0 >> that is all in on this wednesday night. the rachel maddow show is with what alex wagner, good evening alex. >> good evening, chris. my >> kids would bang on pots and pans after the start of the pandemic. ns after the start of th pandemic of the pandemic. >> it was very special and it felt like being something special across distance and it inspired things and i look back now and it >> we are a long way from that moment, my friend. thank you as always. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. on december 1st of 2020 a few weeks after the presidential election,fe a republican state representative in michigan got a very odd voice mail message. wery played a recording of this voice mail message on the show before. it was obtained by a small news service called the michigan information anded research service. but now, in light of new developments, this voice mail has taken on even more significance. >> hi, representative, my name is angela mccalum, i'm calling from trump campaign headquarters in washington, d.c., i know you're veryhi busy but i did wa personally reach out to you on behalf of the president as you've got an opportunity to be a crucial part of his re-election. we just wanted to make sure you knew how you could be helpful in ensuring that every american is representeden and can rest assud that their vote will be fairly andat correctly counted in this election. the united states constitution provides that the state legislators retain sole authority to designate the presidentialau electors. you do have the power to reclaim youre authority and send us a slateur of electors that will support president trump and vice president pence. >>id you do have the power to reclaim your authority and send us a slate of electors that will support president trump. you know,ec just a friendly reminder on behalf of the president that you do have that power. obviously, this voice mail was one part of the trump campaign's fake electors scheme. where they assembled trump electors that they intended to replace the actual electors in states biden won. last s month, we got reporting that it was rudy giuliani leading the effort for theor trp campaign but who else? well, angela mccalum, the trump campaign m staff who you heard making that phone call, she was subpoenaed by the january 6th investigation in novembersu and now that language from her call about urging state lawmakers to reclaim their authority, well, that language has now shown up in new subpoenas from the january 6th investigation. this is from a letter accompanied a subpoena to a guy named mike roman, quote, the select committee is in possession of communications reflecting your involvement in a coordinatedlv strategy to conta republican members of state legislatures in certain states that former president trump had lost andth urged them to reclai their authority, by sending an alternate slate of electors that would support former president trump. it appears that you helped directit the trump campaign staffers participating in this effort. and pathen, as you check out th footnotes in the letter, the investigators say they'refo basg these allegations on quote documents in the possession of the select committee. in other words, the material they have obtained from other witnesses or other subpoenas. and who is this mike roman guy who the january 6th investigation believes helped elect campaign, mike roman may have the perfect resume for false claims of voter fraud. he was behind what you might call the og republican stolen election narrative. do you remember this video? back in 2010, the 80 second video clip of a couple of guys hanging outside a philadelphia polling chase, wall to wall nonstop on a fox news channel, two guys outside a philly polling place, but once fed through the fox news outrage machine,ro it became evidence oa massiveme campaign of voter intimidation by radical black activists that was being covered up by the obama justice department. elections were being stolen for obama and his democrats through shameless voter intimidation tactics. that video, the video that launched a thousand fox news careers, that video came from this guy mike roman and that kind of achievement will get you far in today's republican party. by the 2020 election, it really came full circle for mike roman, he was on the trump campaign poll watching team, spending election day accusing democrats of stealing the election, using evidence photos and videos, of black voters in philadelphia. and after that, the january 6th investigation believes mike roman went on to help direct the trump campaign's fake elector scheme. he is one of several people subpoenaed this week in connection with that scheme, as the investigation appears to be settling, building an org chart how the plot was carried out and the investigation appears to be making progress on other fronts as well. today president biden rejected donald trump'sto attempts to blk the investigation from getting visitor logs from the trump white house. hevi directed the national archives to hand over those logs within 15 days. and honestly, trump and his allies arene acting a little rattled. at the january 6th investigation subpoenas more and more people tied to the fake electors plot, a plot that rudy giuliani reportedly ran and amid reporting that rudy giuliani may be considering actually talking toon investigators, giuliani to toto the right wing pro-trump ns max channel last night to rant about how the investigation is illegal and can't subpoena anybody. he also spent some time peddling a brand new conspiracy theory that hillary clinton spied on the trump white house. heard something about e this, if you ever dip yr toe into the right wing immediato ecosystem. donald trump himself has put out no fewer than five increasingly irate statements for it. i'm not going to deconstruct the whole theory right here but go to maddow blog to see it. and to spy on the white house, hillary clinton would have needed a time machine becauseho the evidence waived around by trump and giuliani and company, it happened before trump was president. with time machines. ipr digress. how many, no matter how many new shiny objects donald trump and his allies throw out to shift the attention to some other imagined scandal they cannot change the fact that the january 6thch investigation is moving steadily ahead. and they can't change the fact that the january 6th investigation has already amassed so much damning evidence.uc today, the "washington post" published a feature on just one strand ofis that evidence. the thousands of text messages the januarye. 6th investigation obtained from key players around trump on january 6th, and in the days and 6 weeks leading up to . quote, thousands of frantic ephemeral text messages that might have otherwise been lost to history are now key to piecingst together the most viv and comprehensive picture to date of the events surrounding the chaos of thete capitol. texts that go all the way back to the day after the election. like this one, to trump's chief of staff, from energy secretary rick perry, previewing what would have become one of the attempted strategies to overturn the election, quote, here is an aggressiveti strategy, why can' georgia, north carolina, opennsylvania, and other republican-controlled state houses declare this as bs and just send their own electors to vote, and have it go to the supreme court? okay, now, rick perry. and this is one to trump's chief of staff from an unidentified memberto of the far right house leading caucus just a few days beforee january 6th, quote. if potus allows this to occur, we're driving a stake in the heartg of the federal republic. and texts like those are just the beginning. the post reports quote, the committee so far has publicly revealed only a sliver of the thousandsre of text messages it so far.ived joining us now is the lead author on that piece, "washington post" congressional correspondent jacqueline alameny and as of today she is also an msnbc contributor. thank you for being here. congratulations. come into the family. let's talk about these text messages. so you know that the committee has only reviewed a sliver of the thousands of text messages, how many of those text messages do you believe were provided by former chief of staff mark meadows? >> yeah, alex, it's a good question. mark meadows has certainly provided the majority of the text messages that the committee has receivedte so far. we believe that number is upwards of 7,000 but meadows himself provided 4,000 personal text messages, most of which were actually not reviewed by the former president trump's legal team since they were retrieved from a personal device. meadows text messages are really viewed by the select committee investigating the january 6th insurrection, asar sort of a connective tissue that is really pulling all of the disparate threads about the planning leadingte up to and on january h all together. these text messages especially throughout the course of our reporting that weou pulled together every text that the committee so far publicly released is really helping to paint a more vivid picture of what happened, especially since there isat a champ between publ statement -- chasm between public statements made between gop lawmakers and fox news hosts versuset the concern and the pac that was communicated and put directly into markom meadows re inbox. >> the release of thect tranchef correspondence, it is like a serialized drama. how is the in the deciding which texts to release publicly and when tong release them? i mean do we havey a sense tha they're holding on to texts that mayin be even more explosive in terms of public consumption? >> absolutely. ite think the committee is tryi to ensure that they have the most blockbuster public hearings possible, and that means holding back some of these text messages. that being m said, the trail of bread crumbs they have left so far, in releasing some of meadows' text messages with people like jim jordan, sean hannity, and as we reported this morning, president and founder of james o'keefe, have been fairly juicy and they have needed to release those in order to makene a persuasive argumento hold mark meadows in contempt. a lot of thoseld messages were released in the context report that the committee put out a few months ago. we're still waiting on whether or not the d.o.j. isnt going to ultimately take up that contempt referral. but there's a fine line, a sort of straddling to apply public pressure to get peoplein like sn hannityle to cooperate voluntarily, with the committee. versus holding back some of these messages, and trying to make thees splashiest public presentations possible to draw the american public in. >> well, as of yet, some of the things we have are splashy and explosive, and drawing the american public in. the text message sent to mark meadows by rick perry, a day after the election, which is essentially like a strategy, an aggressive strategy, into the whole perry, misspelled, with the strategyel in texas, house legs laters in texas, sending their ownin electors that was t plan as laid out and executed, right? and yesterday we find out that the committee issued subpoenas to two members of the trump campaign, who had a role in directing that scheme. i guess i wonder whether you think the committee is ahead of the public, the public reporting we have, on that aspect of the campaign, that effectively they know a lot more about what transpired than we have digested insp the press as yet? >> i think they do. i think not to toot our own horn, we have done a good job of getting out ahead of a lot of the stories before the committee was previously aware of them, but when it comes to the information that they've gathered so far, theto volume o these text messages, documents, andth records, and depositions that they've collected, makes this such that there is inevitably going to be some new big reveals. i think what is important to notes about these text,k other than the content and some of these crazier and unexpected reactions to things, these frantic ephemeral concerns that were raised that would have otherwise been lost to history, its f-not for being realized in the text message, is the forensic analysis that i believe committee investigators can do of the social networking. obviously, these text messages show the direct pipeline between the white house and fox news, andt they also show some of th relationships that were more personal t than potentially we realize. for example, like the fact that mark meadows had a text can relationship with jamesws o'kee, sola that is also helping piece together a lot of these various schemes that were sort of all concurrentlysc going on. >> it's the first kind of beginning of a fully fleshed out org chart of the trump universe and the power grid, if you will. irs got to ask about the news today, that the biden white house is effectively clearing the committee to get access to the trump visitor, the white house visitor logs. what could be in those that might not be in the texts and we've ommunications that been privy to thus far? >> that is a very good question, and it is t actually, you know, i'm not all that certain that we're going to get that much from these logs just yet because as the reporting has born out in the last few week, we know this was a president who subverted, ignored and failed to follow most procedures, and it's unclear if these white house visitors logs were meticulously and accurately kept, or if the president was sort ofly again, sort of sneaking past these processes that were implemented for a reason, to document and keep, paint the most comprehensive picture of histore in order for the american public toto look back and to be able t potentially know who was visiting with the president at this crucial juncture in our democracy, but it's unclear if trump wasde doing that. on the other side of the coin here, any names that are on there of people going in and out of the white house that wepl dot already know of will be extremely helpful. we know in those final weeks that the president was trying to overturn thesi results of the election, there were fringe figures like michael flynn, michael lindell, sidney powell going in and out of the oval, and the white house residence, and i think that at this point, any documentse, that the commite can get their hands on is a win. >> yes, the president was flushing records down the white house toilet and who knows what happened to the visitor logs. we will wait on the information, jackie, "washington post" congressional correspondent and nowck an msnbc contributor, thas for joining us tonight. >> thanks,t alex. next, we have some breaking news, from the white house, wherebr one official now says that russia is actually sending troops to ukraine's border, not withdrawing them. o a border, not withdrawing them i'm jonathan lawson here to tell you about life insurance through the colonial penn program. if you're age 50 to 85, and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. what are the three ps? 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