0 race. virginia and new jersey are the only two states that hold their governor races in a year like this, the odd numbered year right after a presidential election, they are the only two states that do, if they do it every four years, all the way back to the 1980, every year t the president has seen the governor loose his race bothe in virginia and in new jersey. that's the way the pendulum swings. president biden this week actually became the first newly elected president of the united states since ronald reagan to not fall prey to that curse. to not have his party lose bothe those governorships. biden's democratic party did e lose the virginia governor's ir race but they won in new jersey, which we found out this time last night, when nbc news made the call. well, that said, tonight within the past hour the republican candidate in new jersey, jack ciattarelli, has just posted a video on twitter saying he is not conceding that race. he does not think this is over. he says he has a team of lawyers and he mentioned that the state's republican party is still manning its election integrity hotline. at the same time, he did tell his supporters tonight, i don't want people falling victim to wild conspiracy theories or online rumors while consideration is paid to any and all credible reports, please don't believe everything you read or see online. he said, quote, i promise you, whatever the outcome, the election result will be legal and fair. seems good, but he's not conceding. he is more than 40,000 votes behind at this point, and most of the votes still to be counted are from new jersey's heavily democratic-leaning counties, so that 40,000-vote margin is likely to get larger, not bigger as the count goes on, but we shall see. so far no concession, but not in an insane way. that said, given things in the republican party right now, you and i both know it could get insane very fast. we will be watching that. today also was the disciplinary hearing at the texas bar association for trump lawyer sidney powell. you'll remember her for taking a lead role alongside rudy giuliani in trying to use the courts to push the insane trump claims that the presidential election was stolen from him a year ago now. mr. giuliani has already had his law license suspended in new york because of the many, many false claims he made to the courts. now sidney powell is facing the prospect of similar penalties, p up to and potentially including her disbarment in texas. this hearing today was held behind closed doors. if the texas bar association's disciplinary committee finds grounds to move forward on disciplinary proceedings against her as a lawyer, that trial, effectively a trial for her law license, it could be held publicly, it could be held privately as today's hearing was. again, we shall see. former president trump himself this afternoon was confronted with this undoubtedly very un-william headline in "the washington post."ed quote, manhattan d.a. convenes new grand jury in trump organization case to weigh potential charges. former president trump this summer had to endure multiple felony criminal charges being i brought against his business, the trump organization, and personally against the chief financial officer of his business, a man named allen weisselberg.ly those charges came about roughly five weeks after new york prosecutors had convened their first special grand jury to meet on that case and hear the evidence related to it with sort of unusual frequency. they called it a special grand jury because that special grand jury they convened in may didn't just meet weekly to look at that evidence, they met three days a week for six solid months looking at the evidence in that case. it didn't take long for them to hand down those first indictments. by july 1st they handed down those first indictments after they convened in late may.ntt but they were convened for a period of six months, and now it is six months on from that. we learned today in "the washington post" they have convened a second grand jury. and that second special grand jury is already seated, it's already in place, they're already hearing evidence in new york including, according to "the washington post" hearing evidence today.ed s ial "the post" reports that while the first grand jury in the r trump organization case handed i down those multi-part, multiple-defendant felony charges alleging millions of dollars in tax fraud, the secont grand jury that has just been put in place now, according to t "the post" they're looking at different allegations. they're looking at other different types of fraud allegations related to the valuation of various trump properties. now, that type of allegation about trump's business practices just last month led to yet tyst another reported criminal investigation being opened into trump's business by yet another new york prosecutor's office, by the d.a. in westchester county. that was apparently reportedly based on allegations that trump appeared his business lied about the value of a golf course in is westchester county in order to evade paying a fair share of property taxes on it. but again, that's a new criminal investigation of trump and his business in westchester county. what we've learned today from "the washington post" is that ag second grand jury was convened t in the existing manhattan case against trump and his business. in this manhattan case, multiple felony charges have already been handed down against trump's business and his cfo. knowing a second grand jury is convened and is already at work looking at the evidence, that just has to be very uncomfortable for everybody involved, right?mf and, again, just for context in terms of timing here, after they seated the first grand jury in manhattan, it took them about five weeks before they handed down those felony charges we saw this summer. if this second grand jury does the same thing and operates on the same time frame, that would be five weeks from now, it would be merry christmas. today we learned the date on which those vaccine requirements are going to go into effect for federal contractors, for e facilities like hospitals and nursing homes that get federal funding from medicare or medicaid and for private employers that have more than 100 employees. president biden announced these vaccine or test requirements a couple of months ago. but now we know the date by which they will go into effect. it's january 4th. after that date if you have -- if you're employed at one of those kinds of places, you'll need to either get vaccinated ty keep working at your place of employment or you will have the choice to be tested for covid every week instead.nt importantly, along with the date today, we also got the news if you choose to get vaccinated, the vaccine will be free and you get paid time off to go get the vaccine. that said, if you opt for not getting vaccinated and instead being regularly covid tested, well, that's on you. the government is not going to pay for the testing process the way they pay for the vaccine. so lots of republican governors have already started saying and started suing, saying their state won't do it and the federal government can't make them do it.ve the government plainly thinks that it has the authorities to do this, but those cases will start working their way through the courts. but, again, the administration announced today that the deadline for those requirements to go into effect is january 4th, and that's a big deal. i should also tell you on tonight's show we're also going to be talking tonight with a former counterintelligence official at the fbi, about a new indictment,ew new charges unsead today by john durham, by the special counsel who bill barr appointed under trump, who was left at the justice department, left behind at the justice department after barr resigned and after trump left office. they left special counsel john durham in place at the justice department in the wake of the trump administration doing an open-ended investigation into everybody who took part in the russia investigation. the trump administration and bill barr in particular viewed the russia investigation as itself a scandal. they assigned john durham to go investigate and try to find crimes among people who were involved in the investigation, and that's what he has been doing ever since. special counsel john durham unsealed an indictment a few weeks ago against a lawyer who brought the fbi allegations about the trump organization having some sort of surreptitious contact with a kremlin-connected bank during the 2016 election. brthsortt ing obe allegation ann never really caught that much public attention. it was a complex idea and never took off in the public mind. for example, it was never furthered in the mueller investigation. mueller didn't mention it at all.om or senate intelligence committee did look into it. they've just concluded that they couldn't figure out what those communications are themselves, they never sorted it out. john durham's choice to bring an indictment against somebody who brought those allegations to thc fbi has sort of boomeranged on t him in terms of how those in allegations are viewed. once those charges, once that indictment was filed against somebody who had brought those w allegations to the fbi, people o connected to that case, people involved in turning up that evidence of those weird computer contacts in the first place, n they apparently were spurred by that indictment to come forward, to revive those allegations, to defend those allegations, to make a public case that, in fact, it does sort of look like that trump organization and that kremlin-connected russian bank did have something going on surreptitiously that they tried to keep secret during the election. the special counsel appears to be trying to make that allegation about those computer contacts between the trump organization and alfa bank, he tried to appear to be making those allegations seem crazy and even criminal. but by charging somebody relatee heki to those allegations, somebody who brought those allegations to the fbi, what that indictment did is ended up dragging the initial allegation about trump back into the news where it has now gotten more attention and more of a live issue than it ham in years. a bit of a boomerang effect for them on that. now today in this new indictment it's against a researcher that was interviewed by the fbi multiple times in 2017. he's now been charged with making false statements during those 4-year-old fbi interviews. but, again, the indictment in this case tells a story beyond just the charges. the indictment in this case is 39 pages, and it's written well beyond those specific charges. it, like the other indictment from john durham, seems designed to try to further this project of making the russia investigation itself seem like a scandal. we're going to get into it, we've got more on that coming in in just a few minutes with a former fbi senior counterintelligence official. but where i want to start tonight is with a story that i think isn't getting nearly enough attention. i think this story is lightning in a bottle. it has broken this week, but not broken nearly widely enough.ghth in the last midterm elections, the elections we had in 2018, you'll recall that was a really good election for democrats. the so-called blue wave election right in the middle of president trump's term. trump and all the republicans got elected in 2016. 2018 the democrats came back, swept to power in the u.s. house.01 there were hopes at the time something similar might happen in the senate. republicans had just a narrow majority heading into the 2018 midterms. they only had 51 seats. democrats saw a real opportunity, potentially retake the senate for the democrats in that 2018 but wave election. one of the hardest fought and most closely watched senate races in 2018 was in missouri. incumbent moderate democratic senator claire mccaskill faced a challenge from josh hawley. everybody knew this was going to be a hard race for claire mccaskill no matter what. it's missouri. trump won missouri by nearly 20 points in 2016. two years later he's running to try to hold on to her seat as a democratic senator there. something came up right at the end of that campaign. reports surfaced that perhaps josh hawley had gotten some extra help in his campaign that might not have been okay.inoryeu a complaint was filed with the federal election commission jusc a couple of weeks before election day that accused the nra of having dumped a whole bunch of illegal money on josh l hawley during the campaign, supporting his campaign with illegal campaign spending through an elaborate scheme mp designed to evade campaign finance law. e now, this complaint about the nra allegedly illegally funding josh hawley in that senate race, it was filed by a non-partisan watchdog called the campaign legal center, but also by the gunso violence prevention group run by former congresswoman gabby giffords. she was shot in the head, nearly killed at a mass shooting at a i campaign event in her arizona district in 2011. she went on to fund a gun violence prevention fund called giffords. their complaint claimed that tht nra had illegally shoved nearly a million dollars toward josh hawley in the form of tv ads do supporting him. now, on election night 2018, claire mccaskill lost that race. democrats did not take the senate in 2018, even though they did take the house. and it was always going to be an uphill battle for claire mccaskill. because it was missouri, because of the way missouri has been trending, the common wisdom in washington is that she was probably going to have lost that race anyway, no matter what she did. these late-breaking allegations that illegal money went to her opponent, they never really caught much traction. they never got all that much press or all that much attention. in terms of what happened next, a couple of months after the election, investigations by "mother jones" magazine and news outlet focused on gun violence called the trace found that the nra appeared to have not just been illegally funneling money toward josh hawley's campaign in 2018, his campaign against claire m accaskill, but that opn source reporting appeared to indicate that the nra had been using the same scheme to shove illegal money toward two other republican senate candidates and also potentially millions of dollars in illegal spending toward donald trump's 2016 presidential campaign. under campaign finance law the nra, any outside group, can't give millions of dollars to a political campaign. they can spend as much money as they want airing their own ads,n but they can't coordinate their ad strategy, coordinate their spending with the campaign because that would basically be the same bthing, giving illega contributions to the campaign. so this alleged scheme, the way it worked, is that the nra hired a company to buy ads supporting its preferred candidates, whether donald trump or josh hawley or these other candidates who are allegedly the beneficiaries of these schemes. but what the investigation turned up was that the company the nra hired to buy its ads was actually just a front group. it was the same media company ni that was doing all the ad buying for donald trump and josh hawley. they were just doing it with a different name on paper. not only was it the same company, literally the same guy signed off on all the ad buys for both the campaign and the nra.th it's hard to argue it's not illegal coordination when there aren't even two people coordinating with each other. it's literally one guy, the same guy doing the ads for both of them. if you're just one person, you are by definition coordinating with yourself because otherwise, see a doctor. is the guy trying not to coordinate with himself? does he think he has some sort of chinese wall within? it looked on paper like the nra and these campaigns weren't coordinating. in fact the nra was essentially just giving money, illegally huge amounts of money, to trump's and hawley's ad guy and saying have fun. if that was how it worked, that would be illegal. a former chair of the fec said don't think i've ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems so obvious. it's so blatant, it doesn't even seem sloppy. everybody involved probably thinks there aren't going to be any consequences. they probably didn't think there were going to be any consequences because the federal elections commission, in charge of enforcing campaign finance law, they don't do anything. they have been hopelessly deadlocked for over a decade. the republican commissioners on the fec have for years just refused to agree to enforce anything.hey ecbe fbl in so doing, they have e g, successfully blocked the agencyy from doing its job, even in big, obvious cases. but now, this is the really interesting part. gabby giffords' organization, the same groups that filed the complaint against this practice against josht hawley, they appr to have found a way around that deadlocked non-function agency, the onfec, a way to hold the nr to account for this alleged illegal campaign spending. their complaints with the fec about this alleged illegal funding scheme, those complaints sat there for so long and the fec failed to act for so long l that a federal court ruled that giffords and the campaign legal center could go ahead now -- because the fec had blown it for so long, they could go ahead and sue the nra directly themselves. they earned that right. a judge ordered the fec to act. the fec did not act. when the fec did not act, the judge said, okay, you can sue them privately, so now they have. this brand new lawsuit names thr nra but also specifically josh hawley's campaign as well as the campaign of another republican they allege coordinated illegally with the nra, a congressman named matt rosendale who lost his senate race in montana to jon tester, the democratic senator. also mentioned in the suit although not named as defendants are the senate campaigns of thom tillis, arkansas's tom cotton, wisconsin's ron johnson, and former colorado republican senator cory gardner. the nra has engaged in an ongoing scheme to evade campaign finance contributions by coordinating advertising with at least seven candidates for federal office.co through this scheme two nra affiliates made up to $35 million in illegal, excessive and unreported campaign contributions across the 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections, including up to $25 million to the trump campaign in 2016. $25 million in illegal donations to the trump campaign in 2016? plus all those republican senators? this feels like a big deal on a few different levels. for one, it's a big deal these groups may have found a way to actually maybe enforce campaign finance law, which has been the wild west for years now because the federal agency that's supposed to police this stuff is functionally dead, but also $35 million is a lot of money. that's a lot of allegedly illegal money washing around in republican campaigns. that's enough money to potentially have had a major effect on the outcome of multiple elections. i should tell you that the nra told "the washington post" in a statement that the lawsuit is e part of its adversaries' anti-freedom agenda. okay. but this is another huge scandal for the nra, which is already on the ropes, right? the new york attorney general i trying to dissolve them as an organization over their top o leaders allegedly raiding the organization's coffers for their own personal gain. the nra tried to declare bankruptcy in response, and a judge told them that they couldn't because it was a bad t faith effort to declare bankruptcy just to avoid accountability in that lawsuit.j they're also trying to claim bankruptcy while also bragging to their supporters that they w have just as much money as ever and just as much influence as ever.as an nra affiliate is the plaintiff in this major gun il right case argued before the supreme court yesterday, a case which if the court sides with the nra, way, way, way more americans will bey, allowed to carry concealed firearms in public.ll i know there's a lot going on right now, but this lawsuit hitting the nra right now feelst like a consequential freaking deal. joining us now is david pecino, senior staff attorney at the giffords law center which brought this suit. i appreciate you making time ds tonight. thanks very much. >> thanks for having me. >> i'm not an expert in these y matters, either in campaign finance law and i'm not a lawyer in terms of explaining these things. i just want to ask you if i got anything wrong in explaining how this is working. s >> no, that was exactly right. i mean, it's a really complex scheme on paper, but in part the nra was using the same people who were working for campaigns to place their independent spending. so the same person on friday that would be making an ad by for the campaign would turn around and make an ad by for the nra. as you pointed out, that's sfo impossible. so it was a really blatant violation of the law.a the fact that they used these shell companies to hide it makes it seem complicated or confusing,ee but it was a transparent attempt to get around the law. if you dug in just a little bit as reporters did and we've done, it was very clear just on the papers that they were violating the law. >> because it was such a blatant violation, it does open up the prospect that they -- that they didn't try hard enough not to get caught. that they were so confident that this stuff is never policed anymore, that you, in fact, can give $25 million illegal dollars to the donald trump campaign and it won't matter because nobody else polices this, this is essentially unregulated spending now. is that your suspicion? or do you feel like they did take enough steps to try to cover their tracks that getting caught felt like a prospect that might deliver consequences to them? >> i think they did the absolute bare minimum to disguise the scheme, and i think it's because there's this sense of impunity that seems to rule at the nra. they have this attitude that no one is going to stop them and they can break whatever rule they want to. we've seen that in schemes over the years. from the misuse of donor money that attorney general james has documented uncovered just in case after case they think they can get away with it. for years they were right, but i think that's finally starting to change. >> is there any sense in these allegations, is there any documentary evidence that the campaigns knew what they were i on here? obviously we've got representative -- former representative matthew rosendale and josh hawley as named defendants in this case. but trump, ron johnson, tom cotton, thom tillis, they're all mentioned as beneficiaries of this scheme. is there evidence that they knowingly accepted this money? that they knew it was illegal and they took it anyway? >> there is some evidence to that effect, and i think the most striking event is that matt rosendale, who was running for senate at the time, there was a recording madest at the fund raiser that a rosendale held in which he was asked if there's going to be outside spending in his race. he said i had a conversation with chris cox, who was the head lobbyist at the nra. he told me the nra is coming in with a spending the next month. lo and behold the next month the nra comes in with an what's called an independent expenditure.hr so you have a case where he knew what was going to be going on with the spend spending, so he onlydi admitted it, but bragged that he had been coordinating with the nra over it. >> in terms of his -- if that's borne out in court, what does that mean in terms of potential culpability for him or any of the other defendants who might have known that this was happening and knowingly benefited from this? >> so the case that we're bringing is the law that we have. we have the ability to bring civil enforcement. the main thing is a declaration by a court that this scheme was illegal and they have to stop doing it because they kept doing it. the nra has continued to do it. if there's not something done s g se the about it, i think these campaigns will continue to use these same techniques. the other available remedy is to give the money back essentially. you can't take back those ads but you can require the campaigns and the political committees to provide this money to the treasury. so potentially what we're looking at is an outcome of an order by the court for the nra to pay $35 million to the u.s. treasury to compensate for all e of that wrongful spending. david pucino, i appreciate you helping us understand this tonight, thanks. keep us apprised. >> thanks so much for having me. >> much more ahead here tonight, stay with us. stay with us