General. Here is the president campaigning for Luther Strange in september by telling Republican Voters they could vote for the other guy. And by the way, both good men. Both good men. And you know what . And i told luther, i have to say this, if his opponent wins, im going to be here campaigning like hell for him. Donald trumps endorsement did not help Luther Strange who lost in the primary to Steve Bannons chosen candidate roy moore and roy moore accused of sexually assaulting a girl when she was 14 years old and trying to date other girls while they were still in high school and roy moore was a 32yearold assistant district attorney. Republican senator Richard Shelby withdrew his support of the republican ticket and voted for someone else, the republican the Senate RepublicanPolitical Action committee stopped funding roy moores campaign. Mitch mcconnell, leader of the
senate, said an Ethics Investigation of roy moore would begin immediately if he was elected to the senate. What did donald trump do . President Trump Campaigned for the accused child molester. Get out and vote for roy moore. Do it. Do it. Do it. We need somebody in that senate seat who will vote for our make America Great again agenda. And once more, more people voted against donald trump on election day and donald trump, roy moore and steve bannon went down in crushing humiliating defeat in alabama giving us One Of The Best political sound bites of the year. Mr. Bannon, this is a huge defeat for you. The Silent Humiliation of
knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when i decided to just do it, i said to myself, i said, you know, there this russia thing with trump and russia is a madeup story, its an excuse by The Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won. Joining us now, joy reid, National Correspondent and host of am joy on weekends and also Jonathan Capehart with the Washington Post and msnbc contributor. Joy, no question, most important Political Interview of the year. Mr. Lester holt who manages to get without having to try that hard to get a confession out of the president. Yeah, absolutely. With all due respect to the three of us Doing Interviews and journalists, the definitive interview of the trump interview. Lester holt managed to get donald trump to emote and to as donald trump wants to do spill
his guts and he told lester holt the thing that will wind up probably undoing Donald Trumps presidency that he fired jim comey, former director of the fbi, because of the russia investigation. Up to now theyd had a cover story for why they fired james comey and included because they thought he was too cruel to Hillary Clinton and insane and he despises Hillary Clinton and obsessed with her and that confession really does set in motion part two of the russiagate investigation by mueller and track one is whether or not the Trump Campaign colluded with russia. Did donald trump himself obstruct justice . Donald trump seems to think, yes, he did. Jonathan, firing comey, its a hard thing to schochoose but that the biggest trump mistake of the year . Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Just you know, recently, the president even said what we just saw in the clip there which is a madeup story by The Democrats to explain why they lost the election. He wouldnt have to be saying those things had he not fired
mueller. In a normal presidency, james comey would be still the fbi director. A normal president would allow the fbi to conduct its investigati investigation, would say the proper things to get to the bottom of this, means something for the democracy, whatever the russians did and fully cooperate and leave it at that. Instead, the president decides he wants to not just fight with the justice department, fight with the fbi, but fire the fbi director and then keep fighting with everybody who keeps getting closer and closer to him. Might not be a Special Prosecutor if he hadnt fired james comey. We dont know. Joy, theres a racial line going through Donald Trumps first year of the presidency with the both sides comments, with his rush to support roy moore in alabama. And there seems to be no breaking that spell for donald trump. Yeah. And for donald trump its both
his own proclivities back to the Nixon Administration of all administrations prosecuting he and his father and charging them with Racial Discrimination in the Housing Developments in queens. Putting c for colored on the applications through the Central Park Five and him wanting the five accused teenagers who were accused of raping a white woman and proved by dna executed and just the long history of weird, racial comments but you marry it to the zigs to tie the fortunes to theali altright saying Whit Supremacists and that group embedded in the past in the Democratic Party and now in the gop and donald trump decided to make common cause with them with the bannons, the breitbarts of the world and the decision to marry the fortunes to them, his birtherism, his own proclivities lashed him to a kind of a brand of racism that we have never
seen this overtly in the white house since woodrow wilson. The president s views on these things disgusted prominent republican southerns. Absolutely. Look. Again back to the normal president comment before, a normal president would keep the altright at more than arms length. A normal president would not have a White Supreme Cyacist Fe from the oval office and he the president is still consulting with steve bannon. To joys point, i would just add that every time the president gets into a fight with the person of color, whether theyre nfl players yeah. Members of Congress LikeCongresswoman Wilson of florida, you name it, its always playing to his base. His base loves it. If we know about president trump, his job Approval Rating could be in the 30s but as long as that base of the Republican Party still cheers him when he
the Beltway Media long had this sort of romantic attachment to what they call the Plain Spokenness and seeing barack obama as revealing of the own backgrounds and media cleave toward the plain spoken, harry truman and plain spoken guy and have a will have affair with it and then trump voters in tennessee going down as if youre in the zoo looking at the plain, ordinary, White Working Class voter as if theyre an exhibit and i think thats a problem with media. I think it says something about the east coast west coast version of the media that thats where the media comes from but with donald trump and an idea hes a genius because he uses twitter and its done nothing but hurt him. The communication in alabama did not help both candidates. He did not help such a great genius of communication, why is he at 32 bottom of the polls of
every president in modern and probably all of president ial history . Hes not a communications genius. He know who is the audience is. Right. We have to leave it there. Joy, jonathan, thank you very much. Thank you, lawrence. And coming up, the case for normalizing impeachment. This is a hugely important article. The man who wrote it, ezra klein, joins us next. Later, my hero Rachel Maddow joins our yearend Special Edition of the last word. Learn more at moretoparkinsons. Com
if you are charged with a crime in this country, the Founding Fathers gave you a right to a trial by a jury of your peers. If you dont like the result of the trial, you have the right to appeal it. If you dont like the result of the appeal, you can appeal it to the United StatesSupreme Court and if you dont like the result in the United StatesSupreme Court, too bad. Because that is your Court Of Last Resort and whatever the Court Of Last Resort decides is what youre going to have to live with. For impeachment, the Founding Fathers very deliberately gave the president no such rights. The president of the United States can be brought up on Impeachment Charges by a vote by the House Of Representatives and then a right to a trial in the United States senate in which
the members of the United States senate are the jurors and if the president does not like what that jury of senators decides, too bad. Because for the president the United States senate is the Court Of Last Resort. In Impeachment Trials. The president does not have a right to appeal to a higher court. There is no higher court. The president does not have a right to appeal to the Supreme Court if he is convicted by the senate in an Impeachment Trial and that means that the proper grounds for impeachment are whatever the United States senate says they are when they decide an Impeachment Case and for centuries we have pondered the phrase High Crimes And Misdemeanors as if by pondering it we can come up with a legal standard, an objective standard, a judicial standard about exactly what constitutes an impeachable offense. In his brilliant article, mandatory reading entitled the
case for normalizing impeachment, ezra klein has studied the phrase, High Crimes And Misdemeanors. He has studied the history of impeachment in the United States government and mostly been used to impeachment federal judges who have Lifetime Appointments and ezra klein has discovered that High Crimes And Misdemeanors means whatever the United States senate says it means. Joining us now is ezra klein, editor at large at vox and host of the ezra klein show. Loved every word of this. Could read it twice. Go to the first Impeachment Case you cite in the article, a federal judge and what this judge was being impeached for. So the firstever federal impeachment is john pickering, a federal judge and does not commit really a crime and probably suffering we think from early stage dementia, more or
less impeached for behavior unbecoming of a judge and not unusual back then and Founding Fathers are clear on and with the president , too. Quite a few examples of the Founding Fathers considering things not crimes and say would nevertheless impeachment if the president did that. Firing officials and James Madison said a president would be impeached and clear at this time in that era High Crimes And Misdemeanors is much more than criminality. You make the case in your piece that is arguable that instead of the American Government seeing impeachment as a drastic thing that should be used once a century or less, theres actually a case to be made it should be used more frequently. So this is the key. We have an attitude towards impeachment that it can only really be used in the case of criminality and potentially 25th
amendment for Mental Incompetence and we are in a strange position where we are running a Nuclear Hyper power. The president of the United States is the most dangerous job in the world. The president who is the wrong person, the extent of what can go wrong there goes over to Nuclear Holocaust and launched more or less before breakfast and going to be the only job, the only job any of us think of where incredibly poor performance cannot get you fired . There is something wrong with that. And i will say when i began this piece my belief was that the cost, consequences of impeachment too large to considered and then after thinking through what can go wrong with a president that should not be president and seemed an absurd position to me. Everything else in the economy is against some standard of performance. So, too, should be the presidency. And, ezra, when i began really studying impeachment it was the clinton impeachment and
i had stopped working in the senate but i was talking to senator moynihan at the time about it and other senators privately an we all believed we were going to find this holy grail of High Crimes And Misdemeanors and what it meant and the longer everyone stared at it they all began to realize, the senators one by one, theres no definition. It is up to us. We have the look at the clinton evidence and decide for each one of us, does it meet the standard as senators and there is no other standard. Thes nothing written down. Thises a hard thing. We dont like the burden of interpreting the constitution. Right. We want to do this stuff as if its an seance with the founders but its written that way because they decided, chose not to enumerate impeachment. An earlier version said bribery and treason and rejected that as too narrow and left it up to us to have an ability to decide and we want somebody else to make the decision for us because its easier that way, safer that way. Theres nobody there to make that decision for us. It is only us. We have to take the responsibility and by the way when they created this power, they werent worried about Nuclear Weapons or the american militarys ability to project power across the world and in the looking at a presidency like the one we have or consequences anything like the ones that we can create. And so, we are dealing with our world and our consequences and we need to take that seriously. We need to hold not just the leaders accountable but ourselves accountable for what we can do. I think its clear the Founding Fathers would be shocked that there is so much reluctance to use an impeachment process against a president , any president , that has this nuclear code stuff in his pocket, that has that power that they never contemplating putting in the hands of an individual. We could go on and on about this. The way is to read ezra kleins article. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. Appreciate it. Thank you. Up next, my favorite part of this job, talking with Rachel Maddow. Odonnell. I feel i should have told you before now. Okay. But im wearing a wire. Its right here. Its on mila pel. Mine, too. I think even if he was desperately head over heels in love with Jeff Sessions he would be trying to get Jeff Sessions out of there. Desperately head over heels in love with Jeff Sessions is the country song waiting to be written, rachel. More breaking news. Rachel maddow has a new boyfriend. I do. And he asked the question of Chuck Grassley at the town hall in i want to that Rachel Maddow would have asked if she was there. He knew exactly what he was talking about. He had the right followup questions and wouldnt let grassley get away without committing to it. Beautiful. I love him. Were going to get you two together. Susan will kill me. I hobbled in here on a cane tonight. We are but weeks away from you and me back in the dance floor
saturday nights like we always do. Gosh. In this town. You know . Its true. Doing that, you know, Jennifer GrayPatrick Swayze thing. We get to switch off who gets to be jennifer. That was our little secret until now thanks, rachel. The scaramucci quotes today. Even just trying to learn enough about Human Anatomy to figure out what he was suggesting steve bannon was doing with himself steve bannon cant do it. Stop thinking about i