Morning Joe - Morning Joe 8/4/22

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Top Senate Democrat calls on DOD to probe missing texts from Jan. 6

It was just revealed that the Pentagon deleted all January 6th related text messages from the phones of key Trump defense officials. Yeah. When she heard Hillary Clinton was like, well, well. We are following those new developments on the missing January 6 text messages. The questions all over Washington this morning with multiple government agencies now involved. Has a massive cover up been exposed? We'll have the latest reporting and former DHS Secretary Jay Johnson is standing by, plus a federal grand jury subpoenas former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone. What this means for Donald Trump and the Justice Department's investigation of the 2020 election. And polling shows Democrats continue to make gains as Republicans slide when it comes to the party Americans want to control.

Congress will have the new mornings. Really a lot going on this morning. Joe is off bat ears this morning. Fallout from Kansas and Arizona. A lot more of that. We'll talk about that. But also an overall look at Trump's record in these primary races, which is very strong. Also, CPAC kicks off today with an extremely controversial guest. We'll get to that. Yeah. Busy morning, Mika. Let's start with the number two Democrat in the Senate now calling on the Department of Defense to open an internal investigation into missing texts from key officials in and around January 6th. In a letter yesterday, Majority Whip and Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois asked the DOD's Inspector General to launch a probe into the deleted communications of several Trump-appointed

officials who were tasked with deploying the National Guard during the Capitol attack. The letter reads in part, the disappearance of this critical information could jeopardize efforts to learn the full truth about January 6th. I don't know whether the failure to preserve these critical government texts is the result of bad faith, stunning incompetence or outdated records management policies. But we must get to the bottom of it and quote that from Dick Dermott. On Tuesday, court records published by a watchdog group revealed the cell phones of top former defense officials, including the defense and army secretaries, were wiped in the aftermath of the insurrection. The Pentagon claims this was standard operating

procedure for departing employees, but that news comes just weeks after it was revealed Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security officials also had their messages from January 6th erased, despite orders from Congress to preserve those communications. Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta was asked yesterday about the texts being wiped from government phones. Here's some of what he had to say to Andrea Mitchell. Andrea, this is another major concern that obviously officials out of the Trump administration were taking steps to make sure that potential evidence involved in January 6th would not be there. I really do think that the Justice Department has to investigate the loss of this kind of critical evidence. It is, there's no question that this wasn't done in a manner that just kind of was bureaucracy doing what bureaucracies do. This was a deliberate effort to make sure that very important evidence regarding what the players were doing at the Pentagon,

at the Secret Service and elsewhere, were saying and doing on January 6th, all of which is very relevant to the investigation as to what happened. You're saying this was a cover up. I don't think there's any question that when you go from agency to agency and find out that key messages have been deleted, something's going on here that resembles very clearly a conspiracy. Leon Panetta there joining us now, the host of Way Too Early and White House bureau chief at Politico and the bestselling author of The Big Lie, Jonathan Lemire, also former Homeland Security secretary under President Obama, Jay Johnson. Mr. Secretary, let me begin with you and see if you agree there with Leon Panetta.

We've heard from some other folks saying there's a chance that there is policy with departing employees and some of these texts just were wiped and their phones were cleaned. But when you go through the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and now the Department of Defense and officials at this level of those organizations in and around a critical day and an investigation surrounding them. Does it pass the smell test for you that this was just something bureaucratic? Willie, I'll answer it this way. At the senior most levels of those departments, I'd have to say it does smell. It is problematic. Before I was

Secretary of Homeland Security, I was General Counsel of the Department of Defense when Leon Panetta was Secretary of Defense. And I can safely say that if I had been Secretary of Homeland Security in January of 2021, and some chief information officer came to me with a plan to wipe clean the text or emails of our personnel on their phones as they were leaving office. I'd say, no, you don't. There's the Federal Records Act, which requires that we maintain things that are generated in the course of government business. There is the Freedom of Information Act, which means that such texts are subject to request from the public.

So I don't have a good explanation for why this information was wiped just as the Trump administration was leaving office. I do want to say this, however, about the Secret Service, because I was their oversight for three years and I was a protectee of the Secret Service. For as long as I've known the Secret Service, Willie and Mika, they're good at the big stuff, like protecting 170 world leaders at a U.N. General Assembly, including the Pope in 2015. But the back office stuff, the unforced errors that continually show up in Carol Lennig's Washington Post stories, they've just never been good at. January 2021 was a moment for the Secret Service of high anxiety. The nation was on high alert. They're in the midst of a presidential transition and an outgoing president, frankly, who was unhinged. So I am not surprised that in that context, the line agents of the Secret Service who protect us

didn't get the data migration exactly right. The higher level folks, I think that's a different story and there needs to be an inspector general investigation, in my judgment. So that's my next question to you, Mr. Secretary, is how does that work? What's the trail? What's the process to to figure out what happened here? Is it possible that it's just vapor and these texts just randomly disappeared? I mean, might there have been a directive to wipe the phones after January 6th that could be tracked down? I think that's possible. Again, when you're dealing with line agents responsible day to day for the protection of the president, the first family,

the vice president. Right. There may be an entirely different story there. But I get it. If there was some senior level directive to wipe clean various communications around January 6th, that's a very serious matter. And there should be an IG that we trust who can undertake a comprehensive investigation of this. We want to bring Jonathan Lemire in for the next question. And as I do that, Jonathan, congratulations. The Big Lie, number four on the New York Times bestseller list, your coverage of the Trump Big Lie, all in that book. And congratulations. Thank you, Mika. I really appreciate that and the support that you and Joe and this Willie and the show have have given me over the years.

Mr. Secretary, returning to the matter of hand. So what should have happened here? Let's let's set aside the line agents, but at the senior level where we there are questions about what may have happened. What should have happened here? And then I feel like every time I've talked about this story with someone, the question is always, well, isn't there a backup? Isn't there a cloud? Aren't these just saved somewhere? Is that not the case? Well, what should have happened when you're dealing specifically with political appointees who are about to walk out the door is you're given a document that says, I hereby represent that I am preserving all my communications, all my documents, all my emails, all my text. I'm not taking any of it with me and sign here. Something along those lines. And that's standard in the

private sector, for example, when you leave, say, a law firm like mine. And so I simply don't have a good explanation for why that didn't happen, why people exiting the doors were not required to certify, that they were not wiping clean things that might be pieces of evidence that might be subject to the Federal Records Act. There's been a rising tide of awareness as the technology has evolved. Texts are becoming much more prominent by way of government communications. But we're clearly at a point, and we were at a point in January of 2021, when a very basic common sense move for people who are in government services, you have to preserve things that are subject to the Federal Records Act, without a doubt, especially if there's going to be an investigation around something like January 6th.

And there's no backup cloud mechanism at play here for the federal government? Very often there is. You know, things are backed up. Every time I get a new iPhone, for example, somebody comes in, takes my iPhone away from me, preserves it all to make sure that, you know, it goes to my next phone, you know, most notably my 15 year old iTunes collection, my photographs, everything else. So you would you would think the answer to that is yes. And I think it deserves a comprehensive explanation. This defies logic. Stand by, Mr. Secretary, because we have I want to ask you a legal question about this next story. We're reporting a development in the Justice Department's probe of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. NBC News has confirmed

a federal grand jury subpoenaed former White House counsel Pat Cipollone as part of the investigation. This is part of the department's larger look into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, not a criminal probe of former President Trump himself. Joining us now, New York Times congressional reporter who's been covering this story, Luke Broadwater. So, Luke, what more can you tell us about what this means overall and what Cipollone and others can offer? Sure. Well, it's not just Pat Cipollone who's received a subpoena recently. It's also his top deputy, Pat Filden. And the public has not yet heard from Pat Filden.

We have a sense for what Pat Cipollone can tell the public based on some of the clips we've seen in the January 6th committee hearings. But these are the top two lawyers in the Trump White House, and they have access to all sorts of information that is of interest to federal prosecutors, including efforts to put forward a scheme of fake electors, efforts to seize voting machines, meddling with the Justice Department. And a proposal to send a fake letter to Georgia attesting that there was widespread fraud in their election when, in fact, there was no such fraud found. And so we don't exactly know what precisely the Justice Department wants to ask these gentlemen about,

but we do know they have access to the innermost workings of the Trump White House as the former president was trying to overturn the election. And so, you know, I think this is a signal that the Justice Department investigation is escalating and getting much more serious. And obviously, Pat Cipollone is a central figure. He was there in the White House. We heard that first from Cassidy Hutchinson during her testimony before the committee. And now Pat Cipollone going before the grand jury. We'll keep an eye on that. Luke, you're also reporting for The Times that two Arizona Republican officials who helped plan to overturn the 2020 election were worried their actions, quote, could appear treasonous. Chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelly Ward and state Senator Kelly Townsend, quote, were both said to express concern to Mr. Trump's lawyers

in December 2020 about participating in a plan to sign on to a slate of electors claiming Mr. Trump had won Arizona, even though Joe Biden had won the state. That's according to emails reviewed by The Times. The Trump campaign lawyer wrote in a December 11, 2020 email to other members of the legal team that Ward and Townsend, quote, had raised concerns about casting votes as part of an alternate slate of electors because there was no pending legal challenge that could flip the results of Arizona's election. The lawyer went on to write, Ward and Townsend are concerned it could appear treasonous for the Arizona electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court

proceeding that might eventually lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones. The word treasonous, by the way, was bolded in that email. According to Luke's reporting, the use of the word underscored how well aware at least some of Mr. Trump's allies were that they were undertaking truly extraordinary steps to keep him in office. So much so they risk being seen as betraying their country. And of course, Luke, they were betraying their country. But this gets to something that we've seen in the select committee testimony as well, which is that the people who participated in this knew very well, number one, that Donald Trump had lost and number two, that they probably

were doing something illegal. Yes, my colleague Maggie Haberman and I were able to review some of these internal emails from the Trump campaign that lawyers were sending each other. And we've been sort of I don't know don't know if the right word is surprised, but it really underscores just how aware some of the people involved in this scheme were about how it was going well outside legal norms and standards. I mean, for them to put in writing that members who were signing on to these slates of fake electors believed it could be seen as treasonous was stunning to me, that they would actually put that in writing, that

they were that aware of what they were doing and how outside of the law it could be. Among the other emails that were referenced in these articles is one in which they admitted the plan was fake electors. They knew what they were doing wasn't legitimate, that it was not some alternative strategy in which there were legitimate questions of fraud and maybe the election was in doubt. They knew exactly what they were doing. And yet these people signed on to the slates of electors. They put forward these legal arguments. They sent all these false documents to Congress. And they tried to pressure Mike Pence to go along with it. And so I would think that as the Justice Department is moving forward with their investigation

and as the House committee is moving forward, they will be documenting every piece of evidence that shows that the Trump campaign knew what they were doing was wrong. And it was not just some sort of disagreement over the law. Well, they were doing it for one person, Luke Broadwater. Thank you so much for your reporting. Jay Johnson, I want to I want to ask you about that. At this point, you have so many different probes and investigations and hearings going on

that all still seem to be swirling around Donald Trump, swirling around him, hitting people around him and opening up huge, you know, tranches of questions about what they were doing and why they were doing it and why they were hiding text messages and why they were pushing fake electors and why they were calling for Mike Pence to be hanged. I mean, you could go all the way down the line to the insurrection itself, where you have insurrectionists being charged and put in jail, given sentences of up to seven years. And yet it still doesn't feel like any of this is touching the man who inspired it all. Am I correct? Legally, legally, it seems to me, based upon everything I know publicly, based most notably on the January 6th hearings, that Donald Trump personally is well within what an aggressive federal prosecutor would be willing to take on in terms of a prosecution, whether it's seditious conspiracy, whether it's violation of the Insurrection Act.

And January 6th was, in my judgment, the very definition of an insurrection. And the insurrection statute punishes those who incite the insurrection and those who give aid and comfort thereto. There are various theories of fraud swirling around, fraud on those who contributed to the effort to overturn the election when everyone knew it was a fake effort. And so I think at this point, he's within the ambit of potential criminal liability here. It's also very apparent to me that the Department of Justice that gets closer and closer to Donald Trump as as things progress. And if for some reason he is not indicted, I for arizona governor is still too close to call but that is not stopping candidate carrie lake from claiming she won she's hinting at

election fraud but has offered no proof plus with eyes on the midterms republicans are heading to dallas today for the cp conference, including a speaker whose recent comments were called purely Nazi diatribe. You won't believe who's speaking at CPAC. Also ahead, gas prices have fallen for 50 days in a row. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will join us to weigh in on that if they will go down more., plus Congresswoman Alyssa Slotkin is standing by. She co-sponsored the Veterans Health Care Bill that's headed to the president's desk. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. Oh, what a pretty shot of Washington.

Pink skies this morning at 24 past the hour. Welcome back to Morning Joe. In an overwhelming bipartisan moment, the Senate passed a resolution ratifying Finland and Sweden's applications to join NATO. The measure was approved in a 95 to 1 vote with one senator. Yeah. Casting the only vote against ratification and doing so. So people will talk about him. The opposition was previewed in an op-ed that he wrote, whatever. All 30 NATO countries are required to ratify Finland and Sweden's applications before the two nations can become members.

The resolution now heads to the president's desk. From there, it goes to the State Department, where Secretary Blinken will also sign it. Joining us now, Democratic Congresswoman Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan. She's a member of the Armed Services, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs committees. She's also a former CIA analyst. So we've got a lot to talk with her about this morning. We'll start with the NATO ratifications, Sweden, Finland. How does this change our potential security interests

moving forward, especially given the war in Ukraine? Well, I mean, I think it's an amazing rebuke of Vladimir Putin, who thought that he could invade Ukraine and that NATO wouldn't be strong enough to stay together, to hang together, to push back on him. And instead, it's boomeranged on him. And we have two new countries who have joined us. Those countries are important. It's the high north. Russia is very involved in the high north. So it doesn't do Putin any more favors by having, you know, NATO allies right there against his borders. But I think it's just a thing that many of us have hoped for for a long time to continue to expand NATO. And Vladimir Putin made it possible. It's great. Congresswoman, good morning. We've got so much to ask you about.

I want to just ask you quickly about something we were talking about in our last segment, which is the reports of all these deleted text messages from the Department of Defense. We heard about them from the Secret Service, as well as the Department of Homeland Security. You worked, as Mika mentioned, in the CIA. You understand what it's like to have to give up your phone at the end of a tenure. Do you believe that it's possible that this is just bureaucracy, that employees leaving the Department of Defense have their phones taken away and the text messages disappear? Or do you believe there's something more nefarious going on? You know, I just don't know that I or anyone else from the outside can really know. I was at the Pentagon and in 2017 had to hand over my official government phone like everybody else.

And I just I just don't know what the thinking was in that transitional period when folks were having their phone wiped. Of course, there's tech people who are probably just doing their job. But particularly if there's been there have been requests, there have been letters for those text messages, if there had been a request to sort of hold everything you had. And then these departments or agencies went ahead and did this and we have a problem. And those folks, those leadership folks should be to be asked to come in and speak to those issues. I'd love to talk to the former secretary of defense or acting secretary of defense at that time and say, what exactly was the guidance that you gave as the senior most person at the Pentagon? So I don't know from the

outside, but certainly, you know, it's sort of it doesn't smell good. That's for sure. Yeah. And obviously, this was not a routine transition, given everything that happened around the transition on January 6th and into the 20th. So I want to ask you about the PACT Act. Obviously got a lot of attention over the last week. You were a co-sponsor of this bill in the House, the Veterans Health Care package that was held up for some time by Republicans in the Senate. You and others have been giving it voice for more than a year. Jon Stewart came in and ultimately grabbed everyone's attention and helped to get this done. Were you surprised at the way that some Republicans switched their votes and did in fact stand in the way that some Republicans switched their votes and did,

in fact, stand in the way, number one? And then number two, lost in all this process conversation is what the bill actually does. What is it going to provide for veterans who need this so badly? Yeah, well, what it does is basically take the agent orange of the 9-11 generation, these burn pits that everybody lived near if you worked in a combat zone. We burn our trash, we burn our fuel, we burn everything when we serve in a combat zone. And all our veterans who served in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, they live near these burn pits. And surprise, surprise, our younger veterans, our 9-11 generation are showing up at hospitals with weird esophageal

cancers, lung cancers, things that they shouldn't have at 35 years old. It's very unusual. And the PACT Act basically says, if you serve next to a burn pit, we have a presumption that you could have been exposed to some carcinogens and you deserve further testing, further care. You don't have to fight for that when you walk into a VA. We think another three point five million veterans are going to qualify for VA medical care now. So it's a really big deal. And I think because it's such a big deal, it was so outrageous when these 25 Republican senators, just real cowards, basically switch their vote. You know, they had already voted for it. It had been a very bipartisan vote. I was in the Senate chamber when they passed it the first time. And then for procedural reasons, just to stick it to the Democrats, they switched their vote on the

exact same bill just a couple of weeks later. And, you know, I don't usually get pissed off by this kind of stuff, but this this one pissed me. It was just it was just a stunt. And I'm glad that they were felt they felt embarrassed enough to bring it back up the next week. So in Afghanistan, Taliban leaders are said to be holding discussions about how to respond to the U.S. drone strike that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zarahiri. Reuters reports a senior Taliban leader told the news agency that high level meetings have been going on for two days now. The leader also said they are deciding whether to react to the attack and if they do, how to go about it. The Taliban official did not confirm if Zarahiri was in the house when the missile struck. He was killed over the weekend

in a CIA drone strike while standing on the balcony at his downtown Kabul apartment. He assumed leadership of al-Qaeda after the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden more than a decade ago. Congresswoman, obviously, this is a success on one front, but also shows some weaknesses in terms of potentially, some might say, how we left Afghanistan and this so-called relationship or lack thereof or whatever it is with the Taliban. What do you suggest the administration should do moving forward as I guess we await their response? I'm not sure what response they deserve to have, given that they were harboring this man. Yeah, I mean, the number two of al Qaeda, who helped pull off the 9-11 attacks and so much else that's gone on in the past 20 plus years,

was like enjoying himself in a very well-heeled diplomatic neighborhood of Kabul. Right. So you can't tell me they didn't know that. You can't tell me that they weren't aware that he was enjoying this nicer life. So I don't really care what they have to say and what, you know, they're sort of thinking about their next diplomatic move. They've been trying to tell the world that they're a credible government, that they deserve to have access to money, that they should control the food aid that the world is providing them. And I think that they really showed that they don't deserve that respect. They don't deserve to be treated as a normal government. So, look, taking out one man does not end al-Qaeda. We know that. We've had high-level

strikes before. But I do think it sends an important signal to everybody in the whole world that if you attack us on American soil, it may take a minute, but we are coming for you. And that's an important deterrent that I think was I commend the Biden administration for making that choice and that decision to go after them. It also showed, by the way, something that I was skeptical of, that we can actually pull off these, you know, over the horizon strikes when we need to in Afghanistan, even though we don't have a presence there. No one liked how we walked, how we left Afghanistan. No one's proud of those videos we all watch. But and a lot of us on the Armed Services Committee were wondering, can we pull off these strikes without a real intelligence,

heavy physical presence on the ground? And I think we proved not only can we do it, we can do it with extreme precision. Right. So, Mr. Secretary, you were general counsel of the Department of Defense during your first year as the Obama administration, in fact, gave legal approval for the raid that ended Osama bin Laden's life in Pakistan. So now, here we are more than a decade later in bin Laden's number two, also brought to justice by the United States government. What is your reaction to that? What does it mean? One of the things that impresses

me most about this strike is the precision of our weaponry has evolved and improved just over the last 10 years since I was general counsel of DOD. The ability to take out an individual standing on his balcony, kill him, leave the building erect without another single individual being killed, even though his family probably was sleeping just a few feet away, is quite remarkable. And the message that comes from that is, to all terrorist leaders, is it may take 20 days, 20 years, but you can run, but you can't hide from us. We will find you sooner or later. And so this this strike was a remarkable testament to the skill and precision of our national security team and our national security capabilities. Congresswoman, some domestic

politics and also something specific to Michigan. new polling shows momentum for Democrats ahead of November's midterm elections. In the latest poll from Monmouth University, 50 percent of adults say they prefer the Democratic candidate on the ballot this November compared to 43 percent who prefer the Republican. This represents a seven point swing for Democrats since last month and an 11 point swing for May when Republicans had the edge. These gains come as President Biden's numbers, though, remain underwater. In the latest Monmouth poll, just 38 percent of respondents say they approve of Biden's job performance. Congressman, what do you think is going on here when you look at that generic ballot number? And let's bring it down to your state in Michigan, where you, of course, are running for reelection

this fall. Curious to your take broadly, but also what's happening in your state in Michigan, where you, of course, are running for reelection this fall. Curious to your take broadly, but also what's happening in your state where you had a couple of election deniers win in the Republican primaries now pushed into the general election in the fall? Yeah, I mean, we just had our primary this week, and I think, you know, it restores faith, I think, for a lot of people to say that the average person, certainly in Michigan and I think in the country, just wants their government to function. They don't want extremes on either side. They certainly don't want people who deny results of election and are living in the past and have just extreme political views, not practical real life views on the world. And I think that that for many people, they're looking at their choices. And while look, I think there's a lot of stress coming out of COVID, a lot of concern

about the price of gas and inflation and all those things. People don't want extreme people running their government. So I think that's important. And then, frankly, I think with the the reversal on Roe, there was just a lot of people who I think thought, you know, in this country, we get more and more and more rights over time. It may take us time. It may be two steps forward, one step back. But the trajectory is more rights. And when they saw us go backwards, it was a real shock to the system that, you know, no, these things aren't automatically there. And I think in Michigan, we're a snapback state, right? We have a 1931 law that bans abortion outright. So that certainly

will change the calculus. I've had more Republican women come up to me in the past three weeks than in the preceding four years, just talking about this concern that maybe they would never choose to have an abortion, but they don't walk in other women's shoes, you know? So, Congresswoman, I've got a kind of a question for you, putting you on the spot a little bit, but I was very taken by a debate, a part of a debate between two members of Congress running for reelection. They were asked a pretty simple question. And given the discussion you just had about Roe and about women's rights, I do know that President Biden, he speaks really eloquently about this issue and about a number of other issues that you would think the Democratic Party would be quite proud of his accomplishments and absolutely on the world stage, given the potential world war

that he's kept at bay. That's saying that sort of advocating. So my question to you is, do you think President Biden should be running for reelection? Is that even a question in your mind? Well, look, it's a question people are debating. You're asking me on TV. So it's certainly on the minds of lots of people. I have no special insight, obviously, into what the president is deciding with his family, with his advisers. That's not what I'm asking you. I'm not asking you what his family is debating. I just was surprised how hard it was for two members of Congress to talk about whether or not their president, if they think he should run again. Look, a sitting president, if he decides to run again, he should run again. I mean, that and the Democratic Party will support the president as a as an incumbent running again. I don't personally think that that's a hard debate, but I do think that there in general, I think there's a lot of

us who want to see new voices rise in the party. And that's not just the presidency, by the way. That's the House, the Senate, all over the place when it comes to this party. I think that's not a secret. We need more voices, more diverse voices from across the country, not just, frankly, the coast. So there's a lot of us who feel strongly about that. But if a sitting president decides to run again, the party supports him. Congresswoman Alyssa Slotkin, thank you very much. And coming up, a concerning sign for the state of the Republican Party. A major conservative conference embraces a hardline European nationalist. We'll have more about his upcoming speech in Dallas and why is he the speaker? Plus, new reporting on demands from Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema

as Democrats work to pass a at the White House and U.S. Capitol are flying at half staff this morning. The 58-year-old Indiana Republican was killed yesterday in a car accident in Elkhart County, Indiana, along with her two staffers, Zachary Potts and Emma Thompson. The driver and sole occupant of the other vehicle also died. Walorski had served in Congress since 2013 and was the top Republican on the House Ethics Committee. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy released a statement that reads in part, quote, This news is absolutely devastating. Jackie was a dear friend, trusted advisor and the embodiment of integrity who achieved the admiration and respect of all of her colleagues in the House. President Biden also released a statement reading in part, Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie

Walorski. We send our deepest condolences to her husband, Dean, to the families of her staff members and to the people of Indiana's second district who lost a representative who was one of their own. Willie, you know, Congresswoman Walorski's name may not be familiar to every one of our viewers, but the outpouring of shock and grief and love we saw yesterday, bipartisan from both sides of the aisle and for those two staffers shows just what an impact she had on Washington. Terribly sad news. Meanwhile, in a show of force, China has begun live fire military drills around Taiwan in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-governing island. The exercises, which began earlier today, are taking place at six different locations around Taiwan. Chinese state television reports

long range precision strikes also are being carried out in Taiwan's waters and airspace. Beijing says the drills will end at noon local time on Sunday. Meanwhile, Taiwanese officials say the exercises violate UN rules and amount to a blockade of its sea and airspace. Speaker Pelosi, who left Taiwan yesterday after committing to ironclad U.S. support for the nation, is in South Korea today as part of her high-profile Asia tour. American basketball star Brittany Griner is expected to appear in a court today for the start of closing arguments in her trial in Russia. Griner has pleaded guilty to drug charges,

and her defense team has been trying to persuade the judge to be lenient in a case that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. The United States and Russia have signaled Greiner and another American being wrongfully held in the country, former Marine Paul Whelan, could be part of a prisoner exchange. Russian officials have said no progress in those negotiations can be made before the court completes her trial. Mika, we will. This so delicate and difficult, especially with others who are being held as well. We'll definitely be following that story as it as it progresses. Still ahead, the Transportation Department is proposing stricter rules on when airlines would have to compensate passengers for flight changes.

We'll ask Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the potential impact on air travel, plus the big mistake made by the legal team representing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. This was a big one. We'll show it to you and explain it. Morning Joe will be right back. 51 past the hour after years of claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones finally admitted he knows it happened. The admission came during the first of several trials Jones faces as family and survivors seek damages for the hurt his rhetoric has caused them. NBC News correspondent Ann Thompson has more as the jury deliberates. Alex Jones' stunning admission came during a contentious cross-examination. It's 100% real. Finally conceding, the Sandy Hook school shooting did happen.

After years of insisting on his InfoWars show, the massacre was a hoax. How could you believe any of it? It's 100% real, and the media still ran with lies that I was saying it wasn't real. The parents of Jesse Lewis, one of 21st graders who died in the massacre, are seeking $150 million in damages. To restore the honor and the legacy of my son that was tarnished by Mr. Jones. Jones blasted Jesse's father on his show. He is being manipulated by some very bad people. I mean, I'll just say it because I've got to be honest. He's slow.

But in court, he faced Jesse's mother. Jesse was real. I am a real mom. Testifying their six-year-old son and their pain were real. The conspiracy theorist has been a difficult witness. You must tell the truth while you testify. This is not your show. Do you understand what I have said? Yes or no? Do you understand what I have said? Yes, I believe what I said was true. Yes, you believe everything you say is true, but it isn't. Your beliefs do not make something true.

That is what we're doing here. Admonished by the judge for lying on the stand. You're already under oath to tell the truth. You've already violated that oath twice today. And he was caught in another lie by the plaintiff's attorney. Your attorney's messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent for the past two years. Including text messages about Sandy Hook, Jones failed to share as ordered by the court. And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have a text message about

Sandy Hook. Did you know that, Mr. Jones? In discovery, you were asked, do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone? And you said no, correct? You said that under oath, Mr. Jones, didn't you? I was mistaken. I was mistaken. But you got the messages right there. You know what her jury is, right? The jury will determine what, if anything, Jones must pay. NBC's Anne Thompson with that report. And coming up, in the 2020 election, Donald Trump lost Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes.

And apparently, he's still upset about it. We'll look at his new effort to unseat the state's top Republican who refused to decertify Wisconsin's election results. And on the heels of this week's abortion rights vote in Kansas, Democrats are voicing new optimism about the November midterms. What party leaders are saying about Kansas as a bellwether. Morning Joe is coming right back. We'll see you next time.