we start tonight with a late breaking news of special counsel jack smith subpoenaed former president donald trump s former chief of staff mark meadows as part of smith s investigation into trump and his role in the january 6th insurrection. i should say this as according to a single source, and it s being reported by cnn, msnbc has not yet independently confirmed this reporting. cnn reports tonight that meadows received a subpoena for a sometime in january. this comes just one week after we learned the special counsel smith subpoenaed trump s former vice president mike pence. clearly, things are heating up. beyond the fact that subpoena of the former presidents chief of staff is a huge deal on its own, mark meadows in particular is quite a potential witness. meadows was involved in the infamous phone call between trump and georgia secretary of state brian rat in which he pressured raffensperger to find 11,780 votes. meadows was in the over office with trump for a lot of t
at the nation s capital, the fever will break and it will get better. after they lose the midterms, it has to get better. but the fact is, it s not getting better. so i m happy to see that democratic election officials and democratic officeholders are pushing back. but i think that we need to be very realistic about the threats that we face. they are persistent, they re escalating, and they are coming from one side of the aisle. what about, i mean, enforcing some of these? there is a question of how you enforce them, like benson s legislation making it a crime to knowingly spread misinformation about elections, is it enforceable? then there is a counter argument that the more you punish folks like this, the more a kind of almost the more it makes them dig in their heels, the more, at least when you talk about misinformation on social media, you try and sensor it, you try and prevent it from spreading and the virus finds its way to another host. i mean, when we talk about efficacy,
president and when they lost fair and square they started asking themselves why did we lose? and instead of looking in the mirror, again, they started blaming everybody except themselves, and especially they started blaming facebook, saying you ve allowed all this disinformation, you allowed lies about hillary clinton. and the only option to survive politically is to control the means of communication that we no longer control, which is the internet. that was the whole point of the internet was to liberate us from not having to be manipulated and controlled by centralized authority and when they saw that allowing that freedom jeopardizes their political interest, the only conclusion that they reached was, we can t allow that anymore. we can t allow this freedom. we need to control it. we need to silence it, we need to sensor it, and through the trump years, it just escalated and they re like this authoritarian faction now that generally believes that censorship is in the public good.
and to redact or delete or black out sensitive information that they don t want anyone to see? this is an important distinction between kenneth starr, who was an independent counsel, had nothing to do with janet reno, who was the supervisor the attorney general at the time. he could write whatever he wanted in his report. robert mueller is an employee of the department of justice. he is a subordinate of attorney general barr who is a subordinate of president trump. the president has every right to look at this not only just to look at it before it goes out, but to sensor it. because he is in charge of the department of justice. that may be a political problem. as a legal matter, this is something that the department of justice has the authority to do and the department of justice is part of the trump administration. to jeffrey s point, sometimes
changing winds around that? i m having trouble figuring out if they understand the graty g and depth of going on and that they believe they have to do anything to fix it? i think they re becoming aware but i don t think they ve grasped the power of it. zuckerberg created this amazing platform for people to share ideas and it was incredible, billions of people on it but the potential for ill use, for fake news, for misleading people i don t think people were fully aware of but again i don t want to sensor it, i don t think we want the government telling twitter or facebook what they can do, that would be a big mistake. the companies have to be more responsible and at least allow people to know the source of the information but we as consumers have to be better about separating see, we haven t caught up. in a newspaper you pick it up and say well, in the back of your mind they re editors, they re fact checkers, and we ve