candidate seemed to refusal in the specter of violence that resulted from his ambition to cling the power. we will explore how the false claim of a stolen election by the twice-impeached expresident and his party's refusal to knock down that lie has infected our body politic. we will talk to two reporters that reveal the documents, memos and private conversations behind what amounts to a coup plot by the expresident. we will also speak to georgia's secretary of state, brad raffensperger who was famously harassed by donald trump just days before the insurrection and asked to find enough votes to overturn the will of the voters of georgia. we will also speak to someone who has sought to protect their country from donald trump and who is now trying to protect the country from another trump-like term, democratic congressman adam schiff. but we begin with that fresh evidence remerging in the also few days that shows just how close this country came, potentially, to a second trump term despite a wholesale rejection of him by the voters of this country in the 2020 election. we learned yesterday that trump's campaign staff knew back in november that there was no voter fraud, none, in the 2020 election. the campaign continued to spout election conspiracies. we also learned thanks to the new book "peril" of a memo written by a lawyer named john eastman that january 6th select committee member adam kinzinger described this way, saying it outlines a coup, a multistep plan for pence to throw out the vote count from seven states and disenfranchise those voters on january 6th. penguins explored his options, seriously explored them in stopping or delaying certification. and how other republicans went along with it, too, even though they all knew it was lie, that the election hadn't been stolen and there was no fraud. the authors report that senators mike lee and lindsey graham looked into, explored donald trump's fraud claims. they, too, found them to be baseless. but they stayed silent as those lies rat callized the republican base of voters. all of that happening while general mark milley resorted to drastic measures himself to protect the country from donald trump. more than nine months after the insurrection, there are signs everywhere that the threat to this country has not passed. from the domestic terror threat inextricably tied to election fraud conspiracy theories and those who believe them to a party deeply commitmented to disenfranchising voters in service to the big lie of voter fraud in order the stay in power and a right wing media intent on radicalizing people on disinformation on all of these fronts. watch. >> the point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels and anyone who does not like joe biden and make them leave immediately. it is a takeover by the u.s. military. the ring leaders for the riot go agree especially if they are working free, but the people who defense joe biden's friends are in jail. >> the real threat to our future is biden, and the well heeled powerful force who is want us to lose sight what have made america great in the first place. it is not our diversity. it's our freedom. >> as loupert and costa note at the ends of their book, quote, the peril remains. joining us robert costa and bob woodward, the coauthors of the book we have been talking about for many days now, "peril". it is nice to get to talk to you. bob woodward, first to you on what i think is pretty extraordinary. excerpts started leaking in your newspaper about a week ago. no one has rebutted or refuted some of the biggest bombshells, namely that mark milley used a back channel to protect our country from war. >> yes. i think what our discovery, which frankly surprised us, that the existence of trump in the presidency was not just a domestic crisis, but it was a national security crisis. and general milley ( chairman of the joint chiefs saw the intelligence four days before the election. so this is october 30th of last year. the intelligence showed that the chinese thought we were going to attack them. this is the worst moment for a military person because the miscommunication really is the seed of war. and so milley, in a crisis mode, used his top concrete back channel with the head of the chinese military and said to him, look, we are not going to attack you. that's preposterous. and he said, if we are going to attack you, i will be calling you. i will call you. well, that didn't mean he's going to tip him off. it meant that there would be an environment of crisis, that within the military, these two military leaders would be talking. and he said to general li, look, this is not one of those times that's a crisis. we are not going to attack you. and persuaded him, this is a moment where general milley is trying desperately to persuade the chinese. because general li would talk right directly to president xi. that this is not going to happen. and it's what in the military they call deconfliction. let's calm everybody down. and it was successful. as general li said to him, okay, i'm going to take your word for that. five-year relationship. they were able to lower the temp significantly. and for people to say that milley somehow was treasonous in doing this, you look at the full story, as we outline in the book, and that's preposterous. what milley is trying to do, this is a moment, in a moment where he has a practical problem. how do i protect the country? how do i deal quickly with the chinese? >> bob woodward, i want to -- i want to really understand what you are reporting about, why. you lay out two rationales. one, that he thought donald trump could and would wag the dog. and two, that he also believed unrelated that he was unfit, that he was impulsive and can mental decline. i want to read from the book, quote, milley witnessed up close how trump was routinely impulsive and unpredictable making matters even more dire. milley was certain trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election with trump now all but manic screaming at officials and constructing his alternate reality about endless election conspiracies. you never know what the president's trigger point is, milley told senior staff. when might conditions come together to cause a president to order military action? what you detail is a chairman of the joint chiefs who your writing describes trump as a threat to the country. is that how milley saw and sees donald trump? >> certainly. and the chinese part of this -- this all happened in one day, on january 8th, two days after the insurrection, which, of course has set washington and the country, and it turns out, the world on edge. what is going on in america? and the chinese, general li asks -- milley said, are you going to collapse? and milley realizes that the chinese military have gone on alert, as have the russians, as have the iranians. at the same time. this is one of those almost shakespearean moments. there is the convergent problem of nancy pelosi, the speaker of the house, calling milley. and we have a transcript this call in the book. i mean, you ought to -- maybe want to read some of that. extraordinary. the speaker of the house is telling milley, we need guarantee has the president will not launch nuclear represents. and milley is saying, we have procedures. and the procedures should be followed. but then he realizes pelosi has a point. that a president, with all the authority as commander in chief, could go rogue. and so he calls the people from the war room and the pentagon into his office and goes around the room and says, i need to be involved in this. there can be no ambiguity. call me first. and he does what secretary of defense james schlesinger did in 1974, with nixon, who was also deemed unstable. >> that transcript, bob costa, with speaker pelosi and general milley s one of the most extraordinary pieces of book, chock full of scoops. we shared it with our viewers as soon as it was reported by your news outlet and others. what is extraordinary about it. i am going the read about the meeting that bob is describing. and robert costa, what i want to understand from you on the other side this is where are the bob corker's who at the beginning of trump's presidency sought to limit the nuclear authorities of a president? because he saw some of the same things, it would appear. let me read what you guys write in this section that bob described. page 274. politically began to draft a public memo to the military, january 6th was a direct assault. on january 20th, 2021. president-elect biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th commander in chief. it was not traditionally the job of the chairman to make such declarations. milley took a draft to a confidential tank meeting at the pentagon. he handed out copies to the joint chiefs. you don't have to sign it, he said, i can sign it by myself or myself as chairman on behalf of the chiefs or we can all sign it. take a look and tell me what you think. they all read it, and all said they would sign the letter. robert costa. take me through the significance of that. and if you are surprised at the republican party, in its current formation's reaction was to call for milley to be court-martialled or fired. >> these are intertwined stories. that military moment is also related in some ways to the political moment on capitol hill. all of these players in those different sectors of the american system are watching the presidency, especially the presidency under donald trump, and wondering if this office, this institution, had become too powerful. is it presidency even able to be contained in january of 2021 or perhaps today? is it an office that now has too much power, when it comes the military? they can bypass procedures, perhaps. it's a little murky at times about how much a commander in chief can directly order something to happen without a discussion taking place. and on the political level, leaders in congress could step up on different fronts. but if a president wants to stoke a different kind of political action maybe something to even not certify an election what are the powers -- in this day and age the way the norms are shattered and the constitution altered what are the ways to contain a presidency that has become so powerful. that was a theme running through our reporting throughout the last year as we hunkered down and tried to come up with answers. >> robert costa, we called you, everybody called on you during breaking news headlines. the other thread that ran through trump's presidency was the feebleness by republicans to call out what would be an anti-traditional u.s. foreign policy posture. that thread runs throughout his presidency. and they also saw nothing about the claims of fraud having any merit. and nothing of them said anything. did any of them have guilt over what took place on january 6th. >> there is a moment from '74 woodward and i talked about, is when barry goldwater of arizona went to nixon and other republicans on capitol hill and said in shorthand, it's over, president nixon. watergate has consumed the presidency and it is time for you perhaps to think about resigning, think about going. goldwater confronted nixon, the titan of conservatism at the time, who was the nominee in '64. now in 2021, you have someone like senator graham who we show in the book based on the reporting knew it was all fraud about the claims of election fraud. but he is also asking president trump to rehabilitate himself politically, come back, carry the republican party on your shoulders. there is such little political capital and sometimes even will among top republicans to speak out against president trump, to counter him in any way. >> bob woodward, i want to come back to something particularly haunting in the book. on page 416, there is this passage "had january 6th -- >> sounds like you really read it. >> i did read it. i have read all of your books. i have to say, i love this collaboration with robert costa. but i want to ask you about this, i want to ask you what you think milley means here. >> had january 6th been a dress rehearsal. quote, what you might have seen might have been a precursor to something down the road. what is he talking about? >> milley is talking about history. he knows it well that -- 1905 was the first russian revolution. it did not succeed. and lenin himself said, during the successful 1917 revolution -- so this is 12 years later -- oh, 1905 was a dress rehearsal for what was successful. and as you so well know, 30, 40% of the people in the country believe the election was stolen from trump, one way or another seem to be supporting him. that -- if, again, you compare with it nixon -- i am sorry to be a prisoner of that experience. after nixon resigned, he did not go out and campaign. he did not go out and say, i'm going to run again. he did just the opposite. in the case of trump, he's out there campaigning. bob costa, to his credit, listens to those of rallies. and people in our business are overlooking these rallies. may i ask costa -- he knows this cold because he looked at the trump rallies in most recent months. >> go ahead. >> wood ward and i often talk about the trump rallies don't get much attention these days. that's understandable. he's not a president anymore. but when you listen to some of the recent rallies trump has held, you see this almost warlike language. he takes the language of winston churchill, actually, never surrender, never give up, never give in, whipping up thousands of people across the country at different interval this is summer and spring. and you see this person, this former president, really keeping those core supporters, those core voters with him. as bob and i talked about five, six years ago, when we first started covering then candidate trump, you have to take this seriously. look at what happened on january 6th. look at what happened in this country over the past five years. to turn away is the wrong thing. we have to keep reporting on this story and others to keep our eyes on where things are going in terms of power, the constitution, and politics. >> i completely agree with you. and i think that the story of what has happened since his defeat is the gravest threat to the country. my old boss called this current domestic terror threat akin to the threat we faced on september 11th. i wanted to ask you both about something that i think geraldo said to sean hannity, that if nixon had had fox news he never would have faced impeachment or been forced to resign. do you agree with that, bob woodward? >> well, that's -- if i may say, that's pure speculation. >> fair. >> because we had eight or nine months to work on this book and get faction and do the reporting from witnesses, participants, documents, transcripts, we avoid the speculation. fox news exists now, and is one of former president trump's pillars of support. it's very real. you know, if something like that had existed in 1974, maybe it would have been different but here's the reality. in the case of nixon, he had all these secret tape recordings. and if you listen to the secret tape recordings which now have almost all been released, it's stunning, the criminality, the indifference to the people on the part of nixon. and when those tapes came out, the republican party turned against nixon -- >> right. >> -- and said, this is unacceptable. so it's a very different political environment now. >> i mean, i think that is exactly right. and, bob costa, the difference is, there's been smoking gun after smoking gun produced by journalists, produced by congressional impeachment inquiries, produced by testimony from marie yovanovich, to capitol hill, to the videos we all saw with our own eyes and the horrors of that hand-to-hand combat as described by the officers on january 6th. and i wonder when you got to the ends of this reporting assignment. it has incredible report being the current administration, the current president. i checked in with senior official and i asked what should i ask them about the reporting? they said, the stunning reporting is about how close we came. i wonder if you could respond to -- i listen to a number of those rallies. i don't play them on this show, but what is interesting to me what makes the audience react. what maids them clap at defiance when they have babies in hospitals and they are dying of covid. what makes them clap about abuse of election officials, where does that excitement for the violation of the rules of law and incitement to voters come from? >> it's visceral. it's driven by grievance. it's powerful. following bob woodward's method we sat down with people hours on en, days on end, very quietly. some of the top republicans in the country, their advisers. what was so noticeable in some of these conversation is when they talk about the voters in the republican party, the republicans in washington, they really feel like when they are candid and they are kind of pouring themselves out is that they are not in control. it's the voters now in the republican party who are in control in almost every way. you hear conversations in dc, why aren't this person speaking out or this congressman saying something? when you really talk to some of these congressmen and senators they don't feel like they can do much. it is the voters in the crowds at the trump rallies. president trump himself is almost not driving a lot of this. it almost seems organic to many republicans the way the country's currents are changing so dramatically and how each one of the parties are averse to hear any messages if it is tinted with the object sit party in any way. when we come back, more with the authors of "peril". we will ask if dan quayle saved democracy. plus the attempt to curve republican overreach in the last administration. adam schiff will join us and talk about the checks and balances system. later in the program, one of the principals who stood up against trump's coup attempt is our get, georgia's secretary of state brad rachsberger walks the line protecting the votes in his state. and why is georgia again facing a perilous moment? all those stories and more when "deadline: white house" continues after a quick break. don't go anywhere. k break. don't go anywhere. sgt. houston never expected this to happen. or that her grandpa's dog tags would be left behind. but that one call got her a tow and rental... ...paid her claim... ...and we even pulled a few strings. making it easy to make things right: that's what we're made for. usaa. what you're made of, we're made for. get a quote today. trading isn't just a hobby. it's your future. so you don't lose sight of the big picture, even when you're focused on what's happening right now. and thinkorswim trading™ is right there with you. to help you become a smarter investor. with an 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quayle may have played an outsized role in protecting our democracy. in "peril," woodward and costa report on a phone call between quayle and pence as pence seriously considered delaying or stopping the certification of the 2020 election results. trump's efforts to control pence was a dark fantasy. quayle believed, and could precipitate a constitutional crisis. mike, you have no flexibility, none, zero, forget it. put it away. i know, that's what i have been telling trump, pence says, and he really thinks. other guys think i have got this power. quayle interrupts, just don't, just stop. pence pressed again. it was easy for quayle to make a blanket statement from political winter. he wanted to know whether there was a glimmer of light legally or constitutionally to perhaps put a pause on the certification if there were ongoing court cases and legal challenges. quote, forget, quayle repeated again. we are back with bob woodward and robert costa. whether intentional or not i don't know whether there was any reporting that made pence look so horrible, so pa threat knick the lens of history and quayle so valiant. tell me more about this interaction. >> we approached this project as reporters trying to tell the story. what really happened. and the pence story in our view had not been fully told. we wanted to cast our net as widely as possible about that process. in the course of reporting, we found out one of the calls vice president pence made during the navigation of the pressure campaign from president trump and getting advice and counsel from his lawyers and his political advisors, was with former vice president quayle. these are two men who are not just two vice presidents. but they are two men from indiana, two republicans, conservatives. and so it was a conversation on that level. quayle stood there on january 6th, 1993, when clinton and gore had won the '92 election. he had to certify the clinton/gore victory in 1993. he had been through the experience in such a way that almost no one else could talk with pence about. that conversation was frank. based on our reporting, quayle telling vice president pence you can't do this, there is no fraud out there, don't start messing around with the constitution. eventually pence decides not to be tempted by president trump who did tempt him. that call happened before the january 5th meeting in the oval office where president trump approaches vice president pence and says, wouldn't it be cool to have the power to not certify the election, wouldn't you want to have that power if the people out there, the trump voters wanted you to have it, wouldn't it be great to push to it the house? you see in that scene in the book. the pence scenes are many. you see pence in a sense going back to that quayle conversation, the same arguments laid out by quayle and pence's lawyers and advadvisors. you only have the constitutional duty to count the votes. just count the votes. >> robert, one of the most iconic pieces of reporting from your last book is the taped conversation with donald trump about just how much he really did know about covid, that he knew it was deadly, that he knew that very early on, and he proceeded to lie to the country. my question is, are there tapes from the interviews in this book? and would you consider releasing any of them? >> well, from our interviews, certainly there are tapes. we tried to tape all interviews. obviously, with the permission of the person we are interviewing, doing it on deep background, which means very clearly we are going to use the information, but not say where it came from. so we are protecting all of our sources on this. but happily, we worked in an environment where bob costa and i shared everything. if costa would do an interview, it would be taped, we would have it transcribed. i would listen to it. my wife, elsa, who you know was a "washington post" reporter and a staff writer for "the new yorker," acted as kind of super editor and would go through some of these tapes. our assistant, claire mcmullen, would do the same. so we had kinds of four people checking what happened and putting it together. and it gave us, as the editor of the "washington post" now, sally busby, knows, and our editor at simon & schuster knows, this is as close as you can get as outsiders to what we call the best obtainable truth, version of the truth. and i think we've done that here. and at the same time, if you go -- everyone says go to 100,000 feet. if you go to 100,000 feet on this, the possibility of war with china was real. the possibility of trump using nuclear weapons, we think not as he was just going to order a strike, but there could be some incident this the south china sea or around taiwan. and all of a sudden, somebody lights that match on one side or another. trump's understanding of how wars get started and how you can strike a number of points which we document -- trump was very interested. maybe we should strike iran. and milley and the others kept telling him, if you strike iran, that could lead to a major war. so there's a whole environment of, full, peril, that is going on. and then there's the whole pence story, which really called into question or could have called into question the legitimacy of the presidency. >> it was a collaboration that we have been waiting for. it lives up to all of our hopes and expectations. next time you are here, i am going to ask you for a day in your writing life together. the new book is "peril." it's stunning. bob woodward, and robert costa, thank you both so much for taking this big chunk of time to talk to us today. i am grateful. up next for us, how to make sure the country is prepared for should it happen to deal with another attempted coup. congressmanned a 578 chiffon protecting democracy from more than just one donald trump. that's next. me, at the magical everly estate, landscaper larry and his trusty crew... were delayed when the new kid totaled his truck. 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repair. is your family ready for an emergency? you can prepare by mapping out two ways to escape your home, creating a supply kit, and including your whole family in practice drills. for help creating an emergency plan, visit safetyactioncenter.pge.com a little preparation will make you and your family safer in an emergency. a week's worth of food and water, radio, flashlight, batteries and first aid kit are a good start to learn more, visit safetyactioncenter.pge.com throughout the hour, we have been discussing what gone congressman adam kinzinger describes as a blue print for a coup laid out by donald trump, his allies and members of his administration in the waning days of his presidency as his election loss became apparent and his desperation to remain in power by all means seeped out into public view. trump's legacy is hardly a black mark, instead it is a road map for others like trump or worse. ed a an schiff writes this for nbc saying, quote, it turns out the norms that made our system of checks and balances work so well could be violated with near impunity providing one condition was present, that one of america's two great parties put the interests of a president would have all other considerations. the last time a president engaged in such abuses of office during richard nixon's tenure, the forces of fashionalism were less boat skpent the devotion to our institutions was stronger. that devotion was strong enough, in fact, to force nixon from office. each so n the wake of watergate congress passed a host of reforms to insure that such abuses did not occur again. they served us well for almost half a century but it is time for us to add to them. joining us now, congressman adam schiff of california, chairman of the house -- committee member of the committee investigating the january 6th attack on the capitol. i saw some things from bob corker. he sought unsuccessfully to limit a president's nuclear authority. this seems like a fit for it. tell me about it and whether you have bipartisan support? >> it address as litany of weaknesses in our democracy that we discovered over the last four years. so it would protect inspector generals and whistle blowers. it would strength ten independence of the justice department so it can't be utilized as the president's personal law firm or to go after the president's personal enemies. it would address the emodel you meant clause so presidents can't enrich themselves or rent out hotels rooms to gulf nations. it would strengthen penalty for the hat check so we don't have administrative officials recommended for firing for violating the law, whose response is blah, blah, blah, what are you going to do about sit in it would also try to address these temporary appointments to cabinet positions to get around senate confirmation. and there are other critical reforms. most importantly, it who expedite congressional subpoenas. >> the two impeachments, and the mueller investigation, the three reasons to hold the president accountable. they all came up short for different reasons but it sounds like the proposed legislation tries to deal with all of them. could there be a guiding principle memo from the justice department that says a current president cannot be impeached, is that something that congress can change? >> we address it to this degree, that olc that says a president can't be indicted. we have a number of situations so you don't have the situation that the justice department can't take the position a sitting president can't be indicted and after they leave office they can allow the statute to run and then can't be indicts either. that memo that you mention i think is seriously flawed. in particular, the justice department never really addressed whether you could indict a president while in office even if you had to defer the prosecution until they left. that was only very given very glancing attention. so i think it is a flood opinion. constitutionally, can the congress somehow override the justice department's interpretation? it would probably be difficult, although, not impossible. but this does provide a mechanism for holding president's kblt by saying we are going to create a statute so that at least a president can be prosecuted when they leave office. >> it seems like adam kinzinger is saying something when he calls that memo that woodward and costa report on a blueprint for a coup. is the select committee investigating a conspiracy to commit a coup? >> yes. and i think adam is exactly right. the predominant worry i have about our democracy is not that it's the going to be overthrown by a violent revolution, notwithstanding that we endured a violent attempt at insurrection but rather there will be quasi legalins means that so undermine our democracy that it creates a crisis and it falls apart. this is what the republicans tried to do, the trump campaign and administration tried to do with this memo. but it's also what gop party leaders are trying to do around the country by stripping independent elections officials of their powers and handing them to partisan boards so they can succeed where they failed with this attempted coup. that is, if they can't disenfranchise enough people and they still lose, this gives them the chance through the patina of legality to overturn the results. and that, to me, is the most desperate risk that our democracy faces. >> can you protect the country from the threat of domestic violence extremists without the help of the other political party? can the democratic party protect the country alone? >> it's a very good question, because you mentioned that the two impeachments and efforts by bob mueller all fell short for different reasons. certainly, the efforts in congress fell short, but for the same reason. and that is, you have one of the major parties that would not put the interests of its own institution or of the constitution ahead of their interest in maintaining power and the power of the presidency. can one party did it alone? some of the reforms in this package would attempt to empower one party acting alone if they control one of the houses to provide these guardrails. so for example, one party that's in opposition to the white house can bring an action under the emodel yewments clause to stop the violation of that. so there are some provisions, the expedition of congressional subpoenas could be done even without the participation of the other party if there is at least control of one house. but at the end of the day, no matter what genius our founders had, no matter how good we might pass the laws in congress, if one of the major parties gives itself up to autocracy, then the whole republic is at risk and then we really need the republican party to return to being a party of ideas and a party that supports democracy. >> we were talking to bob woodward about how the parallels to watergate fall apart because unlike that republican party the smoking gun evidence that the two impeachments presented to the jurors, the senators, had no effect. congressman adam schiff, thank you so much for making some time to talk to us today. we are really grateful. >> thank you. what do the legal pathways actually look like when it comes to bringing trump to any kind of justice? we will ask a lead attorney from one of his impeachment trials and one of the reporters keeping a close watch on the january 6th committee investigation. that's next. january 6th committee investigation. that's next. one, two! one, two, three! only pay for what you need! with customized car insurance from liberty mutual! nothing rhymes with liberty mutual. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ hey lily, i need a new wireless plan for my business, but all my employees need something different. oh, we can help with that. okay, imagine this... your mover, rob, he's on the scene and needs a plan with a mobile hotspot. we cut to downtown, your sales rep lisa has to 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conspiracy theories about voting machines were baseless before they began a campaign to spread them all over the country. then detailing a strategy to allow pence to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election. in a letter from the disgraced ex-president to georgia's secretary of state, who will be our guest in the next hour sent last friday, mounting new efforts to intervene in the state's 2020 vote count. joining us now, dana goldman, also former u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york. now msnbc legal analyst. and national correspondent for politico, also lucky for us. it feels like there's a crush of new information, but all painting a similar picture. your reaction. >> that's right. what we're learning is what you probably expected to learn and i think you and i have discussed this, which is there is just going to be more that drifts out about to extent to which donald trump and those working for him tried to subvert and overturn the election and when people want to talk about what people have done to hold trump accountable, then we have to start looking at what occurred from the election all the way through january 6th. not just january 6th itself. and when we're learning now that the campaign was aware of that claims were bogus, that there was an extensive six-point plan by a lawyer to try to convince mike pence to overturn the election and obviously a lot of the revelations in the woodward and costa book, it's just more and more evidence that i believe that the department of justice needs to investigate now. that january 6 investigation is really focused on the events of january 6th, but the department of justice needs to have a separate and overlapping investigation into the trump white house's efforts to conspire, to violate federal laws and to intervene and interrupt and obstruct the lawful election. >> one of the books was also revealed that white house counsel thought that trump would be arrested that day. do you think that he is under investigation by the justice department and we just don't know it? >> it's possible. it's possible. but i think at this point, we would hear it and we would have some sense that there was something beyond the january 6th investigation. and so i would urge the department of justice and i think many people would urge them to take a close look. if it requires a special counsel, it requires a special counsel, but remember one of the reasons why merit garland was chosen as attorney general is that he has, for the last 20 plus year, has been completely apolitical. he was a judge. not involved in any of these events. so he's as well suited as any special counsel to be neutral and to be conflict-free in investigating this. it's time, you can't avoid it anymore. our democracy is truly in peril and you just cannot avoid what is coming out more and more and more and continues to happen as you're going to talk to the secretary of state about it. let's not forget the phone call we heard where trump said, find the votes. just overturn your own election. so there's so much going on. there's so much here that needs to be examined. >> betsy, my question for you, not to put trump aside for a moment, but mark meadows was on the call. dan eastman was a lawyer who was creating a plot, a blueprint for a coup attempt. are people lawyering up? >> that's a good question. i'm not aware of the people besides trump himself retaining counsel to help them deal with the january 6 select committee, but of course trump's lawyers have been quite busy in the last week or so. that's because the national archives is moving to get what i'm told hundreds of pages of documents from the trump white house to those lawyers. those lawyers now have to review those documents and decide whether trumps wants to claim they're covered by executive privilege and those lawyers are going to have to decide just how aggressive trump and his legal team may try to be to try to prevent those records from being passed over to congress. that's part of the reason the legislation you talked about with chairman ship in the last segment is so interesting. one of the only things trump has on his side when it comes to the select committee probe is time. we saw trump and his legal team use that over and over again all the way across the board in all sorts of congressional efforts to investigate and hold accountable his administration. and if he and his legal team try to use, let's say quote unquote, creative litigation to keep his white house documents from going to the select committee, it could cause genuine challenges for that committee. so that's one of the legal fights that i'm tracking really closely when it comes to the constellation of fascinating lawyers that always surround the former president. >> we'll stay on it. sorry we didn't have more time with both of you today. thank you so much for making some time with us this hour. with our guest shorts after a very short break. don't go anywhere. s after a 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you have not condemned these actions or this language. senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. this has to stop. we need you to step up and if you're going to take a position of leadership, show some. this is elections, this is the backbone of democracy and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. someone's going to get hurt, shot, killed and it's not right. >> that was georgia election official gabriel sterling warning about the dangerous consequences of the lying being told about the results of the 2020 election. he was right. four people did die just a month after he made those powerful comments on the day of january 6. one police officer died the next day. four law enforcement officers lost their lives to suicide in the weeks and months that followed. the attack was inspired by the president's big lie, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. our next guest, even though georgia's results were recounted more than once, the ex-president's lies about it are ongoing. donald trump sent georgia's secretary of state, brad raffensperger, a letter last friday alleging large scale voter fraud and asking him to start the process of desert fiing the election or whatever the correct legal remedy is and announce the true winner. after that call, where he attempted to strong arm the secretary of state into overturning the will of the people by finding 11,780 votes exactly the number that would change the election outcome. secretary of state raffensperger walked the line in defending the georgia vote. telling the president his facts were wrong. but what has happened in georgia since then is just as dangerous for our democracy. georgia was one of the states this year to pass a law, and do not take our word for it. here's georgia's republican lieutenant governor. >> this is really the fallout from the ten weeks of misinformation that flew in from former president trump. i went back over the weekend to look at where this really started to gain momentum in the legislature and it was when giuliani showed up in a couple of committee rooms and spent hours spreading misinformation and sewing doubt across hours of testimony. >> now secretary raffensperger is coming out with a new book. it's coming out later this fall. it's about integrity. we are eager to understand if that extends to the integrity of the constitutional right to vote. joining us now the brad raffensperger, author of integrity counts. thank you so much for joining us. i want to know your thoughts about these two things that seem very much in conflict. >> well, obviously, this election was over months ago and we're still facing these issues. these allegations and we continue to knock them down. after the fall election, it was like rumor whackamole. our tiny office was really going up against 80 million twitter followers and daily, we were going out there. you showed that clip of gabriel. what he said unfortunately turned out to have prophetic and people did lose their lives. it's really important that people understand that at the end of the day, integrity does count. that we have elections and then we have consequences and when your political team is telling you you're behind ten points before the election, within two weeks after the election, if you lost, what is going on there? what is the point? so we wrote every allegation down and at the end of the day, it was never supported by facts and president trump did not carry the state of georgia. >> major league baseball moved the all-star game from your state because of the voter restriction law. did you support it, sir? >> moving, no, i wanted the all-star game to stay here. >> no, did you support the voter restriction law that was predicated on the lies? >> there are some good measures in there. number one is a signature match. >> was there any fraud in the 2020 election in georgia? >> there wasn't enough fraud to ever overturn the results. >> so why was any legislature, even if it was good, even necessary? >> because every two years, we update legislation to see what makes the most sense. there were a lot of bills that never saw the light of day because i guess leadership understood those were just way beyond what was required. but to make sure we moved and had a very objective way of identifying absentee voters, that's a very good thing. we've moved to driver's license number and that's objective because it's photo id. they've been using that in minnesota for over ten years now and that's a good move they've made. there are other things that perhaps we could have done different, but for the first time ever, we have ballot drop boxes that have been put into law for all 159 counties. that's good. some people wish there was a few more boxes. i understand. but the general, for the first time, let's go ahead and do this then we'll see if we need to add additional ones down the road. so on balance, it was a good, solid piece of legislation. it got spun up because of all the bad bills that were dropped. stepped those way over what would have done. we've expanded early voting up to 17 days of early voting. 15 days during the week. two saturdays and counties, they want to do sunday voting, have two sundays to do sunday voting. that's more than in new york, new jersey, and also delaware. >> you are stripped of power. the new law creates a new chair of the state election board, a position previously held by georgia's secretary of state. it dictates that the newly created chair be nonpartisan, but the position is appointed through the partisan legislature, which in your state, is more trumpy than you are, just to be blunt. you are removed for the person holding your position is removed as a voting member as a state election board. if you hadn't been in your position, do you think donald trump's request might have been heeded? >> i don't know what would have happened there, the part of the legislation i did support. it's not because i was the secretary of state and i chaired the state election board. the secretary of state is reports to the voters. i'm an elected office. and so i've never really supported unlike the boards, commissions and authority, have vast authority and not being accountable to the voters. i thought it made a lot more sense. it had been that way for probably 50, 60 years now and so it was really to me looked like it was retribution. because i did my job. i followed the constitution. sometimes things like that happen. i continue to follow the law and constitution because integrity always counts and that's what people are looking for. people make sure we have fair and honest elections here in the state of georgia. >> do you feel that what has been produced so far by the committee, the bipartisan committee, it is chaired by a democrat, the co-chair is liz cheney, my former colleague from the bush years. republican adam kinzinger is on it. denver wriggleman is serving on the committee and the former attorney from the bush white house is also on that committee. that bipartisan committee, if they wanted to talk to you or interview you about that call and what you were asked to do, would you cooperate with that committee's request? >> at some point, right now, we're pretty darn busy getting ready for the municipal elections that we have coming up and implementing all of the administrative code that goes with the change. i was heartened to see they added a u.s. attorney that comes from the republican side. it looks like they want to have true bipartisanship on that and that's a good thing. i am very hopeful they're really going to get all the information and lay it out on the table so all the american people have all the information in an objective, fair manner because it's very important that people understand what happened last year so that we don't repeat this mistake again. >> i want to ask you in your own words, what did happen on that call? did you feel like you were set up? did you expect to be bombarded by donald trump and mark meadows' chief of staff? someone obviously recorded it. can you tell me what you knew going in? what you thought while it was happening and what you think of what's happened since that call? >> well, i explained that in my book a little bit. i'm a subcontractor and i know where i am in the food chain in the construction cycle and we have the general contractors that are the top of the construction site. they report to developers and president trump was a developer. so everyone thinks things go the developer's way. you can have long conversations and they can get unpleasant at times. i was fully prepared for that. >> donald trump incited an insurrection. liz cheney feels that he has stained our democracy. do you see it that way? >> i respect liz cheney. >> do you agree with her? >> i made my comment there and i'll leave it right there. but at the end of the day, what the republican party needs is really to get back to our focus. when reagan started our revolution, we were led by a person with deep character and charm. he had a heart for people and we built on that. lean back into that. our values that our parents raised us with. our grandparents. these are american values. they're small town based, but american values. we get back to character, a lot of these problems are going to fix themselves. >> i want to come back to the voting restriction. i hear what you're saying. you're saying there was a lot of stuff that was even worse so what you made peace with and supported in georgia's voting restriction measure had some good things in it. it also strips the largest democratic county in the state of its leaders who were largely democrats and could replace them. puts in motion a process that could replace them with very partisan republicans. is that good for democracy? >> well, you're talking about the rule that allows, it's really an accountability measure because if you look at the county you're referring to, fulton county, there's been articles in the atlanta journal constitution since 1993, so this is like 35 years ago, we've been putting up with fulton county mismanaging elections. eventually you have to say enough is enough. the county's tired of it, but so are all the other 159 counties. there needs to be carrots and sticks. hopefully they can improve the process and you don't have to get to the point where you'd have to come in, but that's where there's an accountability measure. >> was there any fraud in fulton county in 2020? >> minor things, but never enough to overturn the election. we had a monitor there with fulton county and what he said is he never saw an illegality or ballot stuffing, but he saw gross mismanagement and dysfunction. that becomes a breeding ground for conspiracies. people are wondering, they saw this, they saw that. it needs a management review and rebuild from top to bottom and hopefully that fulton county will start doing that. >> i want to play some of the phone call. you talked about conspiracy theories. the ex-president was in the grips of a lot of them. let's listen. we'll talk about it on the other side. >> i mean, we have many, many times, the number of votes necessary to win the state and we won the state and we won it very substantially and easily. >> president trump, we've had several lawsuits and we've had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. we don't agree that you have won. we have to stand by our numbers. we believe our numbers are right. >> but your numbers aren't right. they're really wrong, brad. brad, why did they put the votes in three times? they put them in three times. >> they did not put that, we did an audit of that and it was proved they were not scanned three times. mr. president, the challenge that you have is that the data you have is wrong. >> what do you think when you hear that call again? >> i stand by my statement. the data he had was wrong. we did a 100% hand recount of all 5 million ballots and as soon as we did that, we proved two things. one is that the machines did not flip the votes because people were casting dispersions on the voting machines. we also proved the count we had originally was right. the president came up short in the state of georgia. then we did a third one, which was the losing candidate can ask for a recount when they were in a half percent. we counted those ballots three times so we really shook that all out in the process and president trump did not carry the state of georgia. it's as simple as that. >> so why give into his allies who insisted on a voter restriction law in the state and i hear you there were some good things in there. but the antifraud measures were predicated on a lie. there was no fraud. >> well, moral courage is in short supply sometimes and so sometimes people need to have gumption and lean into what is really important. and what's really important for me is being honest, making sure that i fight hard to follow the rule of law and the state laws and so i'm going to continue to do that and you know, sometimes takes some moral courage, but the courage that it takes isn't anything like what the people in our armed services do. they're out there fighting for our freedom. they give their life for this country. that's true courage. we can't stand up to the truth of an election then we really are going to be in a lot of trouble so i'm going to lean into my integrity and what i need to do to make sure i fight hard for honest and fair elections. >> georgia's secretary of state, brad raffensperger, thank you for taking our questions today. nice to see you. when we come back, with democracy in danger, we'll get reaction to what we've just heard from brad raffensperger as the former guy tried to strong arm him into overturning the election results in georgia and why fears are growing that the next coup attempt could be successful. plus, we'll have our good friend about texas' near complete ban on abortions there. and speaking of lawsuits, the disgraced ex-president's lawsuit against "the new york times" and his own niece. it's new today. it's over his tax records. it's being called out for what it is. desperation. we'll get to that later in the hour. we continue after a quick break. don't go anywhere. we continue after a quick break. don't go anywhere. what was right for her. no. nope. no way. but then helen went from no to know with freestyle libre 14 day, now she knows what activity helps lower her glucose. and can see what works best for her. take the mystery out of your glucose levels, and lower your a1c. now you know. freestyle libre 14 day. now covered by medicare for those who qualify. with directv stream, i can get live tv and on demand... freestyle libre 14 day. together. watch: serena williams... wonder woman. serena... wonder woman... serena... wonder woman... ♪ ♪ ace. advantage! you cannot be serious! ♪ ♪ get your tv together with the best of live and on demand. introducing directv 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to you by regeneron. in business, it's never just another day. and it's the big sale, orto tak the big presentation.t. the day where everything goes right. or the one where nothing does. with comcast business you get the network that can deliver gig speeds to the most businesses and advanced cybersecurity to protect every device on it— all backed by a dedicated team, 24/7. every day in business is a big day. we'll keep you ready for what's next. comcast business powering possibilities. but the fact that is greater than the gop already disregarding and distrust. at least 30 new voting restriction laws including georgia. the expectation of our next election. voted to overturn president biden. by statements of all candidates. ten of the 15 have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state's results to be invalidated or further investigated. only two of the nine candidates reuters interviewed said that biden won the election. joining us now -- and lucky for us. msnbc legal analyst. also, kim atkins store, senior columnist for the boston globe, and lucky for us, an msnbc political analyst. and greg is here from the atlanta journal constitution. secretary raffensperger, i just said this off camera and i'll say it to you, to all of you. seemed remorsefully resigned to having to go along with some but not all of big lie. obviously, you reported no better than anybody what he endured after november and after that pressure campaign. only some of it caught on that phone call and but georgia passed a voting restriction law after no fraud was found and made perfectly clear in this interview that there was no fraud, including in fulton county. nothing that would have altered the results in any way. >> your interview kpem fied the crunch he's in. but in georgia, he's hated by democratic leaders for trying to vilify stacy abrams and supporting the new election laws that impose restrictions on voting. there many who say he could have gone into 2022 and in a much stronger position had he played the situation differently or decided not to run for re-election. >> to be fair, how bad is georgia's voter restriction law? so bad that major league baseball moved its all-star game to colorado. it feels a law predicated on a lie. as i said to the secretary, don't listen to me. listen to georgia's lieutenant republican governor duncan. i wonder of what you make of both the bar lowering and i'm so glad he held firm against donald trump. i, too, think that was a heroic moment but there's as much danger in facilitating the enactment of voter restriction laws. >> it's important to note that the bar has already been lowered for a really long time. imposing voting restriction has been a tenant of republican policy long before donald trump. and the editorial board of the boston globe wrote an editorial in december saying yes, brad raffensperger did the very least by saying the truth, which was that there was no voting fraud in the election, but he's already, even before the insurrection, even before anything donald trump did, was already voicing support for imposing voter id laws, for imposing other restrictive measures based on what? the fact that people, he said, didn't trust the election because it was close. didn't trust the election because these claims were made. he was essentially using the big lie even as he denounced it, to push for these restrictive policies that you know, targets with real extreme precision places like fulton county, which echoes donald trump's attacks on atlanta. attacks on detroit. attacks on milwaukee and philly and other places where there were large, black populations of votes that helped give the election to joe biden. these folks elected joe biden. clearly, fairly, and without fraud. but even before all of the shenanigans, the secretary of state in georgia was pushing. so i don't know. he can call his book about integrity all he wants, but i think that he has a lot to answer for it. >> you know, neil, i want to get to the story that i read from reuters about the crop of people running for secretary of state post. they're all election deniers and i know we're having this process driven and you know, fraught hand ringing about the democratic party, the only party interested in protecting the democracy, just speak about the need for federal voting rights legislation. >> it is so urgent and i think kimberly hit the nail on the head just now. watching secretary of state raffensperger, i guess i just kind of feel like my, how the semi kind of a little bit mighty have fallen. he was one of the few guys to stand up to trump when trump and his minions attempted a coup last year. there's only one word for this georgia law and it's disgrace. georgia had record turnout in the 2020 election because 1.3 million absentee voters were there and this bill undeny bly makes it harder to vote absentee and whatever that nonsense is you just heard him saying about making it marginally easier to vote on sundays wasn't compensated at all. in this law is voter suppression. pure and simple. the fact you have a bill with 21 provisions, one of which is kind of okay and the other 20 of which were present, doesn't make the overall bill okay. for example, it cuts the time in half for absentee ballots. why in god's name would you make that harder? voting is our greatest right. why take it away? the law makes it okay to give someone in line water while they're waiting? in june, people waited several hours. they don't want to go vote on a hot day if they can't even get a glass of water. it's unconscionable to me this secretary of state is supporting it. >> but greg, the reality is if he loses to donald trump's favored candidate, is it mr. hice, that's a whole different can of worms. explain. >> yeah. congressman hice is one of the most conservative members of the u.s. house. he is, he's a, was elected earlier last decade and he has been an ardent supporter of everything donald trump says. including posting favorably about the insurrection right before it happened. he's also vowed, he was one of the georgia house members who tried to block the electoral college certification that very day. running as an arch conservative. i'll add, too, while that reuters story gives important national context, in states like georgia, it's not just the secretary of state candidates who are running this election. it is all the way down to ticket to state lawmakers, to other state-led officers and when donald trump comes here this weekend, he'll be touting, trumpeting those other lawmakers' lies about the election. >> i didn't mean to cut you off. this is the threat to the whole country. this is the focus of the two hours. what happen to a country, one of the two parties doesn't just veer off to extremists policies like the near complete ban on all portions, which we're going to talk about later in this show or extreme policies around safety nets or sort of the traditionally whacky things that republicans on the fringe of the party. what does the country do? what does the democracy do when it falls off the cliff and no longer advocates democratic norms? >> well, i think you're absolutely diagnosing the problem, which is one party has become an anti-democracy party. the republican party. so the democrats have to fight like hell for voting rights legislation, which is on the floor of congress right now. but here's one thing that i think should happen. i'm sure when secretary raffensperger goes to sleep at night or looks in the mirror, he says, well, i'm preventing the worse evil by these other candidates. and i just don't think our democracy is up for compromise. i don't think you get to like, go to bed and sleep soundly saying, well, a worse guy will take my place if i don't give in to these 20 absolutely voter repression measures. you take an oath from 1787 on, to uphold the constitution in the united states. someone who gives in is not obeying. >> greg, thank you for being part of this conversation. neil and kim are sticking around. when we come back, the legal prospects for the two lawsuits that could invalidate texas' near complete ban on abortions. that reporting is next. e ban ons that rorepting is next when traders tell us how to make thinkorswim even better, we listen. like jack. he wanted a streamlined version he could access anywhere, no download necessary. and kim. she wanted to execute a pre-set trade strategy in seconds. so we gave 'em thinkorswim web. because platforms this innovative, aren't just made for traders - they're made by them. thinkorswim trading. from td ameritrade. 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"the wall street journal" is reporting that clinics from neighboring states are being flooded with patients from texas who are seeking care, writing quote, women's health clinics are reporting an influx of patients from texas saying they're overwhelmed. they're adding hours to try to handle the backlog. to be clear, tragically, under this harsh law, these are the lucky ones, right? many, many women would not have the means or the time off from work or parenting or other duties to leave the state to access the care they need. one woman interviewed said she was forced to go all the way to denver to get an abortion because she had a heart condition that made pregnancy risky for her. >> i cried. i cried all the way from when they told me, through the counselor session. i didn't know what i was going to do. after a procedure, you're supposed to take it easy. i'm not going to get that option because i'm going to have to walk through the airport and everything else to get back home. >> two new lawsuits filed in texas by private citizens may offer the best chance of overturning the law. "new york times" writing this, quote, legal experts say the lawsuits filed in the state court might be the most likely way to definitively resolve the constitutionality of the texas law, which has withstood legal tests. two more challenges filed in federal court brought by abortion providers and the justice department raised different questions. we're back. to the legal updates here and all my millions of questions. i want to ask you though about the woman we heard from who bravely talked to a reporter without showing her face, and this new normal. this new reality. it's happening in 2021 in america for women. >> yes. and it's happening. i think again, it's important to note that this is, we're at an inflection point for sure, but this is something that has been happening for a while. these increasingly restrictive laws aiming to make abortion unavailable to women. particularly those without privilege, those who don't have the privilege or money or where with all to travel as you said, has been going on for a while. we are seeing effectively abortion came to a halt in texas forcing people to travel long distancing, but for years in other states, take missouri. the only place that abortions are accessible in missouri is in st. louis. if you live in jefferson county or some other place and you can't travel, it's inaccessible to you. so this has been a long march with increasing restrictions on how the facilities were done. the certifications that practitioners have to have. so now we're at the full frontal attack on roe. i don't have a lot of faith that u.s. supreme court will stop it but this is really the final showdown and it begins with this supreme court term. >> help me understand and let me know if you share kim's feeling that she doesn't have a lot of faith that this legal assault on women's health freedoms will be stopped by the supreme court. >> yes, so this texas law, you know, is designed basically to try and overrule roe versus wade, but they're afraid of litigation so they wrote this bizarre portion so you couldn't go to the courts and say stop this law from going into effect. you had to wait for someone to bring a lawsuit and now the lawsuit has been brought. two different lawsuits have been brought and the anti-choice community's freaking out, saying these are random lawsuits, how dare they. if you didn't want the law to be tested by a random lawsuit, maybe you shouldn't have had this ridiculous provision in the law in the first place. now there will be a test case and as you said, there's a separate justice department action which will create that test case and bring it ultimately to the united states supreme court. now before even getting there, however, the court's already hearing a case on december 1st for mississippi that restricts abortion after 15 weeks. roe versus wade restricted it after about the 24th. so the mississippi law is also very much a flat violation of roe and the upshot is the supreme court is being asked to overrule roe versus wade first on the mississippi case then on the texas case. >> and neil, i feel like all three of us make the appropriate effort to acknowledge that there are women suffering and hurt by this today. how quickly will any of these sort of avenues be pursued? >> well, the justice department has gone in to the judge and asked for an emergency hearing which is going to take place in a couple of weeks and so that judge could stop the texas law from going into effect just in a matter of a couple of weeks. that could get immediately reviewed by the fifth circuit, the court of appeals and possibly by the united states supreme court on an expedited basis. that so-called shadow docket that people are talking about every so often. so there is the possibility of some fast rulings here by the end of the year. >> i feel like neil could have been a bar called shadow docket in another life in his retirement. on a serious note, kim, what is your sense? neil and i had this conversation a couple of weeks ago that there might be some new pressure on congress to codify the protections afforded by roe and all the supreme court justices who i've seen go through confirmation have muttered their support for roe. they say they view it as settled law, so i'm not sure why that's even partisan, but is that anything that sort of had any buzz after that first flurry of news coverage around the texas ban? >> yeah, there have been calls for a roe act for a long time. ever since justice kennedy announced his retirement back in 2018. we knew that the ideological makeup of the supreme court was about to shift. so that hasn't happened in all of that time with the enactment of other laws that have made abortion inaccessible for so many women in this country for years. i don't know that that will happen. one thing that has been happening, at least on a state level, is the passage of some roe laws that do codify those protections in states. those are largely blue states, but yeah. i don't know if that's going to be, i don't know if that's going to be the answer. kim, thank you so much. neil isn't going anywhere. when we come back, mary trump's reaction to her uncle's lawsuit. don't go anywhere. uncle's lawsu. don't go anywhere. renae is not an influencer, she's more of a groundbreaker. renae runs with us on a john deere 1 series tractor. because out here, you can't fake a job well done. hear renae's story at deere.com at usaa, we've been called too exclusive. because we only serve those who honorably served. all ranks, all branches, and their families. are we still exclusive? absolutely. and that's exactly why you should join. are we still exclusive? absolutely. and that's exactly why you should join. you need an ecolab scientific clean here. and you need it here. and here. and here. which is why the scientific expertise that helps operating rooms stay clean is now helping the places you go every day too. seek a commitment to clean. look for the ecolab science certified seal. ♪ ♪ i give families a home, not just a place to stay. i am a vrbo host. ♪ ♪ it's not a secret. in fact, at this point, it's really more of a punch line. donald trump's bizarre obsession with suing people who make him mad. the targets this time, "the new york times" and his niece, mary trump. you'll likely remember this piece from 2018 laying out through records and interviews, apparent financial losses and tax avoidance inside donald trump's family. while now the disgraced ex-president is accusing three "new york times" reporters and his niece of an insidious plot. an extensive crusade to obtain his taxes. predictably, the times will challenge the lawsuit. quote, helped him form the public through mettic louse reporting on -- this lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it. mary trump, who admitted to sharing her uncle's taxes in a book, sounds equally confidence. from her statement, quote, i think he is a loser. sorry. i think he's a loser and he's going to throw anything against the wall he can. it's desperation. the walls are closing in and he's throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. as is always the case with donald, he'll try and change the subject. joining our conversation is tim o'brien. neil is still here. tim, did you get, i mean, donald trump does lose a lot, right? mary kind of summed it up. >> that's what, i think that's why mary called him a loser. i always love it when other people's quotes make you laugh. you know, this is, this is baby hughey sitting in his sand box shaking his rattle as loud as he can because he doesn't like reality and he doesn't like vigorous reporting that's in the service of the truth on an important subject that happens to be about him. he's got, this is a garbage lawsuit this will go nowhere and there's ample legal precedent and protections around reporters receiving third party information that they haven't stolen then publishing it in publications that are in the service of the public interests. mary trump has already in a separate lawsuit, disputed whether or not she fully understood the terms of her nondisclosure when her family compelled her to sign it after they entered into a settlement of fred trump's estate that she later found might have ripped her off and robert trump, the late robert trump, tried to stop mary trump's publisher from publishing her book on those grounds and they went right ahead. so on both of these, both of these stances, whether the reporters acted inappropriately or mary trump should not have disclosed the information, i don't think they've got a foot to stand on. and on top of it, as far as i can tell, their legal counsel is not deeply steeped in liable law. i believe their attorney has not tried any major liable teams. you know david. he was on talking about my suit. david is a formidable attorney. he knows liable law inside and out and this is all just a garbage fire. >> i had a couple of thoughts and mary trump's comment made me laugh because the family always goes for the psychological analysis. he's doing this because he's a loser. it reminds me of the scene between joker and batman. he needs the times. he needs the fight with "the new york times" to continue to be seen. do judges have a tolerance for that? is there a method for getting rid of something that has no merit and is this that? >> no. judges don't have any tolerance for these kinds of antics and this lawsuit is totally weird, nicole. there's no claim that trump's making that mary trump lied or is liable. the lawsuit basically admits that all this stuff is true. trump's claim is hey, she hurt my reputation. i didn't really know that was possible, but that's what he's arguing. trump himself has noted that this "new york times" piece was viewed the most of all of its online articles. enough to give him a $100 million bruise to his ego. the first amendment where founders have is really pretty ironclad. i think tim's right. this is a garbage lawsuit. the other question is why file it. i can think of two reasons. one is his lawyers, who let's face it, are not ever very good. from john eastman to rudy giuliani. maybe he's getting bad legal advice, but even then, why wait a year to sue? all this stuff happened a year ago. the other possibility is that remember donald trump forced his white house staff to sign nondisclosure. it's not something i've ever heard the president doing before. the basis is mary trump violated a nondisclosure agreement. maybe it's a shot at its white house staff to not be talking. i don't know. >> you know, tim, congressman adam schiff was on earlier in t has some legislation to make also future-proof the presidency from donald trump. i remember there was a similar thought about donald trump's refusal to release his taxes. i wonder if you think there's any chance, any hope that on the other side of this will become some side of ruling from the two political parties, or the debate commission, that any candidate has to reveal their taxes. we're here because he was the first to not release his taxes. it led to all questions about the bizarre relationship with putin, and a leveraged company. i wonder, if you think it will inspire reforms. >> i don't. it definitely should inspire reforms. whether or not we will see reforming in this hare-brain congress, i'm not optimistic, but the post-watergate era we saul a lot of tightening. unfortunately, most of the federal ethics law that exist don't apply for the presidency. the framers believe if you put too many restrictions around the executive office, the president simply couldn't function. donald trump drove a big hole through that article of faith, that a president could establish on his or her own a trust to blaze his assets into, or sell assets oaf, and then would willingly disclose his or her tax returns. donald trump is the first since gerald ford that didn't do that. we really need to make sure the oval office can't be tested by financial predators. >> tim o'brien, neal katyal, thank you so much for this conversation. a quick break for us. we'll be right back. nversation a quick break for us we'll be right back. once upon a time, at the magical everly estate, landscaper larry and his trusty crew... were delayed when the new kid totaled his truck. timber... fortunately, they were covered by progressive, so it was a happy ending... for almost everyone. if you have this... consider adding this. an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan from unitedhealthcare. medicare supplement plans help by paying some of what medicare doesn't... and let you see any doctor. any specialist. anywhere in the u.s. who accepts medicare patients. so if you have this... consider adding this. call unitedhealthcare today for your free decision guide. ♪ hearing is important to living life to the fullest. that's why inside every miracle-ear store, you'll find a better life. it all starts 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