Morning Joe - Morning Joe 8/23/22

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Trump had more than 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago: NYT

Good morning. Welcome to Morning Joe. It is Tuesday, August 23rd. I'm Willie Geist. This morning we're following new information on the investigation into classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. New reporting overnight about the alarming number of documents found so far. What triggered the unprecedented search of the former president's home and new reporting that Donald Trump personally handled some of the documents that were ultimately returned to the government going through the boxes himself. Plus, it's another big primary day in New York City. Two powerful Democrats and longtime allies going at it now and facing off against one another while a newcomer hopes to shake things up. We'll set the stage for that race and the big contest in Florida as Democrats choose a nominee to face Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. With us this morning, U.S. special correspondent for BBC

News, Katty Kaye, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, and MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle. Good morning to you all. We've got some new reporting on what sparked the FBI search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago. Sources telling The New York Times the government has recovered more than 300 documents marked as classified from Donald Trump so far. The first batch returned in January included more than 150 classified documents, but there were more. According to the Times, quote, the number ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped to trigger the criminal investigation that led FBI agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month,

seeking to recover more. A number of people briefed on the matter, telling the Times the former president personally went through 15 boxes before handing them over in January. The paper reports, quote, the highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the Justice Department, which within months had convened a grand jury investigation. The government retrieved a second set of documents from the former president's aides in June, followed by a third set seized in that FBI search two weeks ago. According to the Times, the large number of documents and the amount of time they remained at Mar-a-Lago while being

sought by the Justice Department, quote, suggested to officials the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling them, not fully forthcoming with investigators or both. Sources telling the Times investigators still are seeking more surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, a sign that officials still are looking into how the classified material was handled while improperly stored at the former president's estate.

According to the Times, the FBI declined to comment. President Trump's spokesman did not immediately respond. Joining us now, NBC News justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Delanian and former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official Chuck Rosenberg. Good morning to you both. Ken, I'll start with you. NBC News is working to confirm all of this. A blockbuster story dropped last night by The New York Times. The top line, though, the 300 documents, 300 of them taken by Donald Trump, according to The Times, reporting out of the Justice Department, is a pretty staggering number when you consider all the excuses that Donald Trump has made that, well, he just slipped some things into his briefcase or they were planted by the FBI. No, it turns out boxes and boxes and boxes in the basement at Mar-a-Lago.

Yeah, it's remarkable, Willie. Also fascinating to me is the fact that Donald Trump's lawyers yesterday in their lawsuit challenging the warrant and asking for a special master to go through the documents, essentially acknowledged the timeline that led up to the search of things they didn't have to admit. For example, that the Justice Department served a grand jury subpoena on them back in May, and then also subpoenaed the surveillance tape from Mar-a-Lago. That had been reported elsewhere, but now the Trump side has confirmed it. And it sort of paints this picture of why they took this dramatic step of trying to obtain and obtaining this search warrant, which is they asked nicely for the documents and they subpoenaed the documents and then they weren't satisfied. The Trump lawyer also confirms that

Jay Brat, the senior Justice Department attorney in charge of counterintelligence, went down to Mar-a-Lago with three FBI counterintelligence agents and met personally with Donald Trump, asked to see the storage room. According to the Trump side, Brat went to the storage room accompanied by Secret Service agents at Mar-a-Lago, then later asked Trump to put a better lock on the storage room. So clearly a lot of concern about what was happening with those documents. You know, you got to believe there were certain things omitted from this account by the Trump lawyers about exactly what the Justice Department was saying. But it really paints this extraordinary picture of all these efforts by the U.S. government to try to get these classified documents back, which were unsuccessful, which then led up to this

dramatic search, which is now being criticized by Donald Trump and his Republican allies as an overreach. But you really see that they tried to do a lot of stuff before they ended up getting the search warrant and swooping in with two dozen FBI agents. And that's the thing, Chuck. This is just a matter of routine for most outgoing presidential administrations. You hand over your documents to the National Archives. The National Archives, as we've seen and now confirmed by this New York Times reporting, tried and tried and tried to get them the right way, the conventional way, and ultimately did not. They said two former White House officials, this according to the Times, told Donald Trump, you got to give this stuff up to the National Archives. He responded by saying, no, they're mine. They, of course,

are not. They belong to the United States government. Chuck, what do you make of this new reporting and just the lengths to which Donald Trump and members of his staff went to retain all these documents and keep them in a basement at Mar-a-Lago? Well, that's right. So, Willie, if you're acting in good faith, if you accidentally took stuff home, right, you would expect that it wouldn't come back in three batches and perhaps more. If you made a mistake and someone told you you had classified information in the basement of your house, Willie, you would go right down there, maybe with somebody to help you, and you would diligently go through everything. So why does some stuff come back in January, some more stuff comes back in June, and it still takes an FBI search warrant to get the rest of it, or at least what we think is the rest of it.

So there's a couple of factors here. If you're thinking about it as a federal prosecutor, right, how much stuff did he have? How long did he have it? Why did he have it? When someone told him that he had it, what steps did he take to return it? And they don't seem to be all that diligent in that part of it. And then what was the classification level, Willie? There's different levels of classified information from confidential to secret to top secret to top secret compartmented information. So in addition to knowing now that they returned about

300 documents, what was the classification levels of it? But the thing that continues to concern me, if you're acting in good faith, is what took so long and why is it coming back in batches? And so I don't blame the FBI or the Department of Justice one bit for trying to get this stuff back. It's a problem to have it in your basement. Yeah, to say the least, Mike Barnicle, as this Times report this morning points out and really gets at is that this was a long process. This was not an overnight move, as Donald Trump and others have claimed that FBI agents showed up at Mar-a-Lago and, you know, kicked down the door and started rummaging through his stuff. No, these were longstanding requests, the conventional way, the routine way to get some of these documents back. And as they trickled in beginning in January of last year, it was taking too long and they had to go in and with a legal search

warrant and get the rest of them. Well, he has been reported. And as you just mentioned, one of the keys to this is the mind frame of the potential defendant here, Donald J. Trump, when he said the documents are mine, they belong to me. And Chuck, in terms of legal jeopardy, what are the pivot points here? What potentially could a former president be charged with, given what he's done? Well, great question, Mike. So, of course, it would be extraordinary to charge a former president, just as it was extraordinary to execute a search warrant on the home of a former president. But the pivot point, really, for all of these statutes, all these criminal laws is intent, right? So not to be too cliched, but what did the president know and when did he know it?

Did he understand that he had classified information in the basement? Did he understand that he had to turn it over? Nevertheless, did he retain it willfully or intentionally, despite the requirements of the law? So for all of these cases, Mike, not to sound overly legalistic, it turns on intent. What was in the president's mind? What did he understand? And why did he act the way he acted? And that's always a hard thing to prove, right? It might be easy to prove that he had classified information in his house. That's easy. Right. The agents went in there. They saw it. They took it. They got it. They brought it back. That's easy. But the why. Right. Why did he act the way he did? What was his intent? Those will always be the pivot points in the criminal case. And it's always, Mike,

the hardest thing to prove. And Gene, these are not just these documents, the love letters that Donald Trump so cherishes from Kim Jong Un. We're talking about classified documents regarding national security. We don't know specifically what they are, but we know the the sources of them, which are intelligence agencies and the national security apparatus. So fair to say there's some sensitive material in those boxes. Yeah, that is fair to say, Willie. And I was just wondering, as I read the story last night, what would happen to me or to you if we were found to have, you know, 300 classified documents, some in our some in my basement, some in my bedroom closet,

and the FBI found out about it? I think either you or I would be under the jail at this point. We'd certainly be charged. So I think there's been extraordinary patience on the part of the government, of the FBI and the Justice Department and the archives in seeking very nicely to get these documents back. My question for Ken is about this. I guess it's a lawsuit that the Trump side filed. What is the point of this? Is this just more delay? It doesn't I don't understand what they think the difference between a special master looking at the documents

and a sort of scrubbing team from the Justice Department looking at the documents would actually be. Are they just playing for time? Well, one thing they're doing is issuing sort of a public press release through a legal document, denouncing the search and calling it an overreach and saying that it violated Donald Trump's Fourth Amendment rights, which most experts look at that and say that's just not the case. I mean, this was a lawfully approved search warrant by a magistrate judge who, by the way, reaffirmed yesterday in his written ruling that he thought there was ample probable cause to justify this search. He said there was evidence

of multiple crimes at Mar-a-Lago. But on the special master thing, you know, that's actually not an unreasonable ask by the Trump side. There was a special master in the Michael Cohen case when the when the federal government searched and seized some of his documents. It's really functionally the same thing. If you believe that the FBI filter team and DOJ filter team right now that's going through the documents, that's independent of the investigation, is acting in good faith and taking out attorney-client privilege documents, a special master would do essentially the same thing. I'm not sure what the Justice Department position is going to be on this, but I can't imagine that it will give them great concern because this kind of thing happens all

the time. And they showed by giving Donald Trump back his passports that they deemed were not relevant to the search that they're happy to do that. And then I just want to add one thing, guys, in terms of the the a lot of people might be looking at this and going, you know, he was president. He had access to all the secrets. So so what if he accidentally had some classified documents or even intentionally in his house? But we're talking about some documents marked TSSCI, sensitive compartmented information. And I've been sort of asking around just to reaffirm my understanding of like how sensitive those documents are.

Those are documents. The reason they're compartmented is because they could betray and likely would betray the sources of information, either a human source or a technical source. They could literally, the disclosure of those could get people killed. So we're talking about the most sensitive documents and at least one set of documents there that the government has. And anytime there's any kind of spill or disclosure in the real world of those kinds of documents, it's a massive firestorm. The federal government swoops in and does everything they can to secure this stuff. You can only look at them in special facilities,

even within the Capitol or within other kinds of buildings. You have to go to a special room to look at those documents. So that's how sensitive some of those documents allegedly in Trump's possession were. Yeah. And just sitting at a beach and tennis club with a membership floating around as well. Katty, just to fill in the blanks a little bit here with Ken's been talking about this special master. So Trump and his team filed a lawsuit to block the Department of Justice from, quote, further review of seized materials before that special master is appointed. Special master is an outside official selected by a judge to carry out a judicial matter on the court's behalf.

In that lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida, it requests a more detailed receipt for the property seized from Mar-a-Lago in that search on August the 8th and asks that anything not within the scope of the search warrant be returned. So that's just what we're talking about when we say special master, Katty. Yeah, we've already had those passports returned. And this this sounds as much as anything a bit like a stalling tactic. Chuck, can I ask you a little bit more about this issue of intent? Because as you say, this is key here. And a lot of Trump supporters are saying, well, this is a former president. He liked to have these souvenirs. So he kept the letter from Kim Jong Un at home. You know, it was written to him after all. I think there's some sympathy amongst Trump supporters with some of the material that he was keeping. How would we know or how would the justice defilement go about trying to find out what

Donald Trump intended to do with those documents? Did he intend to use them for some kind of profit in any way for himself, particularly perhaps these ones that are ultra-secret documents where I imagine there would be an awful lot of concern. What's going to be the process there for finding out whether he intended to do something nefarious with them for his own benefit? Because that would seem to be the key to whether this was really going to land him in legal jeopardy. Yeah, it's a great question, Katty. So you're talking about an aspect of the case that concerns us, those of us who worked in this classified environment the most. Was there a transmission or an attempted transmission of these documents?

In other words, if somebody, Trump or anyone else, has classified information and wants to profit from it or simply hand it over to a foreign power to the detriment of the United States. That's the most serious type of mishandling. It's really actually espionage. So one way you prove that, of course, is by looking at the people around Trump and who he spoke to and what they understood and the conversations that they had with the former president. Katie, if I wanted to know what you were and the conversations that they had with the former president. Cady, if I wanted to know what you were thinking about a particular topic, I could ask you, but maybe you wouldn't tell me or maybe you wouldn't tell me the truth.

So therefore, I'd have to talk to all the people that talk to you, right? If I can't get it directly from you for one reason or another, maybe you confided in someone else or maybe someone had an argument with you, Katty, about how you were handling the classified information and was so disturbed by what they learned from you that they wanted to pass it to the FBI. So one of the reasons these investigations take a long time is you have to talk to a whole bunch of people. You may not be able to talk to Mr. Trump directly or get anything useful from him or get anything that's honest or candid from him. But you can talk to all the people around him, those who work for him, those who worked at Mar-a-Lago, those who visited him. Perhaps he showed the documents to other people. Perhaps he told other people what he intended to do with the documents. None of this is a surefire way to

get to what he intended. But these are all proxies to get to what he intended, particularly if you don't have access to him and to his brain. And just an extraordinary image, as The New York Times reports, of Donald Trump in late 2021 personally going through the boxes, deciding what to keep and what not to keep. Chuck Rosenberg, Ken Delaney, thank you both for walking us through this. We appreciate it. Join us now, senior political correspondent for Axios, Josh Kraushaar. Josh, great to see you. So you've been looking at some of the polling in the two weeks since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago to get some of these documents back and how it may or may not be impacting Donald Trump's potential political future if he decides to run again. What does it look like?

Well, look, Willie, what's bad for Trump legally is good for Trump politically, at least when it comes to the Republican base. And there's been a whole slew of polling. The NBC poll that you guys just did this weekend shows that more Republicans than ever before, at least since he left office, are attached to him. The base really thrives against Trump's sense of grievance against the federal bureaucracy, against the FBI. And he's kind of attached himself a lot more closely to his supporters. More Republicans were actually looking at other candidates, looking at Ron DeSantis than ever before. You had in the NBC poll, 41 percent of Republicans now see themselves much more closely connected to Trump than the Republican Party itself.

That's up by seven points since the spring. So this hurts Trump politically in the big picture. Certainly, if he faces additional legal troubles, this is not good news for Trump politically. But among the base, among the most adamant Republican voters, This latches him more closely with that that that base. And it helps him if he wants to run for president with these Republican primary voters. Yeah, his supporters buying the narrative that he is the victim in this, even though it appears that he is the one who took 300 classified documents, at least home with him to Mar-a-Lago. Josh, big primary day today. Some really interesting stuff going on across the country.

You can look at the state of Florida, the Democratic primary to see who runs against Ron DeSantis there. Some fascinating races here in the state of New York. We have two New York institutions and Maloney and Nadler going at it. Somebody is going home from that. What will you be watching today? Boy, that Maloney Nadler race to two Democratic party titans going up against each other. Only one can win in that member versus member primary. That's going to be the big race to watch. It does seem like Jerry Nadler has the late momentum. He got the endorsement of Chuck Schumer. He got the endorsement of The New York Times. So Nadler may have an advantage in the final home stretch. That's

going to be a big race. There's another big race also in New York City between Dan Goldman, who really got a lot of attention during the impeachment hearings, versus a whole lot of other more progressive Democrats in New York City. This is a real big test between whether the moderates, the Eric Adams wing of the Democratic Party is ascendant and whether the progressive elements within the Democratic Party may be losing support. It's a it's a pretty progressive district, a liberal district that voted heavily Democratic. But Dan Goldman has been running a

more moderate Democratic campaign along along the lines of what we saw with Eric Adams in the mayor's race. And he is right now leading in the polls in that primary. Josh, in terms of Florida, you have an interesting contest on the Democratic side in the race to run against Ron DeSantis. Does Nikki Freed, the more progressive candidate, have a chance against Charlie Crist, the former Republican who's more moderate, former governor? Or does Crist have an advantage in that primary as you see things today? So, Gene, that is a fascinating primary because it does pit someone who's more moderate, like Charlie Crist. He's a former Republican governor, has high name ID, more moderate voting record in the House as a Democrat against Nikki Freed, who's trying to get some late momentum talking about Roe v. Wade being overturned, talking about abortion rights. She's more liberal. I think she would have a tougher time making a race, a close race against Governor DeSantis. But we'll see where that Democratic energy is in Florida.

Is it with the more progressive side of the party? Is the fact that Roe v. Wade being overturned has energized a whole lot of Democratic voters? Or as someone who's more establishment, who used to be a Republican, can they can electability be the bigger factor for Democrats in that race? And also in Florida tonight, Val Demings, Congressman Val Demings, expected to make it official and become the nominee to run against Marco Rubio for U.S. Senate there. That also a fascinating race. Senior political correspondent at Axios, Josh Kraushauer. Josh, great to have you with us. Thanks for being here today. Still ahead on Morning Joe, The Washington Post's David Ignatius taking a look at Donald Trump's point man in his Mar-a-Lago fight against the so-called deep state.

David will join us with his latest piece. Also ahead, Ukrainian officials fear increased Russian attacks as Russia tries to blame Ukraine for a car bomb that killed the daughter of a Putin ally just outside of Moscow. And we've spoken recently about the dangerous rhetoric coming from some top Republicans targeting the IRS. Steve Ratner will be here to explain how their war on the agency has cost the country billions of dollars. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. I know this from my time at Russia, you know, running Russiagate for Devin Nunes, and I know we keep going back to it, but I'm trying to bring people back to it because

this is what the Mar-a-Lago raid was about. There's documents in there that need to be made public that were never released to the public when Devin and I were trying to do that. And that's exactly what President Trump was doing when he was being a transparent president. That was former Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel talking about the transparent president that Donald Trump was. Patel speaking to Newsmax yesterday with his take on the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, claiming it took place because there were documents that needed to be made public. Joining us now, columnist for The Washington Post, David Ignatius. David, we show that clip because you've got a new piece up about

Kash Patel and his role in all of this. Let's just take one step back and remind people who he is in the in the Trump orbit. So, Willie, I wrote in April of last year a piece for The Washington Post in which I described Kash Patel, who began his recent career as a staffer for the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, as being the zealot figure, if you remember the movie Zealot. In Donald Trump's campaign against the deep state. He keeps reappearing in different guises. So in 2017, he's the leading investigator for Nunes trying to show that the Russia investigation is really a hoax.

By 2019, he's joined the White House staff working for Trump as a counterterrorism advisor. In 2020, he's sent to the office of the director of national intelligence as his chief deputy and is really leading the effort to place Trump rules for the intelligence agencies. He then is nominated in 2020 or pushed by Trump to be deputy director of the FBI. William Barr says in his recent memoir, over my dead body, that's how opposed he was to Kash Patel because he saw him as an instrument of Trump in this war, which Attorney General Barr thought was misconceived against the so-called deep state. Then there was an effort to appoint Kash Patel as deputy director of the CIA. At the end of 2020, he was initially proposed.

Gina Haspel, then the CIA director, went to the White House and was told that the president intended to fire her deputy. Patel would come in instead. That stopped when Haspel said, I'll quit if you do that. And then, fascinatingly, Patel has emerged in the last few months as a key point of contact for Trump in dealing with this question of classified documents being kept at Mar-a-Lago. Trump named him as one of the two representatives he wanted to have in dealing with the National Archives in this early summer, but before the search warrant was executed. And going back to May,

before we ever knew anything about subpoenas or search warrants at Mar-a-Lago, Patel was publicly making the case that Trump had essentially unilateral right to declassify materials as president and was continuing to argue that there were materials from the early days of the Russia investigation that would show that the government, the FBI, was working with the media, with the Hillary Clinton campaign to manufacture an investigation, this long-running argument that Trump and his supporters have had that it was all a hoax. In each of these different instances, you find the same person, Kash Patel. He's a fascinating, recurring figure and now one of the leading advocates in the argument that Trump is

making in his motion that his lawyers filed yesterday and generally, that he is really the captain of this ship of classified material. David, I'm always interested in what people like Kash Patel do once they leave administrations and what's he been doing since he left the White House? What's his day job? And is he caught up now in the legal investigation into all of those boxes? Is he somebody that the DOJ is wanting to question? I can't speak, Katady, to who the DOJ is going after. Those are precisely the issues that they're working very hard to keep the public from knowing of, but have no evidence that he is. What Kashtel has been doing since he left the government has really been working with Donald Trump.

He's a director of the company that owns Truth Social, which is Trump's effort to replace Twitter as a conservative social media platform. He has become increasingly a spokesman and defender of Trump's prerogatives as a former president in dealing with classified material. And he continues to make the basic arguments Republicans have been making since 2017, that the Russia investigation was ginned up by Democrats. You can hear him on conservative talk radio, on Fox News, making those arguments almost every week. And Kash Patel, the argument goes is that Donald Trump on his way out of office just declassified everything so that the people, the American people could have access to it. He's making the transparency argument. Fascinating. David's piece is at Washington Post dot com. David, there's some

news out of Ukraine. Russian authorities are blaming Ukraine now for the car bombing over the weekend that killed the daughter of a Russian ultra nationalist, an ally of Vladimir Putin. In a statement yesterday, the Russian Federal Security Service said the attack on Darya Dugina, quote, was prepared and committed by the Ukrainian intelligence agencies. Russian officials allege the attack was carried out by a Ukrainian woman, their story goes, traveling with her young daughter, who then fled into neighboring Estonia. Kiev denies any involvement in the killing. Meanwhile, Darya's father, Alexander Dugin, is calling for revenge. In a statement posted on Telegram yesterday, Dugin wrote, quote,

Our hearts yearn for more than just revenge or retribution. That would be too small, not according to Russia's style. We only need our victory. My daughter laid her maiden life on victory's altar. So win, please, he wrote. This, as new U.S. intelligence reveals, Russia is planning new strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and government facilities soon. So, David, obviously, Russia has earned no trust and deserves no trust when it says this is Ukraine's doing the death of this young woman. What are you hearing about what they may be using it for, though, in terms of a justification for further and escalated attacks?

So, Willie, I think that's essentially what's going on here is this attack, whoever did it. And we just, for the moment, we have a Russian allegation, Ukrainian denial. We don't know the facts. But the attack is being used as a pretext for what will be further escalation. This war is getting nastier and tighter. Bombs are going off in areas the Russians thought were safe. The Ukrainians are learning to use long-range, precisely targeted weapons to go after Russian command and control. The number of Russian officers, including generals, who've been killed in recent weeks, I'm told by my sources at the Pentagon is extraordinary. So we're in a new phase of this campaign where Russia is

feeling much more of the target, is furious about it. There's enormous pressure on Putin to strike back harder. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are pushing against the Crimea, an area that they had basically left untouched. They're doing everything they can to make their southern coast the new battle space in this war. They would like to free their key coastal city of Odessa from Russian threats. But I think in the days and weeks ahead, we're going to see this terrible war, which has already led to so many deaths, go into a new, even more dangerous and deadly period. Mike, the 31st anniversary of Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union is tomorrow. And there are some concerns that Vladimir Putin may have that date circled on the calendar as a moment to escalate Russian attacks inside Ukraine. You know, Willie, as we approach the advent of fall and soon to be winter, and as David pointed out, this increasingly widening war in Ukraine's increasingly

more sophisticated weaponry and the use of weaponry. My question to you, David, is down the short road within a month or so, the target clearly has been Odessa, will be Odessa. But at what point do the Russians, do you think, decide, well, you know, winter is coming, we can jack up Europe with increased energy prices, but We have to get Odessa before winter sets in. So, Mike, I think both sides have been thinking they needed to make progress before the winter freeze, if you will. The Russians would like to consolidate the areas that they've advanced on. They've had very slow progress, really, since they went back on the offensive after their disastrous campaign to take Kyiv. Similarly the Ukrainians have felt that in August and September they needed to show progress to their own people and to

their allies in Europe in being able to push Russians back so it's a different kind of war that the Ukrainians success has been in part that they were on the defensive now they're on the offensive. They need new weapons. And we've been sending them new and different weapons that will help them in the offensive. MRAPs and other special gear to clear minefields that have been laid by the Russians in areas that they control. New tow anti-tank weapons that are designed for very close-up use in battle as an army pushes the other army back. So we're going to see not trench warfare, but war of movement as the Ukrainians try to move the Russians back before winter to show, as I said, to show that their own population in the

world, we can do this. We can actually win this war. Then we will have a period where the leverage on both sides will be economic. It'll be a cold winter for Europe. It'll be a cold winter in Russia as well because of all the cutbacks in supplies for the Russians. And then we'll come back in the spring. I think the big question, Willie, is whether the Ukrainians will begin to have U.S. weapons. They're already said to be training with U.S. ground attack planes. Will their old MiGs, the old Russian-era weapons, Soviet-era weapons that they've still been using, will those begin to be replaced with NATO weapons from the U.S. and other countries? And that would make a different war next year,

even more ferocious than the one we've seen. That's certainly the plan with those billions of dollars of American weapons streaming into the country, into Europe. David Ignatius, thank you so much. We'll be reading your piece at TheWashingtonPost.com. Coming up next, the Inflation Reduction Act President Biden signed into law includes 80 billion dollars for the IRS. With that funding, the agency says it can recover 200 billion dollars in additional tax revenue. Steve Ratner is here next to explain where that money will be coming from when Morning Joe comes right back. They're going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa. Is the IRS gearing up for war in our country? Is Nancy Pelosi trying to start a nuclear war in Asia? Is there an effort by the national security state

to stoke violence in a civil war here at home? Those IRS agents are designed to come after you. They're not designed to come after the billionaires and the big corporations. They're designed to come after small businesses and working families. They're going to go after the mom and pop. They're going to go after the small business person, the independent contractor, the Uber driver. And they are going to focus on basically parts of the country that don't support what the regime is trying to do. These aren't just some nutty podcast hosts. Those are top prominent Republicans and Donald Trump allies spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the new IRS funding in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act.

There will be no armed tax agents coming after everyday Americans. Officials say most of the new 80 billion dollars in funding will go toward hiring desk workers to enforce existing laws on the highest earners. Let's bring in former Treasury official and Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner with his charts. Steve, the IRS long has been a target and it's had an impact. Yeah, that's right, Willie. The Republicans in particular have been going after the IRS for quite a while over a couple of reasons. One is they just don't want to pay taxes. So the less of the IRS there is, the fewer taxes perhaps.

And the other, of course, was that whole brouhaha during the Obama administration about whether the IRS was targeting right-wing organizations. But let's just take a look at the consequences here on this chart. As you can see, since 2010, there's been a sharp increase in overall government spending. That's the turquoise line. This is all inflation adjusted. So it was basically keeping track with inflation. Then, of course, you had the huge COVID upsurge. But even without that, the government as a whole was spending along at or above inflation. The darker line is the IRS. And you can see that they have been squeezing the IRS's budget for well more than a decade, adjusted for inflation. It's now down 25 percent. And when you look at the chart on the right, which is the IRS actual workforce, you can see the consequence

of that. It is gone down on a per capita basis relative to the size of the population of America. It's gone down 45 percent. In other words, they're 45 percent fewer IRS agents for every American than there was a bit more than a decade ago. So they are trying to starve the beast in a nutshell. Yeah. And it's particularly now after the pandemic, people leaving government jobs. If you filed for a tax return a couple of months ago, you may not see it till the end of this year or next. They're just understaffed. And that's part of what this hiring is about. Your next chart, Steve, talks about audits for the wealthy, which is one of the goals most people agree is probably a good idea for the government to check up on the wealthiest Americans. But those rates have plummeted as well. Yep. So as you point, you made the point

processing paperwork has been slowing down and this money will speed that up. But perhaps equally importantly, as you also just said, because of the shortfall of funding, there's been an enormous drop in the number of audits, particularly of wealthy people. And so this chart shows you four different income groups and what's happened to them. If you look at the turquoise group at the top, people who made over $10 million a year, they had a 22%, almost a 1 in 4 chance of being audited back in 2010. Today, they have less than a 4% chance of being audited back in 2010. Today, they have less than a 4% chance of being audited today. I'll give you another example from the third line down, which is people who make over a million

dollars. Back in 2010, there were 41,000 audits of them. Today, there's 14,000 audits of them. And part of the problem for the IRS has been these audits are very complicated, not surprisingly, and they simply have not had the personnel to do them. And so you've had this dramatic rate, a drop in the rate of someone with a lot of money getting audited. Last chart, Steve, is about misreporting. What are we talking about here and the fact that it rises with the income level? Well, first of all, if you think you only have a 4% chance of getting audited, you presumably are likely to take more chances in terms of the kinds of deductions you claim and how you report your taxes. You can euphemistically call some of this misreporting.

You can call it tax avoidance. You can even call it tax evasion. But it also goes up dramatically with income. And so you can see all the way over on the right, someone who made $10 million or more on average, and this is using IRS data that Larry Summers and a colleague collected and turned into a very good, a very effective study. But IRS data shows that if you made over $10 million a year, you on average, quote, misreported, unquote, $1.4 million of your income. If you drop almost all the way down to the left and you take someone who made $200,000 to $500,000 a year, they, quote, misreported more like a 7.5% of of the year. So nine thousand dollars for the person at the bottom, one point four million for the person of the top.

And that's because more sophisticated people have more ways, frankly, to misreport to misreport income. It's estimated that the new 80 billion dollars that you referenced will produce 200 billion dollars of tax collections that the IRS would not otherwise have gotten. Larry Summers and others believe the actual number is considerably more, so it will really help the federal budget deficit. But more importantly, we need to restore a sense of fairness on the part of Americans as to who's paying taxes and who isn't. And this kind of enforcement hopefully will help Americans understand that everybody is going to pay their fair share. Steve, the point of this new money is really to go after the wealthy taxpayers who are avoiding paying taxes, those millionaires

that you talked about. Is there an income cutoff, essentially, that we're looking at? Are they really going to focus on income earners above a certain number and not so much below a certain number? And if so, what is that number? No, they haven't done that, Gene, to the best of my knowledge anyway. When you get down to the lower incomes, a lot of the processing of returns is done automatically, and so they don't need quite as much help to deal with their issues. It'll be processed automatically. You'll get a computer-generated letter, and if you owe some taxes, you'll pay them.

When you get into the upper incomes, and again, no particular cutoff, these returns can go to hundreds of pages. It takes an enormous amount of manual labor for the IRS to go through them one by one and negotiate with very sophisticated taxpayers. So no, what the IRS does is it uses a variety of things in its computer system to kick out returns where it thinks that things have not been done, shall we say, on the up and up. And it's going to target those, but much more toward the upper end. It's a little bit like the old Willie Sutton joke. Why do you rob banks? It's because that's where the money is. Morning, Joe. Economic analyst Steve Ratner bringing us the charts on the IRS this morning. Steve, thanks so much. We appreciate it. Coming up next, Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia,

argues against the newly passed funding to combat climate change, asking an audience, quote, don't we have enough trees around here? We'll try to walk through that argument next they will talk about the green new deal you know climate change I'm gonna help you all with that real quickly and I'm gonna do it in the right sphere way so you can understand what I'm saying. We, in America, have something to clean this air and clean this water of anybody in the world. So what we do is we're going to put, from the Green New Deal, millions, like billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden, China and India ain't putting nothing in there cleaning

that situation up. So all that bad air is still there. But since we don't control the air, our good air decided to flow over to China's bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. And now we gotta clean that back up. That's your Republican Senate nominee in the state of Georgia, Herschel Walker, last month with his take on how air pollution works. Now, Walker is criticizing the Democrats' new law that commits billions of dollars to climate spending, arguing too much money is, quote, going to trees. The former football star said, quote, They continue to try to fool you that they are helping out, but they're not because a lot of money is going towards trees.

Don't we have enough trees around here? He asked. The Georgia candidate stood by his comments in a tweet last night, writing, Yes, you heard me right. Joe Biden and Reverend Warnock, his opponent, are spending one point five billion dollars on urban forestry and raising taxes on those making under two hundred thousand dollars to pay for it. Yes, I have a problem with that. Gene Robinson, you're writing today about some of these Senate candidates, Dr. Oz, Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, among them. On the one hand, it's comical to listen to Herschel Walker

speak at some of these events. On the other hand, there should be some standards. Should they're not calling the old fashioned to serve in the United States Senate? You are so old fashioned. Have you looked at the roster of the Senate recently? I mean, that that ship has sailed, I'm afraid. But Herschel Walker would be a new low. He absolutely would be a new low. I mean, it's just it's I guess, you know, to take a position of anti tree is certainly something new in politics, in our politics, at least. And it's insane. He has absolutely no idea about how, like, air works and how trees work and to say nothing of climate change. But but there is and he could be the next senator from Georgia. Now, he's he's trailing Reverend Warnock right now by a few points, according to polls. But again, it's a pretty close race. He's actually doing better in his race than some of the

other candidates that Donald Trump imposed on the Republican Party, like Dr. Oz, like J.D. Vance and potentially Blake Masters out in Arizona. So, Mike Barnicle, Gene makes the important point that you may laugh, but Herschel Walker is right there. He's in a dead heat, neck and neck with Senator Warnock. It'll be a tight race to the end. It's a coin toss at this point. But Herschel Walker, very well, a football icon with name recognition, unlike anybody else in the state of Georgia, played at University of Georgia, won the Heisman

Trophy, a celebrated figure there. I mean, you heard it at the rally where he's talking about good air and bad air, getting rousing applause for that explanation. He could very well be in the United States Senate. Willie, you know, there's no more history history is how what happens right now at the snap of a finger that man herschel walker rushed for over 5 000 yards as a georgia bulldog that seems to be the best credential that he has in terms of running for office that man as you pointed out won the heisman trophy as a junior at at Georgia. And those are credentials that clearly stand out in his race against Raphael Warnock. And it is accurate to say that he could indeed become a member of the United States Senate. But as Gene pointed out, look at the membership of the United States Senate today.

Compare the United States Senate to the composition of the United States Senate 10, 20 years ago. You really can't in terms of credentials, in terms of credibility, in terms of people elected to office who think about the nation first, our national interest, rather than their own selfish political interests. That's where we are today. That's a reality check. And the ultimate reality check is Herschel Walker could indeed become a United States senator. God help us. Icon in the state of Georgia and also has to be said, handpicked by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump drafted Herschel Walker out of Georgia to play for the team he owned in the USFL back in 1983. So with the support of Donald Trump and his name recognition in Georgia, he's doing pretty well. Still ahead this morning, the new reporting from The New York Times just overnight revealing former President Trump had over 300 classified documents in those boxes at Mar-a-Lago. Plus, Beto O'Rourke will join us. We'll ask him about his campaign for governor and a new Texas law slated to go into effect this week that would ban abortion after conception. Also this morning, it is primary day.

In Florida, New York, and other states across the country, Steve Kornacki will be at the big board to tell us about the races you need to be watching tonight. We're coming right back on Morning Joe.