Morning Joe - Morning Joe 4/4/24

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination 56 years later

I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. That was Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, the night before he was assassinated. Today marks 56 years since his death.

We're going to have Reverend Al join us this morning to talk about that extraordinary moment in our nation's history. Willie, it's just such an extraordinary speech on so many levels. It was April 3rd, 1968. It was April 3rd, 1968. It was raining outside. Martin Luther King was supposed to go deliver the sermon. He was too exhausted. I believe it was Ralph Abernathy who came back and said, Martin, you've got to go. Martin, you've got to go.

And he went and he delivered one of the most prophetic speeches in American history, foreseeing his own death the next day, taken to the top of the mountain to see the promised land, but knowing that he would never get there himself, despite the long march of his people to that point. And to, you know, that speech coming April 3rd, 1968, right before his passing, you know, it's a march on Washington, in our nation's laws. Part of the promises made going back to 1776, and we have come a long way in many, many areas, a black president, a black vice president, black justices of the Supreme Court, black CEOs. And yet, Willie, sadly, there are many of us, and I'll include myself, who believed that the moral arc of the universe did bend upward and continued to bend upward. We've had a bit of a flattening out over the past five, six, seven, eight years, an anger of pushing back on some of the very recent gains made by black Americans and people

of color. And that's in large part what this election is about, whether we continue to move toward being that more perfect union than Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned that night in Memphis, or whether we go backwards to the 50s, to the 40s, to a time of two Americas, a divided America, a segregated America, an America at war with itself. Yeah, a lot of that grievance for which Donald Trump has been a vessel for almost a decade now is exactly what you're saying, which is the progress that this country has made. A little too fast for some people in this country. They feel maybe they've been left behind or perhaps now they're not the ones not getting the fair shake. And Donald Trump has tapped into that.

But man, you listen to that speech, Mike Barnicle. It's still every time you hear it sends chills up your spine. The delivery alone, the substance alone, but also now the context we know that would come the next day when Martin Luther King was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was there to walk alongside striking sanitation workers in Memphis, some of whom were living in squalor. He gave them hope. And he was killed that day on April 4th, 1968, in a day that, you know, you were covering the news, the day that shook the country, and whose echoes are still felt today. I was in Washington, D.C. the night that Martin Luther King was murdered. I was in Washington, D.C. the same night after he died. And Robert F. Kennedy was in Indianapolis giving another incredible speech in Indianapolis

about the assassination. Soon, Washington, D.C. was in flames along with a lot of other major cities in the country. The country seemed fractured. The republic seemed shaky. Were we going to hold? It did hold. It held then. It held throughout the year.

And it held ever since. And I believe hope is still alive that it will continue to hold, despite the fractures in this nation that Joe just described. Yeah, we believe that. This is a tweet from Martin Luther King, the third wrote it yesterday. Tomorrow is the anniversary of my dad's assassination to the world. He was monumental, a titan of justice. But to me, he was a dad. He was at the center of our home and family. The world lost an incredible leader. We lost a loving father. Yolanda lost the chance to meet her grandfather. So we'll be talking more about Martin Luther King with Reverend Al and legacy today and the battle ahead. It's also the anniversary of another consequence of day in history.

75 years ago today, the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO, was signed in Washington. We'll discuss the significance of the alliance amid the war in Ukraine, which is nearing 800 days and counting. And the man who used to lead that alliance, former Supreme Allied commander of NATO, retired four-star Navy Admiral James Tavridis is with us. He is chief international analyst for NBC News. Also with us, the host of way too early White House beer chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire and U.S. special correspondent for BBC News, Katty Kay. And our top story this morning amid growing tensions over the war in Gaza,

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are expected to speak by phone today. This will be their first direct communication since the Israeli airstrike that killed seven World Central kitchen workers. Earlier this week, Biden expressed some of his strongest criticism of Israel to date, saying he was outraged and heartbroken by those deaths. Biden and Netanyahu last spoke on March 18th when the president warned the prime minister against carrying out a military offensive in the southern city of Rafah. Meanwhile, World Central Kitchen founder, Jose Andres, is calling for an investigation into what he says was a deliberate attack on his organization's workers.

Speaking on camera yesterday, for the first time since the airstrike, Andres said the Israeli government's claim that the blast was accidental. He was rejected. He rejected that. They were targeted systematically, car by car, because they were not successful in hitting.

They keep trying. This happened over more than 1.5, 1.8 kilometers. So this was not just a bad luck situation where, oops, we dropped the bomb in the wrong place or not. Every country, obviously, that nationals, including the United States, that had nationals that died on this attack, we need to have an investigation that is neutral. humanitarians and civilians should never be paying the consequences of war. This is a basic principle of humanity. At the time, this looks like it's not a war against terrorism anymore.

Seems this is a war against humanity itself. You know, so many investigations that need to be done, so many investigations that are being put off, so many investigations. You know, why are you tracking these trucks from an organization that you know is delivering tons of food of aid to Gaza to bring desperately needed aid to Gaza? Why? Why were they tracking them? Why did they fire on them? They were clearly marked. After all, this is the same IDF, this is the same Netanyahu government that was bragging about their pinpoint precision and being able to kill Iranian leaders just a few days ago. And here, with pinpoint precision, with their logos on the top of these vans for the World Central Kitchen, missiles are delivered through the middle of those vans and they're targeted. I mean, my God.

And so many investigations coming after the war's over, we're told, Benjamin Netanyahu says, about those hostages. Now is not the time. The hostages who escaped, who took their shirts off, who raised their hands after escaping from the horror of being a Hamas hostage. And the IDF, with their hands in the air, with their shirts off, IDF guns them down. Oh, that's an investigation we have to worry about later, too. And then Netanyahu, knowing for a year beforehand of Hamas's plans, they had the plans in hand in the government, doing absolutely nothing about it, doing absolutely nothing about the illicit funding that Trump and Netanyahu knew about in 2018, the funding sources that kept Hamas's war machine alive. They looked the other way. They said, don't worry about it. And of course, as I've said on this show,

and yet for some reason, Netanyahu still is not having to answer for this. As I've said repeatedly, Netanyahu sent a representative up to Doha three weeks before the attack on October the 7th. The leaders of Qatar said, do you guys still want us to keep sending all this money to Hamas? The answer, yes, of course we do. Netanyahu was the chief sponsor of Hamas through Qatar. It was Netanyahu that was keeping the money flowing there. Well, but we can't investigate that until after the war is over. We can't do anything until after the war is over. We can't ask any questions about why Benjamin Netanyahu set up a situation where Hamas had the weapons, the powers, the means to basically walk,

walk into Israel, walk into Israel and assault the IDF and the famed, the famed Israeli defense forces with mopeds, drugged up terrorists and paragliders. And Benjamin Netanyahu did nothing for hours while Israeli women were beaten and raped and killed and grandmothers were beaten and burned to death. Babies were shot in their cribs. Parents had to watch these terrorists, like to call them something else, these terrorists shoot their children in front of them. And children were forced to watch as these terrorists shot their parents in front of them. One hour goes by, Netanyahu's government does nothing. Two hours, nothing. Three,

four, the rapes continue. Five hours, six out, nothing. Seven hours, not eight out, not 10, 10 hours. Some places, 12, 13 hours, nothing is done. Well, what happened that day? How in the hell did Benjamin Netanyahu's government allow that to happen? Oh, you can't ask those questions. We're fighting. Why would you allow this man to continue running your country when he is responsible? I think they're asking that question. When he is responsible for Hamas being able to run loose in Israel and commit the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. We know the nature of Hamas. We know their stated goal has always been to kill Jews, to destroy Israel. Yet Netanyahu was funding them. Netanyahu had their war plans. Netanyahu did nothing. Netanyahu, he was asleep at the switch when this happened. I mean, Hamas, it's like scorpions. If you had a nanny put scorpions in your baby's crib, would you say, well, you know, it's a tough time right now. The baby's in the hospital. We better keep the same nanny until the baby. No. No.

In this case, the man who is almost singularly responsible for letting Israel's guard down because he was too interested in fighting the rule of law in Israel. He was too interested in dividing one Israeli against the other. He was too busy tending to the needs of religious extremists, so much so that he kind of forgot to take care of the secular elements of the IDF and the Mossad and the intel services that had kept Israel safe since 1948. How long? How long? Let's let's bring in Admiral Stavridis. Admiral, I do not ask you to associate with a single word I said. I do. I do, though, want to know how long. I believe it is my belief. And if I am wrong, please push back.

The damage, the harm that Benjamin Netanyahu is inflicting on Israel, that he has already inflicted on Israel, that he will inflict on Israel for years to come because of his behavior since and before October the 7th, seems to me is so massive that we're going to have to leave it to historians and future generations to sum it up. But I'm just wondering, how long does this continue? The hell that we're seeing play out in Israel and Gaza? Let's start with the political. I think that the clock is indeed ticking on Benjamin Netanyahu for all the reasons you articulate.

No democracy can tolerate that kind of incompetence on display again and again and again. That clock is ticking. And I think we're going to hear from the center of Israeli politics, the center left of Israeli politics, and they're going to demand answers appropriately to the questions you just posed. And I would indeed associate myself very strongly with all of that. I'll add that in the center of that cabinet is former general, leader of the Israeli Defense Forces, Benny Gantz, who is someone I worked with consistently during the four years I was Supreme Allied Commander in NATO. You're seeing a photograph of him right now. He's steady. He's deeply respected within

that society. And he obviously knows the security and the international aspects of all of this. He gets it on how this is damaging Israel in the longer term. And Joe, you laid out very well all of the internal dynamics and questions. I'll give you a couple on the international scene, starting with a tormented, obviously heartbroken leader in Jose Andres, with whom I have worked on a number of different things in my capacity as chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He's passionate, emotional, and appropriately furious at the idea that this attack on his forces could be called an accident. It was a deliberate shot. It was taken with bad intelligence, obviously. But I'll close with this. We absolutely need complete clarity, transparency on the upcoming investigation.

And no, it can't wait until after hostilities stop, probably months from now. It's got to happen now. Admiral, let me ask you about that attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy. There is no good answer here. the one hand chef andres is suggesting they were targeted yeah yeah which my god if that's the case and and on the other hand it's the intelligence was so bad our drones our headquarters couldn't see that there was a world central kitchen logo on the top of these vans which as chef andres has said and many others have said they coordinate coordinated their movements with the IDF, knowing how dangerous it was in that zone. Which of those doors are you looking behind? Neither of them are good. Yeah, neither are. And let me take you inside

the targeteering room, because I assure you at the IDF headquarters, they have a special cell that is put together. It'll have intelligence officers. It'll have a judge advocate general to be considering questions. It'll have typically a red cell individual who will be skeptical of the operation. And above all, it'll have the actual targeteers, the operators who have flown those kind of missions now they're on the ground side of it. That team is going to be looking at every time Israel releases a precision guided weapon. So where that failure occurred, was it intelligence? Was it a judgment call?

Was it technology? Was it a drone circuit that failed to send prompt and accurate information? It could be any of those things. I can certainly attest to the fact that Israeli defense forces are not going to deliberately target humanitarian workers. That's not in their DNA. On the other hand, this is a massive military failure. It has to be pulled apart. The source of the problem is somewhere in that target tearing center. Does it make sense to you, though, Admiral, that the IDF can throw a dart into Tehran,

into Iran and take out a leader or wherever that leader is outside of Iran, actually. And this was in Syria in this case. But make this kind of mistake. That's what just doesn't add up for people. Yeah. And if you think about war, there's always two faces to war. And on the same day, as you said, Willie, there's a highly precise strike on an embassy compound of Tehran that's located in Syria, yet literally within hours, we have this tragic, tragic event where these humanitarian aid workers are killed.

In both cases, here's the point to be made, in both cases, the precision guided weapons did what the makers designed them to do in that they did strike with extreme precision. In one case, the intelligence was good. The judgment was good. The visual technology worked. In the other, something went wrong. And we need to understand that. And oh, by the way, there needs to be significant accountability. I can assure you if that had been a U.S. missile taking out seven aid workers, that chain of accountability would rise way above the sergeant, the Air Force captain, the colonel target tier. It would go up to the one star, the two star, the three star.

That kind of accountability has to follow as well. And all that has to be done transparently. It needs to be done transparently. It needs to be done also with the understanding that when Israel wanted to kill an Iranian leader in Syria, they were able to do it. And so they were precise there, not so precise with aid trucks. They really didn't want to end there. They've been fighting. Netanyahu is fighting to keep aid trucks out of there. I agree with you, Admiral. I agree with you that they're not going to deliberately target those trucks. That said, I would certainly look at a lot of explanations through a very skeptical lens and ask the tough questions. Caddy, it's not always fair.

It's not always fair. It's not always wise, but there are often events that will be seen as defining events for political campaigns, for wars, for horrors like this. get the feeling, and I think you probably do and many others do, that the killing of these aid workers and the very tough words of Chef Jose Andres and the fact that it's going to stay in the news, it is a lead in the New York Times this morning. This may be a defining moment, a turning point for this conflict that that has just led led to the highest number of Jews, the most Jews slaughtered and killed since the Holocaust and just immeasurable suffering for the Gazan people who continue to suffer this very day, we wake up, we're eating, we have homes, we have food, we have what our family needs to protect them. That's not the case for Palestinian fathers in Gaza, Palestinian mothers in Gaza, for orphans now in Gaza. That's not the case. This hell continues. A lot of Americans, though, may be more focused now because of the horrors of this attack on a Western aid organization.

Yeah, we're not waking up grinding up cat food and dog food in order to try and make flour so that we can feed it to our children or trying to force a little bit of salty water down their mouths because they've had no water for the last 24 hours so we want them to drink something that's what is happening from the reports we hear from gaza this and you're right it's not fair 200 other aid workers have died they just don't happen to be european and so there hasn't been as much focus on them. My son worked, my nephew works for, say, the Children Fund in Cairo. They lost somebody on early on. And he sort of said, well, why is there not being this international reaction to it? There hasn't. But this has done and maybe now will change it. And I think it puts a spotlight, particularly, as the admiral was saying, on the workings of the Israeli government.

I mean, it doesn't take very much in the Middle East for people to start thinking that this was deliberate and that this is a deliberate ploy by the Israeli government to use food as a weapon, to starve the Palestinians in order to get Hamas, to give them more favorable terms. That's the kind of language that I'm hearing out of people from the Middle East at the moment, that actually maybe it wasn't something that went awry. Maybe they just don't want food to get in to the Palestinians in Gaza at the moment. The heartfelt pouring from the Israeli military makes that seem like it's not the case. But the international reaction to this has been very swift.

There is a letter that's just come out in the UK from 600 senior lawyers, including retired Supreme Court judges who never usually get involved in this kind of thing, saying that the UK should stop all of its weapons transfers to Israel at the moment because it risks being in breach of international law, because there is the risk that this is a genocidal situation in Gaza at the moment. So let's see if this changes things for the people in Gaza. First and foremost, we have to be thinking today, especially as aid agencies now pull back because it's not safe for them to work. We have to be thinking, how are those children, how are those mothers going to feed their kids? How are those orphans going to get a little bit of water today? And if the situation in Rafah gets worse, which it may do if the Israelis do eventually go into there,

then we need to think how are we going to supply people with the food they need to survive? Because at the moment, at the moment, it looks worse, not better today in Gaza. Admiral, let's stipulate that war, something you know, is a tragic, lethal, messy business. Given that stipulation, why does it seem that Israeli, the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF, has such a high tolerance for civilian casualties, for collateral damage, much more so than any other army? It's a complicated question, but I'll give you three thoughts on it. Number one, it is the the raw emotion of failure on their own part. And what I mean by that is, as Joe said a moment ago, they saw these images of Israeli babies shot in their cribs that will engender immense emotion and fury in any military person, frankly, in any human being.

So that's a predicate to what's happening in front of us. Number two is they live in the toughest neighborhood. They're up against foes who are like Hamas, rapists, mutilators, torturers. There is a component to their reaction that faces the fact of the horrible aspects of those with whom they fight. You should never give in to that as a military professional. You should never give in to either of those emotions, but it is certainly part of the calculus. And then third and finally, and I don't mean this in any way to sound like an excuse for what's happening, but you just can't think of a worse military situation than 2.2 million innocent civilians, half of them children, caught in the crossfire.

It's just an incredibly complex situation. So none of those are excuses. The IDF has got to up its game in taking care of that civilian population. And I'll conclude with this. Katty mentioned RAFA a moment ago. There are a million Gazans in RAFA. The IDF cannot launch attacks into RAFA without securing the food, the medicine, the shelter for those million people, and far preferably actually move them out of RAFA before they conduct military attacks. That's the point at which the IDF needs to overcome the emotions we talked about a moment ago, Mike. If they do not do that, I think these taps of weapons, notably offensive weapons, are going to start shutting down from the West.

You know, Willie, Donald Trump has has risen in America by presenting false choices. We can't be a diverse nation and a strong nation. We can't we can't move forward and progress without leaving too many people behind. If people of color are doing well, that must mean that white people are doing more poorly. If women have more rights than they've had before, then that must mean that men are suffering. It's always a false choice. He always plays one side against the other. That's what Benjamin Netanyahu has been doing for decades now in Israel.

He presents a false choice to the world. And I think more importantly, geopolitically, he presents a false choice to America and America's leaders. And it is this. He says, you can have a secure Israel, but you cannot have at the same time a Palestinian people who have safety, dignity and security. His twisted reality that has kept him in power for a long time in Israel and led us to where we are now is, downtrodden, subjugated and suffering only if they're second class citizens. So Benjamin Netanyahu, this has been his approach because his dream has been, his dream has been in Israel from the river to the sea. You know, Israelis rightly, Israelis rightly are offended when people talk about the need for a Palestine

that's from the river to the sea because it's talking about wiping out Israel. Well, the shoe's on the other foot here because this is Benjamin Netanyahu's vision. To push Palestinians out and have Israelis from the river to the sea. And he presents the United States a false choice. You either support my twisted vision of what I'm doing in Gaza and what I've been doing in the West Bank now for over a decade,

robbing Palestinians of their homes, allowing religious extremists to set up illegal settlements, running roughshod over all Palestinian rights in the West Bank because it helps Benjamin Netanyahu politically with those religious extremists. Either do that or you're not a true defender of Israel. It is time. Moms, dads, please put earmuffs on your children right now. It is time for Joe Biden. It is time for the United States Congress. It is time for Americans to call bullshit on that because that has led us to where we are today. And enough is enough. We can have two things at once. You know, if Netanyahu wants to do this, he has his choice. If he wants to continue taking Israel off a cliff, he has a choice.

He can do that. But we Americans, we have a choice, too. And our choice is not defined by what Benjamin Netanyahu says our choice is. Our choice is to say we will continue to support Israel, but we're not going to continue to support the systematic killing of civilians. And if you want our support, you're going to need to do this, this and this. Anybody that says after what we've seen, Willie, over the past couple of months, anybody who says that that's anti-Israeli, they can go straight to hell because they're dead wrong. There are those of us who have loved Israel, who defended Israel, who have fought about Israel, who still love Israel, who actually went to battle with their fathers in law on national television over Israel

and would do it again and and have fought in Congress for Israel, have fought at night and day on TV for Israel, who will always fight for Israel. That doesn't mean I fight for Netanyahu's twisted vision of what Israel should be. I want an Israel that was and can be better today than it's been over the past two months. So you're hearing that argument domestically from someone the admiral mentioned a few minutes ago, Benny Gantz, who yesterday just came out publicly and said, we need new elections. He's a leader of the opposition party in Israel, also in the war cabinet, said we need to call elections this year. We cannot wait another two and a half years when Netanyahu's next term is up. We need a change in leadership

for all the reasons you just laid out, Joe. And then, Jonathan, there is the United States angle of this. There's going to be a phone call today to be a fly on the wall for that between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu, a contentious meeting on Monday about this Rafa offensive where the Israeli delegation was said to be sort of, well, animated in their defense with Secretary Blinken and others. Joe Biden, he's hearing pressure now, not just from, you know, we've talked about the Muslim American vote and the protest vote we've seen, but members of the Obama administration now coming out in public ways, Ben Rhodes and others saying it's not enough to leak to the media that you're outraged. You've got to do something now, given what we just saw, especially this week with the World Central Kitchen. Yeah, and that's what's happened in the last 48 hours or so since the

strike with these aid workers killed. The White House has made no secret, both leaking to reporters and also saying publicly, we heard from Admiral Kirby yesterday from the podium saying the president is outraged by what happened. The president himself dictated a statement that was released saying how upset he was that he spoke to Chef Jose Andres condemning what happened there. But you noted it. A lot of Democrats, including some pretty big Biden supporters, have said, hey, look, it's enough is enough. You can't just say you're angry. You've got to do something about it. But there's been reporting yesterday from Politico and other places that at least for now, White House still not going to condition aid to Israel. Now, could that change in today's phone call? It could. But that was

the strategy, at least as of yesterday. So this is going to be a significant phone call between the president and prime minister. It's the first time they've spoken since the strike. And there's going to be extraordinary pressure for this to happen because you're right that the RAFA plan that was floated by the Israelis, to Admiral's point earlier, made no mention of supplying food or water or other basic supplies for the Palestinians. They're going to try to move out of RAFA. The U.S. deemed that unacceptable, Joe. And that's what led to that meeting ending with a real force of emotion. So there's a lot riding on this phone call today, and it does not appear that either side is budging at the moment.

Well, I'll tell you what, I just to make an example of what I said yesterday, what I said just a minute ago. You know, Ron Dermer was the guy yelling on the phone yesterday at administration officials. I'll tell you what, yell at me on the phone and I'm a U.S. if I hang up on you. Seriously. And they can call back and apologize and keep talking. But but but Ron Dermer, that's a perfect example. This is a guy I know, known for a long time. I like him. Ron Dermer has called me up after shows thanking me for fighting for Israel, thanking me for fighting against anti-Semitism on college campuses, thanking me for always being shoulder to shoulder with Israel on the cause. Jonathan Lemire,

right now, Ron Dermer is just wrong. And the guy he's working for is just wrong. And you know what? 80% of Israelis agree with me and other Americans who are concerned with this because they have a 20 percent approval rating right now in Israel. So maybe you should try to yell a little bit less and and and and and come together with Americans a little bit more. Are they're going to find themselves on a political island? Yeah, the Biden administration, Joe, as we've discussed on the show from the early weeks of October, felt that politically Netanyahu would not be able to survive this. They thought he'd be out by now. And obviously they now believe that he is in some ways trying to push this war further in order to keep himself in power. We'll have to see what this call for elections yields. So we'll be, of course, focused on that phone call today. But Admiral, before you go, as mentioned

at the top of the show, it is the anniversary, 75th anniversary of an organization you once led, NATO. It's being marked by foreign ministers today in Brussels. Heads of state will do so in Washington this summer. We just want to get your thoughts about the legacy of the organization and why now, perhaps more than ever, it's so vitally needed. Yeah, what a wonderful question for a former Supreme Allied commander of NATO. I'm proud to answer it, Jonathan. Think of NATO like a computer program. NATO 1.0 was the Cold War NATO of the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. We needed those NATO allies to stand toe to toe with the Soviet Union. NATO 2.0 emerges after the 9-11 attacks. The United States was attacked and all of our NATO allies, every nation came with us to Afghanistan to avenge that. And NATO 3.0 is what we see today, brought on by Vladimir Putin, now strengthened by the addition of Sweden and Finland to the north. Together, these 32 nations are well over half of the world's gross domestic product. They have three million troops under arms, almost all volunteers, 15,000 combat aircraft. It's an extraordinary alliance. It's standing up to Vladimir Putin.

And we watched a few moments ago, and I think we were all moved by Martin Luther King's speech. It was extraordinary. There's another extraordinary speech in the middle of all this. It's Ronald Reagan. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. What gave Reagan the strength to make that speech? The answer is NATO. Happy birthday, NATO. Well, and Admiral, I want to put this map up again. And of course, you you talked allies trashing the United States, trashing the West, saying that we've seen our best days, that it can only be great again if he's there. America is great. America has been great. America will be great. Look at that map of NATO and on that map, that is the West. That is the West that supposedly been in retreat. If you and I went back to 1989

and somebody showed us this map and said, this is what NATO is going to look like in 30, we'd tell them they're out of their mind. And it's not just the strongest military alliance in world history. Admiral, I'm so glad you brought up the GDP because I hear all this whining about America failing, America falling, the Europeans being wimps. You combine America's GDP with the EU's GDP. And like you said, in that NATO alliance right there, we have over half of the entire globe's GDP.

Well over $50, $60 trillion to Russia's $1.3 trillion. It's not even close. China, $16, $17 trillion, and they're struggling to avoid the lost decade that the Japanese had in the 1990s. Talk about the strength of America, the strength of the West and the strength of NATO today. Stronger than ever. Stronger together is how we would phrase that. And it is a remarkable economic coalition. But militarily, United States obviously has the largest defense budget in the world. The second largest defense budget in the world collectively, when you add it up, is the budget of all those European allies.

We do laps around the size or scale of both China and Russia combined. And oh, by the way, in Asia, the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Australians, the Kiwis of New Zealand, the Singaporeans, the Filipinos all want to work with NATO together. So it's even beyond the European piece of this. It's really a global coalition which stands for democracy and liberty and collectively is so strong together against these authoritarian regimes. Today, 75th anniversary. Again, happy birthday, NATO. Mika, together, we cannot fail. Right. Which is why Donald Trump wants to break NATO into a million pieces,

because that's what Vladimir Putin wants. It's for anyone with eyes to see. Harry Truman was president, of course, when this alliance was put together. And coming up, the grandson of Harry Truman will be on the show to talk about NATO 75 years later. Retired four-star Navy Admiral James Tavridis, thank you very much for being on this morning. And still ahead on Morning Joe, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office

hits back at Donald Trump's delay tactics in his upcoming hush money trial. Plus, special counsel Jack Smith's harsh criticism of a ruling by the judge overseeing Trump's classified documents case in Florida. We'll have that. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. We're looking at a snowy peaks, Island, Maine, just off of Portland. It is 48 past the hour. Donald Trump's hush money case is moving ahead as scheduled, despite efforts by the former president's legal team to push the trial to a later date. In a ruling yesterday, the judge overseeing the case rejected Trump's request

to delay the trial until the Supreme Court rules on his presidential immunity claims. But Trump's lawyers are trying another tactic, asking the judge to delay the trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Manhattan district attorney's office was quick to hit back in a new filing. Prosecutors say the former president has been the one to stoke and encourage publicity around the case and that he shouldn't be rewarded with an adjournment based on media attention that he is actively seeking. Joining us now, NBC News legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman. Andrew, does this case appear to be on track to start on the 15th? Absolutely. All signs are that Judge Marshawn has had it. All of the scheduled motions were supposed to be in weeks, if not months ago.

All of the efforts you're seeing at the last minute by the former president to delay this trial have been rejected. As you said, there is now this pending motion about delaying the case because of pretrial publicity. That is going nowhere fast. Everyone, both sides agree that pretrial publicity is going to continue and not abate at any time. So that's not a reason to put the trial off. It's a reason to make sure you're careful with the jury selection to make sure you can find 12 jurors who are going to be fair and impartial and put aside whatever feelings they have about the case and decide just based on the facts. But we are now 11 days away. And, you know, knock on wood, I think there are no more delays that are going to happen. We're

going to see jury selection begin a week from Monday. So given let's accept that possibly jury selection does begin on the 15th, a week from Monday. What are the opportunities for Team Trump to create delays within that process? Well, jury selection itself is a critical phase, not just because both sides need to make sure they're finding people who will be fair. But you also, as I said, really want to make sure that somebody doesn't sneak on the jury for one side or the other to decide the case not based on the facts and the law. The judge is going to be very, very careful. In a high-profile matter, that is always a problem. So that I think will take, you know, certainly a few days of selection. It may take the whole week, but the judge is clearly going to move this case along.

This is once the trial starts. This is something that the judge has a very firm hand on. And I also think, you know, you've seen this in the way he's been ruling. He is really not putting up with these delay tactics. He's an experienced judge who is making very quick, very thorough decisions. So I just don't expect that we're going to see what's trial starts, that kind of delay. Final thought is judges are very respectful of jurors time. Remember, jurors are just everyday citizens. They really do not like to see either side delaying a case, which is considered very disrespectful of the time of the jurors.

Andrew, good morning. I want to bounce down to another case, a federal one in the state of Florida, where Jack Smith, the special counsel and his team of prosecutors there, have now questioned the jury instructions that Judge Aileen Cannon had planned to give to the jurors. Jack Smith calling the instructions flawed and wrong, saying they misconstrue the Espionage Act governing the way classified documents are handled. What do you read into this? What's the significance to the trial? This is a big development.

To understand what's going on, unfortunately, people need to understand there's a rule in the federal rules of criminal procedure that says that the trial judge, once a trial starts, has the power to enter a judgment of acquittal for the defendant. And that decision cannot be appealed if the judge does that without letting the case go to the jury. So that's sort of this sort of Damocles that a trial judge has under the federal rules. And what alarmed Jack Smith's team is that the judge was saying that she is accepting, buying Donald Trump's view that the Presidential Records Act applies to these criminal charges. And to do that, it means that she would be able to just,

on that basis, dismiss the case once the jury is sworn. And that law, she is dead wrong. So her jury instructions gave two options to the parties, both of which were wrong, both based on the Presidential Records Act. And don't be much of a lawyer to understand how wrong it is. The Presidential Records Act is a civil statute. It is not applicable to a criminal case. It is not what Donald Trump is charged with. So that is why you saw this very strong filing by Jack Smith that said, this is dead wrong. We need a ruling that this is what you're either intending to do

or that you are rejecting it. But one way or the other, we need a ruling in advance of the trial, because if you stick to your guns and are doing what you're saying you're going to do, we are going to mandamus you, which means we're going to go to the 11th Circuit to get them to reverse this. Remember, the government has done this twice before. This would be the third time they would go to the 11th Circuit and seek a reversal of Judge Cannon's rulings. And of course, Katty K, the Presidential Records Act is the act that Donald Trump has hung his entire defense on. He's wrong about it. The Presidential Records Act does not cover what he did in taking all those documents to Mar-a-Lago and then obstructing the investigation. And that's why in this filing,

Jack Smith said, quote, based on the current record, the PRA, the Presidential Records Act, should not play any role at trial at all. That's from Jack Smith. I mean, it almost kind of ties into Donald Trump's view that he has immunity from everything because of the fact that he was president. Andrew, can I ask you one more question about the hush money case? It is the case that Democrats, when they realized this is the one that was going to go first, actually come to trial first, not just be put first or charged first. There was a sort of slight collective groan because many felt that it wasn't the strongest of the cases. It didn't pertain to January the 6th. It didn't pertain to the election itself. Now that it's here upon us, and it is going to be the one that comes to trial first, are you hearing anything about it or

anything? Can you kind of read the tea leaves of how it's going to play out that might make Democrats a little more confident about this being the trial that actually the American public, as they are weighing up their electoral decisions, gets to see and hear first and foremost? Yes, absolutely. So one, I think it's really important for people to understand that while you might not think this case is as important, is as significant as the other three criminal cases. It is only because of the contrast. The two of the cases have to do with overthrowing our democracy. Another has to do with retaining the most sensitive classified documents deliberately

and obstructing justice in connection with those, those are incredibly serious. So I think this sort of pales only because of the comparison. Anyone else, any other politician who is indicted in New York for 34 felony counts, it would be pretty hard to say, gee, don't take that seriously. Don't look behind that curtain to see what's there. The other is, I think it's important for people to at least consider the way that Alvin Bragg, the DA, has talked about the case. It's very, very easy to give a short sort of moniker of hush money because that is part of the case. But it's important to remember what the hush money was for. The hush money was being paid to keep evidence from the electorate

in the 2016 election, right after the Access Hollywood, very salacious, very publicized tape, this was an effort to not have more bad news by Donald Trump, where he, with a major media outlet, was keeping information from the public in the form of those payments. So one way to think about the case is just an election interference case, but not in 2020, but 2016. And that is the way it's going to be presented to the jury when this trial starts a week from Monday. NBC News legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, thank you very much for your analysis this morning. We appreciate it.