The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at 9:00 Eastern on MSNBC tonight, just after 6:00 p.m. Eastern time, President Biden and the first lady and the vice president and her husband let along just devastatingly sad moment of silence from the south portico of the White House to honor the half million Americans who have now died from covid-19. It has only been a year and already we have lost this year more than all the Americans who died on the battlefield in World War One and World War Two and the Vietnam War combined.

More Americans than are buried at all of Arlington Cemetery, all gone in one year, all from this one contagion, this botched, terribly mishandled pandemic. Before the moment of silence and the candle lighting at the portico, President Biden gave what basically amounted to a national eulogy for all those lost. He addressed the bulk of his remarks to Americans who personally have lost someone they love to covid bringing to bear what's become sort of his emotional trademark in his political life, his empathy for people who are hurting.

We often hear people described as ordinary Americans. There's no such thing, there's nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary. They span generations. Born in America, emigrated to America. But just like that, so many of them took their final breath alone in America. As a nation, we can't accept such a cruel fate.

While we were fighting this pandemic for so long, we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow.

We have to resist viewing each life as this as a statistic or a blur or on the news. We must do so to honor the dead, but equally important, care for the lives of those left behind, for the loved ones left behind. I know all too well. I know what it's like to not be there when it happens. You know, like when you are they're holding their hand, look in your eye and they slip away that black hole in your chest, you feel like you're being sucked into it.

The survivors remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul.

For some of you, it's been a year, a month, a week, a day, even an hour.

And I know that when you stare at an empty chair around the kitchen table, it brings it all back no matter how long it would happened, as if it just happened that moment.

You look at an empty chair looking at that empty chair. President Biden tonight marking five hundred thousand American lives lost to covid-19. But let's put up these new graphs as of today from the covid tracking project. There is there is good news now. New cases now continuing to steadily drop. Since mid-January, cases have been steadily dropping and new hospitalizations have been steadily dropping to. We are still at a hospitalization number that matches the worst of the spring surge and the surge in the summer sing.

Our low point now is still as high as those high points ever got from earlier in the year, but at least it is heading down. And deaths are heading down, too, but not fast enough. Even now, we are still losing nearly two thousand Americans every single day. And nobody knows yet whether the declines in new cases and new hospitalizations and deaths are attributable to Americans finally starting to get vaccinated in considerable numbers. Dr. David Kessler, top science adviser to the Biden administration's covid response, told us here on this show last week that it is just too early to separate and separate out any potential vaccine effect as the cause of these recent improvements that we have seen over the past month.

But on average, about a million and a half Americans are getting the vaccine every single day. Now, that, of course, is coming too late for the half million Americans who have already been killed and for their families and the people who love them. Frankly, the vaccine vaccinations that are happening now are coming too late for the 60 thousand plus Americans who just got diagnosed with covid today. We're still over sixty thousand new vaccine excuse me. Sixty thousand new infections a day, even coming down from that massive peak.

Right. The vaccination effort moved too slowly to prevent 60 thousand plus Americans from getting infected. Now. But at least after all of this loss and failure, at least we are finally headed in the right direction finally and it is probably time to start thinking of what we are ever going to be able to do for our nurses and doctors and hospital staff and EMT and nursing home workers, all the front line health care staff who we have just put through hell this past year.

Forgive me. I mean, we are we are still asking more of them than is humanly possible. We will be four months yet as long as 50 and 60 thousand Americans are still getting newly infected every day, it'll still be that we are asking them to do the impossible as long as our numbers stay that high. But we are the country that has had more deaths from covid-19 and more sickness from covid-19 than any other country on Earth and the people who have had to care for us all through it all, the health care workers are going to need some kind of thank you.

Some kind of respite, at least when this is all done. They have had to do things that are unimaginable and for such a long time for a running sprint of a year. I don't know what we should do on that front, but we really have asked the unimaginable of our nurses and doctors and health care stuff. We are going to have to turn our minds eventually and I think soon to how we do right by them to how we can they are.

Thanks. In the midst of the pandemic at five hundred thousand dead now, President Biden's nominee to be health secretary in the United States will get his confirmation hearing finally tomorrow. More than a month after Biden was sworn in, Republican senators are already lining up to say how they don't want President Biden's nominee, Harvey Apsara, to be confirmed as health secretary, but it is likely that he will be confirmed. There will also be nomination hearings this week for Deb Holland for interior secretary.

She will be the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history if she is confirmed. Republican senators, though, are absolutely opposed to her, too. While we are running down, all the people of color Republican senators object to is Biden's cabinet nominees. I should also note that Biden's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, is also on the bubble right now in terms of her nomination because of not just Republican opposition to her nomination, but because at least one conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin, has decided that he doesn't like her and he's not going to vote for her.

Senator Manchin should say, has apparently invented a whole new standard for Neera Tanden, that he never applied to other nominees that he voted for.

Which has put her nomination at risk, we will have more on that in a few minutes tonight. But in addition to Basara and Holland and Tanden, there will be confirmation hearings this week for the nominee to be CIA director William Burns and for Vivek Murthy to be surgeon general. Today, of course, was the first of two days of confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, President Biden's nominee to be attorney general. Judge Garland was President Obama's nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, but Republicans in the US Senate decided they would hold that Supreme Court seat open for more than a year so a Republican president could fill it instead of even considering Judge Garland when he was nominated.

Republican senators are still pretending like that was some sort of normal move. It absolutely was not. But Merrick Garland himself apparently does not hold a grudge. I do think a lot of people do. I think holding a Supreme Court seat open for more than a year, when you later proved once the Republican president was in there, that you could fill it in about five minutes if you wanted to.

I don't think that's normal. I kind of have a grudge about that. Merrick Garland apparently does not, which means he is a better person than I am on that scale and many others.

But in a sort of twist of fate, the news gods gave us a confluence of events today that you got to feel like they've been cooking up for some time with a little bit of a smirk, perhaps because while Judge Garland was having his confirmation hearing today, not for the Supreme Court, because Republicans held a seat open for a year, instead of allowing him to be considered for that today while he was not being considered for the Supreme Court, but instead was considered to lead the US Justice Department, it actually was the Supreme Court that made news big enough to justify news organizations breaking in to the confirmation hearings for the next attorney general of the United States.

And the news was, in fact, big enough to justify that, as The New York Times put it, and their coverage of this story today, quote, The Supreme Court's order set in motion a series of events that could lead to the startling possibility of a criminal trial of a former US president. The former US president in question soon affirmed that when he released a rambling and even for him, almost hysterical statement in response to the Supreme Court ruling saying, quote, The people of our country won't stand for it.

He called the ruling of the court, quote, Fascism is rambling about the court excuse me, rambling about what he called, quote, all of the election crimes that were committed against me, really election crimes committed against you. He said in his statement that he won the last election and therefore, Joe Biden isn't even really the president. I don't know why that claim is at all relevant to the Supreme Court ruling that he is freaking out about here.

But it seems clear that that's what he's going to say from here on out. Whenever he freaks out about anything that's going to be kind of his go to this isn't happening. I'm secretly still the president.

In my mind, this can't all be true. The Supreme Court's ruling today, it was issued in a short, unsigned opinion with no noted dissents, was that no one, not even a man who believes in his heart of hearts that the earth is flat or that Donald Trump was re-elected. No one is immune from investigation if prosecutors believe they have committed crimes and they have a legal predicate to move forward with such an investigation, no one is above the law.

In August twenty nineteen, it was state prosecutors in New York who sent a subpoena for Trump's financial and tax records to the accounting firm used by the president and his business. And President Trump pulled out all the stops to try to block the subpoena from ever being effectuated. He sued to stop the firm from complying with the subpoena. That that case went to the United States Supreme Court twice. He lost both times at the Supreme Court. He also lost at every lower court.

The case was heard in as well. His legal avenues are now well and truly exhausted. The accounting firm is now going to hand over the data. Multiple news reports tonight describing their expected production to prosecutors as millions of pages of tax returns and financial documents, millions of pages, terabytes full of data. Prosecutors will reportedly collect this information, The New York Times says this week from the accounting firms lawyers in Westchester County, New York. Prosecutors will get access to those millions of pages and then get to work examining them and determining if they prove a crime.

Prosecutors have already retained a large outside consulting firm that specializes in crunching this kind of data, prosecutors office has also brought in a heavy hitting outside counsel who's a former chief of the criminal division and the chief of the appellate division at NY, is a lawyer with a decades long history of White-Collar and organized crime, prosecution and defense work. The investigation that led to this point started with the investigation into payments made during the twenty sixteen campaign payments to two women designed to keep them from talking publicly about their alleged affairs with candidate Trump.

Those payments were made to benefit the campaign of candidate Trump, and they were designated and prosecuted as campaign finance felonies by prosecutors in N.Y.. The president's lawyer, Michael Cohen, who facilitated those payments, he went to prison for those felonies. But those payments that Mr. Cohen made to those women to benefit the president's campaign, those payments were reimbursed by the president's business, reimbursed in a way that was apparently designed to look as if they were payments to Michael Cohen for legal services.

That is not what they were, but that is how they were processed through the Trump organization's financial systems. Now, depending on how exactly that was done, that cover up could be a crime related to keeping fraudulent business records. If those fake legal expenses reimbursed to Michael Cohen were ultimately deducted in the Trump organization's taxes, that could also be tax fraud. Michael Cohen, of course, then testified to Congress and provided documentation attesting to what he described as a long running scheme by the former president and his business to defraud insurance companies and banks and tax authorities.

He described a scheme in which the president and his business radically changed the valuation of various properties, depending on who was asking. They basically kept two sets of books in Michael Cohen's telling. When it came time to pay taxes on a property, Trump would call. Some called the property basically worthless. But when it came time to use that property as collateral to get like a loan from a bank or something, well, then suddenly that same property would be worth the sun and the moon and the stars, which is a cute way to do it.

Also, it's potentially tax fraud, bank fraud and insurance fraud. But then came September 20, 20, feels like it was 30 years ago, it was like several months ago, it's only February now. This was only September when it happened. It feels like a million years ago, September. Twenty twenty in the pages of The New York Times, we came to learn in very dramatic fashion why exactly President Trump had been working so hard on keeping his tax and financial records hidden, why he was working harder on that than on anything else in the whole country.

We learned why he was so panicked about keeping these things under wraps in September when The New York Times reporters, through separate means, obtained more than two decades of Trump tax records. And that reporting those those documents that the Times obtained through off a World Wars worth of bombshells, I mean, the president, a self-described billionaire. Turns out he paid a grand total of seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income tax in twenty sixteen, which is the year he ran for president.

Then in twenty seventeen, his first year in the White House, he again paid a grand total of seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income tax. In 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid zero in federal income tax. He paid nothing. The Times reported that he owed as much as one hundred million dollars to the federal government in back taxes and penalties. They reported that the president had apparently paid his daughter Ivanka, as an employee of the Trump Organization and then double dipped also paid her as a consultant to the Trump organization.

Why does that matter? Well, the money that he paid her as a consultant, he deducted from his taxes as a business expense. And that may sound like an arcane little bit of accounting, Michigan, but that's a kind of fraud that other people regularly go to prison for. And now Trump tax and business records by the millions. Are in the hands of state prosecutors for the first time, prosecutors who are reportedly investigating him for tax fraud, bank fraud, insurance fraud.

Now, lots of questions remain as to why federal prosecutors did not pursue Mr. Trump for prosecution after they named him as individual one, this unindicted coconspirator in the federal case for which Michael Cohen went to prison. Lots of questions remain as to what happened to the culpability of individual one in that case, let alone the president's business and those who signed off on those bogus checks to Michael Cohen, which were really repayments for the campaign finance felonies he was committing, but were disguised to look like business expenses.

One of the things that Merrick Garland is going to have to sort out when he is confirmed as the nation's next attorney general is why his predecessor, William Barr, personally spent weeks leaning on prosecutors that FDNY to try to get them to go easy on that case and then ultimately fired the US attorney in charge of that office. Merrick Garland is going to have to sort that out. The solution to that can not be don't do it again. The solution that has to be accountability for those who abused the Justice Department and the justice process in ways that were designed to shield the president from accountability, if that is, in fact what happened there.

But what's happened here, what the Supreme Court set in motion today is something that does not involve federal prosecutors in that whole FDNY mess. These are state prosecutors and their case is moving forward. And there really is now, as the Times puts it today, the startling prospect. Of a criminal trial of a former US president. We, the public, will not get to see these millions of pages that are getting handed over now, we won't see them unless and until there are criminal charges filed in this case and they surface as evidence in that case.

The closest we can get now is maybe to talk to the reporters for The New York Times who have themselves seen more information like this than any other civilian. We can talk to reporters who, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on exactly this scandal. One of those reporters is Suzanne Craig, investigative reporter for The New York Times. She joins us now. Miss Craig? Suzanne, it's really nice to make time to be here tonight.

Good to see you. From what you understand of the scope of the subpoena, that was the basis of the Supreme Court ruling today, do you think that prosecutors are about to get their hands on a subset of what you and your colleagues saw at the Times? Or do you think they are getting considerably more than what you guys were able to see? When it comes to the tax returns, they're going to get a subset, they're going to see eight years of the tax returns and we had over two decades of the tax returns.

So in that in that sense, they're going to be seen less, but they're getting just an entire universe more of information in terms of other documents that have been subpoenaed that could be really critical to actually making the case. And that includes communication between Donald Trump and his accountants, audited financial statements, communication that has gone back and forth, and a whole other array of documents that are going to be produced that sort of explain sort of what went into the taxes and a lot more detail.

In terms of the communications between the president and his business and the accounting firm or indeed the communications among people at the accounting firm who we're working on on this account, why would those be so valuable potentially to prosecutors that we're looking to try to uncover evidence of the kind of white collar fraud that I just described?

When you say doctors are really important, but they're sort of top line. So if I use an example. So there's a lot of questions you mentioned about the payment to Stormy Daniels and to other potential hush money that was paid. We saw the tax returns. Those payments aren't itemized, but there is a lot of places that those payments could go. For example, legal fees is a likely one. And they could have been put into a line where legal fees or a tax deduction, but they're not itemized when a tax return.

But prosecutors could now get really detailed information. That is exactly what was in those legal fees and they could find something there. So that's one really clear example of where they're probably going to look right away. They can get all of that. They're also going to seek communication back and forth. So you're going to see the decisions that were made about what to file. What did the Trump Organization or Donald Trump tell his accountants where their misrepresentations there. So a lot of things are really important in the pieces that go into it.

We did a story in twenty eighteen where we found tax fraud that Donald Trump had committed in the nineteen nineties. We did that by piecing together financial statements, bank statements, general ledgers, public information. But it was a whole kind of puzzle that we had to put together a financial statement or a tax returns or kind of your best case when you're submitting the IRS. There's actually a line where you can say I accepted a bribe. People don't usually fill it in, but it's usually you're not you're not filing something that's just apparently illegal.

Suzanne, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today was seeing your reaction to this Supreme Court ruling. One of the things you talked about as a potentially sort of dangerous area for the president might be these consulting fees that he paid to his his daughter, Ivanka Trump. You also pointed out that there are a lot of unanswered questions about something that happened in twenty sixteen where the president, when he was running for president, campaign was sort of low on funds.

And you and your colleagues were able to report that he engineered a big cash windfall himself that appeared to originate with a with a Las Vegas hotel. I wonder if you could you could walk us through sort of both of those concerns, the Las Vegas issue in the ivonka issue in terms of what the potential pitfalls might be there for the president. Let's start with the payments, the consulting payments to a bank in trouble and what's interesting about this, she got a lot of money for consulting payments.

We don't know the totality of it. We were able to specifically identify some of it. The question there is she was an executive at the company, so why is she getting consulting payments? And that could be it could be a potentially illegal issue there for them. And then did other I think they're going to be looking at her siblings. Did they also get these consulting fees? What did they do for that since they were already on the payroll of the Trump organization that warranted these special payments?

And then with the Las Vegas hotel, very interesting. In twenty sixteen, he got several one time a really outsized cash payments, more than 20 million dollars that we could see flowing from a hotel in Vegas that he Cologne's with another individual to companies that Donald Trump alone controls. And then they went out is just huge cash distributions in the middle of the election? He asks. He said that there are that there are agreements underpinning these. We could identify a couple of occasions, a couple of the payments where there was an agreement.

Others were not sure. We haven't seen those agreements. So we don't know. And I think that's one of the things that probably investigators are going to look at when they can get in and start to understand what's there. Let's let's see the agreement. What did he tell his accountants about it? They were very unusual. And it was twenty, twenty, thirty million dollars coming to him as to during twenty sixteen when he was his his campaign was running low on cash.

It's amazing that we had a candidate for president, ultimately a successful candidate for president, who engineered a mysterious 20 or 30 million dollar payment to himself in the middle of his campaign. And all these years later, it's still a total black box. So I feel like I feel like go ahead. I just they were shocking to see when we can actually trace the money through a significant amount of money that we couldn't really explain. And they wouldn't provide us with the underlying agreements that they said existed for these just massive contributions that suddenly came to him just as he needed money.

One of the things that I have always found difficult about this story from beginning to end, having read every word of your reporting on this, having read a whole bunch of books that touch on this subject, having followed it so closely, is that I feel like I'm at a disadvantage because I'm not sure how bad the context is in which he appears to have been a bad actor. And I'm not supposing any criminal behavior by the president. And I realize this is an open investigation.

No charges have been filed. He, of course, denies any wrongdoing. But it is my impression that the New York high end real estate market is sort of scummy and gray area enough in terms of legality and money laundering and all sorts of gross stuff that the president might be a sort of normal actor for New York City real estate standards, and that it's therefore hard for me to understand whether his behavior will be seen as essentially normal for a gross pseudo illegal area of business or whether what he's done really stands out even in that sector.

Well, I think your New York real estate, they do get a lot of tax deductions, but that's one thing. I mean, the things that we're talking about are much different than that. What were their payments? Potentially hush money paid to women so that they wouldn't talk and then used as a tax deduction has nothing to do with being a real estate developer in New York. So there's a lot of things that are outside of that. I mean, we've talked about the appraisals and there's been a lot of attention on that.

And that's going to be one thing that's going to be interesting to watch. And when you look at that, I mean, it's not an easy case. People who use appraisals, they usually rely on experts. They hire an appraiser. So you've hired a professional. They can point to that and say we relied on professional advice on what they're going to be looking for in cases like that is did Donald Trump go and did he shop for appraisals until he found the one he like?

We've seen that plenty of times in New York where people do that. That's one example that fits into what you're saying. All we can see on a lot of things when we look at tax information is the final appraisal that arrives like Sibat in New York is going to be trying to find out if you want appraisal shopping or did he put undue pressure on the appraiser? Suzanne Craig, investigative reporter for The New York Times, the only one of the only humans on Earth who could preview for us what these prosecutors are just about to get their hands on.

Thanks for helping us understand. It's good to see you.

Thanks for having me. Good to see you, too. All right. We've got much more ahead here tonight. Stay with us.

New York Times wins the prize for the most eloquent summary of today's plot twist involving the potential criminal liability potential criminal trial of a former president of the United States for the first time in US history, time saying today, quote, The Supreme Court's order set in motion a series of events that could lead to the startling possibility of a criminal trial of a former US president. When the eloquent summary. But the prize for brevity today goes to the New York prosecutor whose office learned today that the Supreme Court had decisively cleared the way for something that President Trump fought for a very long time and fought very hard to try to block from happening.

Former President Trump's taxes and financial records will be handed over to a grand jury upon receiving the Supreme Court's ruling. Clearing the way for that today, District Attorney Cy Vance. His response was three words. He said, quote, The work continues, period. Dan Alonzo was Cy Vance's top deputy for four years at that prosecutor's office. If anybody can tell us what today's plot twist means for Mr. Vance's criminal investigation into Donald Trump and what this may mean for the former president, Mr.

Alonzo is my bet. Joining us now is Dan Alonzo. He's a former federal prosecutor and a former New York prosecutor who did serve as chief assistant D.A. under Cy Vance. Mr. Alonzo, it's a real pleasure to have you with us tonight. Thanks for making the time. Thank you. I am not a lawyer, and I want to give you a chance first to set me straight, if there's anything that I have explained about this court ruling and its implications that strikes you wrong or that you think I might have gotten the wrong way around.

No, I think you got it pretty much right, and your previous guest obviously is incredibly well versed in this stuff. So you got it right. I mean, to a certain extent, we're all speculating a little bit, but it's educated speculation. We know from the D.A. in some statements made in court and we know from some of the great reporting that's been done that there are maybe six to eight areas of inquiry that they are tracking down. But we can't know whether they have smoking guns, whether they can really prove intent to defraud, as Suzanne was saying.

So there are definitely a lot of questions to be answered. But I would say that today's development is huge, not just because it's significant, but also because they probably bought themselves millions of pages to have to sift through now. When you say six to eight areas of inquiry and this being potentially huge consequences, how serious are the crimes that are potentially implicated here? Obviously? Again, there have been no charges. President and his business denial, all wrongdoing.

And we won't know anything about what the grand jury has done until they present evidence in court if they ever do. But given what has been publicly reporting about what they are looking at and the the types of allegations that have been made by people who know something about these business practices, are these the sorts of things for which people get a fine and sort of slap on the wrist? Or are these potentially serious, serious charges? I mean, look, as with so many things in the law, they are it depends.

So obviously, there are very many serious charges that they're considering, just the fact that they're saying the words insurance fraud, tax fraud, bank fraud, those are all serious charges.

Now, do they require time in prison only at the high end. So we'd have to know whether the loss was high enough to require a judge to put whomever behind bars. You know, lower level felonies don't require it, but they do permit it. So we really need to know how much loss they can prove, whether that's tax loss or loss to the banks or loss to insurance companies or intended loss. We can once we know that, we can start to figure it out.

But I'd say all of these, or at least potentially felonies. And so I'd say that by itself makes them quite serious. And Dan, in terms of what you know about the operations of this office, it's one thing for us in the journalism world and the citizens to talk about millions of pages being handed over terabytes full of data. But from a prosecutor's perspective and from the perspective of people trying to put together potential felony charges here, how long does it take to go through something like that?

I mean, it sounds like kind of a life's work and presumably you need certain people quarterbacking it and organizing other people to work on it, delegating different pieces of it out. How how big a job is this? How much time do you expect that much paperwork? How much time do you expect it to take prosecutors to go through it?

Well, on one hand, it's an enormous job. And if this happened when I was first starting out as a prosecutor 30 years ago, I'd say the sky's the limit as to how long it would take. But today the D.A. and the consultant that he's hired have very serious data analytics tools that can be used to sort through what they have to kind of very quickly do the kinds of searches that will get them to separate the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly.

Those are those start out as a simple word, searches, but a number of searches, but they involve artificial intelligence. So I think that they'll be able to do this, you know, relatively quickly. This is very complicated. The New York real estate industry is extremely complicated to begin with. So they have experts guiding them on how that works and how all these five hundred or so else's work together. But I think at the end of the day, they're really going to be right now, they already know what they want to look for.

So they're going to start there and then they'll do the sort of bigger sifting through the stuff. So it'll take a while for sure. But it's not an impossible task. Not in twenty, twenty one. There's also been some very interesting reporting in recent days that the office has brought in a very prominent former federal prosecutor and high level white collar defense attorney, a man named Mark Pomerance, whose real pedigree in New York law and he's going to be involved in this, the Trump investigation only signed on as a special assistant D.A. in the office for that purpose.

There's also reporting, very recent reporting that Mr. Pomerance recently, within the last few days, interviewed, reinterviewed Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer, who, of course, went to prison for this campaign finance felonies and other charges and who has made a lot of serious allegations about the president that seemed to track at least somewhat with these tax fraud, bank fraud, insurance fraud allegations that we had in public reporting are described as the potential contours of this investigation.

What do you think of the appointment of Pomerance? And does it surprise you that he's talking again to Michael Cohen? Is Michael Cohen going to be going to end up being a valuable witness here?

Well, for sure you said it correctly. Pomerance is a is a prominent lawyer. He's what we call a heavy hitter. So that's a good thing because he will have seen cases of this magnitude before in civil and criminal context. I will put in a plug for my former colleagues. The office already has some fantastic assistant days that have been working on this case for a while. So I think even without Mark Pomerantz, the case would have been in good hands.

I think that only enhances it to have him in the case. In terms of Michael Cohen, very interesting. So, you know, I actually watched the the Cohen hearing today when he testified before Congress and some of the attacks that were made by the Republicans will probably be made if he testifies in a trial, assuming that Trump or someone close to him is indicted. And and I thought those, if handled correctly by the prosecutor, those will ring hollow.

Basically, the attack is you know, this is a perjury witness. This is somebody who lied to Congress. How dare we have as a witness, somebody who lied to Congress? Well, OK. But that doesn't end the story. I mean, I put witnesses on the stand who had committed perjury, who had asked others to commit perjury. And that's not the question. If that was the question, then we wouldn't put him on the stand.

The question is not whether they lied before, it's whether they're telling the truth now. And so you got to ask yourself, why did Michael Cohen lie to Congress but was obviously to protect Donald Trump? And it's not like Donald Trump corrected that testimony afterwards, even though he presumably knew the truth. So you have to ask yourself is whatever Michael Cohen is going to say, corroborated by other evidence? And that's a lot of what they're doing now by poring through these documents, other evidence and other other documents and other witnesses, too.

So, no, I think Michael Cohen could be a significant witness, but I think he's got warts. So it's got to be a very careful prosecutor who puts everything out on the table, warts and all. So the jury can see it all. But I do think that that he could be a persuasive witness if properly corroborated. And nothing corroborates like millions of pages of documents that the president fought tooth and nail to try to keep hidden, Dan Alonzo, a former federal prosecutor, veteran of the New York state prosecutor's office, that Cy Vance's team inside Vance's team that just got this incredible ruling today, decisive ruling from the Supreme Court.

Dan, thanks very much for helping us understand. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. All right, we got a lot more to get to this busy, busy Monday night. Stay with us. We're going to start off with a nice, easy warm up, just going to start jumping jacks, nice, easy jumping jacks, everyone, we are going to have a lot of fun today. I don't even know what to do right now, I'm just so nervous, I'm like, oh my God, it's Alabama about the fact that our first lady is so into physical fitness.

And now we've got her on The Biggest Loser working out.

That could not be any court trainer, Bob. Very nervous. There's the first lady with that group of people working out, Michelle. But Michelle Obama, April 20 12, encouraging American families to get moving, to be fit and healthy, watching the first lady in action like that for for a good cause, trying to encourage people doing crunches and lunges and jumping back jumping jacks. That was inspiring to a lot of people. This guy, though, had had a different take.

His reaction was this, quote, Did you notice that while Michelle Obama is working out on TV, she is sweating on the East Room carpet? I'm just saying dot, dot, dot. The guy who tweeted that is named Rick Grenell back in twenty twelve, when he tweeted that he was a Republican operative who had a very public habit of tweeting mean and frequently sexist things about the Obamas and about their kids, also about then Vice President Joe Biden, about prominent Democrats.

He would also sometimes use his Twitter account to go after members of his own party as well. He repeatedly attacked former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He'd like to go after Newt Gingrich's wife. He would make fun of her hair. That was kind of his level of insults, insulting people's looks and their weight. Attacking their family's particular venom for women in the public eye is a real nice guy. This became a little sticky kind of for Rick Grenell when President Donald Trump surveyed the American landscape and decided that above all other Americans, the best pick for ambassador to Germany would be that guy, Rick Grenell.

And there was talk when they when the nomination was announced that Grinnell's past behavior online might disqualify him from getting confirmed in the Senate because it was so mean and sexist and petty and ad hominem and gross turned out to be no problem, though, really ended up being smooth sailing. Mr. Grenell and his archive of mean tweets were confirmed in the Senate with bipartisan support, with votes to spare. Not a big deal, apparently. Right now, the current president, President Biden, is dealing with a confirmation speed bump for one of his nominees, though her name is Neera Tanden.

She is President Biden's nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget. And her nomination drew immediate complaints from Republicans in the Senate who complained basically that her past tweets about them were mean. They said her tweets about Republican lawmakers were too combative. They said her old tweets about them long before she was a nominee would just make it impossible for her to work with Congress. They would never work with her, given what she had tweeted from the start. It looked as if Neera Tanden would receive few, if any, votes from Republican senators to confirm her to the job.

And a 50 50 Senate if every Republican votes against her. Neera Tanden would need every Democrat to vote in her favor in order to get confirmed. On Friday, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin announced that he won't vote to confirm Neera Tanden. He said it was because of her partisan statements on Twitter and they would have a he said the statements would have a toxic and detrimental impact on her work today. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins also announced that near attendance tweets are a problem for her as well.

She says they demonstrate that Mr. Hendin does not have the temperament to lead the OMB. Which is a peculiar decision on the part of those senators, given that both of those senators have absolutely no problem supporting someone with a hyper partisan Twitter whoring history, in the past, Susan Collins and Joe Manchin both voted to confirm Rick Grenell in twenty seventeen. The guy who used his Twitter account to attack the sitting president, the sitting president, children to to mock a woman's hair, to attack all sorts of women for their appearance, to attack Michelle Obama, for sweating on the East Room carpet.

But for them, their attendance criticism of Republican senators, that's caustic and inappropriate. And so she must be barred from a Senate confirmed position. Rick Grenell is fine. Neera Tanden, they were not the only senators to announce they'll be voting no on the Tandan confirmation. Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, who also voted to confirm Grenell, he announced his opposition to Neera Tanden today. So did Utah Senator Mitt Romney. There's still time, though, to find one Republican.

Any Republican vote for Miss Tandan, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was notably quiet today on the prospect. But until then, until a Democrat, a Republican senator, decides that he or she will vote for Mr Handon, Tennant's nomination to lead OMB is hanging by a thread tonight because of the absolutely outrageous and overt double standard to which she is being subjected by even at least one Democratic senator who was happy to excuse much worse behavior than hers for a male nominee in a previous administration, but apparently has discovered some new standard that will keep her from getting his vote.

Republicans have done it, at least one Democrats doing it, that might make the difference here. The Biden administration says they remain in full support of her nomination and they are not pulling it. Watch this space. A couple of developments worth watching on the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the capital back on December 14th, Wisconsin's state electors met to finalize their state's 10 votes for Joe Biden for the Electoral College. But despite the fact that Biden clearly won Wisconsin, a separate group of Republicans in the state decided that they would try to appoint themselves as Wisconsin's state electors.

It was weird, right? Biden won the state. It was there for his electors who would cast Wisconsin's votes to the Electoral College. But these Republicans, including the state party chairman, they just decided they would name themselves anyway. And then they started forging documents. They signed bogus certificates of election. They sent fake documents to federal and state officials proclaiming that Trump had actually won the 10 electoral votes from Wisconsin when, in fact, they were all won by Joe Biden.

Well, that was a weird moment in the post-election craziness in the Republican Party. But now lawyers for a Wisconsin union for SEIU in Wisconsin have sent a complaint to the Milwaukee County district attorney, to state prosecutors in Wisconsin requesting that a criminal investigation be opened into those acts. The union has written this letter to the Milwaukee County D.A. and says these Republicans violated six state laws, forgery, falsely assuming to act as a public officer, misconduct, conspiracy to commit criminal acts, something to keep an eye out of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, tomorrow at the national level on Capitol Hill, we're going to have the first big investigative hearing on what happened on January 6th. That's a joint oversight hearing conducted by the Homeland Security Committee and the Rules Committee. And we're going to hear from a number of officials who should be interesting witnesses. The sergeant at arms from the House and the sergeant at arms of the Senate both resigned in the immediate aftermath of the attack. They will testify tomorrow, as well as the former chief of the Capitol Police who also resigned after the attack.

Those officials, as well as the acting chief of police for the D.C. police department, they're all going to face Senate questions from senators in tomorrow's hearing. It's called examining the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Should be one to watch. Watch this space. That is going to do it for us tonight, I will tell you tomorrow is going to be a big news day, particularly in Washington. Second day of confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland.

Today's first day of hearings is very newsy. Tomorrow should be a big deal. Also, confirmation hearings tomorrow for Javier Basara for health secretary. Deb Hollin for interior secretary should be the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history if confirmed. A lot going on. This could be a really busy week tomorrow in particular. I'll see you again tomorrow night.

The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at 9:00 Eastern on MSNBC.