tie-ups. >> reporter: they say it happened fast, the chain reaction crash on the east bay bring inside the yerba buena tunnel. >> i thought i was a goner. you see something like that coming towards you at full speed. i thought well, this is it. >> thanksgiving day 2022. just a few months later the news outlet the intercept obtained video that showed that accident as it happened. it turns out it was a tesla whose owner says the car was in full self-driving mode and the car just randomly braked super hard in the middle of the tunnel, which is what started that huge pileup of cars in the tunnel, the one that injured all those people. >> reporter: until today we only saw the aftermath of the

chain reaction crash last thanksgiving day. drive-by video of cars stacked up in the yerba buena tunnel eastbound on the bay bridge in a traffic jam that lasted hours, but bay bridge surveillance video now shows how it started. a 76-year-old lawyer from san francisco told the chp his white 2021 tesla model s was in full self-driving mode when it suddenly deployed the brakes. a total of eight vehicles crashed, nine people injured, including a 2-year-old boy. just hours before the crash tesla's ceo elon musk announced the launch of the full self- driving beta version which he called a major milestone, but there are growing numbers of reports of the tesla technology unexpectedly slamming on the brakes. the national highway traffic safety administration assigned a special crash investigation team to look into what happened. they're already investigating dozens of incidents involving advanced driver assistance

systems from volvos, cadillacs, hyundai, genesis, and cruise, but mostly tesla. >> mostly teslas. you know, car crashes happen. we humans aren't all that great at avoiding the problem of hurting and killing ourselves and each other with our cars. car crashes are a plague and who among us can say whether robots might be better at driving than us overall at large? but in a country with more than 280 million cars and trucks on the road clearly it's worth studying if we're going to make this change, right? it's worth studying whether letting robots drive our cars is going to be more or less safe than having us humans drive the cars. the u.s. government is doing that studying. you saw a reference in that news report there to the national highway traffic safety administration looking into that particular crash and others like it. well, the year before that big thanksgiving day crash in the

bay area that government agency started a program where car companies have to report when crashes happen while a car has been in autopilot or in full self-driving mode. they have to tell the government when that happens. so that means crashes like that one that happened in the tunnel in 2022 in the san francisco bay area, also from this other terrible crash that was right nearby in contra costa county in california the following year. this was a fire truck that got slammed into at speed by a tesla that was on autopilot. the tesla driver was killed. four firefighters were sent to the hospital in that crash. earlier this year the agency released its report on its findings after collecting all of this data for several years. it led to headlines like this. "tesla's autopilot and full self-driving linked to hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths." a government report described

the data about these hundreds of crashes, but it also gave the specific details of some of them, including one particularly harrowing one from north carolina. a tenth grader stepped off of a school bus. school bus was doing everything right. it was pulled over, had its lights flashing, had all the warning signals that a school bus activates when it's letting off students to let everybody know around there they need to stop. the school bus was doing everything right. the kid was doing everything right, but a 2022 model y tesla on autopilot mode nevertheless whipped around the stopped school bus and slammed into this kid. this tenth grader had to be medevaced to the hospital with life threatening injuries. by the time that government report was issued, not only had individual crashes like that received a lot of local attention in the areas where they happened, but the overall problem was starting to come into focus. reuters, for example, had

already reported that a criminal investigation into these matters was underway targeting tesla. tesla had already disclosed in an sec filing that had it received federal subpoenas about information for its full self-driving mode, its autopilot mode. then just a few weeks ago the government announced the opening of a formal federal investigation of tesla's full self-driving mode in more than 2 million teslas, more than 2 million cars. that's a big deal. but you might have noticed i said that report happened a few weeks ago. to be specific, that happened, the announcement of that federal investigation, that big possibly very consequential federal investigation, the announcement of that happened in mid-october. what's happened between mid- october and now? since then you might have seen that tesla's ceo, elon musk, has basically had himself surgically attached to donald trump's body.

i mean seriously, are they stitched together? can either one of them get dressed alone at this point? of course, donald trump won the presidential election last month. so what happens now to anybody who was unsettled by the idea of a robot-controlled car driving itself into a nearby fire engine full of firefighters or a robot- controlled car slamming on its brakes without warning in the middle of a crowded tunnel full of cars going 55 miles an hour while people are all driving to go see family on thanksgiving day? what happens to anybody who might have those kind of concerns? reuters headline, "exclusive, trump team wants to scrap car crash reporting rule. the trump transition has apparently surveyed the landscape of public policy in the united states of america and has decided yeah, you know what really needs to go? what needs to go as a matter of priority is this thing that we've had for a few years now where car companies have to report it when their car is on

autopilot and it crashes into something. that's the new priority apparently. "the trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car crash reporting requirement opposed by elon musk's tesla, a move that could cripple the government's ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated driving systems." musk, the world's richest person, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping trump get elected president in november. removing the crash disclosure provision would particularly benefit tesla which has reported most of the crashes, more than 1,500 of them, to federal safety regulators under this program. tesla has been targeted in national highway traffic safety administration investigations, including three stemming from this specific data. now what is the purported justification for getting rid of this rule and getting rid of it now? they can't just say well, you

know, this guy paid for the presidential election. therefore, he kind of bought himself a government. so he gets what he wants, right? you can't really just say that. hey, you kids, getting off school buses, watch yourself unless and until you can start paying for your own president. you're fair game on the side of the road. you can't say it that way. so how do you -- they have to say something that sounds better than that. this is what they came up with. "the recommendation to kill the crash reporting rule came from a transition team tasked with producing a 100-day strategy for automotive policy." the group called the measure a mandate for "excessive data collection." oh, oh, excessive data collection, that's the problem that needs to be addressed here in this photo, excessive data collection. we have way too much data. our thumb drives are all full. if we keep collecting all this

data about self-driving cars killing people, eventually our phones will slow down or something. too much data clogging every up. excessive data collection. "a reuters analysis of the nhtsa crash data shows tesla accounted for 40 out of the 45 crashes reported to the agency through october 15th." 40 out of 45 fatal incidents reported. that sounds bad if you're tesla, right? if you're tesla, better to not have people ever hear numbers like that. therefore, don't collect the numbers anymore. stop collecting all this excessive data, problem solved. problem solved for tesla and for elon musk. problem not solved for the contra costa county firefighters who were in that truck, problem not solved for the eight kids in the giant smash-up in the thanksgiving

day tunnel crash, problem not solved for the tenth grader medevaced to the hospital in north carolina after stepping off the school bus that the tesla slammed into, right? problem not solved for them, but it is solved for the billionaire. i should note that this reporting from reuters is based on a document that reuters saw. we haven't seen the document ourselves. we have reached out to tesla and the trump transition for comment. so far we have not heard back. we'll let you know. when you're thinking about this dynamic and sort of our government, you know, i acknowledge maybe worrying about car crashes isn't your thing. maybe you're thinking less domestic, more global concerns. i can imagine you out there right now being like come on, maddow, you're talking about car wrecks? there's a war in gaza, a war in ukraine, drug cartels and the opioid epidemic. why are you talking about this

domestic specific thing? well, behold, the man who has been tapped to be your next secretary of commerce in the united states, that's him there with the microphone standing next to j.d. vance. as the co-chair of the trump transition team, this man was "in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise, "but he himself has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate vendors around the world all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find." howard lutnick has been tapped to be the next commerce secretary, co-chair of the trump transition. saw the mention there of cryptocurrency. that's about one very specific

thing that's worth hearing. his firm, the trump transition co-chair, the guy who will be trump's nominee for secretary of commerce, his wall street firm, is up to its neck like more than $80 billion up to its neck in one particular crypto firm that is reportedly now the subject of a major federal criminal investigation and it's also reportedly potentially on the hook for being subject to sanctions by the u.s. treasury department. this is reporting from the "wall street journal." "the criminal investigation run by prosecutors at the manhattan u.s. attorney's office is looking at whether the cryptocurrency has been used by third parties to fund illegal activities, such as the drug trade and terrorism and hacking. the treasury department meanwhile has been considering sanctioning the company, tether, because of its cryptocurrency's widespread use by individuals and groups sanctioned by the u.s., including the terrorist group hamas and russian arms dealers. sanctions against tether would

generally prohibit americans from doing business with the company. the cryptocurrency is a vital financing tool for several of the u.s.' top national security concerns, including -- check out this list -- including the north korean nuclear weapons programs, mexican drug cartels, russian arms companies, middle eastern terrorist groups, and chinese manufacturers of chemicals used to make fentanyl. ed to make fentanyl. that criminal investigation first reported literally two weeks exactly before the presidential election, but then trump won the election and this guy gets named to be secretary of commerce and also is named as the guy who will staff up the whole federal government while his firm is again up to its neck in managing tens of billions of dollars for a firm that is reportedly being criminally investigated for alleged links -- put up the list again. what is the list again?

alleged links to the terrorist group hamas, russian arms dealers, the north korean nuclear weapons program, mexican drug cartels and for good measure, chinese manufacturers of chemicals used to make fentanyl. so maybe car crashes aren't your thing. are any of those things any of your concerns? if any of those things are important to you for any reason, sorry. unless and until you are buying yourself a president, the government is going to be taking care of the school bus slaloming autopilot teslas and the alleged money launderers for hamas, russian gun runners, and people who bring you fentanyl. they're not going to be working for you. when we use the word oligarchy or you hear people talk about oligarchs, it always sounds foreign, first of all, right? but second of all, i will admit as a person who is sort of

interested in the drama that goes along with the news, sometimes the whole idea of oligarchy or oligarchs, it sounds kind of interesting, right? maybe i've got a sick sense of what counts as drama in an interesting story, but you've got really, really, really rich people, a relatively small number of them taking over the government and changing the government so it only works for them. it can sound like interesting drama to watch, right, like succession style, really rich people fighting and maneuvering among themselves to see who comes out on top, who gets to control which piece of the pie. maybe there's going to be interesting drama to mine right, succession style from watching trump's various billionaires scrap amongst themselves to see if the guy with $80 billion worth of links to the crypto firm with the alleged hamas and north korea ties, oh, is he going to be commerce secretary or maybe

treasury secretary or maybe he's out or will the one billionaire who wants to live in space when earth goes to hell, will he totally take over nasa himself or will the other billionaire with his own space company make big enough smoochy noises that he, too, will be handed some portion of american space infrastructure? there's a way to think about this as real junior high school drama. these kitty cats hate each other, meow. this should be an interesting fight. there is a way to look upon the oligarchization of the american government as drama, as a kind of theater of greed and maybe there will be some good stories there and, of course, there's also the low down crassness of it all as well, which is its own very low brow kind of drama. you know, one son's girl friend gets to be an ambassador, sure, why not? the other son's wife maybe gets to be a senator? one daughter's husband gets an

ambassadorship for his felon dad and his college roommate gets to be america's hostage envoy, right, because sure, why not? jared's roommate for the hostage envoy job, not like anybody's life depends on it. and the other daughter's husband, he'll get a middle east envoy job for his father who seems to have persuaded everyone he's a billion thayer, but apparently that was all an act and his family owns a truck dealership. so now he's exposed as kind of a con artist, does he still get to be the middle east convoy? i don't know. it's good to watch and maybe good drama unless god forbid, you've got a family member who is a hostage somewhere and is counting on help from the u.s. government to save his or her life and you're starting to worry if maybe jared's roommate wasn't the best point person to head that up for the u.s. government. maybe there's somebody more qualified? it's hilarious unless you've got a loved one trapped overseas in some sort of

problem in an important foreign country who needs help from the u.s. embassy in that country and it turns out don jr.'s girl friend with no diplomatic experience is the ambassador there? it all could be very interesting drama unless you've got a reason to worry about fentanyl and opioids or unless you've got a kid getting off a school bus somewhere or unless you find yourself one thanksgiving day driving a carful of kids through that tunnel at 1:00 p.m. people like ann applebaum have been warning about as we started a slide of government that exists all over the word but has never before been here, one of the things they've been

telling us is that oligarchy under an authoritarian leader, we've got very, very rich people dividing up the spoils of the government and country under an authoritarian leader who lets them have at it, one of the things to know about that kind of a system is that it isn't just about the leader and the oligarchs helping themselves. it is that and it's a sight to behold, right? there are untold piles of ill gotten gains all over the world to show for that, but for most of us what's more important than what they do for themselves is what it does to everyone else. when government exists to serve the people who have been made very rich by technology and industry and business practices that have a side effect of hurting and killing regular people, the effect of that is that more regular people are going to get hurt and killed because there will be nowhere to turn for redress or for protection because the authorities you might once have called, they're no longer there

for you. they're there now for the guy at the gala, at the leader's winter home in florida. they're there for the con artist in laws of the leader's second daughter or whoever. i mean that's what oligarchy is everywhere. the important thing is not the drama among the oligarchs and i can feel our media system right now sliding into soap opera coverage of the drama among the oligarchs. sure, that drama is there, but the real effect on our country is not just about which kitty cat comes out with the biggest spoils, right? the drama among the oligarchs is drama, but the consequence for our country is what that kind of a system, what that kind of a spoil system, does to all of us, does to regular people. how do we prepare ourselves better for that? based on what other countries have been through with that, is there anything that we can learn about how we can try to slow it down or stop our country from becoming that if,

in fact, we want to protect ourselves from dissolving into that kind of a system? that is a question for which there is expert help available and timothy snyder is here with me next. stay with us. irst-day fresh for 50 days. 50 days!? and its refill reminder light means i'll never miss a day of freshness. ♪

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there will be an open u.s. senate seat in florida next year if marco rubio gets confirmed as donald trump's new secretary of state. it will then be up to the governor of florida to pick somebody to replace rubio until there can be a special

election. the choice belongs, therefore, to governor ron desantis, but that has not stopped the president-elect from calling ron desantis and reportedly telling him he should give the senate seat to his daughter-in- law, to lara trump, who is married to trump's son eric, the blonde one. then there are the jobs the president is supposed to fill himself. trump has selected his daughter tiffany trump's father-in-law to be his senior adviser on the middle east. he has named his other daughter's father-in-law, jared's dad, to be ambassador to france, first time i believe we've had an ex-con in that role. he's reportedly giving jared's college roommate an important job in charge of hostage negotiations for the whole u.s. government. his other son, not the blonde one, don jr., the dark haired one, his ex-fiancee gets to be ambassador to greece. i don't know why greece.

this is a fun one. it's kind of like a nesting doll. his pick for surgeon general, she's related to the guy who trump picked for national security adviser. the new trump national security adviser is married to the new surgeon general's sister. hey. same idea with the ambassador to the dominican republic. her brother-in-law is trump's pick to run the transportation department. i wonder why he got -- i don't know. to lead the dea trump picked the son-in-law of an nfl owner friend of his who he pardoned in his first term, though apparently the heat was a little too hot for that guy. he's withdrawn his name from contention. that kind of mess on its own is a lot to take in. any one of those appointments would be kind of a show stopping scandal in any other presidency, but that's just, you know, stuff that nobody's even noticing amid the tsunami

of candidates who aren't related to trump but who have varying degrees of legitimately harming biographical details and lack of qualification, plus the never ending parade of unsettling policy proposals that are floated by the trump transition. let's get rid of the fdic. let's get rid of vaccines. let's get rid of the postal service. let's get rid of the weather service. what else do we need? it does feel like a fire hose right now, but psychologically it has an effect on us. because it feels like too much, does that mean we aren't able to focus on any one of these things enough to potentially make a difference as to whether or not it comes to pass? how do we strategically align ourselves to this moment of information, this moment of transition in our country in a way that keeps us psychologically engaged and strategically sharp in terms of how we think about defending our system of government and our country? joining us now is timothy snyder, professor of history at

yale university. you know him on this show primarily as the author of this seminole book "on tyranny" which became very famous during the first trump administration. his newest book is called "on freedom." it's really good to see you. >> happy to see you. >> i talked about the idea of oligarchy. i just wanted to ask if i talked about that in a way that resonates with you or if you have any thoughts about that or think i got that wrong. >> no. i thought it was absolutely right. it was the ancient greeks who said oligarchs will be stronger than democrats because they will collect the money and have the propaganda. you're right. it's always been a problem for democracy and we borrow the word from the russians who have seen this story happen in the 1990s, weak aging president surrounded by rich clever people who fight amongst themselves, divide up all the goodies and bring the state down. >> bringing the state down is important for people who care about the government. it's also important for people

concerned about their everyday lives. there are things that the government does even if we don't appreciate our government that we will miss when they're gone and if the oligarchs capture the government so that it only serves their purposes, the american people will be worse off and poorer and less safe and ultimately dislocated from the levers that we can currently use to make our government more effective and more responsive. >> americans like to think we're special, but oligarchs in our country will always have more in common and will always be more affectionate and loyal towards oligarchs in our countries. if you want to see how things can go in our country, you have to see the world through their eyes, which is a world of billionaires, not citizens. all the countries trump admires abroad are where people live shorter lives and the rulers are at the core. >> when you look at contemporaries in other countries contending a system like this and the history of

this type of government, are there lessons to be learned about how to stop a slide into oligarchic domination, how to resist it or how to try to retain our rights and the things that we enjoy about our government against those kinds of forces? >> first of all, we have to be able to keep it positive, not in the sense of saying everything's great. it's not. it's terrible. they're trying to break the government which means breaking the country, but positive in the sense of we should have a shadow cabinet. we should have a list of people who are alternatives to these same people so we can look and say hey, that person could have been secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense with. have those people so they can give positive alternatives as pool and give positive alternatives as policy, but also to have someone the journalists can talk to the next four years. so it's not like vaccines plus minus, but hey, let's talk to somebody about how good vaccines actually are and what we could do. let's talk to someone about how

we could prevent car crashes. we have to think about opposition in the sense of what an america could look like if we had other people if we had a real elite. the states can make it harder for oligarchs to function and we can look at other countries to make it harder for musk to function. >> what do you mean look to other countries? >> the things musk and our oligarchs do are sometimes illegal in other countries and we should observe that and be supportive of that. the states control a lot of financial flows. states concerned about oligarchy can do things, too. >> what do you tell people who feel overwhelmed by how bad it is now? i think one of the things that's rocked a lot of people since the election who didn't like the election result is sort of the worst things you can imagine particularly in terms of nominees like tulsi gabbard for the director of national intelligence is kind of the worst choice you could

imagine. robert f. kennedy jr. for health director is the worst choice you could imagine, fbi director kash patel and the succession of those. it wasn't just matt gaetz. it was all these others that are as bad as i think it could probably get i think is overwhelming to people in a sense and it also cumulative makes people feel like i'm not even sure which of these to focus on. maybe i should just check out. >> yeah. i think we can start with none of these people should hold any position of responsibility at all in any country at any level. that should be the starting point. we can't normalize it. a second thing is we can classify them. some of them will destroy the government because they're incompetent, some because of conflicts of interest, some because of ideology and some like musk want to destroy it so we can pick of the pieces and classify it and make it calmer. we have to try to get over the line as many people as possible like spectable republicans should not be voting for these

people and once they do, we have to move on to thinking about the six terrible months that follow chroniclely not, the democrats should be thinking about what thinks look like in june of '25 and how things could be so much better than the terror that this group is going to bring us to. >> that's in part the idea of a shadow government that democrats should be standing up or respectable republicans or never trump republicans should be standing up and saying no, this is what the director of national intelligence should be doing in this situation. >> i think harris or pelosi or somebody else should have a list of people who are the shadow cabinet whose job it is to talk to the press every day not just about what's wrong, but about hey, what the government could do because it's that lack of imagination. when things get terrible, we'll think okay, terrible. let's have less terrible. we should be thinking about hey, we actually have great people in this country and could have had a much better version of all this and could get to that.

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the quite unexpected news this understand that abc news would settle a defamation suit with president-elect trump and pay him $15 million had the president-elect licking his chops today at a press conference talking about the

prospects he imagines for going after more media outlets. he said he plans to sue somebody, the people of iowa, their newspaper? wasn't totally clear. he plans to sue someone over a poll late in the election season that showed trump doing well in -- sorry, trump not doing as well as he did in iowa. since he eventually won iowa, he thinks that's grounds for a lawsuit because that poll said he might lose it. the especially hairy thing that he said today was actually he shouldn't have to bring suits like this himself. he expects that the justice department, the u.s. department of justice, should bring lawsuits like this on his behalf. the dynamic that's emerging for the second trump term is not just that powerful people want to be able to use their own power to harass their perceived critics, it's that the new president-elect expects, he expects, that he will be able to use not just his own power and influence, but he will be

able to use the u.s. government to harass and punish his critics and it's not just the justice department he plans to use. today the outgoing chair of the fcc, federal communications commission, responded again to trump's demands that the fcc should strip licenses from a news network that made him mad. the outgoing chair said, "the fcc has no business threatening to take away broadcast licenses because the president doesn't like the content or coverage on a network." ahead of the election trump talked about using the u.s. military domestically to target americans who oppose him or protest against him, the so- called enemy from within. now he's reportedly planning on creating a new board overseeing promotions and senior officers in the u.s. military which would allow him to purge military leadership of anybody who is disloyal to him or who disagrees with him or who has

different politics. trump and his allies are also reportedly considering withholding federal money from states or cities that don't go along with plans like his mass deportation idea. it feels like a lot because it is a lot and happening all at once, but how do local governments and news organizations and ordinary citizens think strategically about this when trump is threatening and saying he expects to use the most powerful government on earth against its own citizens to attack his critics? what can your mayor or your governor or your local paper or some voluntary organization you might be part of do to stand up against that in a time like this? just the person to ask. joining us now is anthony romero, executive director of the american civil liberties union. really nice to see you. >> great to see you. >> having you and tim snyder on the same night feels like i won the lottery. >> it's great. >> tell me about how you at the

aclu are thinking about your plans to try to defend american civil liberties in this term versus the first term. >> well, we've been planning for almost a year. we were anticipating the possibility that he would win this election. so we've spent thousands of staff hours studying project 2025, tracking the campaign promises, going back and playing back what happened in trump 1.0 to see what might happen with trump 2.0 and so we've been trying to get ready for this whole period of time. clearly we can't run the same playbook. they're going to be more aggressive. they're smarter. they're faster off the block. they're running the gauntlet on many policy issues they didn't dare try last time. they're going to run the ball down the field. so we have to be much smarter and better prepared. litigation will be key. the courts still are a place we have to turn to. we have to be wide-eyed that the courts are also increasingly conservative and

he will appoint new judges onto the courts. it's also true biden appointed a record number of judges on the courts, so not all is lost, but good lawyers will have to earn their pay by picking the right clients, right cases, right theories, where do you file? where do you settle? where do you push the envelope? that's what we're working through now. >> when you talk to regular americans who aren't lawyers, who aren't people engaged in this fight in a practical paid to do it as part of their job kind of way and you hear people feeling intimidated -- >> sure. >> -- feeling overwhelmed by the pace at which we're getting sort of alarming news about the extremism of their plans, what do you tell them about the prospects for holding the line? >> local governments, the state attorneys general, the governors, the mayors, we have this whole plan around a firewall for freedom we call it. the idea that these local officials can really play an important role in stopping the worst of the government abuses. >> how so? >> well, for instance, when they'll try to detain and

deport all these hundreds of thousands, up to 1 million people, that's an operation that they have the legal power to do, to do the raids, but the logistics and they're going to need mayors and governors or city councils, either give them access to police officers or not, jails. where are you going to house all these folks? so part of what we're doing is preparing executive orders and organizing our folks to put pressures on elected officials so they don't roll over. they should sever these relationships they have with the federal government on immigration enforcement. they should begin to think about what actions they could take to pardon immigrants who have a criminal record because they drove on a suspended license. let's take them out of harm's way. >> they could do that now in the transition. >> yes, yes. we've got to swarm our allies in some of these places and even in red states you have

some blue mayors. so there's a whole game plan for this and i think part of what we're trying to do is breaking it down, what can be done by the courts and lawyers, what can be done by citizens, what can governors do, what can mayors do and really have a game plan for that. >> when people look at the fact there haven't been large scale protests like there were pretty soon after the election in 2016, i tend to look at that and think the american people are smart, marshaling their resources waiting for the right moment. do you see it that way? >> totally. you'll never remove the immigration system without ripping apart immigrants. it's going to rip the basic fiber of our lives. americans will say that's not what we bargained for. we got to turn out. >> anthony romero, thanks for being here. there's a lot on your shoulders. >> i have a lot of friends helping me. we'll be right back. stay with us.

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today in a courtroom in los angeles one of the most spectacular debacles of the current republican congress came to an embarrassing and pitiful conclusion that you will not hear about anywhere in right wing media. you may or may not have been following every twist and turn of it, but republicans in congress really did spend over a year trying to impeach president biden. at the heart of the impeachment effort was a star witness, a man with the smoking gun, was an fbi informant who supposedly

had the evidence that president biden took bribes that a ukrainian energy company had paid millions of dollars in bribes to president biden and his son hunter. now problem one for the republicans with this scenario happened when that guy, the fbi informant, the star witness for the republicans against president biden, problem one for them was when he got arrested and indicted for lying to the fbi about the biden bribery allegations. problem two for the republicans is that according to the indictment of him, this man claimed that some of the information he got, the false information about president biden that he got and passed on, was information that he got from russian intelligence officials. today problem three arrived, which is that the man has now pled guilty. he's pled guilty to a felony charge of lying to the fbi about this phoney, alleged bribery scheme and now likely faces four to six years in

prison. you will not be shocked to learn this is not getting a lot of play in the right wing media that hyped the biden bribery allegations for more than a year. you'll not be shocked to learn that republican lawmakers don't at all appear to be chasing to buy this outcome. just this past week the incoming republican chairman of the senate judiciary committee, chuck grassley, was still citing this guy's nonsense allegations as part of a lawyer to fbi director chris wray telling him he ought to resign, but again, the facts here, a spectacular debacle for republicans that today came to its embarrassing close, as if anything is ever really closed for these guys.

nothing is more important than family. a family you're born into, a family you choose or a family you make. i'm padma lakshmi. i came to this country when i was four years old with my mother. we came here because it was a land of opportunity. but for many, that's not the case. immigrant families are being separated. black and brown families are torn apart by a broken legal system. lgbtq people suffer discrimination in adoption and health care. the need to protect and defend the civil liberties

because families belong together. you can help by joining the american civil liberties union today. call or go online now and become an aclu guardian of liberty. all it takes is just $19 a month. only $0.63 a day. the aclu has fought to allow lgbtq couples to marry, for racial justice. to stop a family separation. we can't do this work without you. together we can defend our democracy, ensure liberty and justice for all, and keep families strong. so please call the aclu now or go to my aclu.org when you use your credit card, you'll receive this special member kit to show you're part of a movement to defend free speech, protect our civil liberties, and keep families together. i hope you'll join me in supporting the aclu today. because we the people means all of us.

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