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That's Norton dot com slash matto to save 25 percent off the Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC. We are following a number of developing stories tonight, including one story derive from these court documents that were just unsealed in federal court in Washington, D.C. tonight. And I will tell you in advance, I will tell you right up front that the story that is derived from these newly unsealed documents, the story itself is still sort of shielded in a lot of mystery tonight, in part because these documents that were just released are still almost totally redacted.

And all those black bars on the pages really brings back memories. This for me forever is going to be the sense memory of the Donald Trump administration. REDACTED, redacted, redacted. What this is, is a 20 page long order from the top judge in the federal court in D.C., Chief Judge Beryl Howell. Judge Howell issued this order in late August. She only made it public today. And I say she made it public. As I showed you, a whole bunch of it is still blacked out.

But what we can see in the bits that aren't blacked out is sort of showstopping. What this document reveals is that federal prosecutors that the US Department of Justice have been actively investigating what the judge describes here as a, quote, bribery for pardons scheme, a, quote, secret lobbying scheme and bribery conspiracy by which some number of people were suspected of arranging bribes to the president in the form of, quote, substantial political contributions. The substantial political contributions would be the bribe.

The official act they wanted from the president in return for that bribe was allegedly, quote, a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence for a person whose name is blacked out. So this document unsealed today, although still heavily redacted, what it shows technically, what this sort of the work of the court that is revealed by this document is that Judge Howle approved a request from these federal prosecutors back in August when the prosecutors were asking to look at stuff that had been seized under a search warrant as part of this criminal investigation.

Some office was raided this past summer. And from that office, what was seized were apparently more than 50 electronic devices, computer drives, laptops, iPads, iPhones, thumb drives that were all seized by search warrant as part of this federal criminal investigation into whether Trump presidential pardons were for sale in exchange for cash contributions. The judge looking at that evidence, looking at the circumstances under which that evidence was collected, ruled in this order that we can now see today that those materials seized under that search warrant could be handed over to prosecutors to help them build their case.

That's what this order is and and that's all we know. This order was unsealed today still with lots of redactions by order of the judge who allowed prosecutors to see that material that was seized as part of that investigation. We don't know of anybody being charged in this case. We haven't seen anything that looks like public charges brought against anybody in a case like this, although sometimes in some cases for some amount of time, a charges like this might be kept under seal until the person is actually brought to court to face these charges.

We also don't know who the person is. They were allegedly trying to buy a Trump pardon for we don't know about any level of potential involvement by the White House here other than the fact that they were apparently being targeted by this scheme. But behold, this exists. And at least as late as this summer, a Trump pardon bribery scheme was under investigation by the US Justice Department. We're going to get some updated reporting on that over the course of the hour tonight.

But I have to tell you this strange and still largely unexplained development arrives tonight on top of just an ongoing avalanche of other news about the election and potential pardons, including late breaking news tonight that the president may be seeking to pardon Jared Ivonka, Don Jr. Eric and Rudy Giuliani. Also news tonight about the Justice Department and some unexpected hurlyburly around the relationship between the Justice Department and the president at the time, the increasingly unhinged craziness around the president at this point in him continuing to deny the fact that he lost the reelection, his reelection effort that continues to escalate to almost unimaginable levels.

One of the president's lawyers, although is she still they kind of tried to disown her this weekend, so I don't know if she's still one of his lawyers, he certainly tweets about her like she's still his lawyer. I don't know. She put out a statement. She promoted a statement last night that called on the president to block the Electoral College from convening. She called on the president to declare an insurrection in the country so he could put the US military on the streets.

She called on him to call off the Biden inauguration for January 20th, and she called on him to install a military commission to investigate the election. The statement also called on President Trump to eliminate to to call off to at least suspend the two U.S. Senate elections in Georgia next month. OK, sure seems legit, right? Why not go ahead with all those things? I mean, whether or not you are interested in the increasingly insane online musings of one of the president's disowned lawyers, you should know that the president did today after she posted that the president today did publicly call for the two US Senate elections in Georgia next month to be called off.

He's going along with that part of it. The president saying today that Georgia's governor should call those Senate elections off. You should also know that the lawsuit the Trump folks have filed in Georgia includes an affidavit describing a fraud fantasy about the Georgia election submitted by the guy who runs what's now called eight Thakoon. Most of it used to be eight Channe, which is the message board that's now hosted in Russia, which carries all the pro Trump. Q And on conspiracy theory stuff, his affidavit is included in the Trump lawsuit in Georgia.

He's the same guy who today started a new conspiracy theory attacking a specific young election worker in Georgia that quickly led to all the pro Trump Kuhnen people posting that guy's full name and address and chasing down his family and threatening to kill them. Nice work, if you can get it, nice people, right? Quite an elite strike force team. They've got going. They're working on behalf of the president of the United States. That all led to this today from Republican Gabriel Sterling.

He's the voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state's office. I'm going to do my best to keep it together because. It has all gone too far. All of it. Joe DiGenova today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran Cesa to be shot, a 20 something check in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an E.M.S. to a county computer so he could read it.

It has to stop. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up and take a position of leadership, show some. My boss, Secretary Raffensperger, his address is out there. They have people doing caravanserai of their house. They've had people come onto their property. His wife of 40 years is getting sexualised threats through her cell phone.

It has to stop. This is elections, this is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It's too much, yes, fight for every legal vote. Go through your due process, we encourage you use your First Amendment. That's fine. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation, it's too much. It's not right. They've lost the moral high ground to claim that it is. I don't have all the best ways to do this because I'm angry and the straw that broke the camel's back today is in this 20 year old contract for a voting system company just trying to do his job.

It's families getting harassed. Now, there's a noose out there with his name on it. It's it's not like I've got police protection outside my house. Fine. You know, I took a high profile job. I get it, Secretary. I ran for office, a wife and got to this kid, took a job. He just took a job. And it's just wrong. I can't begin to explain the level of anger I have right now for this.

And every American, every Georgian, Republican and Democrat alike should have that same level of anger. Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We're investigating. There's always a possibility I get and you have the rights to go to the courts what you don't have the ability to do. And you need to step up and say this is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot.

Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right. I that's not right. And I don't have anything scripted. This is like I said, I'll do my best to keep it together.

All of this is wrong.

All of this is wrong. That is the cold, hard fury of Gabriel Sterling is one of the top elections official, is basically the top operations official for the election system in the state of Georgia. After he made those remarks, a reporter asked him to clarify what he meant when he said at the outset of his remarks, Senators, you haven't condemned this language or these actions. And he clarified to that reporter that he meant Republican US Senators Kelly Lefler and David Perdue.

They are the two incumbent senators running in those runoff elections to try to hold on to their seats in January. The elections, the president now says, should be called off. I'm talking about Senator David Perdue and Senator Kelly Lefler, two people who may still support in the election booth, but they need to step up on this particular thing. And that's me speaking as a Republican, not this office, because I've probably stepped out of line, but I'm kind of pissed.

I'm kind of pissed. He says they need to step up on this particular thing. How is the state of Georgia today? You know, the president and the Republican Party and the president's lawyers, Mr. Giuliani really getting twenty thousand dollars a day reported. That's what he asked for, I think is I think that's what he's getting, 20 grand a day. I don't know if that's a Giuliani is getting, but financially as a group, they are cleaning up with this act.

One hundred and seventy million dollars they have raised with this act just since the election. Now, I know large numbers sometimes all sound comparable, but if you wanna put that one hundred and seventy million dollars in context, it means that Trump and these folks have found a way to use these conspiracy theories about the election to raise money at a faster clip right now than they were raising money before the election. Think about that. Turns out they have figured out how to shake more money out of their supporters by losing the election and inventing scare stories about it.

Then they were able to squeeze out of them by actually just trying to win the election outright in advance over one hundred and seventy million dollars. That's beyond Trump's wildest dreams in terms of how much he can still get out of people. And where's that money going? It's not that hard to figure out. It's there in the fine print. It turns out that a big chunk of that money is going to the Republican Party. So this will now be the financial DNA of the Republican Party moving forward.

It's also true that a small portion of this money may be going to these space alien conspiracy theory lawsuits that they're filing around the country still. But the vast bulk of it is going to what's called a leadership PAC for Trump himself. And a leadership PAC in this instance is basically a slush fund for the president himself that he can use to pay not just for political activity. He can use it to pay for his lifestyle. He can use it to pay for everything up to and including his personal expenses like food and travel and rent and haircuts and makeup, very wide pants and very long ties.

I mean, he can even just take the money for himself as income. He can just pay himself from this hundred and seventy million dollar slush fund that he is building off of these conspiracy theories and crazy whack job lawsuits. Nice work if you can get it right. I'll tell you, though, the whack job lawsuits are not going great. They appear to be devolving over time. There's this new Wisconsin one from the Trump lawyers that includes the demand that Trump's lawyers should be given video footage of the vote counting at the TCF Center.

The TCV center is in Detroit. Detroit is a nice place, but it is not in Wisconsin. Detroit is in Michigan. And this is supposed to be a Wisconsin lawsuit. That Wisconsin lawsuit also cites as a named plaintiff in the case, a Republican congressional candidate who lost his race this year and who had no idea until today that they were going to use his name as the plaintiff in the case. He now wants them to stop. Quote, I learned through social media today that my name was included in a lawsuit without my permission.

So losing Republican congressional candidate Darren Derek Van Orden quote, To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin, but they're using his name anyway, and they're trying to make Detroit a city in Wisconsin, whatever works, whatever works to wring more money out of all of us suckers.

Attorney General William Barr gave an interview to the Associated Press today in which he said this, quote, We have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election. It's the same kind of proclamation about the election not being rigged that got the cybersecurity director at Homeland Security, Chris Krebs, fired in a tweet from the president. That quickly led to another one of the president's charming lawyers saying on right wing Boston talk radio yesterday that Chris Krebs should be assassinated for having said that the election was not marred by fraud.

The president's lawyer said on talk radio yesterday that Chris Krebs should be shot, he should be murdered. Krebs told The Today Show this morning that the president's lawyer who said that should expect to have to answer for that in court soon. Chris Krebs also published this op ed in The Washington Post tonight. See the headline there. Trump fired me for saying this, but I'll say it again. The election wasn't rigged. Krebs says, quote, On November 17th, I was dismissed as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a Senate confirmed post in a tweet from President Trump.

That was after my team and other election security experts rebutted claims of hacking in the twenty twenty election on Monday, meaning yesterday, lawyer for the president's campaign plainly stated that I should be executed. Krebs says, quote, I am not going to be intimidated by these threats from telling the truth to the American people. He says, quote, The twenty twenty election was the most secure in US history. The success should be celebrated by all Americans, not undermined in the service of a profoundly un-American goal.

That's Chris Krebs. I don't think that Attorney General William Barr would wear getting fired by President Trump as a badge of honor the way that Chris Krebs rightfully does here. But in any case, Barr knows how to protect himself and how to play the game. Just absolutely stunning today from Bill Barr today. Get the timing of this, even as the Associated Press was publishing their interview with William Barr, where where he said it's true there wasn't any substantial fraud in this election, nothing that would overturn the results.

Even as the AP was publishing that interview with that quote from Barr today, Barr was trooping up to the White House personally, while simultaneously he and his office revealed for the first time that just before the election, he secretly promoted the guy who he had assigned to investigate Robert Mueller and to investigate the FBI for having had the temerity to themselves investigate Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Russia interfered in the twenty sixteen election to benefit President Trump. The FBI investigated it.

Mueller investigated whether Trump's campaign was in on it. Barr then assigned this guy, John Durham, to investigate the FBI and Robert Mueller for having looked into those things. Well, today, as he went up to the White House, upon telling the Associated Press there was no fraud in the election, Barr decided that this might be a good time to reveal that two weeks before Election Day, he secretly wrote a letter giving John Durham the title of special counsel because he wants Durham to keep his investigation of Mueller and the FBI going into the Biden administration even after Trump's gone, according to Congressman Adam Schiff, the head of the Intelligence Committee.

This is going to go down as one of those like nice try PR moves from William Barr, but it's not going to work. Shift saying tonight on MSNBC that what Barr did here might be good enough. PR might pull the wool over President Trump's eyes enough to maybe save Bill Barr's job for a few more weeks, even as Barr is no longer going along with the election fraud grift effort that's lining the president's pockets. But as Schiff points out, based on his reading of the statute that actually allows you to create things like special counsel is what Bill Barr is doing here to try to cover his butt won't actually work beyond that.

With the initiation of this investigation and now with this, what I think will be an unsuccessful attempt to prolong the investigation through this secret appointment only disclosed now of Durham as the special counsel, the appointment is not consistent with the language of the statute that he's relying on and can be rescinded, I think, by the next attorney general. I would presume the next attorney general will look to see whether there's any merit to the work that John Durham is doing and make a rational decision about whether that should continue at any level.

In other words, per Congressman Adam Schiff, head of the Intelligence Committee, whoever Joe Biden picks to be the next attorney general of the United States, that's who will make a decision on this, whether the investigation of Mueller and the FBI should continue because the Russia investigation was somehow so terrible. But still, nice try from Attorney General William Barr to saddle the Biden administration with some sort of investigation that he presumably has told Donald Trump they won't be able to get rid of.

Maybe that will make Trump not fire you for saying the election wasn't a fraud. Good luck, sir. I mean, on top of all of that happening, just stacked up today. Now there's this breaking right now on the front page of The New York Times. Trump has discussed with advisers pardons for his three eldest children and Rudolph Giuliani. Oh, Jared's not in the headlines, but apparently Jared's in on this, too. That story is next with one of the reporters who just broke that story.

What an incredible day of news this has been. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Trevor Noah of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, which is also a podcast. Did you miss last night's episode?

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If you had to build a 20, 20 time capsule in advance, this is probably something that you would have invented to put in the 20 20 time capsule, right. Trump has discussed with advisers pardons for his three eldest children and also Rudy Giuliani just posted tonight at The New York Times, quote, President Trump has discussed with advisers whether to grant preemptive pardons to his children, to his son in law and to his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and talked with Mr.

Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week, according to two people briefed on the matter. Trump has told others he's concerned that a Biden Justice Department might target the oldest three of his five children, Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka, as well as Mr. Trump's husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser. Donald Trump Jr has been under investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel for contacts that the younger Mr. Trump had with Russians offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the twenty sixteen campaign, Don Jr.

was never charged. Mr. Kushner provided false information to federal authorities about his contacts with foreigners for his security clearance, but was given a security clearance anyway by the president. The nature of Mr. Trump's concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the Trump organization has expanded to include tax write offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to have gone to Miss Ivanka Trump.

Presidential pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes. Mr. Giuliani's potential criminal exposure is also unclear, although he was under investigation as recently as this summer by federal prosecutors in New York for his business dealings in Ukraine and his role in ousting the American ambassador there. The plot was at the heart of the impeachment of Mr. Trump, a potential legal liability for all of them in addition to the president himself. Now the news breaking that Trump has discussed with advisers pardoning all his kids and Rudy.

Joining us now is one of the reporters who broke that news tonight, Michael Schmidt, Washington correspondent for The New York Times. He's also the author of The New York Times best seller, Donald Trump versus the United States Inside the Struggle to Stop a President. Mr. Schmidt, it's nice to see you. Thanks for being here tonight. Thanks for having me.

So, Mike, can I ask you what advisers the president is talking with this about? Is this the sort of thing that the White House is handling as a matter of the the the appropriate actions of the president and how this might affect the presidency? Or is this the sort of thing that the president's calling his buddies and yapping about? Well, the president will talk to anyone about anything and relies on a range of advisors and lawyers, people inside the White House, people outside the White House, people like Chris Ruddy who run a television network.

So it's a it's a range of people that the president is always talking to, but specifically on this pardon, if he's going to to move forward with these pardons, he would have to do it through the White House counsel's office because it is truly the ultimate expression of presidential power to use the pardon, to use the power that that that legal experts consider to be one of the most sacred ones that a president has. And even in doing that, in granting pardons, preemptive pardons, these are because none of these people have been charged.

The president would really need a lawyer to have a delicate look at this because the language of such a pardon would really matter. Does it cover all conduct that someone did over a period of time? Does it lay out what the crimes may be that the person committed this is not justice simply is saying, Rubber-Stamp, pardon? Granted. And you need lawyers to do that. And like with everything with Trump, he needs his lawyers.

And Mike, one of the things that when you broke the story in the first instance that Giuliani and Trump as recently as last week, we're talking about preemptive pardons for Giuliani, one of the things you noted pointedly in that reporting was that the president would have to, at least to a certain degree, spell out what crimes Rudy might have committed, Mr. Giuliani might have committed, for which he would require this pardon. Presumably that same sort of careful parsing would have to happen if he did try to pardon his his kids as well.

Yes, so we're in sort of like a legal land that is not clearly defined because most pardons of very senior people in government are not tested. So the question would be, if you pardon, one of these people in the Biden Justice Department wanted to do something. The question would have to be answered of what does the pardon apply to? So what is the wording of the pardon? Is it a blanket pardon for all conduct that occurred during Mr. Trump's presidency?

How far does it go back? How specific does it go? Does it does it actually lay out specific crimes like the numbers and the letters about what they may have done to be the most insulated?

Some lawyers would say that you would want for the specific crimes you may have committed to be laid out, but would that protect that person from being prosecuted for other things and other other criminal theories being pushed by the Justice Department? It's it's like many things with the president and the law. It's really unchartered territory. Like the one of the things that we've sort of tried to follow the threads of and it's been very difficult, is the criminal liability for Mr Giuliani in this investigation that seems to have derived from the Southern District of New York that was public reporting about a lot of subpoenas that went out that were related to Mr.

Giuliani and his business practices. We certainly saw his associates charged with multiple felonies for the Ukraine scheme, for campaign finance violations around that. It really did appear like there was an active criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani in NY through a substantial part of of last year. And and some of the threads of those related investigations are still left. PARNAS was and was left partisan. Freeman were both answering an arraignment this week in federal court in New York. How from your reporting, can you tell how live the concern is right now that Mr.

Giuliani might be looking at charges whether or not Trump chooses to preemptively pardon him for them? So the the we know and as we reported in the story, that Giuliani was still being investigated as of last summer, so that was still going on as of last summer, it would be hard to believe that the Justice Department would have indicted Giuliani in the lead up to an election that sort of this period of time, which we've talked about dealing with Comey and stuff in the past about how the justice doesn't want to take actions around an election that may impact voters.

So it seems like the question of indicting Giuliani was off the table. Now, the question is, what are they going to do now if they wanted to indict Giuliani right now, my guess is they would probably hold back on doing that because imagine if Giuliani in the middle of questioning this election, waging this specious campaign in which he's making all these false accusations about voter fraud, was indicted. If that were to happen, then Giuliani would claim that there's a massive conspiracy and that there's all these terrible things going on and it would look political.

So in a sense, if the Justice Department wants to do something in this period of time, it would be very Giuliani's made it hard. Yes, you want to commit. You want to get away with committing a felony, make sure you are leading a parade out in public somewhere, proverbial parade at the time that you think you might end up getting arrested. It's just a remarkable time and it's a remarkable beat. Michael Schmidt, Washington correspondent for The New York Times.

Mr. Schmidt, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for helping us understand your reporting.

Thanks for having me. All right. We got much more to get to tonight on this kind of amazing night in the news. Donald McNeil, long time award winning science reporter for The New York Times, is joining us ahead. Stay with us.

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Again, that's code matto at Madison. Dasch, Reed, Dotcom. More than two thousand four hundred American deaths from covid have been recorded in the past twenty four hours, we are up at twenty four hundred deaths a day now. But the case numbers looking like they do that will keep climbing. In coming weeks, we are due to hit. I mean, I guess we could think of it as one nine elevens worth of deaths per day soon in short order.

Part of the story of covid in America, part of the history of this time will have to be about people who made it worse, bad actors handling it terribly, punching above their weight in terms of the amount of damage they were able to do as the country reeled under the onset of this virus in terms of the spread of the virus. It's one thing to talk about presidential leadership or lack thereof. But the White House, as an institution itself, has continued to prove that it deserves a spot on the list of bad actors who have been spreading this thing for their final holiday season in the White House.

The Trump administration has now announced that they are planning not one, not two, but twenty five separate indoor holiday parties at the White House this month. Their parting gift to the nation evidently being to plan to seed the entire Republican establishment with covid all in one go. And it's not just what they're doing in public that has a real chance of kneecapping the nation's covid response on their way out the door today. Sort of ominous reporting that the head of the FDA, Dr.

Steven Huhn, was summoned to the White House by the president's chief of staff, reportedly to interrogate him on FDA approvals for covid vaccine. Dr. Hunt immediately signaled that he will not let career scientists in charge of approving the vaccine be rushed by the White House. But it should be noted that Dr. Hunt himself was under covid quarantine in isolation and said that the meeting should happen by phone. The White House insisted that he break his quarantine and come to the White House in person.

Keep your eyes on whether or not Dr. Horn keeps his job over the next few days as vaccines start to arrive. With this crisis continuing to spiral with more than four million of us infected last month alone, there will come a time to figure out who is at fault, how we let this happen, who made it worse, including when they knew better. But there's also just the more immediate concern of the overwhelming magnitude of how bad things are right now and how rough the next few weeks.

Really look what it means for the incoming administration about to inherit this mess, what options they will have to try to turn things around and what's going to happen between now and January 20th when they finally get the reins. One of the first American journalists to report on what was then a brand new respiratory disease coming out of China, a man who has been absolutely ahead of everybody else in predicting how this thing would go. He joins us again next. Donald McNeil from The New York Times is our guest next.

Stay with us. The first time this show switched full time to covering the novel coronavirus was in February, it was February twenty eighth. Our guest that night was Donald McNeil, veteran award winning science reporter at The New York Times. Mr. McNeil has since been a guest on this show several times. He has covered epidemics and diseases all over the world for decades. He was the one who was reporting really the first byline in the US reporting early on before covid-19 even had a name about this strange and very transmissible coronavirus that was emerging out of Wuhan in China.

McMeel was one of the first reporters to shock everyone in this country with his early reporting about how Lockdown's and travel restrictions wouldn't just be for China. They'd need to be implemented everywhere to control the spread of this thing called McNeill's coverage and his analysis from the outset. I will tell you, as a person who digests a lot of the stuff, it was considerably more terrifying than most of what else we were hearing at the time. But he really has been proven right over and over again over the course of this thing.

That's why it was sort of shocking. I sort of felt like the earth shifted a little bit in October when always terrifying Donald McNeil shifted himself to a very uncharacteristic, more optimistic tone when he wrote sort of hopeful pieces for the Times, explaining his hopes for the promise of vaccines under development. While some of the vaccines are apparently on their way now. And Donald McNeil is clear, still quite bullish about them. But in today's Times, the top story on the front page of the paper, he interviews two dozen public health experts around the world about the vaccines, about how that's going to work when we get them, and about what we should expect from now until significant numbers of people are vaccinated.

And what he's telling us to brace for now is right there in the headline The Long Darkness Before the Dawn. Joining us now is Donald McNeil, science and health reporter for The New York Times. Mr. McNeil, it's a real honor to have you back with us. Thanks for making the time. Thank you for inviting me and I'm sorry you had your own brush covid with your partner, you know, nothing is more terrifying than knowing somebody who suffered from it and nothing more convincing, I hope, than knowing somebody who's covered it.

And unfortunately, those parts of the countries that parts of the country now, they're just beginning to feel that. But anyway, sorry to go on to say no, thank you.

Thank you for saying it. I will tell you that I think that I mean, the reason I talked about it publicly, even though was kind of opening my guts for the world, is because I do think that for myself and for a lot of people, it is scary to imagine getting sick. It's scary to imagine having to go to the hospital or potentially dying from some sort of illness. It is considerably more scary to imagine the person who you love most in the world going through that in front of you and you being helpless to do anything about it.

And for me, it was you know, it's an existential thing to see it in Susan, more so than it would have been for myself. And I can't help but think that that dynamic that you're describing there and that I felt in doing that is a little bit of an important dynamic to understand in terms of whether or not people feel motivated to personally take action, whether or not they've seen it, whether or not it feels like it threatens the things that most matter to them.

In every disease I've ever covered, you know, it's the survivors who are the ones who get convinced, I mean, the true of AIDS, true of AIDS in Africa and the polio, it's when you know, it's often when you see your children get infected, you begin to realize that the disease is terrifying.

And, you know, when I was a child or our parents were terrified of polio and that's why they accepted that vaccine as readily as they did, even though there were disasters with the polio vaccine, there was even a bad batch that infected two hundred and fifty thousand kids and killed ten of them.

So I'm optimistic about the vaccines because they seem to be coming in a much quicker time than we expected, you know, six or eight months ago. I feel like I'm playing both sides of the fence in these with these articles. I was actually asked to write the optimistic one because an editor was in a meeting I was in and he was so shocked a few months ago when I expressed some optimism that he said, you've got to write about that.

And that was sort of a first person piece about my feelings long range. But then after the election, I was asked to write another reported piece talking to experts again about how they felt just about this period between the end of the election and when the Biden presidency begins. And that's going to be our dark time. OK, so one of the things that I found very interesting and very constructive in your take on this forthcoming dark time is that it seems to me that the expertise, the experts you talked to and you have confidence in the people who Biden has appointed to work on covid, the people who he's been listening to, the people who have been advising him.

But you raise the prospect that he might need to start thinking about vaccine confidence. He might start to have to think, thinking about disinformation. He might have to start thinking about other what we think of as more social science things are psychological, psychological work around getting the American mindset in order when it comes to dealing with this vaccine, because what we've been through in the past year or so has such a stark psychological component in terms of people either denying what's going on or being unwilling to take steps that will that the country is going to need them to take.

Yeah, it's not just for the vaccine, it's for the virus itself. I mean, we've really seen three separate ways in this virus. We saw the North-Eastern wave in the spring. We saw the summer wave, which was mostly in the Deep South. And now we're seeing, along with the wave all around the country, we're seeing this wave that's hitting deeply into the red states, killing people in states that voted heavily for Trump, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming.

These states are the ones that are being hit extremely hard by this virus and. In effect, you know, that rhetoric has killed Trump, voters of denialism was killed, Trump voters, and they're now a high risk group. And, you know, some people may say, fine, they deserve it.

I reject that kind of thinking. I think it's you know, they are victims of denialism as much as anybody else's. And the experts I talked to were doctors and the doctors. Ethics is that you have to save the patient who is put in front of you. If you're a combat doctor in a MASH unit, you have to save the wounded soldier in front of you, even if he's a member of the enemy.

And we are in a situation like that now where it's important to convince people who have rejected masks to accept masks and social distancing and all the other things that will preserve them until the vaccines get here. And then I hope the vaccines will will come as well. And I hope that they'll be, you know, acceptable because people need them. And it may take a lot of convincing. And the experts I talked to said, look, you you need people who speak to other than fans of the Obama administration.

You need people who are credible to conservative Republicans who otherwise will see this as the Democrats and the doctors getting together again to shut down the economy and cheat America the birthright of personal freedom. You have to get people out there. And people even suggested maybe consulting with Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Mehmet Oz and other doctors that is housing. Dr. Marc Siegel of Fox News, because they're persuaders who can speak to the audience that now needs convincing. Essentially forming ambassadors to the political right that have been the target of all of this disinformation for political reasons or whatever the reasons were seeing them as a high risk group to which you need trusted, for which you need trusted interlocutors.

I mean, I think that's the same as and it's I think it's a very yes, it's very rational in northern Nigeria. You have to get to the imams. You have to get to the local governors. You have to get to the thought leaders. And whoever those thought leaders are, you have to reach them and convince them that, look, your people will die if you don't do something about this and surely you don't want your people to buy.

Donald, do you have confidence in some of the recent steps that have been taken at and around the CDC, we saw the independent panel that advises the CDC today voting to recommend that the first vaccine should go to health care workers and people who live and work at long term care facilities. We've seen the CDC tweak its guidance around how long people should stay isolated from other people after they have resolved their symptoms from getting covid. Obviously, the CDC has been put under some real inappropriate political pressure at times by the Trump administration.

Do you feel like they are regaining their trusted status, that these these recent decisions that they're making are sound? That's my impression the CDC is so constrained from talking right now that it's very hard to get anybody there to talk to you. But when you test the advice that they give out now against other experts, former CDC experts, independent experts who consult with the CDC, they say most of the time it's good advice. It's getting better. It looks less politically corrupted.

It doesn't look like anybody breaking out of the website making changes the way it used to happen.

I mean, but that's sort of an outside impression that but and it's possible to get good advice, not just from the CDC, but from other medical experts.

They're the ones who had to speak up because because of the vacuum that existed for so long. Let me ask you one last thing, just your impression, and it may be that your reporting can add to this, but I also just trust your impression on this if you haven't worked on it specifically. I am very concerned about health care workers right now. Just because I review a lot of this tape that we get and diaries that we get from health workers all across the country.

And I'm seeing levels of exhaustion and people really at the end of their rope from doctors and nurses and respiratory therapist and all sorts of people in the health care environment. While I'm looking at these numbers just topping out, obviously we've got hospitalization records being broken all over the country every day. We got one hundred thousand people in the hospital right now. It feels like that number is just going to go up. Feels like we're going to be at three thousand deaths a day before too long.

Is there something that we can do culturally and just as citizens other than try to reduce the spread of this virus, to try to bolster the health care workers that we're going to need to save us? Remember I said on your show back in March, I think that maybe we ought to at that time think about importing 40 thousand doctors from China would just fought the disease because they knew the disease. They knew how to fight it. They knew what worked.

All right. I was mocked for that. I don't think that's going to happen, but I don't know what we're going to do. Doctors are being pulled out of retirement and nurses and respiratory doctors are being pulled out of retirement all over the country. When the virus hit New York, it was possible for medical professionals from other parts of the country to go to New York and help out. And they did in large numbers. But now the virus is everywhere.

I suppose some doctors could be spared from New York City because they're you know, we're being hit less hard the rest of the country. And, you know, unfortunately, in rural hospitals, in the small counties around this country, if you have one doctor go down with covid, that may be your hospital may it may start falling apart. You've got very small steps out there. So I do not see a remedy for this unless people wise up and do what they can to slow down the transmission of the virus.

And unfortunately, the advice not to travel on Thanksgiving was ignored. Yeah, Donald McNeil, New York Times science and health reporter, thank you so much. It's always a real honor to talk to you, Donald. Really appreciate you being here.

Thank you very much for inviting me on. All right, I'll be right back. The best new thing in the world today is brand new, entered the world today. His name is Julian, the son of our beloved producer, Matt Look. Our beloved producer, Matthew Alexander and his wife Alison have a brand new baby boy. Julian is doing great. His parents are a little flipped out, understandably, but they're doing great to welcome Julian. Can't wait to meet you in person.

Best new thing in the world today. I will see you again tomorrow night.

The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC. Hey, guys, Willie Geist here this week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast, I get together with Hollywood icon Al Pacino for a cruise around Beverly Hills and a conversation about his legendary 50 year career. You can get that now for free wherever you download your podcasts.