degree of humility, with a recognition we don't know everything. there are things we can't see, quite frankly based we're siing in this room. we have to talk to one another, and in this christmas season i have to tell you my favorite christmas hymn is "oh, holy night." in there there is this line that saw his law is love and his gospel is peace. i would hope as lawmakers and citizens we would be guided by the law of love and we would see each other's humanity. >> again, i just can't do any better than that. he's not always the loudest in the room, senator warnock, but often one of the most taufl. that does it for me tonight. happy holidays, everyone, and everything you celebrate. the rachel maddow show starts right now. hi, rachel. >> hi, jen. it was fantastic you pulled that

out. we all know senator warnock is an unusually eloquent public servant, but there was something. he was awesome. >> he is. i loved it when i saw it. 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 in 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 bit later this hour, something i'm going to give you as a christmas present on christmas day. we will get to that later on in this hour. but the other one is just this. it is a -- it is a true story that i think of as a christmas present. it at least i think is -- 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, and 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. he was seen as a real apologist 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 was 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 in the ambassador in russia, she had shipped over to moscow from the united states 25 refrigerators and 2,000 pints of frozen cream. not to like distribute in russia but all for her, all for the ambassador's residence. it was a very high profile thing. this was a second marriage for him, it was 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 welch immigrants. his parents were from wales. he arranged the u.k. 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 marjory merryweather -- her house was her pride and joy. it was a mansion she had built in south florida that was called mother-in-law. 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 this wall that 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 properties, you see that he uses this everywhere. he uses this coat of arms not only in his advertisements and iconography for mar-a-lago, which is where he founded the coat of arms on the wall, but he also uses it at his golf clubs and all his other properties. so here's your christmas present. 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, we'll 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, integrity. 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 in "the new york times" explained although the family from whom trump took this crest were not at all happy about trump claiming it as if it was his own, mr. davies grandson advised the rest of the family to, quote, not bother suing mr. trump because, quote, 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 riverboat 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 owner's son-in-law the job of running the dea, running 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 now announcement that the son-in-law would get the dea job was made on tuesday. the following day he announced

he would pull away from the job, and trump said, he didn't pull himself out, i pulled him out. trump had only named this guy to the job three days earlier. i pulled him out. well, then why did you name him three days ago? there was news of his 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 presses for that particular white counsel had reportedly been demanding top bribes if you wanted him to put your name in contention for the white house. white house dea announcement, not dea announcement, white house counsel announcement, not white house counsel announcement. amid a lot of chest pounding saying they weren't going to let the fbi do any background checks or vetting on the nominees and they didn't need anyone else

meddling in it. among all the chest pounding around that, the trump team themselves ended up claiming themselves blind-sided by all the skel tons in the closet they didn't know about from disastrous picks like the fox news weekend hosts they picked to be defense secretary. shocking when you don't vet someone, turns out you don't find things that 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 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 nep tistic farce. you know, 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 laura trump now publicly removing herself from

consideration for that senate seat after reports out of florida that after all that, after that humiliating, nepotistic farce, she wasn't going to get the tap after all. and then there was of course trump's choice for this man to be the attorney general of the united states. quote, in some the committee found the following. quote, at least from 2017 to 202020 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. during the period 2017 to 2019 representative gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs including cocaine or ecstasy on multiple occasions. representative gaetz accepted gifts including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the bahamas in excess of appropriate amounts. in 2018 representative gaetz arranged for his chief of staff

to assist a woman with whom he was engaged in sexual activity to obtain a passport. representative gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discredibly upon the house of representatives. based on the above the committee concludes that 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, the provision of special privileges and favors, and for good measure, obstruction of congress. violated house rules and state and federal laws prohibiting prostitution, illicit drug use, statutory rape. the house ethics report on republican congressman matt gaetz that was released today,

which immediately raised some questions like given all the evidence that the ethics investigation 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 of this country and decide that this guy's 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 wrongdoing, 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 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? that's my best judgment. hi lindsey graham, hi, tommy tuberville, high bill haggerty.

aren't you glad you took the reputational huhumiliating hit to vouch for matt gaetz and he dropped out and now we've got the ethics committee accusing him officially of statutory rape and drug use including him allegedly setting up an e-mail address in his congressional office 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 pious, bibically guided speaker of the house who went out in public and strenuously 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 committee's 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 pious 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 have also reinflicted political harm and humiliation on lots of other republicans who his errors have mezzed with including his own vice president and all the senators and all the 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 republicans' margin for getting anything passed in the house is now smaller than at any time in the past century. and now -- and now on top of all that on what we expect do 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 this is a normal transition and this hasn't just been gaff after gaff 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 republican in washington while he is doing it, as he mishandles all of these nominations, it has been a terrible, sham balk 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 shutdown 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, stating lots of things about it that were definitely not true, insisting in increasing vociferous terms that republicans needed to tank that bill and not shut everything down. it was only after musk got everything 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. what did he want them to give him, he wanted a specific thing he asked for specifically. he wanted the republican-controlled congress to 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. he demanded it, but 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 the standoff that nearly shutdown the government this weekend, what actually did change is not what would have benefitted trump, is 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 is a production that would have screen 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 dan 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 shamblic mess and really should be covered as such. but on top of all those mistakes, we are now seeing the first signs that the errors and

own goals and self-inflicted humiliations of this 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 signsf 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. on the tree more ahead stay with us only $41 on dealdash. 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. i got this kitchenaid stand mixer for only $56. i got this bbq smoker for 26 bucks. and shipping is always free. go to dealdash.com right now and see how much you can save.

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before president biden was inaugurated in january 2021, the previous president had spent the last months of his presidency rushing to kill as many american prisoners as 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, and i mean extraordinary in mathematical terms. from the time the death penalty was re-established in 1980, the federal death penalty was re-established in 1998 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, he's the same guy who preceded 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 emmanuel 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 biden to take this kind of step is brian

stevenson. he's been the leading anti-death penalty advocate in this country for decades. in 1989 he founded equal justice in alabama. it challenges death sentences in particular all across the country. his best selling memoir "just mercy." among other things it tells the story of a man who spent six years on death row who was not just spared execution but set free when bryan stevenson was able to prove without a shadow of a doubt he was wrongly convicted. "just mercy" became the basis of an award winning film of the same name. bryan stevenson said this. he said, quote, we do not need to kill people to show killing

is wrong in this country. the death penalty is a tortuous, error filled practice that must be abolished. he said, quote, i commend president biden for his historic act and hope state executives follow the presidency. joining us now is bryan stevenson, stevenson,. thanks for making the time. >> it's great to be with you. >> let me just start by asking you why you think this action by president biden was important today. >> well, it's historic in the sense no u.s. president has ever commuted this many death sentences and certainly in the modern era it has no precedent. kbrng it could be a turning point how we think about the death penalty. support for the death penalty is at a five-decade low. we've seen a real move away from capital punishment in many

states that have abolished it including southern states like virginia. the death sentencing rates are lower than they've been in decades, the execution rates are low. a recent poll for the first time established 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 newsom has talked about that. there are people on death row in north carolina and pennsylvania and many other states, and i think we have an opportunity to really step back from his 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 worst 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, as part of what they do to earn a paycheck. 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 lifetime. but, still it's notable by making 37 commutations that he called out those three as an exception. >> 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 they're relatively early in the process, so that is they will be able to litigate the issues in their case for several years. i think there will be another opportunity to address those cases before any of those people are subjected to 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 the crimes they've committed. i think we should be asking do we deserve to kill? and 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 8 people we've executed in the united states over the last 50 years, we've identified one innocent person on death row. and we would never tolerate that rate of error in most areas of public administration. if somebody told you there's a toxin on some apples and 1 out

of 8 apples if you touch one, would kill you, we wouldn't tolerate this in aviation, in public health. but we continue to tolerate in the death penalty. i do think there's something cruel in forcing people to participate in something so problematic, so clearly tortuous. we don't expect our officials to rape people who are convicted of rape. we don't think a government official should torture people that have been convicted of tor cor. somehow we've persuaded ourselves asking state employees to kill people who have killed is something that's going to be okay. and one of the letters submitted to the president in support of those commutations came from correctional officials, wardens, correctional officers who bear the trauma and the weight of having to subject people unnecessarily gratuitously unto these systematic and lethal

killings, and i think that's what's going to push many of us to keep fighting for those three and 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 of the equal justice initiative, 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 just up against the holidays it's really nice to see you and have you here, sir. >> it's great to see you, too. >> all right, more news ahead. stay with us. >> all right, more news ahead. stay with us oney i saved i thought i'd get a wax figure of myself. cool right? look at this craftmanship. i mean they even got my nostrils right. it's just nice to know that years after i'm gone this guy will be standing the test of ti... he's melting! oh jeez... nooo... oh gaa... only pay for what you need.

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so last week we talked about a government rule that requires a car company to report whatever 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 interests 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 manufacturing his cars. right down the street from his huge shanghai tesla factory that he's already got up and running, musk is building another huge

$200 million tesla battery factory, again, to employ chinese workers. while donald trump appears to have not gotten what he wanted out of the near government shutdown this weekend, elon musk does appear to have successfully maneuvered 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 shut done possibly happening right before christmas, even before trump technically gets back into office, and we did it specifically so his billionaire pseudo co-president could protect his relationship with the chinese government and get more of what he wants in terms of chinese manufacturing is

unsettling enough, you know, from a national security perspective, from a national sovereignty perspective. but it's all the more unsettling given reporting in recent days about the ways in which our own government has found elon musk to be a potential national security risk. "the wall street journal," for example, reported while there are several hundred employees musk's space company who has security clearances for what's known as compartmented information elon musk does not have that level of clearance. the journal reports that 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 from keirsten grind, eric lipton, and sheer frankel at "the new york times." quote, elon musk and his rocket company, spacex, have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at

protecting state secrets including 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 under-secretary for defense of intelligence and security separately initiated reviews last month, as in november. the air force also recently denied musk a high-level 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 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 from all of us broadly is why would a person refuse to disclose what's happening at meetings with foreign leaders and foreign governments? and what does it mean to have someone who's seen at that kind of security risk essentially single-handedly directing the actions of a u.s. government during a presidential transition? joining us now is "the new york times" investigative reporter eric lipton. thanks for your time tonight. i appreciate you being here. >> thanks for having me. >> 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 -- you know, 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 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 in the program. it does not happen for a ceo of that level to be questions about a special access program ability for someone at that level. you know, the fact of the matter is 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, you know, create the satellites that are used for missile tracking -- for missile defense programs in the united states. it's an incredibly important company in national security at 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 -- it 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 am. >> 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 with not commuting with potential adversaries information -- sharing information that perhaps he had access to. and that was one of a number of countries that shared with us, that raised a concern about musk and whether or not, you know, basically could he be trusted. i mean the -- 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. >> "the 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. t. >> thank you >> we'll be right back stay with us

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there was an old lady who lived in a shoe. when a pan caught fire, she knew what to do. don't pour water on a burning pot and don't pick it up because it's ooh, hot, hot, hot. first turn off the heat and try and smother the flames with a lid door cover. better still to guard against fire use a firmly controlled deep fat fire. the old lady knew just what to do. do you? >> do you? i might be that lady. public service announce wants are among my favorite things ever in all of broadcasting. i said at the outset this hour i have one more christmas present for you this hour. this is it. we have started our own version of a public service announcement. with the incoming administration not doing normal vetting or background checks for their nominees, we have started a new series that we are calling public servant announcements to

fill in some of the gaps on who's set to get big, important government jobs. and we've just started posting them on youtube. if you go to maddowblog.com you can get the links to all of them. for christmas, for your special christmas present, we are going to drop our newest public service announcement, 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 watch our servance announcement. watch out. i'm feeling very festive this year. i hope you like it. i'm feeling year i hope you like it

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