← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
“Moving the goalpost”
00:45:48
Nicolle Wallace is joined by colleague Rachel Maddow to discuss the latest White House position on the boat strike experts say may constitute a war crime – as well as her new podcast “Burn Order.”
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Deadline. White House is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Quote now@progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who save with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.
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Kids scattered across time zones. Christmas morning FaceTime hits different than being together. But distance doesn't have to mean disconnected. So I created a new tradition delivered on December 1st. Everyone gets a Christmas cactus plant from 1-800-flowers.com. the plant blooms all holiday season long, reminding them of my love even when I can't be there. Order your Christmas cactus today before it sells out or choose from other holiday bestsellers. Up to 40% off at 1-800-flowers.com sxm that's 1-800-flowers.Com sxm. Look who's here. Hi there everyone. It's four o'clock in New York. We have entered the moving the goalpost phase of the Trump administration's response to the fallout from news of a double tap boat strike in the Caribbean in which US Forces killed survivors from an attack on an alleged drug trafficking vessel but experts from across the political spectrum believe may have been a war crime. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today called it a matter of, quote, deterrence watch.
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C
Deterrence has to matter, not arrest and hand over and then do it again. The rinse and repeat approach of previous administrations.
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A
This is meant to get after that approach.
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C
And I will just end by saying as President, Trump always has our back. We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations.
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A
And we do in this case. In all these strikes, they're making judgment.
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C
Calls and ensuring that they define defend the American people. They've done the right things. We'll keep doing that. And we had their backs.
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B
In which the secretary of defense comes out against arresting any survivors. There's brand new reporting in the Washington Post on this story, and it reveals that military officials are today angry at comments like that. They see it as an attempt to shift blame for the killing of those two survivors. From the secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to the commander overseeing the operation, Admiral Frank Bradley. Admiral Bradley is a decorated Navy seal. He has decades of experience. He was among the first to deploy to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is currently the head of the U.S. special Operations Command, which oversees operations in more than 80 countries. The Washington Post reports at the White House press briefing that we showed you yesterday, in which Press secretary Caroline Levitt said that it was Bradley who authorized the strikes, quote, elicited a furious backlash within the Defense Department, where officials described feeling angry at the uncertainty over whether Hegseth would take responsibility for his alleged role in the operation or leave the military and civilian staff under him to face the consequences. Quote, this is protect Pete Bullbleep, said one military official. Another official said of Levitt's statement, quote, it is throwing us, the service members, under the bus. Another person said some of Hegseth's top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration. Meanwhile, the New York Times also has new reporting on the incident, citing five U.S. officials. The new York Times reports this, quote, Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs. But each official said Hegseth's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all those things. And these officials said his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast. End quote. Now, none of what is being reported today disputes that a verbal order to kill everyone on board happened, which is what the Washington Post reported in the first story that blew all of this wide open and into public view. It also invites more questions about Hegseth's conduct during the attack. As friend of this program, Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, remarked yesterday, quote, from a military perspective, if a subordinate is about to give an unlawful order, it is also a requirement for a senior official to stop him from executing it and then counsel him. So there's that, too. End quote. And we know that Hegseth was involved. We know that he watched it live. He told us himself the day after.
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C
The strike watch that that was definitely not artificial intelligence.
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A
I watched it live.
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C
We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented. And that was Trende Aragua, a narco terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.
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B
I watched it myself. It wasn't AI the White House earlier today, Pete Hegseth said that he watched the strike, but he said he didn't stay around for the entirety of the operation, adding this quote, I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. So now we have a new piece right. In Pete Hegseth's world, there was something more important that day than monitoring a live feed of a lethal strike being carried out by the men and women of the military. Something more important was happening at the Pentagon that day. This morning, the bulwark summed up what Hegseth has had to say so far. This way, quote, in other words, Hegseth was there watching live, but didn't issue any orders, but was extremely happy that the spirit of the orders he never issued were executed anyway, which he then took credit for in real time and hailed as a glorious triumph without revealing that it wasn't. All of this, of course, is perfectly ripe for a bipartisan investigation by Congress. It is what they are supposed to do. But Team Trump, once happy to go on Fox News and celebrate the strike in those friendly confines, has suddenly gone silent. The Washington Post reports this, quote. Senators Roger Wicker and Jack Reid published two letters they had sent to the Pentagon weeks earlier, requesting the videos and documenting the boat strike, which so far have killed more than 80 people to date. The Pentagon has not complied, a delay that has surpassed the time required by law for the administration to respond to Congress. A mountain of violations and excuses and finger pointing and nonsensical statements. And passing the buck to the men and women of the military is. The Trump administration faces questions now as to who knew what, when, when what appears like a war crime was committed. It's where we start today. Here with me at the table, my dear friend, my dear colleague, Rachel Maddow will talk to her about everything going on. But importantly, she's here at the table to talk about her brand new Must Listen podcast, Burn Order. First, I want to bring in, though, for. For our benefit and to inform our conversation, retired U.S. air Force Major General Stephen Leper. He served as deputy JAG there, as deputy Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He's also a member of the former jags working group. It's an honor to have you here. I tried to get smart enough to ask you the best questions I could think of. But can you just make clear in my mind, the act, the act that is not in dispute, which is that after the first strike, after the boat was on fire, from top to bottom, bow to stern, I think is the right way to say it, there were two survivors and that any strike that killed them is. The act itself is a war crime. Is that the place from which we're starting?
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C
It really is. And what you described and what the Washington Post described in its initial reporting was no less than murder, to put it very succinctly. When you're involved in military operation, there is fog of war, as the Secretary said. But the law is still the law. And the law doesn't change whether or not there's fog obstructing it. And so what failed in this situation was that everyone from the Secretary of Defense on down to the people who pulled the trigger failed to recognize failure or recognized and did not do their duty to disobey an unlawful order. Folks in the water are defenseless, and attacking them is indefensible.
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B
And folks were quick to point out on this show that at every level of the military, that is the actual example of defenselessness, that in the water, an attack on a vessel that leaves any of the passengers alive, but in the water is the line that is put into the training put into the military. This may sound like a dumb question, but I just have to ask it. Admiral Bradley would have known that, right?
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C
Absolutely. Especially as a naval officer. I mean, he would be familiar with the rules regarding maritime rescue of shipwrecked sailors. And in this particular case, his first strike shipwrecked those sailors and shifted his duty from one of attack to one of rescue.
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B
So what do you think happened?
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C
Well, I believe that at some point, someone's orders were either intended or construed to include killing everyone on board, including survivors. And that is an order. Quite frankly, that in and of itself is a violation of the law. You cannot give orders that require no surrender or no survivors to be rescued or civilians to be killed. And if any of those were present in that situation, our duty is to protect them under the law, not continue to target them. So communication may have broken down. People may have interpreted the Secretary's kill everybody order, which the Washington Post reported he gave, to include everybody, including those protected classes. But at some point along the way, everyone who was obliged to disobey what is clearly an unlawful order. An unlawful order, as you said, is a textbook example from the DoD Law of War. An example of an unlawful order is killing survivors in a shipwreck. Someone along the way should have recognized that was an unlawful order and disobeyed it, or at least questioned it and gotten clarification by the person who issued it.
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B
Jeremiah, let me ask you this. If an operation is viewed in real time, there's a live feed, but it's also recorded for multiple reasons. Maybe the most important for the spirit of this conversation is oversight and the record. The video exists, the answers are knowable to all the questions you just posited, what needs to happen to make sure that all of that is preserved and that all of the answers and the truth and the role of Admiral Bradley and everybody who serves under him is known and that the facts emerge?
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C
Well, you know, the one ray of hope in this whole story is that Congress has agreed to investigate this. Because in investigating, what I hope they will be able to do is get all of that evidence. They'll conduct a forensic investigation, which will include getting all of the videotapes, getting all of the testimony of the people who were involved in the strike from the top, all the way down to the trigger pullers, and will be able to approach this as a way to collect the evidence for their own use. But hopefully the use of anyone who is going to be holding the people responsible accountable. Because at some point, if Congress fails to investigate this as fully as is necessary to sustain some kind of accountability under the law, then an investigation of that sort will have to occur as well. And right now, I'm just not sure that this administration has expressed any willingness at all or evidenced any willingness at all to engage in that kind of investigation or in that kind of accountability.
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B
Retired Major General Stephen Lepper, thank you for starting us off on this today. I'm sure we'll have more questions for you. We appreciate you.
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Thank you.
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Rachel, I know we're here. Burn Order brings you here. But there's not a story that I've more desperately wanted to talk to you about since this Post story just blew this unbelievable fact out into public view. And I wonder your thoughts on all of it.
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D
I am disturbed by this. I think as everybody is taking a step back from this. Nicole, I don't understand why we're going to war with Venezuela. And I'm not sure the administration has even bothered to try to come up with anything even internally coherent in terms of explaining why Trump has proclaimed that we are at war with Venezuela. My sense is that they wanted to use the Alien Enemies act to illegally deport people, arrest and deport people from this country that actually weren't subject to deportation. They decided the Alien Enemies act was a way to do that. They then realized the Alien Enemies act required a war, so then they declared a war. Then they needed a reason for the war, so then they reverse engineered some sort of reason for the war. Ostensibly, right now, the reason for the war is to stop drug trafficking into the United States. Today, the man convicted of the largest volume of drug trafficking in the history of the United States was just freed from prison by Donald Trump, the former president of Honduras. So clearly, if it's, if that's the area of focus, that isn't the justification for this war. So what are we doing there in the first place? Why are we blowing out of the water and killing people in boats with outboard motors, some of which aren't even pointed towards the United States, let alone verified to have drugs on them, let alone even if they did, if they were coming to the United States and they had the capacity to reach the United States and they were filled with drugs, why isn't it possible to just interdict them the way that we do with the Coast Guard, where you go and take the drugs and then put those people on trial and investigate and then follow the drugs to their source of origin and then take care of it there? Like none of this makes any sense. It feels like they bumbled themselves into a profoundly incoherent and illegal situation in which they decided the one true benefit they were getting out of all of it is that they were getting video game style visuals to play on Fox News and put on TikTok. And they liked that. So now they have put this admiral, the commander of Southern Command, every senior officer in that command, and all of the servicemen and women who serve there in the position of potentially being held liable for murder or war crimes until the statute of limitations on those matters runs. And I don't even know what it would be. And by backing and bumbling and shambolically rambling themselves into this mess, I'm less worried about the fate of the bad guys who have gotten us here than I am about the good people who've been put in the way of this mess and from Admiral Bradley on down. And it's a catastrophe. I think Pete Hegseth, it's impossible to imagine that he survives this as Secretary of Defense. I think he must resign. And I think Republicans will ask for that ultimately once they investigate this. But this is a disaster for this generation of people serving in the United States military. And that is a tragedy more than a farce.
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B
I think about the warnings from the generals and I think about how desperate I was in the walk up to the 2024 election for the people who Carol Leonig and Phil Rucker have this incredible scene from inside the Tank at the Pentagon where he's just ripping all of the generals, the most accomplished combat veteran generals who've risen to the ranks, who have the respect of the men and women under them who, you know, have lost. I mean, people who have been through more in their service than Trump has in 10 of his lives. And he's attacking them and criticizing them and belittling them. And I remember being so desperate for those generals to talk to the country about what it would mean for the military, arguably the most opaque agency, even more than the CIA, definitely more than doj, where judges have contact and friction with the things that happen at DOJ. And I played some of General Kelly's you know, kind of 11th hour interview where he talks about what Trump wanted to do with the military. And he says this thing that people didn't focus on. He says everything he wanted to do, I would go to the White House counsel. Now sounds like a normal, routine thing to do. But it suggests that there was constantly a need to tell Donald Trump that which was legal and illegal that he wanted to do with the military.
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Yeah.
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And when you have. And Hegseth's answer today was, quote, we're not going to just arrest people anymore. Well, arresting drug traffickers is what that is what you do. The Coast Guard goes out there and they seize the drugs and they arrest them. And as you said, they go and find them at the source. I mean, if this is what's public facing, what are your, what is sort of the mountain of questions about what's happened to the military in these 12 months?
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D
I mean, Trump wants to use the military for everything. Right. You're also not supposed to use the military for running drunk driving checkpoints in Washington, D.C. you're not supposed to use United States Marines for protecting a federal building in Los Angeles from normal levels of protest. I mean, all of these things that he wants to use the military for. I mean, I half believe that the reason he thinks he can get rid of FEMA is because he's, he's heard that the National Guard did some disaster response once. So can't we just use the military as emergency response? Like, can't the military take care of hurricanes? I mean, they, he, an authoritarian leader, wants unified command over everybody who has a gun. He wants them all answerable to him, and he wants to be able to use them without restraint, and he wants to be able to use them against his own people. Right. So once you're starting to think like Donald Trump does about what power really means to him, when he talks about how there can't be illegal orders by virtue of the fact that he gives an order that means they have to do it, gives you a real insight into what he thinks the military is for. And he wants to use them domestically and he wants to use them for everything. And he doesn't see the value of any other form of governance. So once the US Military is seen as a tool like that of a leader like him, all eyes have to shift to the internal ethos and discipline of the US Military. Will you allow yourselves to be used this way? I mean, that ultimately may be the distinction between us becoming a dictatorship and us remaining a republic is whether or not there is internal discipline and ethic and ethics in the United States military that prevent them from being used the way that Trump wants to use them. And having them carry out illegal orders is a great way to break those ethics and to break that discipline.
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B
What do you think bursts this story into public view? Because to your point, since go he sent them out to the streets of American cities, which is another thing the generals warned him about in the first term, stopped him from doing. Millie and Esper. It's been reported by multiple journalists in the Oval Office after the murder of George Floyd. This is the first strike, but this has now been going on for many months. After this strike, they started returning survivors. I mean, what do you think brought this story into public view?
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D
I don't know and I don't have any inside information on this. This is me speculating. But I think there was a really important NBC News report about what was happening inside Southern Command. We saw the shock resignation of the head of Southern Command. He was not supposed to be leaving office and he left office without Hegseth and Trump attacking him. There was sort of mild praise, thank you for your service, and he's disappearing and nobody knows why he's leaving his post. Then we get that NBC News reporting that the senior jag, the senior legal officer at Southern Command, has been essentially removed from the chain because of expressing concerns about the illegality of these strikes. Then we get follow up reporting about there being a secret classified memo that was prepared in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department saying, you guys won't get prosecuted for this stuff. Okay, we're just, we can't exactly articulate a reason why, but that's why, like, clearly there is incredible friction inside the US Military, including at very senior ranks, among people who know that this is wrong and who are trying to stop it, who are resigning, who are being removed from their positions because they are trying to stop it. And once you've got that kind of internal friction, once you've got that kind of internal fight, you're going to have news. I'm not saying again, I don't have any inside information about what the source of this information. But when you're asking people to do something that wrong and they know it's wrong and they're pushing back and it's ending careers because of it, it's going to come out. It's going to come out. We're lucky that it's coming out now while it's happening, and not just as a point of history, but it's going to come out. These guys can't run from this stuff.
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B
Okay, you said the H word. History. After the break, we're going to talk with Rachel about her new investigative podcast, Burn Order. She unlocks the story of the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II War II and the parallels to the violent abductions and raids being committed by agents here today, right now on the streets of American cities. As we have this conversation, get a head start in listening to this yourself by scanning the code on your screen. Now listen to Burn Order. Wherever you get your podcasts. Wait though, until after Rachel tells you all about it. You can do it at five. We'll be back after a quick break.
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Ms. Now presents season two of the Blueprint, hosted by Jen Psaki. In each episode, she talks to leading Democrats about how they plan to win again, including Texas Congressman Greg Cassar, who chairs the Progressive caucus, Congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, and more who are helping to shape the future of the party. The Blueprint with Jen Psaki Season 2 All episodes available now.
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D
A longtime restaurant owner with a work.
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B
Visa detained by ice.
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D
Well, he says that he has been.
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In this country for 18 years.
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D
He's a father. He has three young kids. And now he was fighting to stay even though people around him say he is well respected. And we have new information tonight on another ICE arrest, this one in Encinitas. Two landscapers were ripped from their truck just blocks away from where a father was detained near an elementary school earlier this week.
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B
And Sunday, a woman who has been living in the US for nearly 50 years was arrested outside her New Orleans home.
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C
You can see federal agents, they just smashed the window of that SUV and then they forced this man out of the car onto the ground. We're told ICE arrested this man with his wife and their child still inside the car. It happened after the family was leaving church and were intercepted by police agents and ICE agents.
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E
You might remember last month this violent arrest was captured on camera. You can see agents restraining a Ford 48 year old man repeatedly punching him, blood visible on his shirt as he screamed. We've since learned that man is the father of three Marines, two active Marines, and one Marine Corps veteran.
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B
It happens every day. Happens so often it can almost feel numbing to scroll through the videos like that social media. It is now a dark hallmark of the second Trump term. Friends and neighbors taken away from communities and towns all across our country by federal agents. We saw them there with your own eyes, thrown into detention centers. Many deported mothers, fathers, people have built their lives, had their kids, built businesses in our country, some of them not knowing life in a country other than this one. And while it is happening right here, right now, it is not a stretch to say that we have done this before in America as Americans. A lot of people have drawn the parallels between what's happening right now and other dark chapters of our American story. Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker put it this year. It is incumbent on us to learn from those dark chapters.
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I just have one question.
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What comes next?
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After we've discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and.
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Lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled.
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The women and the minorities, once we've ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in.
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The face, what comes next?
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All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don't want to repeat.
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History, then for God's sake, in this.
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Moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it.
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B
And learn we will. To that end, and in the spirit of this learning from our history, my friend and colleague Rachel Maddow is out with a brand new podcast, shedding light on one of those critical dark chapters, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Bernard tells the story of those who exploited the moment for hate and fear, but it also tells the story of people who stood up for doing the right thing. Here's a snippet from the first episode.
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One minority group singled out for mass removal, mass detention, arrest and imprisonment based purely on race. The construction of huge camps in the middle of nowhere without access to legal help. The US Military deployed on the streets. And all of it done at the stroke of a president's pen and with the Supreme Court's quiet acquiescence. There was tremendous anxiety as they saw neighbors and friends being taken. Farmers would be taken right out of the field.
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B
There was just a lot of fear. They told my father to get dressed and come with them. I didn't know what they were trying to do.
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Everything is done on the fly. America had never incarcerated.
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You know, a mass body of its citizens before.
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I couldn't. I never believed that America would be doing this reading.
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D
It almost seems like, you know, reading a movie story. It's not reading the story of your family.
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That couldn't be.
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He was told that if you try.
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To escape, this is the bullseye that.
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We'Ll use to shoot you. This is the story of one of the most shocking US Government decisions in our nation's history, and the strange and very specific reason that decision was made. But it's also the story of what it took to stop it, what it took to stand up against it, to undo it, to break its back.
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B
I'm so desperate to start with that because I feel like the echoes to history are, to me, so harrowing and super upsetting. But you find this sort of like strengthening hurricane oversea of hope and the pushback of it. Maybe we will start there. I mean, talk about how it stopped and who those people are. And if you see any people, you see any humans made of the same stuff right now.
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D
Yeah. You know, one of the things, Satsuki Ina, one of the people who you just heard from there in that little clip, one of the things that she describes about her mother and father being put in the camps and her mom giving birth when she was in the camps, she describes the fact that nobody protested. Her mom had this experience where somebody. There was a local Quaker community, and people came to the fence of the prison camp where they were and used to throw fresh fruit and vegetables over to them. And when she was pregnant, she was so desperate for that because she wasn't getting enough food. And it was this thing, and it was just. I mean, she was worried for the life of her unborn child. They threw a blanket over her, over the fence to her that she treasured for her entire life, literally until she was on her deathbed. And that was so important because there was no mass protest, because that was the only sense they had that other Americans cared for them. And that to me, that contrast, seeing Americans protest now and try to stop it now is improvement is better, but it's also born. Order is also the story about the people who did try to fight it in the moment and failed in the moment. People fighting it within the Justice Department, people fighting it within the military, which is really interesting in terms of all the illegal orders that we're talking about now. People, a very, very vanishingly small number of people trying to fight it within politics. Very few elected officials stood up, but the ones who did made a real difference in people's Lives. It's just people fighting it in the moment. The reason that it got through anyway. And then the most important thing about Burn Order is that when the government is doing truly terrible things, they usually know they're doing something terrible, something unlawful, some unconstitutional, immoral, wrong, indefensible. And because of that, they try to cover up the real reasons why they're doing it. And that cover up sets the seeds, lays the seeds of their own destruction. And it is Japanese Americans who themselves discover the COVID up and shred the COVID up and expose what really happened and become the real heroes of this story. And so there's all sorts of different ways to fight it. There's all sorts of ways to stand up for what's right. And you never know exactly when they are going to pay off. I mean, we kept Japanese Americans in prison camps for years, but ultimately the reason our country apologized for it, pledged to never do it again, and actually paid reparations for what we'd done is because of Japanese Americans who never let them get away with it. And I think people who are in the government right now, who are part of things that are wrong and they know it, they need to know that they're not going to get away with it either. History will not let them off the hook and it'll be made right in the end. And they will be happy now, they will be happy in the long run if they get on the right side of it now rather than waiting to be caught out, because they will get caught.
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B
I think it's 70,000American citizens and over 100,000 Japanese Americans, including American citizens and naturalized citizens. You know, their mass deportation plan is for millions and millions of humans. I mean, there's something tactile about the number of human beings being moved. I mean, just physically moving humans out of their homes, ripping them out of their communities, American citizen humans, and putting them into camps. What was it like spending all the time that I know you put into projects like this thinking about that and reporting that out?
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D
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a reason that I decided to do this now. You know, I mean, once again we've got hastily built mass detention facilities. I mean, they're using Fort Bliss again. They used Fort Bliss then too.
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B
They started with Gitmo.
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D
Yeah. And we've got these hastily built prison facilities again. Once again we've got, you know, federal agents grabbing men, women, children, babies, elderly people, pregnant women, pregnant women out of their lives. Once again, it's being supported by lies about them and how terrible they are and why we need to treat these people like animals because they're such a threat to us. There was never a single Japanese American who spied for Japan. There was not a single Japanese American who engaged in an act of sabotage or any effort to help Japan defeat us in the. In the war. And military intelligence knew that. The Justice Department knew that. The FBI knew that. They were all against locking up Japanese Americans. But you had a kind of Stephen Miller type figure, kind of wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, who was able to architect this thing anyway. And the parallels are incredible. Literally to the point where they're using the same facilities to lock people up. But we're protesting against it this time. And we have the history of these heroic Japanese Americans who stopped this and who made this right in our history to, I think, let the people know who are doing wrong right now that they're not going to get away with it.
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B
I need to take a break, but I want to sort of put a pin in what you just said about we had the intelligence we had inside our government and intelligence products that they knew that there were no Japanese Americans who were aiding Japan.
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D
Yes.
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B
And we did this anyway. I want to mine that with you on the other side.
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D
Yeah. I had to cover it up. That's right.
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B
We'll be right back.
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A
Ms. Now presents season two of the Blueprint, hosted by Jen Psaki. In each episode, she talks to leading Democrats about how they plan to win again, including Texas Congressman Greg Cassar, who chairs the Progressive caucus, Congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, and more who are helping to shape the future of the party. The Blueprint with jen psaki. Season 2, all episodes available now.
- [35:16]
D
The United States army for months had been pushing debunked conspiracy theories about Japanese Americans being traitors and saboteurs. In reality, the only Americans ever caught spying or working for Japan were not Japanese Americans. They were Americans who either just liked the paycheck that Japan was offering, or they liked the ideology of arguably fascist imperial Japan for the same reason they liked the ideology of fascist Germany or fascist Italy. But there were no Japanese Americans among them. Japanese Americans were not signaling to Japanese submarines or setting fires to guide Japanese bombers, or sending secret radio transmissions or sabotaging crops or any of the other fantasies that Carl Bendetsen and John DeWitt were citing now as justification for their plans.
- [36:15]
B
So Ben Ditson is the Stephen Miller of this story.
- [36:19]
D
Shorthand, but yeah.
- [36:19]
B
But what's amazing, and it'll make your head explode, is that the bad Acts are so completely reliant on bad facts or lies.
- [36:30]
D
Yeah. That you need to. If you're going to do something truly radical. I mean, they had considered stripping citizenship from Japanese Americans doing what Trump is now threatening to do. Trump is now saying he's going to strip US Citizenship from Americans. They had considered doing that with Japanese Americans, but decided instead that that would take too long, that that birthright citizenship is a thing, that it would be too hard to undo it. And so instead they just gave themselves a racial carve out and said, you know, instead, what we're going to do is we're just going to treat American citizens this way. We're going to take 120,000 people again, the elderly, babies. They pulled babies out of orphanages who they thought might have Japanese blood in them. They pulled kids out of foster families they thought might have some Japanese lineage. They took tens of thousands of people who were native born US Citizens and locked them up. Four years in prison camps with no legal process whatsoever. If you want to do something that radical, I mean, one way to do this is to declare martial law. They did not do that in the continental United States. They did it in Hawaii, where they didn't intern Japanese Americans en masse, but on the western United States, they did. And you need to tell people incredible fairy tales about how dangerous and terrible these people are. And so you see that with the way that Trump talks about immigrants today, and there are these fantastical, totally, totally false stories about Japanese Americans that Bendetson and DeWitt had to tell in 1942 in order to get something this radical done.
- [38:02]
B
Then there is sort of one of the heroes is the person who possesses the intelligence, that Naval intelligence officer, that no Japanese Americans were aiding or abetting Japan at all.
- [38:15]
D
Yeah. There was only about a dozen people in the entire US Military by the time we went to war with Japan, only about a dozen people in the whole military who spoke Japanese.
- [38:24]
B
That's incredible.
- [38:25]
D
Yeah. And one of them was a Navy Lieutenant Commander named Ken Ringle. And he had lived in Japan. He spoke multiple variants of Japanese. He was really good with languages. He also was really good about cultivating sources in the Japanese American community. And he was sent out to the west coast before Pearl harbor ever happened to say, if we do end up going to war with Japan, I want you to assess the loyalties of Japanese American communities. Are they going to side with Japan if we go to war with Japan? And he integrated himself into those communities and found that those communities were absolutely loyal. They were going to be loyal to the United States, but that Japan was spying here. There definitely was. You know, Japan was doing what Japan was going to do. They were about to go to war with us. But Ken Ringel orchestrated a break in of the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, got in, got their lists of spies and agents, busted all of those and also got from the Japanese government's own files in Japanese which he spoke and read their very angry conclusion that they could not persuade anyone to participate in what they were doing. They said they didn't trust Japanese Americans, they were unreliable, they were distressingly loyal and they were course of no help to them. So Ringel had them dead to rights that Japanese Americans were an asset to this country in the fight, not a threat, and that we should work. They were the best assets that he had in combating real Japanese spying. But instead for racially driven reasons, these bad actors at the Western Defense Command cooked up this plan that was counterproductive for our national security. And that was one of the worst civil liberties violations in the history of the United States.
- [40:06]
B
Why do you think people didn't protest?
- [40:09]
D
There were some protests, but they were small. And I think a lot of it was driven by the kind of fear that was stoked by those fake conspiracy theories. I also think the United States was going to war and we had a lot of stuff going on and people were afraid to do it. There was not an immediate clamor to lock up Japanese Americans after, after Pearl Harbor. It took a couple of months of honestly real racist organizing, particularly in California, to try to gin up this idea that this was the solution to some non existent problem. White farmers in California wanted their hands on the land that Japanese farmers had been farming and they saw this as their way to do it. They freely admitted that was their thinking. And there was these guys inside the army who took advantage of that and thought, well, this is our chance to get it done. It's really telling that they thought that Japanese Americans shouldn't be allowed to return to the western United States even after the war was over. They just wanted a racial cleansing of the United States.
- [41:10]
B
That's unbelievable. Let me, before we lose you, ask you quickly how you're feeling about where we are as a country, Because I know since day one you've helped train our eyes country and you don't look as desperately as I do to the politicians to do something to save us. And so I wonder, we were together on election night, Tuesday night. I guess it's almost four weeks ago. How are you feeling about the country right now?
- [41:37]
D
I think that Donald Trump is 24 points underwater in his approval rating.
- [41:42]
B
He seems to know that.
- [41:43]
D
He seems to know that. And he's underwater on everything from crime to immigration to the Middle east to Russia to the economy to inflation to everything. Anything you ask the American people about right now what they think about Donald Trump, they say the answer is no, don't like it, don't like him. And that number is collapsing most dramatically among independents. He's never been at numbers this low with independence. His approval rating with independents right now is in the mid-20s.
- [42:09]
B
Yeah.
- [42:10]
D
And so the American public is not buying what he's selling. Trump's idea of governance is that he should not have to ever get permission from the American public or from anyone ever again, that he should rule by force. But autocrats everywhere know that the thing that gets them in the end is public opinion, and that if the country's against you, you can't last long by force alone. And we're getting to that point that he. His. His designs on us are not working on us, and we're not changing as a country. He's trying to change us, and it's failing. And that, to me, is heartening, both in terms of public opinion and people's willing to stand up and say no. And now newly Republicans willingness in Congress to draw some lines.
- [42:52]
B
To draw some lines. Maybe with the stake of the future of the military's reputation around the world.
- [42:58]
D
The United States military is not going to go down the road that Trump wants them to go. It's going to be bumpy in terms of them figuring it out and in terms of what it's going to cost members of the military right now to go through this, when he's going to turn on them. But he's. They are not going to allow themselves to become the instrument of a dictator. They are not going to do it. And he's about to learn that.
- [43:16]
B
It gives me chills. It is such a treat to get to talk to you. I'm in awe of what you've created here with Burn Order. It's incredible. We've listened to two. Hopefully we get. When do they. When do we get more? Soon.
- [43:27]
D
On Monday.
- [43:27]
B
Okay. All right. I know I have a lot of work to do. I'm sorry. The series is called Burn Order. It's out wherever you get your podcast. Definitely listen to it. I'll excuse you at 5 if you want to go listen to it right now. We're going to take one more break. We'll be right back. Over the course of five hours, late last night, 79 year old Donald Trump posted online more than 150 times publicly. Daily Beast explains that in a lot of those posts, Donald Trump targeted his usual perceived enemies. People like Governor Gavin Newsom, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Former director of the FBI Jim Comey. He called some of those former elected officials and government workers traitors. Again, he complimented guests who had appeared on Fox News. In close correspondence to the time that he posted, Trump also repeated or reposted a lot of things. A lot of the usual right wing MAGA content boosted it with his retweets. He shared some videos of himself. One of them he insults a female journalist. And another one includes footage of his little cameo in the film Home Alone 2 from the year 1992. At one point last night, Donald Trump was firing off more than one post a minute. I want to bring in Ms. Now senior White House reporter Vaughn Hilliard. So Vaughn, if any public figure in the world of sports did that, there would be, you could imagine ESPN or Bill Simmons asking about their state of mind or what was going on in their life. When Kanye west does that, we usually get some sort of reporting out or reaction from the mother of the children he shares, Kim Kardashian. I mean this is bananas off the wall stuff. The rate of posting. How is, how is Donald Trump doing?
- [45:25]
E
I think it's a good point you made. I mean Lane Kiffin tweets a couple of times a day and the amount of scrutiny that each of those tweets get is much more than 160/post over the course of those three hours last night. And I think you, there's, when you're talking about 160 posts, you know, you pulled out a few examples. Another one, him claiming that Michelle Obama used the auto pen at the end of the Biden administration. He also posted this idea that Elon Musk helped thwart the 2024 election from being stolen because Musk quote tracked down the IP addresses of the Dominion office in Serbia and rendered their computers useless days before the election. He also then went on to suggest in a post there that he reposted that there would be a military tribunal for Barack Obama. When you asked what the state of the President of the United States is, I think it's important the context that just four minutes ago Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff wrapped up a nearly five hour long meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. But we haven't heard the President of the United States get into the details about any terms of a negotiated peace plan between Ukraine and Russia, essentially leaving two cabinet members to go forward with those negotiations all at the same time that this morning his press secretary in the White House that they promoted this New York Post story that the president is working 12 hour days according to White House logs and that he is keeping a busy schedule despite what others in the media are suggesting. There was a two hour long Cabinet meeting today and it was a two hour long Cabinet meeting. But the cameras did catch his eyes going drifting downward every so often there.
- [47:01]
B
I think we have that moment here.
- [47:02]
D
For the White House.
- [47:03]
E
For that. Yeah, yeah, for that. For the scrutiny around the Post in his late night hours there. I think that there's also the question about the roles that his Cabinet cabinet members are playing in negotiating these critical negotiations and conversations at the same time that over the course of last night we were watching these true social posts roll in there.
- [47:21]
B
Nicole, it's amazing. We're going to put a pin in that for future discussions. He seemed to have outed Elon Musk's role in somehow meddling in the Dominion voting systems. That's interesting. Von Hilliard sticks around after the break for us. The bipartisan drumbeat for answers on that second deadly strike in the Caribbean is growing louder by the hour. We'll bring you up to date on the latest after short break.
- [47:50]
A
As President Trump continues implementing his ambitious agenda, follow along with the MSNow newsletter, Project 47. You'll get weekly updates sent straight to your inbox with expert analysis on the administration's latest actions and how they're affecting the American people.
- [48:07]
B
The American people are basically telling the.
- [48:09]
D
President that they are not okay with any of this.
- [48:11]
A
Sign up for the Project 47 newsletter at Ms. Now. Project 47.