christmas hymn is "oh holy night." there's this line that says his law is love and his gospel is peace. i hope that as lawmakers, as citizens that we would be guided by the law of love, the gospel of peace, regardless of our faith, tradition. and that we will see each other's humanity. >> again, i just can't do any better than that. he is not always the loudest in the room, senator warnock, but often one of the most thoughtful. that does it for me tonight. happy holidays to everyone and everything you celebrate. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. hi, rachel. >> hey, jep. that was awesome that you pulled that out. that was fantastic. i think we all know that senator warnock is an unusually eloquent public servant, but that was really something. that was awesome. >> he is. i'm glad you enjoyed it. i loved it when i saw it. just felt like the perfect thing going into the holiday season when we're all trying to regroup and spend time with families and

come back fighting next year. >> right on. thank you, jen. thank you, my friend. happy holidays. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. it is december 23rd. tomorrow is christmas eve. so, merry christmas to everybody who celebrates. i actually have two news christmas presents for you. one of them i'll tell you about in a little later on this hour. something i'm going to give you as a christmas present on christmas day. we will get to that later on this hour. but the other one is just this, it is a true story that i think of as a christmas present. at least i think can maybe be something helpful for understanding today's news. and it arrives at an auspicious time. all right. this is a story about this man, his name is joseph e. davies. he was born in wisconsin to immigrant parents. he got involved in democratic

party politics. he became democratic party chairman in the state of wisconsin. he then moved to washington, had some government jobs. he ended up getting very, very rich as a corporate lawyer. and then in the 1930s, two things happened in his life. first, he became a diplomat. he became a u.s. ambassador. he was ambassador to belgium and ambassador to luxembourg, most famously he was also america's ambassador to russia, to the soviet union. he was very controversial in that role because he was seen as a real suck-up, a real apologistic for the stalin dictatorship in russia. but if you want to know what he was really, really famous for, even more than that, it was the other big thing that happened in his life around the same time that he started this very high-profile diplomatic career. the other thing that happened to him right around then is that he

got married to the richest woman in america. and this was a very high-profile affair. he got married before he became ambassador to russia. she was his wife and went with him to moscow while he was the ambassador in russia, she had shipped over to moscow from the united states, 25 ors and 2,000 pints of frozen cream. not to distribute in russia, all for her, all for the ambassador's residence. it was a very high profile thing. this was the second marriage for him, a third marriage for her. they didn't end up having any kids together, but they did stay married for a long time. they were married for 20 years and a lot of that was very much in the public eye. one of the lasting marks of this

famous marriage is this -- this coat of arms. i mentioned joseph davies was the son of immigrants. he was the son of welsh immigrants. his parents were from wales. while he was the middle of his very high-profile diplomatic careers in the 1930s, he arranged that the uk would issue his family this coat of arms. this was the official davies family crest, their official coat of arms for his ancestral family, for the davies family. and while he was married to the richest woman in the country, the couple had his family crest, his family coat of arms, installed at her house, like carved into the fireplace and mounted up on the wall. her house, her name was marjorie

maryweather. her house was a mansion she had built in south florida that was called mar-a-lago. and her house was famously later sold in the 1980s at bargain basement price to a man named donald trump. whereupon trump took the coat of arms that was up on the wall at this house he just bought, the coat of arms that was carved into the fireplace and up on the wall at mar-a-lago, he took this coat of arms, he took the joseph e. davies family coat of arms and he started using it as if it was his own. this is the coat of arms for the joseph davies family, which was up on the wall at mar-a-lago when donald trump bought mar-a-lago in the 1980s. this is the coat of arms that trump uses today as if it is his own. if you go to the web pages or

the advertising materials for any of trump's property, you see that he uses this everywhere. he uses this coat of arms, not only in his advertisements and his iconography, he also uses it at his golf clubs and all his other properties. and so here's your christmas present. here it goes, ready? see if you can see the difference between these two coat of arms, between the coat of arms that trump uses on all his stuff now and the original one that he found on the wall at mar-a-lago when he bought that house. see if you can spot the difference. all right. put them both up on the screen at the same time. on the left, that's the coat of arms that trump trademarked. on the right, that's where he got it from. that's the original. you see on the one on the left, on the trump one, the little scroll on the bottom, it says

trump, like it is the trump family crest. but on the right side of your screen you can see what word was there originally. the word that trump took off the coat of arms in order to put his own name on it. the word there is integritas, sbregty. he literally removed the word integrity and put himself there instead. on somebody else's real family coat of arms that he stole and appropriated for his own purposes. when joseph davies' grandson died just a few years ago, during the first trump term actually, his obituary "the new york times" although the family from whom trump took this crest was not at all happy about trump claiming it as if it were his own, mr. davies' grandson don't

bother suing mr. trump, quote, because you'll be in court for years and years and years. and so they let it go. and president-elect donald trump took that other family's coat of arms, took their family crest and to this day pretends like it is his own, but he literally had to remove the word integrity in order to do that. so, merry christmas. the news gods got you a metaphor. it maybe has not been a good idea to try to run this presidential transition from mar-a-lago. with the bad juju of that family crest stolen from some other family looming over the proceedings minus its integrity. there was the nfl owner with a felony conviction in a famous bribery case involving a river boat casino license in louisiana. trump gave that nfl owner a pardon in his first term as

president. now in the transition to his second term, he decided to give that nfl owner's son-in-law a job in the new administration, decided to give that nfl's owner's son-in-law the job of running the dea, the drug enforcement agency, why not. he knows his father-in-law, the felon that he gave the pardon to. trump awarded this dea choice apparently without googling the son-in-law. the announce that time the son-in-law would get the dea job that was made by trump on a saturday. the following tuesday the guy himself announced he was pulling himself out of consideration of the job whereupon trump himself announced that the guy didn't, quote, pull himself out, i pulled him out. trump had only named the guy to the job three days earlier. i pulled him out. why did you name him three days

ago? there was trump's announcement of his new white house counsel, top lawyer in the white house. who was soon unannounced as white house counsel amid news from mar-a-lago that the guy who had pressed for that particular white house counsel had reportedly been demanding cash bribes if you wanted him to put your name in contention for a top job in trump's white house. so white house dea announcement, not dea announcement, white house counsel announcement, not white house counsel announcement. amid chest pounding they weren't going to let the fbi do any vetting on their nominees, they could handle the vetting themselves and didn't need anybody else meddling in it, chest pounding around that, the trump team themselves ended up proclaiming themselves blind sided by all the skeletons in the closet they didn't know about from disastrous picks, like the fox news weekend host they picked to be defense

secretary. shockingly when you don't vet someone, turns out you don't find out the things that a vetting might turn up about them. after picking a serving u.s. senator from florida for the secretary of state job, trump then let it be known that he was personally lobbying florida's governor to install his son's wife in the newly-vacated senate seat from florida. and that in itself is a humiliating neptistic farce, president demands senate seat be given to his daughter-in-law. but it's something else when the president commits to the humiliating farce of that and then it doesn't work. daughter-in-law, lara trump, now publicly removing herself from consideration for that senate seat after reports out of florida that after all that, after that humiliating neptistic farce, she wasn't going to get the tap after all. then of course, there was trump's choice of this man to be

attorney general, attorney general, of the united states. in some, the committee found substantial evidence of the following, quote from at least 2017 to 2020 representative gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him, in 2017, representative gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. during the period 2017 to 2019, representative gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs including cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions. represented gifts including transportation and lodging in connection to the 2018 trip to the bahamas in of permissible amounts. falsely indicating to the u.s. department of state that she was a constituent. representative gaetz knowingly and sought to impede and obstruct the committee's investigation of his conduct. representative gaetz acted in a manner that reflects

discreditably on the house of representatives. the committee concludes there was substantial evidence that representative gaetz violated house rules and state and federal laws and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, privileges and for good measure, obstruction of congress. violated house rules and state and federal laws prohibiting prostitution, illicit drug use, statutory rape. the house ethic's report on republican congressman matt gaetz, that was released today. which immediately raised some questions, like, given all the evidence that the ethics conversation turned up, how did he avoid getting criminally indicted? also, given roughly 330 million

people to choose from in this country, what does it say about a person's judgment if they survey the 330 million people in this country and decide that this guy is the best one. this is the best pick in the country to be attorney general of the united states. state and federal laws prohibiting prostitution, illicit drug use and statutory rape. now, while congressman gaetz denies all wrong doing, i think it's beyond inarguable that he has sort of a special place in the trump transition and will for all history. donald trump's transition to his second term in office has been a series of humiliations and failures, but none worse than choosing this particular person to be attorney general, a prospect that lasted eight days and then collapsed.

and during that time, the president-elect himself reportedly called u.s. senators and lobbied them to approve this choice, vouching for the guy, telling senators they needed to support him, putting his own political capital into the game. the vice president-elect personally, physically brought this guy in and out of senator's offices, putting his own credibility, his own political capital on the line to vouch for this guy and get this guy approved. multiple republican senators went on the record indicating, oh, yes, absolutely. i'll vote for this guy for attorney general. sure, why not. hi, lindsey graham, tommy tubervillle, bill haggerty. aren't you glad you took the humiliating reputational hit to voup for matt gaetz, given just days later he dropped out and now the ethic's committee is accusing him officially of statutory rape and prostitution and lots and lots of drug use including him allegingly setting

up a fake email address in his congressional office that he specifically used to score pot. was that worth it for you? do you want to do it again? don't forget all the congressional republicans who went on the record and voted to make sure that this information would be kept secret so matt gaetz could have a chance of becoming attorney general of the united states without the public ever finding out all the evidence that congress collected about, again, statutory rape, prostitution, drug use, et cetera. that includes the very, very, very pie yes, sir, bib lickly speaker of the house, argued that the american public should not be allowed to know the evidence that the house had collected about matt gaetz. and the american public should not be allowed to see that evidence so matt gaetz could

become attorney general without anybody knowing about what we now know is the ethics committees conclusions that there is substantial evidence that matt gaetz broke all these laws, including, you know, the ones about grown men not having sex with children. the deeply pias house speaker insists that that information must be kept secret from the american people so that matt gaetz can become attorney general of the united states. house speaker mike johnson, how do you feel about putting your reputation in this particular dumpster? would you do it again? because you're going to be asked to do it again. how do you feel about being asked to put your reputation in this particular dumpster given that the gaetz nomination was withdrawn just days later. so you did it for nothing. the trump transition has been a 20-car pileup of errors and

humiliations that reflect poorly on trump as the decision maker at the top, but then of also inflicted political harm and humiliation on lots of other republicans who his heirs messed with, including his own vice president and senator answered republican members of the house who he made go to bat for matt gaetz. all this after an election in which democrats gained a couple of seats and republicans lost ground in the house which means republican's margin for getting anything passed in the house is now smaller than any time in the past century. and now, and now, on top of all that as what we expect to be his last act presumably before christmas, we just had transition trump run the republican-controlled house right up to the precipice of another government shutdown the closest we have been to a government shutdown since the last time trump was president. i mean, trump has made a lot of errors and unforced humiliating own goals in this transition. and i think the media should

cover it more that way. the idea that this is a normal transition and this hasn't just been gaffe after gaffe and own goal after own goal and reputational harm after reputational harm, trump not only tanking his own political capital but just sideswiping every other powerful republican in washington while he is doing it as he mishandles all of these nominations, it has been a terrible, sham ballic transition. but on top of everything else that he has done with all of these nominations and the way he has mishandled them, the brush with a government shutdown this weekend made trump look not just error prone and easily confused, but also weak. the whole drama over whether or not to shut down the government, you'll remember, was not started by trump, it was started by eccentric right wing billionaire elon musk who posted online over 150 times about the funding bill

to keep the government running. states lots of things about it that were definitely not true, insisting increasingly both sif rouse terms that the republicans needed to tank that bill and not fund the government and shut everything down. it was only after musk gotten the ball rolling that trump eventually joined in. once trump got involved, he did start making demands from the republican-controlled congress, telling them what he wanted from them as he was pushing them toward a shutdown. what did he want them to give him? he wanted a very specific thing that he asked for explicitly, abolish the debt ceiling. don't worry, though. you don't have to bother reminding yourself what the debt ceiling is because they didn't do it. trump wanted it. he demanded it, but he didn't get it. they didn't make any change around the debt ceiling, even though that's what trump was demanding. which makes him look again error prone, easily confused and weak. it particularly makes him look

weak compared to elon musk because what did result from these stand-off that nearly shut down the government this weekend, what actually did change, is not what would have benefitted trump, not what trump asked for, it's not the debt ceiling thing, instead it's what would have benefitted elon musk. because what they did remove from the government funding bill was a provision that would have screened and regulated u.s. investments in china. and those new rules could have interfered with musk's reported plans to build yet another massive manufacturing plant in china, right down the street from the largest tesla factory on earth which he has already built in shanghai. because, usa, usa, usa. as david put it at the american prospect this weekend, quote, this is the first scandal of the second trump term. and take a long look because it's going to look like all the other scandals. this is going to be a constant theme of the next four years. personal business interests are

going to constantly take precedence over governance in the trump/musk white house. the word for this is oligarchy and oligarchs do not think about the country first. luckily they've already taken integrity off the coat of arms, just sandblasted it right off of there. so we don't have to do it ourselves. we are starting the holidays in the midst of a presidential transition that really has been a sham bollic mess and it should be covered as such. but on top of all of those mistakes, we are now seeing the first signs that the errors and the own goals and the self-inflicted humiliations of this nascent presidency, they may reflect a new president who is not just incompetent, who is not just bad at the basics of what it takes to appoint people to jobs and run a transition, we may be seeing the first signs of

a new president who is weak enough not just to fail but to be taken advantage of by some of the brighter bulbs on the tree. more ahead. stay with us. head stay with us vicks vapostick provides soothing non-medicated vicks vapors. easy to apply for the whole family. vicks vapostick. and try new vaposhower max for steamy vicks vapors. [music playing] speaker 1: time is running out to give a year-end gift like no other, a gift that can help st. jude children's research hospital save lives. speaker 2: these kids, they've done nothing wrong in the world, and they end up having to go through all of this to survive. speaker 3: is your throat sore? speaker 2: your donation, it means everything. speaker 1: please don't wait until the last minute. make a difference by supporting the children of st. jude. please, donate now. i'll be home for christmas.

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before president biden was inaugurated in january, 2021, p previous president had spent the last months of his presidency

rushing to kill as many american prisoners at possible. he tried to rush through as many executions as he could at the very end, including three people who he had killed just days before the newly-elected president biden took over. it was a really extraordinary rush to the death chamber. i mean extraordinary in mathematical terms. from the time the death penalty was reestablished in 1988, the federal death penalty reestablished in 1988 through june 2020, there had only been three federal executions total. three in 32 years. then just during trump's last six months in office there were 13. three in 32 years and then 13 in six months. today president biden made sure his successor, of course is the same guy who proceeded him, can't continue on anything like that same pace. today president biden commuted death sentences for nearly every

federal prisoner on death row in the united states. it doesn't mean that these guys will be set free. but it does mean they will not be killed by the government. 37 of the 40 federal death row prisoners will now instead serve life without parole. the only exceptions were three prisoners convicted for acts of terrorism or for hate crimes. those were the boston marathon bomber and the mother emanuel ame church shooter and the tree of life synagogue shooter. those three are the only prisoners left on federal death row today after these 37 commutations today just ahead of christmas from president biden. among the people who have been pushing president bide on the take this kind of step is brian stephenson. brian stephenson has been the leading anti-death penalty advocate in this country for decades. in 1989 he founded equal justice initiative in alabama. it challenges excessive punishment, broadly challenges

death sentences in particular all across the country. his best-selling memoir "just mercy" among other things tells the story of a man who spent six years on death row who was not just spared execution, he was set free when brian stephenson was able to prove without a shadow of a doubt that that man was innocent, that he had been wrongly convicted. freed him before the state had the chance to kill him. just mercy became the basis for an award-winning film of the same name which, of course, stars the great michael b. jordan. after president biden commuted those 37 federal death sentences today, brian stephenson said this. he said, quote, we do not need to kill people to show that killing is wrong in this country. the death penalty is a torture rouse, flawed, expensive and error-filled practice that must be abolished. he said, quote, i commend president biden for this historic act and hope that governors and state executives follow the president's lead.

joining us now is brian stephenson the founder and executive director of the equal justice initiative. mr. stephenson, it's a real honor to have you here. thanks for making the time. >> it's great to be with you. >> let me just start by asking you to explain why you think this action by president biden was important today. >> well, it's historic in the sense that no u.s. president has ever commuted this many death sentences and certainly in the modern era it has no precedent. but i think it's also significant because i think it would be a turning point in how we think about the death penalty. you know, support for the death penalty is at a five-decade low. we have seen a real move away from capital punishment in many states abolished it including southern states like virginia. the death sentencing states are lower than they've been in decades. execution rates are low. the recent poll for the first time established that a majority of americans between 18 and 43

no longer believe in the death penalty. so i think the president's commutations could be a turning point if other executives, if other governors, if other leaders follow his lead. there are 700 people on death row in california that could be commuted and governor newsome talked about that. there are people on death row in north carolina, in pennsylvania, in ohio, and many other states. i just think we have an opportunity to really step back from this punishment that has been so flawed, error prone and troubling over the last 50 years. >> you've made a powerful case that part of what is wrong about the death penalty is because of what it asks of us, as a society, what it asks of our government, that people who do terrible things are more than the worse thing they have ever done in their lives, but those of us who think of ourselves as citizens and as people who are responsible to the way that our

government behaves also have a responsibility to make sure that one of the things our government ought not to do is make it somebody's job to kill people as part of their paycheck, part of what they do to earn a paycheck. >> yeah. >> given that, what do you make of the three exceptions the president made, the three crimes that are associated with those three prisoners are obviously some of the most heinous and notorious crimes that have been committed in this country in my life time. but still, it's notable by making 37 commutations that he carved out those three as exceptions. >> yes. i think that you could characterize those three cases as cases of terrorism, as cases of mass murder. i think what's significant about those three cases is that they're relatively early in the process. so that is they will be able to litigate the issues in their case for serl years. i think there will be another

opportunity to address those cases before any of those people are subjected to an execution. but you're right. i don't think that we should think about the death penalty by asking whether people deserve to die for their crimes they have committed. i think we should be asking do we deserve to kill. we have a system that makes so many mistakes, this year we saw the 200th person exonerated and released after being convicted and sentenced to death. it's a shocking rate of error for every eight people we executed in the united states over the last 50 years, we've identified one innocent person in death row. we would never tolerate that rate of error in most areas of public administration. if somebody told you that there's a toxin on some apples and one out of eight apples if you touch one would kill you, we would stop selling apples. we wouldn't tolerate in this public health or aviation but we continue to tolerate in the administration of the death penalty. and i do think there is

something cruel about forcing people to participate in something so clearly problematic, so clearly tor ter rouse. we don't expect people to rape people who are convicted of rape. we don't think a government official should torture people who are convicted of torture. asking state employees to kill people who killed is okay. correctional officers who bear the trauma and the weight of having to subject people unnecessarily, gratuitously to these systemic and lethal killings. i think that's what's going to push many of us to keep fighting for those three, not just those three on the federal death row, but the over 2,000 that are on state death rows across this

country. >> bryan stevenson, founder and executive director the author of "just mercy" and our nation's leading moral and legal voice on this incredibly important issue, thank you for your time tonight, particularly up against the holidays. it's nice to see you and have you here. >> it's great to see you, too. more news ahead. stay with us. you, too. more news ahead. stay with us like dynamic charting and risk-reward analysis, help make trading feel effortless. and its customizable scans with social sentiment help you find and unlock opportunities in the market. e*trade from morgan stanley. ♪♪ with powerful, easy-to-use tools power e*trade makes complex trading easier. react to fast-moving markets with dynamic charting and a futures ladder that lets you place, flatten, or reverse orders so you won't miss an opportunity. e*trade from morgan stanley there's news, and there's good news. like thousands of patients receiving free life changing surgeries, from volunteer doctors

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so last week we talked about a government rule that requires

a car company to report when ever a car gets into a crash while it is in self-driving mode. crashes like this one on thanksgiving day in 2022 when a tesla in san francisco that was in full self-driving mode inexplicably stopped on the highway and caused an eight-car pileup. thanks to this rule that you have to report it when a self-driving car crashes, tesla had to report that crash to the government. now that the ceo of tesla is kind of a co-president-elect, though, reuters is reporting this, quote, trump team wants to scrap car-crash reporting rule that tesla opposes. for the low, low, low price of financing one presidential election, tesla may have bought itself a u.s. government that among other things no longer requires tesla to report when its self-driving software causes wrecks and hurts and kills people. but tesla's interest aren't just

in the united states. arguably tesla is more a chinese car company than it is an american car company. the biggest tesla factory, the factory that makes more of its cars than any other plant, the single factory which makes roughly half the cars it makes globally is a huge one in shanghai. and tesla right now is trying to get approval from the chinese government to operate its self-driving car technology in that country as well. tesla's ceo, elon musk, really wants to keep the chinese government happy. and he really wants to build yet more factories in china. he's really invested in having chinese workers. ing manufacturing his cars right down the street from his huge shanghai tesla factory that he has up and running musk is building another $200 million battery factory to employ chinese workers. while donald trump appears to have not got whan he wanted out

of the near government shutdown this weekend, elon musk does appear to have successfully maneuver republicans in congress into cutting out of the government funding bill a provision that would have thrown regulatory roadblocks in the way of his continued massive investment in chinese manufacturing for his car company. we reached out for comment, we have not heard back. we'll let you know if we do. but the idea that we have just gone through this near death experience, right, with another trump government shutdown potentially happening right before christmas, even before trump technically gets back into office, and we did it specifically so his dlbillionai pseudo co-president could get more of what he wants in terms of chinese manufacturing and protect his relationship with china is unsettling enough from a national security prospect i have, national sovereignty perspective, but it's all the more unsettling given reporting in recent days our own

government found elon musk to be a potentially national security risk. "the wall street journal," for example, reported that while there are several hundred employees at spacex, musk's company, who have security clearances for what's known as sensitive compartmented information, elon musk is not one of the people who has that level of clearance. that's not normal for companies doing this kind of sensitive work with the government. the ceos of other similarly situated companies they've all been able to get this kind of security clearance. but not elon musk. if you're wondering why, consider this reporting of the new york times. quote, elon musk and his rocket company spacex have rewilled i failed to comply with protocols aimed at protecting state secrets by not providing some details of his meetings with foreign leaders. according to people with knowledge of the company and internal documents. quote, concerns about the

reporting practices and particularly about musk himself have triggered at least three federal reviews. the defense department's office of inspector general opened a review into the matter this year, the air force and also the pentagon's office of undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security separately initiated reviews last month, as in november. the air force also recently denied musk a high legal security access, citing potential security risks. quote, in the past three years, nine different countries, including in europe and the middle east, nine different countries have raised security questions about musk in meetings with u.s. defense officers. it seems clear from the reporting that some of these security concerns may have to do with reports about elon musk's drug use. but there's also these continuing concerns that he has not disclosed all of his meetings with foreign leaders or what was talked about in those meetings and that is required if

you want to maintain a security clearance with the u.s. government. the question for all of us broadly is why would a person refuse to disclose what's happening at meetings with foreign leaders and foreign governments? what are you talking about with foreign leaders that you don't want the u.s. government to know about? and what does it mean to have somebody who is seen as that kind of a security risk essentially single handedly directing the actions of the u.s. government during a presidential transition. joining us now is "new york times" investigative reporter eric lipton. mr. lipton, thank you very much for your time tonight. i really appreciate you being here. >> thanks for having me. >> so help me understand the -- i guess how surprising it is, how unexpected it might be in the abstract for somebody who is the head of a company like spacex, for example, to not have the kind of security clearances that mr. musk has either not been able to obtain or has actively been denied. >> there's something called the

special access program that is a higher level of classification that spacex wanted for elon musk that would allow him to participate in some of the most sensitive discussions around -- for example, right now spacex is helping the national reconnaissance office build a spy satellite network around the globe in orbit. he's also in charge of national security launches, putting some of the most sensitive spy satellites and missile tracking equipment into orbit. and so the special access program would have given him the ability to participate in some of the most classified discussions around these programs. and that was denied by the air force. he does have top secret clearance, but he does not have special access program. and that's unusual for a ceo. it's something that doesn't really happen for a ceo at that level for there to be questions about special access program ability for someone at that level.

and so, you know, but the fact of the matter is that spacex is incredibly involved in the national security and spy system right now. it is not only a launch company, it is actually helping build a spy satellite network and also helping create the satellites that are used for missile tracking, for missile defense programs of the united states. so it's an incredibly important company in the national security of the united states at the moment. >> an incredibly important company for the national security of the united states whose ceo can't get top level security clearance to be allowed access to some of what his own company is doing. it just seems strange. can i ask you about other countries having reported security concerns about mr. musk to u.s. defense officials. do we know anything about the nature of those concerns that they reported? >> the most specific thing is from a colleague that worked on the story with us and that had

to do with israel, had some concerns about whether or not musk could be trusted to maintain state secrets and was not communicating with potential adversaries information -- sharing information that perhaps he had access to. and that was one of the number of countries that was shared with us that raised a concern about musk and whether or not, you know, basically could he be trusted. i mean, it's very unusual to have a ceo of a major defense contractor be so engaged in foreign business operations directly, as you discussed with respect to china and the extent of his operations in china. and the business interests that china and the leverage to some extent that china therefore has over him and his company is unusual. and i think that makes folks at the air force uncomfortable. >> "new york times" investigative reporter eric lipton, thank you very much. i know this is -- this is a

particularly technical area of reporting. it's really hard to report on security clearances and intelligence concerns because of how secret it all is. it's been really illuminating to have you and your colleagues working on this. thank you so much for helping us understand it. >> thank you. we'll be right back. stay with us. we'll be right. stay with us (♪♪) (♪♪) start your day with nature made. and try new zero sugar gummies. ♪♪ vicks vapostick provides soothing non-medicated vicks vapors. easy to apply for the whole family. vicks vapostick. and try new vaposhower max for steamy vicks vapors.

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can get the links to all of them. for christmas, as your special christmas present, we're going to drop our newest public servant announcement. it doesn't fit, which is about trump's pick of dr. mehmet oz to run medicare. so on christmas afternoon, somewhere between tearing down the stockings and carving up the turkey, you can check out our new public servant announcement series. watch out. i'm feeling very festive this year. i hope you like it. pe you like t

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