Trump in search of waste need look no further than his own staff

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Happy to have you here. Quick thing right off the bat, I have a book out.
My most recent book called Prequel came out last year. You might have heard about it.
Even if you didn't, here's the news. Here's why I'm mentioning it.
My book, Prequel, is coming out in paperback next month on May 6th. And the reason I'm telling you this now is that I'm going to be doing a little bit of traveling around the country, doing live events, live talks to support the book coming out.
It's not like a big book tour, but it's just a little one. But just in case you have any interest in seeing me in person at one of these events, where the real attraction is meeting other people who are interested in seeing me in person.
Here's three dates that I can tell you about tonight where we are putting tickets on sale right now. Thursday, May 8th, Miami, Florida.
Friday, May 9th, Long Island in New York. And Saturday, May 31st in St.
Louis, Missouri. So if you'd like tickets to go to one of those events,

you can get them at msnbc.com slash prequel,

which is the name of the book,

or you can just open up the camera function on your phone,

hold your phone up to that weird little blob thing

that's on the screen right now,

and it will give you a link to click to go right there.

So I just wanted to get that out of the way right off the bat.

I will let you know when we've got some more dates. If we have more dates, I think we're going to have a few

more dates. But that's it for now.
Okay, let's get going. You have heard of this person named Kash Patel, right? Do you remember Kash Patel? He was like a cartoon figure from the first Donald Trump term.
He made himself cash-branded merchandise, where the S in cash is a dollar sign. Get it? He sold cash-branded wine.
He sold a magic elixir that he said would reverse your vaccination status. If by some sad turn of events you'd had the COVID vaccine, could reverse it for you he sold something called coin but with a g coin c-o-i-g-n he called it a credit card for conservatives because you know conservatives can't use regular credit cards he did podcasts for a conspiracy theorist media conspiracy theorist media company controlled by the Chinese Falun Gong religious movement.

He also famously sold a whole line of children's books about the glory of King Donald, which means exactly what you think it does.

And so naturally, Donald Trump looked at that list of qualifications and decided that that guy, that man, is the right choice to be director of the FBI. And at that job, Kash Patel quickly distinguished himself, very quickly, very, very quickly.
Upon reporting for the job, Mr. Patel made clear his immediate priorities.
Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, quote, Patel told officials he planned to spend a lot of time in Las Vegas, where he was living last year. He ordered nude decor for his Washington office at the FBI headquarters and asked for his personal trainer to be cleared to enter the headquarters building for his workouts.
That same Wall Street Journal story about Kash Patel's first days on the job at the FBI also included the fact that Mr. Patel, quote, broke a promise he made to agents that he would appoint a deputy director of the FBI from among their ranks.
So here's this, like, podcaster tent revival guy, right, with the merchandise branded with his name and the bottles of snake oil that he'll sell you and the children's books about Donald Trump being a king. That is who Donald Trump puts in charge of the FBI.
When he gets there, he tells the agents of the FBI, essentially, hey, listen, don't worry. I know I'm an outsider, but I respect what you do enough that we're going to pick one of you guys, an experienced FBI agent, to be my deputy in running this place.
Sure, maybe I'm just a podcaster, but we'll put somebody in here as my number two who you'll really trust. And then does he do that? No, he does not.
He hires instead, as the deputy director of the FBI, another podcaster. This burly man whose whole kind of brand as a podcaster is that he's kind of burly.
His whole shtick is man in tight t-shirt talks about fighting a lot and makes a lot of melodrama about the importance of physical toughness and being willing to die heroically for the cause. And of course, the cause is

the greatness and infallibility of Donald Trump. Wow, does he love that guy? But he means it only in the manliest way possible.
Look at these arms. It's like his whole shtick.
So Kash Patel, podcaster, names this other podcaster guy to be deputy director of the FBI instead of actually hiring anyone with FBI experience. But now that deputy director, he too has started on the job.
And how is that going so far? Headline, FBI creates multi-agent bodyguard team to protect Dan Bongino. The former pro-Trump podcaster is the first deputy director to have a security detail.

Full-time protection could require up to 20 agents, former officials said. Quote, in a break from past practice, in which the Bureau's number two officials have not had security details, the FBI has now issued a call for agents to serve as bodyguards for Deputy Director Dan Boncino.
The FBI canvas sought agents willing to relocate for 30 days of temporary duty to protect Dan Boncino 24 hours a day. Full-time protection could require as many as 20 agents.
The previous deputy director was assigned a single agent part-time to accompany him to certain events. He had a full detail only when he traveled overseas.
In contrast, though, now two former FBI officials familiar with the matter said Dan Bongino's current bodyguards have followed him inside secure FBI facilities, including headquarters in Washington. They said directors typically walk around FBI headquarters without their security details.
But not this deputy director, not this podcaster. He wants the full 24 hours, 20-man team surrounding him at all times, including while he's walking around inside the FBI building.
Because what? Spiders? Creaking sounds? Is there any chance you just hate to be alone? I mean, we are in this everything must go moment, right? In this administration, we can no longer fund libraries or museums. We must stop our work on multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and drug-resistant gonorrhea.
We are closing the Head Start offices. We are firing the meteorologists who produce weather forecasts.
We are firing the people who answer the phones at the Social Security office. We are firing tens of thousands of people who work with veterans at the VA.
We are shutting the U.S. Department of Education because everything must go.
It's all waste. It's all waste.
It all has to go because we, the taxpayers, must pay for Kash Patel's new drapes in his office, his nice new decor that he demanded on day one, and also the cost of him, what was that phrase, of him spending, what was the quote? Quote, a lot of time in Las Vegas, where he won't even be enjoying the new drapes. Also, we have to pay for his deputy director, Dan Bongino, the podcaster with the arms.
We will be paying for him to be surrounded at all times

by a full-time phalanx of a 20-man team of bodyguards who stay with him 24 hours a day,

seven days a week. So like, while he sleeps, they can sit and watch him.
And while he's inside the

FBI headquarters building at work inside, they will be there surrounding him in case,

like, he has to get up and go potty or something. There is a team that can take him.
But it's not only Trump's guys at the FBI. Headline, the cabinet secretary who wants his cookies freshly baked.
Trump administration interior secretary Doug Burgum likes chocolate chip cookies, preferably freshly baked and still warm. This peculiar fact became the talk of the Department of the Interior in recent weeks after his chief of staff made an unusual request of staff in his office.
Quote, learn to regularly bake cookies for Secretary Burgum and his guests using the industrial ovens at the department headquarters. That request was not the only move by his team that has alarmed some interior officials.
Four people familiar with Burgum's leadership told The Atlantic that those who run Burgum's office have repeatedly made unusual demands to his employees. His office leadership, for example, once instructed political appointees to act as servers for a multi-course meal.
They also did like waiters. They made them into waiters.
They also dispatched a U.S. Park police helicopter for his personal transportation.
On at least one occasion, a political appointee was told to remake the cookies because the batch was subpar, according to three people. The Atlantic has three sources on the Interior Department staff member being told to rebake the cookies for the Secretary.
What'd they do with the old cookies? What was wrong with them? Is there anything you could do to cookies that would be that bad? Now there are sources from the Department of Interior that are defending Secretary Burgum here, noting explicitly in their pushback to the Atlantic that staff members are not required to make this cookie dough themselves. It is store-bought cookie dough that they only need to bake.
So ease up, people. Quote, Burgum has also used the political appointees in his department for another purpose in recent days, stacking firewood in his office's fireplace.
Burgum also reportedly demands, quote, that any labels get removed from water bottles before they are delivered to him. Or else.
I mean, the man obviously cannot remove the labels from his own water bottles. That must be done by other government employees, people on the payroll paid by the taxpayers, because, I mean, think about it.
Honestly, if the secretary himself was occupied removing his own water bottle labels, he might not get to the cookies in time. And then who would send them back, demanding that they were not warm enough and they must be rebaked? The secretary is in charge of some really specific stuff.
Tell me more about your Department of Government Efficiency. I mean, at the National Park Service, they're firing the rangers and the maintenance crews and scientists by the thousands.
But Park Service helicopters, including the staff that fly them and maintain them, they're being diverted to pop secretary warm cookies around town when he's in a rush. You know, honestly, it's so much nicer than sitting in traffic.
Quote, the aviation unit of the U.S. Park Police, a division of the Department of the Interior, does not routinely handle VIP transport according to a U.S.
Park Police fact sheet. The blue and white helicopters launch to provide additional aerial surveillance

during presidential and other dignitary movements and are used for medevac search and rescue,

high-risk prisoner transport, and to support law enforcement operations.

And also to make sure he is there in time for the cookies to still be warm, or they are going back. Do it again! Doug Burgum used to be the governor of North Dakota.
In his very red state, there were protests all over this weekend. Nearly a thousand people showed up in Fargo, North Dakota.
That's not far from where Doug Burgum is from. But tons of people also turned out in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Devil's Lake, North Dakota, and in Grand Forks.
Minot, North Dakota actually had a really, really big turnout. And look at this.
This was from little Jamestown, North Dakota. When I first saw this, I was like, oh, look, there's like five people down by the Dairy Queen.
But no, that's just who was early. The footage keeps going.
And then you realize, oh, look, the whole town's coming. The whole town's coming down, marching down to join them.
Those other people were just staking out the spot. We tried here on the show last night to show a snapshot of all the huge protests that happened this weekend.
We really only got to a tiny slice of them. There were so many protests in so many places.
I mean, the millions of people protested this weekend. And we heard from you guys about it in response to last night's show.
Hey, you should have made a bigger deal about what happened in my town. You should have shown how big it was in Las Vegas.
Yes, absolutely. Also, you know, Richmond, Virginia was really, really impressive.
And a ton of people turned out in Bozeman, Montana. And in Knoxville, Tennessee, there was a ton of people.
And in Galveston, Texas, people were out and people were in a very good mood. I mean, we didn't even try to show the protests across the border, the protests at cities abroad and at U.S.
embassies like the one in Ottawa where tons of people turned out. There were literally millions of people who turned out this weekend in person to protest against Trump and what he's doing, and it is hard to show it all.
But you know what really surprised me? It shouldn't have. I've been doing

this enough weeks now that this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. What surprised me is

that after we saw millions of people turn out on Monday, it just kept going. As soon as the

hands-off protests finished up on Saturday, it kept going. Protesters gathered outside the Social

Security office in Mount Lebanon, continuing protests against the Trump administration.

Several different groups coming together to hold this rally, fighting against the Department of Government Efficiency's effort to slash funding for the program and showing support for people who work inside the building. They call it an entitlement, but most people who are against Social Security have been paying in their whole lives.
You plan on it when you're older and then for that to be under threat now is unconscionable. This follows the large, widespread hands-off protests across the country over the weekend, including thousands gathering in downtown Pittsburgh on Saturday.
Thousands and thousands of people gathered at a whole bunch of different hands-off protests on Saturday, including in Pennsylvania. But as of Monday, that was Mount Lebanon in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
People are just still going. This was another protest for Social Security in Niles, Michigan yesterday.
This last night was Youngstown, Ohio, in a Republican district where the Republican Congressman Michael Rooley has refused all year to hold a town hall with his constituents. Last night, well, 2,800 people turned out for a single town hall event with Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Their Republican congressman won't do it. A Democrat nearby will.
On the other side of the number line, in terms of the number of people turning up, but maybe just as impressive, were these folks who scrambled and turned out on less than an hour's notice yesterday when they found out that Trump Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
was coming to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to do a freaking anti-fluoride event. You see people turned out on no notice.
This was not planned in advance. They just heard he was coming and they scrambled.
Got polio? Me neither. Thanks, science.
Vaccines save lives. Make America scientific again.
This was, again, not pre-planned. They just scrambled when they heard he was coming to make sure that somebody was there to show up and to say no.
This was today at the U.S. Senate office building in Washington, D.C., fired federal workers going from office to office, telling U.S.
senators of both parties about their jobs and their work and what the American people are losing, thanks to Trump's mass indiscriminate firings of federal workers. This was Detroit today.

People turning out in the cold in Detroit.

Vaccinate yourself against dictatorship.

Kill the cut. Save science.

Cut doge. Not funding.

And, you know, we see the direct line between pushback and the result. Sometimes a dotted line.
Sometimes you got to, you know, you got to follow it out in time. But if you look, you see it working in ways large and small every day, everywhere.
Tonight, we got a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordering President Trump to stop his punishment of the Associated Press. This is from the ruling tonight, quote, The AP seeks restored eligibility for admission to the press pool and limited access press events, untainted by an impermissible viewpoint-based exclusion.
That is what the court orders today, for the government to put the AP on an equal playing field as similarly situated outlets, despite the AP's use of disfavored terminology. The court declares that the AP's exclusion has been contrary to the First Amendment, and it enjoins the government from continuing down that unlawful path.
For these reasons, it is ordered that defendants shall immediately rescind the denial of AP's access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other limited spaces based on AP's viewpoint, when such spaces are made open to other members of the White House press pool. It is ordered that defendants shall immediately rescind their viewpoint-based denial of the AP's access to events open to all credentialed White House journalists.
That ruling tonight in federal court in Washington, D.C. Also today, the Trump administration put back up the website for the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that that website had been taken down by Trump and replaced with a bizarre Orwellian Trump-think version of that history, which didn't mention slavery or African-Americans or the fact that it specifically was African-Americans who were enslaved. Headline in the Washington Post after that coverage Sunday.
Here's the headline today. National Park Service restores Underground Railroad webpage after outcry.
We even today had news that Trump's truly inexplicable, even bizarre cuts at a refuge for Florida manatees. That has now been reversed.
Trump fired the Rangers at this manatee refuge. But now, quote, after public outcry and two court orders, the Rangers are back on the job.
This is such a stupid way to run a government, right? Random individual disasters manage somehow to get enough attention to often get protested, and then the Trump people find they can't really defend them. And so those things then get partially restored or maybe not really restored, but they say they'll fix them and they hope people stop complaining.
But meanwhile, while people are scrambling to try to fix that mistake they made, these guys are destroying 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 other things all the time. It is a terrible, absolutely ridiculous way to run a government, especially under the name of efficiency, right? I mean, how can it be that the reason we still have people on the job today storing and transporting our nuclear weapons is not because Donald Trump didn't fire them, because he did, but only because, just our luck, the right people found out that he had fired them and made a big enough ruckus about it in time so some of them could be hired back.
That is the reason we now have people on the job keeping our nuclear weapons from prematurely exploding. That's the system now.
That's how we're running it. And it's incredibly stupid.
But the big, big, big, big, big problem with that being our system right now is that for some problems, the people who are most affected and most hurt by it are the people who can least make a ruckus. The people who have the least opportunity to see what's wrong, complain about it in a way that is big enough that it's going to get noticed and their complaints are going to be taken seriously.
And so somebody's going to do something about it and maybe it'll get reversed. The people who are going to be hurt the most grievously are the people who are least capable of raising a ruckus about what's being done to them.
And so here we are. Headline, Washington Post.
Social security website keeps crashing as Doge demands cuts to IT staff. Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log into their online social security accounts.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign into their accounts or have logged in only to find information missing.
The disruptions are occurring as Trump's acting social security chief and the Doge team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce. Thousands of social security employees have already been pushed out, many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency's technology systems.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks. The network crashes specifically appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team.
The Trump technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle a rush. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages logins and authentication for many social security applications to go down.
That's the Washington Post. Here's the office in suburban Glendale, Arizona, not long after sunrise.

Dozens of retirees and people with disabilities. outside the social security office in suburban Glendale, Arizona, not long after sunrise.

Dozens of retirees and people with disabilities shuffling papers, some leaning on walkers,

all anxious to know whether Trump's government overhaul had put their safety nets at risk.

When 9 a.m. came, an employee emerged from the building with flyers,

asking the crowd to come back once they had scheduled an appointment.

One woman yelled, I've called for days.

Another said, we came from a long ways away.

Still another let everyone know they had been handed a load of bunk,

though she used a more colorful term.

Quote, on April 14th, the Social Security Agency plans to largely phase out phone services

for people filing for retirement and survivor benefits

or changing their direct deposit information, forcing them to file online or come into the office. Staffing levels at the Social Security Administration were already at 50-year lows, and the departure of so many workers who answered phones and worked field office counters has led to longer lines and phone waits.
Teresa Boswell, whose vote for Mr. Trump in November helped flip Arizona, but who found herself fuming outside the Social Security office in Glendale last week, unable to sign up for $1,200 in monthly benefits after she retired from her job processing legal papers, told the Times, quote, I didn't know he was going to pull this.
She told the Times, quote, the White House has grown worried enough about the political fallout from the long lines and wait times that White House officials are pressuring Social Security administrators to reduce the information that they put online, which could draw attention to problems. Yeah, we wouldn't want to draw any attention to these problems.
Tonight, we are going to speak with the Attorney General of the state of Arizona. She's a Democrat.
Her name is Chris Mays. And at least for the state of Arizona, her office has created a website.
It's an easy toto-use, one-page website. I spent some time on it today.
This is it. This is the whole page.
This is what it looks like. It's very simple.
And the reason they put up this webpage is for people in Arizona, if they're having trouble with Social Security because of what Trump is doing to it, they can use this website to report it to her office, to report it to their own state attorney general's office. So number one, the attorney general's office can document what the problems are.
Number two, they can hopefully offer some help. And number three, you know what maybe is the most important thing here? They can, by doing this, implicitly tell older and disabled people and their families that they do not have to be alone in contending with this.
Because who else is telling them that? We need and we are now getting a lot of pushback to what is going wrong in this country in the midst of this authoritarian takeover. We need and we are getting a lot of pushback.
We also need help from good government. And Arizona's state government is trying to help here on this specific issue.
I want to find out a lot more about it. Arizona's Attorney General Chris Mays joins us next.
It's President Trump's first 100 days, and MSNBC's Alex Wagner will be covering it all from the front lines. What issue matters to you the most? Join her as she travels the country to talk to the people at the center of the president's policies and promises.
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By our count, Arizona's Democratic State Attorney General Chris Mays has filed or joined, I think the number is, a whole honking bunch of multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration. Arizona has led or joined a lawsuit against Trump's attempt to end the part of the Constitution that says anyone born here is an American, a lawsuit against his federal funding freeze, a lawsuit against cuts to NIH research, a lawsuit against Doge's attempts to access private Treasury data, a lawsuit against the constitutionality of Doge itself, a lawsuit against mass firings of federal workers, a lawsuit against cuts to Arizona schools, a lawsuit against cuts to public health grants, a lawsuit against Trump's weird attempt to take over state elections, a lawsuit against cuts to Arizona libraries and museums.
There's probably more. In

Arizona, they have been busy suing the bejesus out of Donald Trump for what he has been doing

in this second disastrous term as president. Well, now, in addition to all of that,

Arizona's Attorney General, Chris Mays, has just launched a new effort to combat what Trump is

doing to gut and essentially disable the Social Security Administration. Attorney General Mays is now urging Arizona residents to report to her office any problems they are having accessing their Social Security benefits amid the Trump administration's efforts to gut that agency and what it provides.
Her office has launched a new website where Arizonans can go to report any problems they are experiencing with Social Security. The website allows Arizonans to register whether they've had any problem receiving their Social Security check on time, or if they were unable to reach the Social Security Administration online, or on the phone, or in person at an office.
It's a very simple website, but it gives people a place to report what they're going through. And announcing this new web portal, Attorney General May said this.
She said, quote, I'm highly concerned that Elon Musk and the Trump administration will take a wrecking ball to the Social Security Administration. We need any Arizonan who experiences any disruption to their hard-earned Social Security to report the issue immediately to my office.
I refuse to let an authoritarian administration override the rule of law and destroy critical services that millions of Arizonans rely on. Joining us now is Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays.
Attorney General Mays, I really appreciate you making time to be here this evening. Thank you.
Hi, Rachel. Thank you.
Thanks for having me. The reason I think this moves me in addition to interest me is that I feel like the people who are having such a hard time and have such anxiety and are so dependent on Social Security right now as they are taking a wrecking ball to it, I felt like very few people have been able to offer them anything in the way of concrete help or even somebody to listen to them in terms of what they're going through.
What do you think your office is going to be able to do constructively with the information that you're able to collect from this website? So, yeah, I mean, what we're hoping to do is, first of all, gather information and gather evidence about what is actually going on out there and this is incredibly important for a state like arizona where 1.5 million arizonans rely on social security one out of every five arizona residents rely on social security and so this is incredibly important to gather this information. And I'll tell you what, we're getting some data back that is very, very alarming.
We now know that more than three dozen people have reported to us a disruption in their actual checks, in the checks that they're getting.

So disruptions and checks. And then a number of other people, 30 or so, have told us that they're having trouble getting online, that when they call, they're being hung up on.
they're trying to change their address or they might be trying to change their direct deposit information and the website is freezing up. And so, you know, this is very alarming.
It is unacceptable. And it strikes me as possible evidence that Elon Musk and Doge and Donald Trump are trying to sabotage Social Security from inside.
Wow, that is very alarming. With that data in hand, I spent some time on the website today.
I know you're asking people to give you contact information, address to give you the basic checkbox in terms of what they're experiencing. And then there's a place where they can elaborate to explain more of what's going on.
I can't imagine that your office has the capacity to individually help every person who's having trouble here. Is there any hope for essentially directing people to troubleshooting resources or to having government agencies interact with Social Security in such a way that maybe these things can be fixed in a more wholesale way.
And this can be really desperate for people really quickly if they're not getting their checks. Absolutely.
And we're just starting to think about that in terms of our resources inside the AG's office. We do have a consumer section where we do this kind of outreach for folks who are reporting consumer complaints.
I have investigators that could go out. I mean, I just saw your lead up talking about the folks outside the Glendale office.
I think I'm going to send investigators out there to check out what's going on. But the other thing we can do is reach out to our congressional, uh, delegations and senators and ask them if they can have their, uh, folks work with these people.
But look, at the end of the day, um, if this is really happening and it's really starting to look like it is happening, um, we may very well be gathering evidence for a lawsuit against the administration on this. I mean, there is nothing,

I think, more important in American life and for Americans than their social security checks. And this is money that Americans earned.
It's their money. And if it's being stolen from them or deprived from them, even for a few days.

For many people, that can be catastrophic, it can mean that they can, that they're going to go without food. They could go without prescriptions, without medication.
It could be a life or death situation. So in my mind, it was just incredibly important for us to give people a way to tell us whether this is happening.
Yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, just from a moral perspective, looking in on this, it feels like the first concrete addressing of people who have otherwise may not have any other means of communicating with people what they're up against when it could be a very dire situation.
Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays, thank you for doing this. Thank you for helping us understand it.
We'd love to check back in with you. As you get more data, you hear from more Arizonans, and you get a clearer picture.
Absolutely. Thank you, Rachel.
Thank you. I would also encourage other states—I know they're doing this in Arizona.
I don't know if they're doing this in any other states, but I don't know at this point why every state isn't doing something like this, because elderly and disabled people need somewhere to go. They should, if we can't do it at the federal level, we should be doing it state by state.
All right, more news ahead here tonight. Stay with us.
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Politics stops at the door. That's this week on Why Is This Happening.
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Before she was Donald Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem was the governor of South Dakota. And her time as South Dakota governor was a lot.
There's so much to say. The flooding, the COVID, the daughter's real estate license, that poor dog, the poor goat.
I mean, honestly, I could go on. I could go on.
But one thing that you may or may not remember about her time as governor of South Dakota was the teeth thing. While she was serving as governor, Kristi Noem, sitting governor, posted on all her social media accounts a long, apparently professionally produced infomercial about her fantastic experience with a dentist in Texas.
nearly five minutes of the governor speaking straight to camera about this particular dentist

and how great this dentist was interspersed with many, many, many extreme close-ups of her Kristi Noem mouth. I mean, this is a weird thing for a governor to do, right? Governor Noem never disclosed if she was paid for this infomercial, or perhaps if maybe she got the dental work for free or at a discount in exchange for doing the infomercial.
She never disclosed if anyone paid for her travel to Texas. But now we know.
Now we know that someone did pay for that trip. It was South Dakota taxpayers.
In newly released travel records, the AP found that the tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses Kristi Noem billed to the state of South Dakota from when she was governor included $2,200 for a trip to Houston for her Instagram dental work showcase. And you know, that of course is a real slap in the face to South Dakota taxpayers.
But in particular, I mean, spare a thought for South Dakota's dentists, right? How must it feel to be a dental professional in the state of South Dakota and have your own governor bill you and your fellow citizens thousands of dollars so she can go get her teeth done in Texas? Because no one in South Dakota is good enough for her and her teeth. I mean, Kristi Noem is now Donald Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security.
Here she is wearing what appears to be a bulletproof vest at a meeting in New York City. Here she is in full Customs and Border Patrol uniform costume on set at Fox News.
She is not a Customs and Border

Patrol agent, but she had to make her a uniform, I guess, including the hat. Here's another hat.
Here's her in a cowboy hat, because why not? Here she is at the southern border on a horse, because sure, what's a cowboy hat without a horse a few feet below it? here she was a couple of weeks ago, posing Abu Ghraib style in front of prisoners at El Salvador's brutal mega prison where the Trump administration has locked up hundreds of people who were living in the United States. And now the new chapter from Kristi Noem is here she is doing armed ride-alongs with ICE agents, where she gets dressed up and she holds big guns and she play acts at helping personally to arrest people as the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Again, comes with a hat. Our friends at the New York Post report today that Noem, on this recent ride-along, brought a friend.
His name is Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Donald Trump ally and advisor. You can see Mr.
Lewandowski in this New York Post photograph today. You can also see him in this very tabloid 2023 report in the New York Post, quote, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem having absurdly blatant and public affair with handsy Trump aide Corey Lewandowski, sources say, claims that Noem and Lewandowski in 2023 denied.
In noting his presence at the All for the Cameras raid today in Arizona, the New York Post wrote, quote, also in the Bearcat with Noam was former Trump campaign manager and senior advisor Corey Lewandowski, who introduced himself to federal agents as chief of staff. The Department of Homeland Security later clarified that he is an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security.
Oh, you're the chief of staff, are you? Chief of staff to what? To who? Kristi Noem also brought another friend, too, a notorious right-wing social media personality who got a badge for the day and everything. But Kristi Noem is not the only Trump administration official doing law enforcement cosplay.

There's another one who's doing it in a way that may be a serious screw-up. Not just an embarrassment, but an actual big legal mistake.
Although I'm not sure they understand that yet. We'll try to explain.
Simply. Next.
After the inauguration, Donald Trump named somebody to be the acting U.S. attorney in the state of New Jersey.
Then recently, and inexplicably, he changed his mind and swapped that person out and swapped in his personal lawyer, a woman named Alina Habba, who has zero experience as a prosecutor, but who did once have a good career representing parking garage companies and all their legal needs. So there's that.
In her new capacity as acting U.S. attorney for the state of New Jersey, Ms.
Habba has now got herself kitted out to do a ride-along with federal marshals a few days ago. She even got to escort people in handcuffs into vehicles and everything, all for the cameras.
In her Instagram post about this adventure, she tagged another woman outfitted with Marshalls gear who appears to be her executive assistant. So that ride along with the Marshalls turns out to have been real fun for the whole team.
Here's something worth knowing about though. Although this part of the law might never have come up in the whole parking garage lawyer part of her career, this riding along and play acting at arresting people with the U.S.
Marshals could be more than just embarrassing. It could also be a big legal screw-up.
Joining us now to explain is MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin. Lisa, thanks very much for being here.
You were trying to explain this to me offline, and I felt like you needed to explain it to me in front of everybody, because it seems both important and relatively simple. Thanks for being here tonight.
Thanks for having me. So, effectively, by doing these ride-alongs, Alina Habba is making herself a witness to the arrest of these people who are being picked up by U.S.
Marshals. Why is that potentially legally problematic? So, Rachel, there's a clear ethical rule that one cannot simultaneously be an advocate and a witness to the same proceeding.
And that differentiates someone like Alina Haba, who's a prosecutor, from folks perhaps like Kristi Noem or mayors who frequently go on ride-alongs. Ride-alongs are not themselves inherently a bad thing.
But when someone from a prosecutor's office puts themselves in a position where they interact with someone who could become a criminal defendant, that could potentially taint any future prosecution because that person could become a witness, thereby demanding that person's recusal. And not only that person's recusal, but potentially the recusal of that entire prosecutor's office.
In this case, the United States Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey. So that's OK.
So this is what seems amazing to me. So by doing this again, specifically because she's the head prosecutor in the federal prosecutor's office for the state of New Jersey, she could potentially be put herself in the position for any of those people who were arrested on that ride-along.
Not only where she personally might face demands for her recusal, but the entire office, which would mean that those people could not be federally prosecuted in New Jersey, right? Or that they would have to be prosecuted by people brought in from Maine Justice or another U.S. attorney's office.
But yes, that is what four former senior law enforcement officials at the federal level told me last week. Wow.
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin, an invaluable part of the Rachel Matter Show team at all times of day, but

particularly valuable here tonight on air. Thanks, Lisa.
I appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right. We'll be right back.

All right. That's going to do it for me for now.
I will see you again tomorrow and every

night this week here at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.