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

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Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

Really happy to have you here.

So

I do not live in Texas.

I like Texas very much, 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.

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,

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I also have not been fired by MSNBC.

Look, here I am.

I still work here.

You see me now on MSNBC.

I have been here since 2005, I think.

I am happy as a clam here at MSNBC.

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?

And

I say all this

because

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

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

And

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

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.

But I gotta say, it's different now.

Now, because of AI, the fake stories

are more compelling to people and more believable.

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.

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.

And AI will generate any visual proof that you want.

So there I am rescuing people supposedly in the Texas floods.

And there I am with a baby of some derivation.

And

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.

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.

And if you look really closely, some of the tells are there.

The baby has too many fingers.

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 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.

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.

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

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

isthatreally 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 that really rachel.com?

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.

Snopes is great.

And there's almost nobody else who does it as sort of consistently

consistently

well as they do it.

It makes them pretty invaluable.

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.

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

I do think that something's happening right now, like 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

And

you can see why.

It's infinite supply.

These things, they don't take human effort.

They are created robotically, in essentially infinite quantities and for free.

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.

And, you know, the antidote is the same as it's always been for all of us, right?

Only use trusted sources of information.

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

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.

Always try to figure out where something is coming from exactly

before you believe it and certainly before you share it.

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.

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.

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.

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

They're on X.

And these bots exist just to automatically praise Trump administration officials.

To praise them and praise everything they do.

Here's the lead, Mr.

Collier's story.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

They input into these bots the content that Trump supporters post online and then they tell the bots to just mimic it, just spit it back out in quantity, thus maximizing what appears to be pro-Trump commentary online.

But here's the problem.

Artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent.

It only knows what it has been trained on.

It only knows what it has been fed.

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

are now getting confused

about what they should say about the

Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

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.

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.

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

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

Same bot.

Less than 24 hours later, one very much against Pam Bondi, one very much for Pam Bondi, both on the basis of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Here's another one.

This bot is called, what's its name?

Carrie36622.

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.

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.

Hashtag justice, hashtag closure.

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.

These bots, this is what, this is the kind of content you get from AI.

These bots are trained to mimic MAGA voices online.

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.

They're like sparking wires and melting down.

Because these bots are trying to say what Trump supporters have always said.

Epstein scandal, scandal, Epstein scandal, why is nobody talking about the Epstein scandal?

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.

Does not compute.

Pew, pew.

They're melting down.

They don't know what to do.

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 account's messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts.

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.

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?

Right?

I mean,

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

They don't know what to say anymore.

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

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.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?

Disapprove by 16 points.

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%.

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

That's almost double.

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.

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.

And 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.

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.

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.

Do you think the big, beautiful bill will help you or hurt you and your family?

Hurt by a two-to-one margin.

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.

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

The number of Americans who say they are somewhat or very satisfied is only 25%.

That is a 50-point gap.

Should the U.S.

Department of Justice release all the information it has regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case?

Yes.

Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But none of that is working.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Meanwhile, Trump's 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Meanwhile, Espatini has received these five 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.

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.

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.

They're just going back to their home countries anyway.

But meanwhile, the Trump administration detoured them to a tiny nation in Africa.

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

With a whimper.

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

With a whimper.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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 people who were seeking to videotape what ICE was doing to someone inside that store.

Now people are picketing outside that Walmart.

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

Core Civic had a disastrous run operating a now-closed private prison in Leavenworth.

Trump now wants to reopen it as an immigration prison.

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.

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.

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.

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

Now a new voice of opposition is speaking out.

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.

I'm here because the Japanese were interned.

My father was interned.

And it can't happen again, but it is.

It's happening.

And

it's almost shameful.

Here, there's no attack, there's no invasion, you know.

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

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

I believe that will be involved right.

In Dublin, Cornell Bernard, ABC 7 News.

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

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.

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.

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.

There were 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.

Senator Todd Young.

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.

This was Washington, D.C.

today.

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.

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.

CBS, of course, just canceled his show while Trump gloated about it.

People outside outside Colbert's studio this afternoon saying, Colbert stays.

Trump must go.

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

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

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.

I'll be right back.

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So, U.S.

attorneys are a really big deal.

It's the top federal prosecutor in a state.

And for smaller states, there's sometimes just one U.S.

attorney for the whole state.

In bigger states, there's often more than one.

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.

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.

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

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.

He was going to install an interim U.S.

attorney.

And this is who he picked.

His name is John Sarkone.

Among the things that have distinguished Mr.

Sarkone's somewhat bizarre tenure thus far in Albany 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.

In response to that reporting, Mr.

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.

John Sarkohn'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 forever.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

They voted that John Sarkone could not stay in office, which legally meant that he has to go.

He can't continue to hold that job.

Now at that point, what the Justice Department is 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.

But instead, they decided to do something crazy.

The Trump administration decided instead to just keep John Sarkoh on the job.

And they decided to do that by naming him to be his own assistant.

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

attorney.

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.

And wouldn't you know, the first assistant is also John Sarkone.

So now he is the acting U.S.

attorney for the Northern 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.

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

this

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.

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

I mean, we don't know if they're going to try 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.

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.

Attorney, she has filed charges against the mayor of New Jersey's largest city.

She has indicted a sitting Democratic congresswoman.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Good to be with you.

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.

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

You did a great job.

It's horribly in the weeds.

I was technically an acting U.S.

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.

With this interim U.S.

attorney,

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.

Now he doesn't need Senate confirmation.

He can just indefinitely hold this position.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The federal judges in the Northern District,

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.

attorney attorney can have his term extended on the basis presumably of their view of that interim U.S.

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.

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

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.

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 way, so he could, for instance, fire the court appointee, put in his own person for another 120 days.

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.

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.

Former U.S.

Attorney Joyce Fance, thank you so much for your time.

We're going to continue to watch this closely.

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.

Thanks.

All right.

Much more news ahead.

Stay with us.

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

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.

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

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

Which I think speaks to the way the news arrived today, really, out of the blue.

I mean, whatever you make of the timing by this White House, which would very much like to talk about 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.

As Martin Luther King III and Dr.

Bernice King, Dr.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Joining us now is my friend, the Reverend Al Sharkton.

He's the president of the National Action Network, and he's also, of course, the host of MSNBC's Politics Nation.

Rev Al, it's really good to see you.

Thanks for joining us tonight on short notice on this story.

Thank you, Rachel, for having me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

King personally at a time so the public is distracted with that?

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.

I think this is as absolutely outrageous as one can imagine to do this to Dr.

King's family who suffered so much.

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.

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

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?

No,

that's my exact point.

They were asking to review the documents.

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?

Is this beyond the assassination?

Are we going to hear some of the unsavory lies that was put out by Jared Gahuva to discredit Dr.

King?

Is Dr.

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

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

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.

Stay with us.

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.

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

he is

the highest-ranking Catholic official for the city of Miami.

He is Archbishop Thomas Wenske.

I know, right?

This is one of those moments when seeing the thing doesn't match with saying the thing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Last night, Archbishop Wenski 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.

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.

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

We've been getting a runaround.

Some people tell us this is state responsibility.

The state tells us it's a federal responsibility.

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

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.

Stay with us.

All right, that's going to do it for me tonight.

Good to have you here.

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