Morning Joe - Morning Joe 12/29/22

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Southwest cancels thousands more flights today 

Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It is Thursday, December 29th, and we're gonna get right to the news. Prosecutors are turning up the heat on Congressman-elect George Santos. After the revelations, he lied about his resume. We're gonna have more on the investigation by a fellow Republican district attorney,

plus the very latest on the weather emergency in Buffalo, New York. First the snow, now concerns about flooding and questions about the response to the deadly blizzard. And we're also following the latest on the Southwest Airlines meltdown. More cancellations and delays are expected today as the unions speak out to say this disaster could have been avoided. I'm Jonathan Lemire. We're in for Joe, Mika and Willie, who all have a well-deserved day off. Thanks for tuning in. With us, we have White House editor for Politico, Sam Stein, capably helmed way too early just now, as well as U.S.

national editor at the Financial Times, Ed Luce. The BBC's Katie Kaye will be with us in just a moment. It has been days since that winter storm paralyzed much of the country, but yet there is little relief expected anytime soon for Southwest Airlines customers. The company has already canceled more than 2,300 flights today, about 58% of its daily schedule. This after more than 2,500 flights were canceled yesterday and a total of 11,000 over the past week. Many passengers say they still have not received any refunds for canceled flights, even after being told to do so by the Department of Transportation. The Southwest Airlines Pilots and Flight Attendant Union say the meltdown was avoidable and that they've been warning the airline for years to upgrade its outdated systems. The pilots union released a statement that reads in part this, for more than a decade, leadership shortcomings in adapting, innovating, and

safeguarding our operations have led to repeated system disruptions, countless disappointed passengers, and millions in lost profits. The Transportation Workers Union blasted the company for paying shareholders, quote, huge dividends instead of investing in their passengers and workers. The airline apologized again yesterday and pledged to, quote, do everything to make it right. Ed Luce, does it actually seem like they've done everything to make it right? It has been days since this storm hit other airlines. Yeah, they had a few, they had some cancellations, but nothing like this. This storm seems to have exposed real vulnerabilities, not just in how Southwest books its flights, but also takes care of its staffing and passengers

are paying the price. Yeah, I mean, it's quite surprising this. If you've been asked a week ago which airline, you know, would hands down malperform versus others, you wouldn't necessarily have predicted Southwest. You could have predicted any number of them. There's been problems with across the U.S. airline sector in terms of understaffing outdated systems and bad relations with staff and with unions for for many many years so clearly there is something over and above that that's unique to southwest that's been been really harshly exposed i don't know i don't know what they're doing to fix this.

I do know, though, that their brand is going to be damaged for many years. The only sort of other point here is that regulators have actually got to regulate. The Department of Transportation has powers it could use, and Pete Buttigieg is talking about using them, I'd suggest that it would be a good time to start imposing very heavy fines on this airline for failing to recompense passengers for cancelled flights in time and for failing to rebook them on other airlines, some of which are putting a cap on their prices in order to accommodate them. So this is a brand disaster for Southwest, and their passengers and their customers are

going to remember this for many, many, many years. Yeah, I mean, it's a brand disaster, obviously, for Southwest. It's a human disaster for those who are trying to travel. I mean, think about it this way. What if you had to get back home for work and you were told by the airline, no, we can't book you for another four days. Your job could be endangered by this mistake from the company. You know, one of the things that Ed points to is the role that government has to play here. And yes, after the fact, there is going to be a lot of scrutiny on Southwest. Pete Buttigieg, of course, needs to step in more aggressively.

What is in the tool shed, I'm not entirely clear. But going forward, we've seen calls from, among others, Elizabeth Warren, that Congress, lawmakers, federal regulators need to look at airline consolidation here, that you have just too few airlines manning too many flights, and that if there were a little bit more competition, companies like Southwest wouldn't get so fat and so complacent, and you might actually have them suffer the consequences, not just reputationally, but economically going forward. Because unlike Ed, I'm not totally sure how big a hit Southwest will take. I mean, ultimately, passengers need to get

from point A to point B. And there are, in certain cases, few airlines that cover those flight patterns. And so, you know, Southwest is in some ways essential. Its survival is essential. And that's a monopolistic failure right there. Yeah. And certainly, federal government's going to have a role to play in the days ahead. But most immediately, passengers stranded. As Sam mentioned, some perhaps not able to get work. And for others, maybe this was their first trip, holiday trip in a couple of years now because of the pandemic. And instead of seeing loved ones, they're still stranded at airports. We'll have more on this story later in the show.

But let's turn now to Congressman-elect George Santos, who is now under investigation by law enforcement for the lies he told regarding his background and experience. The Nassau County District Attorney, a fellow Republican, called revelations about Santos' history nothing short of stunning and promised that if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it. It's not just his lies about his college or personal life that could land Santos in hot water. As the saying goes, follow the money. So we're going to do just that. Fellow New York Congressman-elect Democrat Dan Goldman is now calling for an investigation into potential campaign finance fraud after the business Santos founded just last year, Devalder, was dissolved shortly before the election. Sources told CBS News that federal prosecutors are also reportedly looking into

Santos' financial disclosure filings. When Santos first ran for Congress back in 2020, his financial disclosures listed a salary of just $55,000 as a vice president of a company that was called Linkbridge Investors. But this election cycle, just two years later, Mother Jones reported that Santos claimed he made between $3.5 and $11.5 million from that other company, Devalder. He then loaned his campaign more than $700,000. Semaphore, the news website, reports that before founding his company, Santos worked for Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm the SEC accused in April 2021 of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos says he left the company the month before it was charged and that he has not been

named in the case. Speaking to Semaphore, Santos claimed within the first six months of starting Devolder, he, quote, landed a couple of million-dollar contracts. Santos did not respond to follow-up questions asking what the million-dollar contracts entailed or if he could share the names of previous clients from his business. NBC News has reached out to the National Republican Congressional Committee and all three offices of House GOP leadership for comment, but we have not yet received a response. Santos has also not responded to a request for comment. The congressman-elect did apologize in another recent interview where he admitted to embellishing his resume. And Katty Kay is with us now. And Katty, it seems by

the day there are more revelations of lies, not just embellishments, but lies told by Santos. But some of these new ones could land him in legal hot water. Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good rule of thumb in American politics, isn't it, to follow the money. And once you start looking at the money and where the money came from, a whole host of questions start being raised about Santos that are more serious than resume embellishment or whatever it is that he likes to call it. So the digging that perhaps should have been done a year ago on this congressman is elect is now being done. And the picture does not look pretty. So Democratic congressman elect Jared Moskovitz of Florida is just one of the loudest voices calling Santos out for his lies about his religion.

In a tweet, Moskovitz wrote, quote, Lying about your family almost being gassed in showers or being put in ovens in order to win an election is the lowest form of humanity. And I say that as someone whose grandmother was part of the Kindertransport out of Germany from the Holocaust. And Congressman-elect Moskowitz joins us now. Congressman-elect, thank you very much for joining us. Your great-grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. Your grandparents barely escaped Europe on the transport there what do you make of what Santos is claiming about his heritage yeah good morning uh so I mean look you know it starts with lying about your college it starts

about lying about your job it goes to lying about a charity that he says he ran that he didn't run then it goes about lying that he lost employees in a mass murder uh at pulse nightclub in florida and it lies about his religion and then his piece de resistance of his trafficking and lies is that you know he has family members that escaped the holocaust and so you know, the idea that there is someone out there, someone who now serves in Congress, who thought electorally it would be significantly advantageous to him that he would come up with a lie that he had family members close to him, his grandparents, escape one of the world's greatest tragedies. It's just the lowest form of humanity, but not surprising, unfortunately,

because this is what folks on his side of the aisle have learned. They have learned this from the leader of their party, that you can traffic in these lies and you can get away with them. And Ms. Moskowitz, stay with us, because we want to play you Santos referring to himself as Jewish at the Republican Jewish Coalition last month. And then hear his explanation when he was called out on his inconsistencies in a television interview just this week. Listen to this. Oh, good morning. Shabbat shalom to everybody.

And thank you for for being here, thank you for having me. My name is George Santos. Lee Zeldin really paved the way for all of us in New York. Lee has served as an inspiration, as a friend, and as a leader for the Jewish folks in Congress and for all of us in this room by at one point being just two members. So now we're going to be three. Are you Jewish? We've got a letter that your campaign sent out earlier this year, which reads as follows. As a proud American Jew, I've been to Israel numerous times for educational,

business and leisurely trips. You said there in that letter that you are, quote, a proud American Jew. How do you explain that? My heritage is Jewish. I've always identified as Jewish. I was raised a practicing Catholic. I think I've gone through this. Even not being raised a practicing Jew, I've always joked with friends and circles. even with—in the campaign, I'd say, guys, I'm Jew-ish. Remember, I was raised Catholic. So, look, I understand everybody wants to nitpick at me. So, Mr. Moskowitz, would you, at this point, having listened to what Santos said back in

2019, then listened to his kind of excuse for what he was saying. Would you expect the Republican caucus in the House, on the Jewish members of Congress, to stand up and say to Kevin McCarthy, but actually all Republican members of Congress, to stand up and say to Kevin McCarthy, we can't sit this guy. The lies he's told are too egregious. Yeah, look, the Republican Jewish coalition, I know, has taken a position that he won't be invited to any of their events. But listen, as you all know what's going on in Washington right now, the Republicans have been begging for power for years, saying everything the Democrats are doing wrong. And in their very first moment of having power, they're in complete disarray and can't decide on a speaker. And so you and I both know they're not getting rid of anybody at the moment while each vote counts. But it really is a shame that we have now someone walking the halls of Congress, the first person that I've ever heard of, especially in politics, who thought, you know what,

I need to add to my resume. I need to add the fact that the only reason I exist on this planet is because my family escaped the Holocaust. I mean, it's just the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard of. And something tells me that this story is not finished, that we're going to hear more. Because if you're willing to lie that your family members just narrowly escaped gas chambers, then something tells me we're going to lie that your family members just, you know, narrowly escaped gas chambers, then something tells me we're going to find other stuff as they continue on the ravel.

Hey, Congressman-elect, it's Sam Stein here. And look, us members of the tribe, we welcome everybody, but there are limits probably in terms of appropriating your biography. I'm curious, as a practical matter, what are the avenues of recourse here? Obviously, the House has to vote to expel a member, and we do not necessarily expect that to be considered from a Republican-run House. But is it really just a matter of, did he lie on his financial disclosure form? Is that the one mechanism that could prove vulnerable for Congressman-elect Santos here? Because everything else seems to be in the hands

of Kevin McCarthy, and as you outlined, he wants the Santos vote for his speakership. Yeah, listen, I think, and again, there's probably stuff we don't know as people are combing through some of his financial reports and other forms that he may have lied on that might have a legal repercussion. And so there's definitely, I know people are looking into that, and I'm sure they might find that he has some legal exposure. It at least appears right now that that may be the potential recourse. But look, we don't get a long time to serve in Congress, as we all know. And so, you know, he's going to be back on the ballot in two years. He's going to have an election running for reelection in in less than a year's time from now.

And so, you know, look, there's no way the voters are going to stand for this. I mean, you know, again, this guy started with lying that, you know, he had employees die at a at a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub and thought, you know what, that's I got away with that. What else can I get away with? Well, let's try the Holocaust. And so, look, you know, we absolutely welcome people who discover that they're Jewish, want to be Jewish. But there's no such thing as being Jew and then ish with a hyphen in between. He stole that from the Jewish cookbook, by the way, called Jew-ish Cooking.

So, you know, look, this guy's a clown. He doesn't belong in Congress. He cheapens, quite frankly, everybody else, Republicans and Democrats, that are coming up to Washington to do the people's business that have worked really hard, earned the ability to be there. And so, you know, we'll have to see where this where the story ends. But something tells me this is this is just the beginning of George Santos's journey. Congressman-elect Jared Moskowitz, we think you are right that there will be

more revelations in the days ahead. Thank you so much for joining us. We may find out that George says he was in the book of revelations. I mean, who knows? At this point, we seem to be on pace for that. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. And we mentioned Congressman-elect Dan Goldman. He will be a guest a little later today on Morning Joe. Shifting gears now. For the first time, a federal judge has cited the House January 6th Committee's final report

since it was made public last week, indicating that then-President Donald Trump's remarks on January 6, 2021, telling a crowd to, quote, fight like hell before the Capitol attack, may suggest that Trump was asking them to break the law. In a court order in the case against January 6th defendant Alexander Shepard, U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that Shepard could not raise the so-called public authority defense at trial after his lawyer had argued that Trump had authorized his client's actions at the Capitol that day. Judge Bates, who is a George W. Bush appointee, rejected that defense, writing that Trump did not tell the crowd that entering the Capitol or impeding the certification of the electoral vote was lawful. In a footnote, Judge

Bates went on to note that his ruling was not out of step with the January 6th committee's final report, which concluded that Trump acted, quote, corruptly because he knew stopping the certification was unlawful. Katty, this is feels like a bit of a moment here. The January 6th committee toiling for a year on the final product. That report issued to the public last week. We're still getting transcripts seemingly every day. And here is one cited by a federal judge. Yeah, and look, you know, we still have, what, three more days of this year,

and they are racing to get out everything they can before the end of the year. So there could be even more that we don't know that could lead, you know, serve as more fodder for lawsuits as well. So let's see what else they have to release in the next few days. Meanwhile, the House Sergeant at Arms weighed in on the January the 6th Capitol attack during his testimony with the House Select Committee. According to his transcript, William J. Walker told the panel that the law enforcement response would have looked much different had the rioters been mostly black Americans instead of overwhelmingly white. Walker, who served as the head of the D.C. National Guard during the Capitol attack, said, quote,

I think it would have been more bloodshed if the composition would have been different. He indicated he didn't receive a call from the defense secretary or the secretary of the army on January the 6th, noting the stark difference to the summer of 2020 when Pentagon officials constantly called him to discuss the protests that unfolded in Washington after the murder of George Floyd. Jonathan, we knew there was a difference. Now we have testimony spelling it out from inside. Yeah, we did. That's something that I know Joe on this show was just saying the morning of January 7th, how differently that day would have gone if it had been different people storming the Capitol. Another January 6th related headline here. Out West, new court documents reveal that during an hours-long standoff with the FBI,

a January 6th defendant pointed a gun at the entrance of his home and told officers, they quote, better come in here shooting. A man named Eric Christie refused to leave his California home for two hours last week, even after his attorney, friends, and family arrived at the scene. Christie claimed that the FBI had no lawful authority. The FBI finally arrested him after the hours-long standoff in Sherman Oaks. Government documents indicate Christie purchased a gun several days after he was served with a grand jury subpoena back in March. Christie appeared to be armed with a hammer outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

A number of Republicans, meanwhile, have stepped up their attacks on the FBI in an attempt to undermine the agency as it continues to take the lead in a plethora of investigations of former President Trump. The spike in assaults comes as Republicans are poised to take over the House next week. The New York Times reporting that Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, there he is, is who is set to chair the Judiciary Committee, has pledged to investigate what he describes as the politicization of the FBI, as well as that of the DOJ. The committee's Republican staff released a 1,000-page report last month that accused the FBI of spying on Trump's campaign and ridiculing conservative Americans. Let's note there's no evidence of any sort of espionage on Trump's campaign. So, Ed Luce, I think these two stories deserve to be linked. We have the

rhetoric from Republicans picked up after January 6th, again this summer, after the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago to find the documents held there by former President Trump. These sort of attacks and insinuations against the FBI. And we have no, there's records, there's statistics, but the number of threats against federal law enforcement picked up dramatically right afterwards. And now we have a moment here in California where this man, a January 6th defendant, says FBI agents better come in with their guns blazing. Yeah, we're going to see, we're going to see more of this. I mean, we've seen a couple of attempts. There was one in Ohio a few weeks ago on FBI agents, regional officers. You know, the important thing to

remember is that there is no evidence of established institutional bias in the FBI. It makes mistakes like any other institution. And there was a couple of mistakes with the wording of subpoenas and altering an email for one of the FISA court warrants to tap Carter Page. But there is no systematic bias in the FBI. After a few weeks, though, of Jim Jordan-led hearings, and of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, who Kevin McCarthy's got her vote, she'll be on the Oversight Committee, which is why he's got her vote. There's going to be an extraordinary amount of noise and performative politics about the FBI. And a lot more Americans, unfortunately, are going to believe

that the FBI is part of a deep state plot. I don't know, you know, what can be done about this other than people in our profession do tend to amplify such hearings because they are they are newsworthy. They are, you know, they are theater. But the substance that underlies these claims, this consensus now in the Republican Party is so far yet to be seen. And I'd be very surprised if any substance to systematic bias, political bias could be found. really significant political effect the FBI has had in the last few years is when James Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation a few days before the election. So if one party or the other could be inflamed or annoyed by FBI errors, it would be the Democratic Party. A good point there about James Comey, who violated DOJ guidelines to do so. And certainly so much of this anti-FBI rhetoric can be directly linked to the attacks on the deep state by former President Donald Trump,

attacks without evidence. Ed Luce, your recent column for the Financial Times is titled The Meaning of Ron DeSantis. You write in part, an enduring debate about Donald Trump is whether he stands for a clear ideology or just for Donald Trump. The latter was never in doubt, but it has taken Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor and the former U.S. president's chief rival, to fashion a worldview from Trump's gut instincts, whether you agree with them or not. Those who hope the Republican Party will revert to its pre-Trump character after he is gone are missing the plot. In some ways, DeSantis is even further removed than Trump from the party of Ronald Reagan. The days when Republicans acted as the political arm of big business are gone. DeSantis has shown that he can take on large corporations such as Disney,

the cruise liner industry and the pharmaceutical sector and still rake in campaign contributions. He's also proved that doing battle with Fortune 500 companies, so-called woke capitalism, is a vote winner. His method is to convert resentment of corporate and educational elites into a governing program. Unlike Trump, who trolled liberals on Twitter while also craving the establishment's approval, DeSantis basks in their hatred. Where Trump is capricious, DeSantis is systematic. If Trump did not exist, you might describe DeSantis' philosophy as fossil fuel Christian nationalism.

I like that. Its enemies are amoral tech oligarchs, big pharma, ESG endorsing finance, the corporate media and elite universities. Since Trump does exist, we call it Trumpism. The difference lies in the competence of its execution. I love the way that you call him his heir unapparent, because the two are actually very different. There you've got DeSantis, who reads a lot, who is kind of awkward, who doesn't seem to thrive in the adulation of crowds particularly. He's not just different in personality from Trump. Is he also different in ideology? So I think that's really the key question. I mean, the first bit, the personality one, is a very important one, though,

because we see him now leading Trump in several very big polls by big margins. And yet he hasn't been tested really outside of Florida or even that much within Florida because his events are very sort of set up and orchestrated and my observation of him and others is that he's not just uncharismatic he's anti-charismatic and you know we have seen you know great republican hopes like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio heralded before only to crash, you know, when they hit

New Hampshire or Iowa or wherever, wherever they're interacting with real people and showing the whites of their eyes. But in terms of your question about ideology, yes, I think what he's done is he's packaged Trump's capricious sort of sets of instincts, often really nasty instincts, that Trump gathers by crowd testing rallies as much as anything else into something very systematic, which is a cultural program of resentment. It's a harvesting of resentment against people who went to the kind of universities he went to. I mean he was a Harvard Law School graduate. And he's turned this into a predictable form of organized trolling

that Trump's just not capable, through his indiscipline, of sticking to. And that does amount to a coherent ideology. It is resentment of cultural elites. It wins blue collar votes in Florida, not just of whites, but clearly of Hispanics of all kinds of Hispanic background backgrounds. He launches investigations into Big Pharma for allegedly mis-selling vaccines. He's called for Fauci, a bit like Elon Musk, to be held to account by the law for alleged crimes against science and public communication. These are the result of intensive reading, market research, and planning and consultation. They are programs that are not whimsical. They don't come from tweets. They come from a lot of homework. And I think you can call it Trumpism,

but it's Trumpism without Trump. It's Trumpism without the indiscipline. Ed Luce, thank you so much. And it certainly will be a test. Governor DeSantis, not yet nationally vetted. And you point to his perhaps lack of charisma. So much of Trump's appeal was that celebrity that could keep a crowd going. And we know, Katty, that he can draw tens of thousands of people potentially to a rally. There's no evidence that Ron DeSantis has any sort of those political skills. Yeah, I mean, that's what's always been fascinating about Trump is did it survive? I mean, it was a show, right? You go to a Trump rally, you've been to lots of them,

I've been to lots of them. At some level, it's sort of fun. It's like going to a medieval fair and he whips up the crowd and everybody laughs and you know, and there's the one liners that come and it's kind of predictable. But people go for the entertainment. He was an entertainer after all. And I just, it's hard to, and yet I can see where Ron DeSantis is more disciplined and where he taps into similar grievances. It's just going to be very interesting with once Trump is out of the picture, what happens to somebody like Ron DeSantis? Does he just become a more hardline version of a traditional conservative Republican, more of a hawk on certain issues? I mean, where does he end up when he doesn't have to do the sort of the Trump line?

I just think it's a very interesting idea of what happens to Trumpism after Trump. Yeah, we know what the polls say now, but there are a lot of Republicans who tell me that if you put those two men up on the debate stage together, their money would be on Trump. It's time now for a look

at the morning papers. We'll begin just across the river in New Jersey, where the Star-Ledger reports auto insurance is about to get more expensive for millions of drivers in that state. A controversial new law signed by Governor Phil Murphy will go into effect next year and increase the amount of liability that drivers need to have. The Tampa Bay Times is taking a look at the new census data that shows that Florida is the fastest growing state in the country. For the first time in 65 years, the Sunshine State takes the top spot for population growth. Now on to Kansas, where the Wichita Eagle reports that Governor Laura Kelly has signed an executive order banning TikTok on state-issued devices for executive branch employees.

This comes, of course, as Congress and several other states have also moved to ban TikTok on government devices amid growing security concerns.