election amid the new warning about a possible second trump term. and the fallout from elon musk 's outburst to advertisers as the ceo of ex responds. then, george santos may be on his way out of congress, but not without a fight. how did we end up here? the journalist who's been investigating santos since 2019 will be here, as the 11th hour gets underway on this thursday night. ♪ ♪ ♪ good evening once again, i am stephanie ruhle live from 30 rockefeller center. and tonight we start our broadcast with donald trump and his effort to control the narrative and his legal cases. it has suddenly gotten a whole lot harder. today a new york appeals court reinstated a gag order preventing trump from commenting on court employees for handling his 250 million dollar civil fraud trial. that order was originally imposed after trump repeatedly targeted the clerk assigned to the judge in his case. it will now remain in place until the trial is over, which is expected to be sometime in january. meanwhile, we are still waiting for a federal court to rule on the gag order in the d. c. election interference case, but there is new reporting out that shows the special counsel jack smith has been digging even deeper into how key trump allies work to try to overturn the 2020 election. both politico and the washington post say court documents have shown text from gop congressman scott perry revealed that he was in touch with several different people in trump's orbit about keeping the former president in power. after the election, perry reached out to several trump campaign lawyers as well as rnc chair ronna mcdaniel, white house chief of staff mark meadows, and former doj official jeffrey clark. scott perry's taxed reveal that he was talking to clock about to acting attorney general justice clark was getting the justice department involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. watch this. >> scott perry was right in the middle of the effort to install and enact a attorney general who was prepared to take action without basis in fact or law. dictating messages to the president from jeff clark, he puts the president himself in the middle of this misguided plan and shows that perry was the orchestrator. jeff clark, remember, it was prepared to send a letter to state legislators, essentially asking them to hold special sessions and put forth these alternate fake slates of electors. and publicly declared the justice department had serious concerns about election integrity without factual foundation. >> reporter: tonight, we are also following developments in the special counsel's classified documents case in florida. new reports indicate one of trump's lawyers testified to the special counsel that she told donald trump himself it would be a crime not to comply with the subpoena for the mar-a-lago documents, and she also testified trump, quote, absolutely understood that warning. remember that when he tries to say, it was the lawyers, it was the accountants, i didn't know better. today, we learned she said otherwise. with that, let's get smarter with the help of our leadoff panel this evening. susan glasser, staff writer for the new yorker, a man she knows, well peter baker is also here, chief white house correspondent for the new york times, and barbara mcquade, a veteran federal prosecutor and former u.s. attorney for the eastern district of michigan. barb, let's go to you first. what is the reinstatement of this new york accord or? and what does it really mean for donald trump, because it seems like nothing stops him. >> yeah, you know, you've got to start with a gag order to at least have a baseline. and reinstating this, i think, is really important to the rule of law. we've heard a lot of arguments from lawyers that are really misrepresenting what the situation is, talking about it as if we're in a vacuum and that this judge is somehow preventing donald trump from engaging in political pietz peach. in fact, when you're in a trial, and you are the defined, and you are subject to the orders of the court. and the judge has not just responsibility, but the duty to protect courthouse personnel, jurors, witnesses, and the integrity of the proceeding itself. and, so that's a start. i'm sure he will continue to push the limits of this. at some point, we've seen judge and gore on imposed financial sanctions, and the question is whether your judge cut can or any other judges going to impose the ultimate penalty, which would be to jail him for violation of the gag order. >> reporter: at some point, look no further than today, peter. donald trump put out a social media post claiming that the wife of the judge in the fraud trial was attacking him on ex, twitter. but for fact sake, the judge's wife never sent anything like that. in fact, she told the hill she does not even have in ex twitter account. but here's the problem, trump suppose that he was line and was likely seen by millions of people. it was then amplified by the right-wing media on social media, on social media. but the judge's wife's denial to the hill, that's probably only going to be seen by thousands of people. so this is the misinformation machine work again and winning again. what do we do about that? >> well, look, donald trump is never allowed facts to get in a way of a good argument. and what he's trying to do here is not influenced the court. he knows he's lost this case. the judge has already ruled that trump and his organization committed fraud in their real estate evaluations to banks and so on. so all that's at stake here is how much of a penalty he pay. so having already effectively lost this case, he's trying to explain to his voters why it happened. it happened not because donald trump did something wrong, not because he committed a crime, not because he is a fraud and the court has already determined. but because the judge is somehow biased, or the clerk is biased, or the judge's wife is biased. he does this every single case. remember that campaign, 2016, when he was on trial, or at least in court on the lawsuit regarding the trump university, for which he later paid $25 million to people who we had defrauded. he said the judge there was biased against him, why, because he was quote, mexican. of course, he wasn't mexico, and he was american born, from a mexican background. why would that make him biased? because donald trump over the wall on the border. that itself is biased. and trump does this again and again and again. it's not about legal strategy, -- it's all about explain to his base why he was about to lose, why he's not the fraud that the court is about a column. >> reporter: so susan, this ends up being the challenge. peter just laid it out for any court or any prosecutor in any case where donald trump is a defendant. >> well, correct, and of course, we've never seen donald trump as a defendant in an election year with his campaign moving inside the courtroom. so add that element into it, but i think, you know, the point from upstairs in my house is absolutely correct. in the end, donald trump is a 77 year old man. his playbook is his playbook. and he is nothing if not familiar with courts. in fact, this whole argument we were talking in your introduction about, his lawyer informing him that he had to comply with a subpoena. he doesn't need, at this point, a lawyer to tell him. that because he has been subpoenaed many many times in many different cases going back over decades. he's well aware of his responsibility to comply with them, and if he doesn't, that's on purpose to. so again, i just feel like we've never seen anything like what we're about to see in 2024 when these four criminal cases are all unfolding in the context of the campaign. >> reporter: but susan put it perfectly. we shouldn't expect him to change his behavior, right? he has been in lawsuits dozens and dozens of lawsuits for decades. he's gone bankrupt six times. and what's the net result in all of these disasters? he became president of the united states. he's running again and as the front runner. why would he change his game? barb, let's actually talk about this new jack smith reporting. how much progress does it seem that he's making in building cases against trump? >> well, the indictment has already been filed, so what we're seeing is a trickle out of some of the evidence that is already been amassed there. one of the items in the news today is the idea that this other lawyer, jennifer little, also shared with donald trump the advice, the legal advice, that he had to comply with the subpoena to produce the mar-a-lago documents. and although he has been sued before, he knows what a spin is, i do think this is important testimony, because i think one of his defenses will be that he did not engage in willful retention of the documents, which means he knew that his possession of them was illegal. the espionage act is one of the few statutes that requires a higher mens rhea intend that many statutes which simply require knowledge that you're doing the thing. ordinarily, ignorance of the law is no excuse. it applies in most cases. we have whole heard that adage. but when it comes to the espionage act, it's such a sensitive law, because it's such a serious law, the statute also requires proof that the defendant knew his conduct was illegal. and that's why i think that this testimony, in addition to the testimony that we already heard coming from -- will be very valuable. there are now two witnesses, and so it's very difficult to explain that away as bias from the state over some other excuse against witnesses saying the same thing. so that can be very persuasive to a jury. >> reporter: peter did, that surprise you to hear that testimony from his lawyer? where most used to allen weisselberg who basically stood with trump until the end. but for trump's lawyer to say, i knew he was going to get in trouble. i told him he was going to get in trouble. he was well aware. that can't be good. >> it can't be good, and barbs riot that it obviously undercuts anything the lawyer told me to do it defense. we saw this before. we saw this in the campaign case. how many times too easy told after election day, november 2020, that he lost the election? how many times were we told that some of the legal strategies he was pursuing or wrong or misjudges and in some cases, unconstitutional. how many times was he told of the fraud claims he was making in public on camera were not true? and he goes out and say is them anyway. that's jack smith's strategy in that case as well, the election subversion case, which of course a separate case than the data is classified documents case. but he has made the case in his indictment that donald trump was told time and time again the truth that he went out and said what he said anyway. and therefore, it was not a good face acclaim on the part of a president who thought he might have been cheated on an election. it wasn't, fact according to jack smith, a conspiracy to defraud the public, to tell the public something that the president knew or certainly had reason to know is not true, because he was told a time and time again. >> susan when it comes from these types, scott perot was not one of the jokers that trump brought in to be an adviser. a lot of those jokers had no business even being in washington. we're talking about a member of congress, apparently talking to all these people about overturning the election. so, when we say wire all of these republicans still standing with trump? is the answer because they were part impartial with this from the get-go? >> well i've long been fascinated by the saga scott perry who's a leading chairman of the house freedom caucus. his role was already known in some respects which was his role in connecting president trump to this obscure justice department official jeffrey clark who steps forward and essentially offers his self up and says if the other political appointees the justice department won't do your bidding mister president i will pursue your claims about the rigged election and we've known about jeffrey clark's role in writing a letter that he tried to get the other officials of the justice department to send to georgia to essentially say we are investigating election. which they were not doing. they all refused to sign it, trump we know in this dramatic confrontation in the early days of 2021 basically says i'm going to make jeffrey clark the acting attorney general and it is only when the other officials join hands and say no we are all going to resign that trump backs away. so he knew about scott perry, but the tax strikes me as significant and fascinating. this is a long running effort by the justice department to gain access to scott perry's telephone, this is some examples that leaked out in a document that was then quickly withdrawn from the court website as i understand it. i think it's significant information. it shows that he was acting as a direct conduit with the president, that the president was personally in effect orchestrating this conspiracy at the justice department. i think it is fascinating stuff. it's a reminder of how much we still don't really know. there is more to learn about what happened with trump after the 2020 election. >> barb, what is your reaction to these text? >> yes i think what susan just said is so interesting, i think it demonstrates that there is a lot that we don't know. there is evidence that we will learn for the first time when the case goes to trial. the texture interesting, all the conduct that's alleged in the election interference case, i think the conduct that discussed me the most is alleged conduct against jeffrey clark, because -- i know just how profoundly wrong that alleged conduct is to not just trying to orchestrate fraud but suggest to a state government that they should reconvene their legislatures for the purpose of submitting a slate of electors. it's such an inappropriate role for the justice department and then compounded by the fact that there's absolutely no evidence of fraud and so perry as the conduit talking with clark could have some very interesting admissions contained in there that could be powerful evidence against jeffrey clark. although, the evidence was already strong against jeffrey clark, we know that he wrote this letter, we heard from other officials what he was up to. but i think the role here could be very interesting. >> peter, i cannot let you go until we also cover this other topic because it is an important one. your colleagues at the new york times broke a stunning story tonight that israeli officials had hamas's battle plan for the october 7th terrorist attack more than a year before it happened. but the israeli thought it was too tough for hamas to carry out, apparently they did not take it seriously. can you break this down for us? >> yes, it's remarkable. in fact, they had a 40-page document basically said what was going to happen. there was an analyst who try to get them to take it seriously and was overruled by a supervisor saying well, let's just wait and see. it's almost predictable that this could've happened. downstairs in the living room there's somebody -- because this is what we saw 9/11 as well. you have this big attack this big surprise it seems out of nowhere, somebody somewhere the bows of the government, intelligence agency often turns out to have known, at least the warning signs, and they were disregarded by other parts of the government. this has profound implications for prime minister netanyahu's already deep political trouble at home. the polls show that most israelis blame him for the attack, for leaving israel vulnerable. this will now be used against him as evidence of that and caused him great political trouble. we don't know that he saw this intelligence, we don't know if you had any knowledge of this himself. but he will have to answer about that no doubt, and i think it's not good for him at this point in the middle of the war because it puts pressure on him to continue the war after the current pause is over, in order to, you know, keep the focus on that rather than any political fallout that there may be from this report. >> what about fallout from the u.s.? do we have any sense if the u. s., obviously the u.s. and israel share a ton of intel. is it possible that someone in the u.s. knew about this? even if we did, was there anything we could do about it? it's really an's hands? >> that's right, you've already seen reports essentially saying just that from u.s. officials saying basically this was israel's focus was on hamas because we treated it as a regional and local problem, we outsource that part of the intelligence to israel and we had a close relationship and we trusted that they got this. and hamas was not something in recent years that the u.s. had big intelligence focus on. i wouldn't rule anything out in terms of what the u.s. might have known or what might be contained in any of the u. s. documents, if you look back to the 1973 young kapoor war, the greatest intelligence failure in israel history, up until october 7th of this year there was a precedent established of a robust government investigation ultimately all of the facts came out just like the u.s.'s own failure of intelligence on 9/11. this is a failure of imagination in the end, they had the documentation. they couldn't really believe that hamas was capable of doing such a thing because it didn't fit with the story they told themselves. i'm sure there will be more damning evidence that emerges. read the story is a powerful story. you can almost see the movie version of it down to the doubting colonel who tells the woman intelligence analyst -- she doesn't have it right. >> but of course, she did. i'm astounded by the brainpower coming from the glasser, or baker bureau, it's mind-blowing. susan peter thank you both for being here, barb, always great to see you as well. when we come back, you know what we are talking about him. elon musk has profanity laced outburst to advertisers. jake ward joins us to talk about firestorm surrounding ex, and the ceos response. later expelling george santos round three. the new york congressman embracing his potential second to last day in congress, with a big old performance in the house. the 11th hour just getting underway on an important thursday night. have any idea? 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