MADDOW DEBUNKS: Weird fake news, A.I. slop stories about her and MSNBC infect social media

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This year, lawmakers have attacked our rights, stretched the truth, and taken away access to health care.

Speaker 1 Through it all, Planned Parenthood has been on the front lines, providing care, defending patients, fighting back.

Speaker 1 But the Trump administration and Congress passed a law to defund Planned Parenthood, putting care for 1.1 million patients at risk. Planned Parenthood isn't backing down.

Speaker 1 They're still here, protecting access to birth control, cancer screenings, abortion, and more. Visit plannedparenthood.org/slash defend and donate today.

Speaker 4 Now's the time to start your next adventure behind the wheel of an exciting new Toyota hybrid.

Speaker 5 With the largest lineup of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electrified vehicles to choose from, Toyota has the one for you.

Speaker 3 Every new Toyota hybrid comes with Toyota Care, two-year complementary scheduled maintenance, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 11 Visit your local Toyota dealer today, Toyota.

Speaker 12 Let's go places. See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Speaker 11 Thanks, Tu at Home, for joining us this out. Really happy to have you here.
So

Speaker 11 I do not live in Texas.

Speaker 11 I like Texas very much,

Speaker 11 but I have never spent all that much time there. I've never put down roots there.
I definitely do not own a house in Texas.

Speaker 11 Relatedly, because I do not live in Texas and I don't have a house in Texas and I haven't visited there at all this past year,

Speaker 11 I did not need to be rescued in the Texas floods this month, month, nor was I in Texas personally rescuing people from the Texas floods when they happened.

Speaker 11 Also, just so you know, I do not have a long-lost daughter with whom I have recently been reunited.

Speaker 11 I do not have a daughter. I do not have a baby.
I do not have a baby on the way. No kids, no kids at all.
I've never had a baby myself. My partner Susan never had a baby.

Speaker 11 We've never adopted a baby or had a baby by surrogacy or by any other means by which one might reasonably end up with a baby.

Speaker 11 So no house in Texas, nothing to do with the terrible Texas floods. I don't have a long-lost daughter.
I don't have any kind of baby anyway, anyhow.

Speaker 11 I also have not been fired by MSNBC.

Speaker 11 Look, here I am. I still work here.

Speaker 11 You see me now on MSNBC. I have been here since 2005, I think.
I am happy as a clam here at MSNBC.

Speaker 11 Relatedly, I have not founded my own news network, nor am I planning to. Why would I do that when I work at MSNBC without a baby and without a house in Texas?

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 I say all this

Speaker 11 because

Speaker 11 If you have been looking at the internet machine, particularly if you have been looking at Facebook,

Speaker 11 you may have heard or seen stuff about me that contradicts those things that I just told you.

Speaker 11 And,

Speaker 11 you know, I've been around for a while. I've been in this business for a while.

Speaker 11 I'm used to people saying fake stuff about me to get a rise out of people or to get under my skin or for some other self-serving purpose. I'm used to it.
I don't particularly care.

Speaker 11 But I gotta say, it's different now.

Speaker 11 Now, because of AI, the fake stories

Speaker 11 are more compelling to people and more believable.

Speaker 11 They're really finely targeted and calibrated to tell people things that they want to hear or specifically to tell them things that they want to click on to learn more about.

Speaker 11 The biggest change, I think, is that there are often now AI-generated pictures or even videos that are designed to make you think that you're not only reading a story that has some appeal to you, but there's visual proof of what the story says.

Speaker 11 And AI will generate any visual proof that you want. So there I am rescuing people supposedly in the Texas floods.

Speaker 11 And there I am with a baby of some derivation.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 here I am having a security guard take the White House press secretary off of my set in a TV studio or something. None of this is real.
None of this is real. This is all AI generated.

Speaker 11 And to me, it all looks really fake. Like if you yourself are the subject of some of this AI slop, I can tell you, these images like this look clumsy and ham-handed and weird.

Speaker 11 And if you look really closely, some of the tells are there. The baby has too many fingers.

Speaker 11 There's a random extra arm in the picture with the old lady in the floodwaters. And there's these other weird things that are weird and wrong if you look really closely.
But

Speaker 11 We don't always all look really closely. We don't always have a reason to.
You know, if you're just scrolling through stuff on the internet, you might think this stuff is real.

Speaker 11 It is way more believable to a lot of people than it used to be before AI took over all social media. So, I mean, honestly, don't feel bad.

Speaker 11 It's no fault of your own if you saw any of this and believed any of this.

Speaker 11 For your convenience, I will say if you ever do see something about me online and you want to check to see if it's true, one place you can go to see if it's true is our website where we catalog this stuff, which is

Speaker 11 is thatreally rachel.com? That's the website address. Is that really rachel.com? We try to keep up with this stuff there, so you can check to see if it's real.
Again, is thatreally rachel.com?

Speaker 11 In addition, I will mention the website Snopes, Snopes.com. They always do a really good job debunking this kind of stuff, not just stuff about me, but everything.

Speaker 11 Snopes is great. And there's almost nobody else who does it as sort of consistently,

Speaker 11 consistent as consistently well as they do it. It makes them pretty invaluable.

Speaker 11 You should bookmark snopes, S-N-O-P-E-S.com, and you can always check that regularly against stuff that's circulating online or any rumors that you hear in the news if you want to see if it's true, to see if it's been debunked.

Speaker 11 But you know, even though the internet has always been a little bit of a cesspool,

Speaker 11 I do think that something's happening right now, like this summer, with the advent of AI, There's just been a tipping point, it's just been swapped all of a sudden and very thoroughly.

Speaker 11 I mean, even Google is about 90% less useful than it used to be on a day-to-day basis with the way that they've allowed AI and references to social media that are all fueled by AI to take over their search engine results.

Speaker 11 So, even Google is less useful than it used to be, but social media in particular, and Facebook is the worst of it, is pretty much totally overtaken now by AI slop. It is really just trash.

Speaker 11 And because the companies don't appear to want to fix it or do anything about it, it's not going to get any better.

Speaker 11 This stuff is essentially free and it's become the dominant content in American social media. And

Speaker 11 you can see why, it's infinite supply.

Speaker 11 These things, they don't take human effort. They are created robotically, in essentially infinite quantities and for free.

Speaker 11 And what they create and post online and circulate on social media is just stuff that is designed to manipulate you, to get you to click something, which they can directly monetize, or it's designed to manipulate your feelings or manipulate your perception of what's true and what's going on in the world.

Speaker 11 And, you know, the antidote is the same as it's always been for all of us, right? Only use trusted sources of information.

Speaker 11 If somebody is citing something to MSNBC, go to msnbc.com and see if you can find it there.

Speaker 11 If somebody is citing something to the BBC News or the New York Times or some other name brand news organization, you should be able to go to the website of that name brand news organization and find it there, right?

Speaker 11 Always try to figure out where something is coming from exactly

Speaker 11 before you believe it and certainly before you share it.

Speaker 11 But the fact that we're going through this right now, the fact that we are I think really in the midst of an AI slop information apocalypse online, where online sources of information are just becoming almost default useless.

Speaker 11 In this moment, we're also running into some funny situations because of the combination of AI-driven slop online and the extreme and bizarre news environment that is the second term of Donald Trump's presidency.

Speaker 11 Let me tell you how these two things come together. NBC News reporter Kevin Collier has really interesting new reporting on one particular thing that's going on online.

Speaker 11 It's a newly reported, previously undescribed, network of AI-powered bots that are on Twitter. They're on X.

Speaker 11 And these bots exist

Speaker 11 just to automatically praise Trump administration officials,

Speaker 11 to praise them and praise everything they do. Here's the lead, Mr.
Collier's story.

Speaker 11 Quote, a previously unreported network of hundreds of accounts on X is using artificial intelligence to automatically reply to conservatives with positive messages about people in the Trump administration.

Speaker 11 Quote, it's unclear who is behind the network or which of the multiple AI chatbots that are widely accessible to the public was used to power it.

Speaker 11 The bots have posted support for conservative figures since 2024, including supporting Trump and other Republicans on the ballot in the lead up to the 2024 election, and then afterward posting that they were excited for Trump to take office.

Speaker 11 Now, the bots in the network, quote, offer consistent praise for key Trump figures, particularly support for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt.

Speaker 11 So this is one of the ways that things online are just trash now in terms of your ability to get true and bankable bankable information online.

Speaker 11 In this case, this bot network NBC is reporting on, these bots are trained to automatically post tirelessly, mechanically, over and over again, things that Trump supporters might say in support of Trump things.

Speaker 11 So you no longer have to pay a troll farm of teenagers in Macedonia or St. Petersburg, Russia to pretend to be right-wing Americans saying political things online.

Speaker 11 Now, instead, they just train these automated bots to do it.

Speaker 11 They input into these bots the content that Trump supporters post online and then they tell the bots to just mimic it.

Speaker 11 Just spit it back out in quantity, thus maximizing what appears to be pro-Trump commentary online.

Speaker 11 But here's the problem.

Speaker 11 Artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent. It only knows what it has been trained on.
It only knows what it has been fed.

Speaker 11 And so these bots that are being told to mimic Trump supporters' social media comments, these bots

Speaker 11 are now getting confused

Speaker 11 about what they should say about the Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Speaker 11 I'll show you exactly what I mean. Here's one of the bots as reported by NBC.
This one's name is L Harry38143.

Speaker 11 And that bot posts this, quote, Pam Bondi's attempt to escape with the Epstein client list is laughable. It's time we demand transparency and justice for all victims involved.

Speaker 11 And then less than 24 hours later, here's that exact same bot.

Speaker 11 Retweet if you agree that it's time to take a stand against the mob mentality and support Pam Bondi.

Speaker 11 Same bot. Less than 24 hours later, one very much against Pam Pam Bondi, one very much for Pam Bondi, both on the basis of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Here's another one.

Speaker 11 This bot is called, what's its name? Carrie36622.

Speaker 11 Wow, this is getting juicy. Can't wait to see what comes out of all this.
Stay tuned, folks. It's going to be a wild ride.
Hashtag MAGA bombshell. Hashtag Epstein files.
Hashtag Trump scandal.

Speaker 11 And then literally one minute later, the same bot says this, quote, the coffin of perversion has been nailed shut as the case of Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein is finally closed.

Speaker 11 Hashtag justice, hashtag closure.

Speaker 11 So which is it? This is juicy. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Or finally, closure. I'm so glad this is over.
One minute apart.

Speaker 11 These bots, this is what, this is the kind of content you get from AI. These bots are trained to mimic MAGA voices online.

Speaker 11 They are trained to sound like Trump supporters based on the kind of stuff that Trump supporters say. And so when it comes to the Jeffrey Epstein story, the bots are malfunctioning.

Speaker 11 They're like sparking wires and melting down.

Speaker 11 Because these bots are trying to say what Trump supporters have always said,

Speaker 11 Epstein scandal, Epstein scandal. Why is nobody talking about the Epstein scandal?

Speaker 11 And at the same time, they're also trying to say what Trump is saying now, which is, definitely do not talk about the Epstein scandal. Everybody stop talking about it.

Speaker 11 Does not compute. Pew, pew.

Speaker 11 They're melting down. They don't know what to do.

Speaker 11 As NBC News put it, quote, with the MAGA movement split over the administration's handling of files involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the accounts' messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts.

Speaker 11 You know, what's happening here is the equivalent of the extra arm or the seven fingers on the baby, right? It's no longer working. They're showing their guts.

Speaker 11 But it is understandable that the bots are melting down. I mean, if you're going to try to be pro-Trump on the Jeffrey Epstein issue, what are you going to say?

Speaker 11 Right? I mean,

Speaker 11 what happened to the lawyer who got Epstein his bizarrely lenient plea deal when he was first arrested on sex trafficking charges in Florida? What happened to the lawyer who got him that

Speaker 11 bizarrely lenient plea deal? Well, oh, Trump hired him to be his own lawyer. What happened to the U.S.
attorney who gave Jeffrey Epstein that bizarrely lenient plea deal?

Speaker 11 Oh, Trump put him in his cabinet in his first term.

Speaker 11 Well, who then prosecuted Epstein a second time when he was brought up on federal charges? Oh, that was the SDNY line prosecutor who Trump inexplicably fired last week. Hmm.

Speaker 11 Who was in charge of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons when Epstein then killed himself in federal custody? Ah, President Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 Who bragged to a reporter about how much Epstein seemed to like women on the younger side, who said Epstein was a lot of fun to be with, who bragged that he was friends with Epstein for 15 years, who flew on his plane at least seven times, and who now says that everybody needs to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now?

Speaker 11 Answers there are Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 So if you're supposed to be a pro-Trump bot commenting on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, what are you going to do? You're going to melt down.

Speaker 11 They don't know what to say anymore.

Speaker 11 And the polling of real live humans on the issue reflects the same disgust.

Speaker 11 In the new CBS News YouGov poll that's just come out, Trump is underwater overall in terms of his approval rating by 16 points.

Speaker 11 Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president? Disapprove by 16 points.

Speaker 11 Well, okay, but do you feel strongly about it? Huh, turns out yes. The number of Americans who say they strongly approve of Trump is 24%.

Speaker 11 The number of Americans who say they strongly disapprove of Trump is 47%.

Speaker 11 That's almost double.

Speaker 11 So if you live somewhere with a lot of MAGA supporters and you're always hearing people say how much they love, love, love Trump and they've got Trump flags up and Trump bumper stickers and blah, blah, blah, you should know that the people who feel very strongly against Trump outnumber Trump fans in this country by almost exactly a two to one margin.

Speaker 11 They take up a lot of space, but they are not even a quarter of the population. They are two to one outnumbered by people who strongly disapprove of Trump.

Speaker 11 And it's it's not just him personally. He is underwater on every issue, including the one he wants to be his best issue.
Do you approve of Trump's handling of immigration? No.

Speaker 11 By a 12-point margin. Do you approve of Trump's handling of Iran? No, by a 12-point margin.
Do you approve of Trump's handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict? No, by a 14-point margin.

Speaker 11 Do you want the U.S. government to put tariffs on other countries? No, by a 20-point margin.
Do you approve of Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill? No, by a 22-point margin.

Speaker 11 Do you think the big beautiful bill will help you or hurt you and your family? Hurt by a two-to-one margin?

Speaker 11 Well, what do you think about Trump's handling of the Epstein matter? Well, by a 50-point margin, Americans say they are dissatisfied with Trump's handling of this matter.

Speaker 11 The number of Americans who say they are somewhat or very dissatisfied by Trump's handling of the Epstein matter is 75%.

Speaker 11 The number of Americans who say they are somewhat or very satisfied is only 25%. That is a 50-point gap.

Speaker 11 Should the U.S. Department of Justice release all the information it has regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case? Yes.

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 11 Yes, by a 78-point margin. Nearly 90% of Americans say the government should do that.
To which Trump says, everybody, please stop talking about this.

Speaker 11 Trump has tried to change the subject to threatening to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, even though he's not legally allowed to do that.

Speaker 11 He has tried to change the subject by threatening comedian Rosie O'Donnell. He has tried to change the subject by threatening California U.S.
Senator Adam Schiff.

Speaker 11 He has tried to change the subject by threatening former FBI director James Comey and by threatening former CIA director John Brennan.

Speaker 11 He has tried to change the subject by posting a threatening video about manhandling and handcuffing former President Barack Obama, which President Trump posted online last night.

Speaker 11 But none of that is working.

Speaker 11 And meanwhile, you know, how's he doing in terms of governance and stuff?

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, here's another near miss between another commercial passenger plane and a military aircraft, this time over Minot, North Dakota.

Speaker 11 While the former MTV reality show contestant Trump put in charge of the U.S.

Speaker 11 Transportation Department, has also, in addition to being in charge of things like the FAA and the Department of Transportation, has also additionally been given responsibility for running NASA

Speaker 11 in his spare time, where today hundreds of current and former scientific and technical NASA employees wrote a dissent letter sounding the alarm about what they call the rapid and wasteful cuts at NASA, including to the agency's key safety systems.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, Trump's bizarre bizarre gambit of flying people to a random gigantic prison in El Salvador, apparently in exchange for social media hits from the Salvadoran dictator, that bizarre episode with the big prison in El Salvador has now ended.

Speaker 11 And all the people who Trump sent there, including the gay makeup artist Andrei Hernandez-Romero, they have all been taken out of that prison now and flown to Venezuela.

Speaker 11 Trump's gambit with the weird Salvadoran prison apparently is over now.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, Trump's bizarre assertion that he needed to fly people to yet another random country, Eswatini, which used to be Swaziland.

Speaker 11 The Trump administration said they needed to spend, I believe, millions of dollars to fly five people all the way around the world from this country to that tiny country in Africa.

Speaker 11 They said they had to fly them there in particular because these five men could never be returned to their home countries.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, Eswatini has received these five men men from the United States, and what are they going to do with them? They say they're going to send these guys back to their home countries.

Speaker 11 Because it's not actually a problem to send them back to their home countries. It's not an issue, even though the Trump administration said that could not be done.

Speaker 11 And that's why they had to spend all that time and all that effort and all that money of yours and mine to fly these men to Swaziland.

Speaker 11 They're just going back to their home countries anyway. But meanwhile, the Trump administration detoured them to a tiny nation in Africa.
Okay.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, half the National Guardsmen who Trump inexplicably sent to Los Angeles have now been sent home.

Speaker 11 After completing a mission there marked by morale so low, it yielded press reports like this one from the New York Times, quote, some troops became so disgruntled that

Speaker 11 there were several reports of soldiers defecating in Humvees and showers. at the Southern California base where the troops were stationed, prompting tightened bathroom security.

Speaker 11 Half of those National Guard troops have now been sent home.

Speaker 11 Now today, the active duty Marines Trump inexplicably sent to Los Angeles are also being sent home.

Speaker 11 With a whimper.

Speaker 11 The way all these bizarre, expensive, failed Trump gambits are ending.

Speaker 11 With a whimper.

Speaker 11 Remember all the protests we've been covering against Avello Airlines?

Speaker 11 Avello Airlines signed a contract with the Trump administration to fly deportation flights, and then they kept trying to operate commercial passenger flights alongside those.

Speaker 11 People have been protesting every week at the airports where Avello has tried to maintain its commercial passenger flights alongside its ICE deportation flights.

Speaker 11 Now Avello has announced that it is pulling its operations out of a whole bunch of airports where it was trying to have commercial passenger traffic.

Speaker 11 They're pulling out of Santa Rosa Rosa and McKinleyville and Burbank in California.

Speaker 11 They're pulling out of Calispel, Montana and Las Vegas, Nevada and Salem, Redmond, Eugene, and Rogue Valley, Oregon, and Pasco Tri-Cities, Washington. They're pulling out all those places.

Speaker 11 There were protests this weekend at a Walmart in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where ICE tasered and tackled a woman recently, and then the store forced out.

Speaker 11 people who were seeking to videotape what ICE was doing to someone inside that store. Now people are picketing outside that Walmart.

Speaker 11 There were protests this weekend in Leavenworth, Kansas, led by former employees of the private prison company, Core Civic.

Speaker 11 Core Civic had a disastrous run operating a now-closed private prison in Leavenworth. Trump now wants to reopen it as an immigration prison.

Speaker 11 The city of Leavenworth is fighting it, and that fight is being led by people who worked for Core Civic at that old, disastrously run Leavenworth jail.

Speaker 11 There were protests this weekend in Stark, Florida, against plans to turn the Florida National Guard site at Camp Blanding into another one of Trump's immigration prisons there.

Speaker 11 There were protests at the site of the notorious and now closed federal prison for women in Dublin, California, which Trump also wants to reopen as an immigration prison.

Speaker 11 These protests against reopening that site in Dublin, California, these protests this weekend were led in part by Japanese Americans.

Speaker 15 Now a new voice of opposition is speaking out.

Speaker 15 The Japanese-American community, comparing recent ICE raids to the internment of more than 125,000 Japanese Americans during World War II under the Alien Enemies Act.

Speaker 11 I'm here because the Japanese were interned. My father was interned.
And it can't happen again, but it is. It's happening.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 it's almost shameful. Here, there's no attack, there's no invasion, you know.

Speaker 11 But Trump has cited the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport people without any due process.

Speaker 15 While the future may be unclear, many activists and their allies will keep raising their voices.

Speaker 4 I believe that will free fall right.

Speaker 15 In Dublin, Cornell Bernard, ABC7 News.

Speaker 11 That was this weekend in Dublin, California, Northern California.

Speaker 11 In Cleveland, Ohio, this weekend, on the anniversary of America landing a man on the moon, Ohio residents protested against Trump's plan to fire more than 500 people who work at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio.

Speaker 11 In Savannah, Georgia, there was protest against Trump this weekend. In Nashville, Tennessee, yet another big protest in the name of and in the memory of the late Congressman John Lewis.

Speaker 11 And another one in Columbia, Pennsylvania this weekend, and yet another one at the Kansas State Capitol. and yet another one in Canton, Ohio, and yet another one in Irvine, California.

Speaker 11 There are protests all over the red state of Indiana this weekend at the offices of Republican Congressman Rudy Yakim and Republican Congresswoman Victoria Sparks and Republican U.S.

Speaker 11 Senator Todd Young.

Speaker 11 In Texas, there were protests both in Houston and also in Austin at the governor's mansion there against Texas Republicans' plans to redistrict congressional maps in that state to try to force five more congressional districts into being guaranteed Republican safe seats in Washington.

Speaker 11 This was Washington, D.C. today.

Speaker 11 People protesting Trump's disaster preparedness cuts, protesting with pink camp trunks, pink foot lockers to represent all those girls who were killed by the floods at Camp Mystic in Texas.

Speaker 11 And this, this afternoon, this was outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the great Stephen Colbert tapes his show for CBS in New York City.

Speaker 11 CBS, of course, just canceled his show while Trump gloated about it. People outside Colbert's studio this afternoon saying, Colbert stays, Trump must go.

Speaker 11 Don't believe everything you hear without checking it out. Don't believe everything you see without checking it out.

Speaker 11 But also, don't close your eyes to this stuff either. This is as much the story of this moment in our history as anything anybody's saying in Washington.
It is our moment in history, too.

Speaker 11 I'll be right back.

Speaker 16 This message comes from the International Rescue Committee. Co-founded with help from Albert Einstein, the IRC has been providing humanitarian aid for more than 90 years.

Speaker 16 The IRC helps refugees whose lives are disrupted by conflict and disaster, supporting recovery efforts in places like Gaza and Ukraine, and responding within 72 hours of crisis.

Speaker 16 Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild.

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This year, lawmakers have attacked our rights, stretched the truth, and taken away access to health care.

Speaker 1 Through it all, Planned Parenthood has been on the front lines, providing care, defending patients, fighting back.

Speaker 1 But the Trump administration and Congress passed a law to defund Planned Parenthood, putting care for 1.1 million patients at risk. Planned Parenthood isn't backing down.

Speaker 1 They're still here, protecting access to birth control, cancer screenings, abortion, and more. Visit planned parenthood.org slash defend and donate today.

Speaker 4 Now's the time to start your next adventure behind the wheel of an exciting new Toyota hybrid.

Speaker 5 With the largest lineup of hybrid plug-in hybrid and electrified vehicles to choose from, Toyota has the one for you.

Speaker 3 Every new Toyota hybrid comes with Toyota Care, two-year complementary scheduled maintenance, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 11 Visit your local Toyota dealer today, Toyota.

Speaker 12 Let's go places. See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Speaker 11 So U.S. attorneys are a really big deal.
It's the top federal prosecutor in a a state. And for smaller states, there's sometimes just one U.S.
attorney for the whole state. In bigger states,

Speaker 11 there's often more than one.

Speaker 11 So for example, New York State has four U.S. attorneys for four different districts in New York.
But like I said, they're a big deal. U.S.

Speaker 11 attorneys are nominated by the President of the United States. They are confirmed by the U.S.
Senate. They've got a lot of power.
It's a very prestigious, very powerful job. It's an important thing.

Speaker 11 In one of the four districts in New York, in the northern district of New York, which is Albany,

Speaker 11 instead of nominating a U.S. attorney and submitting that nomination to the Senate, President Trump instead decided that he was going to install somebody just on a temporary basis.

Speaker 11 He was going to install an interim U.S. attorney.
And this is who he picked. His name is John Sarkone.

Speaker 11 Among the things that have distinguished Mr. Sarkone's somewhat bizarre tenure thus far in Albany,

Speaker 11 was the moment when the local paper discovered that the place Sarkone had officially reported at his local home address was actually a boarded-up building where no one lives.

Speaker 11 In response to that reporting, Mr.

Speaker 11 Sarkone ordered his office to take that newspaper off its media distribution list and no longer give them any information because he did not like their story about him saying that he lived in what was actually a boarded up building.

Speaker 11 John Sarkone's temporary appointment as U.S. attorney was scheduled to come to an end last week.
If you're appointed as an interim U.S. attorney, you can't stay stay forever.

Speaker 11 They have to have a Senate confirmed person in the job eventually, right?

Speaker 11 There can be exceptions, though. There is one way legally that an interim U.S.
attorney can extend his or her term in office and stay on a little bit longer if that needs to happen.

Speaker 11 The only way you can do it is if the federal judges in that district vote that that person should be kept in their post beyond the time when the interim appointment would usually end.

Speaker 11 Well, earlier this month, John Sarcone went on TV and said, hey, I've got great news, everybody.

Speaker 11 The judges in the Northern District of New York, they just voted on whether or not I get to keep this gig and they voted to keep me. I get to stay.

Speaker 11 Except that was totally not true. The judges in the Northern District of New York actually had gotten together and voted and they voted no.

Speaker 11 They voted that John Sarcone could not stay in office, which legally meant that he has to go. He can't continue to hold hold that job.

Speaker 11 Now, at that point, what the Justice Department's supposed to do is nominate somebody new for the post or appoint another interim prosecutor to hold the position for a little while until they can figure out who they want the Senate to confirm.

Speaker 11 But instead, they decided to do something crazy.

Speaker 11 The Trump administration decided instead to just keep John Sarkohen on the job. And they decided to do that by naming him to be his own assistant.

Speaker 11 So they've given him a new job where he's now the first assistant U.S. Attorney.

Speaker 11 And since there's been a vacancy left by John Sarcone having to leave as interim U.S. Attorney, now the first assistant has to step up and be the new acting U.S.
Attorney.

Speaker 11 And wouldn't you know, the first assistant is also John Sarcone. So now he is the acting U.S.

Speaker 11 Attorney for the Northern District of New York, as well as serving as his own assistant, as well as, I guess, being the former interim U.S. Attorney.

Speaker 11 he and the White House are now claiming that he can now serve out

Speaker 11 this

Speaker 11 term as the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York indefinitely with nobody voting on it and nobody confirming him. He just gets to stay because he's his own assistant.

Speaker 11 They seem to think they have found this loophole where, well, maybe they, where maybe they just never have to nominate anybody for Senate confirmation for jobs like this anymore.

Speaker 11 I mean, we don't know if they're going to try this this one neat trick to bypass judges in the Senate for other U.S. attorney posts as well, but I can tell you that the interim U.S.

Speaker 11 attorney for New Jersey is the former parking garage lawyer and former Trump personal attorney, Alina Haba. In her time as interim New Jersey U.S.

Speaker 11 Attorney, she has filed charges against the mayor of New Jersey's largest city. She has indicted a sitting Democratic congresswoman.

Speaker 11 She has announced an investigation into the Democratic governor and the Democratic Attorney General of the state, all while posing for immigration enforcement cosplay glamour shots on the regular.

Speaker 11 Her appointment as interim U.S. Attorney runs out tomorrow.
A panel of federal judges in New Jersey was slated to meet today on her request to stay on.

Speaker 11 If they reject her, will they try to keep Alina Haba in the job indefinitely as well?

Speaker 11 Who fixes this if this is the way Trump is trying to break it?

Speaker 11 Joining us now is Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Joyce, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 17 Good to be with you.

Speaker 11 This isn't the sort of thing that regular news consumers and regular citizens usually have to know anything about. This is usually kind of in the weeds in terms of how the justice system works.

Speaker 11 Let me just ask you if I explained any of it the wrong way around or if I confused any of those details.

Speaker 17 You did a great job. It's horribly in the weeds.
I was technically an acting U.S.

Speaker 17 attorney for the first four months I was off in office, but I think even I had forgotten that until all of this came up.

Speaker 11 With this interim U.S. Attorney,

Speaker 11 one neat trick that they have pulled off in the Northern District of New York, saying that by naming this man to be his own assistant, now he no longer needs permission from the judges in the district to stay on.

Speaker 11 Now he doesn't need Senate confirmation. He can just indefinitely hold this position.

Speaker 11 I have to ask if that's something that you know of any other administration ever trying or if it's something that's ever otherwise been tested?

Speaker 17 No, absolutely not. And I think, you know, it's easy to make light of this, but the reality is, this is the top law enforcement officer in the Northern District of New York.

Speaker 17 And he's come into office by making a mockery of these foundational laws in our democracy.

Speaker 17 The separation of power that's meant to keep power from being concentrated too deeply in the hands of any one branch and government, so that the Senate has to confirm the president's pick for these high-ranking jobs.

Speaker 17 It's no way to become the top chief law enforcement officer in a district by doing this.

Speaker 11 The federal judges in the Northern District,

Speaker 11 is it in their part of their remit to sort of police this? I mean, the way that the rules are supposed to work, they're supposed to have a say as to whether or not an interim U.S.

Speaker 11 attorney can have his term extended

Speaker 11 on the basis presumably of their view of that interim U.S.

Speaker 11 attorney, but also the circumstances that warrant the request for an extension, the judges are given judgment in terms of whether or not this is a good idea.

Speaker 11 What can they do, if anything, now that this is being flouted pretty obviously?

Speaker 17 I think it's unlikely that we would see federal judges go to war with the President of the United States over one of these appointments. It absolutely is their prerogative.

Speaker 17 The question is, how would they enforce it in a situation where you've got a president who's committed to doing it the wrong wrong way.

Speaker 17 So he could, for instance, fire the court appointee, put in his own person for another 120 days.

Speaker 17 These laws are really vague and fluid, Rachel, and there are reads of these laws that would say that would be an okay thing for the president to do.

Speaker 17 So I think we'll just consider, we'll continue to see this kind of tomfoolery as opposed to taking this seriously like it should be.

Speaker 11 Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, thank you so much for your time.
We're going to continue to watch this closely.

Speaker 11 I think if they think they've gotten away with it once, they'll keep trying it in other places. So we'll see.
Thanks, Joyce.

Speaker 11 Thanks. All right.
Much more news ahead. Stay with us.

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Speaker 11 The Trump administration today released thousands of documents, nearly a quarter million pages, related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 11 They did it as a surprise, without warning. For nearly 50 years, these records have been kept under seal.
Dr. King's immediate family did not want them released.

Speaker 11 According to the Associated Press, the King family had gotten advance notice of the release.

Speaker 11 The AP says the family had been reviewing the records, and quote, those efforts continued even as the government unveiled the digital trove today,

Speaker 11 which I think speaks to the way the news arrived today, really out of the blue.

Speaker 11 I mean, whatever you make of the timing by this White House, which would very much like to talk about FBI records other than Jeffrey Epstein's, whatever you make of the timing and the politics here, these quarter million pages involve the death of a man who was very much loved by his family, who again did not want these documents released.

Speaker 11 As Martin Luther King III and Dr. Bernice King, Dr.

Speaker 11 King's surviving children, said in a statement today, quote, we ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief.

Speaker 11 The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context.

Speaker 11 During our father's lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the FBI.

Speaker 11 The intent of the government's COINTELPRO surveillance campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle, and destroy Dr. King's reputation and the broader American civil rights movement.

Speaker 11 While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father's legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.

Speaker 11 Joining us now is my friend, the Reverend Al Sharfton. He's the president of the National Action Network, and he's also, of course, the host of MSNBC's Politics Nation.

Speaker 11 Raval, it's really good to see you. Thanks for joining us tonight on short notice on this story.

Speaker 18 Thank you, Rachel, for having me.

Speaker 11 I know you've been in touch with Dr. King's family.
I just wanted to ask what you can share about what you're hearing from them tonight as the public starts seeing these records.

Speaker 18 Well, I've been talking to Martin III over the last several days, not

Speaker 18 since the documents were released, and he and Reverend Bernice's sister, the two surviving children, have said they want to be able to review documents.

Speaker 18 It seems strange to many of us in the civil rights community, if not outright conspiratorial, that you want to release files, a quarter of a million files from 57 years ago, but you can't release the files of right now with Epstein just a few years ago.

Speaker 18 So is this a distraction? And are we going to see Jared Gahoova and many of the vicious and untrue lies that FBI agents some were documented to have falsified to hurt the civil rights movement and Dr.

Speaker 18 King personally at a time so the public is distracted with that.

Speaker 18 Things that were never proven, things that had biased investigators, and we're chasing something from decades ago while they're avoiding talking about releasing files from today.

Speaker 18 I think this is as absolutely outrageous as one can imagine to do this to Dr. King's family who've suffered so much.

Speaker 11 And Dr. King's family, just to be clear, they were in the process of going through, of being allowed to see and being allowed to go through these documents that were being released.

Speaker 11 They were still in the middle of doing that process, still in the middle of looking at all that stuff.

Speaker 11 They hadn't looked at everything before suddenly they were just released today because the timeline all of a sudden had to be very urgent.

Speaker 18 No,

Speaker 18 that's my exact point. They were asking to review the documents.

Speaker 18 I know they had not finished all the review. I don't know how far they had gotten.
Why was it so necessary to release them now? And what quarter of a million documents?

Speaker 18 Is this beyond the assassination? Are we going to hear some of the unsavory lies that was put out by Jared Gahoova to discredit Dr. King? Is Dr.

Speaker 18 King being assassinated by this administration character-wise to try and avoid dealing with some recent files that the American public want to know?

Speaker 18 This is outrageous, and the civil rights community and most Americans, I don't believe will stand for this.

Speaker 11 The Reverend Al Sharpton, Al, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Again on short notice, I really appreciate you getting to the studio.
Thank you. All right, we'll be right back.

Speaker 11 Stay with us.

Speaker 11 I'm about to show you something that will seem like it does not match with what I'm about to say about that thing. Okay, ready? The visuals and the verbiage won't feel like they match.

Speaker 11 This guy, this older guy, biker dude in the leather vest on the jet black Harley, Harley.

Speaker 11 He is

Speaker 11 the highest ranking Catholic official for the city of Miami. He is Archbishop Thomas Wenske.

Speaker 11 I know, right? This is one of those moments when seeing the thing doesn't match with saying the thing.

Speaker 11 Archbishop Wenske is part of a group called the Knights on Bikes, as in the Knights of Columbus, Catholic charity organization. on Harley-Davidson's.

Speaker 11 They do charity, they do volunteer work, they pray, and they ride their motorcycles together.

Speaker 11 We've been talking about what's been happening in Florida around the so-called alligator Alcatraz facility, Trump's immigration prison camp in the Florida Everglades.

Speaker 11 We've been talking about local Democratic elected officials getting into that facility to see the conditions there.

Speaker 11 We've been watching local press do good investigative work there, documenting the conditions there, the fact that at least one 15-year-old has been taken there, unmasking the contractors who've been covering up their logos so you won't know that they're working there.

Speaker 11 Well, now there's also the the Knights on Bikes.

Speaker 11 Last night Archbishop Wenske led about 25 fellow knights on bikes to the front gate of Trump's Everglades prison camp to pray a rosary for the men who are imprisoned there.

Speaker 11 For about three weeks now, the Catholic Church in Miami, the Archdiocese there, has been trying to get into that new immigration prison camp to provide religious services for the men who are imprisoned there.

Speaker 11 For three weeks now, the immigration prison has denied them entry.

Speaker 19 We've been getting a runaround. Some people tell us it's a state responsibility.
State tells us it's a federal responsibility.

Speaker 19 But we haven't got an answer yet of why we cannot have religious services there.

Speaker 11 Archbishop Wenski says he is still waiting for approval for the Catholic Church to provide religious services for the men in that prison camp. But meanwhile, every way they can, they'll keep pushing.

Speaker 11 Stay with us.

Speaker 11 All right, that's going to do it for me tonight. Good to have you here.

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