and we start the fourth hour of morning joe with the january 6 select committee holding the final public hearing before the july 4th recess and there were plenty of fireworks and a lot of drama. top officials from the justice department described then president donald trump s relentless obsessive efforts to persuade doj officials to join him in a plat to overturn the 2020 election results by just saying the election was corrupt and essentially act as an extension of his campaign. riveting testimony came from trump s former acting attorney general jeffrey rosen. his deputy richard donahue and steven engel. how often did president trump contact you or the department to push allegations of election fraud? so, between december 23rd and january 3rd, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day. so the common element of all of this was the president expressing his dissatisfaction that the justice department in his view had not done enough to investiga
this is allegedly, he said, no, i don t need a ride, i need ammunition. i ask him did you really say that and he said it happened and that united states and other countries put out extensive offers including offers of planes and helicopters to evacuate him and his family. but that he declined. wow, nbc news chief foreign correspondent richard engle, thank you very much. and we ll note that nbc universal news group is the media partner for the aspen ideas festival. and still ahead on morning joe, the surfside condo collapse one year later. today the first lady will lead a service to remember the victims of that disaster. as survivors are still struggling over what happened. we ll get a live report from florida straight ahead. plus, with women across country bracing for a supreme court decision on roe v. wade,
have nearly encircled it. let s bring in nbc news foreign correspondent richard engle who just sat down with ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy. it was part of a discussion for the aspen idea festival. richard, what did he tell you. we spoke for a long time. we sat down in his office here in kyiv for about 40 minutes. and this entire interview is going to run at you mentioned next week at aspen ideas festival. but there are certain elements of it that are newsworthy and we re just going to go with them right now. and he described the situation as critical. it is not just critical out in the east, also it is critical in the south and we ve heard president zelenskyy say that he needs more weapons. that he needs more weapons from the united states, and other countries. we ve heard him say that before but he emphasized he needs a lot more weapons. that right now they are outgunned 10 to 1.
he was invited to speak at the aspen idea festival, a roomful of academics waited to hear his wisdom. during the question and answer session one of them daredid to k the most basic question of all, how are we defining racism? you would think that ibram x. kendi would be ready for that question but it wasn t. you talk aboutd the defining racism, and i must have missed it because it s that s possible. i didn t hear one, your personal definition, is that when he would offer us? racism, i would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantially aided by racist ideas. [laughs] short. a collection of racist policies that lead to racial r inequities that are substantiated by racist
having good weeks. whether this will be responsive over the long haul, we don t know. dana: anybody talking in aspen about this move to the left by the democratic party in these debates in particular on healthcare and immigration? concerns that you heard? well, i watched the debate with a group of attendees to the aspen idea festival. as you might expect, they weren t exactly right of center, by and large. but even they showed, oh my god, look at that. some of these conversations spun off into the ether, particularly some of the lesser by being as far left as they could. there s a lot of angst. i m going to write about it this week. you look at the transcripts of those, of the debate, it is extreme rhetoric. it s only gonna, i think, get worse. dana: karl, i have to ask