Morning Joe - Morning Joe 12/30/22

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Fmr. WH Comms director describes her time in Trump administration as ‘wild eight months’

Beautiful live picture of Times Square where that big old ball will drop tomorrow night at midnight. Good morning. Welcome to Morning Joe. It is Friday, December 30th, New Year's Eve Eve on this final Morning Joe of the year. And this morning, there is more heat on New York Congressman-elect George Santos, who also now is under federal investigation. After it was revealed

he lied about his resume while campaigning for Congress. We'll have new reporting on what those charges could be. Plus, newly released transcripts from the January 6th committee showing the struggle within the Trump White House to keep bad information, conspiracy theories away from the president and the failure to do that in many cases. We'll take a closer look at former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in his failed role as presidential gatekeeper. Plus, after thousands of canceled flights and a reputation now in tatters, Southwest Airlines says it finally expects to resume normal operations today. We'll tell you what the company is saying it plans to do to somehow make

things right. With us this morning, the host of Way Too Early, White House Bureau Chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire, MSNBC contributor, our good friend Mike Barnicle, columnist and associate editor for The Washington Post, David Ignatius, and member of the New York Times editorial board, Mara Gay. Joe and Mika will be back on Monday. Good morning to you all. Want to dive right in with a newly released batch of deposition transcripts from the January 6th House committee from some key witnesses, including members of former President Donald Trump's inner circle. That includes former White House communications director Alyssa Fara Griffin. She spoke to the January 6th House panel on April 15th,

describing her tenure at the Trump White House as a wild eight months. In her words, Griffin revealed one serious and ongoing problem was a lack of organization. She described a Trump White House in which jobs were filled with underqualified staff because more senior government officials would not take positions within the administration. Griffin said any report about the Trump White House being chaotic and operating without structure was, quote, more or less accurate. That included there being no competent gatekeeper to stop harmful or unhelpful information from getting to then President Trump, which led to this moment at the beginning of the covid

pandemic. Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds interesting. Right, and then I see the disinfectant

where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number of lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that.

That was April 23rd, 2020. Griffin said she tried to stop former President Trump for making those infamous remarks. But she was blocked by Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who allowed for easy access and unchecked passage of bad material to the president. Griffin told the committee, quote, I tried to stop it outside of the Oval Office because I knew the president was willing to go on national television, have not been able to properly digest what the report was indicating and say something stupid or dangerous to the public. She went on. I went to Mark Meadows and I said, sir, this is going to blow up in our faces. He's not ready. Like, what are we encouraging? Are we saying like, you know, go buy a humidifier? Do we want to put a run on humidifiers or turn your heat up to 95 degrees? Like it just didn't make any sense. Griffin continued and Meadows overruled me and we got

the injecting bleach thing, end quote. Griffin added former President Trump was only, quote, marginally focused on the COVID virus for about two months before moving on. She also said Trump's senior advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, shot down any idea of looping the incoming Biden administration into informational COVID meetings following the 2020 election, saying, quote, it was the first COVID morning meeting that Jared led after that had been announced. And Dr. Birx raised, she said, well, should we be looping the Biden transition into these conversations? And Jared just said, quote, absolutely not. And then we just moved on. So, Jonathan Lemire, where to begin on all of

this? I guess the first thing to say is that none of this is surprising. something about the light sunlight on playgrounds making them safe, that the equipment was safe for kids to play. He internalized that and said we should shoot light into people's bodies. But to hear it from the inside is something else here. But at least there wasn't a run on humidifiers, I suppose. That's true. We knew there was a brief moment where John Kelly was White House chief of staff, and he did put protocol in place to restrict access to the Oval Office. Well, that got Trump angry. So John Kelly wasn't chief of staff for very long.

And then from when we got by time we got to Mark Meadows, it was, in the words of a Trump adviser, Grand Central Station. Anyone could come in and out, bringing whatever they wanted. Stuff about COVID. We know from Alissa Farah's, Griffin's testimony yesterday that Congressman Matt Gaetz brought a conspiracy theory to the president's desk about the host of this very show. And most troubling is that it had easy access for the likes of Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani and others to bring conspiracy theories about January 6th to the president. That's where, you know, in those days after the election, when there was a real vacuum in the White House because senior staff was starting to leave, there had been a COVID outbreak, there was even less of a process in the Oval Office than before. And people brought in these

conspiracy theories and we saw Trump, what happened next. So Marge, obviously, this is a complete breakdown, not just of what should happen in the White House, but it also just goes to show this environment fostered by this president where conspiracy theories could not just take hold, but how vulnerable his supporters were to believing them. Well, that's extraordinary as well. But, you know, you have to kind of take a moment to pull back here and think about as absurd and kind of funny as some of these goings on were inside the Oval Office. It wasn't funny because the American public and the rest of the world was dealing with the beginnings of a pandemic that would, you know, kill lots of people, lots of Americans, over a million Americans dead now.

And all the time, now we know this is what Donald Trump was doing in the White House. Instead of bringing the best people that he promised to bring, he brought people who were completely obsequious to him, who were jockeying for position, giving him false information. And the entire time he's sitting there enjoying it like a mob boss rather than running the country like a president should. And of course, we also know at the time that Donald Trump knew a lot more about the virus itself than he had told the American public, which is really shameful. So the American people were left completely unprotected. And then there's just also this larger narrative of he was acting more like a dictator than a

president even then, according to Griffin's testimony. And this moment where Griffin describes the president being enraged, actually, that somebody had leaked the fact that he had gone into a bunker to hide from peaceful protesters outside the White House. I mean, that's not the behavior of an American president. That's the behavior of, you know, Muammar Gaddafi. I mean, what is this? So it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing for the American public. And it's disturbing. And a lot of these people have yet to be held accountable. You know, Mike Barnicle, I'll let you take this wherever you want to take it. There's so much in there from this testimony that we just got to see yesterday from Alyssa Farah Griffin, but also the piece about Jared Kushner there at the end, that Jared and Ivanka Kushner have always tried to sort of

insulate themselves from all of the mess of this White House and kind of walk away and live their lives in Florida. But to hear Jared Kushner right up until the very end saying, no, do not work with the incoming Biden administration, do not share this COVID information with them. And we know that from the other side of it, from the Biden transition team, that they had trouble getting any information from anyone in the Trump administration about a pandemic that they inherited from the Trump administration. Jared Kushner right at the middle of things again. Willie, as history is rewritten each and every day, and we follow this each and every day, it becomes clearer and more clear each and every day that the combination of incompetence,

duplicity, and delusion in the Trump White House was staggering. I mean, you had a president who was incompetent and duplicitous. You had a White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who was more than incompetent and more than duplicitous. And David Ignatius, as I was reading those transcripts yesterday, all I could think of was someone like Jim Baker, former White House chief of staff or other White House chiefs of staff who were responsible, responsible to the person they worked for, the president of the United States and the country that they represented, our country, America. And I'm wondering in your experience across all the years you've followed different White Houses and different White House

chiefs of staff, if you could talk a bit about the importance of a chief of staff maintaining an information gate, that what gets to the president is clearly a priority and what doesn't get to him clearly is not. So, Mike, you got it right. The White House, among other things, is an incredible management problem. And the role of the chief of staff is to budget the president's time, to focus the president on precisely the things that the country needs attention on minute by minute. I can remember one of the great masters of that job, Leon Panetta, telling us a story about his advice to Richard Daley was coming in as the new White House chief of staff and asking,

so what's your plan? Meaning, what's your plan for screening information coming into the president and President Clinton? And the answer was, well, I don't have a plan. And the response from Panetta was, you're typically profane. You're blanked. There's no way you can run a White House without a clear plan. Mark Meadows didn't have one, never was able to achieve one. And yet, for me, the interesting paradox of this new material is Trump kept going.

In this chaotic White House, Mark Meadows burning documents, doesn't know who's coming to see him. Conspiracy theories floating all around. Trump continues to move toward the things that he's identified as his objectives. Overwhelmingly, toward the end, his desire to remain in office despite the electoral count. So it was an odd White House where there was complete lack of control and yet insistence on control by the man at the top. It really is extraordinary. These descriptions, it's like we're talking about a daycare. They're trying to keep sharp objects away from Donald Trump, keep the conspiracy theories, keep bad information away from this man, the president of the United States, so he doesn't amplify them, make the centerpiece of his tweets that day. Let's bring into the conversation political investigations reporter for The Guardian, Hugo Lowell, who's been covering this story very closely. Hugo, you've looked at all these transcripts. You're looking at possible connections

now to the Department of Justice investigation here. What else did you see? Yeah, I mean, what really stood out to me in the latest batch of transcripts yesterday is not so much what the witnesses were saying, but what the witnesses weren't saying. And it really stood out with people like Don Jr., people like Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was a Trump 2020 advisor and also Don Jr.'s fiancee. You know, several moments in Kimberly Guilfoyle's testimony that really illuminated the whole, I think, was when she gets questioned about her contacts with the January 6th rally organizers.

You know, this is not the sexy stuff. This is not, you know, Trump and Meadows in the West Wing, you know, running around uncontrolled. I mean, this is really the dark stuff about how these rally organizers were connecting with people around the Trump campaign and around the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who actually stormed the Capitol. And so from an investigative perspective, it's really interesting. And if you see how Kimberly Guilfoyle cannot recall very conveniently how she was supposedly on the phone with Ali Alexander, this far-right activist, days before January 6th, how she didn't recall she had been copied into a list of speakers for the rally itself, which is

a real big point of contention. This wasn't some throwaway list that ended up in our inbox. It was a really big deal for Trump because they were trying to keep the quote-unquote crazies off the stage. That, I think, is where the Justice Department will focus next, because those are the kinds of areas the committee doesn't have the investigative powers to go after, but the Justice Department does. They can see cell phones. They can subpoena people to appear before a grand jury. And so I think the Justice Department's focus going into the next year is going to be not so much on what people were saying, but where people were reluctant to testify. Yeah. So, Hugo, as you say, this final report

from the January 6th committee, this big volume, this document for history does provide a roadmap for the Department of Justice, which of course has been conducting its own investigation, its own interviews and everything else. But now that we've turned the page on the January 6th Select Committee, what does the Department of Justice take from that and where does that investigation stand? Yeah, I think the Select Committee gave a real head start to the Justice Department with respect to the political elements of January 6th and Trump's effort to overturn the election. A lot of the statutes that the Justice Department got a referral about, stuff like inciting insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding,

those are statutes where you have to prove the intent, and the intent weighs large for prosecutors. And I think the January 6th committee did a really good job in getting that initial evidence to kind of bring it up to a probable cause kind of standpoint. You know, that's really the committee's job here. And they were able to show, I think, quite clearly that Trump knew he had lost the election. Trump knew and had been told that trying to get the vice president on January 6th to stop the certification was illegal. And the kind of threshold for the first charge, obstruction of an official proceeding, is actually consciousness of wrongdoing. That's actually a lower bar than maybe some of the other criminal statutes. So I

think the Justice Department can now build upon what the committee found and the evidence that the committee obtained and turn that into some sort of prosecution memo. So I think that's where the Justice Department heads next. So, Hugo, the January 6th committee dissolves tomorrow. It has come to the end of its road. A remarkable set of hearings really sort of moved the needle on a subject that so many Americans thought they knew so well. You've been covering it from day one. And as you talk to the members and their staffs, do they think, as this process draws to a close, that they accomplished what they set out to do? Did they meet their goals in exploring what happened on that day, January 6, 2021? I think it's a really good question. You know, when this committee was first established, and I remember it really well because, you know,

I was on these conference calls with kind of House Democratic leadership and trying to figure out where they were going to go, whether they're going to do a commission or if they're going to have the House Homeland Security Committee investigate this. And, you know, Pelosi ultimately decided to go with the Select Committee. I think a lot of Democrats, and Pelosi particularly, thought the direction of the committee was going to be very different. I think there was a real political aim here to try and get Trump before Congress and have him swear, I'm going to testify in a public hearing. And that was the original intention. I think Pelosi imagined this as dragging Trump to the hill and conducting oversight on him in a very public setting. And I think Pelosi imagined this as dragging Trump to the hill and conducting oversight on him

in a very public setting. And I think the committee actually went above and beyond that. They were able to put together a real fact-finding investigation. And I think the real gift of the investigation was basically showing how Trump was involved at every stage of this multifaceted plot to try and return himself to office. I don't think anyone before the committee had really put all of these things together in a coherent way to kind of tell the story, you know, through the post-election period. And so, in doing so, I think the committee illuminated to Americans just how pernicious the White House's role from October through to January 2021 really was. And I think in doing so, they had this added effect of influencing the midterms in a way

that I don't think anyone else saw coming. You know, democracy really was on the ballot in these midterms. And I think the January 6th committee contributed to that in a real way. And so much of that damning testimony came directly from Donald Trump's allies, from his own advisers, from people who were in the room. Political investigative reporter for The Guardian, Hugo Lowell. Hugo, thanks so much and Happy New Year to you. We'll see you soon.

Yesterday was another day of trouble for Southwest Airlines, but the company insists it will return to normal operations with minimal disruption today. So far this morning, Southwest reporting fewer than 50 cancellations for the day. The company said the roughly 15,000 cancellations over the past week allowed the airline to rebalance its system and get crews where they needed to be. Company officials say they are making every effort to get checked baggage back to customers and will cover the cost of shipment. Boy, I hope so. The airline also promised anyone whose flight was canceled will get a full refund and a reimbursement of travel expenses, including tickets on other carriers, rental cars, gas, hotels and meals.

However, told that process, as you can imagine, will take weeks if If the airline does not deliver on those promises, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says Southwest will face massive fines. We are going to be putting Southwest Airlines under a microscope in terms of their delivering these kinds of reimbursements and refunds to passengers. The airline said to me that they were going to go above and beyond what's required of them. I'm looking to make sure they actually do that. And if they don't, we are in a position to levy tens of thousands of dollars per violation, per passenger in fines. I don't want to resort to fines and penalties, but we'll do whatever it takes to make sure passengers are taken care of. And frankly, I'm disappointed that the airline has not been more proactive communicating this to the public. I don't know why the CEO of Southwest

hasn't been on TV 10 times as much as I have to explain to passengers what they can expect from their airline. Pete Buttigieg talking there. Mike Barnicle, I flew Delta yesterday, a long flight. I was at the airports and outside of Southwest, despite the weather last week and despite it being the holidays, things were moving very smoothly for the most part. And when you ask why did this happen with Southwest? Well, it was an antiquated system, bad computer software and a system that has them flying for Christmas, let's say, and you were standing in an airport and ultimately couldn't get there, maybe you lost your luggage. Now you've got to go into this website and hope you can get reimbursed for the hotel you had to stay in. Just a nightmare. Willie, as you will recall, with a younger family, when you have little kids, traveling to any airport and flying anywhere is incredibly difficult.

I have a couple of grandchildren here in this house with us today. They're flying JetBlue. But I'm thinking about Southwest Airlines and the money they're going to have to pay out. I don't know where they're going to get it. They've been paying so much in dividends to their shareholders that they scrimped on coming up with a computer system that would allow them to operate in a crisis like they went through. And the crisis management situation at Southwest Airlines is one that business schools are going to be studying

for quite some time. And they've received massive amounts, along with other airlines, of taxpayer money. Now they're going to have to bail themselves out of this one. Let's turn to the weather forecast for the final weekend. Hopefully travel a little bit better this weekend than it was last. No matter what airline you're traveling on, meteorologist Angie Lassman has the look for us. Hey, Angie. Hey there, Willie. Yeah, I have some good news. If you live in the midsection of the country, that's where we're going to have really quiet conditions moving into the weekend. But you can see Times Square. All is quiet right now. That's not going to last like that. We actually have some some wet weather working in. That means pack your poncho. We'll see some cool showers. But I really do mean just cool because our temperatures will be into

the low 50s. And here's why. You see this storm system moving through parts of basically the Gulf Coast up into the Ohio Valley. That's going to continue working its way to the east, eventually spreading into places in the northeast and mid-Atlantic. Over on the west coast, this is where we're really going to watch for some of those travel issues you mentioned, Willie. We have rain working in, heavy rain at that. The flooding concern will be there, and plenty of snow is expected for those higher elevations. Many winter weather alerts up now, and you can see more than 16 million people in that flood watch in the bright green there in parts of California. Why? They're expecting anywhere from three to five inches.

We know those burn scar areas tend to flood a little quicker than other spots. So just keep that in mind if you plan to be out and about on the West Coast or traveling on the West Coast. Salt Lake City, L.A. and up into San Francisco are just some of the trouble spots. Now, meanwhile, in the east, it is quite warm. Sixty six degrees in Raleigh. Later today, New York hitting 53 degrees. Temperatures are going to be on the warm side as we get into Saturday and Sunday, but the heavy rain will be with us as we transition into Saturday. Eventually, into midnight, we'll start to see it winding down, but many locations, especially in the New England area, could still

see some of that rain persist into the evening hours. We'll have a brighter New Year's Day, though, Willie. All right. That sounds good. And a balmy night in Times Square. Angie Lastman. Thanks so much, Angie. We appreciate it. Still ahead this morning on Morning Joe, President Biden takes a break from his vacation in St. Croix to sign a massive spending bill to fund the government. But will that legislative victory be the last in his administration streak once Republicans take control of the House in a matter of days? Plus, New York City Mayor Eric Adams will join us to reflect on his first year in office and top agenda items for the next year. Also ahead, a look back at the life of one of the most commanding sports figures of the last century. Soccer icon Pele passed away yesterday at the age of 82.

You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. NBC News now can confirm Congressman-elect George Santos of New York is under federal investigation. The probe from federal prosecutors is at least the second faced now by Santos. The Nassau County District Attorney said earlier this week his office would look into Santos after it was revealed the future lawmaker lied about his background, experience and history. Citing two law enforcement forces, NBC reports the federal investigation is said to be in its very early stages and has not zeroed in on any one allegation of wrongdoing just yet. The two sources confirm prosecutors are examining Santos's finances, including potential irregularities involving financial disclosures and loans he made to his campaign while he was running for Congress. Santos loaned his 2022 campaign $700,000 and claimed he made between $3.5 and $11.5 million from a company he founded last year. That's according to financial disclosures. That company was dissolved in

September, but was reinstituted by Santos just one day after the New York Times report that revealed his lies. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment to NBC News. A spokesman for Congressman-elect Santos, as well as three members of Republican House leadership, have not responded to our request for comment. The congressman-elect did apologize in one recent interview where he admitted to embellishing his resume. As the lies of Congressman-elect Santos pile up, so do the questions, including when exactly did his mother die? The future congressman has given several conflicting timelines on her death. In July of 2021, replying to another account, he wrote on Twitter, quote, 9-11 claimed my mother's life. Just months later, he wrote December 23rd.

This year marks five years I lost my best friend and mentor. Mom, you will live forever in my heart. As you've done the math here, that would mean his mother died in December of 2016, not September of 2001. Both tweets are still up on his Twitter account. Then there is this. In an interview, Santos claimed that while both of his parents were at the September 11th terror attacks, neither of them died. Here's what he said. I get emotional. My parents were both down there the day of the attacks, and fortunately, none of them passed. We were not able to confirm the exact date that interview took place. Many people who were present at the World Trade Center during the attacks later developed cancer. It's not clear if this is what Santos was referring to. Congressman-elect Santos, again, has not responded to the request from NBC News for comment. So, Jonathan Lemire,

we can add this when did his mother die question to the long list of questions where he claimed on Twitter he was biracial. He is not. Where he claimed he was Jewish, he amended that later to saying he was Jew-ish. A little tongue-in-cheek there, I guess, he was going for. Didn't work where he said he worked. Didn't go to college where he said he went to college. It's all listed in the New York Times interview here. I guess the question a lot of people have is, what happens now? There's this federal investigation in its early stages. There might be an ethics probe. But Republican leadership is silent on this because Kevin McCarthy needs George Santos's vote to become speaker of the House. And Republicans don't want to risk giving this seat back to a Democrat. I guess we even have to wonder if his name is George Santos at this point,

because everything else has been a fabrication. But you're right, Willie. I mean, in terms of the calculation from Republicans, it has been striking how silent Kevin McCarthy and other members of House leadership have been. That's because Kevin McCarthy doesn't yet have the votes he needs to be speaker. Santos had pledged to support McCarthy. McCarthy can't afford to lose that vote. Also, if Santos were to resign his seat and there were to be a special election, one would figure Democrats would be favored in it. So, Mara, I mean, it is so disturbing. I mean, there seems to be no depth, no bottom here in terms of what Santos is willing to lie about, including his own mother's death. There's still questions raised about the story he has told about some of his employees being murdered in the Pulse nightclub shooting down in Florida four years ago. No one's been able to verify that. And he does seem to be, though, almost the perfect embodiment of a Republican

party in the age of Trump, one that is willing to lie about anything, thinking they can get away with it. And at least right now, George Santos is on track to become a member of Congress. Yeah, it's disturbing, John. But of course, pulling back, this is the latest iteration of drama in the New York political map. I mean, this has been an extraordinary turn of events. And I won't get into all that drama. But needless to say, actually, control of Congress really ended up depending on some congressional mapmaking that went wrong in New York. And so this seat is actually quite important. It was flipped by the Republicans. And now, you know, we'll have to see kind of what happens in the courts, too, because ultimately, if there's any crime that has been committed or potentially

committed, I mean, he's under investigation. So that process is apparently moving forward. I actually covered years ago Michael Grimm, the former congressman, who ultimately did have to resign his seat because he was indicted. And so there's a special election. So, you know, voters may actually end up having, as you pointed out, to vote in a special election. But in the meantime, you have a public servant who's going to be sworn into office who has been lying not only to all of us, but to his constituents. And that's just not acceptable no matter what political party you're from. Who is he? Can he be trusted? I mean, this is really not encouraging. This is not the kind of behavior that we want to

see from anybody, Republican or Democrat. And this was, by the way, an important election. It was one of those Long Island seats that got flipped from a Democrat to a Republican and giving Republicans part of that narrow margin they have in the House now. So, David Ignatius, there's the question of what happens now to Congressman-elect Santos. But then there's a question a lot of people have been asking for about a week now, which is, how did it get to this point? How did we not know this before voters went into the polling booths? How did opposition research from his opponent not find this? How did the media not booths? How did opposition research from his

opponent not find this? How did the media not find this? How did this man get this far? So, Willie, this is a lesson in gullibility, among other things. It turns out that there was a Long Island newspaper that wrote back in September. nobody paid any attention, the basic details of some of these fabrications, but it just didn't make an impact on voters, but good on them. The New York Times then in December had a detailed examination. There are always serious issues here about what does it mean for Kevin McCarthy and what are the legal ramifications. But to be honest, this reminds me of one of the great Hollywood stories about people who were incredible fabricators. I don't know if viewers have seen Inventing Anna on Netflix about this woman who claimed to be Anna Delvey, a millionaire, and just convinced everybody that she had a life that she'd never lived.

There's a great movie with Leonardo DiCaprio where he pretends to be an airline pilot and flies all over the place and nobody figures out that he's making most of it up. This is a story we see in American life over and over again. Herman Melville wrote a wonderful novel called The Confidence Man about that. That was the title, we'll remember, of Maggie Haberman's biography of Donald Trump. So it's a part of political life. Santos has done it again. Shame on all of us, especially voters, for not looking more carefully at the facts.

But I'm just so struck by the Hollywood details. George Santos, if you're not going to be in Congress, think about calling your agent in Hollywood to see if this can be a miniseries. You know, David, you mentioned that newspaper. The North Shore Leader is the Long Island newspaper that did break this story in September. We ought to give them credit for doing it. But chiefly shame on George Santos above everyone else for lying about his resume. Mike Barnicle, there was a time not so long ago that this man would have been laughed out, run out of his position when all this came to light. Maybe back in September when the newspaper in Long Island first broke it or perhaps now. But as we've been saying, Republican leadership is totally silent about this because they cannot afford to lose his vote no matter who he is or who he says he is.

Yeah, well, in politics, we now live in the age of have you no shame? And they have no shame. The large parts of the Republican Party. You know, interestingly enough, Willie, yesterday while grocery shopping, I encountered a doctor, a psychologist who works at McLean Hospital, one of the finest psychiatric facilities in the country. And she described Santos' situation as a portrait in self-loathing, which I found really interesting as I spoke to her about it. And it's that he hated himself and the component parts of his real life so much so that he

made up everything about a life that he wanted to have, a life that he could never have had, could never have attained, because he was so disgusted with himself. This is her theory. And I'm buying into it. I am buying into it. Because as Jonathan just pointed out, the same thought struck me. Are we sure George Santos is his real name? We don't know, really. And we'll find out, I guess, when investigations ensue and we find out what happens with his seat in Congress. Yeah, and I think that's right. We're going to learn more about who George Santos is, a life built on lies. But I think we should flag here the campaign financed those disclosures. That's going to be the potential legal tripwire. That's not going to get Santos out of Congress before January 3rd.

That's not going to deprive Kevin McCarthy most likely of Santos's vote. But that is the thing, Willie, that could eventually lead to real trouble for Santos facing some consequences for his actions and lies, even before he potentially has to face voters again. Yeah, that's a good point. But as you say, he will be seated. It looks like the Republican Party is not going to do anything about this. That investigation may play out. He may face some justice down the road, but he will be a United States congressman, it looks like, from here. And by the way, John, some great reporting from Barnacle, from the Market Basket, as always. Just shoot on the ground. There is a wealth of information. Every day, Mike comes back with a nugget the Market Basket, as always. Just shoot on the ground stuff. There is a wealth of information. Every day, Mike comes back with a nugget from Market Basket, the nation's greatest supermarket chain.

Absolutely. Barnacle feeling the cantaloupe, right, and checking the produce while he gets his reporting. Coming up next, we will turn overseas. Much of Ukraine is dark this morning after a new round of Russian rocket attacks targeting the country's power facilities. We'll have the very latest on the fighting and get some new reporting from David Ignatius. Plus, a look inside Ukraine's leading newsroom and the difficult conditions for the journalists there risking their lives every day to tell the story. Morning Joe's coming right back. Large swaths of Ukraine are in darkness this morning after Russia launched one of its biggest attacks of the war on Ukraine's electric facilities. NBC News foreign correspondent

Matt Bradley has details. Rockets have returned to Ukraine with a vengeance. In one of the largest assaults on civilian targets since the war began more than 10 months ago, 69 missiles aimed mostly at Russia's preferred civilian target, electricity infrastructure. Like this facility in the eastern city of Kharkiv that burned for hours. The barrage left the country in darkness. 40% of Kyiv was without power, according to its mayor. The attack looked like retribution, coming only days after a Ukrainian drone struck an air base deep inside Russia, killing three Russian servicemen. Ukraine's military said it shot down all of the 16 missiles Russia fired at the capital Kyiv. But as this damage shows, even an intercepted missile can rain down ruin on civilians.

The strikes injured three people in Kyiv, including a 14-year-old girl. Just look at this crater. There was an elderly man and his son in this house when it was hit, and incredibly, they made it out alive. Leonard Fetkurin lived in this home for 40 years until this attack. He and his son escaped after fast-reacting neighbors forced open the door. Are you angry about this? Are you sad?

What else can I feel now? But I would say that it's not even hate, he said. I just feel contempt for these people. A contempt that for many Ukrainians is becoming harder to contain. NBC's Matt Bradley reporting from Ukraine this morning. David Ignatius, we've crossed the 10-month mark of this war. Before we know it, it'll be a year that Ukraine's been under attack from Russia. They continue to go after civilian targets. They continue to go after infrastructure like the power grid as a cold winter grips that country. President Zelensky, of course, was here in the United

States last week pleading with the United States Congress to hang in there with him. What does this look like now as we turn the corner into a new year? How long do you expect this war to continue? So, Willie, we're in a particularly brutal phase of this war. On the ground, it's a stalemate. It's a war of attrition, bitter artillery battles that remind people who visited the front of World War I and the slaughter there. If you stand back and look at this last year, I think there's some basic conclusions. For Russia's Vladimir Putin, this has been a disaster. However, it turns out he has failed in his basic attempt to remake the face of Europe rather than splinter Europe, get more Russian advantage. He's brought Europe together in a way that I haven't seen in decades.

It's been a year of success for Ukraine, this country that's just amazed the world, thrilled the world and inspired the world with its bravery and standing up to Russia. They get pounded without heat, without light, these daily attacks on the infrastructure. And yet people come back. When I visited Ukraine this year, I found absolutely unbreakable resolve among people determined to keep going forward. It's been a year, I think, when President Biden's done a pretty good job in keeping the allies together, in maintaining a flow of weapons to Ukraine, in keeping bipartisan support for the war. The visit of Zelensky to the White House and then Congress last week was an example for that. Finally, this is a war that, because of its brutality, the whole world would like to see end.

And yet there isn't an endgame that's clear to me or to most observers. Russia and Ukraine are still so far apart on their demands for peace talks. Russia says you have to accept that we've annexed these four territories. Ukraine says we won't think about peace talks until all Russian troops withdraw. There simply isn't ground yet for peace negotiations. We'll head into next year in a war of just slugging it out and wars end finally when combatants are exhausted. And maybe that's what the spring and summer of next year will show. I do know that the United States is trying to figure out ways to help Ukraine target Russian forces more precisely in Ukraine,

not in Russia, but in Ukraine, teach them how to advance more rapidly on the battlefield, in the hope that that will change the balance. But this is a war in which the whole world should be astonished by what Ukraine achieved and see that Russia's power is far distant from what Putin pretended it was when he launched the war February 24. Mike, the world is inspired and astonished by what the Ukrainian people have been able to do and by their courage through all of this. But it doesn't mean that they don't continue to suffer every single day, as we've seen in that report from Matt Bradley a minute ago. Well, Willie, it's an incredible story. The spine, the character, the fierceness, the willingness to fight for their own country. The Ukrainians are a role model for all of those things, especially living in a country that large parts of it, as David just mentioned,

have literally been destroyed by Russia. And the rebuilding of Ukraine is going to be a colossal and very expensive effort that's going to have to take place whenever they sign a peace treaty, whenever peace comes to Ukraine. But David, you were just in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago. And what you just mentioned, I'd like to ask you about a little bit further. The Ukrainians are going to get increasingly sophisticated weapon systems including the Patriot missile system so targeting and training could you speak to both those issues from the point of view of the ukrainians the sophisticated targeting necessary with these weapons and the training to how to use these weapon systems that they're being given.

Where does such training take place? So, Mike, I wrote at the end of the year after this latest visit several weeks ago to Kiev a series about what I call the algorithm war. And a part of this war that has not been really visible is the extent to which the U.S. and all NATO partners are helping Ukraine with the most advanced tools of warfare. In effect, electronic battlefields where commercial satellite imagery of every space of this battlefield is uploaded constantly, updated with intelligence. The location of Russian tanks and other equipment is detected by artificial intelligence algorithms that are produced by a Pentagon program that updates them literally every month. So there's a lot of modern technology combined with the most basic ancient skills of warfighting, bravery, courage, standing in trenches, fighting off an enemy.

That's part of what makes this war so extraordinary, the ultra-modern and the ancient. The Ukrainians have managed to combine those two in a way that I think will change the future of warfare. We've never seen a war quite like this with as many technology tools. And the message to China, I would think, as China thinks about attacking Taiwan, is be careful. The Americans and their allies have more in this technology space to do intelligence and targeting that most of the world understands. Let's bring into the conversation someone just back from Ukraine, award-winning correspondent Charlie Sennett. He's the founder and editor of the Ground Truth Project, recently traveling to Kyiv to visit Ukraine's leading newsroom. Charlie,

it's good to see you. This is an angle of the story we don't talk about a lot, but such an important one, getting the truth of the war out to the world. Tell us about UP and the newsroom you visited there. Yeah, good morning, Willie. UP is an extraordinary newsroom, a place where you see people just going about their jobs trying to tell the truth of this war. Ukrainskia Pravda, the name of the news organization, means Ukrainian truth. They go by the name UP. And I've just never seen a newsroom just so focused. You know, we talk all the time about the way this country is showing resolve and its endurance. The newsroom is an incredible lens to watch that through. Every day, a team of about 50

are going out into the field, risking their lives. You have people back in the office who are constantly fighting off cyber attacks. They're also constantly fighting off incredible cold. They are part of this entire country trying to survive this winter with what really amounts to a war crime of trying to punish collectively a people by plunging them into darkness and really frigid temperatures. And just being there with them and sort of in solidarity, really, in their jobs, watching them go at it was really, it was really inspiring. It was humbling. And it just reminds us of the incredible importance of those who are on the ground reporting on their own country

and telling the story to their own citizens of what's really happening in there. And I came away just in awe of the work they do every day. Mike Barnacol, I'll let you take it to Charlie, but I want to read part of what he wrote in his amazing piece talking about the newsroom being in one of the meetings when it was interrupted by urgent alarms on the cell phones of editors and reporters. Charlie writes, quote, the phone alerts are silenced and the members of the news team stare with great intensity at their phones,

reading their text warnings and firing messages to colleagues, family members, and military sources while following the latest government bulletins. They are checking on loved ones and colleagues at the same moment they're trying to cover the daily story. This is what the modern equivalent

of air raid sirens feels like, and each member of the team knows precisely what to do at this moment. They pack up their laptops and head for an interior room without any windows and supported by thick concrete walls where they will continue the meeting. They pray the power stays on so they can keep the newsroom functioning since their aging generator is not always enough to pull them through the night shift. Just another day at the office, quips the editor of the English language edition of UP, Mike Barnicle. So, Charlie, you've covered fighting in Afghanistan, you've covered fighting in Gaza, and now you've been in Ukraine. Mechanically, how do they get the news out? Is it by the hour? Is it by the day? In what form?

What form do they get the news out? Ukrainskia Pravda is a digital news organization, so they are constantly online. And this is a country that's very much online. People have good smartphones. They are constantly checking their phones. People are checking their phones with a different level of intensity than we do in this country, of course, because they're looking for every minute to get an update on what's going on. But one of the most difficult challenges, Mike, is power. This is a newsroom that plunges into no power. So when I got there, they were using an old generator, diesel-powered generator. They had to go out late

at night, try to forage for diesel, bring it back. They had the fumes choking back from a fire escape into the newsroom, which is a five-story walk-up. It was just untenable for them to make it through the winter. So one of the joyful moments we had was to bring them a new generator. We brought them a generator that can hold power for about three to five days. And it's solar powered, so they can put the solar panels out on the fire escape. And they're in business now for their overnight shift. That meant so much to them to be able to do that. And so that's why I was there, really, was to try to help the newsroom to see what they needed. We brought Kevlar vests. We brought helmets. We brought first aid kits. The basics you need to cover a war. But what they really need is power. What they really need are more resources to help them continue to just bring the information to their own country.

Right now, they have about 35 million unique visitors to the site. But they're into the billions of page hits since the war started. And they've become this juggernaut of information, reliable, accurate. And as you say, it just comes through this incredible hard work around the clock, fact checking out in the field, seeing their reporters out there risking their lives is something that I just don't want us to forget. You know, tremendous reporting from your reporter from the field today. But there really is an army of people who are there reporting on their own country. And it was it was a kind of a different level of intensity to watch that in action.

Yeah, they're incredibly brave. And as you write in the story, Charlie, they've been brave for a long time reporting about the oligarchs of Russia, for example, and what they've been up to over the years. You can read Charlie's account online at the ground truth project dotorg. Charlie Sennett, it's great to see you. Thanks for bringing us the story. Happy New Year. Thanks, Willie. Happy New Year.