Summary
The committee investigating the insurrection on January 6 has now taken possession of more than 700 pages of Donald Trump`s documents from the National Archives. The Committee now has in its possession this draft executive order that Politico published today which is titled Presidential Findings to Preserve, Collect, and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election. Ever since Donald Trump and his allies started the big lie that the election was stolen, there has been an unprecedented wave of threats against election workers across the country. President Biden is now open to splitting the major domestic policy agenda into separate climate and social safety net bills called Build Back Better.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: I don`t like what they did to Colin Kaepernick, but they did do one to thing. They got Jay Z to be in charge of who does the halftime show because I think they caught him on the week with the halftime show that`s coming up, Mary J. Blige, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem. It`s going to be a dope halftime show. So, you may be mad at the game. I`m still mad at the NFL but it`s going to be great halftime show.
Joan Walsh, Gary Chambers, thank you very much. That is tonight`s "REIDOUT." ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES starts now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voiceover): Tonight on ALL IN.
SIDNEY POWELL, TRUMP LAWYER: Every voting machine in the country should be impounded right now. There`s frankly more than enough criminal probable cause to justify that.
HAYES: Jaw-dropping new documents released to the January 6 Committee including the executive order Donald Trump was considering that could have ended American democracy as we know it. Then --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors.
HAYES: What we learned today about the Trump world control of the plot to fake electors. Plus, the Justice Department announces the first arrest of someone threatening the lives of election officials. And why life needs to imitate art as Democrats look to salvage parts of the Build Back Better Plan.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It`s real and it`s coming. If anyone tells you any different, they`re foolish.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. Well, they`ve got the Trump documents. The committee investigating the insurrection on January 6 has now taken possession of more than 700 pages of Donald Trump`s documents from the National Archives.
The ex-President fought all the way up to the Supreme Court to keep them out of the committee`s hands but the court ruled against him earlier this week. And it is now clear why he fought so hard, they appear to be incredibly incriminating, and include one of the biggest smoking guns we have seen yet though I will note there`s been a few.
The committee now has in its possession this draft executive order that Politico published today. It`s dated December 16, 2020. It is titled presidential findings to preserve, collect, and analyze national security information regarding the 2020 general election.
Now, before I get into it, let me just say, having read this, if this draft order had been issued and signed by the president back in that December, I think it would have very clearly signaled to the country and to the world that the United States was in the midst of an attempted coup. It would have created a moment of forced constitutional crisis, one we didn`t ever quite get to until the day of January 6.
The order as contemplated and drafted would have seized voting machines used in the 2020 election. "Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall cease collect, retain, and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and material records citing a federal law about retaining election records.
The unsigned order also cites a slew of conspiracy theories, including alleged evidence of international and foreign interference in the election, which I guess is why the Secretary of Defense would be involved here, although that is deeply strange. The executive order also would have directed the Secretary of Defense to complete an assessment of the election and submit that to the Director of National Intelligence within 60 days."
Now, Betsy Woodruff Swan points out in Politico, since the order was dated in mid-September, that suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021. The final provision of the order is the appointment of a special counsel to oversee this operation to institute a criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected, or in other words, to use the power of the Department of Justice to investigate the 2020 election.
Now, we still don`t know who actually wrote this thing, who authored this draft executive order. We do have some clues about how it may have come about. In the very first sentence, the order cites to classified documents, National Security Presidential Memoranda, 13 and 21.
We knew of Memoranda 13 but not Memoranda. 21. A source with knowledge of both of those told Politico, "The fact the draft executive orders author knew about the existence of Memorandum 21 suggested they had access to information about sensitive government secrets.
We also have the context of what we know was going on at the White House and who was around the president at the time of this memo. The conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell visited the White House multiple times in mid to late December 2020.
On one of those visits, just two days after the executive order is dated, Powell was joined by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little known former Trump administration official Emily Newman for what Axios describes as the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency, which is, of course, saying something.
Powell and her fellow conspiracy theorists spent hours in the Oval Office with the President trying to convince then-President Trump the voting machine rigged, to flip votes from Trump to Biden. It was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
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Axios report she proposed declaring a national security emergency granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize voting machines.
Now, members of Trump`s team had already looked into all these claims and found over and over that Powell`s allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny. People were yelling and cursing, as White House lawyers and aides tried to shoot down Powell and her allies.
Multiple outlets reported that Sidney Powell went back to the White House on December 20 where according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, she was once again pitching an executive order on seizing voting machines.
Those White House meetings on the 18th and the 20th took place just days after Sidney Powell laid out very clearly what she thought the president should do in this interview with the far-right Epoch Times.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
POWELL: Well, given the level of foreign interference, we can demonstrate and the country has evidence of in our filings of foreign interference in the election. It`s more than sufficient to trigger the President`s executive order from 2018 that gives him all kinds of power to do everything from seize assets to freeze things, demand the impoundment of the machines.
I think under the emergency powers, he could even appoint a special prosecutor to look into this, which is exactly what needs to happen. Every machine -- every voting machine in the country should be impounded right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Seize the machines, appoint a special prosecutor. Well, that sounds like a lot, like a real executive order there. Now, we don`t know why the order was never issued. Thank goodness, it was not. One answer maybe, it was clearly would not have stood up to legal scrutiny. Then Attorney General Bill Barr made that clear at a press conference on December 21.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Does the President have the legal authority to order the seizure of voting machines around the country?
BILL BARR, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: I see no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government in a wholesale seizure of machines by the federal government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Keep in mind, by the way, just to note, that guy, that coward, just tucked his tail between his legs. He wrote an overwhelmingly ludicrous encomium to Donald Trump in his resignation letter about what a swell dude he was, and then just ran away from the constitutional crisis. That`s William bars legacy.
But it seems like Donald Trump may have come close to signing the executive order. We know from Axios` reporting about the December 18th Oval Office meeting, he was actually considering Sidney Powell`s ideas. He reportedly told his staff, listen this. You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They`re saying they have the evidence. Why not try this?
Again, had that executive order been issued, we would have been in completely new territory. We would have been very far beyond any familiar frontier of constitutional governance and in the midst of a constitutional crisis, unlike anything this country`s encountered in more than a century
Ian Bassin served as associate White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. He`s now the executive director of Protect Democracy, nonpartisan organization dedicated to fighting efforts to undermine democracy. And he joins me now.
Ian, as someone who formerly worked in a White House Counsel`s Office and is familiar with executive orders in their drafting. What`s your just reaction to this document as a document?
IAN BASSIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PROTECT DEMOCRACY: I mean, first off, it`s incredible if it was actually in the Oval Office and presented to the President, because executive orders go through an enormous amount of legal review before they could ever make it anywhere near the president.
Now, we don`t know whether this went to the president or whether he saw it. But the fact that it`s even possible in this mix says a lot about dysfunction in the White House and what the President is willing to do because this thing would never have passed a laugh test.
As a lawyer in the White House, you cannot simply cite a series of statutes and say, therefore, I authorized the person to go shoot someone on Fifth Avenue which is what this would have done to our democracy.
HAYES: It also seems to me -- I mean, again, he doesn`t go through with it. But just to play out like President Trump issued executive order directing the army, the Pentagon, to seize voting machines. The military seizing voting machines is just like, that`s a one sentence description of a coup for anyone hearing it and I think would have been read as such domestically, internationally, everywhere.
BASSIN: I mean, one of two things is true here. Either the former president of the United States corruptly tried to overturn an election knowing that what he was doing was unlawful and inappropriate. In which case, very likely, there were crimes committed.
I point out earlier this week. 1000 alumni, more than 1000 alumni of the Department of Justice signed an open letter endorsing Attorney General Merrick Garland`s promise that he would go wherever the facts lead and bring indictments against anyone no matter what level of government they`re at, which is really important.
Or the former president United States was so misled by conspiracy theories and believe things that were so patently false that everyone who looked at them other than a handful of cooks in his office rejected, including an attorney general, that he sought to overturn American democracy based on those lies.
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Either one of those things suggests that something incredibly dangerous was occupying the Oval Office. And I will just point out that there`s another culpable party here other than the former president, and that is the Republican Party right now which I did not see making statements today about how this man should never be allowed anywhere near power again.
And you can bet the House that if documents they suggested that training was behind this, every Republican Congress would be knocking themselves over on the way to the television cameras to rattle their sabers.
And yet, Mitch McConnell, still to this day says if Trump is the nominee, he`ll support him in 2024.
HAYES: That is a really important point. The other point that I think about here is, in the end, this doesn`t happen. And I think it speaks to something that`s at the core of what happened during that period, which -- and I think it pertains to the work that you`re very focused on which is how do you fortify and strengthen guardrails of American liberal democracy and constitutional governance.
There was this threat that people would quit. There was the specter of a kind of Saturday Night Massacre. We`ve got this text from Sean Hannity and Mark Meadows. This is around the same time as on December 31, says we can`t lose the entire White House Counsel`s Office. I do not see Gen six happen the way he`s being told. I think this is pertaining to another part of the plot.
But ultimately, it seems to me, a huge part of what happened was enough people in the White House around said, we`ll quit if you do this. And the political blowback from that was what stopped it from happening as best we can tell.
BASIN: That`s true, it seems to be true of those bureaucrats within the administration. But where it has not been true, and it is not true today in terms of the continuing roiling efforts to undermine future elections, is among the elected leadership of the former president`s party of which he is the titular head, Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of How Democracy Die have made the point that there are three requirements for political parties in healthy democracies.
One, they unambiguously accept electoral defeat. Two, they issue violence. And three, they break with anti-democratic extremists. And over the last year, the Republican Party has failed on all three of those. There are good members of the party. There are good members that are elected that needs to do more, but there`s too many who aren`t doing enough.
They need to bring that party back into the fold of healthy democratic governance in order to preserve this republic for the next generation. And right now, they`re failing at that.
HAYES: Ian Bassin, as always, a pleasure. Thank you.
I want to now bring in Congresswoman Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia who serves on the House Select Committee investigating January 6. And let me just start by -- first by asking how significant, how important is it to the work you`re doing to now have possession to have won this case in the Supreme Court and have possession of these documents that committee requested?
REP. ELAINE LURIA (D-VA): Well, Chris, I would say that, you know, this is so far the singular most important outcome of the investigation, the fact that the Supreme Court upheld with an eight to one vote that, you know, the committee should have access to these documents. And, you know, we recently received 700 pages of documents, maybe a slight glimpse into those for some reporting today.
But, you know, this is the truth, the facts in writing. These are the documents that were the closest to the President, that his staff was using to brief him, to plan and to execute the work of the White House. So, this is an incredibly important development.
HAYES: Yes, I want to -- there`s another document here that political published parts of. So, this is in the public record. I`m not asking you to comment on anything that hasn`t been released, which was a draft of an address for the President to give the day after January 6. It was never given.
But I want to read parts of it and get your reaction to what it says that it was drafted and that it was never given and I`ll -- it was labeled remarks on national healing, and these are some of the portions. Like all Americans, I was outraged and sickened by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem. I`m directing Department of Justice to ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. To those who engage in acts of violence and destruction, I want to be very clear, you did not represent me, you do not represent our movement, you do not represent our country. And if you broke the law, you belong in jail. What does it say that that was drafted and never given?
LURIA: Well, you know, Chris, it`s very clear that those words that you just read never came out of the former president`s mouth, but they certainly should have. That`s the kind of statement that we needed, that the country needed in order to understand that what had happened was wrong, that this big lie was in fact a lie, and that we needed to move forward and have a smooth transition of power to the new administration to tell the people overrunning the capitol to leave and stop the violence.
And, you know, the committee has pointed out numerous times, we waited 187 minutes, over three hours for the President to take action. And it`s very clear, you know, the bottom line is that there are people, there are people who -- within the White House who knew the right things to say. They tried to put that message forward. Someone drafted this speech. It was very eloquently and appropriately written for the moment. But did the former President make a choice to deliver those words? No, he did not.
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He said, essentially the opposite of that. He said something like, we love you to these rioters. And that was just, you know, obviously, not the leadership the country needed. And you know, as we`ve said from the committee, it`s really a dereliction of duty. He had a responsibility to stop this violence and he didn`t do it.
HAYES: Yes, it is -- it is striking to read those words if you go to Politico and read -- and read the excerpts. I mean, it is -- I was like, oh, right, this is what -- this is the obvious thing that a politician should say under the --
LURIA: This is what a President would say.
HAYES: Anyone. I mean, any person. I mean, not even a president. Like, someone just a normal -- like, you know, normal person who saw this happen or felt responsibility for this happening.
One of the other themes that I think we`ve seen in the documents that, again, that have been made public or have been hinted that and excerpted and quoted in the letters, is just the fact that the President is in a small group of people who seem to be most gung-ho about these various plots, attempts to stay in power amidst a bunch of people who are either skeptical or outright opposed.
And that seems like one of the avenues if it`s fair to characterize that you`re pursuing one of the narratives that we`re seeing come out of the committee.
LURIA: Well it`s certainly is. And, you know, going back to something you said earlier on in this reporting, the fact that there was this Presidential Memorandum number 21 that wasn`t publicly reported or known about it, that`s really concerning to me. I mean, it means that someone who had knowledge of that document at the highest levels of government participated in providing information in order to draft this document. And that`s what we need to look at.
We don`t know right now where a document like this came from, how high it got within the levels of the White House administration. But it`s a record that the archives provided in White House documents. So, you know, it does bear full investigation.
And we really have to understand who was involved in this. I mean, it wasn`t like, you know, some fringe person, maybe Sidney Powell, or people who, you know, were not involved in the government, wouldn`t have access to that kind of classified information. How would they have known that a document like that existed in order to cite it in this memorandum?
So, there`s a lot for us to look at and we haven`t yet had a chance to look at it personally. It was 700 pages last night. So, still a lot to digest. But these are huge questions that the committee has.
HAYES: Yes, that`s a -- that`s a great point. I mean, just aside from the citation of memorandum, 21 which refers to something that`s that that`s classified, just the fact that this was in the National Archives possession as part of the White House papers means by definition this was not something that was like, drafted on a napkin in a bar by someone who was four steps removed. Like, this was a White House paper. It was in the possession of the White House. It was moving -- circulating through the White House`s paper system. It must have gotten some consideration.
LURIA: Well, it is very concerning. When we clearly outlined and I request to the archives what types of documents we wanted, things like the press secretary`s briefing books, the President`s working papers. You know, it`s very clear the kinds of things that we think are important from within, you know, the workings of the Trump White House that would inform our investigation.
And the fact that, you know, something like this could have wound up there is really overly concerning. And, you know, this is part of what we have to get to the bottom to in the committee`s work.
HAYES: All right, Congresswoman Elaine Luria, thank you for making time for us tonight. Have a good weekend.
LURIA: Thanks.
HAYES: So, it`s clear there was no shortage of schemes for installing Donald Trump in office over the will of the voters. They did have a lot of irons in the fire, including another plot centered on January 6.
Next, the plan to install fake electors in seven states and new reporting on the Trump World underboss in charge of the whole operation. That`s next.
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HAYES: We`ve talked at length on this show about the many ways that Donald Trump sought to stay in power whether it was bullying Georgia officials to find one more vote than what he needed, or sending a mob of his supporters to stop the electoral vote-counting process.
One tactic that`s largely escaped the same level of scrutiny until recently is the Trump campaigns attempt to send its own electors to replace the rightful Biden electors. In a normal year, the electoral process is still pretty complicated.
The Washington Post explains "Before Election Day presidential candidates or their parties nominate a slate of potential electors and each state where they appear on the ballot. After the popular vote is certified the governor in each state is required under federal law to certify the winning candidates electors.
The electors then meet in mid-December and send signed certificates recording their votes to among other places, the National Archivist and the president of the U.S. Senate. The votes are tallied on January 6. That`s but they were doing in the capital that day.
But as my colleague Rachel Maddow has been leading the way in reporting, while those legitimate electors were meeting in December, Republican electors in five states won by Joe Biden also signed certificates that are suspiciously nearly identical to each other, saying they were the real electors. And they even went so far as to submit the certificates to the same authorities.
Now, if that seems say, fraudulent to you, you`re not the only one. In Michigan, one of the states where Republican submitted fake Trump electors, Attorney General Dana Nessel said she believes there`s absolutely enough evidence to bring criminal charges against the 16 Republicans who signed a certificate falsely claiming to be the state`s presidential electors.
Politico reports today, the house January 6 Select Committee has trained its sights on the false pro-Trump electors. So, how do Republicans across the country decide to move forward with this plan by signing and submitting nearly identical fraudulent certificates?
The fake electors themselves have been really sketchy about that. Watch what happened when one of them, an Arizona State Representative was confronted by local journalists?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you have direction from anybody in doing this? Was it you allowing yourself doing this or that someone gives you advice on the manner in which you can do?
JAKE HOFFMAN, ARIZONA STATE REPRESENTATIVE: So, I`m simply -- I was one of the electors, right?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
HOFFMAN: I`m not in charge of the electorate so you would need to --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How did you hear about that? How did you hear about that?
HOFFMAN: You would -- you would need to ask the party chair about that.
[20:25:00]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How did you hear about the plan? So, you`re just told to be someone?
HOFFMAN: You would need to ask the party chair about that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, but you`re the -- you`re the person who received the call. You showed up, right? How did you know to show up that day?
HOFFMAN: So as I said, you can go ahead and ask the party chair of the logistics of it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ask her how you got a phone call from someone.
HOFFMAN: You`re welcome to talk to them about that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you know how you arrived at a place?
HOFFMAN: Thank you. I appreciate your question.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you really not know how you got a call?
HOFFMAN: Have a great one.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Excellent, excellent questioning there. Well, despite sophisticated evasion like that, we now know who organized the whole thing. The Washington Post reports it was Donald -- President Trump`s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who was just subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee on Tuesday.
Amy Gardner is part of the reporting team that broke this story in the Post and she joins me now. Great to have you, Amy. First, just sketch out what the -- what the scheme was or what happened in the States with these alternate slates of electors.
AMY GARDNER, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Sure. So, in the days leading up to December 14, as you pointed out, which was the day that the electors were due to gather in their -- in their state capitals to vote, the -- led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump`s top lawyer and other Trump officials, the Trump campaign was planning to -- and encouraging his slates of electors in those states to convene and vote for Trump and to send that vote on to Washington.
We know this from talking to numerous Republican officials, party officials, campaign officials in the states in question. We know that they talk by phone the weekend ahead of December 14, and that they were described -- they were discussing really, really nitty-gritty details like which legislator in Lansing Michigan was going to let them in the building or in Arizona or in Georgia or Pennsylvania or Nevada and you know, where they were going to meet.
What`s really interesting too is that they discussed at length the fact that there were a number of electors in the original nominated Trump electorate slates who balked at this plan and were not willing to go along with it because they believe that in their states, Biden was in fact the duly elected president.
And so, they had to also scramble to find replacement electors for those who are unwilling to do so. And we learned this from talking to a number of people and no one has really provided any evidence that it`s not true.
HAYES: Yes, we should just note -- I mean, the complexity of how America elects its president, which is really quite complex, that you`re voting for basically like a team of people that are going to be the slate of electors Team A or Team B. And what your reporting says and what we know from other reporting -- even at the time we knew some of this meeting was going on that, you know, if the Biden -- if Team B wins, you know, those are the people that send in their certificates because that`s --- they won the state. And what we had was Team Trump being like, acting as if they had won and getting together anyway and going through the motions as if everything that happened with Trump winning the state, so as to send these electors on to Washington DC.
And maybe talk a little bit about -- I mean, what`s crazy here is as far out as this plan might be, the idea of disputed electors is contemplated in the Electoral Count Act. There`s some precedent American history, and would have given Mike Pence a kind of pretext to maybe do some of the things that Donald Trump was prevailing on him to do.
GARDNER: Yes. And I do appreciate your lengthy description of the process because it is complicated. And I only learned in reporting this story that the governors of the states are required by federal law to send in what`s called a Certificate of Ascertainment to Washington that says who the rightful electors are.
And the governors in all of these states, two of them Republicans in Georgia and Arizona had already done so. So, they had already signaled to Washington that the Biden electors were the electors whose votes were supposed to be counted. What`s really interesting is, and I think you`re alluding to this, is that the -- at the time this was happening in plain sight, it`s not news that these electors gathered.
What is news is that it was used to try to persuade Mike Pence to do what you described, which is to deny Biden his victory on January 6. And it`s funny because at the time, when the electors were gathering, they claimed it was just a contingency plan. It was just intended in the event that some or one of their many legal challenges would prevail, even though most of them had already failed in court.
HAYES: Right. But there are a few still outstanding, so they claimed it was just in the event that a legal challenge prevailed because if you don`t have those electrodes in place on December 14, there`s not really any recourse for you, which is true.
But what`s important to note here is that the existence of the slates of electors and the fact that they voted on December 14 was used as evidence for Mike Pence to do what Donald Trump wanted him to do.
HAYES: Right because he now -- the argument was, well, who`s to say which of these electors. You got to -- got to throw it into the both houses of Congress? There`s a complicated process by which they can determine who the true slate is.
[20:30:09]
There have been, you know, contested slates of electors and other times in American history, particularly in reconstruction. When white supremacist governments sometimes like to send an alternate slate of electors to Washington, even though they didn`t have control of the state.
I want to just to sort of confirm your reporting that Boris Epshteyn was on my colleague Ari Melber`s program tonight, which essentially confirms that, yes, he was doing it under the direction of Rudy Giuliani, take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BORIS EPSHTEYN, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER FOR THE TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors for when as we hope the challenges to the seated electors would be heard and will be successful part of the 12th Amendment of the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act.
Everything that was done was done illegally by the Trump legal team by according to the rules and under the leadership of Rudy Giuliani.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: To your point, Amy, he seems to be holding to that line that this was just a contingency should something have happened despite the fact that your reporting indicates it was -- it was more than that.
Amy Gardner who does some great reporting with her colleagues in Washington Post. Thank you very much for your time.
AMY GARDNER, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: All right. Coming up, election workers around the country were subjected to so many threats and acts of intimidation. The Department of Justice created a special task force to handle them all. Tonight, they have their first arrest. That`s next.
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HAYES: Ever since Donald Trump and his allies started the big lie that the election was stolen from them, there has been an unprecedented wave of threats against election workers across the country. Every state officials down to just volunteer poll workers attacked, harassed, threatened with violence.
In response, the Department of Justice launched an election threats task force this summer. Today, they made their first arrest charging a Texas man was trying to hire people to kill election workers in Georgia.
Josh Gerstein is the reporting on the arrest for Politico and he joins me now. Josh, just tell me a little bit about who this individual is and what they`re alleged to have done.
JOSH GERSTEIN, SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER, POLITICO: So, this fellow, his name is Chad Stark, he`s 54, from Travis County, Texas. And he`s alleged to have gone on Craigslist about a year ago in January of 2021.
And to have posted sort of a want ad on Craigslist, you know, you can list something like a bike and a price. And he said that he needed Georgia Patriots to kill a Chinese agent for the price of $10,000.
And then, he laid out a series of grievances against top officials in Georgia election officials, who happened to be the focus of Donald Trump`s ire at that particular time for the fact that they weren`t doing what he wanted to, you know, reverse the results of the election in Georgia.
HAYES: Yes, let me just read a little bit from the Craigslist hit he allegedly put out, it`s time to put a bullet in the treasonous Chinese official A, then we work our way down to official B, the local and federal corrupt judges. It`s our duty as American Patriots to put an end to the lies of these traitors and take back our country by force.
Do we know who these individuals are? I know, they`re not -- they`re not mentioned in the indictment (PH)?
GERSTEIN: Well, we don`t know for sure who all of them are. But we believe that the top one is Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger and then, other officials there.
So, these are we think more senior officials, as opposed to the sort of rank and file election workers that had been receiving the plethora of threats that you just talked about a moment ago.
HAYES: Yes, we should note that -- and again, there`s -- obviously, this is not a coincidence if he would direct this ire at Brad Raffensperger. I mean, these were people that were being very publicly pointed to by Donald Trump and the media that is sympathetic to as the problem here.
We should also note just for your -- for your point, the Georgia really got the brunt of this that Ruby Freeman was singled out by Donald Trump by 18 times at a now famous column, which he pressed Georgia officials to alter the state`s results.
He called the 62-year-old temp worker a professional vote scammer, a hustler, a known political operative who stuffed ballot boxes.
And she too faced death threats and harassment and people outside our apartment. So, there was a real atmosphere of this kind of thing at that period of time, particularly towards people in Georgia.
GERSTEIN: Right, and some people in fact are surprised that this is the first case that has been prosecuted by this six-month-old task force and it took them a year to bring it. They did tell us today that the Justice Department said they`ve investigated dozens of matters through this taskforce focused on specifically election related threats. So, we`ll see if any of the other ones come to charges.
We should say they have brought other threat type charges in connection January 6, and public officials and so forth. But this is the first one to stem from the particular effort that the Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced about six or seven months ago.
And I would also point out, Chris, that, you know, you mentioned Donald Trump`s comments about the officials in Georgia, as recently as today, he is still issuing public statements, the former president saying that, you know, nefarious people are trying to protect the people that committed crimes in places like Georgia.
So, this kind of rhetoric is still out there, or unhinged people to seize on and escalate even further in this kind of vulgar way.
HAYES: All right, Josh Gerstein, thanks so much for joining us.
GERSTEIN: Thanks, Chris.
HAYES: Ahead, the future of the Build Back Better bill more uncertain than ever. I`ll make my case for the most important thing Democrats need to salvage from this bill, after this.
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[20:43:49]
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It`s clear to me that we`re going to have to probably break it up. I think that we can get -- and I`ve been talking to a number of my colleagues on the Hill, I think it`s clear that we would be able to get support for the worth of $500 plus billion for energy and the environmental issues that are there.
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HAYES: President Biden made news this week that he`s willing to break up the big domestic agenda, the social safety net and climate bill called Build Back Better.
Now, that is a combined entity, passed the House back in November after going through a lot of negotiations to try to ensure the votes of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
But now, Joe Manchin no longer seems to be on board, and even his own $1.8 trillion offered compromise is apparently no longer on the table. So, it`s unclear what happens next.
Now, there are a lot of reasons we are now at this point, people are angry Manchin, I get that. One thing I think is under appreciated, is the failure by progressive groups to achieve consensus on domestic policy prioritization.
Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for president, it became clear throughout that campaign that health care was going to be the big first domestic policy, that was for a variety of reasons, a bunch of interest group politics that had come together, the fact that they`d taken a bite at the apple under Clinton and failed and they felt they had to do it this time.
[20:45:18]
In 2020, that never happened around an issue, it was never clear what the single domestic priority was going to be.
I would always ask presidential primary candidates, what`s your first bill if you`re elected. And other than Elizabeth Warren who consistently talked about her anti-corruption bill, most candidates said something along the lines of we need to do everything, walk and chew gum.
And that has continued today, for politicians in the Democratic Party interest groups. I mean, take the climate group, The Sunrise Movement, which has done a lot of amazing stuff. They have been very spirited in their activism, I think they deserve a lot of credit for pushing climate to the fore.
After Biden floated breaking up Build Back Better, the climate movement -- Sunrise Movement spokesperson told The Washington Post, the idea of breaking up the bill into smaller bills is a false choice for Democrats. Everything in the Build Back Better Act is urgently need urgently needed.
That`s wrong. I don`t agree with that. It`s not a false choice. It`s a very real choice.
If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority, that`s definitional. The nature of prioritization is putting one thing over another. It`s hard to do. It sucks. But it`s what legislating often requires.
Right now, I think the priority has to be climate. Which is not to say that other parts of the bill are unimportant. I would have voted for the original plan that came out of Bernie Sanders` shop, it`s $5 trillion. There`s lots of amazing stuff in there. It`s awful that it`s getting left on the cutting room floor.
But to take the metaphor of the film "Don`t Look Up", if there`s a comet headed towards Earth, you have to act like it. You can`t say we`re not going to deal with a comet until we get the child tax credit.
No, you send the rocket ship up to hit the comet. The odds of Democrats having a governing trifecta anytime in the next 10 years are slim. The clock is ticking. The comet is coming. Lawmakers must do whatever they can to get the bills climate provision signed into law. That is what prioritization demands. It`s what the planet demands.
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[20:51:28]
HAYES: Democrats must unite around focusing on passing the climate agenda that President Biden has proposed, no matter what that takes, no matter what it requires to be split off of the big Build Back Better bill, that`s my view.
President Biden is now open to splitting the major domestic policy agenda into separate climate and social safety net bills despite the wishes of many progressive groups.
I want to see what two lawmakers who would have to make that legislation a reality think of this strategy. Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat in Massachusetts who sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democratic California who chairs the Oversight Environmental Subcommittee and both join me now.
Senator Markey, do you think do you agree that climate should be prioritized above everything else, and you do whatever you can to salvage that portion of this legislation?
SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): I agree with Joe Biden, we should prioritize climate. It`s largely been negotiated, the financing is there, and we should use it as the foundation.
And then, if we can get the 50 votes on any other family protection provisions in the Build Back Better bill, we should add that in as well. But climate should be the foundation.
And then, it`s absolutely imperative that we set a deadline that we used to the State of the Union address on March 1st as the deadline to get it done. We should bring a bill out in February onto the floor of the United States Senate. The time for talking is over. It`s now time for action. The time for negotiation is over, it`s now time to reach an agreement.
And so, from my perspective, climate has to be the foundation. It`s the healthcare, environmental, economic, national security, a moral issue of our time. And we cannot miss this historic moment. We can reach an agreement on that issue.
Joe Manchin said it`s the easiest area for him to reach an agreement. We should take him at his word, reach that agreement and add in whatever else we can get on the social issues.
HAYES: Yes, we should note that the climate just in case people think this is wishful thinking, the climate portion of the bill, the 500 billion already went through a kind of like, Manchin washing, where a bunch of stuff that he objected to got taken out, including things that I really support.
I think both of you support the clean energy standard, got taken out. I think we should have it in. But you know what, you can`t get a vote for it. You can`t get over it. Congressman Khanna, do you agree with this strategy?
REP. RO KHANNA (D-CA): I do, Chris, let me just say because I rarely am on with Senator Markey, no one has done more for the climate in the entire Senate or House than he has. But climate will be the foundation for what we come up with. And it`s going to be about $500 billion. As you said, Senator Manchin is on board with that, it will be the largest investment in climate that the United States government has ever made.
My view is and I have a good relationship with Senator Manchin, let`s give him a chance to say what he is for, I think he`s going to be for not just climate, but universal preschool. He`s actually for raising taxes in some of people who are wealthy. He`s for negotiating on prescription drugs. I think he could come up with something that will have the consensus of support of the president, support of House progressives, and we should give him that opportunity.
And frankly, we should do it with respect. I mean, going in attacking him isn`t going to get you the 51 votes.
HAYES: I couldn`t agree more. I`m agreeing -- we`re now all agreeing with each other, which is slightly disappointing because I was already to argue with both of you, but I do think -- I mean, I guess -- I guess this is everyone`s gotten religion on this, because I think that, look, the strategy here Senator Markey was, we`re going to outline this thing, and we`re going to get Manchin and Sinema to come along.
[20:55:14]
And you know, you can`t invent leverage over a person that you don`t have. And I just want to say for people watching this, I looked at polling from West Virginia today, Joe Biden`s approval rating in West Virginia right now is 29 percent, Joe Manchin is 54 percent, Donald Trump is like 65 percent. That`s West Virginia voters.
So, you know, if you can get the West Virginia Senator on board for half a trillion dollars in climate spending, Senator Markey, that`s not bad.
MARKEY: Yes, Henry Waxman and I from California, we worked hard on a bill, we got a pass through the House in 2009. But a lot of talking, a lot of negotiation in the Senate and it died. And that was 12 years ago, we`ve lost a lot of time, we cannot lose the next 10 years.
So, this is our opportunity to use climate, again, as the foundation, we can do this. But time is running out, time is our enemy, time is the -- is the front of the climate denial, fossil fuel industry.
So, if we take advantage of this, and again, Ro Khanna has done a great job of leading on this in the -- in the House of Representatives and so many other progressives, we have to take a win here, we`ve got an opportunity for a big, big win.
And we can -- and we can add in other big victories that Ro Khanna was just referring to, and if we do it, this will be an historic victory for Joe Biden, for the Democratic Party and for the planet, because the Democratic Party will be looking up at this threat of climate change. And we will be putting the solutions in place.
HAYES: I just want to be clear here, like, there`s very tangible modeling on all this. This isn`t -- I mean, look, we don`t know the future, this is all -- to a certain degree, unspeculative.
But here`s the drop-in emissions, business as usual, just with the infrastructure bill or with this chunk. Can we -- can we put this up because I think, like, the 2030 goal, which is the dotted line there, the current trajectory doesn`t get us there. If you could get the climate provisions and Build Back Better, we get there.
Now, again, the future is unwritten, Lord knows what happens. But like our best guess, is that is the thing that puts us on trajectory.
And I want to ask you this, Congressman Khanna, because I -- just to go back to sort of the thesis of the last block and I know you`re not going to pull back the curtain too much, but I`ll ask it anyway. When you look back at the ACA and healthcare, right, a lot of that was this was unfinished business of the Democratic Party because the last time there`s a Democratic president, the Democratic House and Democratic Senate, it died, right?
Clinton care didn`t happen. An enormous setback. It was the dream of Harry Truman on forward, the Democratic president to get some sort of health care.
Waxman-Markey named after the Senator on your screen right there with Henry Waxman was the big unfinished business of domestic policy of the Obama administration. Dodd-Frank passed, the ACA passed, Waxman-Markey dies in the Senate.
My question Congressman Khanna is why wasn`t climate -- why wasn`t it that thing? That health care was back in 09 this time around?
KHANNA: It was part of an economic message. I think part of it was, Donald Trump had just won. All these folks we`ve met had economic anxiety, jobs have gone on short, President Biden (INAUDIBLE) and got to rebuild America.
And part of that was the Green New Deal or climate new policies. But it was one piece of the puzzle. But I agree with you, it`s the most important piece because it`s irreversible. I mean, who knows when we`ll have this problem again. And I actually don`t think it`s that complicated.
If you give Senator Manchin the pen, I know some progressives don`t like me saying this, but just give him the pen, let him come up with something. I think he`s going to come up with something that is going to be extraordinarily much better than nothing on climate. And I think we can get consensus on that. And he will look good in history. Senator Markey, of course already has a place in history. And Joe Biden will look good in history, and we`ll do something for the planet.
HAYES: Is that the feeling in the -- in the caucus, Senator Markey, do you think on your side?
MARKEY: I think once President Biden spoke and said that he wants to move on climate, and then add in these other large chunks of policy that are critical to the well-being of American families, I think that our caucus will be moving in that direction.
And if we don`t on climate, we miss, one, the ability to create millions of new union jobs in clean energy.
Two, the ability to rectify the environmental justice to those most adversely impacted, mostly poor people.
And third, we missed the opportunity to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases. So, I think our caucus will move in that direction. And I am glad that President Biden is giving us the leadership.
[21:00:08]
HAYES: Once again, we`ve solved all the world`s problems here in the final segment of ALL IN. Thank you both Senator Ed Markey, Congressman Ro Khanna, that was great.
That is ALL IN for this week. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts now with Mehdi Hasan in for Rachel. Good evening Mehdi.
