preservation of records, the presidential records act is part of that. and when you go into the government on day one, you are told you can t use other cellphones, you have to use only your phone for official work, only your official email. there is a whole suite of things you are told and it is impossible that trump wasn t told those things. he had to have been told. so that makes a criminal investigation of this by the justice department more likely. this is an easier thing than some of the other stuff that is a piece with all the missing documents story. and i want to turn to the other big story, the national archives finding classified documents. walk us through where things stand now. so trump had taken with him a bunch of boxes from the residence down to mar-a-lago as was reported earlier this week. and when those boxes arrived back at the national archives,
folks from those communities so it s not that black people are more susceptible. it s the fact that black people have historically been done wrong by the u.s. government so it s not too far a leap to believe that the government would not just sort of subsidize but encourage drug usage because there is a fairly healthy belief in some sectors of black communities that the government is invested in black failure and in destroying the black community and that could be through drugs, that could be through the dissolution of black families, through a number of means. so that s why i think this story got picked up so quickly, even though it was very easily verified in other ways. look, there s a reason that snowfall on fx is that popular, right? lots of people believe this is how this stuff happened. clint, one of the things that we talked about a lot that i don t think is discussed enough today was misinformation in the 2020 election and specifically how russia engaged in misinformation. n
in the cities certainly with young voters, with african-american voters, he continues to be very popular with hispanic voters and young democratic base voters, that will be a message that the democrats must define this election around. what biden has done on the economy is historic. they have created i think over 6.5 million jobs already into year one. and with the covid pandemic slowly but surely receding into the background, this is the opportunity i think for them to get that messaging in place going in to the string and summer to set the stage to try to hold on to these majorities in november because it is a very good story to tell the american voter. tim, in light of the picture that he paints there, have republicans self inflicted wounds calling what happened on january 6 legitimate political discourse for example provided a bigger opening for dems going into midterms?
i ve got here today. i m going to start with you, tara, because the genesis of this story, and i think this is really key. the genesis of this biden pays for crack pipes story is from the washington free beacon. it is a conservative republican leaning newspaper outlet. what is the motivation for conservatives and republicans to promote these kinds of stories and this kind of misinformation in a news outlet? thanks for having me, jason. i think you went to me first because i m at your alma mater. there s that too. listen, this is part of the playbook, right? republicans understand how to gin up their base. they know that certain buzz words, certain cultural issues, certain issues around race, because let s be honest here, they chose the term crack pipe because i m sure that in those circles, that is a euphemism for urban, black crime. this is the way that people
address this story as it battles a wave of harmful misinformation and conspiracies recently, ones that hit on topics from covid to the 2020 election and now funding. we know from the updated terrorism bulletin that our heightened threat environment is due to factors including an online environment filled with misleading narratives and conspiracy theories so while this crack pipe misinformation can hurt biden politically, false stories like it pose huge national security implication as well and that s where we begin. dr. carter is an associate of political science at howard university. we have a senior advisor to the lincoln project. and clint watts, former consultant to the fbi s counterterrorism division and now a distinguished research fellow at the foreign policy research institute and an msnbc national security analyst. what a bunch of fantastic names