President trump who took questions from the press pool for the First Time Since election day yesterday. The chaotic back and forth ended the longest stretch of time in his presidency that he didnt engage with reporters. 23 days, four hours and three minutes. Here was the most notable part. Just to be clear, if the Electoral College votes for joe biden, will you concede . If they do they, there is a mistake but will you was a fraud. The Electoral College does elect President Joe Biden will you not leave this building . Certainly i will. Certainly i will. You know that. But i think that there will be a lot of things happening between now and the 20th of january. Well, to the surprise of nobody, the president contradicted his own statement when he tweeted this morning on his way to, hope youre sitting down for this, the golf course that joe biden can only be president if he can prove that his votes quote were not fraudulently or illegally obtained end quote. That is, of course, plainly not true. Biden did indeed win the election. The states certified those elections one by one. Thats the proof that the election was valid. And then the electors vote on december 13th and joe biden is going to be sworn in on january 20th at noon. The reality of the situation has not stopped the president from pushing the same misinformation about the election that started months ago over and over and over again without any proof at all. Sorting through the president s tweets and the false information he broadcast yesterday was a stark contrast from president elect joe bidens fairly simple thanksgiving message. I know this isnt the way many of us hoped wed spend our holiday. We know that a small act of staying home is a gift to our fellow americans. Yes, its a personal sacrifice each of our families can make and should make to save somebody elses life, but its also a shared sacrifice for the whole country. The statement of common purpose that says we care about one another and were all in this together. All right. Lets begin tonight with the latest from washington. Donald trump spent the day the way he spent many days recently, golfing and tweeting. Carol lee joins me now. What sort of a whiplash time. I was a little surprised donald trump actually said he was going to leave the white house if the Electoral College determines joe biden is the president on december 13th. Then he went on to say they have mountains of evidence coming in and then his lawyer jenna ellis tweeted that the decision on the Third Circuit court of appeals was by activist judges. The main judge was a trump appointee that took the bench on november 17th, the other two were George W Bush appointees, im trying to get a handle what is spinning around the white house. Are y are they coming to the conclusion the presidency is ending or in earth two considering these court cases . Youre not alone in being confused if that makes you feel any better, ali. Our understanding from our own reporting what is the mind set inside the white house is yes, they know that they have to leave, that theyve lost this election, the president , though, is continuing this public battle to try to undermine the results of the election by saying that there is wide spread fraud without any evidence and after today, you know, listen, from the president s perspective, its everyone from local election workers to average voters to a republican secretary of state in georgia who voted for the president and contributed to his campaign to now an Appellate Court judge including one nominated by the president and others in the grand conspiracy against him. Thats the picture hes painting and its not true. What we know is that the president is never going to concede. Hes never going to say joe biden won this election fair and square. Hes not. He signalled how difficult losing would be for him when he said on election day that losing is tough but especially for him and part of what he said on the campaign is if he were to lose to joe biden, that would be very embarrassing, more embarrassing than just losing period. What youre seeing is the president who is continuing to try to save some face, to gin up supporters, to try to create an image that he didnt lose this election fair and square and its for the same reasons that people around him have been saying for weeks is that hes trying to cast himself as something other than a loser. And thats pretty much it. Yeah. Well, the confusion will rain for a few more weeks, probably. Carol, good to see you. Thank you for joining me. Nbc news correspondent carol lee. During a week when most people arent paying as much attention to the news. The president made a lot of headlines and one in particular should not be ignored or buried in the chaos. Trump pardoned his former National Security advisor Michael Flynn on wednesday. Remember this, flynn pleaded guilty twice for lying to the fbi about conversations about the russian diplomat. The pardon did not come as a surprise. It was long aexpected. That didnt work out but now it moot because the pardon has been issued. Charl charlie joins me to talk about this. Amsnbc contributor. No surprise. The questions, however, that emerged from this pardon are several fold. One is what else is coming . Are there a bunch of other pardons to come and are they all sort of or many of them going to be people who are tied to Donald Trumps personal grievances or things having to do with his election and of course, the biggie, is there some mechanism for pardoning himself for things that have not come to pass yet . Thats right. Good to see you. Happy thanksgiving, belated. Thank you. We expect that President Trump will indeed go out the door by pardoning a whole pile of people and at this point, because hes not working through the normal process of consulting the Justice Department having prosecutors who worked there vetting candidates who have applied and talking to victims and judges and so fort to see who deserves one, its tightly held. People who will be speculating caught up in the trump russia investigation, Michael Flynn, you hear names like george papadopoulos, rick gates, Paul Manafort and so forth surrounding that as well as other people who just have connections to trump. Elliott a big donor to his inauguration just got convicted in foreign lobbying scheme or steve bannon or perhaps Jared Kushners father was famously prosecuted by Chris Christie some years ago. Surrounding also are complicating that up until maybe right around now is that to talk to this president about how his grip on power is about to go away and so he ought to go out with a bang would be to concede he lost the election. I think people have been a little reluctant or on egg shells around him to raise a topic that only makes sense in the end game of a presidency that is almost over. Your other question can he pardon himself . Thats a great question. A question that constitutional scholars are turning over in their hands now and the answer is we dont know. No president has ever purported to pardon himself and then be prosecuted by Justice Department after that act. Hes never even tried. Therefore, we dont have any court case to look to for the question of whether the pardon extends to selfpardons. There is nothing that says cant, on the other hand there is a long standing principle that says no man can be a judge in his own case and in fact, during the watergate, we dont think he can pardon himself. That doesnt count for anything thats not for the president. Right, there is a technical piece of language that says a pardon can be granted and one assumes one cant grant it to themselves but there is another technical thing. We havent seen the language of the Michael Flynn pardon and i wouldnt have thought that important but there is a case against him. The department of justice was trying to get the case against Michael Flynn withdrawn and judge sullivan said no. So do they have to go before a judge with this pardon and say this case is moot now and needs to be withdrawn . I think its extremely likely we will see the text of that pardon entered into the court record against Michael Flynn before judge sullivan. Not that he said no. He hasnt said no or yes. Hes sitting on the request and thinking about it and so this will probably leave him of any difficult question of whether he can sentence someone who pleaded guilty but whom the Justice Department no longer wishes to proceed against. Nevertheless, there are other issues surrounding Michael Flynn than just the question of his charged conduct of lying to the fbi. The plea deal that he agreed to before he blew it up was going to take care of his legal liability for having acted as a paid agent of turkey without registering as an agent of a foreign power in 2016 and then signing paperwork belately registering that falsely minimized the scope of his work and judge sullivan himself has raised the prospect that Michael Flynn may have committed perjury by giving inconsistent statements in his courtroom when he first pleaded guilty and said he was innocent after all. So trump said in his twitter feed, this was a full pardon, which suggests it might be written broadly but we havent seen that language yet. That said, i would caution people that left twitter speculation about this, that maybe they screwed up and theyre going to leave him exposed in someway. Trumps White House Legal Team led are competent smart people. They are a different caliber than the lawyers who have been filing these somewhat farcical lawsuits for the campaign trying to overturn the results of the election complete with misspellings and Everything Else. It seems to me people should not should wait to see before they assume there is going to be any problem with this quote unquote full pardon. The correlation to that, i dont know if you have a parlor account, the right wing has no greater cause to lever than Michael Flynn. He is the symbol to the right of the democrats and the deep state and the conspiracy or whatever you call the russia investigation. So this is there is nobody in the middle on Michael Flynn and people have very strong views on him. Charlie, good to see you. Thank you for joining me today and have yourself a great weekend. Charl charlie for the New York Times and the author of a great book that becomes more relevant each week. Read it. Were getting into a new one. On january 20th is when the new presidency begins. Joe biden will be sworn in as the 46th president at noon and the transition of power will be complete. On that date, donald j. Trump will lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president. The New York Times said hell be quote more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the manhattan district defense attorney for the president s business and practices and taxes. Andrew wise mman says the next attorney general if warranted prosecute him for federal crimes but Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Ruben argues that the process should be selective while the investigation and she writes all require instead the greatest likelihood of success, in protecting our democracy of provoking endless and her words should be the focus. Jennifer ruben joins me to talk about her perspective. Old friend, good to see you. Thank you for being with us. I think this becomes a really, really important discussion and president of the United States and that we need to move on with things gnnot done for the last four years. Every book available some believe should be thrown at him and youre walking a line down the middle. Why . The president elect pointed out one issue, which is that he doesnt want to be completely involved. Doesnt want to keep giving donald trump options. He has a new presidency to get after and there is another compelling reason, which is as you read from my piece, we dont want to get into a pattern of the cycle of recrimination, of one incoumbent president prosecuting the next one. There is a danger there and as i said in the piece, i think its appropriate to go back to come up with a complete record of what happened and in particular to see if other people were involved but with regard to actions during his presidency, my preference, i think, would be not to prosecute those. Now i think there are categories of crimes which do involve or potential crimes which do warrant investigation and as you pointed out, the tax issues really have nothing to do with the presidency. They predate the presidency and i think to the extent that the new york prosecutors at the city or state level or both find there is a crime civil or civil infraction or criminal infraction should be prosecuted. We shouldnt allow president s or ex president s to avoid paying their taxes and there is a third category which i point to and that is attempts to undermine the election and i think this is a new category of violation, again, perhaps, civil perhaps criminal but this president attempted to over throw the results of an election. It seems like a long time ago because were in trump time but it wasnt that long ago that he called in two members of the Michigan State legislature and started presuming they over throw the will of the voters and substitute their own judgment. We also heard that he put in a phone call to one of the members of the wayne county canvassing board after she had gone along with the certification and low and behold changed her mind the next day. These have a legal implication, as well as a moral implication. It is a violation of the Voting Rights act, in fact, its punishable under the Voting Rights act as a crime to not record peoples vote to not properly record the outcome of an election. This is the essence of our democracy and it shouldnt be the president of the United States is immune from this. It shouldnt be that frankly Lindsey Graham is immune from this as nbc has reported extensively. He allegedly made phone calls not only to the secretary of state of georgia who you referenced, a republican but other states, as well and if hes applying pressure to individuals to over throw the results of an election that is a serious matter. I know the president elect joe biden said hes not going to direct his new attorney general whoever that may be to investigate matters but the next attorney general should look at the couple of categories that i outline and in particular, the threat to our democracy. We dont want this happening again. So they are different people, right . Joe biden would not be inclunin to do this because he doesnt live in the fear everyone is trying to undermine him. Donald trump does. I guess if youre not all about recrimination and maybe retribution, where does reck reconciliation come in or does it . I spent the last three months traveling around the country and were a divided country. You dont need my evidence to prove it. The vote proved that. Where does it begin where people say we have lived a weird few years. How do we get back on to something that feels like plural in a dock moemocracy shared by americans. It starts at the top. Everything joe biden has done since he was declared the winner reflects that sentiment that were one country, were one person, we have grate challenges. We have to Work Together so i think one way of reaching these gaps is a different tone from washington d. C. Now well see if the republicans want to reciprocate that or keep this going, but i think from the appointees youll get that message. I think quite frankly, we expect politicians to do too much. Part of this is personal. We have to do it in our communities with our own organizations and churches and synagogues and state and local governments which frankly can operate in some cases with a lot less than the federal government. The reckon sillation is a huge issue is not simply a matter of government but government can play a role but its really up to all of us in our personal and communal lives. That is our work for the next few years and its going to be heavy, heavy work. Jennifer, good to see you. Thank you for joining me and have yourself a great weekend. Jennifer ruben is an msnbc contributor. A lot more to get to in this twohour special. There is a longstanding tradition for president s to be looped in on classified briefings but intelligence officials dont think that privilege should be extended to President Trump once he leaves office. Good news, it looks like the house and senate have agreed on a bill that would avoid another Government Shutdown next month. Bad news, Coronavirus Relief money is not included in that bill. As of today, the United States has had more than 13 million cases of covid19. The country seen more than a million positive cases in the last six days alone. The midwest being hit especially hard. Were going to take you inside an icu in st. Louis, missouri where Health Care Workers are struggling to keep up with the number of patients pouring into the hospitals and we learned this week that a familiar face will be bidens special president ial envoy for climate. John kerry. What do we know about the new administrations policies and strategy to fight Climate Change . Well look at the plan and who could be standing in the way. Thats coming up. Youre watching msnbc. G up youre watching msnbc. But we didnt stop there. We made a cloud flexible enough to adapt to a