gets tonight's last word. the 11th hour with stephanie ruhle starts now. >> tonight, it is exactly 2 years since the supreme court struck down roe v wade, a decision to put abortion on the ballot in the race for the white house . then biden goes off the campaign trail through debate prep while trump focuses on bringing in more campaign cash. plus, the mar-a-lago documents case. prosecutors face off against trump's lawyers over a gag order request as the 11th hour gets underway on this monday night. good evening once again. i'm stephanie ruhle joining you from colorado at the aspen ideas festival, and we are now 134 days away from the election and today marks two years since the supreme court included donald trump's three hand- picked justices took away the constitutional right to abortion. the cause of that decision, almost 28 million american women of reproductive age now live in states with partial or total abortion bans and president biden wants to make sure every voter who knows that donald trump is the person responsible and what to do next. >> things donald trump says about your freedom. after 50 years of failure, nobody coming even close. i was able to kill roe v wade. three years ago the supreme court justices that trump hand- picked help overturn roe v wade. >> never before has the court granted and then taken away a widely recognized constitutional right. >> new laws banning abortion or taking effect. >> decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the white house. we know what will happen if he gets another four years. to republicans roe is just the beginning. they're going to try to ban the right to choose nationwide. they're coming for ivf and birth control next. on against extremism. >> and earlier today, vice president harris spoke at the university of maryland to explain the choice americans are really facing in november. >> donald trump thinks the government is in a better position to tell women what's in their best interest than women are to know for themselves. but joe biden and i trust women. and women trust all of us to fight for their most fundamental freedoms. >> donald trump has consistently claimed credit for the end of roe and for all of the state abortion bans that followed. just this past weekend he publicly thanked the judges who were responsible for those decisions. with that, let's get smarter with the help of our leadoff panel tonight. john allen is here, senior national politics reporter from abc news. josh gerstein, senior legal affairs reporter for politico and barbara mcquade, a veteran federal prosecutor and former u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. her new book, attack from within, how disinformation is sabotaging america, is out now and it is a summer must-read. barb, let's look back. think back to that decision two years ago. fast forward to tonight. what has gone through your mind from then until now? >> you know one of the things that the majority said in the dobbs opinion is that finally we are going to take abortion out of these of in court and send it back to the states where it longs. and of course we see nothing of the sort because it created the chaos that people predicted it would, because of the lack of clarity, and so now we've got this patchwork of different states trying different laws, seeing what sticks, seeing what works. we've also seen 117,000 people travel to have abortions out-of- state in the past year. so i think we're in this period of chaos that is not likely to subside anytime soon. >> josh, what about you? you were the person who broke the news that the court had voted to overturn roe when the dobbs decision leaked early. what are you thinking tonight? what were you thinking then? >> well, we were thinking this was going to be significant, stephanie, but we never thought it would be as big as it turned out to be, and by that i mean the political impact really wasn't expected. and the reason for that is we've seen so many other cases come and go from the supreme court on the issue of abortion. we've seen predictions from democratic activists, addictions from abortion rights activists, predictions from political analysts that, oh, this would be the one that would really bring people to the polls, and it never seemed to happen, especially the issue of bringing women to the polls. and then in the wake of this decision, first disclosure in politico a couple months early and then the decision two years ago, we saw something we haven't seen before, which was a dramatic political upsurge as a result of this, even in states really not known for progressiveness. >> john, clearly the democrats think this issue will help them in november. it did in the midterms. how does trump's camp feel about it? >> they're obviously very concerned about it, steph. you've heard donald trump over the course of the last couple years basically scold other republicans were taking extreme positions or what he views as extreme positions on abortion, particularly those who want to have bands that don't include exceptions in cases of , incest aware the mother is in danger. you saw joe biden's clicks for democrats. number one, they can motivate their base. number two, they absolutely have to make sure that voters understand that donald trump is responsible for the supreme court justices who made this decision. voters understand that and you can see from what biden said that that's important to him. and the third thing there that's very important for them is trying to portray this as part of a larger extremism pushed by donald trump. >> but john, donald trump can't be that scared or worried about it. he's the one responsible for putting us here and he takes credit for it every chance he can get. he's chosen to make white evangelicals his core base and we know they're single issue voters, and we know what that issue is. >> i would just say that wouldn't be the first time that donald trump had taken an action, taken it proudly, and then learned that the consequences weren't exactly what he wanted. i think that he is happy to say that he put this court in place. he's happy to let people interpret from that, and at the same time, if he understands the horrible force that was unleashed by the reversal of the dobbs decision and the reversal of roe versus wade in the dobbs decision, and it is one of the political factors that has to occupy his campaign. there's not much they can do about it now except for try to make sure, appear to be a middle ground between the far right that wants to ban abortion completely and the democrats who want to keep abortion protections in place that are there now and also expand them back to at least where roe stood. >> josh, what do you think about how this is being talked about in the presidential race on both sides? >> well i think that i agree with jonathan and i think you got sort of a classic straddle going on in the trump campaign, where they're continuing to try to make their pitch to the religious conservatives, to the evangelicals, as you note, stephanie. at the same time, there very much concerned about this gender gap. you know it's a big problem. a lot of people including a lot of republicans think this is what cost trump the 2020 election and i think he has that in his mind. he knows he can't give up on one side of the ledger, at the same time, he has that lurking in the back of his mind that he doesn't want to see a replay of 2020. and then on the biden campaign side, i've been struck by the rather complete embrace of this issue by them. i was at an event over the weekend with both second gentleman dug him off and also the vice president himself were at and they were really stressing the degree at which they consider the supreme court responsible for this and the second gentleman was even talking about supreme court reform, which is interesting because that's a little bit off script for the biden administration. it's something the president himself has never endorsed but it remains very popular with liberal voters. they are definitely swinging at this particular pitch as hard as they can in the biden campaign. >> biden's campaign is now saying things like ivf and birth control could be next. what are you most concerned this court could go after next? >> i think, stephanie, and he kind of right that is built on the concept of substantive due process is at issue here. if you think about that dobbs opinion, you may remember that the majority included language like this was very narrow, we're only talking about abortion here. don't try to extend this to other things, but clarence thomas in his concurrence said oh yes it is. the basis of roe was substantive due process and if we find no textual support for that, that means there's also no textual support for other rights including contraception, gay sex, which had been upheld in a case previously based on substantive due process, interracial marriage. all of those things go to this idea that there is a fundamental right to privacy and self determination, even though those precise words are not in the constitution. and so, if dobbs can overturn roe then they can absolutely overturn all of those other rights, as well. >> josh, some americans hear these concerns about a national abortion ban or crackdown on birth control and they think these are just politicians being dramatic. this could never happen. you covered the court closely. how do you see these concerns? are they legit? >> well i mean we already see these sorts of cases coming to the court, stephanie. we already had an abortion pill case at the court this year, which was basically turned away on more fundamentally kind of procedural and standing grounds. we had another case that's still pending on the issue of access to emergency abortions in emergency rooms across the country. so as barbara said at the outset, these issues are not going away and we'll see. so far the supreme court has tried to sort of tread the centerline on this in the wake of the dobbs decision. perhaps a little bit of the backlash they received, and they may be trying to moderate themselves. but how long that sticks for and whether it sticks in every single abortion case they get i think is really an open question, because none of them is probably repudiating the decision that they rendered two years ago, even if they might be trying to attack one way or the other at this particular moment. >> josh, we are also relating another big decision for the court about abortion. this time it's a case out of idaho about emergency care. can you explain this to us? >> so yeah, this has to do with a federal law that basically governs what kind of services have to be provided to you in an emergency room. it stems from situations a couple decades ago where people with insurance would show up at private hospitals and be turned away, even though they were deathly ill, because they didn't have the correct kind of insurance, and there was a law passed at that time that basically said if your hospital takes medicare, certain medicare patients, you have to provide emergency care to anybody that comes through the door. and the situation that has developed in idaho, and it's developing in other states, is a question of what happens if the state has implemented a rather strict ban on abortion and you show up in an emergency room, and you need an emergency abortion. it does happen sometimes. people are going into sepsis. their life might be in danger but a more common situation is that they're having some kind of problem that is going to cause them to lose the pregnancy eventually end could potentially, if not treat it, result in them losing the ability to have children in the future. and so you have hospitals now that basically, and doctors, that won't provide that sort of care anymore. so you have a basic classic clash here between the federal law in the state law that in this case is trying to outlaw abortion and that's what we are looking at the justices to resolve perhaps by the end of this week. >> in idaho, a state that already has a shortage of hospitals and maternal care. barb, there is some other big legal news tonight, completely unrelated. wikileaks founder, a namely noel, julian assange, has reached a plea deal with the u.s. and he is now a free man. can you explain this to us? >> it's actually really a fascinating development. you may recall that he was charged and has been awaiting extradition out where he is in england for about five years now and even before then, he was in the ecuadorian embassy and sort of self exile for seven years so he's already been locked away for 12 years. it appears that a plea agreement has been reached where he will enter a guilty plea to conspiracy with chelsea manning to violate the espionage act by coercing, cajoling, working together with her to get classified national security information and disseminate that to the public. one really interesting fact about all of this comes stephanie, is that he's going to enter this plea, apparently, in the northern marianna islands and the prosecution has asked that the plea and the sentencing all occur on the same day. it's expected that the sentence will be time served and that it's occurring in the northern marianna islands because that is the court location nearest to his home country of australia, to which he's expected to return. >> all right. one more topic before i let any of you go. john, you know i wasn't going to let you leave without covering your latest reporting. donald trump says he knows who his vp pick will be. where do things stand? i know he loves to play it like we are watching the apprentice, the bachelor, who knows what, but this is some serious illness. any clues? >> the could name anybody stephanie. they could name you, could name joss, could name barb. >> okay, really quickly, of the three of us, who do you think has the strongest shot? >> i feel like i should leave that alone, stephanie, but i would just note that at least a couple of you are not going to attain the 35 years necessary to be vice president. but all of our reporting suggests that the leading candidates here are north dakota governor doug burgum and jd vance, the senator from ohio. marco rubio is still in the mix, we are told from a dozen sources that nbc news spoke to, who are wired into the process. again, he could make any choice. we don't know exactly when he's going to make it but it looks like it's narrowed down pretty closely to her room and vance. >> but again, you just said it could be anybody so in true trump style, could he absolutely surprise us? >> it would be like bringing somebody for the final rose ceremony who wasn't in the entire bachelor or bachelorette game. it's certainly possible. i wouldn't rule it out but i think at this point it would undercut his effort to show to people that he is stable and making decisions based on a thoughtful process, right? if he has this entire sort of game show atmosphere and at the end of it decides to throw a curveball that might lean into the biden campaign's argument that he's not very tethered, not very stable. >> just imagine it's the final rose ceremony and the bachelor and he brings in ramona from the real housewives. that's what we're doing. it's 2024. john josh, barbara, thank you so, so much and john, thanks for the vote of confidence. when we return, all eyes are on the supreme court as we await two major decisions related to trump and jinro sixth. we are going to break down the high stakes with the best guy in the business. and later, those rulings could end up colliding with -- guess what -- the first presidential debate, which is just days away. how both candidates are preparing for the very big night. the 11th hour just getting underway on a monday night in aspen. aspen. so, i didn't think i needed swiffer. until... i saw how easily it picked up my hair every time i dried it. it only takes a minute. look at that! the heavy duty cloths are extra thick for amazing trap and lock. even for his hair. wow! and for dust i love my heavy duty duster. the fluffy fibers trap dust on contact up high and all around without having to lift a thing. i'm so hooked! you'll love swiffer or your money back! you know what's brilliant? 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