Morning Joe - Morning Joe 9/2/22

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Biden attacks Trump, MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy in blistering speech

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies. President Biden in one of his most forceful speeches yet denouncing Donald Trump by name and warning about the threat he and his followers pose to America. The president saying today's GOP is, quote, dominated, driven and intimidated by MAGA Republicans will have complete political and historical analysis of his address to the nation. Plus, the latest developments in the investigation of

former President Trump's mishandling of classified documents as another conservative legal voice predicts Trump will be indicted. Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It is Friday, September 2nd. With us, we have U.S. special correspondent for BBC News, Katty Kaye with us, the host of way too early White House bureau chief at Politico and the author of The Big Lie, Jonathan Lemire, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist at The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson and NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss joins us this morning. It's like Secretariat. Like Secretariat at the Kentucky Derby in 1973 starts out slow, then boom, takes off. I know you had to be thinking about Secretariat. Either that or another last place Boston Red Sox finish. When they came back in the ninth inning last night, what a comeback.

Four runs. For the ninth against the Texas Rangers. We're talking about Joe Biden's reversal of fortunes. His poll number is surging. The Boston Red Sox doing the same. Things are turning around there. And we all remember the headline, Dewey defeats Truman. The upset there.

People who had held up headlines, Yankees win the AL East, heading to a similar fate. Here come the Boston Red Sox, only several games under.500. Yeah, all the way up the show, they're going to lose. And also, it must be stated for the record that last night, we've just run out of pitchers. They actually got a couple of attendants in the parking lot to throw the seventh and eighth inning, which, of course, is why the Red Sox gave up two runs each inning.

Yeah, they're doing a raffle tonight. It's a contest winner. You buy a ticket, buy a hot dog, get to pitch the seventh. Gene Robinson, would you like to pitch for the Boston Red Sox? Tonight's your chance. Yeah, I got a little tendonitis, a little shoulder tenderness. That's perfect. I'll skip it.

That's perfect. I mean, that's even better, Gene, if your arm hurts and you can't throw when the Red Sox give you one hundred and fifty million dollar contract for 10 years like they do with Chris Sayles. OK, you're in business. Let me just tell you all they're going to lose and let's move forward. I thought you were talking about Joe Biden. Let's start in Philadelphia, where President Joe Biden issued a dire warning about threats to American democracy last night in a rare primetime address. Standing outside Independence Hall, where the United States Constitution was written and signed, the president spoke directly about the dangers posed by the Trump-backed wing of the Republican Party. Here is some of what he had to say. Equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise. So tonight, I've come to this place where it all began

to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face. What's happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I've been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.

They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they're working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. You've heard it more and more talk about violence as an acceptable political tool

in this country. It's not. It can never be an acceptable tool. We can't be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They're incompatible. We can't allow violence to be normalized in this country. It's wrong. We each have to reject political violence with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster. Now, we saw law enforcement brutally attacked on January 6th. We've seen election officials, poll workers, many of them volunteers of both parties, subject to intimidation and death threats. And can you believe it? FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens. On top of that, there are public figures today, yesterday and the day before predicting and all but calling for mass violence and rioting in the streets. I want to say this plain and simple. There is no place for political violence in America, period.

None ever. You know, Maureen Dowd a few years ago had a column, quite a few years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Times, where Maureen said that what presidential candidates prepare for is never what they have to deal with. And she gave the example, one of the examples Michael Bush lost was of George W. Bush, who famously said in 2000, telling what was in the party line was that America was going to have a humble foreign policy and that it was really more of a domestic focus of the agenda than there was 9-11. And of course, George Bush and the entire

government had to respond in several ways. Joe Biden, likewise, wanted to bring this country together and talked about that. He has been able to work with the other side in a way that we haven't seen in about 20 years. That said, when you have United States senators that are talking about Republican riots in the street, talking about violence in the streets. If the law is enforced, Joe Biden's really pushed to a position, is he not, where he really doesn't have any choice but to speak out against those calls for violence and civil war. I think you're absolutely right, Joe, and good morning, Mika, as well. Here we're in a situation where, you know, we're talking about historical parallels. In 1860, we were on the precipice of

civil war, very different from where we are in 2022. But this specter of looming violence, 1940 world violence, would the United States enter World War II to oppose Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and the Imperial Japanese? I'm not suggesting that this year is the equivalent except for in one respect, and that is if, you know, a historian from 50 years from now were to go back and visit America in 2022, the overwhelming question is, are we going to have a democracy in a year or two? Are we going to have free and fair elections with all those state officials and state legislatures threatening to say, we're going to just name the winner whoever we feel like? Are we going to have rule of law? You know, take a look at what happened at Mar-a-Lago. So those questions are hanging in the balance.

And to have a president saying that this election this year is about anything but the survival of democracy, you'd wonder where he was. Yeah. And Gene Robinson, just again, to go down a quick list of of of really where we are as a country, you you've had Republicans calling law enforcement officers, the Gestapo, calling them communists, threatening the FBI, threatening members of their family, threatening violence in the streets, threatening riots, Republican riots in the street. You have Donald Trump amplifying the worst part of this and his social media platforms. And so, again, I think you would have a president be derelict if he did not speak to this. It's something that, you know, I'm the first person, as you know, I'm always talking about both sides should work together. And these are the sort of speeches I don't know when you have Lindsey Graham talking about if if Donald Trump's held to the same standard of every other American, then Republicans are Republicans are going to go out and burn down cities. There's going to be riots in the streets. There's going to be violence in the streets.

Republican members of Congress talking about the Gestapo, just whipping, whipping the base of the frenzy again with a context that we have the January 6th riots in a rearview mirror. These people know what they're doing. Donald Trump knows what he's doing. He's calling for violence. He wants Republicans and MAGA supporters to go out into the street and commit acts of violence. Yeah, the speech last night to me sounded like a president delivering a wartime address. And and indeed, Joe Biden sees this as as he said, a battle for the soul of the country. It's a battle for the preservation of our democracy. And to me, the significant thing was that he yes, he called out Donald Trump, but he also called out the MAGA Republicans, Republican officials and followers who, you know, for whatever motive, under whatever delusion,

are going down this authoritarian path, this undemocratic path, and trying to take the nation with them. And he framed this as an emergency, as something that we as a nation need to bond together to stop and to reverse and to return to our democratic principles and our democratic practices. And to me, it was an urgent wartime address. Well, Gene, to your point, wartime addresses come during grave moments of peril for this country. And Biden was using Trump's language to try and reach every American. He was using the word MAGA Republicans. And if you just look at the latest news, Joe, just for the past 24 hours, it's hard to keep track of the concerns that Trump poses to this country. But in the past 24 hours, he was threatening

another run for the presidency, planning another run for the presidency and promising pardons to January 6th protesters, to January 6th rioters. He was doing that to rioters. Yeah, this is in light of everything that's happening to rioters that brutalized police officers that beat the hell out of police officers with with American flags that they had turned into weapons. Donald Trump calls those people patriots, says he loves people who batter and abuse police, a former president to try to overthrow with an election result with an indictment looming. This is what he's saying to his followers. I'm going to run for president. If I run for president, I'm going to give pardons to criminals. And, you know, his attorneys not so pretty either in the past 24 hours calling the taking of top secret documents, something that doesn't belong to the former president, removing it from the U.S.

government property, from skiffs, from the White House, taking it to his home, to his club, to his public place. Mar-a-Lago calling that not a big issue. That's more like overdue library books. Once again, completely not denying that he took something that is not his. It's very hard, I think, not to viscerally feel like this is a man on a streak to tear up this country for his own gain. And I think President Biden had to say what he said last night and he has to do more. Well, he he's he's been calling for violence against the United States attacks against the United States government for a very long time. He's been shredding constitutional norms. It's one of the things that makes me wonder how how my friends and family members can still support a man who

told the proud boys to stand by in a presidential debate and then, in fact, made a call to him and everybody else in in texts after, you know, in in tweets after he lost the election, talking about coming to Washington, saying it would be wild, demanding that his attorney general, when he was still president of the United States, throw his political opponent into jail along with his political opponent's family two weeks before the election. Again, this is this is as authoritarian as it gets. This is what Putin does. He throws his political rivals in jail. And that's what Donald Trump is not overstating. Our democracy is at stake. Right. And after the election, of course, Donald Trump said that that, of course, that the election was rigged. He and he fomented a revolt and a revolution. And it didn't it was failed because,

of course, Donald Trump was was in charge of it. But again, he has taken an authoritarian path and continue to whip MAGA supporters into a frenzy. And that's why we're at a point now where you have cops, NYPD cops that are being sent to jail for 10 years for brutalizing police officers on January the 6th. Their lawyers saying that they were under the spell of thisement, over 50 percent of Republicans believe there's going to be a civil war. Republican figures like Newt Gingrich are calling the FBI wolves who want to devour Americans and that people should fight back. You have a group of people around Donald Trump. And it's important to note, it's not the entire Republican Party. Joe Biden talked about Republicans he worked with,

that this is a part of the Republican Party that has taken over the Republican Party. But there is a part of the Republican Party that is authoritarian, talking about violence, talking about civil war. Yeah. Donald Trump released this idea into the atmosphere that the 2020 election is stolen. And now it's spread throughout the country and has almost gone beyond him. As one Republican said to me, Donald Trump needs his supporters almost more than they need him now because they have taken this idea of the election being rigged and they are running with it. And it's leading to talk of violence. And I was really struck as I was traveling around the country this summer. That was the thing that struck me most, how often I heard people speak about coming violence.

And I heard it both from the left and from the right. And Joe Biden's absolutely right. American democracy is in a moment of peril. I mean, the very fact that an American president had to use a primetime address to defend democracy in this country tells you an awful lot about the state of America in 2022. But curiously, I heard from Democrats and from Republicans who would say democracy is in peril. But of course, from very, very different points of view, it is oddly one of the things both people, both sides agree on. They just have no agreement on the facts and why it's in peril. And I don't know if Donald Trump I mean, if Joe Biden will have changed any minds, even in the middle of the political spectrum last night. But he was quite within his, it was quite the moment to say what he said, because it is what I've been hearing all summer. This country's democracy cannot be

taken for granted. And we left with a pretty remarkable split screen yesterday where Donald Trump gives this radio interview and suggesting he would give pardons, not just pardons, but pardons and an apology to those convicted of rioting at the U.S. Capitol. And, of course, the latest courtroom hearing battling over the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. And then we had President Biden last night. I mean, he said it in his sort of plain spoken way. He said, what is happening in our country today is not normal. And that's right. The idea that a huge percentage of another party, the MAGA Republican Party,

and he took pains to say this is not the entire GOP. These are the MAGA Republican Party, that they are refusing to acknowledge the results of the last election. They're refusing to promise to adhere to the results of the next election. They are endorsing violence. This is an extraordinary threat to the very foundation of the nation's democracy. And White House aides in the run-up to the speech told me and others that this was not going to be a political speech. This was not going to be about one person.

Well, it was. It was about Donald Trump and his legacy and the impact he's had on the Republican Party, that cult of personality that Biden spoke about last night. And he said that MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. This was some of his strongest language he's used since taking office. It was a stern warning and it was a blaring red alarm, Mika, from the president of the United States about where this nation stands right now and where it could be going. All right. Well, we're following two developments in the fallout from the FBI search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and club.

At a hearing yesterday in Florida, federal judge Aileen Cannon said she would make public a more detailed list of what the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. Trump's lawyers requested a more specific inventory of what investigators took, claiming the version they got from the government was too vague. In a court filing earlier this week, the DOJ stated it was ready for the possibility the judge would order a more detailed list be unsealed. It's unclear when the document will be released. Judge Cannon did not immediately rule on the Trump lawyer's request to appoint a special master to review all of the material seized in the August 8th search to determine whether any of it includes potential attorney, client or executive privilege issues.

Meanwhile, conservative legal analyst and former judge Andrew Napolitano says he believes the Justice Department will present its findings to a grand jury right after the midterms and that it will result in an indictment, maybe more. Here's what he said yesterday on Newsmax. I think that the DOJ has already decided to ask a grand jury in either Miami or or Washington, D.C., to indict former President Trump. And what they've tipped their hands on, the little that they've revealed to the public and what they've shared with Judge Cannon is more than enough to indict him and probably enough to convict him. Wow. Let's bring in former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official Chuck Rosenberg. Chuck, do you agree with Napolitano's assessment there of the potential for an indictment? The potential? Sure. His certainty? I don't know where that comes from just yet, Mika. Look, I wish I was as certain about things in life as he seems to be. You know, folks pick horses to win races all the time, and some of them turn out to be right, and they go to the window and collect their money, but they had absolutely no idea what they were doing when they laid down the bet.

That could be the case here. I think it's a serious matter. The search warrant indicated that, that crimes have been committed and evidence of crimes were found at Mar-a-Lago. That we know. But who's responsible for it? Who will be charged? That will be determined. You know, that stuff, Mika, was in the redacted portion of the affidavit that we're all anxious to read. So unless Judge Napolitano has some access that we don't, I really don't understand why he's saying what he's saying. It doesn't make sense to me yet. Well, Chuck, tell me from everything you've heard from Donald Trump, from Donald Trump's lawyers, what is his best defense against taking top secret documents and classified documents, secret documents from a government building and then lying to the FBI,

lying to the Department of Justice about returning everything that he had had down at Moralago. Is there a defense that you can think of? I can hypothesize the defense, Joe. I don't know if it's going to work for him or not, but here's what it would sound like, that he didn't pack the boxes, he didn't know what was in the boxes, he didn't move the boxes, and he didn't care to review it. Now, there's a problem for him here. As you well know, some of this stuff wasn't just found in the basement at Mar-a-Lago. Some of this stuff was found in his office, apparently in his desk drawer. And so that defense I just laid out, that hypothetical defense becomes much more difficult when you find this stuff in his desk. But what I'm really getting at is intent, right?

Because crimes require intent. You mentioned the fact that there were misrepresentations made to the FBI about what remained at Mar-a-Lago. If the lawyers who made those misrepresentations, Joe, and you know this, you're a lawyer, if the lawyers who made those misrepresentations failed in their due diligence or passed on bad information that was given to them, but they didn't intend to lie, then they didn't commit a crime. They're just bad lawyers. And we don't put bad lawyers in jail unless they intended to commit a crime. If we just put bad lawyers in jail, we'd run out of space pretty quickly. So it turns on intent, right? What did the lawyers know when they made these misrepresentations to the government? What did Trump know when the documents ended up in his

home? I think it becomes more difficult for Trump. And I agree that he's in serious jeopardy. And I imagine the Department of Justice is having very serious discussions about whether or not to charge him. But the certainty that Judge Napolitano expressed, I just don't see that at this point. I'm not as certain. And when you talk about intent, they're looking for intent. Even there, you have tapes of Moralago that the DOJ and the FBI have their hands on of that of people moving documents out of a certain room after they get a call and a request from the FBI. Which, again, you talk about showing intent. They asked for documents. Then suddenly documents are moved from the main holding room. How does that play out, Chuck? And what should we expect next in this case? Yeah, that's a really interesting point, Joe. And that that sort of suggests to me more than suggests that that indicates to me that there are a bunch of people that the FBI needs to interview who was on those tapes.

Where were they going and what were they doing and at whose direction were they going there and doing that? So these are all leads. This is why I have been saying over and over. Let's wait to have more information in the public record. But you're absolutely right. If after getting a call, a bunch of people are dispatched to the basement to squirrel things out of Mar-a-Lago, that's extremely damning evidence. Now, we need to figure out who told them to do that, why they were told to do that, and whether or not that's what they were actually doing. That requires interviews, that requires FBI agents, and that requires time. That's what they're actually doing. That requires interviews, that requires FBI agents, and that requires time. That's what they're doing now. That's why the investigation is ongoing. And that's why we should also reserve judgment on what the evidence, what the investigation

is going to produce. I really appreciate that we need to stay right where we are with the information, not get in front of it. And it is still a long way off from resolution. Let's put it that way. Chuck, I'm just curious when members of Trump's team call this something like an overdue library book, establishing that they have whatever documents it is we're talking about once again. Does it seem to you, though, that it's just sort of a misunderstanding and, you know, Trump could have just given them back and it's not a big deal? It's a big deal. And calling it an overdue library book is nonsense, Mika. It's much, much more serious than that. Who will be charged and what they'll be charged with is to be determined. But this is not an

overdue library book. If I had an overdue library book and gave it to a Russian intelligence officer, it wouldn't help him very much. If I have top secret SCI classified information from the United States government and gave it to a Russian intelligence officer, I could do grave damage to the national security of the United States. So in no way is this like an overdue library book. And I think lawyers really do themselves and their clients a disservice when they make idiotic arguments. That was an idiotic argument. Yeah, it really was.

Former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official Chuck Rosenberg, thank you very much for coming on the show this morning with your analysis. Michael Beschloss, just we can look back at recent history and see what these so-called overdue library books have cost other top government officials. Two CIA directors faced consequences for mishandling some some documents. You have Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, of course, charged as well. The idea that these are just overdue library books just just doesn't square. And I also also. When we play Judge Napolitano, of course, we don't know how this is going to end. And perhaps he's right. I think what I think is more telling is you're starting to hear guests. Coral Rove on Fox News, Judge Napolitano on Newsmax, Andy McCarthy in the New York Post, you know, other

people in other very conservative news outlets that have predominantly defended Donald Trump through the years, now allowing voices on their channels, now allowing op-eds in their pages that are saying this guy, like Karl Rove, that these documents were not Donald Trump's documents. He should have never had any of these documents at Moralago. And Judge Napolitano talking about he was guilty. Andy McCarthy saying that, you know, the feds have a pretty darn open and shut case against Donald Trump for obstruction. This is I think that's the that's really the breaking news and what Judge Napolitano, Karl Rove, Andy McCarthy, a lot of these other Republicans are saying now.

Yeah. And you as a great lawyer know that a charge of obstruction of justice requires establishing a motive. And if it is obvious that Donald Trump was trying to obstruct the investigation of what was at Mar-a-Lago and impede a legal proceeding, which is part of the official definition of obstruction of justice, he is in really bad trouble and deserves to be. You know, Joe, if you and I were to think of something that would outrage an American conservative or most Republicans, let's say just 10 years ago, I think we would have said that an American president took potential nuclear secrets, lists of CIA agents, took these things and at least raised the possibility that they shared it with hostile governments and others who wished Americans ill and that CIA informers

and others might have gotten killed by these hostile governments as a result. Or nuclear secrets that could kill millions of people got into the hands of people who should not have them. So in a way, you hear someone like Karl Rove, this is, I think, conservatives and Republican leaders just coming back to their senses after this spell, this excursion during the period of Trump. And as for the overdue library book, you know, I've worked in formerly classified documents in the National Archives since I was 18 years old. I've been doing this for a long time. And to say that that has anything to do with a nuclear secret or an ultra classified list of CIA agents, it reminded me of the crummy lawyer who is trying

to defend John Wilkes Booth in 1865 and says Booth deserved leniency if he had survived because he left 99% of the people in Ford's theater alone. It's ridiculous. It's an affront to anyone's intelligence. Yeah, no doubt about it. Gene Robinson, really quickly following up on what Michael said about what Republicans would be thinking 10 years ago. You know, it is we are going I predict I'm not one of those who thinks there's going to be a civil war. I predict that the Republican Party will move past Trump eventually. Maybe it's another two, three years. Maybe it's another two, three years. Maybe it's another two, three election losses. And when they do, you'll see a return to a more

traditional Republican Party and people pretending that this never happened before, because you are starting to see suddenly, you know, Donald Trump's Republican Party was against NATO, apologized for Vladimir Putin. Trump apologized for Vladimir Putin, in fact, did so in a question in Helsinki that was asked by our own Jonathan Lemire. We defended when I was Republican, we defended the FBI. We defended the CIA. We defended the Intel community. We balanced budgets. None of that, of course, that sounds mundane, but these days. But we also, you know, we were the ones that would get the most incensed about top secret documents being misused and no more. Now, now they now Republicans is I would love to hear if the Republican Party believes that that squirreling away top secret

documents at your home after you've left government service is nothing more than an overdue library book. Well, if the Republican Party is going to awake from this nightmare, you know, from your lips to God's ear, I certainly hope you're right. It is astounding what has happened to this party. And as the president pointed out last night, it isn't just Donald Trump. It's the people who are following him. It's those state officials who are election deniers, who are very openly preparing to not respect the results of the next election if the next election doesn't go their way. I mean, it's a big deal.

And parties usually change when they get creamed at the polls, when they lose, when they get wiped out. And it may take a couple of election losses. And they've had some, right? I mean, Donald Trump, like Herbert Hoover, managed to lose the White House, the House, and the Senate all in one term, which is pretty astounding. You'd think Republicans would get some message from that. But there has to be more losing until the party, I think, comes to its senses. And we all hope that it does. But it's nowhere near its senses right now. I mean, most Republicans

support the mega line. And that's just the unfortunate fact. President Biden definitely drew a line last night and, might be from my point of view, but it seemed like the Republican response. Kevin McCarthy sort of fell flat in his response. And that goes beyond his sort of strange alliteration about the electric court of history or something. What was that electric court of liberty? The whole thing fell flat. It looked like a sort of a high school presidential stump. Jonathan Lemire, what is the electric court of liberty that lights our hearts? Liberty. Got it. Because it seemed like a shocking sort of metaphor. Yeah, I missed that.

If that was taught in school or if it was a famous quotation, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, electric court of history. I don't I don't have that here. But but to make his point, I mean, McCarthy went to Scranton, Biden's hometown, also in Pennsylvania, where Biden was yesterday and delivered sort of a prebuttal to his speech. But it it did seem like there's the Republicans have not been able to coalesce around a message on this, the idea of the defense of democracy, which Biden is offering. Look, do Republicans want to be talking about inflation? Sure, they do.

But they haven't been able to in a long time. And because the Democrats have moved through the legislative agenda, because Republicans are stuck day after day trying to explain or defend what happened at Mar-a-Lago. And even those defenses have grown quieter in recent days. And it does seem like they're on their back heels. And I know we'll get to it later in the show, but there's a lot of infighting in the Senate, the Republican Senate right now, feeling that they could lose their shot at claiming the majority and the House in question as well. They're right now fumbling. And Biden took the moment, a moment where he's got the wind at his back and laid out the stakes very plainly for this November. Our presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, thank you very much for coming on the show early this morning.

And still ahead on Morning Joe, the committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol wants to hear from a former Republican speaker of the House. Who could that be? We'll have that. Denny Hastert? They want to talk to Denny? No, it's Newt. Oh, the guy that says the FBI is wolves that want to devour Americans? That Newt.

New revelations about the efforts to overturn the 2020 election by the wife of a Supreme Court justice. Turns out Ginny Thomas wasn't just pressuring officials in Arizona. A new report in The Washington Post reveals she was also emailing officials in another state as well. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Another state to tell them to ignore the voters? The reporter behind that scoop joins us next. You're watching Morning Joe.

The authoritarianism runs deep. The electric cord of liberty still sparks in our hearts. Bart, Lisa, stop that. No, no, no. No, wait a minute. Wait, wait. Hold. No, wait a minute. Wait, wait. Oh. We are live. No, no.

I'm here. It's me. The reflection. You won't have to follow me. Only you can set me free. 43 past the hour, a live look at West Palm Beach, Florida, for you, where's 2020 victory, not only in Arizona, as previously reported two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, state Senator Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate Elections Committee, and state representative Gary Tauchin. The Post reports they both received the email on November 9th, virtually at the same time the Arizona lawmakers received the exact same copy of the message from Thomas. The post adds Thomas sent all of the emails through free routes, an online platform that allows people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials. Joining us now, the investigative

reporter at The Washington Post behind this report, Emma Brown. So, Emma, what can one deduce from these discovered emails? What exactly was she pushing these lawmakers to do? And is there a potential she was using her influence as the wife of a Supreme Court justice to try and sway an election that Joe Biden won, fair and square? Well, she sent these emails to the Wisconsin lawmakers, as you said, on November 9th. So the context here is, you know, two days earlier, major news organizations had called the presidency for Joe Biden. And the messages said essentially stand strong in the face of media pressure, you know, do the right thing and, quote, choose a, quote, clean slate of electors.

So sort of taking that in context, she's saying, you know, you don't you should take action state legislators to to to disregard the will of the popular vote and choose your own electors. You know, I think you asked, was she using her influence? There were thousands upon thousands of emails sent via this free routes platform. But one thing that these new records from Wisconsin show us is that Ginny Thomas was one of the first people to send this particular email. And somebody with the same name as one of her associates sent the very first one. And her lawyer, the House Committee has sought to speak to Ginny Thomas and her lawyer in response to that request and in response to a really sweeping documents request from the House Committee said about these emails to the

Arizona. This was back in June after we reported on the Arizona email said, you know, she didn't write these emails. She didn't edit them. She she merely sent them as one of many people who did. But the fact that she was one of the first to send them is interesting to me. Well, and Katie Kay, it's ridiculous for her to claim that she was just, you know, hanging out at home and said, oh, look at this form email. I'm going to send it along when, in fact, she had been on the phone with conservative leaders, with with MAGA leaders. She had been pushing hard for Kevin McCarthy to overturn the election. She had been pushing hard for Donald Trump. She'd been in the White House,

talking to Donald Trump, trying to get her to talk to I forget the lady's name with all the wacko theories, the Kraken lady. And and she was calculating, trying to figure out exactly what her response was going to be. There's emails out there where she made these decisions and thought through these decisions. And so if she's one of the first to send these emails to Arizona and to Wisconsin lawmakers, she had calculated it. She had talked about it. She was a MAGA conservative thought leader who decided she was going to ask state legislators to throw out the popular will of Democratic voters, Democratic in democracy, and he has to rule as they did in 2000 on which way an election might go. The wife of that Supreme Court justice has sent these emails not just to elect officials in Arizona, but also now in Wisconsin as well. Emma, my question to you is, how does this play out?

The January 6th committee has asked to talk to her. So far, of course, she hasn't. What's the legal process? What's the legal recourse that the Justice Department has to try to get more information from Jeannie Thomas if she just says, no, I'm not going to talk to the January 6th investigation. Could you see her being subpoenaed at any point by the Justice Department? Where does this play out? How far does this go? I don't think we've heard anything about the Justice Department's interest in speaking with Ginny Thomas. But what we know from the documents request that the January 6th committee sent to her a couple of months ago is that they wanted to see everything that she was communicating with a wide range of people, members of Congress,

employees at the Justice Department, where, you know, part of the effort to overturn the election was taking place. I mean, it was just a really broad document request. And so it was almost as if reading it, you wonder whether the committee almost saw her as a portal into understanding the actions of many other people. And so far, we have no indication that she has turned over documents.

As I said, her lawyer responded to that request by saying he didn't see a sufficient basis for her to sit for an interview and provide those documents. All right. All right. The Washington Post, Emma Brown, thank you very much for your reporting this morning. And coming up, gas prices continue to fall. And in less than two hours, we're going to get another snapshot of our economy with the August jobs report. Ahead of that, Steve Ratner joins us with why there remains a major shortage of workers in most fields. We'll talk about that when Morning Joe returns. In the big machine now. Fifty four past the hour, stock futures are flat as investors await a key jobs report for August. New York City is it's a gorgeous morning.

The city's back. It's always so city is back. And you can tell it's a city back in the New York groove. As kids would say, sure about that, but it is very pretty. So this jobs report is due out later this morning, Joe, and that should tell us a lot. Economists expect to see that 318,000 jobs were added last month. And for the unemployment rate to hold steady at three and a half percent, we'll see if that happens. The big question remains, how will the Fed react? Let's bring in former Treasury official and Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner. He's going to talk about that, what we can expect, but also the worker shortage. What is going on,

Steve? Good morning, Mika. Yes, well, we're going to be watching the jobs report. Obviously, we're all rooting for a lot of jobs to be created. Good for America. Good for those people who are looking to work. But the other thing we need to keep our eye on is the workforce, because one of the problems we're having is that workers dropped out during the pandemic, as we know, but they're not yet fully returning to work. And you can see that on the chart on the lower left. The turquoise line is the labor force participation rate by people in what we call prime age, between 25 and 54. They started to come back to work. They almost got back to where they were, but now it's kind of plateaued out. It's been bouncing around a little bit. They're still not all back to work. And then a bigger place where we have people not back to work are the

55-year-olds and above. Many of them just decided to retire. And you can see that the participation rate by people 55 and above is less than it was. So all told, our workforce is short about 600,000 workers. Even though all our jobs are back, we have 600,000 fewer workers actually looking for work. And what's interesting on the right side is who those are. And so it turns out that people with a college degree are entirely back. You can see that red line is all the way back to where it was. The people who are still not back are people at the other extreme who have high school but no college. And this is a bit of a mystery. We had theories during the so-called great resignation about whether it was the

benefits were too high or the COVID fears or whatever. Most of those issues have gone past us, and yet we still don't have a full workforce back. Yeah. And so what are the leading theories on why high school graduates with no college degrees are not going back into the workforce? It's certainly not because the jobs aren't there. This isn't 1974 or 2009. There there are people begging for jobs in any any service industry, any restaurant, any car dealership, you name it, they're begging for workers in jobs that just don't require a college degree. It's interesting, Joe, as I said, and we've talked about this a lot in the past, at the early stages or during the pandemic, there were some reasons we could all relate to.

Again, health fears. You did have the stimulus checks and so on and so forth. But why they're not coming back now and a lot of people just saying, I don't want to work in a fast food restaurant anymore. And I'm sure we can all relate to that. Not wanting to work in a fast food restaurant. But at some point, you'd think people wanted to earn a living, needed to earn a living and would come back. So this is this is one of mysteries. There's another big factor going on out here, which is immigration. Immigration is playing a significant role also in the worker shortage. During covid, essentially, our immigration offices had to shut down overseas and couldn't really process visas. This was not really a policy issue by Donald

Trump or anybody else. It was simply a function of COVID. And so if you look at these two periods, 29 months each before the pandemic, after the pandemic, you can see the shortfall in workers being issued visas. And of course, I think this summer, a lot of us who've traveled around have seen the shortage of the summer workers who come on visas. But the upshot of all this is another 800,000 or so workers who would have normally been here but are not now here. Now, this situation is normalizing itself. Immigration is getting back.

I'm talking about legal immigration, of course, is getting back to normal levels. But nonetheless, there's still a hole, a hole in the size of the workforce. Wait a second. So you're saying we're and again, we're not talking about the chaos of the southern border, which I'm against and have stated for a long time. I'm against it. I believe in strong immigration enforcement on the borders. But I've heard from one small business owner after another, one family restaurant owner after another, that one of the reasons why they're not able to stay open seven days a week, why half of the tables in the restaurant are are not served is because the immigration levels for legal immigrants for work visas are way down. Are you saying that that situation is starting to be rectified for small business owners? I think it is certainly by next summer. I think it will be. But the problem you talk about, we all saw this summer, any of us who traveled anywhere,

any of us were at resort locations were normal, which normally depend on a lot of these guest workers, saw the shortages. And it was really sad. You had small businesses that have a very short season in these resort areas who need to be open seven days a week, two or three meals a day, and simply couldn't get the staff to do it and couldn't do it and therefore are having a tougher summer of it. And so, yes, I do believe that situation will be normalized by a combination of COVID passing, but also, frankly, simply better government in Washington, better administration, more able to execute these things. But, Joe, to your point, there are a huge, huge number of jobs

that are still out there and unfilled. And we actually had a report earlier this week that talked with the so-called Jolt's report, which talks about how many open jobs there are. And you can see on the next chart that basically we had twice as many, we have twice as many jobs open at the moment as we have workers to occupy them. That's the turquoise level on the left. You can see how much it dropped and how much it came back. Now, a good consequence of that, we all want wage growth. We've been getting a lot of wage growth. And you can see that on the right. And Joe, to your point, it's not surprising that since the people of high school or less are the ones who dropped out more than others,

their wage growth is actually faster than others because this is the shortage of workers in the service industries. And so we all want wage growth, but wage growth does become inflation at some point. And that's the very that's the Goldilocks spot we want to try to get into. Not too hot, not too cold. So when you watch the jobs report today, look for the total number of jobs. We want a lot of jobs, but we also want to see who's coming back to work and who's not coming back to work. And that's and that is one of the core issues behind our inflation problem. We'll be watching for those numbers to come in. Morning, Joe. Economic analyst Steve Ratner. Thank you very much for being on this morning.