made missiles and the fleet s headquarters in sebastopol was struck by missiles last year, the repeated humiliations pushing russian ships further and further away from ukraine and eventually leading to the dismissal of russia s navy chief in march, not so long ago, russian state media would celebrate the navy s single aircraft carrier, the admiral, cuz nets off the jewel in the crown. but the ship has long been plagued by mechanical problems and has been in dark for years and more months, some western analysts predict it will never set sail again despite putin s glorification of russia s naval prowess, many of its warships here are vulnerable to both air and sea attacks and lack the technology to compete with western navies. or even cheap maritime drones made and ukraine an air in the ukrainian say that while the russians might be gaining ground in other areas, they feel that they ve really hurt. moscow is black sea fleet and essentially rendered it ineffective and the ukrainian say they will continue to develop those sea drones to hurt vladimir putin s naval forces even more. aaron. all right. thank you very much tonight and thanks so much to all all of you. it s time now for ac30, 60 tonight on through 60, the former president goes to washington to formalize his almost total takeover of the republican party. what he told lawmakers behind and closed doors when it signals about his plans, if we elect it. also time, cnn s donie o sullivan and talking with trump s supporters about what they think will happen to the country if he loses and to appeal its are prize-winning historian. but what she thinks might happen if you wins. also breaking news on supreme court justice clarence thomas already under scrutiny for setting millions of dollars in gifts and travel over the years. now, the senate judiciary committee reveals three more trips he took did not disclose. good evening. thanks for joining us. we begin tonight. keep them honest with the former president s de in washington with his party, and that use the possessive to describe the republican senators and house members he met with today in separate closed-door sessions, each just steps from the capital is no accident because if he s done nothing else over the last three-and-a-half years. of insurrection and search warrants and indictments and trials and felony convictions. it has been to remake the party of ronald reagan in his own image at the house meeting, he made a point of reminding members that nearly every republican who voted to impeach him as either been voted out of office or retired? not that by this point, there s survivors really needed reminding listen to speaker of the house mike johnson was basking in the afterglow and majority whip tom emmer, a self-proclaimed tough on crime law maker, attacking the criminal justice system he said very complimentary things about all of us we had sustained applause. he said, i m doing a very good job. i mean, we re grateful for that. i m going to add anybody who thought that this president was going to be down after the sham trial after that crooked trial that we saw in new york i think again more than more than one member of congress and the house meeting told cnn that the former president has spent most of his time airing grievances about his felony conviction. afterwards that a house judiciary committee hearing democratic members were all too happy to bring it up. just a show of hands for anyone in the room who hung out with a felon today hey, guys. i everyone get your hands up i want to begin by quoting the jury in the manhattan hush money payment trial guilty guilty guilty. guilty now, it s remarkable because whatever you think it congressional decorum or for that matter, x presidential criminality. this is where we are, but we are a convicted felon leads the self-proclaimed party of law and order in his post-conviction visit, just a few blocks away from the place that his supporters attacked into filed is just another headline. and so is what one lawmaker in the rooms, as he told house members about former democratic house speaker nancy pelosi, after calling one of his daughters a quote, wacko he reportedly claimed that one of her daughters wants told him that he and speaker pelosi would have had a quote, great romance in another life. daughter christine, today responded tweeting quote, speaking for all four pelosi daughters, this is ally he also called milwaukee side of the republican national convention, quote, horrible, according to a source in the room, another lawmaker later saying he was only talking about crime. all from a single meeting. at this other meeting, his republic republican senator is also close to the capital. he spoke with minority leader mitch mcconnell for the first time since december 2020. the photo prompting this reaction from liz cheney, the staunchly conservative former republican congresswoman, who was drummed out while first out of the party leadership and then out of office for co-chair and the january 6 committee she tweeted and quoted words mitch mcconnell made on the senate floor in february 13, 2021. cheney wrote, mitch mcconnell knows trump provoked the violent attack and our capital, and then quote watch television happily unquote as his mob brutally beat police officers and hunted the vice president he knows trump reviews for hours to tell his mob to leave and quote, even then with police officers bleeding, he kept repeating his election leinz and praising the criminals she went on to say again, quoting mcconnell, he knows that trump committed a quote disgraceful dereliction of duty unquote, and is a danger to our republic here are some more of what mcconnell said on that day there s no question nod. their president trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day those are tough words for mitch mcconnell, but just 12 days later, after he said that on the 25th, senator mcconnell, eight, those words telling fox is brett baer, he would support the man he so recently criticized if he s nominated in 2024 talk, it seems is cheap. join his now with more cnn s meloni s and ohno. what else went on behind closed doors today with trump will anderson heading into these meetings, lawmakers are really hopeful that trump was going to be talking about a campaign strategy or laying out his vision for a policy agenda. and now there was some of that. one of the more substantive moments was on trump brought up the topic of abortion and any counseled republicans about how he thinks they should talk about this issue. and he said they shouldn t be afraid of it. they should frame it as a state s issue. and you also encouraged republicans to voice support for exceptions not come across as too extreme on the issue, but for the most part, according to all the lawmakers that i spoke to, these meetings were more of an airing of grievance it says it was a gripe session at particularly in the house meeting this morning, i m told that trump, of course, brought up the legal challenges against them, calling all the charges against him, quote, bogus he also referred for to the department of justice as quote, dirty, no-good according to some of the lawmakers that i talked to, he even at one point, complained about taylor swift, were endorsing his rival president joe biden. and he also gloated about how most of the house republicans who voted to impeach him over the january 6 insurrection are no lines hunger in congress. so it was very wide ranging speech, very freewheeling that member ce felt more like a pep rally or even a roast than a serious policy discussion. morning and taylor swift has not endorsed joe biden. do you have any more details on the trump mcconnell counter well, with trump and mcconnell, there was a very serious effort. i m told by both parties he s to really bury the hatchet after years of feuding and years of frost newness right before the meeting, trump and mcconnell shook hands, which was captured on a phone photograph during the meeting. trump credited mcconnell with helping to elect more republican senators, and then after the meeting, mcconnell praised trump and said the mean eating was very, very positive. so just a remarkable inflection point. i think anderson, we re going to look back on this moment similar to kevin mccarthy trekking down to mar-a-lago in the weeks after january 6 and really just captures how much the party, including some of trump s former critics like mcconnell, have really fallen in line in the years after january 6 and despite these criminal convictions, anderson, millions and thanks so much, jonasson. i was new york democratic congressman daniel goldman, congressman. any surprises for you today in the visit by trump not really. he didn t come to the capital, which was good good thing because this is where he fomented a massive riot and insurrection to try to keep him installed in office. he didn t talk much about policy because he doesn t really care much about policy. what he cares about is himself and what he cares about is his conviction 34 times for being a felon and what he cares about her as three other cases and getting revenge. and he wants to do that by tearing down our democracy and what he was effectively doing today is greases the wheels, trying to play nice with republicans who support he needs in order to become president. so that he can take his fat let s just authoritarian views into office if he were to win. and it is just a very telling i think that mitch mcconnell has now bowed down to the ring of donald trump someone who, you quoted what he said on january 25, where he helped donald trump responsible for the january 6 riot. and has resisted donald trump. but now he has clearly demonstrated graded that donald trump owns the republican party. there is no other faction of the republican party that has any influence other than donald trump his maga supporters, obviously, none of us, there s privilege privy to the inner thoughts and mitch mcconnell. but why do you think center mcconnell made this choice? i mean, after, you know the strong comments he made criticizing trump theta, the racist attacks trump made against me kennels own wife. i mean, what is mitch mcconnell get out of this anderson, what do any of these people who have i know good mccaul s running. i mean, it he could he could go out on i d like liz cheney, who at least, has taken a very strong stand ultimately mixed for the same reason since that mitch mcconnell refuse to give merrick garland a vote for the supreme court and then rammed any amy coney barrett through under the same circumstances, two weeks before the election? that s what connell has a very focused and narrowly tailored view of what he wants to accomplish. and at the end of the day i m sure mitch mcconnell views donald trump as the only possibility to get these type of conservative judges who have now overturned roe v. wade paid back into more into the our judiciary and into the supreme court and push forward a clearly minority favored agenda that mitch mcconnell has been pushing for decades. it was seeing melodies and i was reporting is that trump was telling lawmakers counseling them on how to run about and talk about abortion and to talk about states rights and to not seem too extreme do you have any belief that that s how he would be if he got into office? absolutely none. donald trump does not care. donald trump used to be pro-choice. he used to be a democrat. now, he s out there promoting and celebrating his own work and getting roe versus wade overturned he will do whatever he needs to do to secure the support for his fascist anti-democratic attacks on the rule of law to undermine our democratic institutions. and if that means that he ll give over supreme court nominations to mitch mcconnell or someone else on the far right who wants to roll back our individual freedoms, even more than the supreme court has done. he will do that in a minute. and if there here s a national abortion ban that the republicans pass donald trump will sign that in two seconds. do not believe donald trump whenever he says that he will stand up for abortion rights, he has completely flip-flopped in his career. he will do whatever benefits himself. speaker johnson was asked yesterday, the former president attempt the outcome of the election. i just want to play that for years really for the first time republican house and senate meeting with him since the january 6 attack on the capitol are you committed or have you spoken to him about basically not not doing anything like that again, in committing to respecting the sort of american tradition of peaceful transfer of course, he respects that and we all do and we ve all talked about it at nauseum i mean i mean yeah. i mean, i can anyone say with a straight face is donald trump respects the peaceful transfer of power that i want you to take that clip and run it over and over and over. that is everything you need to know. oh about mike johnson and the maga republican party. they will look you in the eye and they will lie directly to your face over and over and over. there is no question that donald trump does not respect the peaceful transfer of power he has made it a litmus test for his vice president that whoever that will be willing not accept the results. and that s why you have every single vice presidential candidates. so far refusing to concede or acknowledged that they will accept them the results. donald trump, it will not accept the peaceful a trap power. you don t have to ask me or trust me, he already did it so for speaker johnson to look in the camera and to say that of course he respects the peaceful transfer of power. put that on every bulletin board around the country. it is total bogus and it shows you what knowing liars the republicans are. congressman, i appreciate your time. thank you thank you. president biden met today with ukraine s president zelenskyy of the g7 summit in italy. the two signing a new tenure security agreement at the press conference afterwards, frozen biden spoke briefly when asked about his son, hunter i m extremely proud of my son hunter. he is overcome and addiction. he is he s one of the brightest, most decent man i know and i am satisfied that i m not going to do anything. i sat i said i advise by the jury decision. i will do that no i m not pardon him the present-day also ruled out commuting his one-sentence seen as mj lee is traveling with the president joins us now from from very italy. so mj, earlier in the week, the white house appeared to leave open the possibility of a commutation or that flee not commenting at essentially overturning the sentence, not a conviction. what specifically did the president say about that yeah. when the president was walking away from that press conference, some reporters yell loud. would you commute your sons sentence and he answered directly. he said no that was after he had more broadly addressed the conviction of his son, hunter, as you just play they re standing by his son, standing by the judicial system, and also reiterating his previously stated position pardoning his son. he said, i will not pardon him. anderson white house officials had suspected that it was likely he would get asked about the hunter issue at this news conference, given that it happened just two days ago, he had not publicly commented on in yet on it yeah they knew that the specific issue of the commutation was one that could come up if you ll recall yesterday, white house press secretary karine jean-pierre was asked by a reporter whether she would rule out that possibility and she wouldn t say yes or no. and that exchange, the white house, new had taken on a life of its own when in reality, i m told the issue was really that some senior aides hadn t had a chance yet to speak to the president about the commutation issue. corinne john p, or said yesterday to reporters, i haven t talked to him about this yet. i m not just i m not going to have anything more to say on this, but it certainly was a really remarkable moment. the president speaking on this kind of a stage. on the other side of the world about an issue that has been so deeply sensitive for his entire family, mj lee, thanks more in prison, biden s trip later in the program next though cnn s donie o sullivan talking to trump supporters as well as a historian of dictatorships and autocracies about donald trump and democracy. and later there s breaking news turns out there are even more undisclosed it s trips supreme court justice clarence thomas took paid for by republican megadonor ave heart failure with unresolved symptoms. it may be time to see the bigger picture heart failure and seemingly unrelated he did symptoms like carpal tunnel syndrome shortness of breath an irregular heartbeat could mean something more serious cold, eight ttr cm a rare under-diagnosed disease that worsens over time 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[ bird squawks loudly ] to a pet shop. meg s moving company uses t-mobile. so she scaled down her fleet to save money. and don s paying so much for at&t, he s been waiting to update his equipment! there s a smarter way to save. comcast business mobile. you could save up to 70% on your wireless bill. so you don t have to compromise. powering smarter savings. powering possibilities. colleague, 33 leaf filter today, more physically filtered filter.com i m under raja capitol hill. this the sienna prison. biden is billing his reelection campaign as a fight to preserve democracy. tonight, how that notion is going down with trump s supporters as well as one noted author who s made describing how democracies fail. her specialty more from cnn s donie o sullivan what happens if trump loses? i don t see him losing. i don t think he lost the last election to be honest. do you think he s going to win yes. yes. without a doubt. no doubt. you want if he doesn t this time what happens to the contrary where biden talks about democracy saving democracy. they re the ones that are killing democracy. obviously, there s a lot of criticisms of interim than he is bad for democracy, that he s bad for america i republican or republic are not a democracy republican. we re not or democracy one thing we ve been hearing a trump rallies like this over the past few months does that america isn t really a democracy. america s not a democracy as a republic. we get is not a democracy. okay? democracy? she is actually not as good as you think it is but for centuries, america has celebrated its democracy democracy is worth dying for democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy, but some republicans and pro-trump media are pushing the idea that america is not a democracy. united states of america kirk is not a democracy. we are constitutional republic. those things were america is not a democracy. you don t want to be in a democracy. we are not a democracy. we are a republic. is america a democracy america is a democracy. it was founded as a democracy. i ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories. i hear a lot of things out on the road but to hear americans, people who would describe themselves as patriots say that america is not a democracy that stopped me in my tracks. you are hearing people say america is not a democracy because there are people around trump who want them to be saying that who ve been planting that narrative? his america democracy i don t i think we ll never know, but yeah, we re republic. what s the difference i feel like democracy what do we think this through its government i don t see freedom in democracy freedom in the republic honestly, the word democracy and the word republic have often been used interchangeably. there isn t a meaningful difference between them. so much of the warnings and criticism about trump is that he is a threat to democracy, that he has anti-democratic. absolutely. if they can convince people that we don t have a democracy, then it s okay that trump is attacking democracy because it doesn t really matter that s why, like why has democracy become a bad word? because it s been used in a way to change the flavor of our country, which is a republic these words were used in different ways in the 18th century and it s true the founders didn t want direct democracy by which they meant people gathering on the town square. they wanted representative democracy. but i think the reason why does conversation about language has so now is because there is a part of the republican party that would like to rule as a minority and they need an excuse for why that s okay. and so they ve begun to say, we re not a democracy. were, are public and it s not 100% clear what that means. but i think they mean we want donald trump to be able to do whatever he wants some people i ve been seeing debt trump events recently. yes. have been saying american is not a democracy. it s a republic and we ve always been my pros. first of all we have sleek. we re use that freedom of speech and freedom of religion. we used to have that two. now they re picking on the christians and the jewish people i mean, how much more can we are you concerned if trump loses yeah. that there ll be another january 6. no. i think there will be a civil war that s what i think will happen during this whole democracy republican is fascinating. this is the first i ve, i ve heard of that new thing that there are now pushing those. it looks like folks on fox are pushing it. is there a reason the people you spoke with think that country isn t a democracy now, i mean, yeah, look, i mean, i understand some of those folks. no doubt genuinely believed that i might have believed for a long time, this isn t necessarily a new talking point. however, we have seen it just revive over the past few months and they re really the reason we did this piece was over the over the past few months, just unprompted. as i was speaking to a lot of trump s supporters, they would bring this very specific lineup i love this real, it s not a debase right about the former government here. it s not a debate about democracy really why this is happening. and you saw it there in that piece, some fox news and elsewhere on conservative and right-wing media people are trying to convince trump s supporters, others that america is not a democracy in the first place. and we actually saw i haven t noticed that this seem to pick up a bit after president biden speech in philadelphia, where he described trump as a threat to democracy. this is how they seem to be trying to twist language to try and neutralize describing trump as a threat to democracy. because if america is not a democracy in the first place, then there s nothing to worry about your winning a solvent. thank you very much. one of the pillars of a democracy is the rule of law and laws of course are enforced by courts and the highest court in the land supreme court is once again under fire tonight. over new ethics concerns, specifically the behaviors surrounding justice clarence thomas. late this afternoon, senate judiciary chairman dick durbin released new information from a major republican donor about more undisclosed trips provided to justice thomas. it follows previous reporting about numerous undisclosed gifts from that conservative billionaire harlan crow, which include private school tuition for a relative of thomases and decade s worth of luxury vacations. last week after the release of his 2023 disclosures, thomas said certain disclosures had been, quote inadvertently omitted wherever last month in a speech, who railed against the quote, nastiness and quote lies directed toward him. draw now by our justice correspondent, just cash snyder, also a former federal district judge, johnny jones, the third and former federal prosecutor elie honig. so jessica, what do we know about these additional trips now that thomas took on harlan crow plane? yeah. the details just being released tonight for i m senator dick durbin. the details are several new trips happened in 2017, 2019, and 2021. so first and may 20, he 17 justice thomas took harlan crows jet from st. louis to montana and then to dallas. then there was a march 2019 flight where he flew roundtrip between washington, dc and savannah and then in june 2021, he flu round trip between washington, dc and san jose, california. all of this on crows jet and really intersect. i mean, these newly revealed flights, it only adds to what we know were other luxury trips that justice thomas enjoyed, bankrolled by harlan crow. there was also but 2019 trip to indonesia where justice thomas stayed on crows mega yacht. so there have been a lot of previously undisclosed travel that s been gifted by harlan crow is a gop megadonor. he s active and conservative causes. justice thomas, though, i ll note anderson has always it s described him as just a dear friend and says they ve never had any discussions about cases before the court. they ve wow, i mean, that that s you you re hanging out with justice supreme court. that s kind of amazing to think. has justice thomas explained why he did not disclose these these trips? because he talks about his love of staying in for vrb travel and drawing ran on a bus yeah. so he hasn t directly answered about these recent disclosures, but his attorney just released a statement tonight. it says this. it says the formation that harlan crow provided to the senate judiciary committee fell under the personal hospitality exemption and was not required to be disclosed by justice thomas the judicial conference change this provision last year, and justice thomas has fully complied with the new disclosure requirement. so i ll expand upon this to really explain it up until last year there was in fact this personal hospitality exemption. so justices, in the way they read it, didn t have to disclose certain benefits, maybe from there wealthy friends, things like when they stayed at their friends properties or traveled on jets. it was just last year, anderson that exemption was removed. so justices now have to disclose these perks, but there s some question as to whether the disclosures need to be retroactive. there s nothing specifically saying justices have to go back now and disclosed year s worth of trips. but it is still coming out and it came out tonight from the senate judiciary committee, judge jones, does this make sense you why wouldn t justice thomas just come clean about everything harlan crow has given him or paid for. why go through this kind of drip, drip, drip? you know, anderson, i have no idea but this has all the allure of a slow motion car accident. it doesn t look good. i toiled in the federal judiciary for 20 years and i love it. i respect it, but this tears that the fabric the code of ethics that the justices are subject to, which is, by the way, not enforceable says in the first canon that it is there to basically preserve the integrity and the independence of the judiciary now, under the circumstances to the point that was just made he amended his is 2023 ethic statement and he added a couple of his trips when you go to the question of retroactivity, i agree it s less than clear so why would you do that? and not include the other trips they re just revealed there s there s no good answer to that elie. i mean, do you agree with the statement from thomas s attorneys saying that because the personal hospitality exemption, he didn t need to not at all, the spirit of these rules is disclosure and these are not just a small gifts, these are gifts and not donations, but gifts worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. and the whole explanation that this is just a friend doing something for me. i mean, i gotta get better friends that this is something more than just a friend paying for his friend. hundreds of thousands dollars over that here for private school tuition for flights, for hotels violates every cannon in this ethics code. and if you remember anderson about a year ago, the supreme court for the first time ever adopted an ethics code. the criticism we made was it s toothless and i think now we re seeing that judge jones i mean, go ahead, judge. while i was going to say it s interesting to ellie s point about having a friend. here s the acid test, and this is not hard and it s not in the statement of ethics at all if you are making a friend because you re on the supreme court of the united states. if that s why this guy is friends with you, then i would suggest to you that if he s providing hospitality, that s just wrong. it just shouldn t happen. and i don t think that s a hard a hard test for any justice or judge observe if i had done this as a district judge, us district judge, i would have been absolutely subject to judicial discipline of the the most pronounced kind, and i would have deserved it. and so to me, there s if clarence thomas was sitting on this circuit court or was the head of the eoc. do you think that harlan crow would afford him this kind of hospitality? of course, he would judge jones. thank you. elie honig, jessica schneider, as well, just ahead. present. biden, promoting democracy on the world stage with ukraine and making a campaign issued home former us ambassador to the un, susan rice it s joins us next welcome to the waiver hood with wave. finding your style is fine when the music stops grabbing it, doesn t matter if you re outdoors hello. i m sorry, carl. this is me and chair form. i don t see you. just perfect for you but you love it. i told you we should have done opinion data i explained how many died they re not sending you need to sit down every style, every home at fisher investments. we may look like other money managers, but were different. and how so we re a fiduciary, obligated to act in our client s best interests. so we don t sell any commission-based products, then how do you make money? we have a simple management fee structured, so we do better when our clients do the clients really come first then yes, we make them a top priority by getting to know their finances, family, health lifestyle, and more. wow maybe we are different at fisher investments were clearly different. let s get started no. where s your mask? 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if it s not binding on the next administration well, anderson, let s step back a second and thank you for having me on and take a look at what president biden is doing at the g7 in europe he is going back to his third g7 with, our alliances restored and rebuilt stronger than ever with the united states leadership embraced in respected and he has rallied the world to defend ukraine, including with a $50,000,000,000 loan that the united states led and negotiating this week using the interest off of the russian frozen assets. he s negotiated this bilateral agreement, which is very valuable in that there is always a cost for the united states when it reneges on its commitments, when it walks back its agreements and while it s not a legally binding treaty, it s a powerful statement of us support and intentions in addition, he s just this week led and imposing tough new sanctions on russia and china. so with joe biden, we have strong leadership that is strengthened our leinz is not only in europe, but in asia and around the world, which makes america more secure and we have a leader who s trusted and respected we contrast that as you did in your opening with donald trump who is so profoundly dangerous, he has not committed to democracy at home or abroad. he embraces dictators he is the president, former president whose own vice president? national security advisors, secretary of state secretaries of defense. yeah, pretty much everybody on the cabinets of staff. all have set are unfit. and what does that say when the people closest to you say you re unfit to lead, that s very, very concerning when you hear from say that vladimir putin would release wall street journal reporter it just adjust if he asked, what i mean, does that make sense to you like, why wouldn t he then just ask now for that to happen? well, that s a good question. i understand. no, of course it doesn t make sense. it s bluster. it s, it s all dishonest and every day we hear something dishonest out of donald trump s mouth. that is inherently self-serving and not anything we can rely on its. you don t just get to wave a magic wand and have a dictator who s hell-bent on not only taking over ukraine but western europe and more if we allow him. and what is donald trump s say? donald i m trump calls putin a genius. donald trump tells putin that he can do whatever he wants. the hell he wants with our nato allies. i mean, it s the height of recklessness self-interest, and danger, and it s not a future that we can be confident in at all, it would undermine our security profoundly at a time when the world is a complicated place, when you are us ambassador to the un, you obviously dealt with nations whose leaders disregard laws, carry out vendettas against their political opponents when you hear don trump talking about getting revenge or retribution does that seem i mean that seem realistic to you? do you believe he would do that? i do believe he would do it. i believe we have if we have learned anything we should listen to what he says and what he does is often exactly what he says and sometimes worse we have in donald trump a leader who is not running to be the president of the american people he s running for his own self-interest to try to stay out of jail and that is incredibly worrying. and when he says that on day one, he intends to be a dictator, that he will come after his political opponents and anybody who has rubbed i m tim the wrong way. i take that very seriously and i think we all should susan rice. thank you for your time thank you. anderson. way up next to cnn exclusive. been wiedemann talks with hamas spokesman in beirut about the remaining hostages they are holding captive in gaza he asked them how many are still alive and why hamas is yet to agree to ceasefire. his responses coming up this is country is corrupt. we ve got to save it do some terrible things for the greater good we need you build. for the soup, start rounding this up and dumping us off in kansas show me, wrap that doesn t sound good. ashley? ashley. ashley bad debt holding you back only ran visions all in one low fixed rates, borrow up to 100 keg, no fees required. so phi get your money, right? oh, no what if we don t get down in time to get a birthday gift for zoe. don t panic with etsy. we can find the perfect gift and, center. a preview right away i love this thank sky that s a relief it sure is great to know and some things coming don t panic, drift easy with etsy from, medium rare to whelmed done so many ways to save life, ready? while it happy, that s 365 by whole foods market sail through the heart of historic cities, an unforgettable scenery with faking, unpack once, and get closer two iconic landmarks. local life and cultural treasures because when you experienced europe on a viking long ship, you they ll spend less time getting there and more time being that viking exploring the world in comfort nine out of ten people don t get enough fiber bennett fiber is the easy, gentle solution for every day. it s plant-based prebiotic fiber nourishes good bacteria in your gut, working with your body to promote digestive health with so many ways to enjoy benefit is your fiber. your way you made to fund we were made to try flight prices to paradise once. upon a time. there was an infinity meticulously crafted to stir your imagination and. daring to dream luxurious. three roe dream for. everything, for every passenger, could be just right introducing the all new three roe infiniti qx at we re how, solomon in new york and this is cnn alder james is cold calculating, cynical, and needs the money. not only was the cia compromise, he also was compromised its secrets and spies. a nuclear game sunday at ten on cnn that is rescued israeli hostage noa argamani reunited with her father last saturday a long-awaited hug that she and three other hostages were rescued in an israeli military special operation. all of them kidnapped by hamas from the nova music festival eight months ago. benny gantz, who quit israel s war cabinet last week, said today in israel tv interview that israel note about how many hostages are still alive in gaza, didn t say how many were, but that israel knew a quote, very close number this comes on the backdrop of going ongoing ceasefire negotiations and now tonight s cnn exclusive, a senior hamas official talk today with cnn has been wiedemann in beirut. they discussed the hostages, though hamas refuses to use that word and efforts to reach a ceasefire here s ben s report since 7 october last year when hamas militants streamed into israel, killing hundreds, grabbing hostages warned gaza has been unrelenting nightmare, death and destruction talks to end the war are once again bogged down. as every day the death toll mounts in beirut, we spoke to senior hamas leader osama hamdan, one of the few privy to details of the ceasefire negotiations but not privy. he claims to the condition of the 100 hostages still in gaza. how many are of those 120 there s still alive. i don t have any idea about that. no one has any idea about this the wall street journal recently reported that messages from gaza hamas leader, yahya sinwar to mediators and other hamas officials included one in which he allegedly said the deaths of civilians in gaza is a necessary sacrifice. harm done insists the messages or fake after eight months of this war, more than 37,000 palestinians have been killed, probably more, more than 80,000 injured was it a necessary sacrifice for the people of gaza? you seem that count star from the beginning. let s start from beijing on. but one why to talk about the base of 7 october what about the israeli came after good luck to 7 october. it was a reaction against the occupation. what camps after that? it shows the real face of israel. it shows how israeli the cube buying the policy and lands demolishing the situation of the palestinians, killing the civilians. it s not the first time they are getting the civilians hamas is, is an organization. does it regret what it did on 7 october, given what happened afterwards? we are living with this for the last 75 years as palestine s yes now, cnn spoke to one of the doctors who treated the for israelis who were freed on saturday. and he said that they suffered mental and physical abuse. and what do you say when he is an israeli has to say what does lay authorities are asking him to say if you compare the images of both before and after releasing, you will find that they were better than before. i believe they have mental problem. this is because of what israel have done in gaza. but in addition to what has been said about the four recent hostages freed there have been also claims about the dire conditions others faced while in captivity. the fate of the remaining hostages hangs in the balance at the g7 summit in italy, us secretary of state antony blinken said, hoping hamas would agree to the latest us backed ceasefire proposal. response we got was unfortunately not the yes that we were looking for a yes that virtually the entire world has given. okay. mr. hamdan simple question. why hasn t hamas yet agreed officially to the us backed posel for a ceasefire who said it s a positive step but we need to see the facts on the ground. we need to know what exactly that president means by saying a ceasefire, i withdraw while what is left, what do you need we need an israeli ideally, a clear position from israel to accept the ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from gaza, and let the palestinians to determine their future by themselves are you optimistic at this point in time that you will reach some sort of agreement well, i think if the united states administration acted in the positive way, seeing the situation not only in the eyes of israel we can reach soon an agreement. and in the absence of an agreement, this war goes on with know site then i mean, this hamas leader justifies the october 7 attack by hamas. and as long as she had an others, which was a violation of an ongoing ceasefire, claimed, no one knows how many hostages are still alive. obviously there are people who know in hamas, any claims that the released, that the hostages who were freed just recently, the four hostages that they are actually better off than they were before they were taken into captivity. i mean, that s just absurd well, that s what he said, but you need to look at it through the lens of how it s been seen in the region anderson there lot of pictures circulating for before and after pictures circulating on social media of palestinian prisoners who d been freed from israeli jails hills the pictures show healthy people going in gaunt, sickly people looking out. no. mr. hamdan, like millions of other in this region are seeing the pictures of these for israelis who were recently freed from gaza, who on the surf base surface superficially looked to be okay. so that seems to be why he s saying this and we re hearing it from many other people as well. keep in mind also that osama hamdan is a political figure in hamas. he is involved in and then negotiating process, but he s not part of the military wing that holds the hostages in gaza, so he s probably not complete the up on the situation in there. and i think what you re hearing in that interview is more a reflection, perhaps social media then his knowledge of the specifics of the hostages themselves anderson, where she refuses even call hostages, but been wiedemann. thank you. appreciate it. we ll be right back three body serie a. city client uses city s financial expertise to help drive its growth and keep its supply chain moving some more pet parents can get everything they need, right when they need it keeping more pets and families happy for the love of moving our clients forward, for the love of progress grass whether you re moving across town or across the country now, you can count on pods to deliver when we say we will, which is why we were voted america s number one container moving company. hook your move today at pods.com, introducing new advil targeted relief. the only topical pain reliever with four powerful pain fighting ingredients that start working on contact to target tough pain at the source for up to eight hours of powerful relief new abdo targeted relief all these games on directv and no satellite on the roof. think about this blue jays cardinals orioles. what s missing? the andean condor now, walnut brain pigeons they d rather neighbor team at the socks to be fair, we re not very athletic kept kept. can i get a response to the trader and it s great let s raise means move him we re talking about moving, moving main contractors, inspectors, strangers, judge, in my carpet. well, we talking about staging. we talk about a full ficus a full ficus. nobody s gonna be your fault. ficus in my house. you could use opendoor. sell your house directly to them excuse me i guess we re moving can you go ask me about next practice someone needs to customize and save hundreds of liberty mutual wait, there s an elevator only pay for what you need labor day why choose asleep numbers, smart bad. can it keep me warm when i m cold wait. no, i m always hot. sleep number. does that can i my side softer. i like my side firmer sleep number. does that can help us sleep better and better please speak number does that 94% of smart sleepers report better sleep now say 40% on the sneak numbers special edition smart plus 0% interest for 24 months shop now at sleep number.com, you re calling some people find there s at an early age, others later in life are calling was to build trucks. and that s why trucks are what we do we put our everything and every truck so that when you find it your calling nothing can stop you from entering now, during the ram, make this the summer event, get $1,000 cash allowance plus finance and get no monthly pay payments for 90 t service, but kaitlan collins next 2002 was my first year at cnn and it didn t go very well, not a lot of people saw much value in me here. and it got so bad that i didn t see much value in me here either. but there was this young producer and orlando who did see something in me and i saw something in him. his name is charlie moore and he and i have now worked together from nearly all of the 22 years that i ve been at cnn for the last 14 years. he s been the executive producer of this broadcast are 360 is now taking on another role at cnn. and i just wanted to take a couple of moments to say, thank you. in dozens of countries in dangerous and difficult times, in high stress moments and mundane ones as well. and dusty roads and forgotten places from dingy rooms to debate halls charlie moore has always been by my side, just off camera. usually with a satellite phone press to his ear, trying to somehow solve the never ending problems that column with reporting live it may be my voice. you hear my face on screen, but whatever stories i ve told had been charlie s as well. i don t know all the things that producer s job entails, but i know with a great ones do and charlie is the best i ve worked alongside it s not just the amount of time we ve spent together, the miles we ve logged it s the moment that we bear witness to the million things we ve heard and seen and the people we ve met along the way there is a bond you formed doing this work. i can t describe it and it s so special. i m not sure. i d want to even if i could. we ve all found ourselves in positions were not used to searching for survivors, taking chances every day. charlie, my producer had to hang onto a stop sign to keep our boat from getting swamped. katrina in haiti? let s tsunami afghanistan, iraq. so many places we ve been all those stories we ve told, interviews and live shots and folders, endless days and sleepless nights, boring car rides and bad flights all those airports we ve rushed to getting, there, getting out how many hours have we waited? how many calls have you made how much could cajoling and talking? how did you come to know me so well time passes and memories fade but i hope i never forget all that we ve shared and all that you ve been and will forever be to me. charlie and i spend more than a month reporting from new orleans and the gulf coast in the difficult days after hurricane katrina. the last show we did was from a badly damaged street and it was all deserted and it was charlie and meeting maybe seven or eight others cameraman and engineers and satellite truck operators we ve finished around midnight. we broke down the equipment, we wrapped up the cables are other people did neal halls worth one of my cameraman two dozen years from the cooler on his truck and pass them around and we lingered there for time talking remembering the things we d all just lived through, not wanting that feeling we had to
they may not even have to go that far. i think the lesson is that you can terrorize people into not doing anything just by having a law and having the threat out there that somebody could be criminally prosecuted for doing something. the comstock act, this is not a hypothetical. there are lots of folks in right-wing circles writing about and talking about this. lisa rubin, thank you. thank you. that is all in on this thursday night. alex wagner starts now. good evening. there are women already terrified making choices about bodily economy. certainly. fear at all levels of american society. thank you, my friend. today donald trump made his first visit to capitol hill. the first time since his followers ransacked the capital on january 6. to understand why trump chose to come back now after more than three years away, you don t have to look as far back as the insurrection. you just have to remember what trump has been asking congress to do since his criminal conviction two weeks ago. the day after trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in his new york hush money case, eight republican senators vowed to oppose all biden nominees and all democratic legislation as retribution. today six republican senators led by j.d. vance put the oppose all biden nominees part of that into writing. senators explained they would block nominees including anyone who suggested the trump prosecutions were reasonable. anyone who opposed trump s guilt. anyone who supported organizations that celebrated the indictment of donald trump and anyone who supported alvin bragg or supported lawfare or censorship in other ways. which is just big enough to include basically anyone president biden nominated. these republican senators say their blockade will last until election day and in practical terms that means the u.s. government will not be able to appoint representatives to things like the u.n. general assembly or the world health organization or even the not particularly political seeming places like the civil aviation organization and public buildings reform board. what exactly do those organizations have to do with prosecuting donald trump? nothing. this is not about policy, it is about retribution. you might remember last year senator tommy tuberville pulled a similar stunt. tuberville became the first senator in history to do a long- term blockade of u.s. military appointments. senator tuberville kept more than 400 qualified servicemembers, 400, from being appointed or promoted for 10 months. all because of a department of defense policy that had nothing to do with those servicemembers. the blockade was such a blatant misuse of power. it was not just democrats who were appalled. there were some of his fellow republican senators no matter if you believe it or not senator tuberville, this is doing great damage to our military. this power is extraordinary that we are given as individual senators, but it is incumbent to use it in a reasonable way. everybody uses holds. the key is you put a hold on someone who typically has some kind of control over the issue you are trying to fix. there is not one senator in here who could not find a reason to object to an administration policy. in the military. none of us. we could all find something. i hope we don t do this routine. i just hope we don t do this routinely. does two times count as a routine? if so this makes it a routine and this time it is not even about the policy disagreement, however tangential. it is so republicans can protest donald trump being found guilty by a jury of his peers. today we also saw 29 republican senators sign onto this letter disparaging the rule of law and saying trump s conviction was nothing short of the evisceration of the american judicial process. so it is safe to say that from now to november the u.s. senate is effectively going to be at a standstill and unable to govern, not because of policy disagreements, but so republicans can perform an act of retribution on donald trump s behalf. as for the house where republicans hold a majority, well, things are looking worse. politico is out with new reporting saying that in the days after trump s conviction trump made a f bomb filled call to speaker johnson. trump s message, we have to overturn this. now a few weeks after that call it looks like speaker johnson s mission is not just to grind the government to a halt like his republican colleagues in the senate. it is to use the power of the government to make trump s criminal concerns go away. by way of an example yesterday, house republican leaders spent the day whipping votes for a bill that would allow presidents charged at the state level to move those cases to federal court. let me check my notes. how many presidents have been criminally charged at the state level again? oh, only one. what an interesting use of congressional power. politico also reports the speaker johnson is in talks with jim jordan about using the appropriations process to target special counsel jack smith and de-fund his investigation. neither of those have the votes to pass yet, but that is the kind of stuff that republicans in congress are working on right now, which helps put into context why donald trump went back to capitol hill today. it was not for any legitimate legislative concern. it was for what republican congressman matt gaetz called a pep rally for president trump. a pep rally complete with an early birthday party for donald trump himself. 11 something to do with this room. joining me now is the senior editor at slate two covers the courts and philip, columnist for the washington post. the birthday cake, pardon the culinary metaphor, but it really is the icing on the cake of fealty if that is the metaphor. are you surprised that the pledges of allegiance as they are are so explicit, so undisguised on capitol hill? i am not surprised. this is something we have seen for years. watching that package, the thing that struck me as republicans are a little bit like parents on an airplane with a crying child. they have this source of frustration and everyone is sick of it. they are stuck and have got to figure out how to calm this kid down. the kid is donald trump and he is mad about being convicted. don t worry, i will talk to the supreme court. they are doing everything to keep him happy, keep him quiet, keep him on their side and most importantly keep him from lashing out against them. that is what we see with this. they are all trying to keep him happy, keep him quiet and get through this. they are terrified of him and they adore him. he is the center of their universe and they can t control him at all. i do wonder as you see the machinations of the conference and republicans in the senate openly trying to undermine the rule of law, does it not throughout the notion of the justice system in america as we watch the legislative branch to this work? i think that is a feature, not a bug. i think we are seeing a systematic attack on the rule of law. i think even if we had not had the conviction in the new york trial, we have seen a long- standing set of attacks on judges, on juries, on, you know, prosecutors. on witnesses. i think the whole zeitgeist is, and it is not a surprise. this is a classic authoritarian play. just to foment doubt in institutions. if you foment enough doubt people start looking longingly at the strongman who will save them when institutions crumble. so no part of this is new or unfamiliar. i think what is interesting is seeing a lot of republicans who might have, at one point felt about donald trump, but stood fast on the principle that judges and juries and statutes and the concentration actually enforce some meaning. the degree to which they abandoned that and see no value in that i think is the part that is new and chilling. to that point, the idea that they will withhold these nominations across the government, right? the tuberville blockade wasn t great politics and yet they survived it and they are replicating it. on a different level it is not the u.s. military and certainly the w.h.o. and u.n. are not favorites of the republican party, but nevertheless they are stymieing the work and they think it is good politics? they do think it is good politics from the standpoint that the political focus at this point is retribution against joe biden and that is what they are focused on. mitch mcconnell doesn t wake up in the morning and say that is what he wants to do, but he understands. it is also mitch mcconnell in 2016, holding a supreme court seat. we have also seen this pattern in the past and it is very anti- institutional, but fundamentally about sending a message to the american public that d.c. does not do what it is supposed to do and we need to get trump in there. to make us do our work again. right. that is the singular focus from now to election day. i do think, you know, republicans are betting that the electorate won t punish them for this and that the broader american electorate is not tuned into this. this is part of the swamp, part of the dysfunction of the capital and you make an important point in one of your pieces this week about normalcy bias. americans have a normalcy bias. it leads them to believe everyone who tells them that everything is awesome. even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss. we are talking about a system of justice, but i think it has extended to the dysfunctional government. because it still exists, because there is still a congress that occasionally passes laws, people can deride functionality, but they don t think democracy is in danger of falling apart in the same way they hold trumps criminal conviction as an example. a jury of peers found him guilty. it all works. things are not normal right now. things are very abnormal and i wonder if you can talk a little bit more about your level of panic in this moment. i try not to use the word panic because it makes my parents super scared, but i guess i would say think about where we were in 2016. what was deemed disqualifying in that race and think about the fact that in the intervening time we have civil jury s finding trump guilty of being a sexual abuser. we have 34 felony convictions. we have january 6. we have donald trump, who ran in 2016. we forget in the fog of memory, but as a family man, as a businessman who was going to drain the swamp. now just running as a straight up autocrat. he is running under the banner of violence, of suppression of rights, of suppression of speech. of deporting immigrants. this is really scary, what has happened, and it seems people are almost less dialed up now than they were in 2016 when they were like that access hollywood tape sounds bad. now every single day you get this drumbeat of what i think is really distressing. you know, saying kind of the quiet part loud about wanting to create an authoritarian state and i think we normalized it because we have to get to cvs to fill our prescriptions and we are raising our kids and we are tired. i think this allows us to wait until some adult says break the glass. i think what we have metabolized is normal is deeply frightening. you write about the way in which republicans were very incensed about the trump conviction. democrats were not about hunter biden s conviction and as a result republicans are up in arms and democrats are largely accepting of the hunter biden conviction. i find a number that is particularly staggering around all of this, is the number of people who acknowledge that the donald trump conviction is the right call. it is not moving them at all in their support for trump. this is new monmouth pulling out today. do you agree or disagree with the verdict finding trump guilty? 47% agree. 34% disagree. then you look at the numbers of people who are definitely or probably supporting each candidate. biden, 43. trump, 44. numbers are not moving even in the face of saying this conviction was the right thing. what does this tell you? it tells me two things. first we should expect this from the standpoint that even before the verdict a fifth of trump supporters said they thought he already committed a crime. we will vote for him anyway. the second thing is that donald trump did an effective job of inoculating his base against this. it is not just last year. it is in 2016. as soon as the russian investigation came to public consciousness he started saying it is a hoax and that pattern is continuing. it really helped his base. once they bought in on that that was it. this indictment, they look at it and they are like, that is exactly what he said. at some point rational people step back and are like it is hard to believe that they came up with all of these different crimes. they ve been busy. they are like they are allowed to get him. calling it an inoculation is right. ironic. because we had breaking news in the vein of the abnormal tonight, i want to get your thoughts. clarence thomas, who is a key part of the system of justice and rule of law, found to have three additional undisclosed trips that he took from his billionaire a friend harlan crow. these were trips he did not disclose. this is on top of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of gifts he has taken thus far and only lately come clean about. what does this tell you about the danger we are in in terms of the high court and the lesson it sends to lower courts? i think i would put this under the bucket that philip has been talking about. law is for suckers. you may have disclosure statutes. you may have ethics rules. you may have all sorts of obligations. this is not a surprise. and then coming out in drips. last week we had a partial disclosure of some of the trips that were paid for. but not all of them and here are three more trips that were never disclosed. so i think this is kind of part of the larger trump theory which is that we have leaders who do not have to answer to the rule of law and when the little guy fails to get his death penalty paperwork right, he goes to the death chamber. when clarence thomas again and again, time after time after time, does not file disclosures or amends disclosures partially, that s okay because the law is for the little guy. i find it part of this sort of very systemic devaluation of the rules that everyone is supposed to abide by and it is a very systemic effort i think to normalize the notion that some people are too cool and important to follow the rules. everyone is supposed to abide by the law. thank you both for your time and thoughts tonight. really appreciate it. we have much more ahead tonight. do you have any summer travel plans? today former president donald trump singled out one, quote, horrible american city he might recommend skipping. first the supreme court upheld access to the drug used in most abortions for now, but it does not mean the fight is over by a long shot. we will talk with nancy from the center for reproductive rights, next. rights, next. me platinum plus gives you the highest standard of clean, even in your machine. clean enough for you? yeah! scrape. load. done. cascade platinum plus. sandals jamaica sale is now on! with rates from $199 per person per night. visit sandals.com or call 1-800-sandals here s to getting better with age. here s to beating these two every thursday. help fuel today with boost high protein, complete nutrition you need. .without the stuff you don t. so, here s to now. boost. her uncle s unhappy. i m sensing an underlying issue.. it s t-mobile. it started when we tried to get him under a new plan. but they they unexpectedly unraveled their “price lock” guarantee. which has made him, a bit. unruly. you called yourself the “un-carrier”. you sing about “price lock” on those commercials. “the price lock, the price lock.” so, if you could change the price, change the name! it s not a lock, i know a lock. so how can we undo the damage? we could all unsubscribe and switch to xfinity. their connection is unreal. and we could all un-experience this whole session. okay, that s uncalled for. in a unanimous decision today, the united states supreme court maintained access to the primary pill used in most abortions, mifepristone. the court rejected a bid to restrict access to that drug on procedural grounds. justice kavanaugh claimed the plaintiffs, a collection of antiabortion doctors and dentists and unlicensed retirees calling themselves the alliance for hippocratic medicine, justice kavanaugh said they had no legal standing to challenge the drug s approval. this case is dead, but the group of doctors say they are not done. the court said the clients don t have standing in this case. we are grateful the case will continue with three states working to hold the fda accountable for its reckless actions. today republican attorney generals in missouri, idaho and kansas are continuing to challenge access to mifepristone using the same legal argument in the case the court rejected today. this time they are framing access as an infringement on states rights. even if this challenge fails in federal court, there are still restrictions at the state level. last month in louisiana where abortion is already banned, it became the first state to classify both drugs used for medication abortion as controlled, date dangerous substances. effectively shutting down access to these pills through the mail. joining me now is nancy northup, president for the center for reproductive rights. i would first like your general reaction. was it one of optimism, anxiety, pessimism? how did you see it? well, it was huge relief because if the supreme court had upheld the ruling from the fifth circuit, then availability of medication abortion by telemedicine, receiving it by mail, things that made it much easier for people to get access to medication abortion if they do not live near a clinic, if they do not take time off, could have been taken away. so relief, but frankly also anger because we should not have been here to begin with. you can tell that nine of these justices agreed with each other. this case had no merit in the law and no merit in fact. so while i am breathing a sigh of relief today, i am really concerned. we know and you just showed us, you just heard, the campaign against medication abortion by those who are opposed to abortion is far from over. yeah and it seems very clear that the adf, the legal organization that offended these doctors, is out there, ready for the next wave of this which involves the states. the attorney general of kansas said today that states have the standings that the doctors in this case did not. how concerned are you about that legal theory? well i am concerned about it because obviously we have lower court justice who even agreed to this case that the supreme court said had no merit and threw it out. but it does not have merit. you can t go into court because you disagree with the ruling based on science by the fda. let s be clear. why are they going after medication abortion? because it is the method of choice by almost two thirds of women who have abortion in the united states today, choosing medication abortion. they want to cut that off. they want to cut it off in states where abortion is illegal, in states like illinois and new york and california and beyond. we need to be concerned because trying to keep coming in with the junk science as they did in this case and really baseless claims, they will keep on going. they can t ban medication abortion, which obviously is the end goal. there is a non-core strategy which is for states to independently take it upon themselves as louisiana did to say this should be a controlled substance. we are not going to use a here. is that the most pernicious strategy? is that the one you are most concerned about or do you think the whole ballgame of banning it nationally is where they will focus their firepower? they are going to do both and let s also remember that abortion is already banned in louisiana. so where we are today is the same status quo which is unacceptable and harmful. 14 states have banned abortion with really severe criminal penalties and for people in those states, you know, that status quo is completely unacceptable. in the meantime, nancy, as this is debated in the courts and so forth, there is a reality for people seeking bodily autonomy and healthcare across this country. the new york times has a staggering map of the number of people traveling across state lines to seek abortion care. 171,000 people traveled for abortions last year, which was more than double the amount in 2019. what is the picture you can paint for us about the reality of abortion care and reproductive health care in the united states right now? it is completely unacceptable that in 2024, four people in 14 states, that they have to travel out of state to get care they should be able to get in- state. we were in congress yesterday. there was a hearing in the subcommittee of the judiciary on of course travel out of state and one of our clients in texas talked about how because she was denied a medically necessary abortion in texas, what would have taken 15 minutes and turned around her health in 15 minutes, she had to spend three days and thousands of dollars going to the state of colorado. that is the reality for so many women and not everybody can leave their state. they don t have the means or the child care or the time off from work. it is really a healthcare crisis happening in the country right now. a completely self afflicted crisis. nancy northup from the center of reproductive rights, it is great to have your perspective. thanks for your time tonight. thank you. survivors of the sandy hook massacre reached a major milestone this weekend tomorrow could bring another measure of justice. first, donald trump s new election strategy to compete against joe biden and the rustbelt. insult the wisconsin city hosting the republican national convention. we have more on that, coming up next. we re trying to save the planet with nuggets. because we need the planet. and we also need nuggets. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. slowing my cancer from growing and living longer are two things i want from my metastatic breast cancer treatment. and with kisqali, i can have both. kisqali is a pill that when taken with an aromatase inhibitor helps delay cancer from growing and has been proven to help people live significantly longer across three separate clinical trials. so, i have the confidence to live my life. kisqali can cause lung problems or an abnormal heartbeat, which can lead to death. it can cause serious skin reactions, liver problems, and low white blood cell counts that may result in severe infections. avoid grapefruit during treatment. tell your doctor right away if you have new or worsening symptoms, including breathing problems, cough, chest pain, a change in your heartbeat, dizziness, yellowing of the skin or eyes, dark urine, tiredness, loss of appetite, abdomen pain, bleeding, bruising, fever, chills, or other symptoms of an infection, a severe or worsening rash, are or plan to become pregnant, or breastfeeding. long live life and long live you. ask your doctor about kisqali today. they say we should stop eating so much meat. and long live you. so we made meat out of plants. because we aren t quitters. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. are your gutters clogged? cleaning them can be dangerous, mucky, yuck. get leaffilter. it s as easy as one, two, three. call or click today. get your free gutter inspection on your schedule and get leaffilter installed in as little as a few hours. you ll never have to clean out your gutters again, guaranteed. get leaf filter today. call 833 leaffilter or go to leaffilter.com as easy as 1, 2, 3 donald trump wants to talk about things that he thinks are horrible, but all of us lived through his presidency, so right back at you, buddy. to insult the state hosting your convention is kind of bizarre. kind of unhinged in a way. that was mayor johnson responding to donald trump s comments made reportedly behind closed doors where trump called the city of milwaukee horrible. milwaukee of course is the city where in a little over a month donald trump will officially become the republican presidential nominee at the rnc. meanwhile first lady joe biden was in green bay today kicking off a healthcare initiative. nbc news found since the launch of the reelection campaign in the fall, the team has made 10 trips to wisconsin and pennsylvania. in addition to a dozen visits to the state of michigan. there is a logic to this. nbc news notes that biden s most likely path to victory lies in pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin, and a single electoral vote from an omaha base to district. joining me now is founder and executive director of a more perfect union and manager of bernie sanders campaign. thank you for being here. obviously this white house is thinking about all 50 states, but the campaign is increasingly looking at a specific reality for biden s reelection. as onlookers to all of this, should we be looking at those three states as the prism through which we understand everything else joe biden does from now to november? it is not the end-all, be- all, but it is critical to maintain the presidency. when you look at wisconsin, i appreciate donald trump trying to dig a hole and keep digging, but you and i know what he is trying to do which is to set up a rural and urban divide. that is a state that he won in 2016. flashforward and biden wins with 20,000 votes. what happened in those four years? 300,000 more people voted in the state of wisconsin and that help to deliver a margin for biden. for those playing along at home, what are you expecting in 2024 and if it is closer to 2020, biden is in a great place. closer to 2016 and trump is in a better place. it is generating enthusiasm for the states to win. what you think about his actions and priorities in terms of what he talks about tailored to those states? what effect do you think that will have on the man in the coming months? will we see a focus on certain issues over others? geography matters. if you think of michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, what defines them? these are states that you know well that are factory towns that of lost jobs. due to manufacturing that has moved away from the united states. these are towns that are proud and built trades and apprenticeships. cars and parts supplies and they made crayons and all kinds of things. all kinds of stuff that we like and we saw those jobs move abroad. here comes joe biden saying i ve got a different plan. i ve got a plot that says we will make it in america. we will invest in industrial policymaking to bring jobs back. the priority is not just getting it cheap, to get equality and good and made in the united states. in 2016 and 2000 17 2017, everything is going terribly. here is joe biden doing it and now the politics as to translate in the states where we make that choice. you can see the way donald trump is campaigning. he does not have the same ability to go to these towns and argue that somehow he will do something to rebuild these areas when joe biden has come along to start to do it. the goal is to educate people about the fact that this choice has been made and do we stay on the track that joe biden is offering? do you feel there is tension within some of the states and i will pick pennsylvania because you have a more urban and suburban electorate clustered on philadelphia that he has to keep on his ledger and perhaps even expand his support and he also has allegheny county and the rustbelt part of the state which is much more of the scranton joe persona. is that a delicate balance? those are very different voters, different levels of income, different levels of information and education. how do you see his ability to strike a balance between the two? i tend to believe, alex, that i think joe biden does it well. the persuasion audience, the people who have not yet made up their mind about either candidate, the ones who are concerned about joe biden here and maybe donald trump there, those are working-class people who are often defined by not having a college degree, holding down a job, making under $100,000 a year. that to me is where you have to be laser focused and to my mind the argument they have not heard and need to hear over the next few months as you have a billionaire and ceo class. we are speaking on a day when donald trump went to the business roundtable to tell them you will get tax cuts for the rich. i will come back and you will be so happy. they have to know that that is the choice. as you mentioned, scranton joe, who has been taking on a billionaire class. trying to un-rigged the economy. fighting junk fees. going after uncompetitive mergers. things that speak to your pocketbook and trying to make your life better. here is a guy promising every day that i ve got the ceos backs. i will deliver tax cuts. that i think will be decisive and if you hone in on that working-class audience i do think they are the most important of all of the audiences we need to persuade. you are being generous and suggesting donald trump had a strategy by insulting the city of milwaukee, calling it horrible reportedly. mike johnson i think was on another cable news network saying he did not hear trump say that. i think other republicans don t think that is a great strategy, if it is a strategy. you know, is alex, i will say i blame myself for this. i listen to every donald trump speech and and everyone he tells you about the decline of american cities. he will go to san francisco, new york and wherever he is. he will pick a place nearby. everything is terrible. it is no slip of the tongue. this is intentional and by design. he is realizing the politics might not play exactly as i wanted it to because i will be going there shortly to court those votes. but this is what he believes. this is the american carnage theory. he believes in decline and everything is terrible. well, maybe he forgot that actually the rnc was in milwaukee, which is entirely possible. in the strange brain of donald trump. thank you as always for your wisdom and enthusiasm. it is great to see you. thank you, alex. coming up, today was the deadline for donald trump to file motions in his hush money trial ahead of sentencing next month. what did we hear from the former president and his legal team? that is coming up. stay with us. food isn t just fuel to live, it s fuel to grow. my family relied on public assistance to help provide meals for us. feeding america, a network of food banks, helps millions of people put food on the table. i go by jackie, i m 44 years old and had three kids at the time and single mother. i was working 60 hours a week, couldn t pay bills and skipped meals that they could eat. it s been hard because one thing falls into place, ten things fall out of place. you just can t do this alone in making work. one in five kids face hunger in america and food costs are rising. call or go online right now to join feeding america with your gift of just $19 a month, only $0.63 a day. together, thanks to a nationwide network of food banks, dedicated volunteers and the monthly support of people like you. we can fill plates with nutritious food for kids facing hunger this summer. one day my mother came over to my house and said, there s a meeting at the pantry. i said, okay and i went. they asked several questions. some of those were about me and my story. but it helped me to open up a little bit. we■re getting closer to the day when no one in america faces hunger. but we can t do it without you. call or go online now. visit helpfeedingamerica.org and give $19 a month. just $0.63 a day. 98% of donations go directly to help millions of children facing hunger from coast to coast. and in your own community. and when you give my credit card, we ll send you this exclusive canvas grocery bag to show you are a part of a movement of supporters working together to help end hunger. i have people that i can trust. i have, i have hope. join the movement to end hunger and together we can open endless possibilities for people to thrive. please call now or make your monthly donation at helpfeedingamerica.org. working together, we can end hunger in america. we re trying to save the planet with nuggets. donation at helpfeedingamerica.org. because we need the planet. and we also need nuggets. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. if you have chronic kidney disease you can reduce the risk of kidney failure with farxiga. because there are places you d like to be. farxiga can cause serious side effects, including ketoacidosis that may be fatal, dehydration, urinary tract, or genital yeast infections, and low blood sugar. a rare, life-threatening bacterial infection in the skin of the perineum could occur. stop taking farxiga and call your doctor right away if you have symptoms of this infection, an allergic reaction, or ketoacidosis. far-xi-ga it was december 14, 2012 when a 20-year-old man armed with an ar-15 style assault rifle entered sandy hook elementary school in newtown, connecticut and killed 26 people. 20 of those victims were children between the ages of six and seven years old. the events of that day left a scar on the nation, but no one felt the trauma more than the families of the victims and the surviving children who witnessed the murder of their classmates. last night, more than 11 years after the worst day of their lives, the sandy hook survivors officially graduated high school. going into graduation we all have very mixed emotions. trying to be excited for ourselves and this accomplishment that we worked so hard for, but also those who were not able to share it with us who should have been able to. the shooting was like our most core memory growing up and i think that took away a lot of the joy we could have experienced. even going to prom, you think what if they were my prom date? or what if they were my significant other or what if they were able to walk the stage with me? who would i still be friends with now? seeing those children enter adulthood as a reminder of where this nation is 11 years later. according to the gun violence archive, america experienced more than 4800 past mass shootings in the past decade. in 2022 the nation mourned the death of another 19 elementary school students. another american community that will now be remembered as the site of a horrific tragedy. in the wake of that shooting president biden past the first gun reform in generations, but republicans have resisted the continued calls to ban the very assault rifles used at sandy hook and robb elementary. for years the family hook the sandy hook family were re- victimized by alex jones, who said that the shooting was faked. the families sued for defamation and eventually they won. tomorrow the judge overseeing that case is expected to move forward on liquidating alex joneses assets to help pay down the $1.5 billion jones owes those sandy hook families, just days after their children would have graduated high school. over the past few years there has been no shortage of discourse about how the next generation of kids will experience the transition into adulthood. could kids have a normal graduation during covid? tion d? will they survive long enough to make it to graduation day? in 2030, the children of uvalde, texas will become the next class of elementary school mass shooting survivors to graduate high school. maybe they can be the last ones to get their diplomas with so many missing classmates. missin. 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! chewy, a citi client, uses citi s financial expertise to help drive its growth and keep its supply chain moving, so more pet parents can get everything they need. right when they need it. keeping more pets, and families, happy. for the love of moving our clients forward. for the love of progress. limu emu. and doug. 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[ bird squawks loudly ] to a pet shop. meg s moving company uses t-mobile. so she scaled down her fleet to save money. and don s paying so much for at&t, he s been waiting to update his equipment! there s a smarter way to save. comcast business mobile. you could save up to 70% on your wireless bill. so you don t have to compromise. powering smarter savings. powering possibilities. everybody say there s no crime. and there s no evidence whatsoever connecting trump with any criminal wrongdoing. there is an insufficient amount of evidence, no crime has been shown. bragg evidence is inadequate. there s no evidence. there is no evidence and there s no crime. there s no crime. throughout donald trump s criminal time in new york, the former president citing legal experts arguing there was no evidence to convict him. a jury that found him guilty of 34 felonies disagreed but under new york state law, trump has one more chance to prove there was no real evidence of a crime by arguing that the judge should set aside the jury s and today is the deadline for to file that motion. joining me now is kristi greenberg former prosecutor. by my clock which is fairly accurate, it s 9:55, there are two hours left for them to file this. this is their chance to you know, basically this is a last chance that they have to make their legal arguments before they proceed to an appeal so they will be filing a full some motion. what is that, like everything and the kitchen sink? we are going to see a lot of the same recycled arguments that we saw before, just that you heard, that there s no crime here, you can t use state laws to deal with federal election crimes, you can t, the judge is biased, the prosecutors are vindictive and said you re going to take a lot of those arguments and you re going to cite the trial record but the problem is the trial record doesn t support the argument. they will point to a number of places where the judge ruled against them or reprimanded them, but there are also plenty of examples where the judge ruled in their favor and actually kept out evidence like playing the access hollywood tape, like hearing about sexual allegations against trump, you know, after that access hollywood tape, none of that came into the trial and so, there are any number of evidentiary rulings, things that went in his favor so this judge was fair, i think their attempt to use the trial record to regurgitate a number of these arguments is really not going to work. so is there a downside to doing this, you know, do you further erode confidence in your argument, if anything you are adding to the record, right, this is a judge who has already told trump s lead counsel that he has lost all credibility with the court and that was before the trial even started. there was, we got new information today on the gag order, on monday i believe trump legal team introduced a new motion for the judge to lift his gag order. the reasoning in part being that trump would like to be able to speak freely presumably about the judges, witnesses and prosecution during the debate. you think judge merchan moves at all on this? i do, and he is moving quickly and more quickly it seems from the papers that trump filed, which tells me he actually is looking seriously at this. so i think, there are three categories as you mentioned, and there s one category where i think the judge is going to take a close look at it and that is the statement that trump can make about witnesses. now we have seen the appearances from stormy daniels, and michael cohen, where they are talking about the case, talking about the election, talking about trump going to jail post verdict. so i think there is some merit to trump s argument that he should get to respond to those kind of attacks and i think the prosecutor, they seem to just that they would make some amendments to allow for that. that s the one category where i can see some shift but trump s motion says really nothing about why he should get to now attack the jurors, after the verdict or why he should now get to attack the judge s daughter, so if anything, what we ve seen from nbc news reporting, brian riley talking about the threats on jurors, people trying to identify who they are, trying to threatened with violence and now we are leaning toward sentencing, if any of that is revealed and he keeps ramping up these attacks, i mean, that is only going to intensify, so the need to protect these jurors and protect the court staff and the court staff and their families has not gone away. this case is still pending. from the state of the presidential debate that a lot of people are tuning into, that is not keep anybody any safer. i appreciate it. that s our show for tonight, and a reminder, you can listen to every single episode of alex wagner tonight as a podcast for free, scan the qr code on your screen or search for alex wagner tonight wherever you got your pad cat podcast. nancy pelosi is going to be our guest tonight. i
plants and meatpacking plants. these aren t the most powerful people and where do they turn? you have a right-wing house of representatives and a very right-wing supreme court. exactly and i think this is why so many people feel powerless and ironically some are feeling so powerless that they turn to somebody who looks like a strong man. wright, with a golden toilet. who was actually at this moment giving big tax breaks and promising more tax breaks to the biggest corporations. people need to know that the most important thing to remember is the massive trump tax cut will expire next year. he is not for the regular person. robert reich, thank you so much. that is tonight s reidout . all in with chris hayes starts now. tonight on all in a hero s welcome on capitol hill for the architect of the insurrection. we are 100% unified behind his candidacy. a lot of support. the best speech i ve ever heard. we are incredibly unified in working with president trump to get him elected. tonight, how congressional republicans became accomplices to the criminal ex-president. this is an outstanding group of people. i m with them 1000%. they are with me 1000%. as trump pressures the speaker of the house to overturn his felony conviction. then, new reporting on undisclosed luxury gifts to clarence thomas. and why today s supreme court ruling on abortion pills is just the beginning of the battle, when all in starts right now. good evening from new york, i am chris hayes. a lot has happened on capitol hill since the last time donald trump was there. there was the deadly insurrection he incited. there was the biden inauguration he skipped. there was the record-setting second impeachment he faced and there was a time in the immediate aftermath of all of that, late january, february, march, it seemed he may never be welcome back. but we know how that turned out. today the former president and his 34 felony convictions tracked to capitol hill at the invitation of house and senate republicans where he was received like a different dawn. a crime don. seeking not supporters but accomplices and co-conspirators. they are using us as a bad example of democracy and they are getting away with murder and we are not going to let it happen. you are all elected or you are going to be elected again and reelected. i m with everyone of you and i will be with you always. this is an outstanding group of people. i m with them 1000%. we agree just about everything and if there isn t we work it out. the term kiss the ring has been used so often with trumpet has virtually lost all meaning, but it really was on display in washington today. everything about this appearance was meant to convey the idea of republican party unity and they all performed it strenuously. that unity essentially remaking the party of lincoln into a mafia type operation with him at the top. a man convicted in a conspiracy to pay off former paramore is because he feared their stories would complicate his campaign. a man found liable for sexual assault of exactly the kind he brags about. a man who surrounds himself with lackeys who have been convicted or charged of serious crimes. steve bannon, michael flynn. trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of many of those men. of course they never snitched. because trump envisions interactions with people in these sort of organized crime transaction terms. you do for me and if i am in a good mood and i am happy with your performance, you will get a cut. the republican party signed up to be part of this. that was on display today with discussions behind closed doors. as sources told reporter jake sherman, trump singled out house republicans who voted to impeach him saying that out of the 10 that impeached only one is left. sherman pointed out that was wrong, there are actually two left, but this was trump basically doing his impression of al capone in the untouchables, pointing out all the people in his gang that flipped on him. a sort of snitches get stitches, stay on my good side message to the foot soldiers. if you think that pressure does not work, look at the outgoing majority leader mitch mcconnell. remember what he said about trump in the aftermath of the insurrection? there is no question, none, the president trump is practically and morally responsible for promoting the events of the day. no question about it. this was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters decision or else torch our institutions on the way out. and yet here was mcconnell today. the old man, supplicant, submissive, bending over to kiss the ring. getting a breezy endorsement of trump s capitol hill pilgrimage. reporter: senator how was it seeing the former president? we had a good meeting. we shook hands a few times. he took questions from the audience and it was an entirely positive session. great work, mitch. despite all that plenty of those lawmakers were feckless enough to drip out details of trump s backroom talk to sherman and other reporters because you can never underestimate just how cowardly they are. for instance when trump told republicans today that milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city. another source told reporters trump was rambling to the crowd. said it was like, and i quote, talking to her drunk uncle at the family reunion. of course in public those sources will get in line and kiss the ring and give the don whatever he wants. maybe you think this is all being too literal. hyperbolic with the metaphors. crime bosses. surely he does not embrace actual criminal gangs and racketeering and violence as a campaign feature. but this is now part of his campaign. listen closely to this because i still can t get over this. it flew almost completely beneath the radar on the mainstream media. i will include us with this, with the exception of the associated press and a few others. but it was on display at his campaign rally last month in the bronx when he shared the stage with a few supportive guests. where is where is he? come on up, fellas. always going to whisper your accomplishments and shout your failures. trump will shout to the winds for all of us. make america great again. okay so trump is doing a rally in the bronx. to trump those rappers are powerful allies. they are also criminal defendants in a sweeping gang case where prosecutors say they gave material support to a gang during a violent street war with another gang. brooklyn district attorney gonzalez says gang members used more than 30 guns to threaten or eliminate their rivals. in total gonzalez says there was one murder, for attempted murders and 12 nonfatal shootings. what we allege and learned during the course of this investigation was that he used a lot of the money that he earned to help facilitate further gang activity. he encouraged gang members to participate in violent crimes. sheff g, who is the rapper on stage with donald trump that he invited up there. prosecutors allege that he threw a party to celebrate a drive-by shooting in october, 2020, in which one alleged gang member was killed and five others were injured. murder. again, alleged. innocent until proven guilty in our system, but did you hear all of that? imagine what the new york post would have done with this headline if those gentlemen had shown up at a rally for aoc or if president joe biden introduced to them introduced them on stage. but the fact of the matter is that conservatives have a criminal as their preferred nominee and he is embracing a criminal model for the enterprise that is now the republican party. michelle goldberg is an opinion columnist for the new york times. tara, let me start with that. those two individuals on that stage. again, i can t believe it happened and these are not, you know, there are all kinds of ways people have been accused of crime. the system can be unfair, but they are accused of being part of a gang that has killed and shocked and maimed people and they are on stage with donald trump and i don t think it is an accident because i think this is kind of the vibe of the campaign. yeah, i talked about this right after the rally, i think on this network, as a matter of fact. pointing out how despicable this was and how this is seemingly okay now in the law and order republican party. it is such an affront to so many things and it is an insult to the american people that we are supposed to sit here and think this is normal. donald trump is a convicted felon. republicans are welcoming him to capitol hill with a hero s welcome. back to the scene of the crime where mitch mcconnell calls him practically responsible for an insurrection. pal around with accused murderers. this is all normal. it s just fine. it s not. it s not. he gets very frustrating sometimes when there seems to be a moral equivalence made between trump and biden and the way the campaigns are covered. like donald trump did what he did today. he is having these rallies where he is going on random rants about sharks and boats and electrocution. he is palling around on stage with guys who are also alleged criminals. meanwhile president biden is overseas representing the united states with honor and dignity of the g-7 and just entered a security deal with ukraine trying to maintain democracy in europe. there is no moral equivalence. your point about how this slipped under the radar and seems par for the course for donald trump, unfortunately this is who he is. he thinks this is okay and by the way for any black folks who think donald trump is on your side, this is what he thinks of you. black people will like me because i hang around with criminals and they were flashy chains and gold sneakers. it is such an affront, honestly, but this is who donald trump is. michelle, one of the thing that happens and again i use the mafia metaphor, because the unity is so intense. of course behind-the-scenes you have like talking to your drunk uncle. he was rambling. everyone goes and tells reporters and there is this distance. the unbelievable applause and then everyone going to tell the reporter that he was really nuts behind closed doors. right, it kind of brings back memories of 2016 to 2020, where you constantly had republicans in these really degrading displays of fealty and then they would go and try to distance themselves from it when no one was looking. maybe because they think it is all a game and we see how far it goes over and over again. i think after the mafia element, it is not just these two rappers. the trim campaign is leaning hard into mafia metaphors. you have seen the godfather t- shirts and merchandise with godfather iconography. donald trump has compared himself favorably to al capone. recently breitbart ran an interview with peter navarro, former trump official and probably future trump official if trump is reelected. currently in prison in miami. he gave this jailhouse interview boasting about how he gets treated really well because the guards and the inmates love donald trump. sort of how a made demand would be treated if he goes to prison and is still able to slice the garlic really thin. i think what is important is it is not just hypocrisy. not just a defiance of law and order. it is a different model of governance that a lot of republicans have embraced. a hierarchy based on personal relationships that they see as an alternative to technocratic liberalism. yes, mafia state as an aspirational model. and then i never know what s worse, like the people who are pretending or the people who are true believers. i think i know which category marjorie taylor greene is, but let me just play her reaction to seeing donald trump today. i really found his speech to be one of my favorite speeches. he came in, talked to the conference. he was very honest. he was funny. he was joking around constantly with everyone. he was really sweet to me. he said to speaker johnson, okay, you ve got one more seat. you need to be tougher. i was sitting back a little ways. he saw me and he was like hello. he is always so sweet and recognizes me and said are you being nice? he was joking and said are you being nice to speaker johnson? he said okay, be nice to him and i nodded my head. the thing about this is, yes, there is always a duality here. he knows what he is doing and the transactional politics are real and they have all sort of bought into it. it is successful because they are willing to get on board for what it will mean for them. yes of course and to answer your question who is worse, the true believers or the enablers, it is the enablers 100%. the true believers, you can excuse it away that they are so far into it that it is not rational for them. the enablers are the ones who know better and are in a position to say no or to say stop, when no one else will. which is what conservatives were supposed to be doing according to bill buckley, the godfather of modern conservative history. they did not do that. they made a decision that this would be a transactional, politically expedient decision to suck up to donald trump who is a direct and immediate existential threat to our democracy. he wants a club talker see and they are okay with that as long as they get their piece of the pie, but no one is safe under donald trump. he will come for them, too. then we as a country and a democracy have to pay the price. that is why he has to be stopped. go ask mike pence who narrowly avoided correct. getting grabbed by a mob calling for him to be hanged. this is j.d. vance, speaking of people auditioning, to be the next person who may be facing that situation. no real republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming trump for january 6. i think it is a good thing. the republican party is in a good place. i think today was kind of like the button on the january 6 was bad era of the republican party. to whatever extent it was there, today was the definitive marking of the end. right and it has been coming for a while. this is obviously a candidate running extensively on january 6 rioters were heroes and warriors and i m going to pardon the mall. the party has embraced him and embraced that message. j.d. vance is right. there are not very many republicans, if any, who have credibility in their party who will say what mitch mcconnell said after january 6 and what i think most of them know in their hearts to be true. michelle goldberg, tara setmayer, thank you both. when you are the republican pic for president and you want to overturn your conviction for multiple felonies, who do you call? the plea he made to the speaker of the house, next. se, next. clean white socks? it can with tide. do i need to pretreat guacamole? not with tide. this is chocolate, right? just use. tide. yeah. no matter who s doing it, on what cycle, or in what temperature, tide works. so i can focus on all the 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these aren t all the side effects. imagine. what could relief from ibs-c mean for you? talk to your doctor and say yess to linzess. learn how abbvie and ironwood could help you save. they say we should stop eating so much meat. talk to your doctor and say yess to linzess. so we made meat out of plants. because we aren t quitters. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. higher shipping rates may be “the cost of doing business.” but at what cost? turn shipping to your advantage. with low cost ground shipping from the united states postal service. for all the bravado from republicans insisting that being convicted of 34 felony counts is somehow a good thing, it seems donald trump himself is not a believer. no reporting by political reveals that in the days after his conviction trump made a desperate call to speaker of the house mike johnson. in fact trump was so angry on that call. pleading with the speaker, we have to overturn this. that is not really in the power of the congress, nor should it be. also donald trump was convicted in the state of new york, not the federal system, but that s not stopping them. the morning after the verdict johnson was on trump news making an appeal to the conservatives on the supreme court. i do feel the supreme court should step in. this is unprecedented and dangerous to our system. i think the justices on the court, i know many of them personally. i think they are deeply concerned about that as we are, so i think they will set this straight. yesterday house republican leaders spent the day whipping a bill that would allow presidents charged at the state level to move cases to the federal court. she is a contributing writer at the atlantic where she wrote about trump s absolute disdain for democracy and joins me now. when i saw this i thought that is nutty and not the way any of this works, but that has not stopped things before. i thought that about the mifepristone suit and look how far that god. so it does seem like they are on board, the house republican caucus, on trying to come up with some way of bailing him out. the house republican caucus may be on board, but i don t think that means whatever they are planning will work. if this bill went through i think there would be serious challenges probably made on realism. congress can t just miss around with state courts however it likes and of course he has already been convicted. his options at this point are really appealing through the new york state court system and then the supreme court. there are a handful of legal arguments that he could make on the grounds of federal law, but that will take a very long time and it certainly won t be done before the election. the reporting around the sort of scotus hail mary and this is the daily beast saying that most request for emergency action go to the justice assigned to a particular circuit. in this case it is sotomayor, who has ruled against trump in a most every case before her. the rulebook says the petitioner may renew the application to any other justice of his or her choice and theoretically continue until the majority has denied the application, which means he could keep on the slot machine until the right justice pops up. i m with you again that that seems implausible even by the degree of standards of this supreme court, but that might be true now. all that stands between us and the unthinkable are are those people in power at the high levels going to do the right thing or do something transparently crazy? i do think this is a case for the courts. institutional equities are important to understand. it is also worth noting, the idea that he could ping-pong from justice to justice, that is not how the court tends to do things now. what they usually do is yes the emergency application will go to justice sotomayor and then instead of going to another justice it would go to the full court as a matter of practice and i think it is safe to say they would almost certainly turn it down. this is an extremely conservative court. it is a hard right court, but it is not really a maga court. there have been issues where trump s issues align with those of the conservative justices and uc benefits for him there, but it is really hard for me to see how he could even get to for justices who would be interested in taking on this case right off the bat. he really would be stretching. i totally agree and i think one of the things you see is mitch mcconnell had this sort of speech after january 6 that was basically like this is not the way you do this. basically he was saying you ve got to do the bush league or thing if you want to take an election away, not this january 6 nonsense. do it the bush versus gore way. that is a ludicrous argument and it has done what it needed to do almost certainly in terms of delaying. to call up mike johnson and yell at him to make a magical bill that i am no longer a convicted felon is not going to do the job. right and i think this is what things look like in a federal system. the congress, the president of trump is elected again, they do not have power over what the new york state courts do. alvin bragg, whose office prosecuted this case as district attorney, he was directly elected by the people of manhattan. to some extent i think what trump is really raging against is just the idea that there might be jurisdictions simply out of his control. that is exactly what has him so worked up. quinta jurecic, thank you. coming up, in case $4 million in gifts weren t enough, what s the, it looks like terrence kalama s forgot looks like clarence thomas forgot to disclose another set of gifts. that is ahead. ahead. clean enough for you? yeah! scrape. load. done. cascade platinum plus. i have moderate to severe crohn s disease. now, there s skyrizi. things are looking up, i ve got symptom relief. control of my crohn s means everything to me. control is everything to me. feel significant symptom relief at 4 weeks with 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tiredness. with cabenuva, you re good to go. ask your doctor about switching. president joe biden is in italy today meeting with the world leaders for the 50th g7 summit. this morning the group posed for the classic family photo. this version of that picture, edited by political scientist ian brehmer, reveals something important about the leaders of the world s biggest economies. they are all unpopular. those numbers are net disapproval ratings with joe biden coming in second, underwater by only 18.5 points. there is one reason why these leaders are also unpopular. all g7 nations and most of the world have faced levels of inflation not seen for decades. none of the leaders are directly responsible for that. as you can see job creation coincided with the end of the pandemic. it was the result of a surge of pent-up demand amidst a constrained supply. but voters totally understandably hate inflation. it has been three or four years of prices going up and they blame the incumbent party. in the u.s. the consumer price index hit a whopping 9% in 2022 and we have actually recovered since then, better than our g7 counterparts. the index dropped to 3.3% as of yesterday. that is the rate of increase. prices are going up at a slower rate. cumulatively prices are still way up here and everywhere, but the truth is that joe biden didn t have a lot to do with the fact this line went up or that it went down. that is mostly circumstances outside his control. the bed. i will say this. joe biden s administration has tried very hard to cut costs for americans wherever they can, taking steps to lower prescription drug costs. canceling student debt. getting rid of junk fees for airlines and banks, for example. but for the most part being real, the rise and fall in inflation was the result of external factors like the pandemic and decisions by the federal reserve outside president biden s control. voters might look and say well then, why does it matter who the next president is? it is calming down on its own. it matters because donald trump is running on the most explicit inflationary platform in modern history. i think we should have a ring around the collar, as they say. i think when companies come in and dump products in the united states they should pay automatically, let s say a 10% tax. i do like 10% for everybody. trump s proposal, a 10% tariff on all foreign goods would basically be a sales tax. it would raise prices for american consumers 10% on everything from avocados to iphones. if you think that is bad, today, behind closed doors outside of the view of cameras, donald trump proposed one of the most arranged policies i have ever heard. he told republican lawmakers behind closed doors that he wants to eliminate the income tax and replace it entirely with tariffs, effectively taking us back to the 19th century. this idea makes as much sense as ripping up the interstate highway system and replacing it with canals. economist paul krugman did some math and estimates the policy would require an average tariff of 133%. not 10%. that is a 133% tax psych on all imported goods that would be passed on to consumers. it would cost americans hundreds of millions of dollars. a policy advisor explained further. another way to put trump s latest incredibly unworkable idea, get this, it would raise taxes by $5000 for a typical family if you are a working person who buys stuff. it would cut taxes for the average family in the top 0.1% by $1.5 million. this proposal would jack up everything everywhere for normal people, crushing the average american s wallet, while giving the wealthiest folks who no longer have to pay income tax and don t buy that much relative to their income, and enormous windfall of millions of dollars. this is the man who has a 50-50 shot of taking the white house, in large part because of the conditions that produced high inflation and he is seriously and earnestly currently running on the most inflationary platform i ve ever 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food programme empower families across the globe. surprise, there are even more undisclosed private jet trips. tonight we are learning supreme court justice clarence thomas took at least three private jet trips paid for by his benefactor billionaire republican harlan crow, according to an ongoing investigation by democrats on the senate judiciary committee. propublica is reporting the newly revealed flights add to the picture of using the jets for personal travel. he owns a high-end jet that can cost over $10,000 per flight hour to charter according to charter company estimates and thomas has repeatedly flown to a destination and back again on the same day. in a statement thomas s lawyer said the trips fell under the personal hospitality exemption and was not required to be asked closed to be disclosed. the reporter who broke the story about many of the undisclosed gifts, he and his rest of his team won a pulitzer for the reporting last year and joins me now. congratulations, by the way. three more trips. what have we learned? the thing that is so striking is the scale of it. we are looking at a picture where harlan crow s private jet, a particularly nice private jet was at the disposal of justice thomas and there are multiple incidents where, for example, flying from washington, d.c. to san jose, california, staying for a few hours and turning around and going back on the same day. that s happened repeatedly. and going from where the jet is based in dallas to d.c. to pick up the justice. it adds to a long list and the picture is a billionaire political donor in a real way subsidizing the life of a justice. they don t make clear the purpose of the trips that included trip from st. louis to montana. location of glacier park international airport. he was scheduled to be in st. louis for a speech. in one instance he flew from the east coast to san jose and returned home later that day. another he took a round-trip flight from washington, d.c. to savannah, georgia. this is how taylor swift or elon musk, that is how they get around. right, the round-trip alone, seemingly for some kind of lunch, we don t know what it was for, still, that could easily cost $100,000 for the flight. probably double the median income that an american makes in a year. it is an extraordinary amount of money. a $100,000 flight. yeah and last week justin thomas amended some prior years disclosure forms to disclose other things harlan crow has paid for. hotels and lodging and vacations. a trip to california. that is the third time he s done that. to be clear, these three no one knew about and no one reported. these were totally new to us. you had no idea? i had no idea. this is it, right? this has to be it. i think we have an absolute, definitive account. look, some of the reporting we did took myself and coworkers months of reporting to piece together these trips that justice thomas and justice alito also got. we don t have subpoena power. the senate judiciary committee does. they said today there would be a full report coming out this summer, so i would not be surprised if there are more revelations. they subpoenaed leonard leo as well, who basically told them to go pound sand. pound sand, thank you for stopping me from saying what i was going to say. harlan crow, he is cooperating. they are getting this from harlan crow. right. they authorized a subpoena. didn t actually issue attended became leverage in negotiations with lawyers and they came up with this deal where he is giving information about the past seven years. potentially not just travel. we will find out when the full investigation comes out this summer. we have to update our bar chart. it is a tough one to read. let s see, which one is thomas? right, there he is on the left. we might need to raise up that bar after we price these ones in. maybe this summer we will get more. can i get your response since i have you here about something justice alito said about your reporting. this is something that he said recently. surreptitiously recorded. take a listen. there are groups that are very well-funded by ideological groups that have spearheaded these attacks. that s what it is, you know. like who? propublica. propublica gets a lot of money and they have spent a fortune investigating clarence thomas for example. have you spent a fortune or are these ideological attacks? it was frankly disturbing to hear this because it was speculation based on no evidence. as one of the two or three reporters who did this work i tell you how it started, which was not a report on justice thomas and alito. we will report on how supreme court justices are spending their time when they are not at the court. it started with a stack of documents of travel records with no names and we pieced together that it is justice thomas taking private jets. we took a hard look at democratic appointed justices and simply found nothing equivalent. if we could put up that bar chart for a second, it is hard to find the signal for the noise in that chart. it takes a lot of energy to uncover that one on the left. right, if somebody out there knows about george soros funding trips, i would love to report it. you can find my contact information on all of our stories. thank you. coming up, as the supreme court rejects the attempt to ban the abortion pill, why the right wing is just getting started on reproductive rights. next. nuggets. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. when we say it ll be on time they expect it to be on time. turn shipping to your advantage. keep those expectations with reliable ground shipping. thanks brandon. with usps ground advantage®. my name is marie. i m 49 years old and i m a business owner. i own a lemonade and ice cream shop in florida, so i can feel and see that my lines have gotten deeper just from a year out in the sun. i m still marie and i got botox® cosmetic. i did not want a dramatic change. i wanted something subtle. and i m really, 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comfortable. always. fear no gush. they say we should stop eating so much meat. so we made meat out of plants. because we aren t quitters. impossible. we re solving the meat problem with more meat. today the supreme court unanimously rejected an attempt to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone and that, i should say, is definitely good. mifepristone is used in more than 60% of all abortions in this country, as well as the treatment of miscarriages. it should remain easily accessible, but this case should not have made its way to the supreme court in the first place. it is shocking that it did. the case is based on faulty legal logic and was first introduced by a conservative group in amarillo, texas. incorporated there so they could file the case and ensure it would land before a hard right activist appointed to the bench by donald trump. predictably the pan plan worked. issued a nationwide injunction. the decision was mostly upheld by the court of appeals. that court of appeals is arguably the most radically right wing pro trump court in the land. the supreme court threw it out today because plaintiffs lacked standing and the entire ruse was too ridiculous even for this court. make no mistake, republicans may have lost this battle, but they are still fighting the war. it is all but certain that they will bring a similar suit again and will absolutely do so given the opportunity. they don t want to stop there. today senate republicans blocked a bill enshrining protections for ivf only a day after the southern baptist convention, the largest protestant this domination days protestant denomination in the country voted to condemn the procedure. the republican party and grassroots of the party truly believe in this. they are not going to stop there crow seed against stop there crusade against reproductive rights. joining me now is nbc legal correspondent lisa rubin. i guess let s start with the decision today which was not surprising. they kicked it on what are called standing grounds. what does that mean? standing is the notion that you have to be a person who has been injured to maintain a lawsuit. it goes back to the concept that the courts can only hear cases or controversies, not imagined grievances. what the court is saying is that the alliance for defending freedom did not have standing to bring their suit and there are a couple of lines. in one place justice kavanaugh says an organization that has not suffered a concrete injury caused by a defendant s action cannot spend its way into s standing by spending money together information and advocate against the defendant, meaning the food and drug administration s action. that is the good part of this. but as you noted, there are little easter eggs sprinkled throughout this decision that are sort of gifts to the antiabortion right. in large part because of one side can t have standing, the other can t either. one of the things this says is that doctors should not presume that they will have standing to advocate for their patients. that usually means something very different for pro-abortion doctors than it does on the anti-choice side. that s a great point. i want to read the standing argument the plaintiffs presented, because it is one of my favorites. this is from the initial, i don t think of this is the scotus brief or district court. doctors lose the opportunity to provide professional services and care for the women and child through pregnancy which causes harms to providers who can no longer care for their patients and bring about the successful delivery of a new life. you deprive me of the joy of delivering your baby, which is a tangible harm to me, ergo i have standing. the standing analysis survived the district court and survived the fifth circuit court of appeals. it is kind of galling and there is a twist on that argument, too. you deprive me of the ability to care for more deserving patients, the women who want to deliver their children as opposed to women who present in the emergency room having had a complication. hypothetically, to be clear. that hypothetically might do so. when i am forced to divert my attention from deserving woman a, to take care of you, morally bankrupt woman b. you can do this through the courts or through the department of justice if you have the teeth to do it. here is justice samuel alito talking about, he does not say the name, interestingly. he just reads the u.s. section and the solicitor general of the united states does say the name. listen. shouldn t the fda at least have considered the application i think the comstock provisions don t fall within fda s lane. the comstock laws, those are passed in the victorian era to outlaw basically all tools for abortion and birth control. and really sending them between states. if you want to talk about zombie laws and we have talked about them a lot on your show and others. these are statutes prohibiting abortion or things that allow people to achieve abortion. it was a zombie law and it was understood for many decades that the comstock law had no effect. why? because row was in existence. the biden administration has made clear they don t believe the comstock act needs to be enforced unless the intent is to help somebody accomplish something that would be unlawful and given the mail order prescription of mifepristone is lawful, then the interpretation is there is nothing to be done. a different administration however, you can count on the same sorts of folks to press that heavily with the department of justice. and i want to be clear. there are criminal penalties attached to the comstock laws. the department of justice could conceivably on day one start having the fbi arrest people and prosecute people for mailing abortion drugs. they may not even have to go that far. i think the lesson is that you can terrorize people into not doing anything just by having a law and having the threat out there that somebody could be criminally prosecuted for doing something. the comstock act, this is not a hypothetical. there are lots of folks in right-wing circles writing about and talking about this. lisa rubin, thank you. thank you. that is all in on this thursday night. alex wagner starts now. good evening. there are women already terrified making choices about bodily economy. certainly. fear at all levels of american society. thank you, my friend. today donald trump made his first visit to capitol hill. the first time since his followers ransacked the capital on january 6. to unde
and ultimately humans and what s really best for society. you headed isabel. it s a threat to their power structure. family faith first. the government is not so important suddenly and neither is politics. as a you getting married it? you are about to get married yourself? i am on june 29th, right around the corner. i think there s a revival toward the things that matter most the things that have enduring importance in our lives. congratulations on that, best wishes. we are going to do a lot longer segment later on. that s it for us tonight. make sure to follow me on social media, thank you for watching. remember it s america now and forever. jesse watters is going to take it from here. jesse: welcome to jesse watters primetime p. are tonight. we have great unity, we have great common sense, we have one thing in mind that s making our country great. reporter: trump back in washington. biden in italy getting lost. i think she should step down. it should the democratic party remove her if she doesn t? i think so. jesse: wearing thin. the first runner-up is. jesse: a man wins ms. miss maryland. plus. are you a manly man? no. jesse: a swing and amaze pure goes of the words about her never wants to hear but at last night s congressional baseball game it s all democrats heard. and a swing and a miss. and a swing and a miss. and a swing and a miss that will end the inning. jesse: republicans roughed up democrats 31-11 the. at the baseball score. maybe a little preview of what s coming in november. if you think about it, baseball is kind of like politics. if you keep striking out you put the other team back at bad. all season democrats have been striking out with hoax after hoax, the dictator on day one, bloodbath and revenge. strike three. jesse: democrats just put the other team back at bat in their own home stadium, washington dc. donald trump back on capitol hill for the first time in almost four years. the former president spent the day meeting with house republicans, senators and businessmen. this was a great meeting. there is tremendous unity in the republican party. we want to see borders, we want to see strong military. we want to see money not wasted all over the world. we have great commonsense, a lot of very smart people in this room. a lot of people that love our country. they love it just beyond all else and the only thing that ab supersedes it is their family and maybe their faith in certain instances and that s very nice but they want this country to be great again and we are going to make a great again. jesse: donald trump is running around dc trying to unite the party in the country because teamwork makes the dream work. and we d never seen the republican party disunited under trump. even gave them a birthday cake. [ inaudible ] [ applause ] jesse: there was so much love and unity in the room it broke adam shifts brain. guilty, guilty, guilty,. jesse: has battle cry was heard by the media and they went to work doing what they do best. apparently the former president made for made reference to hannibal lecter saying he even had a friend over for dinner. we ve seen him praising hannibal lecter. apparently did it again this morning, not sure we fully understand the context of that. jesse: we weren t inside the room but neither was cnn and that s the point. we did what journalists do, we went towards sources who were actually there. did trump really call a flesh eating serial killer a nice guy? no. trump was joking that if he said something about hannibal lecter, the fake news media would say he was praising him. cnn took the bait. and that wasn t the only hoax. i m getting word from my producers we have a new hoax alert. he said as it s gotten a lot of publicity and we broke this that he doesn t like the walkie, it s a horrible city he says. the campaign is pushed back on that. everybody comes out and didn t say it. of course he said it. that is according to almost everybody in the room. jesse: everybody in the room says he didn t say it. as soon as the news broke people inside the room debunked it. a congressman says i was in the meeting, president trump never disparaged milwaukee. another one, i was in the room appear president trump did not say this. another, trump was specifically referring to the crime rate in milwaukee. here s what trump had to say. democrats are also hating you on this comment that you made about milwaukee, the host city for the rnc for the convention and they seem to believe that you said that it was a horrible city. can you nip this in the bud and clarify what you meant. i think it was very clear what i meant. i said we are very concerned with crime. i love milwaukee, i have great friends in milwaukee. the crime numbers are terrible and we have to be very careful. jesse: how is the media directly quoting him if they are not in the room with him. and then telling the people inside of the room that they are wrong. it s what nancy pelosi calls the wrapup smear. you smear your opponent with lies, the press writes about it, that validates it and then the politicians run with it. as soon as the media reported the hoax, the mayor of milwaukee rushed to the camera. donald trump wants to talk about things that he thing so horrible, all of us lived through his presidency so right back at you buddy. joe biden saying i happen to love milwaukee. he didn t write that himself. kamala harris saying milwaukee is a beautiful city and for the record, milwaukee was the third most violent city in the nation, third most. so when primetime goes to the convention, johnny is going to have two bodyguards. democrats are down late in the game, you can t yank them because you have no bullpen. so you just have to keep throwing trash. here s more. the media wants to to thank trump spent every waking second plotting revenge. i m told there s a similar dynamic behind closed doors with advisors or other republicans where he will talk about revenge , sometimes get a look of d. really mean that and he makes it clear he does. this is his retribution, that s the word that s been at the centre of this campaign for a year now. they re not going to be. it s going to be true believers and loyalists. if trump says he wants revenge or i want to target a particular person or institution they are going to do that. jesse: who are these advisors that are leaking this to msnbc? they don t exist. it s made up. trump s people don t talk to this guy. look at him. he s on morning joe. they say trump went to washington to harness the power of congress to go to war against the democrats. really? people inside of the room told us revenge never came up. it was the economy, foreign policy and election strategy. it was forward-looking. a feeling that washington hasn t felt in four years. that s not revenge, that s success and like trump says, success is his revenge. she was in the room with trump today she joins me now. so he did not praise hannibal lecter? much to cnn s despair he did not. he joked about the fact that they were going to report fake news and many of us were there. they don t want to talk about the fact that he has a plan in dealing with our foreign policy debacles that this diminished ration has caused. we are excited about the numbers we are hearing. jesse: what were the policies that he was discussing today behind closed doors with you guys? the number 1 issue that he has is concern for what s happening with russia. there s the media really silencing what s happening with russia. warships off the coast of cuba and also florida. i think more importantly he made sure that the american people would know that what is currently happening in ukraine and israel would ve never happened under him and he does have a plan and solution moving forward and i also want to point out that he understands that world leaders respect him and right now what s coming out of the white house, a lot of people realize that joe biden is likely not going to be the nominee which is from what we are hearing on capitol hill, representative kylie had reported that kamala harris eyeing a run for california governor because of it. jesse: so you are hearing also in dc that joe biden isn t going to be the democrat nominee? correct. it appears that our colleagues are trying to put guardrails on a 2024 presidential election with president trump and also what you are seeing is according to our pulling, you know as well as i do that they have been trying to paint republicans as anti- woman and trying to push an abortion crisis right now with the election and i don t think that s a case. a lot of the american people know that this is a state rights decision so i think that they know that they are losing. jesse: the straight truth from inside the room, didn t need any spin from cnn. thank you so much. we always appreciate you coming on the show. north dakota governor and potential vp candidate joins me now. so you are going to be in milwaukee, it has a crime problem. third worst violent crime last year of any city in the united states. are you used to this so far, they just make things up and then merchandise it? i wish that every american could see what i ve seen the last six months because the opportunity to be with president trump, be in the room, see what s reported whether it s at the trial or at a rally, whether it s at a fundraiser, the thing that i see reported versus. are two different planets just like you described tonight. jesse: when you guys are behind-the-scenes talking policy , personnel, what you mostly focused on? i want to say when president trump. guided over a dozen events between roundtables, rallies and fundraiser things, sometimes 500 people, sometimes a thousand. whether he s in the line getting the photo or at a roundtable with the owners that are job creators, the number 1 thing people don t report is he s curious. he s asking them how are biden s regulations hurting you. what d the things you need to help moving forward. are they being affected affected by inflation? he understands. he was in the hospitality business. he cares about what people are experiencing and then that feeds into his thinking. i looked at that schedule that he had, and joe biden couldn t have done one of those events and he did 14 nonstop 12 hours a day moving between locations. incredible the energy and the stamina. he s got real interest in people. jesse: how unified is the republican party right now? never been more unified. jesse: is out of feeling or can you see numbers to that? everybody is coming together. you are seeing it in the primaries that are happening around the nation right now. everybody is unified and they are unified for two reasons. one is because they know that president trump represents strength whether that s on the world stage or on the economy or the border or it s fighting inflation, he represents that strength. they are also unified because what s the alternative? the alternative is joe biden s weakness which has started wars, it s inviting wars. it s inviting russia to come to cuba. president trump is actually a deterrent. we talked about our defence budget. but that kind the white house and we don t have to raise our defence budget a dime and also we ve got a better deterrent because they know that we ve got strength that we would be willing to use. al raed our economy, diplomacy. jesse: i was looking at the new york times over the weekend, big hit piece. your name keeps coming up as vp. big hit piece, how are you feeling about all of this? a lot of that is a distraction. of the key is the ability to focus on. the key is making sure that we elect president trump because there s never been a politician, a leader like him in history. no one has raised the kind of money that he s been able to raise. no one generates the crowds he s been able to generate and no one has the enthusiasm. you go to a fundraiser and they say there s going to be san francisco or all of these rides riots and protesters and nobody shows up to protest against them but i thousand people are waving their flags and cheering for him. you get down to newport and it s people lined up with boats on the water. i take it back to one thing, the people that show up and are waving the flags along the sidewalks. they are all working, they all have jobs and they all know they were better off under president trump and they are under joe biden and that s where it is. it s working class people that care about america. that s his voting block. jesse: basic economics. thank you very much. johnny hit the streets. it s a tough one right? that s a tough one. s s i was only 23 when i was first diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer. 40 years later, i ve had almost 20 mohs surgeries. i had just accepted that the pain and the scars were going to be part of my life. but when i was diagnosed with two basal cells on my face, i became determined to find an alternative to surgery. if you, like millions of others, are affected by skin cancer. it s important to know that surgery isn t the only option. there s another choice. gentlecure. it sounded like everything i had been looking for. gentlecure uses low energy x-rays to kill skin cancer cells with a 99% cure rate. plus, there s no cutting, no surgical scarring and no downtime. i m so glad i did it. it was successful in every way. to learn more, call today or go to gentlecure.com jesse: last night we told you biden can t run on his record so they are going to drag him across the finish line and replace him with come all after inauguration. they have to distract you from how old and incompetent he has. the way they do that is to slap those labels on trump. you will hear trump say the most common sense things biden s failed policies. the shower presser regulations making you have a bad hair day. this weak trump said democrats are going to start putting electric batteries not just in cars but in boats. and if you know anything about how heavy these batteries are, that boat is going down. there s a shark 10 yards away from the boat. do i get electrocuted if the boat is sinking and water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking, do i stay on top of the bow and get electrocuted or do i jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted. jesse: you hear that and you laugh but it makes sense. the media here is it and calls him senile. he s out there talking about wind turbines and sharks in boats and sinking, not talking about issues voters care about. if this was your father you would take him in for a neurological exam. fox news didn t carry them or broadcast them. didn t air them after the fact either. in the words of stephen king, that speech was like listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink. jesse: except fox did our that and we aired it monday. biden says cannibals snacked on his uncle and that he started the civil rights movement, that a lightning strike burned his house down and almost killed dr jill and whiskers the cat. and he s a puerto rican truck driving jewish professor who went to a historically black college and captain their undefeated football team and won a lawsuit for a guy who lost a testicle in a construction accident. trump stories relate to real concerns people have about public policy. biden stories, the fantastical lies of an insecure old man desperately trying to relate to people. biden was in europe today at the g7 and wandered alone into an italian field. jesse: people are falling out of the skies and he can t even focus. wise he always going in the wrong direction? and why he is the always moving in such slow-motion. world leaders have to hurt him like a stray sheep. reportedly the main focus in italy has been making sure biden gets his sleep. president biden got a much earlier start than he usually does today. aids typically keep him as close to an east coast schedule even on a trip like this as they possibly can one it s possible but today when you look at the tape he was rolling out of the hotel about 5:11 am eastern. jesse: you can see the cpap creases on his face when he leaves the white house at noon. now joe is trying to turn sleepy joe into an asset. what he s doing at three in the morning i don t know. jesse: today biden signed a ten-year defence agreement with ukraine and confirmed that we expect to see ukraine joined nato in the future. what? do we get a say in that? oh and we ve loosened the rules of engagement allowing american weapons to be fired from ukraine into russia proper. ukraine will be getting f-16s this summer. and those of you in miami may have noticed but the russian navy just held a poor call in cuba 90 miles up the american coast. china s building deep water ports in south america, hello munro doctor npr china selling dual use tech to russia s war machine. china just landed on the moon and saudi arabia just ended its 80 year deal with the united states to sell oil solely in dollars. i think that s enough to worry about. does the man wandering alone into an italian field look like he has everything under control? it s not a shark but it s pretty scary. former sec reof state secretary of state mike pompeo joins me know. you are seeing the president wander around alone away from everybody as people are falling out of the sky. does not give you confidence that he has this world under control? it s good to be with you and thank goodness for prime minister who grabbed him and kept him from walking off completely. it certainly doesn t give any american confidence and the contrast between seeing president biden unable to perform basic functions to keep america safe and we know the policies have failed. i think the american people, it was a bad day for america and one sense. we saw our president failed to be able to lead on the world stage but it was a good day and we got to say there s a sharp contrast as we all consider what s going to happen in november. jesse: we want to win proxy wars. we also want to make peace everywhere donald trump s big message today on foreign policy behind the scenes at sec. was we of these messes in europe, in asia, in the middle east if he were president. it s remarkable to watch the biden administration say we ve done such a good job, everybody s working hand-in-hand. you ve gotten tens of thousands of ukrainians killed. you failed to deter. 1200 israelis dead on your watch. still a war going on in gaza. the failure of the policy isn t that you react after the crisis is taking place it s that you are strong enough and then america s leading sufficiently so you can deter the bad guys. the other folks that watch this today were chairman kim in north korea,. they all watched what happened today in italy and said we think we are right, this may well be the time that we continue to probe and test america because when president biden said he doesn t know what donald trump is doing at three m, i hope we never get that three m call with president biden as commander-in-chief. jesse: he wants to pat himself on the back for reacting but we shouldn t have been in this position in the first place. today fanny willis took us to church. i m so tired of hearing these idiots call my name as fanny in a way to attempt to humiliate me because like silly schoolboys, the name reminds them of a woman s rear. they get mad when i call out their lunacy. you can t pistol on me and tell me it s raining. jesse: we are not trying to humiliate her, we thought her name was. and i we don t feel like going back. nathan wade went on cnn and was asked when did you start sleeping with her. these exact dates are at issue and these dates are i m getting signalled here. jesse: they apparently hadn t prepared him to answer the one question at the centre of the entire case. sohi exit out mid-interview to prep him? it s not like she asked him did you guys ever go to the cabin. did you go to a cabin with ms. miss willis ever? ever? ever. no. jesse: happy dei thursday. why did you stop the ballots? there is video viewed stopping the ballots. do you have anything to say? wanda? what do you want to say to the people of bridgeport? jesse: that was johnny confronting wander the stuff her after she was shoving a legal ballots in a dropbox peer she was arrested along with three other democrats. she was charged with ballot fraud and witness intimidation tied to the 2019 election. tonight we got our hands on the arrest warrant. we learned investigators examined absentee ballots, surveillance video from bridgeport senior housing and use witnessed interviews as evidenced to make the arrest. a voter who did not request an absentee ballot told investigators wanda came to my house and told me only to sign the bottom of the blank application. she went on to say i have done with the done this with wanda over the past ten years. wanda said no. jesse: it was a got punched a democrats peer she s been there ballot wizard for over a decade. wanda has a government job, runs the city s democratic party and is the gatekeeper at the mayor s office. now she s busted and democrats need to answer some questions. reporters have been chasing down connecticut s democratic governor since the arrest. he endorsed the men wanda allegedly stopped for. the governor thinks the mayor had nothing to do with it of course but says wanda should take the fall. i think she should step down. if she won t step down, should the democratic report democratic party remove her? i should thank so. are you going to ask them to do that. i hope they do the right thing. jesse: hours after wanda was arrested, he signed a bill that puts a camera on every dropbox in the state. primetime called for this months ago. it took four arrests to make it happen. it s not enough to end corruption and secure elections but it s a step in the right direction. next let s get rid of the drop boxes altogether. they are ripe for fraud. will have more on wanda soon. we have new details on biden s bad dog. the president watched as commander attacked secret service agents. kevin corke is in dc with the story. an exclusive window into the harrowing circumstances surrounding commander, the president s dog and his numerous attacks on secret service agents which could top three dozen such attacks according to new really newly released records. apparently the president himself was present for at least three of those attacks. now everybody knows commander has been known to bite but there are a lot of examples you may not know about including this one. as i started to walk toward him, him being the president, to see if you needed help, commander ran through his legs and bit my left arm through the front of my jacket. i pulled my arm away and yelled no, potus yelled and then blank. the story went on to say that the dog later jumped up and bit him in the left arm again for a second time. his suit coat had not one, not to but three holes. and that s not it, there are other conversations between secret service officials including this one from september 2023. tmz just reported a dog bite at the white house dog bite at the white house. can we find a way to get this dog muzzled. you will recall former first dog major was also rehoused back in 2021 after apparently attacking a lot of people. secret service members wish each other safe shift as the attacks mounted. that s really damning right there. that tells you plenty. i ve been written by a vicious democrat dog and it hurts. still have a mark on my upper thigh. thank you so much. jesse: so what is a man? why does society want men to act like women. now they are djs and promoters . jesse: happy dei thursday. we re bringing you the best stories about diversity, equity and inclusion. first stop the beauty pageant crowned their winter over the weekend. sorry ladies, the crown went to an asian man. the first runner-up is. trace: jesse: they were born cambodian baby boy before getting a sex change. they say we see bailey s win as a win for everyone who dreamed the impossible dream. impossible. we told you about how biden spent nearly a billion dollars and only built seven ev charging stations. now we are finding out why. white house insiders are blaming dei. the regulations for government contractors are huge roadblocks. construction can t start until the builders prove they are inclusive. they have to host block parties and minority communities with interpreters in case nobody speaks english. and they have to hire minority subcontractors to do all the work. good luck finding a black electrician in maine. mountain view high school was pumped to hear their gay senior gift will be a massive mural of thor representing their thunder mascot. the school s equity office cancelled it because thor is racist. according to one student, the equity office said thor was. and is a white supremacist and the image should be more inclusive. no dei thursday is complete without a primetime victory. transits will merit leah thomas will not be participating in the summer olympics. thomas lost a legal battle that he hoped would overturn a policy that bans athletes who have been through male puberty from competing in the female category. you can try again in four years. let s bring an author of the sad truth about happiness. when you hear how preposterous some of these dei items are, what goes through your mind? of course i live within the ecosystem of academia so none of this surprises me up and warn against this for two decades picked just make you feel better down there in the united states we are even crazier in canada. let me give you a few examples to add to your d. dei thursday lineup. at my university, or five-year strategic plan posits that we must now all indigenous eyes and decolonize our curriculum. it doesn t matter what you are teaching, you to be teaching pure mathematics or neuroscience or shakespeare, you need to decolonize and indigent eyes that. second example, on may 17th you ll be happy to hear that we held a symposium on menstrual equity because it turns out that menstruation is a human rights. i didn t know that women were forbidden to men straight in canada but apparently we need to have a symposium. third quick example, university of waterloo is searching for a professor in artificial intelligence, they have to be either gender fluidity, nonbinary or whatever or to spirit. you haven t reached the level of lunacy that we have in canada. i m enjoying the canadian dei edition on dei thursday very much. menstruation is a human right that i don t need because i can be a little bit of a complainer. when you process some of these things, what do you think the end goal is besides screwing around with everybody else. what you think is really motivating it? postmodernism, i call it the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it purports that there are no objective truths. it s a form of intellectual terrorism. operas down, slavery as freedom, men or women. it s a way to liberate ourselves from the pesky shackles of reality. it s grotesque, it needs to end and we need to return to a commitment to reason, logic and science. jesse: it s like modern arts. i don t understand it, it changes all the roles, makes no sense but people thank it s amazing. happy dei thursday to our canadian friends. a new study says men won t call out sick from work because it s not manly. so what does it mean to be a man? johnny went out and found out. define a man. that s not simple. it s a tough one right? it s a tough one. this is hard to. someone who is strong. if that demand, what the manly man? someone who looks good doing it. the firefighter who is at the door in the middle of the night. he drives a harley for no reason. a manly man takes orders from his wife? are you a manly man? no. what is a man have to do to be considered a real man? have a job at. love a man that works out. he s not sitting out here. not giving up [ bleep ] what other people think. why does today s society want men to act like women. they used to go to war now they are djs. masculine characteristics have been demonized. he was complaining to some woman about something that women do. every time i think about trump i get allergic. and want to put men and women sports and the women lose. that s not funny. should men cry? i don t want to see men crying. i cry a lot. i love crying, i think it s so fun. he came to my office, tears in his eyes. mentor saying they are afraid to take a sick day because they don t want to appear weak. they should suck it up at. what if you did have covid and you got the whole office sick. so you are a big believer in . should men be drinking out of straws? yes. do you think that s very manly? yes. father s day is coming up, what is more one important lesson about manhood that your father is taught you. to be financially responsible. they all want one thing and it s inevitable. is joe biden a manly president? he is not as sure of himself. he s doing better than trump i know that. how s the crime? worse every day. how s the border? it s messed up now man. tell me again why biden is better than trump. you have a good point. can men get pregnant? i don t know because i have i m not sure if. i will tell you at the time, i ll keep you in suspense. jesse watters, manly man what you think? he s going to see it. he s a man but he does wear makeup because he s on tv. i think he has cojones man. jesse: the spartan race part two next. sues keep piling up? it may be due to a buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain. visit morethannormalaging.com home inspectors, general contractors, roofers; all kinds of pros recommend leaffilter. why? it s engineered for performance. because with leaffilter s patented filter technology, there s no gaps, no openings, no place for debris to get in at all. leaffilter is a permanent solution we install on your existing gutters. you ll never have to climb a ladder to clean out your gutters again. our installation process is simple and easy. just give us a call and set up an appointment today. we ll come out and give you a free gutter inspection. if your gutters are sagging, we ll repair them. if they re broken, we ll replace them. if they re in good shape, our local trusted pros will install leaffilter in as little as a few hours. and the best part? leaffilter comes with a lifetime transferable no-clogs guarantee! you ll never have to worry about costly damage from clogged gutters again! it s peace of mind, and then some. call us today to get started. join millions of satisfied homeowners, schedule your free inspection today! call 833 leaffilter, or visit leaffilter.com my back got injured very bad. i was off work for about a year. i heard about relief factor from my wife. i took it every day, three times a day, for three weeks. .look at her and i said, the pain is gone. and she said, i m glad it helped. i said, no, you don t understand. it s gone. you, too, can feel better every day with relief factor, a daily supplement that fights pain naturally. call or go online now and get 35% off your first order. jesse: the spartan race part geomagnetic time with video. weedeater you up yesterday. this is achille climbing through the mud to make what is this a 5 k? a 5 k got stuck in the mud, had to be rescued, pulled out by gerrit but i can t let them go. now this is a ropes course. this is what they due for f fun. i don t understand these people. these people are crazy! but this is what they due in their free time. look at this. this is just vicious currents, water streaming through their nostrils. other even swimming? what is this? this is going on their barbed wire. running. fire is involved. they want to torture themselves. working for presage jesse watters prime time, they have to do in their free time. we are very proud of a keylock on everyone else on the fox group. talking about tony s. koneh s. will not aquila, obviously. [laughter] let s do some stacks. mark from whitefield, kansas, there s only one thing worse then a broken record, a shifty broken record. i just want to apologize to the audience, that was a terrible shifty soundbite. tyler from kentucky, watch out for that doug burgum fellow, he has great hair. they re here alone will get you on the ticket. greg know we ve got janine from milwaukee, and wisconsin, come to milwaukee, exhibit a city with beautiful people. state downtown, and obraro recap take a picture with the bronze funds. we ll be there in milwaukee the whole week, johnny will be there cutting trouble. johnny from brooklyn, what about men blowing up candles? is that manly? . only on a birthday cake. if you re doing it in a dining room, use the software. always remember, i am watters, this is my world. sean:
hamas in gaza. i can t thank you enough for making time for us. we re all thinking about you and your family. thank you very much. and we pray for the safe return of all of the hostages as soon as possible. this is a humanitarian issue. this is not some political issue, and people trying to make this a political issue, especially, the government trying to make this political. no, this is a humanitarian crisis. and everything should be done to get them back as soon as possible. thank you very much. that is all in on this wednesday night. alex wagner tonight starts right now. good evening, alex. 250 days, just unbelievable this is where we are. thank you, my friend, as always. so i want to start with a story that in any other universe would have absolutely nothing to do with politics or anything even approximating controversy. the kind of news we all used to read or hear and accept. but in the post-trump era, this kind of news has become a sort of conservative litmus test with potentially disastrous consequences for the health and the well being of thousands and thousands of americans. i am talking about bird flu. i know. stay with me here. if you have been following the news recently, you may have seen that the u.s. is currently dealing with an outbreak of bird flu. bird flu has spread to at least 80 cattle herds across over five states. and because of that outbreak, the fda, the food and drug administration, has issued guidance for how to stay safe and avoid exposure, including warning americans against drinking raw milk. that s because raw milk has the potential to spread animal borne diseases from one species to another. this is pretty straight forward, noncontroversial scientific advice, don t drink raw milk. it s noncontroversial except if you are a conservative who follows the influential, pro-trump youth organization turning points usa. milk is good for you, but here s what the american dairy farmers association or whatever isn t going to tell you is that that pasture rised milk crap, you might as well be drinking water. it does nothing. it s not healthy. ideally, you need to be drinking raw milk. that was alex clark a turning point usa host, and one of the chief proponents of drinking raw milk. miss clark is such a raw milk enthusiast she tells her followers to drink raw milk while pregnant, something that you absolutely not do under any circumstances. and in response to the fda s warning about drinking raw milk during a bird flu outbreak, alex clark told her nearly 200,000 followers on social media, f the fda, legalize raw milk. this issue so animates conservatives that turning point usa is currently selling $35 t-shirts on their website promoting raw milk. now, if this seems like an echo of the anti-vax, anti-fauci, anti-science movement embraced by a ton of conservatives and therefore put a lot of that put a lot of this country at risk, well that is because it is. it is precisely the kind of extreme, own the libs, reality be position that is a hall mark of turning point usa under charlie kirk. charlie kirk and turning point usa have been an influential part of maga land since donald trump was elected in 2016. in recent year, kirk and his organization have become more outspoken about their beliefs, including kirk s embrace of christian nationalism. in addition to running what appears to be a raw milk propaganda outfit, charlie kirk is also a supporter of something known as the seven mountains mandate a philosophy that calls for conservative christians to take over the government. and kirk has started speaking openly about how he wants donald trump to be the champion of that cause. finally, we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence. finally we have a president that understands the significance of standing, yes, i m going to use a term, in solidarity with the grassroots activists of our country. across the republican party, christian conservatives are becoming more and more emboldened about making america a christian nation under trump, even as trump himself continues to exhibit some very unchristian behavior on a near daily basis. this was donald trump a week ago at a campaign event inside a phoenix mega church. so they come up with this order i won t say it because i don t like using the word [ bleep ] in front of these beautiful children, so i won t say it. i will not say it. but this thing allows millions of people bleep [ bleep ] donald trump swearing in a house of god and then getting the crowd to swear with him in front of children. we ve seen the same thing from trump s allies. here was rudy giuliani speaking at the pro-trump christian reawaken tour just last week. i ve got two prosecutors, fani the i m sorry. fani willis. fani. it s not fanny, and i m not calling her fani. i could drop the part if she d quit and go away. classy. all of this is part of trump s unspoken agreement with the christian far right. they let trump and his allies break the rules and be vulgar and be blasphemous with the expectation that they will refashion american life according to their christian values. may not be a bad bet either. here was trump just this week speaking to a conservative christian organization that believes all abortion is, quote, child sacrifice. you re going to make a comeback like just about no other group. i know what s happening. i know where you re coming from and where you re going. and i ll be with you side by side. you re going to make a comeback and i ll be with you side by side. even as donald trump refuses to give straight answers about where he stands on things like a national abortion ban or contraception, conservative christian groups understand what trump will do for them. it s not that much of a mystery. and part of their confidence here that an extreme christian nationalist agenda is within their grasp, part of their confidence is because these groups don t have to rely on just trump alone. they can count on trump s most powerful ally in the fight for christian dominion, the conservative majority of on the united states supreme court. just this week we heard supreme court justice samuel alito tell a progressive activist that he believes we need to return america to a place of godliness. as elizabeth and lisa write in a new analysis for the new york time, while justice alito is hardly openly championing these views, he is embracing language and symbolism that line up with a much broader movement pushing back against the declining power of christianity as a majority religion in america. the movement s rise has been evident across the country since mr. trump lost re-election in 2020. justice alito and his fellow conservative justices have already delivered for christian right with their dobbs decision, striking down roe v. wade, and soon they will have a chance to do so again. the supreme court is about to rule on two major cases of considerable significance to the christian right. one will determine whether access to the most common form of abortion in this country is significantly restricted or not and another will determine whether doctors in emergency rooms can deny pregnant women medically necessary abortions. how the court rules on these issues could tell us just how much power the christian nationalist movement has gained in this country and how close they are to victory. joining me now are lisa, the national political correspondent for the new york times , she is also the author of the fall of roe: the rise of new america, and with me is mark joseph stern, senior writer who covers the courts and law at slater mag sooeven. thank you both for joining me. lisa, let me start with the piece you have out today in the times. an array of conservative, including anti-abortion activists, church leader, and conservative state legislators has openly embraced the idea that american democracy needs to be grounded in christian values and guarded against the rise of secular culture. i don t think it s an exaggeration to suggest that strain of conservatism now seems to dominate the supreme court as well. do you think that s far off? look, part of what we document in our book, the fall of roe and the rise of a new america, is that latter part of the title, the rise of a new america. what that is about is the radicalization of conservative christians. and we ve seen some of that cooling out of these tapes from the court, but you know, i wanted to draw your viewers attention to another story today, which was that the southern baptist convention, which represents the largest protestant denomination in the country, 13 million church goer, came out and said they oppose ivf. this is a fairly radical statement for that group, and we re seeing this return to these christian conservative cultural values from the churches all the way up to alito s statements at the court. so i do think what we re watching is this shift in american power. we don t know where it s going to go, but we have a template for success for this movement, and that, of course, is the fall of roe. and how that network of conservative christian activists and lawyers were able to take down that legal precedent may be a way that they can then move on to tackle these other things they are opposed to like, as we learned today, ivf. yeah, i mean, i do when we talk about shifting the window, moving the goal post on the field, it feels like the activists on the far right are signalling to the alitos of the world, this is where we re at, see if you get here. mark, i want to talk about alito s evolution here, because he wasn t always either this explicit or radicalized when he joined the court. can you talk about his progression to where he is now? yeah, i think a crude but accurate term to describe alito is maga pilled. during donald trump s rise and presidency, alito really let his christian nationalist flag fly and xan to embrace not only the rhetoric but also the substance of this far right christian supremacy and this idea that christianity is rooted in the constitution, that we are a christian nation, and that courts have some kind of obligation to protect and, indeed, elevate christianity above not just other religions but above secular society. and he went on a little bit of a talking tour earlier this decade where he decried the new moral code of secularism that promoted reproductive freedom and lgbtq equality and said that it was an existential threat to christianity. and all of this is reflected very much in his decisions, decisions like one a few years ago where he tried to let pharmacists deny plan b to patients to whom it was prescribed. not, you know, any kind of actual abortion drug but just plan b. and decisions like hobby lobby where he s allowed corporations to restrict employee s access to birth control. and these abortion cases, most notably dobbs as lisa documented, sam alito was always going to be the man to write that opinion overruling roe v. wade. in the coming days and weeks, we re going to get these decisions on abortion, especially involving the abortion pill. and i think alito is quite likely to stick his neck out in that decision and write about how he believes medication abortion is unlawful under existing federal law, under the comstock act of 1873. this is a radicalized justice, very much maximizing his impact by staking out the positions that activists in the grassroots want him to take, legitimizing them and shifting the window and eventually, he hope, transforming them into the law of the land. yeah, i mean, it s quite obvious that the dna of the christian conservative warrior class has imprinted itself upon the supreme court, but lisa, when we talk about the relationship in politics between, for example, donald trump and his pro-maga coalition and the conservative christian warrior class, i wond every if trumpism hasn t imprinted on them. i m thinking about those two pieces of sound where donald trump is in a church, a big church, and the call and response is the word bs. it s a family program, so i m not going to say the actual word. and rudy giuliani is calling taney willis, the d.a. the fulton county, one of the most vulgar things you can call a woman, with distinct racist undertones. this seems to be a new brand of, i guess, christianity, if you want to call it that, in the age of trump. yeah, look, the church has changed politics. but politics has changed the church too. and church, especially conservative evangelical and catholic church, have grown so much more political. as we show in our book the fall of roe, they made this deal with president trump. he promised them in 2016 in iowa christianity will have power, and conservative christians jumped on the trump train, and it ended up being a bullet train for them. they got three justices on the supreme court, and the deal was set. and now they ve been with him for eight years, and it doesn t for conservative christians, they re with him. he can moderate his tone on abortion, say he wouldn t sign a 15-week federal ban, and they re still probably going to stick with him. they are fully bought in and part of this maga movement, and the two are operating together. now, you know, donald trump is in a different position, because the politics of abortion have changed so radically. he senses the toxicity there, which is why you ve seen him come out and say it should be returned to the state, that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother, so that dance has gotten more complicated for him politically, but there s not a sense that he s worried about losing this group that s really become a central core of his movement and his base of support. well, yeah, and i i mean, one wonder where is the guardrails are in any of it. i mean, the republican party has effectively pledged fealty to everything trump represents, christian warrior class and all, and then on the supreme court, mark, how much of a counterweight is someone like john roberts of brett kavanaugh, does the attempt at counterweighing happen on the supreme court? they are a very feeble counterweight when they choose to be one at all. all three of trump s appointees generally vote in lock step with what the republican party wants. trump has, of course, taken over the party, so it is very much his court. and i think it s really disturbing, especially, to look at some of these decisions that do involve extreme circumstances of tragic medical mishaps where wrim in dire of need of abortion, right, this is one of the big cases this term. states are saying these women cannot get abortions that they have to get sepsis, they have to begin hemorrhaging, they have to be dying before they can get abortions. well, republican politicians lined up to agree with those laws and to support those laws of the supreme court you had a ton of republican state attorneys general and republican governors lining up to say we do think woman should be forced to the brink of death before they can get emergency abortions. i think the supreme court will likely agree with them and continue to force these women into these horrible circumstances. and trump is savvy enough not to say anything at it, because he knows he s got his foot soldiers in the judiciary doing the work for him. he s got his guys on the bench who are ready to uphold the most draconian abortion bans imaginable, and he doesn t have to say anything. and just by remaining silent and not speaking out and condemning these ban, he knows he can keep the christian right very much on his side. and that is the whole genius of the strategy behind capturing the courts. you get these justices and judges on the bench for decades, they will do your bidding, they will uphold your extreme law, they will uphold your draconian policies, and most voter, unfortunately, don t draw those lines between the judges and the presidents that appointed them and the parties those presidents belong to, so they get away with this stuff. that s the story of trumpism in the judiciary. a story where there s no accountability. lisa and mark joseph stern, thank you for your time tonight. coming up, the gaslighting continues as republicans vote to hold attorney general merrick garland in contempt of congress. but first, new secret recordings have given us insight into the real thoughts of samuel alito and his wife ma that are ann. i m going to speak to the neighbor at the center of a verbal altercations with the alitos outside her home and made the story about her flags a national scandal. that s next. t her flags national scandal that s next. children are the greatest joy and our best hope for a better future. friends, they are the future. but did you know that millions of kids right here in our own backyard are facing hunger every day without healthy food? it s harder to grow, to thrive, to feel their best. the impact when children don t have enough to eat is tremendous because 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show that you re helping kids build a brighter future for themselves. thank you. families are struggling to make ends meet. these are hard times, but together we can help connect america s kids with meals. so please call now or go online to give. thank you. her uncle s unhappy. i m sensing an underlying issue. it s t-mobile. it started when we tried to get him under a new plan. but they they unexpectedly unraveled their “price lock” guarantee. which has made him, a bit. unruly. you called yourself the “un-carrier”. you sing about “price lock” on those commercials. “the price lock, the price lock.” so, if you could change the price, change the name! it s not a lock, i know a lock. so how can we undo the damage? we could all unsubscribe and switch to xfinity. their connection is unreal. and we could all un-experience this whole session. okay, that s uncalled for. after the new york times reported that two flags associated with the january 6th insurrection had flown at the homes of supreme court justice samuel alito, the justice defended himself in a letter by putting the blame squarely on his wife, martha-ann alito. i was not familiar with the appeal to heaven flag when my wife flew it. i was not aware of any connection between the historic flag and the stop the steal movement and neither was my wife. she did not fly it to associate herself with that or any other group. but audio of martha-ann alito released this week by undercover progressive activist lauren windsor paints a decidedly different picture of mrs. alito s flag collection and why she flew them. you know what i want. i want a sacred heart of jesus flag, because i have to look across the lagoon at the pride flag for the next month. exactly. and he s like, oh, please don t put up flag. i said, i won t do it, because i m deferring to you. but when you are free of this nonsense, i m putting it up, and i m going to send them a message every day. maybe every week i ll be changing the flags. they ll be all kinds. i made a flag in my head. this is how i satisfy myself. i made a flag. it s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. and in the mid sl the word vergagna. in italian it means shame. joining me now is emily, the former neighbor of supreme court justice samuel alito. emily, thank you for joining us tonight. i m eager to hear your reaction to this audio that was released. and we played that specific clip there because it really sounds like mrs. alito is intentional when she flies these flags and that there is absolutely a political point of view she is trying to communicate. what did you make of that audio? absolutely. well, fist of all, thank you so much for having me tonight. it s a pleasure to be here. and to hear her talk about the flags in that way just solidifies what we all know is that they re meant to display a particular message. she mentions the being upset by the pride flag and wanting to fly a sacred heart of jesus flag. well, that flag specifically means anti-lgbtq, anti-pride, so it s very clear what she s doing with the flag. and that just proves us all right that in his statement he s lying where he says we didn t have any reasoning behind it. we don t know what it mean, et cetera. yeah, well, she wasn t trying to be part of a movement or group. i think that that s definitely questionable given fact that she s absolutely flying these flags in response to certain groups. yes, yes. emily, i got to ask you, because she s so animated when she talks about this flag she d like to make that says vergogna, which means shame in italian, it brought back to mind your account of the alitos, according to the new york times , when mrs. alito confronted you, you said something like how dare you behave this way. you ve been harassing us over signs. you represent the highest court in the land. shame on you. the concept of shame really seems to animate her, and i wonder if you could talk more about your interaction with her when the word shame and the concept of shame was discussed. yes. well, that so that interaction, the one that happened on february 15th, the one that they re using as an excuse for why they flew the upside down american flag, which we know doesn t make sense because the flag was up weeks before that. what do i make of it? it s just it was such an intense interaction, and it was about the third time that this has happened, each time escalating more and more. and yeah, i meant it, shame on you for behaving this way. because you do represent the highest court in the land. and that was more intended towards him who was there as well and did not step in. can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the alitos, as you saw it. i mean, he was present for some of these interactions, if you want to call that, and i was there s part of the undercover interview or the undercover audio that we heard where martha-ann alito talks about her plan for gaining seeking justice for all that has befallen her and her husband. let s take a listen to that sound. it s okay because if they come back to me, i ll get them. i m going to be liberated, and i m going to get them. what do you mean by get them? there s a five-year defamation statute of limitations. i don t know who you mean. the media. so martha-ann alito has a plan here. she s mapped it out, five-year statute of limitations for defamation. the question is, is that justice alito s plan? and that begs the question, what is the relationship between these two people, to you think what she says is tacitly endorsed by him, or is that overestimating, you know, her import in terms of a family strategy? yes. you know, i don t think it s for me or anybody else to say that or to pass any judgement on their relationship. all i witnessed was her, you know, behaving in that way and him not stepping in. and what i really just want to point out is that there s no way that he didn t know those flags were flying at his house. and in those same recordings, in his own words he is unable to be impartial. he says that there are two sides and one side must win and he s basically saying that he sits on one side and he says that he can t negotiate with the other side. he can t split the difference, as he put it. and that is a giant red flag. and at this point, we ve moved past the idea of him just recusing and we ve reached the point in the general consensus that it must be removal at this point. i think we re a ways from that, but i do, i mean, i have to ask you, because this is a woman who verbally there were verbal confrontations, i believe she spat at your car at one point. yeah. there s a point in this audio where she says i m german from germany, my heritage is german, you come after me, i m going to give it back to you. in the context of these interactions with her, how did you hear that part of the audio? i think as most people who heard it it was absolutely chilling. and terrifying that people in such a high position of power are saying such threatening and scary things. now, i can t presume to know what she meant by that, but i think a lot of people are assuming kind of the same things. and none of it is good. and we really need to do something to hold this court accountable. this is mostly about his inability to be impartial, and that is his bare minimum job description, and he has said on tape that he can t do that. emily baden, at the center of a national controversy, really appreciate you taking the time to join us tonight. thank you. thank you so much. thank you. still to come this evening, a response to the story we did last night about an apparently coordinated effort to spin a negative story about president biden across a vast network of local tv stations. stick around to hear what the network has to say for itself on that. plus, former obama advisor dan pfeiffer has thoughts on how to take on republicans like house speak mike johnson when they try to rewrite reality. that s next. they try to rewrite reality. 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given the fact that president biden s own son was convicted yesterday of three gun felony charges brought by the federal government in a case that was heard by a trump-appointed judge and decided upon by a jury of biden s peers, but that didn t stop them. this afternoon house republicans fanned the flame of a weaponized government conspiracy by voting to hold attorney general merrick garland in contempt of congress. the alleged reason for the contempt vote was the justice department s refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena to hand over audio tapes of an interview president biden did with special counsel robert hur. now, to be clear, the justice department has already released a full transcript of that interview, and officials argue that releasing the audio could endanger future investigations. but refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena, hmm, republicans managed to be outraged about that despite the fact that multiple republicans, including congressman jim jordan, who is leading the fight here against merrick garland, multiple republicans have literally defied congressional subpoenas themselves. when speaker of the house mike johnson was asked about that hypocrisy today, this was his response. you talk about apples to oranges, there couldn t be a more clear contrast between that and what we re talking about here. hmm, joining me now is dan pfeiffer, former senior advisor to president obama and cohost of pod save america. thank you for being here. i don t know, is it an apples to oranges comparison or an apples to apples comparison. it seems pretty apples to apples to me. you have members of congress, someone refusing to comply with a subpoena from congress, so yeah, it s apples to apples. the reality is that the headline merrick garland held in contempt of congress is a big, juicy headline for republicans to make hay over. and i wonder how you think democrats and people interested in preserving, i don t know, some shred of democracy, can answer that with a fairly nuanced discussion about subpoenas and why the hur audio would not make sense for future prosecutions. i don t think we have to get into the details of that. that s the conversation they want us to have. the conversation they don t want to have is why republican plans would do nothing to lower prices or higher wages. what they are planning on doing is how they can pass a tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. it will add $3 trillion to the deficit. they re trying to distract from the things that matter to people and their own popular agenda. we sdroebt to play that game as democrats. let me follow up on that, that gets to the central question of this entire campaign as it concerns joe biden, which is how much should he be talking about the sort of institutional threats posed by donald trump, institutional threats to our system of justice, to our democracy, to the voting system, and how much should he talk about, what you say, the bread and butter issue, the economy, inflation, et cetera, you seem to be landing quite clearly in camp b, don t focus on the institutional threats, is that fair? there s no such thing as a single-issue campaign for president. right. it s about a lot. now, it is very clear that most voters by pretty large margins say the economy and inflation are the single most important issue that s going to decide their vote. it s also true that three quarters of voters say that the they are unhappy with the economy and that donald trump has a big advantage on the economy. we have to narrow that gap. that doesn t mean we shouldn t talk about abortion and freedom and the threats that donald trump has. because what ties together donald trump s positions where he wants to cut social security, medicare, cut taxes for the wealthy, repeal the affordable care act, repeal abortion, is maga extremism. that s how i think we should frame it. i do wonder where you think the most movable voters are, right? because the economic stuff is plain to see. it s not a mystery, right? inflation is coming down. the joblessness rate, all of it, and it hasn t sunk in. whereas, i m not necessarily arguing for this, but the polling that we got, i think it was this week, an ap/norc poll, approval of donald trump s conviction nationwide, 15% of republicans approve of his conviction. those seem like the ghost of nikki haley s supporters. and i wonder if you think, you know, given freshness of this story and the fact that people are responding to it, whether there s to blunt about it, gold in them there hills for the democrats and the biden campaign. oh, sure. this is the anti-donald trump coalition is the biggest political coalition in america. but it s very diverse, right? you have voters who are biden voters who are upset about the economy. you have people who are biden voters who are upset about what s happening in gaza. you have trump voter who is may be upset former trump voters. so you have a lot of messages to a lot of people. what we know is there is a sufficient group of people who are deeply concerned about the idea i know this sounds crazy but deeply concerned idea that we should not have a convicted felon as president of the united states. i hope the president takes advantage of this during the debate in two weeks and brings it up. we have to make a full throated, proud, unafraid case against donald trump. that s going to talk about raising prices and cutting taxes for rich people, the threat he poses to freedoms like abortion, contraception, and the threat he poses to all of our freedoms because of the way he wants to govern what he did to try to pull the wool over voter s eyes in 2016 whshgs he got caught for and convicted for, tells a story about the kind of president donald trump would be and we shouldn t shy away from that. given the things we talk about, you know donald trump s going to bring up, well, we think he would bring up hunter biden. there s another trial in california, i believe, in september. should biden be talking about that? playbook suggests this is an opportunity to show empathy and connect with people who have faced hardship that in their own lives and families. what do you think about that? well, this is obviously deeply personal and deeply painful situation for the president, right? he had this is it s obvious every time he s ever been forced to talk about it. in all of the reporting you read, this is something that s very hard for him, of course it is. all this tragedy in his family, dealing with addiction, having to witness that. there s no question donald trump s going to bring it up in the debate. he did it in 2020 to try to rattle biden s case. i think if he can talk about this from the perspective of a father who loves his son, much like the statement that he and the first lady put out after the conviction, that hug he gave his son afterwards that he returned home to give, to show that side of joe biden, i think that is powerful. because the essential truth of joe biden is that he is a deeply empathetic person who is running for president because he cares about everyone else. and he can show that in that moment if that comes. and i think that s the way to do it and the way i think he would do it. i mean, his empathy, i think, does distinguish him from the other person who s going to be across the stage from him. dan pfeiffer, my friend, thank you for making the time tonight, buddy. thank you. coming up, some really good news this week. violent crime is way, way down across the country, but you couldn t be faulted for believing the very opposite, especially if you like watching certain local news stations. we re going to have more on that right after the break. on that right after the break. whoa! how d you get your teeth so white? you gotta use the right toothpaste! dr. c?! not all toothpastes whiten the same. crest 3d white removes 100% more stains for a noticeably whiter smile. new personal best. crest. if you have chronic kidney disease you can reduce the risk of kidney failure with farxiga. because there are places you d like to be. farxiga can cause serious side effects, including ketoacidosis that may be fatal, dehydration, urinary tract, or genital yeast infections, and low blood sugar. a rare, life-threatening bacterial infection in the skin of the perineum could occur. stop taking farxiga and call your doctor right away if you have symptoms of this infection, an allergic reaction, or ketoacidosis. far-xi-ga ed gutters. an allergic reaction, or ketoacidosis. call leaffilter today. and never clean out clogged gutters again. leaffilter s technology keeps debris out of your gutters for good. guaranteed. call 833.leaf.filter today, or visit leaffilter.com. so the president wraps his remarks on crime without a single mention of the growing immigrant crime crisis happening in this country right now. you re seeing since joe biden took office crime skyrocket. wouldn t we love to have a statistic where crime is down 67%? ours is only going in one direction. if you listen to donald trump or conservative politicians and conservative media like fox news, you probably think we are in the middle of a massive crime wave. we are not. this week we got new fbi crime statistics showing that in the fist quarter of this year, crime is yet again down across the board. overall violent crime down 15% from last year. murders down 26%. by every national metric, crime is down. regardless of the facts here, fox is still going big on crime. the organization media matters counted 304 reports about crime on fox in just the first two months of this year alone. the last time the fbi released crime data, back in march, crime data that again showed another drop in crime across the board, fox gave that data approximately two minutes of air time in the first two weeks after the data came out. fox only mentioned the declining crime rate seven times in those two week, and one of those mentions was this one. new data from the fbi claims that the u.s. crime rate is dropping. let s look at this graph while i stab you. given how much elected republicans and national conservative media are pushing the narrative of a staggering crime wave despite the facts, it sort of makes sense that republicans believe there is a rise in crime when really there isn t. but the thing is, it s not just republicans who believe that. recent polling from gallup shows that 77% of all americans believe there is more crime in the u.s. today than there was a year ago. despite, again, the opposite being true. crime went down this year and crime went down the year before. we are in the opposite of a crime wave. so what gives? why do so many americans think that crime is up? well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but there is one reason that does not get enough attention, local news. in 2019, one of seattle s local tv news stations, komo news, put out this documentary entitled seattle is dying. it depicts seattle as a city in decline because of rampant crime and homelessness. the seattle times newspaper was quick to refute the documentary s assertion that seattle was dying, pointing out that both property crime and violent crime have been dropping in seattle for decades, and komo news isn t some independent, whacky outlet, it is part of the sinclair broadcast network, a network of nearly 200 local tv stations. as the washington post put it, sinclair s recipe for tv news is crime, homelessness, and illegal drugs. journalist anne nelson told the washington post , sinclair plays up crime stories in a way that is disproportionate to their statistical presence. or as david told the post, it s a fox news wannabe. that s their model a political tool rather than a journalistic platform. but unlike what people hear from fox news or donald trump, viewers may not necessarily have their radars up when it comes to information they are getting from the local news stations that give them the weather. s stations that give them the weather sinclair broadcast group. a story about how dozens of their anchors from across the country all read the exact same script and this one was pt questioning president biden s mental fitness. sinclair has since given us their response. we are going to get to that, coming up next. . millions of children are fighting to survive due to inequality, conflict, poverty and the climate crisis. save the children® is working alongside communities to provide a better life for children. and there s a way you can help. please call or go online to give just $10 a month. only $0.33 a day. we urgently need 1000 new monthly donors in the next 30 days to help the children we support around the world. you can help provide food, medicine, care and protection, plus so much more that a child needs by calling right now and giving just $10 a month. all we need are 1000 monthly donors in the next 30 days. please call or go online now with your monthly gift of just $10. thanks to generous government grants, every dollar you give can have up to ten times the impact. and when you call with your credit card, we will send you this save the children® tote bag as a thank you for your support. your small monthly donation of just $10 could be the reason a child in crisis survives. please call or go online to hungerstopsnow.org to help save lives today. we have some new developments in a story we covered last night. the newsletters public notice and popular information first brought to attention anchors at dozens of local tv news stations who have been reading the same controversial script about president joe biden based on a widely criticized wall street journal article. have a listen. the wall street journal calling into question the mental fitness of president joe biden. as national correspondent matt galka tells us, the issue could be an election decider. the issue could be an election decider. the stations have one thing in common. they are owned by the conservative leading sinclair broadcast group and tonight we have a statement from sinclair denying wrongdoing or bias. here is a quote. the allegation sinclair is deceiving its audience are spreading misinformation is outrageous. our goal is to buy the accurate and timely coverage. any insinuation otherwise is unfounded and undermines the integrity and hard work of our teams. joining me now is the founder and author of the popular information newsletter. he is one of two reporters who broke the story. thank you for joining me. let me first get your response to sinclair s response. well, i think it was interesting that they ignored really the key issue, which is that they are amplifying and requiring dozens of local, trusted local news broadcasts, to amplify this very shoddy story by the wall street journal questioning biden s mental fitness based on really kevin mccarthy, the only on the record source. so they did not really address that. i think they are unhappy with the fact their tactics are being exposed. this is a problem they have had in the past of sending these very biased scripts to all of their affiliates and having them read them verbatim. can you talk about when you say they were forced to read these. sinclair as part of its defense says giving out scripts is common practice to affiliates and basically there is nothing to see here. from your reporting, what you understand about the pressure, if any, these local anchors are given to read this stuff verbatim? this is been well-established that sinclair, which has 186 affiliates it owns or controls, sends must runs segments that are produced out of their national office. actually after trump was elected in 2016 they hired one of his spokespeople, boris epshteyn as their national correspondent and then would have him do commentary which they required all of these stations to run. so it is true, there are affiliates that have relationships with different services. cnn operates one. there are a bunch of different ones. they will send along scripts, but that is something optional for them to do. this is the corporate parent requiring these affiliates which have all sorts of branding, abc, nbc, everybody, locks, and really pushing very hard right content in a way that is not transparent. the owner of sinclair broadcasting is a gentleman named david smith. he also purchased the baltimore sun not that long ago and i want to read for viewers who are unfamiliar with what has happened. the union representing the newspaper sternal essay monday that the articles do not meet standards. including a one-sided story about immigration policies and an op-ed by the co-owner likening the transgender movement to a cancer. in addition journalists say stories under their names have been changed without their permission and they have been reusing reporting from one of the 185 local tv stations owned by the sinclair broadcast group. this is a feedback loop, it sounds like. what do you know if the editorial practices under david smith? i think he has established himself as a right-wing operative. he has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to right- wing groups and famously he met with donald trump in 2016. jared kushner helped cut a deal where they would get access in exchange for not fact checking. david smith himself said we are here to deliver your message, so it is a very partisan operator, but he is really pulling the strings behind local affiliate neck works affiliate networks that unfortunately viewers may not know what is going on. over 185 tv stations, plus the baltimore sun. judd legum, thanks for your time. that is our show for tonight. now it is time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. . good evening, alex. sheldon whitehouse is joining us to talk about the supreme court. alex, i was fascinated to hear your interview with the alito neighbor