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That's Norton Dotcom Matto to save 25 percent off The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC. Rachel is quarantining after a close contact tested positive for covid-19, but she will be back soon, real soon. Fun fact. She's going to join us live from quarantine later this hour. We're also going to talk live with Stacey Abrams shortly. So lots to get to, but we start tonight on a damp and windy day in Oxford, England, in nineteen fifty four when a twenty five year old med student attempted to do something that no human being had ever done before.

Oxford running for three days against the university. Roger Bannister limbers up for a planned attack on that four minute mile never before achieved by Matt. In May of nineteen fifty four, Roger Bannister was the first person on earth to run a mile in under four minutes flat, he ran his four laps around the track and hit the tape in three minutes, fifty nine point four seconds crack. Experts who follow this sort of thing say that had it not been for the wind, he probably would have shaved another second off his time.

Roger Bannister made headlines all over the world because no one had thought it possible for a human being to run so fast. The New York Times called it, quote, one of man's hitherto unattainable goals. The sub four minute mile Roger Bannister did it. He attained the unattainable. Now, he said after the race, quote, I felt pretty tired at the end, but I knew that I would just about make it, end quote. And we may not all be athletes running a mile would probably take me into double digits.

But for those of us who have made it this far in the Trump presidency, for those of us who've had to endure an election night that turned into election weeks, we can all empathize with Roger Bannister and his pretty tired legs. For us, it's been more of a marathon than a sprint. Instead of four laps, it's been four years. But unlike Roger Bannister, we have yet to cross that finish line because this president will not let this election end.

Today, the president initiated yet another last ditch effort to try to overturn the legitimate results of this election by calling for a recount in the state of Wisconsin. Now, it is, of course, well within his right to call for a recount in Wisconsin. The race was super tight there. Joe Biden appears to have won the state by less than one percent to fully recanvas. All the ballots in the state would cost the president's campaign about eight million dollars.

And don't get me wrong, eight million dollars is a lot of money. But if you're the president, if you've been blabbering for weeks about how this election has been a sham, that there's been rampant voter fraud, you'd think eight million dollars would be a price worth paying to prove it to the American people, that you were correct, that you were indeed the rightful winner of Wisconsin. Right. Well, if we know anything about this president, it's that we know he likes a good deal.

The recount in Wisconsin funded by the president's campaign, will actually not be a full recount of the entire state, but rather a partial recount of just two counties. Those two counties happen to be the most populous counties in the state and swung heavily for Joe Biden. And wouldn't you know it, they also happened to be the most racially diverse areas of Wisconsin.

That strategy is a carbon copy of what we saw last night in Michigan when the Republicans on the canvassing board in Wayne County and Michigan's largest, bluest, most diverse county tried to hold hostage the certification of the ballots to delay Joe Biden's official victory in Michigan, because that's how Trump and his allies and his legal guns are trying to overturn this election in his favor. What they are saying is that there was widespread voter fraud across the country. But as Rachel likes to say, watch what they do, not what they say, because they are not worried about widespread anything.

Their strategy is targeted to diminish and discount and disenfranchise Democratic voters, generally speaking, non white Democratic voters, to try and chip away at Joe Biden's lead in places like Detroit and Milwaukee and Philadelphia in Atlanta and flip the results of this election. It's exactly what President Trump's top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was arguing in court in federal court yesterday. For the first time in twenty eight years, Rudy Giuliani entered a federal courtroom as a practicing attorney yesterday to represent the president and his legal battle in Pennsylvania to try to halt the certification of the election results in Joe Biden's favor.

And let me tell you, it did not go well. Giuliani began his arguments by claiming, quote, The best description of this situation is it's a widespread nationwide voter fraud and quote, But again, what the Trump campaign is arguing here is that widespread fraud is really just happening in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the two bluest parts of the state. Just get rid of those ballots, Your Honor. And the rest of the state looks peachy keen to us.

Part of his evidence included a picture of a woman looking through binoculars. Giuliani said she was a Republican ballot observer who was forced to stand so far away from the ballot she needed binoculars to see the ballot. You couldn't say where or when the picture was taken, only that he understands it was taken in Philadelphia.

If you're feeling like this argument doesn't make much sense, it's because it doesn't.

Now, granted, I'm not a lawyer, but to be honest, after yesterday's performance, I'm not convinced Rudy Giuliani is either. This was an actual snippet of Rudy Giuliani's performance in court yesterday. Giuliani in the plaintiffs counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and sure, opacity, I'm not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see. Right. The judge responds. It means you can't. Opacity means you can't see Joe Biden won this election.

Joe Biden will be inaugurated, the 42nd president of the United States on January 20th. But because of Trump's continued nonsense, we will have to keep our tired legs running just a little bit longer. This race to the finish line isn't quite over. We've got one more lap to run, especially because while all the votes to decide the presidency have been cast, the same cannot be said for the United States Senate. There are, of course, two Senate races still outstanding in Georgia.

Those two races will take place on January the 5th and will decide which party controls the Senate next term. Joe Biden, of course, won the state of Georgia this year, Georgia turned out its most diverse electorate in recent history. African-American turnout was up 20 percent compared to twenty sixteen. Hispanic turnout was up by 72 percent. That's a big reason why Joe Biden is the first Democrat to win Georgia since nineteen ninety two. And so now the Georgia's electoral votes are officially out of their grasp, the president and his Republican allies are ripping a page out of the playbook that they've been running in Wisconsin and in Pennsylvania and in Michigan with the control of the Senate hanging in the balance.

Republicans are now laser focused on blue, mostly black, diverse voting pockets of Georgia to find new ways of disenfranchising Democratic voters in the newly turned blue southern state. So as we embark on this bumpy, fraught final lap of the 20 20 election, keep your guard up and your eyes open. Closing out this chapter of history will indeed be remembered as one of man's hitherto unattainable goals. So channel Roger Bannister. He was tired at the end, but he knew that he would just about make it.

I want to bring someone into this conversation who's going to help Democrats in the final leg of this race to bring them over the finish line, Stacey Abrams ran for governor in Georgia in twenty eighteen if it were not for a coordinated Republican effort to suppress Democratic votes in Georgia. Stacey Abrams said she would be governor today, but her race was not in vain. The grassroots work that she did in Georgia during and after her campaign helped cement the right to vote for everyone in Georgia to stop what happened to her from ever happening again.

It is this woman's work that has been credited with helping Joe Biden win the state of Georgia this year. Joining me now, Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and the founder of Fair Fight Action. Miss Abrams, good to see you and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Let's talk about the strategy heading into these two runoffs, there's nothing to celebrate yet in Georgia. We've got the presidential election largely behind us, but for a certification and an audit issue.

But there are two very serious Senate races that are going to happen on January 5th.

What's the strategy? Well, first, we have to celebrate what we accomplished in November, because that's one of the reasons we have a pathway in January, we have to remind voters that they can start again with absentee ballots. We won absentee ballots in the November election. We can win it again in January. But we also have to remind voters what the Senate does and why it's so critical that John Asaph and Raphael Warnock represent the state of Georgia and help determine the future of our country.

We know that the strategy is, one, to educate voters about the Senate races and about our two candidates. Two, to raise the level of resources that we need to reach pockets of the state of Georgia that still don't believe in their power to be heard. Three, we need to do the work of making sure that we protect the right to vote. We are watching the two sitting senators do their best to create disinformation and to disenfranchise voters, and even they're willing to attack their own people to create the obfuscation that you spoke of earlier about who should be able to win.

And so our responsibility is to educate those voters, mobilize those voters, and then protect their right to vote so that we can get to victory in January.

So your strategy couldn't be further away apart from what the Republicans have done in this election, your organization registered as many as eight hundred thousand voters in the past two years. Data from The Washington Post shows that only two percent of Georgia's voting population is not registered to vote, which means most of where you are going to be able to make gains is with people who are already registered but maybe didn't vote. Your whole thing is about getting people who otherwise might not be voting to vote.

What's your plan for that? I think the word you use is people who don't they're not convinced of their ability to be heard.

Well, let's be clear, the eight hundred thousand number is a compilation of efforts across the state to make certain that voters who typically were not included in the franchise believe that they should be included and registered to do so. And we have to remember that this is work that not only happened over the last two years, but there's been a 10 year effort to register tens of hundreds of thousands of people of color in the state of Georgia. But now that they are registered, we have to remember there are new people who are eligible to register, folks who are turning 18 and whoever is still in that two percent who needs to be talked to.

We're going to do that work, but we're also going to do the work of reminding people about why the Senate matters. We spend billions of dollars as a nation explaining the importance of the presidency. We've got to do the deep work of explaining the utility and the effectiveness of the US Senate. Not everyone knows that Mitch McConnell has been the reason they haven't received unemployment benefits, that he's the block against most of the resources and the support that we need to survive covid.

And so we've got to do that work. But we've also got to do the work of explaining that David Perdue and Kelly Lefler have done nothing to serve. The people of Georgia have only worked to profit themselves and that John Osthoff and Raphael Warnock are men of courage, men of character and men who are ready to get to work on behalf of all Georgians. But that means that we've got to go back to what turned out. No, no, I did not mean to interrupt you, I'm sorry I was OK, I was just saying we've got to go back to the people who voted in November and remind them that they've got one more thing they have to do.

We've got one more thing to put on their Christmas list. We need them to cast their votes, thank those votes early so that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we've already won this election and we can watch New Year's come in knowing that a new life is ahead for all of us.

The the biggest gains, we're watching this very closely, obviously, on election night and the days after, but the biggest gains Joe Biden made compared to what Hillary Clinton did in twenty sixteen was in that northwest top left part of the state, the Atlanta suburbs. He netted nearly two hundred thousand more votes than Hillary Clinton did there. Atlanta is, of course, Fulton County, Gwinnett DeKalb County around Atlanta. And another six or eight counties are really full of voters.

And that looks like where that and other city, other urban areas, other metro areas look like where there are gains to be had for the Senate race. Do you agree with that?

Absolutely. We can increase our gains there. But we also can't ignore rural Georgia, where we have pockets of Democrats, largely African-American rural voters, who too often get left out of the process and get left out of the efforts of candidates. But John and Rafael are traveling around the state and we're going to be doing the work necessary to not only increase our numbers in metro Atlanta and then the metro areas, but to also include and engage those voters who are being affected most acutely by covid-19, by the failure of David Perdue and Kelly Lefler to provide any support and any resources.

If we work the entire state, we have the ability to put together the math to win this election. One of the interesting things we understand, the rural urban spread, but when Republicans have talked about suburban voters in this context, it is often a synonym for white moderate voters. That's not actually the case in a lot of Georgia. It's absolutely inaccurate. We know that in this election cycle, Asian-American voters increase their participation by 90 one percent from twenty sixteen, that Latino participation increased by seventy two percent, that black participation increased by 20 percent.

Fifty seven percent of Atlanta's popular of Georgia's population is in the metro Atlanta region, which means those are all populations that are represented in the suburbs and the exurbs. And as I said earlier, we have a very large rural population that is black and Latino. Those are all people who are eligible to vote. And so folks go to the Senate dotcom or fair fight dotcom. They can support the work we're doing to ensure that those voices get heard at the ballot box in this election.

The Daily Beast is talking, saying that allies close to you are saying that you plan to run for governor again in twenty twenty two, is that right? No, I've made no decisions about my future other than my future includes making certain that John USCIRF and Raphael Warnock become the next two senators from the great state of Georgia. You've been on opposite sides in the past of lawsuits with Georgia's Republican Secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, over voting rights issues.

Interesting situation he's found himself in in the last few days, pushing back against pressure from the Trump campaign, from Lindsey Graham, from other Republicans to assist in an effort to undermine the results in Georgia. ProPublica is reporting that the Trump campaign has been pressuring him since before the election. So I'm really curious about your take on this. As someone who has been up against Raffensperger, what do you make of how this is playing out? I think that there were market improvements made between June's election and November, but there's still work to do where Brad Ratzenberger does a good job, I celebrate it, including the fact that he's reopened the portal that will allow voters to get their absentee ballots without filling out a piece of paper.

They can do it online. If they want more information, they can go to vote dotcom. But we also know that voter suppression, while we have mitigated it dramatically in Georgia, it still exists. And we're going to be on the lookout. I want Bread Rasenberg to be able to focus on his job, and that is the job of running free and fair elections. And when he is doing that job, I will celebrate it. When he is not doing that job, we will challenge him because every day we should be spending our time thinking about how do we make certain that Georgia citizens can be heard.

And are you feeling like right now he's doing his job as he's resisting pressure from other Republicans and being fairly public about it? Absolutely. Look, we have the right as Americans to litigate, to challenge and to call into question, but we do not have the right to our own facts and we do not have the right to manufacture evidence. We know that this was a free and fair election in Georgia and that Brad Ratzenberger ran the election based on consent decrees and changes that we were able to compel.

And those changes have made it easier for voters to cast their ballots. Donald Trump is entitled to his opinion. He's entitled to being happy about the outcome. But as I did in twenty eighteen, I acknowledge the legal sufficiency of the election. I just simply challenged the system that allowed voters to be disenfranchised. It is time now for Donald Trump to acknowledge that the legal sufficiency of the system says that he is no longer the president. And unlike what happened to me, where we had enough evidence to go to federal court and to see changes made, he has to admit that there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

He can continue to fight, but he's going to lose. Stacey Abrams, you are one of the most watched and important people in Georgia politics right now, which makes you one of the most watched and important people in American politics right now. Thank you for joining us this evening.

Thank you for having me. And a reminder that the Rachel Maddow will be joining us a little later in the show, but first, we're going to speak to someone on the ground in what has become one of the epicenters of the latest covid outbreak with the pandemic wreaking havoc across the country. It's worth noting that the United States Senate has gone home for Thanksgiving early tonight with no sign of any form of a covert relief package. They will not be back until the week of November 30th.

But don't worry, they spent their last day before the break doing the very important work of let me check my notes here. The important work of confirming a thirty three year old lawyer who has only ever handled two cases and who the American Bar Association has rated, not qualified to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. Not like there are more pressing things going on. We'll be right back. From the banana bread phase to the sour dough phase, we've all flixster cooking mussels more now than ever before.

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We clocked more than one hundred and sixty two thousand new coronavirus cases today alone after a week of record setting numbers. And this is not a geographically specific problem. Cases are now rising in all 50 states. And as we know, what follows a surge in cases is a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. But there is a glimmer of hope ahead of us. Pfizer announced today that its coronavirus vaccine, the one that people were already excited about, is now considered ninety five percent effective with no serious side effects.

The company plans to apply for emergency youth use authorization from the FDA, quote, within days. So there is hope that the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine will be available soon. But even when the vaccines are available, we'll need a way to distribute and administer them and a plan to do so. And that requires cooperation and coordination within the federal government and between the federal and state governments. But the Trump administration has been stonewalling the Biden transition, withholding crucial coronavirus information from the Biden team.

During a vital roundtable with frontline workers today, President elect Joe Biden drilled down on the ramifications of a delayed transition on vaccine distribution. And there's a whole lot of things that are just we just don't have available to us, which unless it's made available soon, we're going to be behind by weeks or months being able to put together the whole initiative relating to the biggest promise we have with two drug companies coming along and finding ninety five percent effectiveness efficiency in the vaccines, which is enormous promise.

So I just want to tell you that that's the only slow down right now that we have. Biden shared those concerns with a panel that included a firefighter, an ICU nurse, a school nurse and a whole home health care worker who in turn explained to him their needs and their frustrations with the federal virus response. I think so much of the problem is that there's been no federal plan, no leadership, and it's really hurt us or our health department here in Cleveland really is bare bones.

It's still bare bones. Our contact tracers are working 24/7, but they're about four days out there, about four days from contacting a positive case. We're not being given the protection that we need. We need to have optimal PPE for us to prevent airborne and droplet transmissions. We need testing of our workers and patients and contact tracing and notification of exposure for health care workers. Do you know that? I have not been tested yet and I have been on the front lines in the ICU since February.

You're kidding me. That was the president elect off camera incredulously trying to verify what he had just heard. Sadly, none of those front line workers were kidding. Eight months into this pandemic, eight months in and our front line health care workers are still sounding the alarm about the lack of personal protective equipment, the lack of testing and contact tracing, all of which are basic containment measures that we have heard about repeatedly for eight months. Right from the beginning, the experts said testing and contact tracing in particular are key ingredients to slowing the virus and reversing the surge that we are seeing nationwide now.

But in some places, the virus is so bad that contact tracing is next to impossible places like North Dakota, which currently has the highest covid mortality rate in the world, one contact trace here in North Dakota wrote in an op ed in The Washington Post describing how drastically her work as a contact tracing has changed since the virus began to overwhelm the state. She explains, quote, Things got so bad so fast that we surrendered one of our key weapons against the pandemic test and trace went by the wayside.

Even if we had enough staff to call up everyone's workplace and contact, there are so many new infections that it wouldn't be as effective at this point. The government has given up on following the virus path through the state. All we can do is notify people as quickly as possible that they have the virus, she continues. Quote, What began as a 15 hour a week position is now around the clock job. My phone buzzes constantly with calls and texts from my cases, reporting symptoms and asking questions.

Legally, I'm not allowed to give medical advice, but I direct them to the right services and sources of information. Mostly I just try to listen. Some people, when they are sick and in isolation, just want to talk to someone so they don't feel so alone when you get down to it. Listening to a person's worries is both. The least I can do and the most I can do to help, which is awful to think about. Joining me now is Kylie Langtang, a North Dakota contact racer and senior nursing student at the University of North Dakota.

Kylie, thank you for joining us. Thank you for what you do. There are people like you, thousands of them across America who we don't know unless the phone rings. And because I travel, my phone does ring from contact tracers and they're just trying to gather some basic information from me that gets put into a system that is supposed to give us a map to sort of tell us to give us advance notice of what's going on, to be able to warn people who've been in contact with me and to give authorities some sense of where this virus is going.

You said that at some point, North Dakota kind of had to abandon the idea that they they're actually tracing this virus. Yeah, so and it wasn't so much that we ended up giving up, it was more of we couldn't keep up with it. People were either having contact lists of maybe only three people to 50 different people in one place. It became a necessity of it's more important to contact the cases that are positive and spreading than it was to contact every single contact at that point.

Talk to me about what good contract tracing looks like, how is it supposed to go down? Yeah, so good contact tracing and what we had done originally is we would be assigned cases once they test positive, we usually call them, they would already know that they were positive through the clinic or the testing site. And then we would get all of their demographic information, health and medical history stuff that was more important. And you'd move on to more of where where have you worked, where have you been, who have you been around and putting all of those places into the system.

Now, unfortunately, again, that's not something that we can do. And if you were able to do what you originally designed, the way it was originally designed, how effective is that? What's the goal there that you can figure out everywhere this place, this person has been and with whom they've been in contact and then what? Try and find all those other people? Yeah, so the whole thing is to I would get a list of everybody that you've been around and then I would contact them individually and say you have been exposed to covid-19.

You need to isolate for 14 days. And then they would be inputted into the system and get monitored themselves as well. Talk to me about how this goes. Obviously, each one of these calls is different. You don't have to divulge anything that you're not allowed to divulge. But generally speaking, what happens when you call someone? How do they respond to you? Yes, so now it's usually kind of like it was said in that article, people are almost very resigned about it.

It's like, of course it was. I thought so. So it's usually just starts with, hi, is this so-and-so? And have you been made aware of your test results? And then you get their day of birth, confirm who they are and just start talking to them. I like to form a relationship with people more so maybe than others, but it's a scary time, especially if it's your whole family or it's an older person. It's scary.

So it's offering all of that, getting their information, seeing if they've worked, letting them know this was when you were infectious. This is who you need to notify. We give need to isolate letters so they can provide that to their employers. And then I usually just leave my personal contact information for them to reach out if they ever need anything. And you are still running into some people who don't take this seriously. Yeah, yeah, sadly, we are so there are still a good amount, I would say it's less now, but originally, yes, there was a lot of this is political.

This is a hoax or I mean, it's not happening in North Dakota. It's not needed here. That's not true. So thankfully, now it's kind of toned down and people are more serious about it. But we're still seeing huge numbers of cases and hospitalizations and yeah, it's going downhill. Kayla, you have one of the most important jobs in America, and I will say that six months ago or eight months ago, I didn't even know such a job existed.

I didn't know what this was all about. We heard these terms. We were told contact tracing is going to be the most important thing. It's an honor to speak to you. Thank you. History will smile upon you in the thousands of others across America who are doing this important work. Kaley Langtang is a North Dakota contact racer and a senior nursing student at the University of North Dakota. Thank you for your work and thank you for your time today.

Thank you. Well, you are likely to recognize our next guest from her own show, The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel joins us live from her quarantine after the break. We get support from fundrise fundrise makes it easy for all investors to diversify by building you a portfolio of institutional quality real estate investments. So whether you're just starting to invest in real estate or looking to add more, our friends at fundrise have you covered. Here's how Fundrise is an investing platform that makes investing in high quality, high potential real estate as easy as investing in your favorite stock or mutual fund to date.

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That's Fundly RISC dotcom programs to have your first 90 days of advisory fees waived. In a town where disagreement is par for the course today, there was one thing that almost all of Washington could agree on, namely that the government's top election security cyber cybersecurity official Chris Krebs, did a great job protecting our democracy and did not deserve to be fired. Chris Krebs was dismissed last night via presidential tweet after he repeatedly pushed back on Trump's claims of election fraud and after his agency refused White House requests to edit or remove informational, accurate content, which was pushing back against Trump's false election claims, most notably cybersecurity and infrastructure.

Security Agency Cesa, a unit within the Department of Homeland Security last week called the November 3rd election, quote, the most secure in American history, adding that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised, end quote. Democrats today reacted to Krebs firing with predictable outrage, but notably they were joined by many Republicans, including some of the president's most ardent defenders in Congress. It's the president's prerogative, but I think it just adds to the confusion.

I'm I'm I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to return to this a little more of a. What I don't even know what it's what's normal. Of course, while Chris Krebs is rightfully earning plaudits and an enhanced reputation for a job well done and for standing up to this president, this lack of normalcy is likely to continue for the remaining nine weeks left to go in this administration. We all need a way to get through it. So I'm happy to give you one.

I'm happy to say that joining us now to discuss the story and others is someone who obviously needs no introduction on this show or anywhere else, the inestimable Rachel Maddow. Rachel. It is so great to see you here. I'm going to ask you the first question on behalf of all of your viewers. How are you? I am great and I just let me just start by saying how thankful I am to you for doing for stepping in for me on zero notice and doing this at length.

You've just been fantastic. And my staff loves working with you. And you just I've been watching every night and you guys are doing an amazing job. And so I am grateful to you for making it possible for me to be in quarantine, which is which has been a trip. But I'm I'm fine. I have continued to test negative through this whole thing, which means that I'm getting close to the end of my quarantine period. I will hopefully, I think, potentially be back hosting either tomorrow night or the night after, in which case I will have more to say about where I've been and what I've been doing and what it's been like.

I definitely have some stuff to say about that, and I want to let people know what's been going on. But bottom line is, I'm grateful to you and I'm fine. And I will be back in something that looks like your chair pretty soon. Well, you come in the time that is needed for you to come, and as I remind our viewers all the time, this continues to be your staff who put the show together and it has your DNA.

And it's so we're glad for that. I want to ask you about this topic. We were just talking about Chris Krebs, a man who was responsible for trying to keep at least outside interference and cyber interference out of our election. He told people last week he thought he was going to get fired. Then last night, in typical fashion, he got fired by tweet for doing his job. The president directly contradicted him, saying he was wrong about what he said this election was not safe.

Votes were changed. Votes that were cast for Trump became Biden votes and Chris Krebs is now no longer there. What do you make of this?

A couple of things. I mean, in terms of Krebs himself, I feel like it's worth reflecting on the fact that I don't know that there is anybody else who has served, particularly at a high level in the Trump administration, who has come out of it, not just with an enhanced reputation for having done a job very well and done right by the country and taken something that was very, very difficult that other people have had a really hard time with and sort of nailing it, doing it well, but also leaving not just with this badge of honor, of being fired by the president for having done his job well, but leaving without having compromised himself, without having bit his tongue, without having kowtowed to the president or compromised himself in any way that was trying to either stave off himself, being fired or trying not to rock the boat or trying to go along to get along, which so many good people have fallen prey to, because that's the way the president manipulates people and gets what he wants.

And so I think Chris Krebs is being lauded justifiably by people on all sides of the ideological spectrum and all levels of government for having done a really good job. But he also really, in some ways, stands alone in terms of having done well and done right and not having himself to the vagaries of this president. I think that's really important. I will also say, though, Ali, that I think there's an institutional thing to watch out for, because part of the reason we started talking about Crabb's potentially being fired last week was when a divisional chief at got fired, then crêpes himself got fired.

His deputy also got fired. What's happened is this agency has been decapitated. And that has a couple of risks. One is that the system doesn't just work on election security. They are responsible, for example, for protecting vaccine researchers from what appears to be a robust international malign effort to interfere with and steal vaccine data by actors like potentially North Korea, Iran, Russia. That's really important. We reported in recent weeks on hospitals being hit with ransomware attacks, Russian speaking gangs from the former Soviet Union hitting US hospitals in the middle of this pandemic with ransomware attacks and locking up their computer systems.

That's also within ISIS's remit. We need an agency that's good at that stuff.

But also in terms of the election, I mean, there are still being counted. There are recounts happening. There are certification tallies that are coming up. And people, including senators on the Intelligence Committee, have warned that this is one of the times when we are quite vulnerable to disinformation and potentially foreign interference as somebody might target the understanding of the American people to try to confuse us and upset us and muddy the results of the election now as it is being finalized and finally tabulated.

And so to have Cesa, which Krebs ran so well, not just to have him oust it, but to have all the whole upper echelons of the agency taken out for these reasons at this time is very dangerous for lots of different reasons. And I'm I'm very, very uncomfortable with not just what this means for crêpes, but what the implications are for our national security. Rachel, one of the reasons I would like you back is because rather than doing it myself, I'd like to hear your narration of this legal clown car that is driving around the United States, stopping in Michigan last night with the board of canvassers in Wayne County not agreeing to certify Detroit's election results.

Then 15 million, three hours later after getting pressure, decided to do so. Rudy Giuliani walking into a court case after twenty eight years of walking into a courtroom in Philadelphia, not really understanding the law very well. Republicans putting pressure on the secretary of state of Georgia. It is a bit of a clown car, but they are doing stuff to stop this election from being certified and to stop the Biden administration from taking the reins and getting their transition moving.

Yeah, that's right, and I think you had a really interesting, good conversation with Stacey Abrams about this earlier in the hour, Ali, and I think that one thing that's that's interesting that we can see at work is what you were talking about with her, about the secretary of state in Georgia, the Republican secretary of state, who's absolutely been involved in contentious voting rights disputes with voting rights advocates like Abrahamsson and with Democrats in Georgia, but is emerging here as a sort of normal Republican and not a Trump Republican in the sense that he's not exactly a champion of voting rights in Georgia.

Georgia's had all these troubles, but he's also not willing to go along with the insanity of the Trump Republican claims that the Georgia election should be thrown out because of some magic dust that they've imagined they can cast over those election results. So I do think that this is accelerating in some small ways with Republican elections officials, whether it's the local commissioners in Pennsylvania or the secretary of state in Georgia or other people who are just sort of regular elected officials who are responsible for election integrity, finding themselves affronted by the president and what his legal team are trying to do in a way that I think maybe is giving us a little bit of a peek at a post Trump Republican Party or at least where the schism might be between Trump ism and Republicanism as we move forward.

Also, though, I will admit to having good to see you unsettled, unsettled by that Wayne County thing. It only lasted for three hours, but that was an unsettling. It was an unsettling three hours.

I don't you know, we started the show with the lieutenant governor and at that point, the votes weren't certified. And literally, as we finished the interview, we got news that they had voted again. So in one hand, I'm very settled by the idea that that public pressure did lead them to change that. But it was very unsettling that can these after all this election, after all this democracy we worked so hard for, after all the work that Stacey Abrams does to get people registered to vote, this is how it can be stopped.

That was worrisome. Rachel. It is great to see you. I guess I should have had you hold up today's newspaper just so that people your viewers know that this was actually you today live. You come here, you come back when you are ready to do so if it's tomorrow or Friday. But we are looking forward to having you back. Thank you, my friend.

I will do so. Thank you all. And again, thank you so much for coming this so ably. We are all of us at times are so lucky to have you, my friend. Thank you. It is absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Rachel. More news at. Stay with us. Barack Obama's historic election night victory in November 2008 paved the way for what used to be a normal, smooth and orderly presidential transition. The very next day, Obama unveiled his transition website, Change Dot Gov, in which he took questions from the general public.

The most popular of the more than 70 thousand questions that poured in was whether he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of CIA torture and illegal surveillance by the Bush administration. But despite enormous pressure from his liberal base and some Democratic lawmakers who wanted criminal inquiries into Bush era torture and terrorism suspects, the new president elect nine days before he was due to be sworn in made it clear it was time to turn the page. I don't believe that anybody is above the law, on the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.

So no 9/11 Commission with independent subpoena power. We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation is going to be to move forward.

Twelve years later, President elect Joe Biden is facing the same questions as he and that he and Obama face following their election victory, except this time the questions of criminality relate not to the previous administration, but to the president himself. President Trump currently faces a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office and a civil investigation from New York's attorney general. As the latest New York Times magazine cover story notes, no ex president has ever been indicted before, but no president has ever left office with so much potential criminal liability.

If history is any guide, the desire to move on will only grow stronger in the weeks and months ahead. But how does the country move on from a president whose disregard for the law has been so constant and so pervasive? And while many have cited the need for Trump to be held accountable by the incoming administration, it seems Biden himself is not so inclined. NBC News reports that Biden has privately told advisers he does not want his presidency consumed by investigations of his predecessor.

One adviser told NBC Biden has made it clear that he just wants to move on. Joining us now, Andrew Weissman. He is a former senior member of the special counsel, Robert Mueller's team. He also previously served as FBI general counsel and as the former head of the Department of Justice's criminal fraud section. His inside account of the Mueller investigation is called Where Law Ends. Andrew, good to see you again. Thank you for being with us. You know what we were talking about?

Impeachment. There were a lot of there's a lot of political pressure not to impeach the president. When the when the Democrats won control of the House, there was some sense of get on with the work of the people. And others said and a lot of people use the legal argument that there's an obligation to do something if the president has done has committed impeachable offenses. There's an obligation. It's not a preference. Where do you stand on this? Is there an obligation for the Biden administration to pursue Donald Trump's criminality from when he was in office or prior?

So we're going to be in a very different situation. We're going to be as of January 20th, twenty twenty one in a situation where we no longer are talking about indicting the president, but rather a former president, somebody who is a civilian. And the question is going to be, does the rule of law apply to that person?

And it's very hard to see an argument if it is shown, for instance, that in the Manhattan district attorney's office that the president has committed tens of millions of dollars of tax fraud or bank fraud or both, and any other person would normally be prosecuted, then it really shouldn't be the case that just because he becomes president, that he shouldn't have the day in court where a jury decides whether or not he committed those crimes prior to becoming president. And with respect to his conduct in office, you have to remember in the Mueller report, there is substantial evidence that the president obstructed justice and whether it's obstructed the special counsel investigation.

And to me, that's even more important to vindicate. If you are not going to hold a president accountable for a special counsel investigation obstruction, then there's no reason to actually have a special counsel in the future. Now, there's the precedent that you're setting in the future is don't bother appointing a special counsel because there isn't going to be any accountability to a president who obstructs that investigation. An animal over your right shoulder. That is my English cocker spaniel making himself very comfortable, very cute, very cute.

I want you to evaluate the statement from the New York Times magazine. It says, The stakes of an indictment could be very high. Putting him on trial for his conduct as president would be tantamount to putting on trial more than seventy two million Americans who voted for his re-election. How do you evaluate that? You know, I think that's looking at it the wrong way. Remember, a jury is going to have to make the decision and is going to have to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt in the same way any other defendant is entitled to all of the due process rights that we have in this country.

And Donald Trump, if he were to be indicted, whether federally or by the Manhattan district attorney's office, would enjoy all of those same rights in the same way, for instance, that Paul Manafort went to trial and a jury made up of citizens from a cross-section of the community made a decision regardless of politics, whether someone's a Democrat or Republican, just on the facts and the law. And Donald Trump would face the same kind of jury making that determination.

Ed, good to see you as always, my friend. I think we should make it a law that people with animals should have them in their shots because it really just makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable than otherwise. Andrew Weissman is a former senior member of the special counsel Robert Mueller's team. We will be right back. All right, that does it for us tonight. Rachel's likely back here tomorrow, but as you heard from her own mouth, it will be soon.

I'm going to see you Saturday morning on my show, Velshi at 8:00 Eastern on The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at 9:00 Eastern on MSNBC.

Hi, it's MSNBC's Ali Velshi. You know, these days there's just so much news to wrap your head around. It's hard to know what's most important. That's why we're updating MSNBC Dotcom with a special feature on our homepage called MSNBC Daily. It's a place where you'll find the same type of expert analysis you're used to getting on TV. But now with a new written perspective section all neatly organized in one place so you can go beyond the headlines and get a deeper understanding of the stories that matter most.

You'll find perspectives written by people uniquely qualified to write them.

People you're familiar with from our network, like Barbara McQuade writing about legal matters. Dr. Kavita Patel weighing in on public health. Liz Plank giving her take on women's rights and gender issues. And I'm excited to share that. I'll be writing some pieces of my own. So visit MSNBC Dotcom today and look for our new feature, MSNBC Daily.