Morning Joe - Morning Joe 8/10/23

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

DOJ executed search warrant of Trump’s Twitter account

This woman is not a capable woman. She's a woman that has, I mean, and maybe she'll change her mind. And I don't know what she's doing. I really don't know. All I know is she could have done it two and a half years ago if she was going to do something. And this is about a perfect phone call, a call where I'm questioning the election. I'm telling them that, in my opinion, the election was rigged. You need people with courage.

You know, Bill Barr was a coward. He was afraid to do things. He was afraid he was going to be impeached. And I was very rough on him, I will say. I said, you have to do something. You know, you're an American. You have to do something, Bill. And he just was a coward.

He was afraid to do anything. Jack Smith, he's like a he's like a deranged individual. And I think we're doing very well with that guy. But he is he's a sick puppy. John, John Heilman needs to trademark the confession or projection line because it really is so true. Everything Donald Trump ever says is confession. Our projection, you know, it's so fascinating. He said Bill Barr was a character. Bill Barr did everything he could do to defend Donald Trump until Donald Trump told him a couple of weeks before the election. I need you to arrest my opponent and his family and throw them in jail so I can win the presidential election. I mean, that's straight out of a fascist dictatorship. And so Bill Barr, after, I've got to say, humiliating himself for several years,

Bill Barr decides, this is where I get off. This is enough. This is my life. I may believe in an imperial presidency, but I don't believe in a fascist presidency. And that's what Donald Trump was asking him to do, asking him to steal an election, asking him to arrest his political opponents, asking him to do the sort of things, again, that fascist dictators do. You wouldn't do it. And so now Trump's turned on him. And as far as Fannie Willis goes and Jack Smith and everything else, again, we can point you back to and we can play it for you again. What we were saying in 2019, that if Donald Trump lost in 2020, he would run again and

he would run again simply to avoid all the crimes he was committing. Again, I'm not good at math, but that was four years ago. Four years ago, we were saying he will run again. So he can try to avoid going to jail. And so here we are. And I mean, I must say, a lot of people were saying that. So it's hard to believe anybody's stupid enough watching that show to completely forget that we all saw this coming like a freight train out of the mist. And now he says this when, again, he's running to try to avoid jail time, as we've been saying for four years. That's pretty much the only reason.

That was, by the way, Donald Trump going after his former attorney general, Bill Barr. Also, the prosecutors seeking to hold him accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election will have the new developments on the former president's legal troubles. That now includes his Twitter account. They didn't want to turn the information over to the government. In fact, they wanted to run and is calling the results of Tuesday's special election in Ohio, quote, rocket fuel for the Democrats. We'll have much more on the fallout for the Republican Party. Plus, the latest from Hawaii, where raging wildfires have turned deadly overnight. Such a sad story.

We'll have the very latest with us this morning. We have U.S. special correspondent for BBC News, Katty Kay, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and associate editor for The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, and senior columnist for The Daily Beast, Matt Lewis joins us this morning. And we begin with a new court ruling

that has revealed months before charging Donald Trump in two separate cases, special counsel Jack Smith's office executed a search warrant of the former president's Twitter account. According to the redacted ruling made public yesterday, the Justice Department executed the warrant back in January, despite being challenged by the Elon Musk owned company, Musk refused to turn over Trump's account at first because of his objection to a part of the warrant that barred Twitter from informing the former president that his account was being searched. It was a criminal investigation. Wow. The billionaire claimed that the order, quote,

violated the company's First Amendment right. It's a little flexible these days, by the way. With the former president, to communicate with the former president. Twitter was held in contempt of court, sanctioned $350,000 and ultimately forced to comply after a judge ruled that there was, quote, probable cause to search the account for evidence of criminal offenses. The judge also found, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that telling Trump about the search beforehand would give him the chance to destroy potential evidence. It's unclear what evidence Smith's office collected as a result of the warrant. You'll remember Trump's Twitter account was banned in the days following the January 6th attack, but it was restored last year after Musk purchased the

company. NBC News has reached out to Trump's lawyers and Twitter, which has now since been renamed X, for comments. We didn't get any. Gene Robinson, I must now since been renamed X for comments. Didn't get any. Gene Robinson, I must say, it's a bit fascinating. That's a polite way to put it. A bit fascinating that a company that bends over backwards to do what Chinese censors, Chinese Communist Party wants them to do and other other dictatorships, what he wants them to do, are now worried about First Amendment rights and,

oh, we need to notify Donald Trump, even though that would actually hamper the investigation. Yeah, they seem to have no problem following government instructions or orders or restrictions elsewhere in the world, especially China. They have a problem doing what the U.S. courts instruct them to do, which they're legally required to do and which they finally did after being sanctioned and fined. It's, you know, what's fascinating about this is one worries, one wonders what it is in that account they wanted to go after. Are they trying to, you know, something that you can't see publicly? Are they trying to get into his direct messages? It's unclear to me exactly what it is, but clearly Jack Smith thought there was

something in there. And we'll see what it was, I guess, in the fullness of time when it comes out in court. Joining us now, NBC News justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Delenian with more on the former president's legal woes. Ken, first of all, what's your take on the Twitter story or X? Nick, I think Eugene is absolutely onto something there, because obviously Donald Trump's tweets are public, right? You can even now go online

and find that old account, which has been dormant for two years. But what's not public are direct messages or, for example, drafts of tweets that were never sent or metadata that might show whether a tweet was sent from a phone or a desktop. And if you recall, the January 6th committee trying to get those outtakes of the video that Trump was making on January 6th, a message to the rioters. And their point of that

was to try to figure out what he didn't say, what he didn't want to say, what he proposed to say. Again, this is speculation, but a lot of people are wondering if that's one of the things that Jack Smith is going after. Another fascinating thing about this kind of comical is that for a few days, Smith and his team reached out to Twitter through the channel that they had established for legal process, and nobody responded because Elon Musk had gutted the staff of the place to such an extent that and any of us who have tried to reach out to their press operation have found the same problem. But so finally, you know, the special counsel gets through and then Twitter delays. And in fact,

they were fined three hundred and fifty thousand dollars by the court for that initial reluctance to comply with this. Again, a search warrant, not a subpoena, because this is getting content, which is protected by the Fourth Amendment. So you need to go to a judge and show evidence of crime. So very significant development. We'll have to see how it figures in the case. So obviously, a lot of all of President Trump's tweets are public and they can be found in a different way. A draft of a tweet, is that saved? If you type something out, does anyone know? And then you erase it. Is it all in there? And is that what they're looking for? Well, I know you're asking me that because I'm such a technological

whiz kid, but it does beg the question, though, Katty. I mean, they're in search for a crime. If it's not on the public tweets, you do wonder where that is. Yeah, I'm not even a simple country lawyer, but I don't see how something that's written in draft, which would be your kind of thoughts or things that you didn't actually put into action, that seems less pertinent than perhaps things that have been sent to your DMs that you had written to somebody else. And we know that Trump is careful about not sending very many texts and emails to people. It's not a form of communication he favors. Did he send a lot of DMs?

I don't know whether his Twitter account is full of the kinds of conversations, effectively, which is what direct messages are, one-to-one conversations. Is it full of the kind of direct conversations that he might have been having that would be useful for prosecutors? It's intriguing. It'll be interesting to see where. I'm sure we'll finally know. We will get to know during the trial what happens, but it'll be intriguing to see what this led to. So the Trump campaign is taking on the former president's indictments in a new attack. I'm going to say this. Yeah. If they went searching. Yeah. It's because somebody on his

staff said something like, you should check the direct messages. Right. Or you should check the drafts. He's given somebody else the password so anybody can open up and see the drafts. They're just not going to do that phishing exposition. Yeah. as we were talking about it, if they went searching there, they went searching because a Trumper who worked on the inside of Trump's team said, hey, you want to know how we communicated? Go there. Yeah. So this attack ad, the minute long television spot names the prosecutors and

investigators that brought charges against him, connecting them to President Biden. The majority of the ad focuses on Fulton County D.A. Fannie Willis and spouts a number of inaccurate and misleading allegations. Willis addressed the ad in an email to her staff, calling it derogatory and false. The ad is scheduled to air frequently in Fulton County, Georgia, as well as nationally. Timed to air as Willis reportedly prepares to bring charges against Trump and his allies. And we're looking at maybe next week, maybe next week. But Matt Lewis, that is just specifically designed to influence a future jury pool by actually doing a hit job against law enforcement. So you do the hit job against law enforcement,

spread all of these lies. And what are you doing? What you're doing is, again, you're tampering with the jury pool. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the interesting thing is that we've got, like, what, four indictments now, so I'll try to not confuse them. But in Georgia, legally, the people that I talk to who are legal experts, I'm not even a country lawyer either, they say that the, you know, what's happening, like, in Georgia, for example, and the Mar-a-Lago case, that both of those cases would legally be very easy to prove. Whereas the January 6th case, legally, even though obviously what Trump did was, you know, in my opinion, he incited the riot, but legally hard to prove. But the difference, of course, is venue. Right. And so if you're having a trial in Washington, D.C., that's going to be a very different jury pool than if you're having it in Florida. And I do think, obviously, Donald Trump is engaged in, you know, sort of preemptive witness tampering. Joe, to your point about the Twitter thing, I think that that is the other

interesting thing. Like I'm listening to all of these conservative legal experts who are talking about the January 6th trial. And and they're basically saying, yeah, what Trump did is horrible, but I'm not sure he broke the law. It's going to be hard to prove that he actually broke the law. And I think the thing to keep in mind is that Jack Smith knows things we don't yet know. And whether it's somebody flipping on him, as you've sort of suggested, whether it's his former chief of staff or whoever, there may be details that come out that are dispositive. And so this we don't know yet what Jack Smith knows. Ken, Ken Delaney, I want you to underline that fact.

And also, I'll just make I'll just take note that, again, over the past several days, I've been disturbed by the fact that establishment Republicans who claim to be anti-Trump, even if they were anti-anti-Trump at the same time, have all said, oh, this is Jack Smith. This is about the First Amendment. Or what about Hunter Biden's like a laptop or a lot of different distractions from Jack Smith in January 6th. For some reason, the Republican establishment that was anti-Trump is now scurrying back to him, claiming somehow that Jack Smith is attacking Donald Trump for using his First Amendment rights. I mean, we saw that memo yesterday. And my gosh, the conspiracy that was hatched seems to me, again, I don't know as much about the law as you, I'm sure, but

seems to me to be a laughable defense. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. It is a conspiracy to push fake electors on Mike Pence to change and to discount the votes of tens of millions of Americans. And Joe, not all of the Republican establishment is trying to justify it. You may have noticed that Alberto Gonzalez, the Bush administration attorney general, wrote an op-ed the other day, which came out and said, look, this indictment is very strong. And I'm disturbed that my fellow Republicans and pundits on Fox News are impugning the justice system and the Justice Department that he used to lead because he knows that it's filled with nonpolitical, nonpartisan people who are trying to pursue the rule of law. And in his view, the indictment was quite strong.

So, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean, the Cheeseboro memo that we learned about yesterday by Kenneth Cheeseboro, the Harvard trained lawyer from Wisconsin who was advising Trump, appears to be the blueprint for the false elector scheme. There's some covering language in there. For example, he said we should only execute this if there are plausible legal claims that we think are going to show fraud. Of course, that wasn't by the time the false electors were voting in December 2020. There was there were no plausible legal claims and they went forward anyway. And that's the crux of the issue here. And Joe, I also want to go to what you said about jury tampering and Trump's, you know,

inflammatory criticism of prosecutors and now the judge in the federal case. I've been talking to legal experts today. I wrote a piece about this, which will be published later today. And it's a really horrible dilemma that all these judges are in because Donald Trump is running for president and political speech is the most protected speech under the First Amendment. And yet normally a criminal defendant would not be allowed to get away with trying to influence the jury pool by impugning the prosecutors. But a lot of experts I talked to,

even ones very critical of Trump, think that these judges are going to have no choice but to let him do almost everything except threaten like he did the other day with the, you know, if you come after me, I'm coming after you. That is what they think would cross the line. If he starts posting things that that can be conceived as threats to the judge or prosecutors. But then you're going to be in this horrible situation where what is a judge's leverage? They can find him. Right. Essentially, their ultimate leverage is they can throw him in jail.

And now we're into this situation where can a person with lifetime Secret Service protection be jailed? How are the marshals going to react to that? How's the Secret Service react? So, I mean, we say this all the time, but we are really in dangerous, uncharted territory with these legal cases against the former president. Right. And I fear for former law students are going to be grappling with this First Amendment question in con law, because what you have is, again, you have the balancing of protecting prosecutors, stopping somebody from subverting the judicial process, the legal process, the criminal process. That's on one hand. On the other hand, you

actually have, again, political speech. And as we said yesterday, all political, all speech, all free speech is not created equally. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has always valued political speech the most and are the least likely to interfere with political speech. So I think you can tell the difference between political speech and threatening a witness. That's where these two come together. Yes, you can. Yeah. What I'm what I'm trying to say here is it's not going to always be simple. Now, and speaking of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, we can ask him about all of this. He'll be our guest at the top of the hour.

So in an interview last night, Trump essentially admitted that he interfered in Georgia's 2020 presidential election, discussing his now infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes. That's what I think. And I expressed that on the phone call. And I said, I don't know what the number was, like 11,000 or something. I said, what I need is 11,000 votes. I won this thing by hundreds of thousands of votes. That's my opinion. It's a strong opinion. And I think it's borne out by the facts.

And we'll see that. Yeah, and I think I won the Masters in 1987. I'm going to go take the trophy from the person who they awarded it to. I think I have more number one hits and gold records than the Beatles, Rolling Stones and C.W. Call combined. And I think, come on, he thinks he thinks he won by. I think they had to do a disclaimer. He knows he didn't win by hundreds of thousands of votes. And afterwards, Newsmax

actually did a disclaimer saying that they knew that Joe Biden legally won the contest. But this idea, this idea among Donald Trump and his Trumpers, that just because he says he believes, as somebody said yesterday, he owns all the money in the bank, doesn't mean he can have a conspiracy like an Ocean's 12 conspiracy to go, or Ocean's 13, I forget which one it was to have Brad Pitt go in and break into the safe and take all the money out of the bank. So and here again, yet another admission. Yeah, I told him I needed 11000 votes. That perfect phone call not sounding so perfect

anymore, Gene. No, it's not. I think that was Ocean's Eleven when they took the bags full of money out of the casino. But in any event, no, you can't just say, you know, I believed that I was a billionaire and go rob a bank. You can't just say I believed I had won the state and then not just ask, but pressure and try to intimidate the Georgia Secretary of State into illegally inventing or changing 11,780 votes so you could then have won the state by one vote. It's, you know, the perfect phone call, right? I mean, it was perfect for prosecutors who were trying to prove what Donald Trump did. This is astounding, and it is a riot that Newsmax ran a disclaimer afterwards. Obviously, they have a better purchase on reality than Donald Trump does. And also, frankly, they see what Trump is doing in in continually coming out with this stuff. Yeah, I think we have that disclaimer. It's kind of a strange way of covering it.

But here, take a look at how it plays out. I totally dispute that election. I think it's ridiculous what happened and that they allowed that to happen and that the media doesn't want anybody to talk about it. We just have to make sure they don't cheat on the elections because that's the question I get more. Sir, will they do it again? Will they cheat again?

We're not going to let them. I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes. That's what I think. Just a note, Newsmax has accepted the election results as legal and final. Oh, my God. And so it's so rich. It's so rich. So they just have to pop that in because of course, don't want to get sued.

Cost Matt cost Fox $787 million to keep churning up the lies. They're, they're now liable for maybe up to another billion dollars. Newsmax actually famously had their morning anchor get up out of a chair when Mr. Pillow was spreading his lies and was like smartly. So one of the great, great moves in recent cable news history got up and just walked off the set, left the chair there. But, you know, they sit there and they let him spew lies for an entire interview, knowing that they're lies, knowing that they have to say this disclaimer and then they have to say this disclaimer because

they know that they're letting him lie through the entire interview. Yeah, I think, you know, Donald Trump's entire, I guess, argument now, at least in two of the four cases, is the George Costanza defense. Right. It's not a lie if I believe it's true. And so he has to commit to the bit. And actually what the Newsmax thing reminds me like a little bit maybe of of professional wrestling, you know, where Donald Trump's it's kayfabe or whatever. He he is in this act. And now when they cut back to the announcers at the end, they have to, you know, we're now called world wrestling entertainment, not world wrestling Federation. They have to kind of give away that

this is, this is for entertainment purposes only. Um, but, uh, I think the damage is done though, to be honest, I don't know that the disclaimer at the end, we find it, you know, obviously hilarious and very telling. For people who are watching, the wrestling fans, so to speak, I don't know if the disclaimer matters to them at the end. But it's surreal and very postmodern, I have to say. Yeah. And Ken, before we end the block, want to hear a little bit more about this FBI raid in Utah where a man was killed. Tell us what happened. It's a tragic segue from, you know, false claims on Newsmax to a story about a Trump supporter, 75 year old Craig Robertson in Provo, Utah, who had been posting things like in September, the time is right for a presidential assassination or two.

First, Joe, then Kamala. So the FBI decided to go and try to arrest him yesterday morning at 6 a.m. with President Biden coming to the region. And they as they were serving that arrest warrant, they say that he was armed and they shot him to death. But he had been threatening not only the president, the vice president, but D.A. Alvin Bragg of New York, the attorney general there, Letitia James. He called Merrick Garland a Nazi. He owned weapons and a Trump hat and a camouflaged sniper suit and was living in his own reality. And this this is the tragedy that ensued. And this is not a one off. There was just an analysis published the other day that threats against public officials across the country have absolutely spiked in the last year. And that's just looking at federal charges. Many of them are not captured around the country, but there is a climate of angry rhetoric that has has erupted into actual action, threats and action like we've never seen before. And so these these words that these politicians say that that in many cases, as you just demonstrated, are false.

They have consequences, guys. Yes. You know, and, Katty, they do have consequences. And of course, there are 77 million. I guess it was like 77 million people voted for Donald Trump and the overwhelming majority of them obviously not doing this. The problem that I think anybody will tell you, whether even pre-Trump, the problem is with the lies and propaganda where you're constantly turning the other side into enemies. You're going to find people like this tragically without guardrails. You're going to find people that buy into the lies, people that buy into the conspiracy theories. And you see it. You saw it on January the 6th.

One lie after another. And, you know, it's not until they're arrested. It's not until they're in jail. It's not until they talk to their family members. We're like, what what were you doing that they sort of come to? And then tragically for them, it's too late because they're in jail. Tragically, here you have a guy that, again, making one threat after another, wanting to assassinate politicians. And arming up. the costs of this paranoia that is ginned up either by Donald Trump or Trumpers or by the NRA through the years. We've seen it through the years where they're constantly pumping up paranoia. They're coming to take your guns. They're coming to take away the Second Amendment for you and then defining the Second Amendment in the most exaggerated, unconstitutional way.

This all comes, unfortunately, at a tragic cost. And it did again yesterday. Yeah, I mean, one of the traits of Trumpism that I found traveling around the country is a kind of free-floating anger. And it can attach itself to anything, to gender issues, to race, to immigration, to the libs, to the establishment. But it's very real and it kind of morphs as time goes on. But the worst consequences of that anger in a country where there are an awful lot of guns, it has to be said, are the kind of threats and potential attacks that we saw that played out in Utah yesterday.

And we are living in this very tense environment. We did hear a bit. I mean, 2022 is interesting, the midterms, because we did hear then, and I heard it, interviewed people who told me that there was going to be a civil war if the Republicans lost. And it didn't happen. So, you know, there are moments where we may we shouldn't catastrophize and we may think that there's going to be something terrible happens. And the country does manage to hold back and rein itself in. And the votes, by and large, at the midterms were accepted without consequence and without violence. So let's see what 2024 happens. Let's keep our fingers crossed. But it's a terrible situation that we're in that we have to keep our fingers

crossed about having peace and security and acceptance after an election here. Yeah, you know, we have been a 50-50 nation for the past 20, 25 years. The only difference is that obviously since Donald Trump came in, what used to be normal has now been turned into a reason for a, quote, civil war. I mean, we were basically 50-50 in the 2022 election. Republicans expected to do much better and they underperformed. Joe Biden, if you looked at the polls in 2020, was expected to do much better. And in states like Wisconsin, where it's like he's supposed to win by 13, 14, 15 points, if you believe the polls, underperformed. Why? We are, for the most part, a 50-50 nation. And these lies that, again, are spread come at a great cost.

And it's something that, unfortunately, is even turning now against our military. Yeah, because now Fox News, I mean, they've run documentaries saying that the FBI is coming to kill people who are Trump supporters just because they're Trump supporters. Forget about the assassination threats and and everything else. And they run documentaries saying that helicopters that were used in Afghanistan are going to come to the United States and be used against American citizens who are Trump supporters. You have not just people on Fox News, but people in in in the United States Congress over the past year who've called our military leaders pigs. Called our military leaders pigs, like some left-wing Marxist hippie from 1967. They've called them pigs. You have Republican senators spewing hatred towards our military, saying that he wishes they were more like Russian

military troops. And so, again, all of these stupid conspiracy theories, all of this extremism, it's now it's now leading a lot of Trump supporters to hating the very institutions. Conservatives once proudly defended the United States military, the FBI, law enforcement. They want to defund, Mika, an agency that stops terrorists from attacking the United States of America. That's where we are.

And it's becoming mainstream. NBC News justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Delaney. And thank you very much for being on this. Thank you, Ken. Also, we are following breaking news out of Hawaii where officials say at least 36 people have been killed by the fast moving wildfire sweeping across the western part of the island of Maui. Dozens more are injured and being treated for burns. Hundreds of homes and businesses are destroyed and communications on the island are crippled. Thousands of residents have evacuated, with some diving into the ocean for safety from the flames. The devastating wildfires have been fanned by strong winds from Hurricane Dora passing well south of the Hawaiian Islands. Let's bring in meteorologist Angie Lassman for the latest on what the conditions are for firefighters.

Angie, what's the latest? Good morning, guys. Yeah, so we're going to see some improvements. That's the short term of it. But we really have kind of a recipe for these winds to remain elevated in critical fire weather to stay with us at least for a little while longer. Here's the setup. We have Hurricane Dora, as you mentioned, just to the south of the island. And that's a low pressure system. Just to the north of the island, we have a high pressure system. When you have differences in pressure, in short, that's what creates winds. So we had

really strong trade winds blowing through parts of that region and gusting up to 50, 55 miles per hour. We know when we have all of those recipes for fire, we're going to deal with it spreading quite quickly when we have those strong winds. Over the next 24 hours, this is the good news. Both of those systems will start to move away. They're going to move west, but the winds don't immediately subside. We're still going to be talking 30, 35, even close to 40 mile per hour winds in the short term. And there's still fires there burning at this hour. Now, on top of that, we'll start to see these winds kind of calming down. We don't have a lot of rain in the forecast. We're dealing with really dry conditions. You can see on that island, we've got moderate drought

and severe drought still in place. We're going to have some dry winds on the leeward side of that island. And as I mentioned, not a lot of rain in the forecast. We'll see maybe a few of these passing showers. But at the very least, those winds will come down, which will help the firefighters, of course, battle the conditions that they're dealing with in Maui, Mika. All right. Keep us posted. Angie Lassman, thank you very much. It is a terrible situation out there. Hey, Gene, really quickly, I just want to go back to you.

And I just I want to expand on what I was saying about the lies that people are are telling people the FBI is coming to kick down your door and kill you. What happens when the FBI shows up at somebody's door who's been threatening to assassinate and planning to assassinate the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States, he comes out shooting because he's been told by Fox News and the Trumpers that when the FBI shows up, they're going to kick down your door and kill you. So. So, yeah, you actually you talk about real life consequences. These lies create real life consequences and put the lives of law enforcement officers on the line and make their already tough and dangerous job even more dangerous. Absolutely. So after after this incident in Utah, you know, what it tells the authorities, the FBI and local police and others, that because of this rhetoric that's being spread by what used to be the Law and Order Party, obviously is not now, the next time they have to go in with more armor and more weapons because they're likely to confront somebody who shoots next time.

I mean, words have consequences. Words are dangerous. Lies have consequences. And it is just shocking to me, as somebody who remembers the way that hippies talked about the FBI in 1967, it's just shocking to me to hear the Republican Party not just adopting that rhetoric, but turbocharging it and essentially saying that the FBI is a bunch of stormtrooperske and allowed all this stuff to come out. But, wow, it's just amazing. And what a tragedy yesterday, that 75-year-old guy who believed the lies, who, you know, that's the tragedy. And that's the danger is the guardrails are taking off because they hear this on TV. They hear it from politicians. And so they're ready to start their own civil war when law

enforcement comes to check on an assassination threat. Well, I just wonder how Judge Chutkin is going to be dealing with Trump's, quote, political speech with her experience trying January 6th rioters and seeing how infected their minds were. It will be very interesting to see how affected she might be by some of the words that he puts out there. Maybe more than other judges. You never know. Still ahead on Morning Joe, top Republicans are sounding the alarm after voters in Ohio rejected a measure that would have made it tougher to protect abortion rights, what it means for the fight over abortion access and the 2024 election. Plus, a top evangelical leader is warning about conservative Christians rejecting the teachings of Jesus as, quote, liberal talking points. We'll show you those new remarks. Also ahead, former

Arkansas governor and 2024 White House hopeful Asa Hutchinson is our guest this morning. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. I picked up my bag. I went looking for a place to hide. When I saw your duly elected state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit and nothing done by a weak dictator can change that. This is an outrage. But under this tyranny, elected officials can be removed simply for political purposes and by a whim of the governor. And no matter how you feel about me, you should not be okay with that. That is Monique Worrell, who was an elected Florida state attorney slamming Governor Ron DeSantis after he abruptly suspended her yesterday.

This is now the second time in one year that DeSantis has removed an elected official from their position, an elected official from their position. An elected official. An elected official. Both are Democrats who were replaced by Republicans. His executive order accuses Worrell of under-prosecuting crimes. But she says this is an attempt to jumpstart his presidential primary bid.

Monique Royal has vowed to run for her position again. But before she does that, she joins us now right here on Morning Joe. It's good to have you on. Ms. Royal, thank you so much for being with us. I have to admit, I mean, I've been my family moved to Florida like over 40 years ago. I've been involved in politics and and intimately involved in politics for a very long time. I just say I've got to say, despite all that, even I am shocked that a governor can can just boot out somebody who was elected by the people. That's what everybody needs to understand.

You weren't appointed by anybody. You were elected by the people. And as you said, this this this sort of dictator move is it really is shocking. What's been the response for your constituents and the people who voted for you just three years ago? Well, you know, you're right. It is shocking. And the nation should be shocked by that, because essentially we are dealing with a dictator. We're dealing with someone who is overreaching his political authority and removing elected officials simply for not being politically aligned with him. Typically, the removal rules were used to remove individuals who had been arrested or convicted of crime or individuals who had fallen into addiction and weren't able to properly perform their duties. But now this governor is using these rules to remove people who simply are Democrats or remove

elected officials in Democratic counties, which he's retaliating against because they didn't support him in the election. This is a sad day in Florida. It's a sad day in America. And the whole country should be watching because if we're not careful, this could become the next president of the United States. Well, and the thing is, there's nothing conservative about this guy. I'm a conservative. I'm a small government conservative. We believe the power starts at the local level and anything the local level can do. You give it to the local level. If they can't do it at the local level and anything the local level can do. You give it to the local level. If they can't do it, the state level does it. If they can't do it, the federal government does it. Everything is upside down with DeSantis.

He's like he's like a centralized state, like authoritarian, whether he's banning small businesses from running their businesses the way they want during covid are banning are going after baseball teams. But now here, this seems to be an even greater breach. constituents? What do the people of your district think about you being elected, you campaigning, you debating, you running against another candidate, you winning the election, and then him just unilaterally deciding to fire you, to push you to the side for a campaign talking point? Well, people are upset. There's no doubt about that. I ran on a very specific platform and I kept my word. I stood by the things that I said that I would do based on research and analysis of the criminal legal system over my 20 years of practice.

I talked about mass incarceration in this country and how Florida leads the nation in incarceration. And I ran on a platform of implementing things that would change that, using the strong arm of the law when necessary, but also implementing programs that would divert people from the criminal system. And the constituents are upset. They are angry because their votes have been stolen from them. They elected someone to govern according to their values, and that's been stripped away. And he didn't put in someone who was close in ideology or anything like that because there was some, you know, malfunction with my way of doing things. He put someone in who was completely opposite of what the people elected and what the people wanted all at a time when crime is down in central Florida. So there is no public

safety reason for him to take this step. There is strictly a political reason. And you said it best to jumpstart his failed presidential campaign. Mika, it doesn't matter whether people agree, as she said, as the state attorney said, it doesn't matter whether people agree with her philosophy on crime or not. I suspect, I don't know all the details, I suspect based on what she said that maybe I would disagree with some parts of it. Maybe. But make no mistake, if Republicans can basically fire elected officials because they disagree with their philosophy, don't Republicans understand that a Democratic governor in the future can fire somebody because they think that they're too much of a quote law and order official? This is such a dangerous anti-democratic step that as a state attorney said in her press conference.

Her views and ideology don't matter here because the people already endorsed them with their vote three years ago. Understood. And Ms. Rorell, aside from speaking out on platforms like this, do you have any other options? Are there legal options? And how does this, I understand you intend to run again. How does this change what you're fighting for in the state of Florida? So with your question towards our legal options, we have assembled a legal team and they are currently reviewing the executive order and making determinations about what the next steps are legally. I filed for reelection in March and that hasn't changed. I am still running for reelection and what I'm running for hasn't changed. The people voted for it by an overwhelming majority by 67 percent of the vote I won in 2020. So and I trust that they will speak

again, despite the backdoor efforts that the governor is currently making to gerrymander the court circuits in the same way that he's gerrymandered the voting districts. Gene Robinson with the Washington Post is next. Gene, the state attorney won with two thirds of the vote and she with somebody who is a Federalist Society member, who I suspect wouldn't get 14 percent of the vote. This is this is just so anti-democratic. It's it's it's really shocking. Yeah, it is shocking's shocking to me. Ron DeSantis? for various reasons, you know, because you're so popular, because you were pursuing policies that he didn't like. And frankly, perhaps because you're an African-American woman, but, you know, for political reasons. But are there others who are also in danger? Yep. Well, I think that, you know, you can look at the democratically elected prosecutors across the state and each of them are in danger. But I think that as it comes to me, all the reasons that you stated, Jean, are factual.

I think that I am unapologetically opposed to his way of doing things. And because he is a bully, because he is a weak authoritarian, he has decided to retaliate against me by my removal. He's not stated one valid legal ground for my removal because we still have prosecutorial discretion in this state. But I believe that if you look around, I believe there were three democratically elected prosecutors out of the 20 circuits in the state of Florida. I think each of them are in jeopardy. But also something to watch for is the gerrymandering of the judicial circuits, because in doing that, he'll be able to essentially wipe out all democratically elected prosecutors by merging them with red counties. All right. Governor Ron DeSantis picked on the wrong democratically elected Florida state attorney. That's just my gut. Monique Worrell, thank you very much for

coming on the show. And thank you for knowing your value. I have a feeling I see you once again. Madam state attorney, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Monique for state attorney. OK, here we go. So, Matt Lewis, this this really confirms what Republicans in Tallahassee have been telling me for some time. about people like you and me that are part of the, oh, I don't know, Reagan Republican Party, the small government Republican Party that I used to be a member of that actually believed in small government and bottom up leadership instead of top down. I've been told by so many people in Tallahassee over the past year or two that if you don't like Donald Trump, you will hate Ron DeSantis. And they don't like Donald Trump,

but they say he is he is he is like a tyrant. He's again, these are Republicans. I don't know a whole lot of Democrats in Tallahassee, to be honest with you. He is these are Republicans. I don't know a whole lot of Democrats in Tallahassee, to be honest with you. He is. These are Republicans. And they'll say they always tell me, look at how he banned small business owners from implementing safety precautions during COVID. And so they couldn't keep their businesses open. Look at how he banned cruises, you know, cruise liners from doing the same thing. So they couldn't make millions of dollars. They couldn't operate. Look at how he went after politically to try to hurt the Tampa Bay Rays for posting a tweet after Uvalde in sympathy of the children there. And of course, we have the war on Disney. There is fear. There is fear and loathing among all CEOs in the state of Florida. They won't admit it on the record, but they say it to lobbyists all over the state. They're like,

we we're afraid we can't do anything because this guy will come after us for political purposes. It's just it is a top down, state centered, like authoritarianism type approach, isn't it? I think it is, Joe. And look, I think this is actually indicative of a of a schism within the conservative, the conservative movement such as it exists today. And you noted kind of the Reagan conservative philosophy that that existed for decades, which believed in limited government and that it was inappropriate to use the power of government to try to impose your beliefs on other people. And I do think it's very clear that

there's now a big section of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, you can call them common good conservatives, or there's different names for it. But essentially, they believe that it is incumbent, if you are a Republican or a conservative who gets elected, you must use that power to impose your beliefs in a non-democratic way. Right. So so outside the scope of your powers, of what you've actually been granted. And so I think that Ron DeSantis is maybe the avatar of this philosophy and what he's doing in Florida. It's right wing, but it is not conservative in the sense that we knew for decades, Joe. And to restate something you said earlier, I don't understand how a conservative could watch this and not be afraid that it's going to be used against us down the road. You know,

is it crazy to think that a Democratic governor or president could have enough power to decide to impose left wing progressive values on conservatives. Once might makes right, it is a it's a slippery slope. And so I think it's something we should push back against even when it's our own team doing it. Matt Lewis, thank you very much for being on this morning. Matt's new book entitled Filthy Rich Politicians is out now and still ahead on Morning Joe. A former U.S. attorney general has a message for his fellow Republicans, quote, the Justice Department is not biased against us. Alberto Gonzalez, who served in the George W. Bush administration, is our guest at the top of the hour. Plus, one of our next guests was on the ground in Ohio when voters there pushed back Republican efforts that could have stripped away the rights of women.

NBC's Ali Batali has more on the fallout from that critical special election when Morning Joe comes right back. What they've done with the election to be to weaponize a DOJ and an FBI like he's done. People have thought about it for probably 100 years and they do it in third world countries, but they never did it here where you have three and four indictments. You never had an indictment in your whole life. And now you have three or four in a period of a month. It's all because of the election. They could have done it two and a half years ago, by the way, if they really wanted to. But they never thought it was going to be necessary. Yeah, well, actually, we did think it was necessary. And we actually said in 2019,

Donald, that you were going to run for president again if you lost because you would want to stop the prosecutions from coming because you knew where they were coming. Everybody knew they were coming. They were coming because you deserve to be prosecuted. In fact, Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell said after criticizing you for January the 6th and that impeachment proceeding, he said, listen, this isn't the forum to do it. All right. There's a forum to do it. And it's in the courtroom. So the head of the Republican Party in Washington, D.C., said, do the investigation and you can you can go after him and indict him for crimes that were committed on January the 6th. So so again, this this whole there ain't nobody acting like a third world dictator more than Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

And we'll get to that in a second. Well, that was Donald Trump last night repeating his false claims that the Department of Justice and the FBI have been weaponized against him. Our next guest is trying to set the Republican Party straight. Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez joins us in just a moment. Also ahead this hour, we're going to get a historic perspective on Trump's legal issues by looking back on Richard Nixon's resignation, which came 49 years ago this week. Plus, a Republican presidential candidate who is still trying to qualify for the first debate, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, will join us just ahead on Morning Joe. It is just a few minutes past the top of the hour. Katty Kay and Eugene Robinson are still with us and joining the conversation.

We have former U.S. senator now on NBC News and MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill. You know, have you on? Claire, before we get to the attorney general, I want to start with you. I was talking to Matt Lewis. We kind of come from, you know, we we were inspired to become Republicans with the Reagan revolution. The idea was what we always said, what I said when I went to Washington is trust the people. And if local government can do it, let local government do it. If they can't, the state government can do it.

If they can't, then the federal government can do it. Sort of a bottom up approach. Right. government can do it. Sort of a bottom up approach, right? We now have, though, unfortunately, in Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, this top down approach that's trying to literally take votes away from the American people. Of course, January 6th, the fake elector scheme to rob tens of millions of Americans of their vote in Tennessee, the Tennessee legislature deciding that two black politicians needed to be kicked out of the legislature because you're talking about free speech because they protested.

Of course, the white woman that was protesting, she got to stay in there. Then, of course, you have Florida, where a black woman who got 67 percent of the vote as a state attorney and she ran on a progressive platform, ran on a platform. As I said, maybe I disagree with that platform, but she ran on a progressive platform and 67 percent of the people in her district voted for her. That's called democracy. Rhonda Santus has fired her, kicked her out. It's really shocking. And then, of course, we have what happened in Ohio this past week, where Ohio has referendums that allow 50 percent of the vote to be enough to pass a referendum, a state referendum. They suddenly decide to move it up to 60 percent because they know they're going to lose an abortion battle. This is it. It is literally anti-democratic movements to take votes away from Americans.

And it looks like not all Republicans, because I certainly have a lot of friends who are concerned about it. But it looks like the Trump wing of the Republican Party, they're all in. They don't care about democracy. They just care about power. Yeah. You know, I spent a lot of time in politics listening to Republicans lecture me about the evils of the heavy hand of government. They have now taken the heavy hand of government and done the most damaging thing you can possibly do in a democracy. And that is figure out how to keep people from voting and how to cancel out people's votes and how to make sure that people don't have a voice that is strong and clear at the ballot box. What happened in Florida with DeSantis is beyond outrageous.

I mean, I was an elected prosecutor. I ran for office and I think I got those kinds of numbers when I ran as a Democrat in the Kansas City area. I think about what it would feel like for someone to just come in arbitrarily and say, you know, I don't care what the people who voted for you said. I think I know better. That is not a heavy hand of government. That's a hammer. That is a sledgehammer wiping out people's right to be heard. And what the people in Ohio said this week very clearly is we get what you're doing and we don't agree with it. And they do it many ways, Joe. They don't just do it, you know, by calling secretaries of state and saying, I'm going to engage in conduct to try to take away votes. They do it by trying to keep people from voting, to try to limit their ability

to vote, whether it's mail-in ballots or whether it's college students. The Republican Party has, over the last five to six years, has tried to circle this country with barbed wire around people having their voices heard. And I got to tell you, people need to get on it and get out there and work as hard as they know how to stop this incredibly dangerous trend the Republican Party has made part of their foundational politics.