The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 10PM - MSNBC NEWS today 8/27/2024

corporate landlords buy hundreds of houses and apartments then turn them around and rent them out at extremely high prices I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices we will end America's housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that we should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home not less I'm KLA Harris and I approve this message we renters too in my preschool years for all of Donald Trump's childhood his father was a racist landlord who refused to rent apartments to people like kamla Harris and her parents Donald Trump the most racist Presidential nominee of a party who did not personally own slaves grew up to join his father's racist business which led them both to be charged by the justice department in 1973 with violating the civil rights of applicants for apartments by viciously discriminating against black people the new superseding indictment issued by a grand jury today covers familiar ground for regular viewers of this program and for readers of our first guest's indispensable book the Trump indictments which now has to be updated the new indictment is 36 pages long replacing the previous indictment which was 45 pages long gone from the new indictment is the dramatic scene that will be in all of the movies about Donald Trump's crime crimes because the Supreme Court decided to allow Donald Trump to commit crimes he committed in the Oval Office on New Year's Eve when the entire command structure of the justice department threatened to quit sitting there right in front of Donald Trump When Donald Trump if Donald Trump went through with his plan to make an obscure justice department official named Jeffrey Clark the new acting attorney general to help carry out crimes with Donald Trump that scene will be in the movie but not not in the Trump indictment anymore the Supreme Court ruled that any crime Donald Trump conspires to commit in the Oval Office with appointed members of the executive branch any of those crimes are crimes that the Supreme Court believes the founders wanted the president to get away with the Republican Supreme Court is of course insanely wrong about that here's what Justice kataji Brown Jackson said to nor O'Donnell about that tonight in your descent you wrote that the court declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can under circumstances yet to be fully determined become a law unto himself it sounds like a warning well I mean that was my view of what the court determined you were concerned about Broad immunity I was concerned about uh A system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same that decision was not a product of legal scholarship that decision was a product of Republican convenience every Justice who voted in support of that opinion is a Republican only one of those Republican justices was appointed by a president who entered the presidency by winning the most votes George H W bush is the last Republican president who entered the presidency by winning the most votes that was in 1988 and he gave us Clarence Thomas if you lived in a democracy where the candidate with the most votes wins there would be no other Republican Justice currently serving on the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas would be the only one the current composition of the Supreme Court stands in my view and in my view alone as a stain on America's claim to the world that it is a democracy and no other democracy in the 21st century would seven out of the 50 states decide presidential elections through an electoral contrivance created in a slaveholding country 235 5 years ago a contrivance they tried to make sound serious by calling it a college the Electoral College the Electoral College gave us this Supreme Court not the voters and the Supreme Court has given Donald Trump his immunity which in Jack Smith's interpretation of that immunity decision still allows Donald Trump to be charged with all the crimes he committed while president that were not committed in his official capacity as president of the United States and so the indictment stresses that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators quote were acting in a private capacity in the new indictment all of Trump's co-conspirators are people who were not government officials Rudolph Giuliani being co-conspirator number one the other co-conspirators were all private lawyers turn turning Donald Trump's lies about the election into crimes the other co-conspirators are John Eastman Sydney Powell Kenneth chesboro and according to the New York Times likely Boris Epstein on page 12 of the indictment an unnamed senior campaign advisor who is not a co-conspirator is quoted by Jack Smith describing everything Donald Trump and his co-conspirators were publicly saying at the time as quote all conspiracy beamed down from the Mothership leading off our discussion tonight is Andrew Weissman former FBI general counsel and former Chief of the Criminal Division in the eastern district of New York he's an MSNBC legal analist and co-author of the New York Times best-selling book the Trump indictments now in need of an update with a new indictment uh Andrew there's so much uh to say about this including how the Supreme Court forced the rewriting of this indictment and and what do you see as the the likely way Jack Smith has tried to thread the needle to get this to trial yeah so one piece of interesting news to to sort of pick up on on your uh opening which is if for people who are counting this now makes five grand jurs that grand juries that have decided that Donald Trump is guilty of by probable cause of multiple felonies so this is the fifth time that he has been charged criminally um because it's this is start by the way with why this had to be a new grand jury hearing all of this for the first time yeah so that's a a great point because that really goes to the question of why now why was Jack Smith doing this like what do he gain from this one of the things that I think he gains is really taking an argument off the table and trying to say you know Donald Trump can't challenge the old indictment by saying the grand jury that charge that didn't know what the law was that it somehow was tainted by evidence that the Supreme Court has now said it shouldn't hear and so there may not have been a lot of Merit to that argument but this just removes that issue about whether there needed to be a new indictment because now there is one um it's a relatively simple process to represent a case they clearly did that and so it just I think will streamline the sort of arguments that are going to come both at the district court level and up to an including back to the Supreme Court so this is all an issue if KL Harris wins um otherwise this is all irrelevant because Donald Trump will get rid of this in in a nanc so what does this do to the schedule in judge Chin's courtroom we were anticipating a possible hearing or at least argument about what should be allowed in this case this has this Rewritten indictment in effect is this become Jack Smith's argument about this is what the charges should be yeah I mean you know I had anticipated that he could have done this without superseding he could have just said you know we are not going to proceed on the following allegations but this is a definitely a cleaner way to do it Donald Trump ases his want and frankly as a defendant is is entitled to raise any and all arguments about he will certainly say there should not be a hearing on this until after the election we will know on Friday whether Jack Smith says no we should have argument in hearings about proceeding on this case before the election there's no way it will go to trial but you could have a lot of issues decided um because the key thing that um happens in terms of what's added and what's subtracted what's subtracted as you noted is all of the allegations about the Department of Justice and internal White House um uh actions are sort of deleted from this what's added is lots and lots of language saying that Pence acted as either a candidate or as president of the senate in other words not as an official um piece of action and that Trump was acting also in an unofficial way well Donald Trump can say I challenge that I think that's not right and you could then have a factual hearing now of course that's the last thing that Donald Trump wants is he does not want a factual hearing at least before the election because that would lead to people like Mike Pence being able to take the stand and testify that he in fact was acting as a candidate who he was acting as um you know as the president of the Senate that I think is going to be the Battleground and I'll be interesting to see whether the sort of reports that Jack Smith may not be seeking that kind of hearing before the election whether that's true or not it's not totally clear we haven't really heard from the horse's mouth we have really only heard sort of leaks that presumably are coming from the defense side and on Friday we should know whether there will be that type of hearing which of course could be really exp laive because you of course Mike Pence's position and what he has said in the grand jury to Jack Smith is not public so one kind of basic interpretation of the Supreme Court immunity invention is that the president uh when he's ordering people in the executive branch who he can boss around whatever he's doing there he's immune from crimes that's a sort of quick dirty way of saying it the trouble with the vice president is he is under no obligation at any moment to obey anything the president ever says to him he's independently elected and he occupies an independent constitutional office he need not ever speak to or listen to the president of the United States and so this Dynamic with Jeffrey Clark and Justice Department officials that may have gotten that scene knocked out of the indictment uh doesn't seem to have any impact on a very similar scene of Donald Trump talking to Mike is trying to get him to uh overturn the election I think what Donald Trump would argue on that point is that is true what you are saying about the vice president's independent function is true but when Donald Trump is acting as president in trying to convince his vice president to do something as long as he is acting in an official capacity the Supreme Court has decided that that would at the very least be presumptively immune and if it's within his core Powers it's absolutely immune just to be clear I think that is to use a technical term Bonkers I mean that is just an outrageous decision KI Brown Jackson was unbelievably polite in the clip that you played in terms of what this means for the country the idea that just to be sure everyone understands the Supreme Court said even though that that Donald Trump is alleged in the prior indictment to have sought sham criminal investigations of his opponents he is absolutely immune to do that MH that is the Supreme Court decision sham doj investigations absolutely immune because that is considered by the Supreme Court a core presidential function is seeking sham investigations just just to say it is really to refute it yeah um so what do you see as a timetable here in this in this case now um so I think that that judge chuckin has her work cut out for her if she wants to have a factual hearing with evidence before the general election on the other hand that is in large part one of the things that the Supreme Court decision said she needs to do at least on some of these areas they said there are factual issues that she needs to decide so she could decide that she's going to go forward um you know the issue will be whether she's sort of helped by Jack Smith's position on Friday where Jack Smith says yes I'm willing to to do that or whether Jackson says no let's do this after the general election and so uh as it goes forward and as judge Shen decides through one process or the other what she's allowing to go forward the Trump law is going to just get up and make a motion to dismiss pretty much everything in the indictment saying Supreme Court immunity she's going to say no uh and then they're going to appeal it up again to the Supreme Court yes