Morning Joe - Morning Joe 6/22/23

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Republicans take the rare step of censuring Rep. Adam Schiff over Trump-era probes

Today, we are on the floor of the House where the other side has turned this chamber, where slavery was abolished, where Medicare and Social Security and everything were instituted, they've turned it into a puppet show. A puppet show. And you know what? The puppeteer, Donald Trump, is shining a light on the strings. You look miserable. You look miserable. You look miserable.

The only advantage to all of this is that instead of reversing what we did on the IRA to save the planet or reversing what we did to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, you're wasting time. You look miserable. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

calls out Republicans for their grievance politics and using the House floor to appease Donald Trump by censoring Democrat Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment against the former president. It comes as there's a growing rift between two of the most outspoken far right members of the House over how and when to impeach President Biden. Also ahead, we're learning more about the case. Special Counsel Jack Smith is building against Donald Trump in the classified documents case. Not looking good. Plus, a man convicted of attacking a Washington, D.C. police officer during the Capitol riot shows a complete lack of remorse for his actions. We'll show you the officer's reaction to what happened in court yesterday.

And we'll have the latest on the search for the missing submersible. Crews are desperate to find the vessel before the five people inside run out of oxygen, that oxygen that is if they're even alive. Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It is Thursday, June 22nd. A lot going on this morning with us. We have the host of Wait Too Early, White House Bureau Chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire, Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today, Susan Page, and U.S. National Editor at the Financial Times, Ed Luce, is with us as well. You know, before we get started, I just let's just get an overview really quickly of what this Republican House majority is doing.

You know, we were warned that they were insurrectionists, weirdos and freaks, that they would be reckless if they were given a little bit of power. Ed Luce, they've censored Schiff. They can't really tell us why other than he investigated what Marco Rubio's intelligence committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, called, quote, a grave counterintelligence threat to the United States of America. That's what Schiff was investigating. Let me say that again. He was investigating something that Marco Rubio's Senate Intel Committee said of Trump's 2016 interactions with Russia.

Manafort's high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely associated with the Russian intelligence services represented a grave counterintelligence threat. So, OK, so he opens up an investigation against that and brings up, again, so many things that are disturbing. Then we keep hearing about the Biden crime family. But you ask the question, what crime? They can't tell you. Wall Street Journal editorial page rightly says a lot of smoke, no fire. You've got Grassley, the most senior Republican, when confronted about what a document they're looking for and how it really doesn't do anything to to to to suggest Joe Biden did anything wrong. Because we don't care whether they're right or wrong. You have Comey going out saying we don't really care.

We're just trying to bring down his poll numbers. Comer, I'm sorry. Comer. So we have that. And then yesterday, I think maybe the saddest and most pathetic spectacle of all, when John Durham, who's made a fool of himself time and again, brought one case after another, trying to slander the FBI, trying to slander Hillary Clinton. He goes before a House panel and he claims to be completely ignorant of things that happened that were on the front pages of The New York Times that Marco Rubio's Intel Committee wrote about. He even claimed that he didn't know about that grave counterintelligence threat to the United States. He didn't know about that grave counterintelligence threat to the United States.

He didn't know that Donald Trump had asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton's emails. He didn't know one news item after another. And his lame response was, I don't follow the news. I don't really read newspapers and watch television. This would be the starting point for any investigation of the investigators that he would have. And yet they keep making fools of themselves. They're just gesturing to the most extreme members of the Republican Party, including Durham, people who get their news from Chinese religious cults. You know, if you were to ask me, is the Republican Party today closer to Mitt Romney or to George Santos, who is a clown of the first order and should not be in the House?

I'm sad to say I think it's closer to being the party of George Santos. The censor of Adam Schiff yesterday devalued an incredibly powerful and important tool of the legislature disciplining and shaming its own members for criminal conduct, for extreme ethical breaches. What Adam Schiff did was uphold the constitutional duty of the House to provide oversight of the executive at a time when the executive was breaking all kinds of rules. It's become conventional wisdom to say, not just on the right, but, you know, amongst sort of polite conversation, to say that the Robert Mueller report exonerated Trump. I reread that 448 page report a few months ago, having read it originally at the time. It is an extremely damning document corroborated, as you say, by the Senate Intelligence Committee report signed off by Senate Republicans that establishes multiple counts of obstruction of justice in the investigation into the alleged Russia collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. There is no doubt that there was

Russia collusion. There's absolutely no doubt there was an attempt by Donald Trump to get Putin to assist his election. It wasn't critical, probably, to his election in 2016. So there's been some overstatement of that on the left. But of course it happened. So to censor a congressman, Adam Schiff, for this makes this the party of George Santos. Now, just one last point. Adam Schiff said, look, one day Trump will be gone, but your dishonor will remain. This is dishonorable. This is deeply dishonorable. Yeah, it is deeply dishonorable. And Jonathan O'Meara, again, we keep hearing about the Biden crime family.

Here's another example. You know, you have you have Durham going around lying about the FBI. You've got these right wing freaks, insurrectionists and weirdos lying about the, quote, Biden crime family. You have a member of the Supreme Court's wife taking part in in in activities around January the 6th, you know, sending sending emails around to people and saying the Biden crime family should be put on a prison barge outside of Gitmo for crimes. I always ask what crimes, what crimes, what crimes? They have no answer. What crimes? No. We said here yesterday, people in the media have been saying for years what Hunter Biden did. Looks unethical, looks bad. He's a crack addict. Nobody here is defending him.

There's no media blackout. I mean, there's massive pieces written about Hunter Biden during the 2019 and 2020 time period. Nothing. And yet they keep chirping Biden crime family, Biden crime family. Durham keeps talking about investigating the investigators. Russia hoax, Russia hoax. When Marco Rubio's Senate Intelligence Committee said, they said after the 2016 campaign, when Marco was already kissing up to Donald Trump, that the Trump campaign's connections with Russian influenced people caused, quote, a grave, what is it, a grave threat to U.S. counterintelligence, a grave threat. So the person who's in charge of the committee on the House side shouldn't investigate that. And now they're censoring him for doing that. I mean, you've got that. You've got Durham. You've got this Biden crime family nonsense and now impeachment. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Thank God we don't have a 31 trillion dollar debt that Donald Trump basically gave us. And if these same Republicans gave us,

thank God we don't have any concerns with China. Thank God we don't have any concerns with China. Thank God we don't have any concerns with the economy. Thank God we don't have any concerns about skyrocketing college costs. Thank God. It's far more important for MTG and Lauren Boebert to fight each other on the floor and calling each other bitches because they're having a race to impeach Joe Biden over what? Nothing. More gesturing. This is what we warned about if they put insurrectionists, weirdos and freaks in charge of the people's house. And they have put weirdos, insurrectionists and freaks in charge of the people's house. And this is what people in those districts get. Dishonorable, dishonest and unserious. That's what this is. It's unserious. It is not a party into showing any interest in governing. It is just about gesture and playing to the lowest

common denominator, whether it's that Fox News viewer, the podcast listener or the person who's going to write them a check for their next campaign. It is the Biden crime family, quote, quote, quote. You know, yes, as we just mentioned, Hunter Biden, some certainly appearances of unethical behavior. He was charged with crimes this very week. He pleaded guilty. No widespread corruption, nothing about enriching him, the president or himself because of official business, but rather because of tax matters. And he shouldn't have purchased a gun when he did. Those are crimes. He pleaded guilty to them. There is no Biden crime family that's not stopping the Republicans from trying to spin this up into something to do Donald Trump's bidding and certainly to do Donald Trump's bidding in terms of censoring Adam Schiff yesterday. This is a this is a rare thing.

It's only happened three times this century. The last representative to be censured, we remember this, Paul Gosar, two years ago. Why was he censured? Because he tweeted out an animated image of him murdering a colleague, a Democratic congresswoman, and threatening to kidnap President Biden. And he was censured rightly for that behavior. Adam Schiff was censured for this behavior, the behavior of simply doing his job, of investigating Donald Trump's behavior. They dropped the $16 million fine that was on the table last week, but he still has now been censured. Only the third representative this century to do so. And Joe, to your point,

next appears to be impeachment. Speaker McCarthy was able to table that for a little while. But Mika, this is something that should only be used in the most serious of matters. It's only been used a handful of times in the history of the United States. And we're dangerously getting close to it just simply being another thing that happens that Republicans can use to score political points. Well, as you said, to your point today, House Republicans will vote to send a resolution to impeach President Biden to the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees. The resolution charges Biden with high crimes and misdemeanors over his handling of the southern border. So it's about policy they don't like?

Yep. It was introduced by Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. She had wanted to hold an immediate floor vote, but Speaker Kevin McCarthy urged her to go through the committees that are investigating the president. Boebert says she's fine with going through the process, but won't give up her fight. Telling reporters last night, if her proposal doesn't advance out of committee like she was promised, she will, quote, bring a privileged resolution every day

for the rest of my time here in Congress. Thank you, Lauren Boebert. Meanwhile, as Joe mentioned, Congresswoman Boebert and her Republican colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene were involved in a heated exchange on the House floor yesterday. During the argument, Greene cursed Boebert out. Multiple sources tell The Daily Beast the two were fighting over Boebert's resolution to impeach President Biden. Greene had also filed articles of impeachment, but Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her resolution within days. Now, Greene says the Colorado representative copied her legislation.

Boebert denies that allegation. She told the Daily Beast, quote, Marjorie is not my enemy. Joe Biden and the Democrats are destroying our country. My priority are to correct their bad policies and save America. Greene also acknowledged the feud, telling Semaphore she told Boebert exactly what she thinks of her. Greene says Boebert only introduced a resolution for fundraising saying, quote, it's throwing out red meat so that people will donate to her campaign

because she's coming up to the end of the month. I mean, yeah. And Susan Page, here we see, here we see again a race to impeach Joe Biden for policies they don't like. Let's just be very, very clear here. When people are talking about how reckless Adam Schiff was for leading the first impeachment, that impeachment, the first impeachment was because Congress passed funding for defensive weaponry to Ukraine. Donald Trump stopped that, stopped the delivery of those weapons to Ukraine, got on the phone with Zelensky and said that he might be able to do it.

But first, Zelensky needed to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Joe Biden's family. Something I never remember happening in the United States history. Something that is clearly an impeachable event. A commander in chief actually stopping congressionally mandated funding defensive weapons for Ukraine because he wants to get political dirt from a foreign leader. And again, that's what Adam Schiff is censured for in part. And now we've got these impeachments based on policy differences. Well, let's let's talk about unintended consequences. I mean, what is the consequence for Alan Schiff politically from being censored? It is to bolster his fundraising for his Senate race. It is to burnish his credentials as someone who stands up to

Republicans and investigated former President Trump. What are the consequences of pursuing these impeachment matters against President Biden for Republicans, I think it might be something there might well be the kind of backlash we saw with the Clinton impeachment, where it actually helped Democrats in the 1998 midterms to have Republicans pursuing an impeachment proceeding that Americans thought didn't make sense. So this is this is it's not a good thing to be censored by the House in many ways. But this is this is it's not a good thing to be censored by the House in many ways. But this is very risky business for Republicans, including their hopes of holding on to the House the next time around. All right, let's bring in NBC News justice and intelligence

correspondent Ken Delanian. And Ken, we want to look at the Mar-a-Lago documents case and parallel it to a similar case. Well, what just happened? Because, you know, Ken, we've been saying for some time, if anybody else had done this, if any member of Congress had done this, we had Mark Palomaropoulos said, if I had done this as a CIA analyst, if I took one document, I'd be fired on the spot. If I took more than that, I'd go to jail. Well, a former FBI analyst has been sentenced to four years in federal prison for very similar charges to the ones against Donald Trump right now. A judge handed down the sentence to Kendra Kingsbury yesterday after she pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defense. She took hundreds of classified documents just like Trump, took them home, just like Trump, many containing intelligence sources and methods tied to the government's counterintelligence efforts. Just like Trump.

Unlike Trump's case, though, she was not accused of showing that classified material to anybody else. So hers wasn't really as serious as Donald Trump's. And the judge basically said, asked her, Ken, what in the world were you thinking, taking documents pertaining to America's national defense and leaving them in your bathroom? Does that sound familiar, Ken? Yeah, Joe, Kendra Kingsbury was a counterintelligence analyst for the FBI for 12 years. She's a resident of Dodge City, Kansas. And as you said, she took home all sorts of documents, 20,000 documents they found in her home, 386 of which were classified.

I'll tell you one more difference between her and Donald Trump. According to the court documents, the most serious, the most sensitive documents she took home were classified at the secret level, not the top secret level, which was the designation given to many of the documents found at Donald Trump's compound in Mar-a-Lago. She got three years, 10 months in prison. Her lawyers asked for probation. They cited a series of very sad circumstances in her life, health struggles, deaths of relatives. But the judge essentially went along with almost all of the government's recommendation and said that this was a serious threat to the national security of the United States. In the sentencing memo, the prosecutor said that essentially there's no way to know whether anyone, any foreign adversary or anyone not entitled to see this material actually saw it because

it was improperly stored. That would be exactly the same thing they would say, even assuming they can't prove that Donald Trump actually showed the documents to people in two cases. They would still say that they were stored insecurely in various places at Mar-a-Lago where people were streaming through. And there's really no way to tell. There's no way to disprove that a foreign adversary didn't put an agent in and take a look at some of those documents or steal them. That is the situation. And, you know, she did plead guilty, which we don't expect Donald Trump to do. So you

get a little bit of a benefit for pleading guilty, although she didn't fully accept responsibility. And there was a little weirdness in her case. So they found that they were never really sure why she took these documents, but they found that she made phone calls to the subject of subjects of FBI counterterrorism investigations. They were never able to explain that she didn't explain it. So that was a little bit of a hint as to some weird motive going on there. But again, you know, no, no dissemination to a foreign adversary. Three years, 10 months in prison. That's what happens to regular people who take home classified documents. We've seen it time and again. This is just the latest case, guys. And Ken, just to highlight, the documents that this woman had were not as highly sensitive as the ones that Trump has. Is that a fair way of putting it?

I think so, because they were designated, the most sensitive designation given to them was secret, which is different from top secret. Top secret are the most sensitive documents, you know, the disclosure of which would cause grave damage to U.S. national security. Now, the indictment, the court documents say that the material she had was very sensitive. It came from not only the FBI, but another agency, which may have been the CIA, counterterrorism information, very sensitive stuff, but not the kind of stuff that would go to the Oval Office of the president of the United States. We always have to remember when we're talking about Donald Trump, he is the number one customer. The entire $50 billion intelligence apparatus is designed to give him the most esoteric information, you know, the most sensitive, the most exquisite that the U.S. government collects. So it just boggles the mind what, and we hopefully will never know exactly what Donald Trump had.

You know, the indictment gives us 30 and cites 31 documents out of out of the hundreds. But whatever Trump had has got to be far more sensitive than what, you know, an FBI counterintelligence analyst in Kansas has access to. Right. Well, and Ed Luce, I mean, again, proving again that so many of these Republicans that have been critical of the handling, the FBI's handling of this case are lying through their teeth and they know they're lying through their teeth. This woman, do we think that this woman was called politely by the FBI and asked if she would please return the documents? Pretty please, please, please return the documents and give months and plead and beg. No, no, that's not what they do. I've said it time and again. If any member of Congress, if I had come back from a from a classified briefing with documents,

the FBI would be knocking on my door in about 30 minutes, in an hour. It just this. So when people talk about double standards, when these Republican hacks who are trying to defend a man who stole nuclear secrets, when they do that and say there's a double standard, they are right. And the double standard time and again has broken in Donald Trump's favor,

and this case proves it. So when you see Donald Trump's difficulties in hiring lawyers, there's a very good reason for that, because there were multiple times over the last 18 months where his legal team were advising him, look, I think you should give them back now. I think you should do a thorough search of everything we've got and cooperate with the FBI. And then this will be then this will go away. You'll get a light wrap on the on the wrist for it. And he ignored that. Instead, he chose to sort of double down, self-incriminates whenever he opens his mouth

on this, most recently Monday night on Fox News, and seems to have some kind of a I don't know, some kind of a legal death wish going on here, because if I were prosecuting a lawyer, so so so health warning. But if I were prosecuting Donald Trump, he would be the dream defendant. He makes the most basic mistakes. He leaves his fingerprints on everything. He declares that he's breaking the law on tape and then on TV. So, you know, you need a psychologist really to explain what Trump's game plan is here. I don't think any lawyer can help a client like this.

Well, I mean, you know, somebody who agrees with you is the former attorney general of Donald Trump. Yeah. Barr has said. Who he thought was his attorney, but he wasn't. Yeah, he thought it was his personal attorney. And Barr kind of got confused for a little while there. Thought he was his attorney instead of America's attorney general. He's sort of course corrected a bit now.

But again, Barr has said he's toast. And for a reason. He's toast because every night he goes on TV, more legal admissions that the prosecutors are just lapping up. And then, you know, on top of that, he's on tape admitting intent, admitting that he knows why he's doing this and knows that he doesn't have the power to declassify documents as an ex-president. The best thing one can do for Trump supporters who, I mean, the most ardent will double down and say it's a witch hunt.

Just ask them to listen to his words and look at the law. Well, I mean, he'll tell you he broke the law. Yeah, but they don't really care. You know, they actually don't care about that. They're fine. They're fine with grave counterintelligence threats towards the United States. They're fine with riots started by Donald Trump against the United States Congress to try to stop the counting, the legal counting of of electoral votes, the overturning of an election. They're fine with that. And now they're fine. It's good that we see how far Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and other Republicans are willing to go. And the base are willing to go with Donald Trump. They are fine now. Make no mistake. They are fine with Donald Trump stealing nuclear secrets and lying to the FBI about having nuclear secrets and not giving those nuclear secrets. And they think consequences to that would be bad for America.

That's an interesting question. Bad for America. For the FBI to try to get back nuclear secrets, secret attack plans against Iran, and also secret assessments of America's greatest weaknesses. That's an interesting question. That's fascinating. Not going to even ask how they live with themselves because, well, we could have been asking that question for the last six years. All right. Still ahead on Morning Joe, as we've been discussing, we'll show you the chaos that broke out on the House floor as Republicans in a rare move voted to censure Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, plus new developments in the classified

documents case against Donald Trump as special counsel Jack Smith starts sharing the evidence the government has with the former president's legal team. Also ahead, the two highest ranking Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, will each join the conversation. And Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will give an update on the round the clock work to prepare the collapsed section of Interstate 95. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. This is not a circumstance where he's the victim

or this is government overreach. He provoked this whole problem himself. Yes, he's been the victim of unfair witch hunts in the past, but that doesn't obviate the fact that he's also a fundamentally flawed person who engages in reckless conduct and that leads to situations, calamitous situations like this, which are very destructive and hurt any political cause he's associated with. And this was a case that entirely of his own making. To Michelle Pfeiffer that you've ever seen. Oh, lady, running down to the river, taking away to the dark side.

I want to be your left hand man. I love it when you sing that song. And I got a lump in my throat. The three past the hour, the January 6th insurrectionist who pushed a stun gun on the neck of Officer Michael Fanone will spend more than a decade in federal prison. Daniel Rodriguez was sentenced to 12 and a half years yesterday, and he shouted Trump won as he was sentenced, according to multiple witnesses. Rodriguez acknowledged attacking former officer Fanone after before his sentencing, but did not apologize. He insisted he truly believed

a civil war was breaking out. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to a host of charges, including inflicting bodily injury on officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon. Rodriguez also bragged about his crimes, including the attack on Officer Fanone in an online chat room, writing, quote, tased the F out of the blue. Officer Fanone spoke with NBC's Ryan Riley after the sentencing. Seeing him saying Trump won, what does that say to you, that he's still that sort of deluded about it? I mean, I've said, and I think it's been clear by the defendant's own behavior that there is no remorse,

at least for the individuals in which I came in contact with on January 6th who were criminally charged. It's chilling. The Georgia State Election Board dismissed its years-long investigation into alleged misconduct by Fulton County election workers during the 2020 election. It comes more than two years after then- Donald Trump and his ally, Rudy Giuliani, repeatedly claimed two workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shay Moss, were counting fake mail-in ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. A heavily edited brief clip of security footage was widely circulated online and by Trump allies as supposed proof. Those fraud claims were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit. The investigation concluded Freeman and Moss testified before the January 6th committee last year about the abuse and mental anguish they suffered due to Trump's accusations against them.

There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby. A small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stand up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.

Ken Delaney, and we want to get your reporting on what we heard or rather didn't hear from John Durham yesterday. After four years of investigating the FBI's decision to probe possible collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia, former Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham testified yesterday that he, quote, didn't know basic elements of the investigation. While Manafort, the campaign chairman for Donald Trump, was giving this Russian intelligence officer internal campaign polling data, Russian intelligence was helping the Trump campaign, weren't they? I don't know that. You really don't know those very basic facts of the investigation? I know the general facts, yes. There was a suggestion of a suggestion that the Russians could help at damaging information as to Mrs. Clinton.

By releasing it anonymously, right? And that's exactly what happened, isn't it? I don't, I don't. You really don't know? I'm not sure exactly. When you say exactly what happened. Well, the Russians released stolen emails through cutouts, did they not? There were emails. It's a very simple question. Did they release information, stolen information through cutouts? Yes or no?

I'm not sure. You really don't know the answer to that? The answer is yes, they did. Through DC League's... Well, your mind is yes. Well, Mueller's answer was yes. Did anything in your report prove false that Russians met with Trump's family during the

campaign at Trump Tower after an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton? Anything prove that that meeting didn't happen? I don't have any evidence that that did not happen. Anything in your report prove false that in the 2016 campaign Donald Trump tried and concealed from the public a real estate deal he was seeking in Moscow? I don't know anything about that. There's nothing in the report about it. It's not something we investigated. Anything in your report proved false that Donald Trump publicly asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails and then hours later they did?

If you're referring to... Did Donald Trump not say at a press conference, Russia, if you're listening to, um, did you prove that Donald Trump not say at a press conference, Russia, if you're listening, you should get Hillary's emails. Did you prove that he didn't say that? Yeah, no,

we didn't. We didn't investigate. Did you prove false in the 16 campaign that Trump's campaign manager gave polling data to a spy for a Russian intelligence service? We didn't investigate that. Oh my God. I'm speechless. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and others who have been defending this man, who's made a fool of himself repeatedly, who had 24 jurors humiliate him in two different cases.

A guy that actually had no prosecutions, no convictions. After investigating the FBI to try to smear them, trying to, of course, again, smear Hillary Clinton with an investigation of the investigators that took twice as long as the actual underlying investigation. I mean, he he's either foolish. He's got early onset of dementia or he just operating in bad faith and has been from the very beginning and i don't think number one or number true or number one or two are true now let me note again a 2020 report from the republican-led senate intelligence committee said interactions between donald trump's 2016 campaign and a Russian intelligence officer represented, quote, a grave counter intelligence threat.

And Ken, he claimed he was ignorant about that. He claimed he was ignorant about WikiLeaks. How's this possible? He claimed he was ignorant about cutouts, about Donald Trump saying, Russia, if you're listening, please, you know, find Hillary Clinton's emails. And then that night, again, reports that everybody in America read that follows any of this know about these things. And John Durham, who was supposed to be leading an investigation on connections between Russia and Trump and whether the FBI went too far, claimed ignorance on all of this. I must say for a special. I mean, sounded like he was a flack for Donald Trump. I must say, I've never, ever seen anything like that from from a special counsel's testimony, especially from a man. Let us underline this. And I know you will, too, Ken. A man who had a really good reputation as a U.S. attorney before William Barr sent him on this, this, down this rabbit trail and he completely humiliated himself. Joe, the exchange between Durham and Adam Schiff, I found particularly shocking because it went to

information that was directly relevant to why the FBI opened the investigation in the first place, which was the whole thing, which was the main point of Durham's findings. And let's remember that one of Durham's criticisms is that the FBI wasn't justified in opening a full field investigation after the Australian diplomat reported the troubling comments by George Papadopoulos about the Russians in emails. What he says is that they should have opened a preliminary investigation, that they didn't do enough. They didn't do enough investigating before they took the dramatic step of opening an

investigation into a presidential campaign. And what I've always thought about that conclusion and when I read his report is that it ignored the larger context. It ignored the fact that Donald Trump had publicly asked the Russians to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails. It ignored all the press reporting about Donald Trump's bizarre comments about Vladimir Putin and the potential Russian connections with the campaign. It just looked purely at the Papadopoulos reporting. And now we know why it ignored that context. Durham claims he didn't know about it. That is just unbelievable to me. And it's one thing to talk about things that the Mueller investigation found

later. And Durham can say, well, it doesn't justify improperly opening an investigation, even if they found stuff. That's his whole claim. But he missed the context. He missed the plot here. And I am so glad, Joe, that you keep bringing up that Senate Intelligence Committee report. Can't underline it enough. Written by Republicans and Democrats. Marco Rubio, Richard Burr signed off on this, that what the Trump campaign did, the contacts with the Russians, was a grave counterintelligence threat to the United States of America.

They left themselves open to manipulation by the Russians. So that finding vindicated the Mueller investigation in the views of many. And now we know that John Durham did not really understand a lot of the key facts that led the FBI to open that investigation. Ed Luce, it's hard not to just be incredulous about all of this. And Durham's performance history was so woeful that he even got a lot of Republicans mad at him. In fact, Matt Gaetz tweeted a sharp, he said in person, he sharply criticized him and then tweeted later that Durham is, quote, part of the cover up. Nonsense to be sure. But let's just get you some of your takeaways here from what was truly a pretty appalling spectacle yesterday. Well, Joe was speculating about, you know, whether he has

dementia or whether this is just plain dishonesty. Look, I mean, very tragically, my mother has advanced dementia. She doesn't even live in America. She could tell you about the WikiLeaks. There is just no plausible way that anybody in Durham's position could possibly not know these basic facts about the original investigation. It was often said during Trump's presidency that the silver lining to Trump was that his incompetence outran his malevolence. And that's saying something because there's a lot of dark, there's a lot of darkness in Trump and in Trumpism. But if incompetence is stronger than malevolence, well, then at least it's not going to be efficient in executing this

darkness. I think John Durham is the kind of sort of special counsel prosecutor equivalent of that. This is an extraordinarily incompetent performance. He must have known the kinds of questions he was going to ask. And his answers were, I don't know. This is an embarrassment, another embarrassment. You know, Ed, one thing that strikes me, though, is there's so many threats to democracy that we're concerned about. But I wonder if we're not seeing the system where we see one of the most violent January 6th defendants convicted, sentenced to a long prison term. We see Georgia State Agency rejecting the claims of miscounting votes in Fulton County. And we see Durham's investigation end without a single successful prosecution. And so I think those are things to be actually encouraged about during a time where we do have these significant

threats. Well, and that's such a great point. I've got to say, though, you have to look also at the same time at the Republicans and look and see what a destructive force against democracy Trump Republicans have become. Think about all the things that happened yesterday. Durham, who attacking, trying to attack the FBI, trying, I guess, to cover up. I have no idea what he was trying to do yesterday. But a four year investigation ends with him claiming he doesn't know about WikiLeaks. He doesn't know about cutouts. He doesn't know about the most basic things that, again, that Republicans in 2020 called a grave threat to U.S. counterintelligence.

You have the cops who were brutalized and almost beaten to death on January the 6th and defendants still screaming Trump won, something that Donald Trump is still screaming, things that Republicans are still screaming in Congress. You have them actually going after Adam Schiff because Adam Schiff followed through an investigation regarding, again, regarding what the Republicans themselves called grave threats to U.S. counterintelligence. You have a woman being sent to jail for four years for doing far less than what Donald Trump did. And yet, Mika, they continue. They continue to defend Donald Trump. It's not because it's not because of any any of these

people have dementia. It's not because any of these people are dumb. It's because Donald Trump has corrupted them completely. They are corrupt and they're willing to roll the dice on American democracy just for a little bit of power. Little time of the limelight, I guess. Money, I don't know. But it's absolutely shameful. There are many different ways. I got to just keep going. Comer. Right. Comer has nothing. Basically, he says we're doing all of these investigations to to bring down Joe Biden's poll numbers. Again, the most senior Republican in the United States Senate said he doesn't care if Biden's guilty or not. They're just conducting these investigations to try to destroy Joe Biden. It is shameful. It's insanity. NBC's Kendall Lenny.

And thank you very much for being on this morning. We'll be following this and coming up. Samuel Alito is the latest Supreme Court justice to face scrutiny in the wake of unreported luxury trips with a billionaire GOP mega donor. What's going on and what it means for the push for ethics reforms. And wake up the kids, OK? Oh, my God. Wake up, Jack. Steve Ratner is standing by at the wall and he says. All the kids love Ratner's charts.

He has an economic fact that most Americans don't know. Oh, is he going to tell us how much money he has? Morning Joe is coming right back. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Chamber of Commerce Day in Washington, D.C. Yeah, it's not looking too good. Drink it in. Yeah.

Beautiful day in Washington. Kind of foggy and rainy. Yeah, I don't think anybody's getting in or out of there for a while. And depressing. Oh, Lord knows. Oh, come on. By the way, today, Mike Barnicle, so great. He just said on this day in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill, an unprecedented act of legislation designed to compensate returning members of the armed services known as GIs for their efforts in World War Two. And what a massive difference. Mike is so right.

Thank you, Mike. The GI Bill has made such a massive difference to Americans through the years. Also, my mom's birthday today. Oh, Mary Jo. Mary Jo's birthday. Yeah. Okay. President Biden will host India's leader at a state dinner later today.

Biden and the first lady welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House yesterday. U.S. and Indian officials are expected to discuss ways to deepen defense ties, partner more closely on technology, and expand cooperation on key global issues such as climate change. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby says leaders will also discuss the war in Ukraine. India has maintained neutrality throughout the war and continues to buy Russian oil, helping Moscow fund its military efforts in the region and avoid U.S. sanctions. So, Ed Luce, you're writing about America's lavish red carpet for Modi in your latest piece for the Financial Times.

Love for you to talk about that, but also talk about, I think in America more so than Britain, we have a blind spot and have always had a blind spot to what a massive growing power India is and how it's the potential there for an offset against Chinese power in Asia is there as well. And how Modi, let's face it, he's going to be there for quite some time, most likely as his popularity just soars. Yeah, you're right. I mean, there has been some underweighting of India, I think, in Washington over the years. It's begun to be corrected under Bush, then Obama. But earlier this year, India overtook China to be the most populous country in the world, the largest population in the world. It's also now given China's post-COVID slowdown, India is the fastest growing economy in the world. So

it's long past due for the United States to be lavishing this kind of attention on India. Now, in terms of what the real motivation is here or the most immediate one, it's China. India has a 2000 mile border with China. There is no other country in the world that is of the size or potential to counterbalance China. No one else can compare to India in that respect. So all of this makes sense. My concern here is that I think the Biden administration is going too far in terms of behaving almost like a supplicant to Narendra Modi, who is, after all, the biggest democratic backslider in the world. He puts Erdogan in the shade. He's also somebody who's not been taking our stance. He's been abstaining at the United

Nations over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And there I think are more cards in the American hand than the Biden administration seems to be implying. India is much more threatened directly by China than the United States. India would desperately need the United States should there be another border war. So I just think there's a little bit of, there's a little bit too much, too much flattery going on here of this strongman, even though we do need India and ties should be getting closer. Yeah, it's a deeply complicated visit.

This is only the third state dinner that President Biden has hosted since taking office. That's an honor usually reserved for the closest of allies, France, South Korea, the other two. India, as Ed noted, has been backsliding on democracy. Human rights groups charge India with really persecuting Muslims who live there in that country. They've denounced the president, giving Modi such a welcome here.

India has also not only stayed neutral on the war in Russia, but still buying a lot of Russian gas, helping fuel Moscow's war machine. Undoubtedly a growing power, a country on the rise. Susan Page, New Delhi is hosting the G20 later this year. The world's leaders will all come there. But it's a pretty fraught visit here. And I know White House, White House White House paid to put it to me. They know Modi is far from a perfect ally, but he's the best one they got in the area as they try to establish that bulwark against China. Well, you know, Jonathan, in diplomacy, friendship is relative and relative.

If you compare our relations with India and China, India looks like a much better friend than China. Our willingness to cozy up to India and to decline, to challenge India on some of the concerns that we have, including buying the Russian oil, including backsliding on democracy in the world's most populous democracy, that reflects the priority the administration has put on standing up to China. And I wonder how China views these U.S. efforts with India. Do they see it as a sign of U.S. weakness or does it make China nervous? I don't know the answer to that question. You know, you know, the thing is, we've been talking for the past couple of weeks about how China is going to Europe and trying to get closer to Europe.

This is just my opinion. Nobody else is here. I think it's absolutely critical we engage India. I think it's critical we engage China. You have two massive powers, whether you're talking about the economy, whether you're talking about the environment, whether you're talking about climate change, what you're talking about, you name it, a host of global challenges and issues, whether you're talking about global national security, India, China, the United States have one thing in common. They actually want the existing world order to stay in place. Russia does not. They want to

disrupt that because they continue to get weaker and weaker. So, again, we don't have to agree with India. We don't have to like everything Modi's doing. We don't have to agree with China. We have to engage and continue engaging. And if it makes China feel good to sit our Secretary of State in a chair away from him, a little bit down, everything, people can freak out about that. Secretary of State Blinken, he's a tough guy. He can handle it. We have to engage. So we're exactly hitting the top of the

second hour of Morning Show. We have a lot to get to this hour. We're going to continue to talk about Congressman Adam Schiff being censured and for doing his job, trying to protect America. Parallel case to the documents case. What happened there and what Trump might be facing a lot there. A woman gets sent to jail for four years. And it's not even as bad. For doing far less than Donald Trump. One thing, she did the same thing. Donald Trump, did she hit her documents in a bathroom?

And she wasn't given months and months and months to pretty please return them. And she, I mean, this is is this is what Trump is facing. Four years. And some believe that former President Trump might be putting up a brave front, but is very, very afraid. We'll talk about that at loose. Thank you very much. Joining us now, former Treasury official and Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner. Steve, we hear how bad the economy is all the time

from the same gesturing Republicans who, well, just as Aristotle would say, make stuff up. One thing that we've heard politicians talk about for years is the need to get our manufacturing moving again. You have some information that Republicans don't want America to know. What is it? Well, I don't know what they want America to know, but we want America to know that there is actually some good news. And it relates to manufacturing, which has been, as I'm sure many Americans,

all Americans know, a tough place for us in the economy in recent years. But let's take a look at what's actually been happening over here. So as I mentioned, manufacturing construction, this is spending on manufacturing facilities. That's kind of was kind of flatlining, flatlining, jumped up a little bit, but never really got over 100 billion. We'll remember that Donald Trump said he was going to make America great again in manufacturing. He persuaded the carrier corporation to keep a few hundred jobs at large costs of tax benefits. Foxconn was supposed to invest 20 billion dollars. They backed out of that and only invested a small amount of money. But look what's happened now since the Biden inauguration, which is that we have 189 billion dollars of manufacturing spending that has been announced and expected so far for this year.

And this will obviously create a lot of jobs. It's already created over 200,000 construction jobs. And then obviously the manufacturing yet to come. That's incredible. What's your next chart, Jeff? Well, we're going to talk about the reasons. And the reasons are multiple, but very heavily oriented around some of the policies that the president and the Democratic leaders in Congress have put in place. Let's talk about the IRA, the climate bill, whatever you want to

call it. So when that bill was passed, the Congressional Budget Office thought that about three hundred ninety billion dollars of those tax credits would be used. They've raised their estimate to five hundred seventy billion. Brookings thinks it's more like seven hundred eighty billion and Goldman Sachs thinks it's $1.2 trillion. Now, normally, when we talk about government spending increasing, it's a bad thing. But this is, in a sense, a good thing, because what it means is that companies are taking advantage of this bill, of the tax credits they get, to build far more facilities than anyone really expected when the bill was passed. And just by example, let's take

a look at battery plants. So electric vehicles need batteries. We are going to try to make a lot of them here. And you can see again that since the IRA was passed, these are announcements of new battery plants that are being built all over the country. Obviously, a good bunch of them in Michigan are traditional auto center. But as you move down, many of them are going actually into red states, into Indiana, into Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Kansas and places like that. And so this is a this these battery plants could produce 10 to 12 million batteries a year for new electric vehicles. That is more than 50 percent of our current auto production that could become electric thanks to all these battery plants, plus all the other auto facilities that will be built as well to take advantage of that. Well, you say there are also two other new policies that are helping drive investment. What are they? Yeah, there were really

these three packages, the IRA being the one that may ultimately have the biggest impact. But a couple of other things. You remember the infrastructure bill, five hundred and fifty billion dollars for everything from a lot of transportation, but also broadband utilities, utility upgrades and things like that. And so that money is being spent now. And as it gets spent, obviously, companies have to build facilities, create jobs, and so on to produce the materials that are needed to build out all of this spending. And then lastly, you remember the CHIPS Act, which is about $52 billion of government tax incentives and grants for R&D for semiconductors. Now, semiconductors are not just an economic benefit to us, but a huge national security benefit to get more of that production here, currently in Taiwan and other places that are not as secure.

And so you've had this huge increase in the number of semiconductor projects that have been announced, over $200 billion of projects. And again, all over the country, a bunch of them in upstate New York, but also all Texas, Kansas, all over the place. And this is going to hopefully get us back in the game. And Phoenix, of course, which was the one that President Biden visited a few months ago. All right, Steve Ratner, thank you very much. Steve, how much you learned? I learned so much. I always learn so much.