okay, that does it for me tonight. the rachel maddow show starts right now. hi, rachel. >> hey, jen. i was happy to see you in washington the other day. nice to run into you. >> you too. and to see susan. we love her. >> any time you see susan anywhere like 28 to 38 days around christmas on either side of it, she's ten times happier than she is any other time of the year. so you got to see susan at like peak susan happiness because we're this close to christmas. >> she was glowing near the christmas tree. i believe you. i take your word for. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. really happy to have you here. so speaking of holidays, two years ago on thanksgiving day,

so 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. quote, 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 auto pilot slash a.i. team on achieving a major milestone. these is two years ago 2022 thanksgiving day no warning this was coming. just, hey, if you bought a tesla if you had the option when you bought it to pay a little extra

so it would be capable of driving itself someday, if that day ever came, well that day has come, happy thanksgiving. so tesla like lots of cars now, they send software updates over the air to your car. so your car gets its operating system updated while it's parked in your driveway. what the company ceo was announcing that day in 2022 was, hey, while you've been inside enjoying turkey and stuffing and i don't know 6 to 8 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 your screen, your dashboard, and the car henceforth will drive you wherever you want to go. it was thanksgiving day the company's ceo put out that announcement. within a few hours it had led to

some news. >> now 16 people including 8 kids were part of a multi-car crash on the bay bridge causing some major traffic tie ups. >> they say it happened so fast, a chain reaction crash eastbound on the bridge and inside the tunnel. >> when you first see something like that happen coming towards you full speed, i thought, well, this is it. >> that was thanksgiving day 2022. just a few months later the news outlet the intercept obtained view 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. >> until today we only saw the aftermath of the chain reaction crash last thanksgiving day.

drive by video of cars stacked up in the tunnel eastbound on the bay bridge and a traffic jam that lasted hours. but surveillance video now shows how it started. his white tesla model s was in full self-driving mode when it suddenly deployed the brakes. a total 06 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 a growing number of reports of the tesla technology unexpectedly slamming on the brakes. the national highway traffic 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. >> car crashes are a plague and robots might be better than driving than us overall writ large. but in a country with over 280 million cars and trucks on the road, cleary it's worth studying if we're going to make this change. it's worth studying whether letting robots drive our cars is going to be more or less safe than have human drive cars. you saw that reference 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 auto pilot 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 auto pilot. 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 that led to headlines like this. quote, tesla auto pilot and full self-driving linked to hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths. 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, all the warning signals 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 auto pilot 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 criminal -- a criminal investigation into these matters

was underway targeting tesla. tesla had already disclosed in an sec filing that it received federal subpoenas for information about its full self-driving mode, its auto pilot 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. and that's -- 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 potentially consequential federal investigation, the announcement of that happened mid-october. what's happened between mid-october and now. since then you might have seen tesla's ceo, elon musk, has 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? and of course donald trump won the presidential election last month. and so what happens now to anybody who is 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 has those concerns? reuters headline, quote, 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 you know what really needs to go, what needs to go as a matter of priority is this thing we've had for a few years now where car companies have to report it when their car is on auto pilot and it crashes into

something. that's the new priority apparently. quote, 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 -- now, what is the purported justification for getting rid of this rule now? they can't just say, well, this

guy paid for the presidential election, therefore he kind of bought himself and government so he gets what he wants, right? you can't really say that, heyer, you kids getting off school buses watch yourself unless and until you can start paying for president, watch yourself on the side of the road. they have to say something that sounds better than that. this is what they came up with. quote, 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, quote, 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. we keep collecting all this data about self-driving cars killing

people, eventually our phones will slow down or something. too much data clogging everything up. excessive data collection. quote, a reuters analysis of the nhtsa crash data showed tesla accounted for 40 out of the 45 crashes reported to the agency through october 15th. 40 out of the 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 fire 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 sengt grader medevaced to a hospital in north carolina after getting off a school bus the tesla slammed into. problem not solved for them, but it is solved for the billionaire. i should note this reporting from reuters is based on a document reuters saw. we haven't seen the document ourselves. we have also 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 ability this dynamic and sort of our government, i acknowledge maybe worrying about car crashes isn't your thing. maybe this is just generally not what you're worried about. maybe you're thinking less domestic, more global concerns. i can imagine you out there right now being like, come on, mado, you're talking about car wrecks, there's bigger things at stake in the world. there's the war in gaza, drug cartels and the opioid epidemic and nuclear war rogue states. why are you talking about this

domestic, specific thing? well, behold the man who had 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 cochair of the trump transition team, this man was, quote, in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second trump administration including anti- trust officials, securities lawyers, and national security advisers who have global expertise. quote, but he himself has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, crypto currency trading platforms, and real estate ventures around the world, can all of which are regulated by the same agencies his appointees he is helping to find. this is about howard tapped to be the next secretary, cochair of the trump transition. saw the mention there of crypto currency. that's about one very specific thing that's worth hearing. his firm, the trump transition

cochair, the guy who's going to 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 is 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." quote, the criminal investigation run by prosecutors at the manhattan u.s. attorney's office is looking at whether the crypto currency 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 crypto currency'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. crypto currency is, quote, 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. 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's going to 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 -- just 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, the mexican drug cartel, and for good measure chinese manufacturers for chemicals used to make fentanyl. so maybe car crashes aren't your thing. are any of those things are any of your concern? if any of those things are important for 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 auto pilot teslas and the alleged money laupders for the hamas russian gun runners and people manufacturing fentanyl. they're not going to be used for you. when we hear that word oligarchy it always sounds foreign, first of all, right? but second of all, i will admit as a person sort of interest

would 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 sixth sense for what counts as drama and an interesting story but you've got 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 maneuvering among themselves to see who comes out on top. maybe there's going to be interesting drama to, succession stall from trump's various billionaires scrap amongst themselves, to see if the guy with $80 billion worth of links to the crypto firm with alleged hamas and north korea ties, oh, is he going to be commerce secretary or 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 smooching noises he too will be handled part of america's space infrastructure? there's a way to think about this as real 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'll 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 bro kindf of drama. one son gets to be an ambassador, 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 on voy 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 pervaded everyone he's a billionaire, but apparently that was all an act and his family actually just owns a truck dealership. so now he's been exposed as kind of a con artist, does he get to be the middle east envoy? i don't know it's hilarious and low brow. unless god forbid you've got a family member who's 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 government. maybe there's someone more qualified. it's hilarious unless you've got

a loved one trapped overseas in an important country who needs help from the u.s. embassy in that country, and it turns out don jr.'s girlfriend is the ambassador with no interest there. it could be an interesting drama unless you've got something to worry about fentanyl or opioids, unless you've got a kid getting off a school bus somewhere, or unless you find yourself one thanksgiving day driving a car full of kids through that tunnel at 1:00 p.m. but people like anne apple baulm and ben-ghiat and timothy snyder as we've started this slide all over the world but never before been here, one of the things

they've been telling us is that oligarchy under an orthoritarian leader, we've got very, very rich people dividing up the spoils in the country who lets them have it, one of the things to know about that kind of system is it isn't just about the leader and oligarchs helping themselves. is that and it's a sight to be hold, right? there are untold piles of ill-gotten gains from all over the world to show for that. but for most of us what's more important 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 re-dress or for protection because the authorities you might once have called, they are no longer there for you.

they're there now for the guy at the gala, 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 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 in person with me next. stay with us. in person with me next. stay with us

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there will be an open u.s. senate seat in the state of florida next year if marco rubio gets confirmed as trump's new sitting secretary of state. it will be up to the governor of florida for someone to replace rubio until there could be a

special election. the choice therefore belongs to governor ron desantis, but that has not stopped the president-elect from picking up the phone and calling ron desantis and reportedly telling him he should give this senate seat to his own daughter-in-law, to laura trump, who is of course married to trump's son, eric, the blonde one. then there are the jobs the president actually is supposed to fill himself. trump has selected his daughter tiffany trump's father-in-law to be his senior advisor 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 ever had an excon in that role. he's reportedly giving jared's roommate a really important job. he's going to be in charge of hostage negotiations for the u.s. government. also his other son, not the blonde one, don jr., the dark haired one, his ex-fiancee, she gets to be ambassador to greece. i don't know why greece.

this is fun one. it's kind of like a nesting doll. his pick to surgeon general, she's related to the guy trump picked for national security advisor. the new national security advisor is married to the new surgeon general's sister. 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 she got the -- i wonder why he got -- i don't know. to led the dea trump picked the son of an nfl owner of his. apparently the heat is too hot for that guy and he's already 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 alarming biographic details on qualification. plus the never ending parade of unsettling policy proposals being floated by the trump transition. let's get rid of the fbi, 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 that has an effect on us. because it feels like too much, does that mean we're not able to folkance on any one of these things 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 shar in terms of how we think about defending our system of government and our country? timothy snyder, professor of

history at yale jufrt. you know him on this show primarily as the author of this seminal book on tyranny. his newest book is called "on freedom." thank you for coming on. >> happy to see you. >> let me ask you, i talked a bit about oligarchy in the first segment. i just want to ask ifiotalked about in a way that resonates with you or if you thought i got that wrong? >> i thought you got that absolutely right. it was the ancient greeks who said oligarchs will be stronger than democrats because they will collect the money, have propaganda. 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 who are 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 leversthality we can currently use to make our government more effective and more responsive? >> yeah. americans like to think we're special, but oligarchs in our country will always have more in common and always be more affectionate and loyal than oligarchs in other countries. so if you want to see how things can go in our country, we have to see the world through their eyes which is a world of billionaires, not of citizens. all the countries trump admires abroad rule countries where people have shorter lives or where they are poorer. >> when you look at examples from our contemporaries in other countries who are contending the systems like this but also 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 things that we enjoy about our government against those kinds of forces? >> i think, 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 posit it in the sense of we should have a shadow cabinet. we should have a list of people, who alternatives to these same people who people can look and say, hey, this person could have been secretary of the country, secretary of the treasury. give positive alternatives as people and policy but also have someone so the journalists can talk to them for the next four years. it's not vaccines plus, minus, but, hey, let's talk to someone how good vaccines actually are, and what we could do. let's talk to someone who can

prevent car crashess and what that can look like. we have to talk about opposition in the sense what if we had a real elite. more practically the states can make it harder for oligarchs to function and look at people that make it harder for people like musk to function. >> what do you mean other countries -- what do you mean there? >> i mean the things that musk and our oligarchs do are sometimes illegal in other countries, and we should above that and be supportive of that. it's the states that control financial flows. states that are concerned about oligarchy can do things, too. >> what do you tell people who feel overwhelmed by as you say how bad it is right now? i think one of the things that has rocked a lot of people since the election, even people 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 director of national intelligence is kind of the worst choice you can imagine. robert f. kennedy jr. for health

secretary is i think the worst you can imagine, fbi director kash patel definitely the worst choice you can imagine. in the succession of those, it wasn't just matt gaetz, it's all these others that were as bad as i think it could probably get. i think it's overwhelming to people in a sense, and it also cumulatively makes people feel like i'm not going to focus on any of this and check out. >> i think they should start with none of these people should have hold any responsibility in any country at all at any level. that should be the starting point. we can't normalize them. some of them would destroy the government because they're incompetent, some will destroy it because of conflings of interests, and some like musk will destroy it so they can pick up the pieces. in terms of what we actually do about it, we have to try to get over the line as many of these people as possible. like respectable republican should not be voting for these people, and then once they do, we have to move onto thinking

about the six terrible months that follow, chronicling that the democrats should be thinking not about this lost election but about what things look like in june of '25 and how things could be so much better than the terror this group is going to bring us to. >> that's in part of the shadow government, that democrats should be standing up or respectful republicans or never trump republicans should be stepping up and saying, no, this is actually what the director of national intelligence should be zoog in this situation, this is what the transportation department should be doing in this situation. >> i think harris or pulosary or somebody else should have a list of people who have a shadow cabinet, whose job is to talk to the people every day. when things get terrible, we're going to think about, hey, we actually have great people in this country and we could have have had a much better of all of this and we can get to that. >> timothy snyder, the author of

the books "on tyranny" and "on freedom," thank you. we'll be right back. "on freedom," thank you. we'll be right back. fast-acting, sky-high sales stacking champion of checkouts. businesses that want to win, win with shopify. dealdash.com, online auctions since 2009. this playstation 5 sold for only 50 cents. this ipad pro sold for less than $34. and this nintendo switch, sold for less than $20. go to dealdash.com and see how much you can save.

the quite unexpected news this weekend 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 -- i don't know 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 -- 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 that 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 out going chair of the fcc, the 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, quote, 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, so-called enemy from within. now he's reportedly planning on creating a new board overseeing promotions of senior officers in the u.s. military, which would allow him to purge military leadership of anybody who's 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 it's 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 perp to ask. joining us now is anthony romero, executive director of the american civil liberties union. anthony, it's really nice to see you. thank you for coming in. >> it's great to see you. >> having you and tim snyder here feels like i won the lottery. >> it's great to be with you. >> 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, and we were anticipating the possibility that he'd win this election, so we 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. so we've bip trying to get ready for this whole period of time. clearly we can't run the same play book. they're going to be more aggressive. they're smarter. they're faster off the block, they're really going for -- they're running the gaunt lpt on many of the 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 much better prepared. the courts are still a place we have to turn to. we have to be wide-eyed the courts are also increasingly conservative and he'll appoint new judges to the courts.

it's also true biden appointed a record number of judges on the courts, and so not all is lost, but good lawyers are going to have to earn their pay by picking the right clients, the right cases, the right theories. where do you file? where do you settle? where do you really push the envelope? and that's where we're working through now. >> when you engage with people who aren't paid and you hear people feeling intimidated, feeling overwhelmed by the pace at which we're getting sort of alarming news of the extremism of their plans, what do you tell them about the prospects for holding the line? >> the local governments, the state attorneys general, the governors, the mayors, we have our whole plan with our firewall we call it, the countywide these local officials can play an important role in stopping the worst of the the government abuses. >> how so? >> for instance, when troir

going to try to detain and deport hundreds of thousands, up to a million people that's an operation they have the legal power to do but the logistics. and they're going to need mayors and governors and city councils to 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 we're preparing executive orders and we're organizing our folks to put pressures on elected officialssy they don't role over. they should sever these relationships they have with immigration. they should make sure our prisons and jails are off-limits. 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. well, let's take them out of harms way. >> they could do that now. >> let's commute. >> they could do that now in transition. >> yes, yes. part of what we've got to do

we've got to swarm our allies. even in red states you have some blue mayors. part of this is breaking down what can be done by the courts, 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 bip large scale protests thus far there were pretty soon after the election in 2016, i think people are smart and marshaling resources and choosing the right moment. >> totally. when you he starts deporting all these folks, ripping away communities, the idea you're never going to be able to move that many people through the immigration system without ripping apart citizens. that's when people are going to say oh, that's not what we bargained for, we've got to turn up. >> anthony romero, there's a lot on your shoulders, my friend. >> i have a lot of friends helping me. thank you. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. lping me thank you. >> 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 ren 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 who was an fbi inform ant who supposedly hd

the evidence that president biden took bribes, that a ukrainian energy company that paid millions of dollars in bribes to president biden and his son hunter. now, problem one for 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 was 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 phony alleged bribery scheme. he now likely faces 4 to 6 years in prison.

you'll not be shocked to learn this is not getting a lot of play in the right-wing media. ayou'll not be shocked to learn republican lawmakers don't all appear to be chastened by this outcome. just this past week the incoming republican chairman of the senate judiciary committee, chuck grassly, 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 of it here, a spectacular debacle for republicans that today came to its embarrassing close. as if anything is ever really closed for these guys. for thes.

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