0 disturbing. >> adam mackay, it's a great movie, you should check it out if you have. and thank you so much. >> thank you, chris. always a pleasure. >> that is all in on tuesday night, the rachel maddow show starts now. good evening rachel. evening, chris, thank you, my friend, much appreciated. thanks for joining us this hour. we've got a lot going on tonight. after president biden's big voting rights speech in georgia, and all the fallout from that. we'll talk to a senator who was there at the speech, and has a bit of an inside track on whether or not the senate is actually going to deliver on what vice president harris and president biden called for today. this is a senator who has been with the president all day. she's going to be joining us live in just a few minutes, after she touches back down in d.c. on the air force one flight back from georgia. very much looking forward to that conversation. we're also going to be speaking with one of the leading voting rights activists in the country, someone who, to be honest, has actually given president biden a really hard time on this issue. who has been really confrontational with president biden and the biden administration on this issue. he's been pretty relentless in saying president biden needed to do more, say more, go further to make sure everything possible was being done to protect voting rights. this activist told us today that he thinks president biden in atlanta today hit it out of the park. that this is exactly what he was hoping to hear. so we'll hear from him in a few minutes tonight as well. he's got a really interesting perspective on this stuff. we're going to get to all of that. briefly, though, before we get to all that, i do want to tell you about a new interesting development in a story that we have been chasing for a little while now. and it suddenly seems like we are starting to get somewhere with this, and i want to give you an update. we first talked about this on the air last month, just before christmas, when we obtained this document from wisconsin. this document is a forged document. it purports to be the official slate of electors chosen by wisconsin in the last presidential election, but it's not. in wisconsin, joe biden defeated donald trump which means the state chose democratic party electors to cast votes in the electoral college. but last month, we reported on this document that was created by republicans in wisconsin after the election. they actually sent it into congress, they sent it into the national archives. they tried to pass it off as an official document, as if they were the real electors, and they were casting wisconsin's electoral votes, and they were casting them for trump and pence. so we talked about that forged document from wisconsin on the show last month. and we did that in the context of this sort of ongoing open question in wisconsin as to whether or not anybody's going to get in trouble for that. whether or not the state election board or in fact state prosecutors in wisconsin are going to signers of that fake document, potentially on forgery charges. so that is sort of where this story started for us. and, boy, did we hear from you, the viewers, on this story. when we started covering it. we got a lot of feedback, a lot of people expressing concerns about how serious this seemed to be. and, you know, it's a big story. you know? wisconsin republicans taking the whole election denial thing one step beyond. actually sending the national archives and congress a forged document, it's a fascinating story. and i understand why a lot of our viewers were disturbed by it and contacted us about it. that was where we were last month. then last night, thanks to reporting from politico.com, the reporter nicholas wu, we were able to show you additional forgeries from additional states. turns out it was not just wisconsin. republicans in michigan and republicans in arizona also created forged documents after the election where they tried to pass themselves off as the real electors for those states. when in fact they were not the real electors for those states. and again, they didn't just prepare these documents for, you know, home scrapbooking, how i wish the election had gone. right? they actually prepared these documents, made them look as official as possible. they cited u.s. law, they proclaimed themselves officially to be the legal representatives of the state. and they sent these things in to the government to be counted. pretty astonishing thing. right? we first got the forged documents from wisconsin last month. and last night, we showed you similar forgeries from michigan and from arizona as well. now, if you watched last night's show, do you remember how i said, when i was talking about this story, raise your hand if you think there will be more of these? yeah, that didn't take long. turns out there's more. and let me show you this at the outset. this is what the real one looks like. this is what the real document is supposed to look like. when a state finalizes and certifies its election results, they know which candidate won the state, that tells you which candidate's elects will cast that state's vote in the electoral college. if trump won, it will be trump electors, if biden won, it will be biden electors. this is a real process. here's what it looks like for real. here, for example, this is michigan. and all the states do it a little differently in terms of presentation, but the basic point is to convey all the same official information. so, here's the real elector certificate from the state of michigan. it kind of looks like a diploma, right? let's do another state. let's do the real elector certificate from arizona. yeah, the arizona one is very nice. the arizona one, i think, sort of looks like a medical degree. and not all of them are fancy like this. this one from georgia is all business, just the facts. same with the one from wisconsin. it's cold this time of year, don't have time for any periphery. just get to the point. most states are somewhere in the middle, somewhere between a diploma and a gas station receipt. here's one, for example from nevada. this is fairly typical. every state does it different, but they're all real. the basic information is the same. we the undersigned, being the qualified electors for the state of "x," and then the votes are cast, they have the signatures and all of the people who have the qualified elects, that's what the real ones look like. can we put those on the screen together? i think we have them from a bunch of different states. there's the five i just mentioned. as you can see, it's the same basic information on all of them. all these documents serve the same purpose, they all meet the constitutional threshold they need to meet in order to convey the information differently. but they all look a little different. they convey the information visually a little differently. depending on how the state felt about this particular topic and what kind of nice stationary they had laying around on foil seal. and i picked these five because thanks to the watchdog group american oversight, in all five of these states, republicans also prepared forged, faked documents sent to the government, proclaiming that actually, these are the electors, or the real electors from these states. and they were casting electoral college votes not for biden, but for trump. tell me if you notice something. these are the documents from georgia. in georgia, that's the real electoral vote document on the left, that's the forgery that was created by republicans on the right. now, let's do nevada. in nevada, that's the real one on the left. and that's the fake one on the right. here also is wisconsin, where we reported on their forgery last month. that's the real one on the left. fake one on the right. here's michigan, the real one on the left, and the forgery on the right. and lastly, here's arizona. the real electoral vote document on the left, and the fake one on the right. wasn't one state. wasn't three states where they did this. it was at least five states where we have now obtained forged documents created by republicans. and it's not like they, again, created these documents to, like, hold close to their chest and fantasize that this had been the real outcome. it's not like they created these documents just to keep as a keepsake. they sent them in to the government as if they were real documents. and it's not like they sent them in saying, hey, we know we're not the real electors because biden won here, but here's our names for posterity, here's our names for the records. but, no. they created these fake documents purporting to be the real certifications of them as electors. here it is in the forged document from georgia. look at the language. we, the undersigned, being the duly elected and qualified elects from the state of georgia, do hereby certify -- you are not the duly elected and qualified electors for the state of georgia. you are not. but that language, or language just like this is in all of these. you might have noticed something when i put them all up there, when i put the real documents up there. again, all the real certificates from the state, they're all unique, with their quirks, fancy or not fancy paper. decorations and seals. contrast that with the forged republican documents. look at them. they all match. exactly. same formatting, same font, same spacing. almost the exact same wording, all of them. now, you might remember on last night's show, we noted that the forged documents from michigan and wisconsin looked really similar. looked really alike. but the arizona one actually looked a little bit different. here's the amazing thing we discovered today about arizona. it looks like there were actually two sets of forged electoral college documents sent in by arizona republicans. there was the sort of hoopy different looking one that showed you last night with notary stamps all over it, obtained by politico.com. as of today, thanks to american oversight, we've obtained another one, also from arizona, also a forgery. a whole different set of republican impostors sent one in from arizona, and that matches exactly all of the other forged electoral votes from the six other states that we've found. excuse me, from the four other states that we've found. so this is kind of nuts, right? i mean, arizona alone. in arizona, they're so around the bend that two different sets of republicans sent the national archives and congress two different sets of forged, fake documents purporting to be the electoral college votes from the state of arizona. one of those forgeries was maybe, like, freelanced, let's get a notary to sign every page. that will make it look real. but the other one from arizona matches exactly in form, spacing, font, and language, exactly the forgeries sent in by republicans in at least four other states. in these five states, one of the two forgeries from arizona, and the four other states, the forged documents all match. this would therefore appear to be some kind of a coordinated effort, or at least someone gave republicans in all these states the same template for creating these false records. because they all have the same font, they all have the same language, they all have the same spacing, formatting. that doesn't happen by accident. who organized this in these five different states? we have learn a lot in the last year about all the things former president trump and his associates did to try to seize power, to try to falsify the election results and prevent the newly elected president from taking over. now we're starting to figure out that those efforts appear to include someone, somewhere coordinating an effort in at least five states to have republicans create and submit to the government forged documents in which they claim to be the real electors from their states when they were not. elects for trump, even though these were all states that biden won. this was not a clear and coordinated effort before, but now we know it was. who coordinated this effort? now, at the time this was happening, pennsylvania republicans, pennsylvania is not one of the states we've been talking about here, they actually put out a statement saying the trump campaign had asked them to create and certify, like, within the republican party, a republican set of electors for pennsylvania. as they explained in their press release at the time, though, the pennsylvania republicans didn't forge a document to make it look like they were the real electors. they created a new document that said they would become the elects if a court ever ordered that the republican side had actually won the election in pennsylvania. they didn't forge a document saying they believed they were, they were purporting to be the official electors from pennsylvania. they created a document that said if a court ever says republicans won in pennsylvania, then we'll be the electors. now, they say the trump campaign advised them to create that alternate slate. we're trying to track down the claims in that statement, if in fact the trump campaign was recruiting republicans to not just create contingent elects, in case it was reversed by courts, but if the trump campaign were commissioning them to forge official looking documents in multiple states where the wrong elects purported to be the real electors, well, we'll do our best to get to the bottom of that. but here's something else to note. after these forged documents were created and submitted to congress and the national archives, from these five states, where fake slates of electors said we're the electors from our states, five states, after that happened, at least one trump loyalist at the department of justice, the u.s. department of justice, was aware that republicans had done this in multiple states. now, one of the trump officials who has pled the fifth, invoked his fifth amendment rights against self-indiscrimination to avoid testifying to the january 6th investigation, his name is jeffrey clark. clark, he's the one trump reportedly tried to install as attorney general right at the end. best we can tell from public reporting, trump seemed to like the cut of his jib after jeff clark drafted a letter that he insisted must go out on justice department letterhead to some of the states that trump lost, including georgia. this letter that was reportedly drafted by jeff clark was addressed to the state government in georgia, it was reportedly going to be sent to multiple other states as well. and this letter falsely stated that the u.s. justice department was investigating serious credible claims of fraud in the election in that state. and that the state legislature should therefore consider holding back the state's electoral college votes. jeff clark drafted this letter from the u.s. justice department to go to georgia and other states. and because the rest of the justice department wouldn't sign off on it and do it, trump tried to install jeff clark as attorney general so jeff clark could send that letter and sign it attorney general. now, had that happened, think about it, had the u.s. justice department jumped in the way trump wanted to, the way jeff clark proposed, had the u.s. justice department told republican-led states in formal letters don't send in biden electors on advice from the u.s. justice department you better not do that, how do you think republican legislatures in those states would have acted? it's one thing to get, you know, an off the wall call from trump berating you. right? it's another thing for the u.s. justice department to formally advise you over the signature of the united states attorney general that you must not send in your electors because there's real problems with the vote in your state. how would republican legislatures have responded? we would be living in a different country right now. i'm not sure all of us would be living in the same country as each other anymore, had that letter gone out. that was just insanity. that would have been as radical as trump's plan to send the national guard to seize election information. to intervene to stop the administration of the election in that way. here's the thing, that insane draft letter written by jeff clark, which made trump want to install him as attorney general, that insane letter was apparently created last december. dates december 28th, 2020, that letter explicitly describes these forged slates of electors from multiple states. it says in the middle of the letter, the department believes that in georgia and several other states, both a slate of electors supporting biden and a separate slate of electors supporting trump gathered on december 14th at the proper location to cast their ballots and that both sets those ballots have been transmitted to washington, d.c. to be opened by vice president fence. pence. in fact, i don't know why the justice department believed that to be true, but that was correct. we now know, republicans in multiple states had sent in false assertions, forged documents claiming to be the electors for their states. that draft letter was dated december 28th. how did that guy, that trump guy at the justice department know that two weeks earlier, republicans in at least five states had in fact created these forged elector documents? did the trump justice department know about it, because they helped republicans in those states do it? we don't know. but somebody helped them do it, because they all filed the exact, same document in the same font, in the same spacing, with the exact same language that somebody helped them do it. we are working on figuring it out. i'll also just tell you one other thing about this. in a lot of these states, for whatever reason, the forged, fake elector votes, the documents that were sent in, they also, in addition to the assertion that these were the duly elected electors from these states, which was a lie, a lot of them also included a bunch of substitutions. meaning the people who were originally supposed to be trump electors from the state had trump won, the originals had their names dropped and they were replaced with other names, with other republicans who did sign these documents. so when the fake documents were created to try to pass these off as the state's electors, some of those who had been slated to be trump electors, weren't the people who signed them, they were replaced. they were substituted at the last second. in almost every state that did this, people who were originally supposed to be trump electors got replaced with others before the forged documents got sent in. why is that? we're trying to get to the bottom of that, too. but i can tell you that at first pass, that in at least one state, at least one of the republicans who was substituted for, whose name was dropped as an elector, one republican who was replaced by somebody else before that forged document was signed and sent in, that republican told us this evening that that substitution was deliberate. that person had their name taken off the list and replaced because that person did not want to be part of that effort to forge a slate of electors that was not the real electors from that state. one of the republican electors who was replaced in georgia. that person told us this tonight. quote, i knew the meeting was taking place, but i did not wish to attend. i did not wish to give my electoral vote knowing that president biden had already been certified by the state. that you'd hope would be the reaction by every republican approached to sign their name as if they were a real elector in a state that was not won by their candidate but in fact was won by the other guy. you would hope that would be the reaction from everyone approached to forge a document like this, and sign their name to it under circumstances like this. but in at least five states, we know they filled out a full slate of fake electors who were willing to put their names there. there was at least one republican we know of who balked who knew this forged elector thing was going ahead, who didn't want anything to do with this. there are at least a dozen other republicans who were also substituted out, for whatever reason they had their names replaced, and other republicans signed instead. we know at least one decision was a matter of conscience and patriotism. for one georgia republican. we will see if we can find out about the others. now, as we reported here in december, there is an open question in wisconsin as to whether the forgery there is going to be pursued by the state election board, or indeed by state prosecutors. those people in wisconsin said they were the state's electors and they were not, and they tried to pass themselves off that way. that would appear to be against the law in wisconsin. there is an open question as to whether or not that is going to be pursued as a criminal matter by the state election board. this is new. in michigan, the detroit news has just reported that the matter is part of an ongoing information by the attorney general's office. here's "the detroit news" new reporting, a spokeswoman for the michigan attorney general declined to discuss the legality of the republican certificate in detail, saying it was part of an ongoing probe. saying that is part of an information into election related matters. we're not in a position to share specifics as the review remains ongoing. so, in terms of whether or not the people who did this are individually going to get in trouble -- open question in at least two states. i don't know about the others. but this is a thing that happened, and apparently in five states at least. this is a new element we didn't previously understand about the way trump world maneuvered to try to falsify the election results to try to stop the transfer of power. it may have put in individual legal jeopardy all of the republicans who put their names on these forged documents in at least five states. now widening on, a little bit, the basis for all of these efforts they made to throw out the real results in the states were these, you know, false claims of fraud, which, frankly, they started hyping even before the election. they're still hyping them now. they're still hyping them now, both to justify new restrictions on the right to vote, and trying to subvert the reality of the last one. and that's a connection that in atlanta today, president biden argued loudly and clearly. >> here's how they plan to subvert the election. the georgia republican party, the state legislature, has now given itself the power to make it easier for partisan actors, their cronies, to remove local election officials. think about that. what happened the last election? the former president and allies pursued, threatened, and intimidated state and local election officials. election workers, ordinary citizens were subject to death threats. menacing phone calls. people stalking them in their homes. remember what the defeated former president said? quote, i just want to find 11,780 votes. pray god, he didn't say that part -- he didn't say count the votes. he said find votes. that he needed to win. he failed because of courageous officials, democrats, republicans, who did their duty and upheld the law. but with this new law in georgia, his loyalists will be placed in charge of state elections. what is that going to mean? well, the chances for chaos and subversion are even greater, as partisans seek the results they want no matter what the voters have said. no matter what the count. the votes of nearly 5 million georgians will be up for grabs if that law holds. it's not just here in georgia. last year alone, 19 states, not proposed, but enacted 34 laws attacking voting rights. there were nearly 400 additional bills, republican members of state legislatures tried to pass. and now republican legislators in several states have already announced plans to escalate the onslaught this year. the end game, to turn the world of voters into a mere suggestion. something states can respect or ignore. jim crow 2.0 is about two insidious things. voter suppression, and election subversion. it's no longer about who gets to vote. it's about making it harder to vote. it's about who gets to count the vote. and whether your vote counts at all. it's not hyperbole. this is a fact. >> voter suppression and election subversion. president biden speaking today in atlanta, trying to rally the country in support of strong new federal protections for voting rights and for the technique that cattic nonpartisan administration of election. he's rallying the country. he's speaking to the country today, but it's 100 americans in the united states senate who will make or break this issue. who are both the intended audience, and the instrument on which this tune has to play. whether or not it can be done, whether or not it can be changed, in terms of two conservative democrats who are blocking the possibility of this happening. we'll get into it next with senator amy klobuchar. stay with us. senator amy klobuchar. stay with us
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