← The Briefing with Jen Psaki
The Briefing with Jen Psaki
Failed idea features prominently in Republican bill despite red state regret
00:40:55
Georgia and Arkansas have both tried to implement work requirements for Medicaid, with both producing disastrous results. Now Republicans in Congress want to impose those work requirements on a national level and seem oblivious to the idea's previous failure and the regret expressed by fellow Republicans for their role in it.
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- [00:01]
Rachel Maddow
Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. New episodes of all your favorite MSNBC shows are ad free plus ad free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, Ultra Bagman and Deja News. And all MSNBC original podcasts are available ad free and with bonus content including why is this Happening? Main justice and more. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. MSNBC Films presents a six part documentary series David Frost versus On the next Episode, Elton John.
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Chris Hayes
It's okay to ask for help. I didn't think it was because I thought it was a sign of weakness.
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Rachel Maddow
Sunday at 9pm Eastern on MSNBC.
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Chris Hayes
In just a moment, we're going to talk with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No one's done more to push health care through the House and to protect it than Speaker Pelosi. And I am looking forward to talking to her about that and what whether she thinks Mike Johnson has the votes. But I want to start by just talking about what's actually in this bill that is a pivotal thing for all of us to know and whether it's going to get through. I mean, Mike Johnson announced that he plans to bring Trump's, quote, big beautiful bill to the floor for a vote either tonight or tomorrow morning. As I mentioned, we're going to keep watching that. We'll see, we'll see what he has. One of the factors here is whether or not the right wing of the Republican Party is willing to agree to the Medicaid cuts and what they have or whether they want more. And House Republicans have basically been desperately pushing to rush this budget bill into law, to rush it through on their own fabricated Memorial Day timeline. They basically pulled an all nighter last night, starting at 1am last night because that was the earliest they could start in order to speed this bill through as quickly as possible. Conveniently, literally in the middle of the night, in the dark of night. The hearings were so late that at one point, at least one Republican congressman, South Carolina's Ralph Norman, you can see him right there having a little beauty slumber. I suppose he seemed to have trouble staying awake, seemed to have a lot of trouble actually staying awake. His poor hand there. I don't know what's happening there. But at the end of the day, meanwhile, massive cuts to Medicaid, to health care, snap benefits, that's all of what's in this bill. And we're going to talk about it may be utterly boring, I guess, to Ralph Norman and other Republicans who weren't caught on camera last night to Some sitting in the comfort of House chambers. Americans all over the country are understandably worried and outraged. I mean, this is how local news, which always tells you whether it's breaking through, is covering this budget.
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Luke Seaborn
Hundreds of thousands of Utahns are at risk of losing access to medical care or paying higher costs.
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Chris Hayes
Right now, Republicans in Congress are planning big cuts to Medicaid with the aim.
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Nancy Pelosi
To offset tax cuts. Maryland leaders are worried the changes could cost the state up to a billion dollars and knock tens of thousands of.
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Chris Hayes
People off their health insurance. More than 300,000 people in Arizona could.
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Rachel Maddow
Lose their health care coverage.
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Luke Seaborn
If the bill passes, the potential cuts.
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Rachel Maddow
That we're hearing could impact over 40,000.
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Luke Seaborn
Upwards to 60, 80 West Virginias potentially could lose their coverage. So yes, it's a big concern.
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Chris Hayes
Now, even after you heard all of that from local news anchors just trying to tell their communities about what was happening. The latest Trumpian spin seems to be that the only things this budget cuts from Medicaid are waste, fraud and abuse, which is quite a piece of spin because a core concept of this bill is the idea of adding work requirements to Medicaid. Now, this has been tried many times before and we already know that it does not work because we've seen it not work. Back in 2023, Georgia added work requirements to its state Medicaid plans. And the program that checked whether people were working enough to qualify was something they called Pathways. Last year, to promote the program, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp released an ad. And it's an ad about a mechanic named Luke Seaborne, who was one of the first Georgians to receive Medicaid from Pathways. Seaborn became kind of a poster boy for the program.
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Luke Seaborn
My name is Luke Seaborn, 53, and we've been here at the shop at this place since 2018. Pathways is a great program that offers insurance to low income and working professionals such as myself. And that's what I was. I was looking for insurance, low income insurance to help my son and I out because we didn't have insurance. I highly recommend Pathways to anybody that can use it and qualifies.
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Chris Hayes
So a ringing endorsement at the time from Luke Seaborn. But last week ProPublica caught up with him to ask him about the Pathways program and it turns out he is no longer a fan. They wrote this headline to describe the conversation. I'm going to tell you more about it. He became the face of Georgia's Medicaid work requirement and now he's fed up with it. I mean, the first issue Mr. Seaborn ran into came just a few months after he taped that very ad that you just saw. Seaborn said he had logged his work hours into the online system once a month, as was required. But his benefits were canceled after he failed to complete a new form that he said the state had added without adequate warning. And one of the issues here with Medicaid work requirements is all the bureaucracy. Now, lucky for Mr. Seaborn, he had someone he could contact. Since he'd become the poster boy, he reached out to the insurance executive who had asked him to be in Governor Kemp's video just months before, and she told him that she happened to be having lunch with one of Kemp's aides that very day. And wouldn't you know it, within 24 hours of that, Mr. Seaborn's benefits were restored. Governor Kemp's press secretary then claimed. Wait for it. That the governor's office had no involvement in helping his case. But that timing is obviously quite, quite a coincidence. Hard to believe. Now, after that incident, Mr. Seaborn decided to be more vigilant about his benefits. He even signed up for text and email notifications so he wouldn't be caught off guard. But still, things went wrong. He stopped receiving texts from the Pathways program in February, and then when he logged into the digital platform in early March to make sure everything was in order, a notice informed him that his benefits would be terminated on April 1. That was in early March, so he had only a couple of weeks. My head exploded, he said. I didn't get a text or an email. I did what I was supposed to. But that wasn't good enough. Now, without coverage, Mr. Seaborn had to pay out of pocket for his and his son's prescription medications. He tried calling his insurance provider. No one called him back. But wouldn't you know it? The day that ProPublica reached out to the state government for comment about Mr. Seaborn's case, he got a call from the government himself. They told him they would make sure he got his coverage back. And sure enough, he did. But here's the thing. Even with a direct connection to the governor's office, even with a national news outlet literally pressing the state government about his case, Mr. Seaborn says he is fed up with the system. And he's not alone. Nearly two years in, of the 250,000 Georgians who are eligible to receive coverage through the program, only 12,000 have it. Only 12,000. Meanwhile, the state has paid upwards of $86 million, primarily to consultants to build this dysfunctional screening program. ProPublica talked to a lot of other Georgia residents who tried to get health care through the state's program. And one after another complained about getting stuck in kind of a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. One woman telling ProPublica, quote, you'd go from one robot voice to another. No one called her back. Now, after nearly a month of trying, she gave up telling ProPublica that she got the feeling that they really didn't want to help me. So that's how well adding work requirements to Medicaid went in Georgia. But just in case you think this is an isolated Georgia program, it's not the only state that added work requirements. Arkansas did it back in 2018. And how did that go?
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Adrian McGonigal
Adrian McGonigal's Life is Coming undone. He, like many Medicaid recipients, got confused about how to report his hours.
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Luke Seaborn
I thought that everything was good about this.
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Chris Hayes
I thought it was just a one.
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Luke Seaborn
Time deal that you reported and then that was it.
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Adrian McGonigal
He was wrong. He was supposed to log those hours online every month. He became one of the 12,000 people that the state has booted from the Medicaid rolls in the last three months.
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Luke Seaborn
How do I get my insurance back on?
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Adrian McGonigal
He discovered this only when he went to fill prescriptions at this drugstore and the pharmacist told him, sorry, your coverage has been canceled, and that it was.
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Chris Hayes
Going to be like $340 for one of the medications and like $80 for the other one.
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Adrian McGonigal
So he left empty handed. This was a big deal because McGonagall has severe COPD, a chronic lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe without his meds. He landed in the hospital multiple times and missed a lot of work. His supervisor tried to accommodate him, but he wasn't healthy enough to perform his job, so he lost it.
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Chris Hayes
So at the end of the day, 18,000 people lost their health care coverage because of Arkansas work requirements. 18,000. The system undermined Medicaid's ability to provide health coverage to Arkansas's poorest residents so much that the work requirements were ultimately stopped by a federal judge. And now, after seeing Georgia and Arkansas and how it's failing there, Republicans want this to make this system nationwide. They want to mandate it in every state in this country. This all makes me think about the fact that a budget is a moral document. This is actually something Senator Warnock says a lot, and it sticks with me. It tells us who members of Congress and elected officials anywhere think deserve support from the federal government or the state government and who they think doesn't. I'm sure you have heard by now that this bill will mean 8.6 million Americans will lose their health insurance. That's actually a low ball number. It turns out there are 8.6 million Americans. This bill actively would take health care away. 8.6 million. But this bill doesn't extend something that sounds kind of wonky. It's called the Affordable Care Act. Premium tax credits, which were passed back in 2021, extended in 2022 as a part of expanding and building on the ACA. It was passed in the Inflation Reduction act back in 2022. It was meant to continue lowering the cost of health care plans for millions of Americans. It worked. More people signed up. Now these tax credits are set to expire at the end of this year. And if they do, that will mean health care premiums will go up for millions of Americans and millions will also be basically priced out of coverage. There's also not another obvious vehicle for them to be extended. And it certainly is not a priority of Mike Johnson and Republicans in the House or Republicans in the Senate, I don't think. And when you add all of that in, when you add all of that in, people who would lose their health care because of the Medicaid requirements, all of the cuts to health care programs, the failure to extend the ACA premium tax credits, the number actually shoots up to 13.7 million. This bill that Mike Johnson is trying to get a vote in the House on either tonight or tomorrow morning, would take health care away from 13.7 million Americans. Today we also learned that this bill will mean cuts to Medicare. This is another kind of wonky one, but basically because of how much this giant bill would add to the national debt, it would trigger $500 billion cuts to Medicare, and that would start happening next year. So massive cuts to Medicaid, massive cuts to Medicare, not extending tax credits that lower the cost of health care. Oh, and did I mention that this bill would mean the biggest cut to food stamps in the program's history? It's all pretty bad stuff for the overwhelming majority of Americans. So why are Republicans pulling all nighters trying to jam this bill through? Why do they want this? Who is this even for? Who is this for? The Congressional Budget Office crunched the numbers on what this bill would mean for the overall household resources for the 10% wealthiest and bottom 10% poorest households in America. So combining income and health care costs and food stamps and everything all together, here's what this. By 2027, this bill would make the bottom 10% of American households 2% poorer while making the top 10% of American households 4% richer. This bill is a tax on America's poor to benefit America's wealthy. So what can Democrats do to stop it? What else should we know about the fine print in the bill? And if they can't stop it, what's the case that they should be making to the American public about it? Lucky for us, I have the perfect person to ask. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is standing by and she joins me in just 90 seconds.
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Rachel Maddow
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Chris Hayes
All the stories that we're covering are live and happening as we speak.
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Rachel Maddow
Watch your favorite shows live.
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Chris Hayes
What's happening right now is a hostile takeover of the US Government.
- [13:32]
Rachel Maddow
Read live blogs and in depth essays and listen to coverage as it unfolds. Go beyond the what to understand the why. Download the app now@msnbc.com app.
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Chris Hayes
As promised. Joining me now is House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. Very few people have done more to fight to protect health care coverage for Americans than you. I watched you do it up close through two administrations. I just want to start, I mean, I just gave a summary, a pretty comprehensive summary of all of the damaging things in this bill. But you've read the fine print of it. What did I miss?
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Nancy Pelosi
Well, we didn't haven't seen the hype find.
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Chris Hayes
Yes, that's fair.
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Nancy Pelosi
But you studied it.
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Chris Hayes
Yes.
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Nancy Pelosi
It hasn't come out of, hasn't come out of the Rules Committee yet. But it started at 1:00 o' clock, 1:00am last night. They didn't want the public to see really what was in the bill because it's very damaging to families across our country. What's curious to me is because my whole mission in politics is about the children for the children. And I went from housewife to House speaker or from the kitchen to the Congress for the children because 1 in 5 children in America was living in poverty and going to sleep hungry at night. Now this bill comes along and makes matters worse. It is as you, as you said in your presentation, 10% at the bottom will be poorer. Those 10% at the top will be richer. It's a Republican Robin Hood reverse. Reverse Robin Hood take from those where we should be helping people and give it to those who do not need help. It really has no values based it's not what our country is about and it's damaging to families and children.
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Chris Hayes
We've been trying, as a lot of people I work with have been trying to inform people about Medicaid work requirements and how horrible and draconian those are. One of the pieces I think hasn't been talked about enough is the fact that this doesn't include an extension of the premium tax credits that were passed in 2021, extended in 2022. Do you, you have done so much over so many years to fight for the protection of the aca, do you feel like this is an effort to dismantle it?
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Nancy Pelosi
Yes. Well, actually, we had amendments in the course of the day to extend those subsidies so that more people can continue to have health care or join. I had an amendment with Jimmy Gomez of California where we. If you didn't want to do that, at least do it for pregnant women and small children and the rest. They didn't want to do any of it.
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Chris Hayes
But the thing Republicans don't want to.
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Nancy Pelosi
Do that, to be fair, Republicans don't want to be doing it. It has no sensitivity of what it to be a family. And how complicated. As Jim McGovern, our chairman, our ranking member in rules, has said, it's complicated families, all the things that happen. But here's the thing. If you, when you, you had this presentation about a worker in Georgia and.
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Chris Hayes
What, how he experienced it. Yeah.
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Nancy Pelosi
And lost the health care. I want to talk about a seven year. What's in this bill. If a woman works and she wants Medicaid, she can have it until her child is seven years old. When a child is seven years old, she must go to work. And that we have stories from moms who say, my child got sick, I had to go to work, so what could I do? I can't afford child care. If I miss work, I lose that pay. If I miss work, too many times I lose that job. So I put my child on the bus, sick, sick. And you just, I mean, it's really sinful almost. So we have Medicaid where they're taking over $700 billion, $300 billion from SNAP.
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Chris Hayes
Yep.
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Nancy Pelosi
So a trillion dollars as an assault on America's working families. Trillion dollars. And then the Congressional Budget Office came out today and said $500 billion in Medicare. In Medicare. So this means people will lose their coverage. 18 million children may lose school lunch programs, meals on wheels, food banks, all the rest. And why, why is that? To give tax breaks to the highest end. When we had the, in 2017, when the president had the majority. President Trump had the majority. He had the big tax bill that gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%, 83% of the benefits to the Top 1% adding $2 trillion to the national debt. Here he is again to extend those, but further adding over $4 trillion to the national debt. All their talk about fiscal responsibility. So in any event it adds to the national debt. It's problematic in terms of Medicaid is people think of it as a benefit for poor children. That would be justification enough. However, it also is a middle class benefit if middle income families that have a senior who needs long term care. Much of that is covered by Medicaid. Veterans who are with disabilities or people with disabilities who aren't veterans need Medicaid. And yet here we are.
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Chris Hayes
Let me ask you, I mean I remember watching you work in lockstep with President Obama to get the ACA passed, with President Biden to extend tax credits to protect the aca. The relationship between Trump and Mike Johnson does not seem like a normal relationship between a speaker and a president. I mean, he doesn't seem to know if he has the votes. But what do you make of his management of this?
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Nancy Pelosi
Well, what I'm concerned about is the integrity of the legislative branch. Article one, the legislative branch. The Republicans in Congress have surrendered their leverage, their responsibility, their responsibility to have. That's where legislation starts that for spending and for investments, for appropriations and the rest. But they've surrendered all of that to President Bush and they don't have any. They don't seem to have one qualm about the fact that the Constitution, they take notes of the Constitution and they should. It's a, the brilliance, the genius of the Constitution is the separation of power, a separation of powers. And they have surrendered that to Trump.
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Chris Hayes
So Mike Johnson is sort of surrendering in many ways.
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Nancy Pelosi
But he didn't even put up a fight. It wasn't even a surrender. It just wasn't a fight. But to take it back to like Martin Luther King, he said of all of the inequalities of health care is the most inhuman. He said inhuman because people could die. And that has been our theme. We have built. What are we doing? We are building a grassroots operation around the country which we have had. That's how we won in 18. We had a grassroots operation. When the president, then President Trump then said Obamacare sucks, to use his lovely language to quote the president, Obamacare sucks. And we said, well no, it doesn't suck, it cures. But we had events, 10,000 events around the country where people told their story. My child was born with, my baby was born with a heart condition. My wife has breast cancer. My mom, it's this or that. So when people told their stories, it wasn't about provisions of the bill or what it was about their personal stories. And we won that election. We won 40 seats, 31 of them in Trump districts, because people knew that's what we're doing now is making sure that people know what is in that legislation, making sure the Republicans know that their constituents know what they're voting for.
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Chris Hayes
I think the worst thing, of course, that could happen is for this to pass and the impact. But if it passes, it feels like it is something that Democrats should be running on next year.
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Nancy Pelosi
I think we always, we run on health care. When we won in 18, people said to me one, weren't you lucky that health care became the issue in the campaign? I said, no, we weren't lucky. We made our own luck. 10,000 events. But since the election, our grassroots people have been out there making calls into nothing more eloquent to a member of Congress than the voice of his or her own constituents. So these have to be people who live in their districts calling them. And that's the operation that is out there. And people are just, they just know that. Lincoln said public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish anything. Without it, practically nothing. But people have to know if sentiment is going to prevail.
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Chris Hayes
Spoken by someone who knows what it's like to win races and also to count vote. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, thank you so much for joining me.
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Nancy Pelosi
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
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Chris Hayes
Coming up, we're going to take a quick break, but we thought the Oval Office meltdown with the president of Ukraine would never be topped. But then Donald Trump's truly insane ambush of South Africa's president today certainly gave it a bit of a run for its money. I'm going to tell you all about it. Talk more about the history here after a quick break.
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Rachel Maddow
Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. New episodes of all your favorite MSNBC shows are ad free plus ad free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series Ultra Bagman and Deja News. And all MSNBC original podcasts are available ad free and with bonus content including why is this Happening? Main justice, and more. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
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Chris Hayes
So today, in what has become a bit of a pattern, Trump ambushed yet another world leader in the Oval Office. And this time it was the president of South Africa. And this ambush was about promoting one of Trump's favorite topics for some time now, what he outrageously refers to as the genocide of white South African farmers. Now this white Genocide myth is undercut by the fact that the high rates of violence in South Africa have long affected farmers and farmworkers regardless of race. A South African court dismissed claims of white genocide in the country as imagined. And none of South Africa's political parties, including those that represent white South Africans, have claimed that there is a genocide in South Africa. So how exactly did this white genocide myth get into Trump's head? Well, we have to go back to 2018 for a moment when Trump posted, after some apparent inspiration from Fox News and Tucker Carlson, that he had asked his then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to study the issue. You can see the post right there on the screen. Now, the Fox segment that Trump appeared to be responding to was about a new land distribution proposal. But for the far right, the story was really about whites being unfairly targeted rather than reform. That was that perception. Now, in January of this year, South Africa passed a new land reform deal, a move that sparked fury among a lot of people on the far right, including the guy who donated a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump's 2024 campaign. Yes, Elon Musk. You can see him right there. He has, of course, used his social media platform to push the spaceless white genocide myth. And that leads us to the debacle of the Oval Office meeting we saw today when South Africa's president calmly tried to explain to Trump why the white supremacist fever dream that they're pushing was completely bonkers. I would say if there was Africana farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my Minister of Agriculture. He would not be with me. So it will take him. President Trump, listening to their stories, to their perspective. That is the answer to your question. But you're still.
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Luke Seaborn
Mr. President, I must say that we have. No, no, wait. We have thousands of stories talking about.
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Nancy Pelosi
It and we have documentaries, we have news stories.
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Luke Seaborn
Let me see the articles, please, if you would. And excuse me. Turn the lights down. Turn the lights down and just put this on. It's right behind you.
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Chris Hayes
So, yeah, I mean, he had a video ready to push his baseless claims. And we're not showing you that video because the video was focused on years old comments from a fringe radical politic that folks like Elon Musk have fixated on. And look, the fact that Trump and his allies are not just pushing this narrative, but they're making policy decisions based on it is incredibly alarming. It's also not surprising. I mean, this is the same administration that is waging an assault on diversity and equality right here at home by firing qualified officials, taking books off shelves, removing posters off walls, and now even opening DOJ investigations against Chicago's mayor for celebrating his office's diversity. Something, by the way, elected officials of both parties have done for a long time. There's a reason that Trump is relentlessly pushing this myth, and it falls directly into his and his administration's worldview that diversity is simply a threat to purity. Patrick Aspart is the former US Ambassador to South Africa, and he joins me after a very quick break. Okay. Well, it didn't originate with him, as I just explained. I just laid out how Elon Musk has played a big role in the president spreading white supremacist lies about South Africa. But what's Musk getting out of all of this? Well, here's South African billionaire Johann Rupert in the Oval Office earlier today.
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Luke Seaborn
We have too many deaths, but it's across the board. It's not only white farmers, it's across the board. We need technological help. We need starlink at every little police station. We need drones.
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Chris Hayes
That was a very strange moment. It definitely, the comment definitely caught the attention of former US Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard, who posted this. Pretty extraordinary to see billionaire Johan Rupert pleading Trump for some deal for Elon Musk and Sterling to come, quote, save South Africa. I think that this grift from Musk lies at the heart of this entire performance. And former U.S. ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard joins us. Patrick, you mentioned, and I started, I just explained how this didn't originate with Musk, but you mentioned how Musk's grift is a potential factor here, which it feels like, there's no question. How much do you think this is about his South African roots versus a chance for him to make money and explain to us the whole Johan Rupert factor here.
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Patrick Gaspard
I will, and thanks for having me on, Jen. It is all of. It is all of the above. Right. So for Trump, there's a perfect trifecta here. He gets to play to a domestic political audience that's obsessed with white existential threats, white Christianity being threatened, being removed, and Donald Trump is anything that could save them. That's one part of it. The second part is you and I are not having a conversation right now about prices going up in Walmart or the millions of people who are going to be slashed off of Medicaid. And the third piece with Donald Trump is always about the art of the grift. Elon Musk has been in a contentious policy debate argument with the South African government for some time now, as he's tried to get the sterling system into South Africa, there is a regulatory body that makes sure that if a foreign owned business is coming into South Africa, that there's equity in it for black South Africans who traditionally have been boxed out of the middle class of the economy in the country. Musk, having failed to get his way, started then lifting up all of these discredited myths about white genocide in South Africa. It all then migrated on the air to Tucker Carlson, who of course is the bullhorn, if you will, to Donald Trump. Donald Trump picks it up, begins to amplify it at a time that he knows that his friend is trying to cut this deal and in a fashion that he knows is going to be in the service of his own domestic politics as he sends his dog whistle to his fringe element in the US it all works perfectly well for him. Johann Rupert is one of the largest landowners in South Africa. He's been close to many political parties in the country. He's got a long term relationship with Trump because of how they've played golf with one another in the past. And he's been a bit of a backchannel with Musk and other Africana business leaders.
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Chris Hayes
It is watching that was bizarre, offensive, strange, all of the things in addition to being the ambassador of South Africa. I mean, I want to talk to you about that. And you just have a very interesting background. You also have had very high level roles in the White House. Just watching that today. I mean, you referenced sort of sending the dog whistle to his domestic audience. He also, they've gone after the Chicago mayor for saying things that are very normal. Explain to us how you see the connections between him lifting up this storyline in South Africa and his effort to kind of dog whistle to the United States and to his domestic political audience.
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Patrick Gaspard
Jed, I had the honor of working with you in the White House serving under a president. But you and I understood every single day that we were not serving that president, we were serving the American people. It is so deeply offensive and does a violence to your spirit, if you believe in public service. To see the gilding that he's put around the White House now and to understand that there is self benefit in almost every act from him. And that self benefit, tragically for the American people is tied to an autocratic drift where we're seeing the weaponization of the doj, I fear the weaponization of the FBI and possibly the IRS at the same time. And here in that Oval Office today, this man who just A few days ago, stood in Saudi Arabia and told the Arab world that we'll no longer be lecturing them on human rights. And he's fine if MBS wants to chain saw journalists in his embassies now stands up and does a pretense of caring about human rights in this profoundly cynical way, in a way that lifts up this kind of white genocide story to help him with raw, crass politics. Deeply offensive, hurtful to a partnership that we have with a really important nation in sub Saharan Africa, but altogether harmful to our constitutional instincts, our norms, our values, and does a major disservice to that Oval Office, that sacred space.
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Chris Hayes
Ambassador Patrick Gasper, thank you so much for talking straight about this kind of horrific meeting to watch. I really appreciate you joining me.
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Patrick Gaspard
Thank you.
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Chris Hayes
Coming up, a Trump official tries to literally edit an intelligence document so it couldn't be used against the president. A long list of crazy stories today, and there are many. This is right up there. Senator Michael Bennett is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. My guess is he's going to have some thoughts about this. He joins me next.
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Nancy Pelosi
If the president tries to suspend habeas corpus and a federal court reverses the president's order, will you comply with the court order and uphold habeas corpus or.
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Chris Hayes
Will you follow the president's directives? We are following all federal court orders and are complying with that, as is the president and every decision that makes sense.
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Nancy Pelosi
Well, that is obvious.
- [34:14]
Chris Hayes
Okay, so Secretary Noem said in that hearing under oath, we, we are following all federal court orders. That's what she said again at the Senate hearing just yesterday. You probably won't be shocked to learn that what Kristi Noem said was not true at all. I mean, here's why. Noem claimed that President Trump and DHS are following all federal court orders as it relates to their deportation efforts about halfway through the hearing. So just before 10:15am Eastern, literally 20 minutes later, approximately 1500 miles away in Texas, DHS was actively defying a court order. Yesterday, eight migrants were taken from the Port Isabel Detention center in Texas, loaded onto a plane and flown overseas South Sudan. And today, a federal judge said that these flights to South Sudan unquestionably violated an earlier federal court order. Now, you'll also be shocked to learn that Kristin OEM is not the only. You won't be shocked, I should say is not the only Trump official who is less than completely truthful in order to further Trump's deportation plans. Remember how Trump claimed a Venezuelan gang as committing crimes here in the United States at the direction of Venezuela's government. And remember how he used that claim to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act? Well, the New York Times is now reporting that when an intelligence analysis contradicted Trump's claims about Venezuela, a top aide to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Grabbert, of course, reportedly responded to that truth telling by saying, quote, we need to do some rewriting so this document is not used against Gabbard or Trump. And that, my friends, is definitely not how intel is supposed to work. Joining me now is Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado. Among many things, he is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator, it's great to see you. I just wanted to start by asking you, you're on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don't want us to become numb to what's happening here. What do you make of this New York Times reporting about the effort to essentially change an intel assessment to make sure Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump don't look bad?
- [36:20]
Luke Seaborn
I was laughing, John, at the beginning because you characterized it by saying that, in short, is not how intel is supposed to work, and that is not how intel is supposed to work. You're not supposed to take the intelligence and manipulate it to tell the story you want to tell. It's not about politics. The intelligence agencies that, that support the president and the Congress, as you well know, are supposed to give their unvarnished view of the facts, which, by the way, doesn't mean they're right all the time. But we're supposed to be able to rely on the fact that they are giving us their truthful assessment as they can best determine it. And when politics interferes, when people ask to manipulate it to get your story straight, then you end up not getting the intelligence. And the president, if he even does read the daily presidential brief, you know, the president can't get the straight story. And you can see here, at a minimum, somebody trying to please the president, which is dangerous. You know, it happens in, in, in places where there's a dictator in charge that other people are trying to anticipate. What, what will make them happy.
- [37:34]
Chris Hayes
I just want to just add. Yes, as you, you deal with many intel officials. I mean, they're apolitical. They are allergic to politics. Most of the time they are just doing analysis. That's what they do. Do you, I mean, you sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee along with your Democratic and Republican colleagues, always think about, you have to think about what could be happening out there. Do you think this forced rewriting could be happening elsewhere. Is that something that you're concerned about within the intelligence community?
- [37:58]
Luke Seaborn
Well, that's got to be one of the things that we provide oversight on. And when you think about the checks and balances in our society right now and how important they are from the work that people like Judge Boasberg in D.C. are doing, the courts all across the country that are striking down the president's actions, another place that's really important, important is the oversight function of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate. And that is a bipartisan committee. And it's a place that traditionally has worked to provide that oversight in a bipartisan way because we owe our responsibility not just to ourselves, but to the other members of the Senate who are counting on us to tell them the truth about what we learned there or pass our own judgment about it without being being able to share intelligence, they're relying on us to understand what that intelligence is. And I hope that that will continue to be the way this committee behaves. But time will tell and we'll have to see. It's no surprise to me at all that we would see this kind of behavior, though, when you've got a system that's being run by, you know, somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, who has paid so little respect to our intelligence agencies when she was a member of Congress. And now that she's been in the top job for President Trump, there seems.
- [39:24]
Chris Hayes
To be one of the many troubling trends is this lying. I mean, she was under oath when she said that, of course, Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security. Others are lying when they're not under oath, which isn't good either. What do you this is not, we have not really dealt with this before in terms of Cabinet officials just flagrantly lying everywhere all the time. What are the repercussions for it? Are there any? What can people expect?
- [39:49]
Luke Seaborn
Well, I think what's what this is, you know, there are many people at home, you know, that are furious with what Donald Trump is doing, and they're furious with anybody that they don't think is standing up sufficiently to Donald Trump. And I say to people, thank you for calling, you know, about my questioning of Tulsi Gabbard or Bobby Kennedy. And also thank you for calling to tell me to do more. In the case, though, of Tulsi Gabbard, it's clear that she's lied before. And again, this is a place where Congress has a responsibility to push back, to reveal it to the American people. When she and the CIA director, you know, claimed that the. That the Defense Secretary had not sent war plans out or classified information out on signal. That was preposterous, and it was obviously a lie. And I think our airing of that in front of the American people gave them a very distinct impression that not only weren't they being leveled with, but that she was lying about one of the most important things that somebody who's the head of the intelligence agencies in America could lie about, which is our war plans. It's cool to be on the intel committee, Jen. It's cool. A neat place to be, let me tell you. There's virtually nothing that I've ever seen there as classified as what the Secretary of Defense send out on his signal chat. Not just to Tulsi Gabbard, but to his wife and brothers as well, which.
- [41:19]
Chris Hayes
Is not how the intel community is supposed to work. Just to end where we started. Senator Michael Bennett, I think you invited a lot of people to call your office. We'll see. Thank you for doing that, representing the people, people that you represent. Thank you for joining me.
- [41:31]
Luke Seaborn
Keep calls coming. Thank you.
- [41:34]
Chris Hayes
And coming up, Donald Trump can't seem to stop attacking lots of people, including Bruce Springsteen. And now some of the most famous rock stars in the world are jumping to his defense. We'll tell you about it when we come back. Okay. Ever since Bruce Springsteen criticized the president on stage during a concert last week, Trump has been firing off insults toward him. Today, Trump even posted an edited video of himself hitting the singer with a golf ball. And now other rock stars are rushing to Springsteen's defense. Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder said it to show that part of free speech is open discussion. Part of democracy is healthy public discourse. The name calling is so beneath us. And Neil Young posted this on his website. Stop thinking about what rockers are saying. Think about saving America from the mess you made. You're forgetting your real job. You work for us. I'm not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us. Amen to that. That does it for me today. You can catch the show Tuesday through Friday at 9pm Eastern on MSNBC. And don't forget to follow the show on Blue Sky, Instagram and TikTok for now. Goodbye from Washington, and we'll see you next week.
- [42:42]
Rachel Maddow
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