Updated
Summary
President Biden made another rebuke of the MAGA GOP for threats to FBI and law enforcement. Justice Department to address Trump`s request for a special master tonight. How America is treating the cocaine epidemic in a criminal lens versus the opioids with empathy and systemic problem. Jay-Z on going from drugs to poetry and reflects on success. A Secret Service agent for Trump will retire after the January 6th bombshell.
Transcript
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: Thank you so much for letting us into your homes during these extraordinary times. We are grateful. THE BEAT WITH ARI MELBER starts right now.
Hi, Ari.
ARI MELBER, MSNBC HOST: Hi, Nicolle. Nice to see you. Welcome to THE BEAT.
Let me tell you, we have a lot going on in the show tonight. Justice Department expected to respond to Trump`s effort to have a different review process for materials that have largely already been reviewed, so we`re keeping an eye on that.
I also have a special report for you tonight on the war on drugs, on lessons from the Obama era, from Attorney General Eric Holder, and why a new song is making waves all about this. Sometimes we go old school. Well, this is brand new contemporary music. We`re going to get into that as well as the politics.
Also tonight, Carole King, the icon is here with us live. We`re going to get into her activism and why she said she has something to talk about on THE BEAT, and we said come on over. So it`s a lot cooking here on this late August kind of summer vibes. A lot of news, a lot of guests, a lot to get to.
And it ain`t summer as far as the president is concerned. This is not some slow news week vibe for him. President Biden going at what we calls the semi-fascism of certain MAGA Republicans in that party. These are, according to some really, depending on how you measured it, the strongest comments yet, as he rebukes MAGA today, just days after making waves in what was apparently a very clear deliberate effort to address authoritarianism in America.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress. Don`t tell me you support law enforcement if you won`t condemn what happened on the 6th. For God`s sake whose side are you on? You can`t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Fact check, true. Those Trump fans battered, attacked, bashed, sprayed the police that day. They were anti-blue lives. They were anti-law enforcement. And as we`ve reported, you can`t claim to be law and order and then only want law and order applied to black Americans when they are policed.
Biden also addressing the mounting threats to the FBI. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: I want to say this as clear as I can. There`s no place in this country — no place — for an endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: In some ways this was a more decisive Biden on an issue that is different from the economic emphasis they`ve made in the past few weeks, including student loans. At one point he appeared to reference something that we alerted you to last night, the absolutely anti-rule of law, anti- democracy comments that Senator Lindsey Graham made. Well, here`s what Biden appeared to be referring to that, talking about where the hell are we?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: But the idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, if such and such happens, there will be blood in the street. Where the hell are we?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: I`m joined now by Obama veteran Chai Komanduri.
Chai, your thoughts on the substance of what the president said and whether we are seeing any different emphasis here?
CHAI KOMANDURI, POLITICAL STRATEGIST: I think that this goes to Biden`s midterm strategy, which is a two-pronged strategy. First, you have to mobilize and energize the Democratic base. The Democratic base currently is mobilized and energized base on the returns, from the special elections, around the idea of GOP extremism that the party in power in this country that is creating radical change is not the Democratic White House. It is the Republican Supreme Court and it is the radical Republicans who have put them in charge.
That`s the first thing. The second thing is the idea that what really is a problem in American politics right now is this fear that a lot of suburban voters have. That Democrats are in some ways soft on crime. Biden is turning the entire argument around. He`s saying the people who are soft on crime are the Republicans. Look at January 6th. So I think to combine, this is a very strong message and a very good message for us for Democrats heading into the midterms.
MELBER: Right. Well, and you`re speaking to sort of why this emphasis is coming now. We are just days away — you get past Labor Day and you`re into the heart of the midterms, and there were other fundamentals we`ve reported that were going against Biden and Democrats.
[18:05:08]
As for this party, you memorably said soon after January 6th that there were parts of the Republican Party that had become riot adjacent.
KOMANDURI: Right.
MELBER: It was one of those things that at the time may have struck some as a reach. Oh, here goes this Obama guy, you`re trying to move the goalposts. Behold, just some of what we heard from Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham back when they claimed to be against what they called looting in the BLM season of 2020 to what Graham`s saying now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): Rioting and looting, we have zero tolerance for.
GRAHAM: Being upset with what happened to Mr. Floyd is absolutely all American. Trying to occupy part of a city and turn it into a socialist enclave, not.
It`s all about getting him. There literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Chai?
KOMANDURI: Yes. I mean, I think that what we have to understand, I think we need to be blunt about this. When Republicans talk about crime, they`re not talking about crime. They`re talking about white grievance and white anger that they are trying to stoke against African-Americans. And they are associating crime specifically with African-Americans. That is what they`re constantly doing, and that is why you see such a tremendous double standard in the way Republicans apply issues of law and order to African-Americans versus how they apply them to their own side.
This is tribalism in its most precise and simplest definition, but this is exactly what they`re doing. And there`s a long history of this. You can go back to the `60s when George Wallace sort of began talking in this particular manner. Richard Nixon picked it up as part of the Southern strategy. Pat Buchanan sort of elaborated and sort of enlarged this whole sort of playing field. And Donald Trump took it over.
And every single time Republicans talk about crime, they very specifically talk about African-American crime that is occurring or is perceived to be occurring in the inner cities. The best example of this is to look at our reaction and our response to the opioid epidemic and the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. I mean, it`s been night and day. You know, we treated the opioid epidemic and we continue to treat it with empathy, with compassion, as a situation where we have to sort of look at systemic roots of this, while the crack cocaine epidemic was treated as just lock them up, put them away.
MELBER: Yes.
KOMANDURI: You know, it was very much part —
MELBER: And Chai — yes, you make a great point. And we run a transparent program here. Did you know we have a special report tonight on that contrast to opioids?
KOMANDURI: I did not, actually. That`s actually pretty remarkable.
MELBER: How could you?
KOMANDURI: No, I do not.
MELBER: But how could you? But it speaks to a linkage. A, you`re speaking along these lines. B, this is important in the country right now so, you know, it`s funny. You didn`t know that but we are doing that later today. And that goes to the line that Biden is trying to walk. And so I want to play some other parts of this speech, again, new today. This is days before the White House has also touted a separate primetime speech they say Biden will give about the soul of the nation.
And we heard some tough in crime language in a range of categories. Ban assault weapons, fund law enforcement, they call it Safer America, and then there was this discussion of so-called bad apples. We`ve heard this over and over about rogue cops just being, quote, “bad apples.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: There`s bad in everything. There`s lousy senators, there`s lousy presidents, there`s lousy doctors, there`s lousy lawyers. No, I`m serious. But I don`t know any police officer that feels good about the fact that there may be a lousy cop.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: That`s the president`s view, although there is a lot of data that America`s policing problem is not statistically reduced to just a handful of bad apples in, say, a bunch of 100 apples. That it`s a systemic issue, that removing individual officers from police forces has not, even when they`re caught with wrongdoing, reduced, for example, complaints about excessive force.
And Chai, that goes to, I think to be fair, a tension within both the Democratic Party, the Congress in general. Is this about rooting out one or two people on any given force, the way the president just put it?
KOMANDURI: Right.
MELBER: Or in fair pushback to him, what we`ve heard some experts say, including law enforcement veterans and other legal experts, that there are structural problems that also should be addressed?
KOMANDURI: I think Democrats can afford to be bolder on this, to be frank. I think we can talk about how we can address some of the systemic issues with policing and also still be vigilant, strong, and tough on crime. The two are not incompatible.
[18:10:04]
And it`s not just Democrats who believe this. Look, Pat Robertson, I remember after Daunte Wright, after that killing last year, came out and said, we need to attract better officers on to the police force. We need to attract a better caliber of police officers. This has gone too far. This is enough.
That`s Pat Robertson who said that. So I think that that should tell Democrats that you can sort of go much bolder and more pragmatic and more systemic on these issues, and not be as afraid and not cower and worry about what Republicans will say about you if you do so.
MELBER: And my final question to you as a political pro then, is given that, do you think — you know, I just have a minute or less for you. But given that, do you think the president was sort of a little bit off script because he`s just sort of saying what he thinks or that sometimes what`s called that OG Biden who wants to sit down with Republicans and make a deal in a party that no longer, as he even warned in separate points in his speech, functions like that?
KOMANDURI: Well, I don`t think he`s off script. I think this is actually part of a strategy. He wants to differentiate good Republicans from bad Republicans. Now you may say, where are the good Republicans? That`s a question I ask and I think a lot of our viewers may ask themselves. Where are the good Republicans? Well, what Biden is appealing to are not actual Republican politicians but voters who live in the suburbs, who sometimes have historically swung from Republican to Democrat and back again, and trying to say, hey, look, you may have voted Republican in the past. That`s fine.
But right now I need you to vote Democrat, because this is what we stand for, and this is what the other side stands for, and the other side is extreme. He`s drawn that contrast, and it`s into voters, not elected officials.
MELBER: Understood. You were precise as always on a big news day with the president speaking out. Chai Komanduri, thank you.
We have our shortest break. It`s just 60 seconds. When we come back, the DOJ punching back at Trump`s request for a different type of review from the search of Mar-a-Lago. We`re back in one minute.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MELBER: DOJ prosecutors will respond tonight to Donald Trump`s request for a different type of review of materials seized from his home in the search, a special master that would oversee a review that, as we`re reported, has already been undertaken. Trump`s team has until 8:00 tomorrow night to respond to this new filing tonight, and then the judge rules by Thursday. “The New York Times” points out, all of this could delay parts of the investigation.
We`re now joined by a veteran Watergate prosecutor, Nick Akerman.
What do you see going on here?
NICK AKERMAN, FORMER ASSISTANT SPECIAL WATERGATE PROSECUTOR: Well, I think there is really no need for a special master at this point. They`ve already gone through it. They went through it before the judge even issued her initial order this week. They found some documents that may be covered by attorney-client privilege, but they`ve really completed their task. There`s nothing else.
Trump`s claim of executive privilege really doesn`t hold water. All those documents belong to the government. The executive privilege belongs to the current executive, not to Donald Trump. I don`t see this investigation being, you know — there`s not going to be any delay here. There just can`t be. The government knows what these documents are. They obviously have other problems. They`ve all been cataloged.
They probably have all been fingerprinted at this point, so there really is nothing for a special master to do, even if he were appointed. So the investigation will go forward. There`s a grand jury presumably sitting in the District of Columbia that`s doing this. It`s not in Florida. The only reason it`s happening in Florida is because, under the law, the Justice Department is required to get a search warrant in the district in which the search warrant is being executed. So, the investigation itself through the FBI, the agents, the grand jury, it`s not going to stop.
[18:15:04]
There`s no way if Trump thinks this is some way to stop the clock or to run the clock, it`s not going to happen here because the investigation will go forward. I mean, the other problem with appointing a special master is you have to have somebody who has a high, you know, classified information category. It`s got to be somebody who has passed a very rigorous standard of being able to look at these documents.
So even if the judge were to appoint somebody tomorrow, it`s going to take a few days for somebody to be cleared for classified information. I`ve done this most recently. You spend the whole day just filling out the form. They ask you everything you`ve ever done in your entire life, and you have to lay it all out accurately or you`re in trouble. So I don`t see that this is really going to delay anything.
The judge gave her kind of tentative opinion at the beginning of that order that came out this week. But she also said at the end of the opinion that this was not final, which is actually a typical way that judges operate in California of all places, not Florida, but this judge was a member of the California bar for a while. And it`s not a bad process to let counsel know where you`re coming from as a judge so that you can direct your arguments towards what the judge is kind of thinking at the time.
I think these 40 pages that we`re going to see from the government tonight, there`s going to be a whole exposition on why executive privilege doesn`t apply. They`re going to differentiate the cases of Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani, in the sense that these were lawyers whose offices were basically searched through a warrant. And obviously in those situations, you`re going to have lots of attorney-client privileged information.
So it really is a completely different animal that we`re looking at. And if you read Trump`s papers, which in the beginning were just terrible, all the cases he cited had to do with lawyers. And normally, if he really thought he had anything in there that was covered by attorney-client privilege, what you would do is put in an affidavit or a declaration telling the judge what those items are, where they might be, when it occurred.
None of that has happened. I mean, if this was a normal case, Trump would have been thrown out of court on this already but it`s not a normal case obviously.
MELBER: Clearly. Nick, with the full breakdown, including the analysis of the judge`s background, all very interesting. Appreciate you joining us, Nick Akerman.
Let me tell everyone what is coming up. I mentioned in our discussion at the top of the hour with Chai Komanduri when he raised double standards in opioids and criminal justice, we have a special report we`ve been working on, drawing on what Obama and Eric Holder and others have done and looking at the nation right now. We have been working hard on it. We`re going to present it to you next after this break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[18:22:41]
MELBER: Now to our special report. Around the world, many nations face corruption. In the U.S., police often tell themselves a story about America being exceptional or superior to other nations when the facts show there is American corruption in voting rights, criminal justice, housing policy, a political system that faces legal corruption with some of the most expensive campaigns in the world, and many critiques of U.S. foreign policy, which brings us to this 1996 exchange between Lewis Farrakhan and CBS`s Mike Wallace.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE WALLACE, CBS NEWS “60 MINUTES”: You go to Nigeria, which is, if not the most corrupt nation in Africa, and it is, it could be the most corrupt nation in the world.
LEWIS FARRAKHAN, RELIGIOUS LEADER AND ACTIVIST: 35 years old. That`s what that nation is. Now, here`s America, 226 years old. 30 years ago, black folk got the right to vote. You`re not in any moral position to tell anybody how corrupt they are. You should be quiet. When you have spilled the blood of human beings — has Nigeria drop an atomic bomb and killed people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Have they killed off millions of Native Americans? How dare you put yourself in that position as a moral judge? I think you should keep quiet.
WALLACE: Can you think of one more corrupt?
FARRAKHAN: Yes, I`m living in one. I`m living in one. I didn`t mean to be so fired up.
WALLACE: No, no, that`s good. That`s good.
FARRAKHAN: That`s my passion.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Farrakhan was not correct about everything in his career, but those points resonated with many, as he dispatched the contradiction between America`s reality and perhaps her selective vision of herself. Corruption just refers to fraudulent conduct by the powerful, which is pervasive across American history, and especially in the long war on drugs. So remember that exchange.
We will come back to it tonight in this report about the failed and often racist war on drugs, which started so long ago. Now we`ve covered this story many ways. Tonight we`re going to look at it through the life and poetry of an American who lived it, and lived to tell about it. And he sure is telling.
[18:25:00]
Sean Carter or Jay-Z went from a poor tough project in Brooklyn where he once sold drugs and turned himself into a billionaire with a following that had Obama soliciting his endorsement and even touting their common rise.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT: Mr. Carter and I understand each other. Nobody who met us as younger men would have expected us to be where we are today.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: It`s an American dream story, and you may know some of it. But you don`t know all of it, especially since the story is not over. And a new installment just came out heading into this weekend as Jay-Z uses an unusually long four minutes of straight poetry to tackle the drug war, business, discrimination, and perseverance. The poetry spoken over a beat in a song with other artists. And I think you`ll see why it`s poetry, as we go through it now.
We live in a politics and in an economy dominated by billionaires. Since Jim Crow America has made racial progress in some areas. Congress is now much more racially diverse than it`s ever been. The last three winning Democratic national tickets have featured diversity, racial minorities. But other paths have hit roadblocks.
Consider the wealth gap. In contrast to politics of Congress, it is as you see here virtually the same now as it was all the way back in the early 1960s. The main reason is most family wealth is generational, houses and inheritance, so last generation`s discrimination automatically lives on for many, many decades.
Now it`s the general economy affecting most people. At the very top, billionaires shape business and politics. Fewer than 1 percent of all billionaires are black. Only about nine black Americans are billionaires at all according to Forbes. Jay-Z is one of them going from the teenage poverty I mentioned to a billion dollars by 50 years old. And a third of those nine made their first millions with Jay-Z as he touts in the opening of this new poem/song.
(MUSIC)
MELBER: Jay, also known at Hov, marveling how he went from poverty to a billion and touting how those others basically came from his same space or crib. Kanye, who worked with him as a producer and collaborator, Rihanna who Jay signed early on, and LeBron, who`s linked to Jay`s Rock Nation Company. So Jay`s reference there, technically as both the caveat, LeBron on plenty on his own, and a double entendre for technical fouls in basketball.
Jay opens there by asking forgiveness for making his first dollars off drugs, cooked on a stove, and notes he left that. Drug or dope game with his record clean, turning the cocaine, and that`s a nod to his ability to evade charges. A clean record gave him the lane to go from street coke to the good life of the champagne.
It`s also a play on how he makes money off records. His albums are now clean records since he left the street life while the alchemy of turning illegal coke into legal bubbly sounds like a turn on Jesus turning water to wine, and it is because soon after Jay completes the parallel.
(MUSIC)
MELBER: But think about it. There`s nothing automatically legitimate about wine or champagne. It was criminally punished during Prohibition, a policy that ultimately fueled gangs and violence and was the only constitutional amendment ever to be reversed because both parties determined that Prohibition was a messy failure, so politicians turned the alcohol back to a legitimate business, a slippery spectrum, which Jay notes a few lines later in this poem saying breezy with the businesses, we pushing Fenty like Fentanyl, issue is all legitimate. He was down 10 for this.
Those lines quickly go from Prohibition to a war on street drugs, associated with minorities, as mentioned earlier in this broadcast, to Fentanyl, a huge driver of drug problems and deaths, which politicians do not treat criminally the same way they attacked the drugs that Jay or others once sold.
I can tell you corporations have made over $10 billion selling addictive painkillers legally. So that`s a contrast. Jay also invokes the fellow billionaire Rihanna, citing her Fenty fashion line, noting everything they produce now, that they deal, if you will, is legitimate. And that other line I mentioned refers to E, Emery Jones. He`s an associate who served roughly 10 years for a drug sentence and now work at Jay`s company.
[18:30:00]
Now look, many listeners may not know his name, but the story is something so many communities know. It illustrates how hundreds of thousands of others are locked up for nonviolent drug offenses. The data shows the drug war is discriminatory, that entire categories of drugs can be arbitrarily banned or allowed, often depending on who was really using them.
That ranges from prohibition like I mentioned to the opioid abuse, which does not involve the same sentence is dealt to black and brown Americans. Or marijuana long classified as the most severe federal level, schedule one. But now that you`ve heard about this, marijuana has been shifted by politicians and voters to legal in 19 states and counting.
That`s good news for reforming harsh punishment. But it may be cold comfort, to all the lives upended for something that is now legal in almost half of the states in the nation. This is something Obama`s first attorney general emphasized in discussing reform.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIC HOLDER, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: As the so- called war on drugs enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it and the approaches that comprise it have been truly effective. And with an outsized unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter, and to rehabilitate, but not merely to warehouse and to forget.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Not to just warehouse. But the warehousing of so many people for drugs that are now, right now illegal all over the nation. Well, as a policy matter, it`s absurd. Even before you get to race, it`s also been documented as racist. Now, Jay did evade indictment for dealing illegal drugs. Now he gets paid for selling legal ones.
He founded the upscale Monogram marijuana company, which is a play on the traditional term monogram, a reference to selling the gram. And this poem Marvel`s about living on both sides of the law in one lifetime, as this law around the country has been changing. I want you to listen here as Jay conjures the image of a monogram joint in his pocket, while actual monograms are often embroidered on the breast pocket.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY-Z, RAPPER: Monogram in my pocket off the red carpet. You see the face I made that night, (BLEEP) is that shockin`. Odds wasn`t great, we`d even be alive. Gotta be crazy to y`all (BLEEP). We surprised (BLEEP) is too much how we grew up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Now there`s an inside reference there to when Jay was visibly shocked seeing an old friend from Destiny`s Child. A cute moment that went viral, you can see the shock. Well, he flips that meme to say he is that shocked about the whole path of his life. From a period growing up where it was likely death to this current success.
It`s an emotional honesty about challenges that many can relate to and maybe some can. Growing up in a place where peers go to prison or face a life expectancy of 30, where police are a source of lethal danger where the law is used and abused and corrupted. Where the lines of the law keep moving, enforced harshly for you, and then barely for others.
And looking back at navigating that reality in this same lengthy, deep poem. Jay contrasts a youthful recklessness to applying the care that can come if we`re allowed to live that can come with age and wisdom.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY-Z: Never my intention, the consequences of our way of life. The way we used to play with life. I`m now careful with the sentence. Them only jail bars I like. I never wanted to be the state`s custodian. The laws are draconian. Lot of fallen soldiers on these roads of sin. For those who make the laws, I`ma always have smoke for them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Jay invokes being a writer. He`s careful with his sentences or bars, his lyrics are called because he lives now the legitimate life, writing sentences, not jail sentences, rap bars, not jail bars. And those jail bars come from the Draconian laws so he will clash with those who make the laws he says.
He calls that clash by the slang term smoke, which is also a play on the smoke he now sells legally. It`s deep. This is a kind of elevated prison for these issues. I can tell you. We`ve interviewed many lawmakers who don`t come close to this level of nuance about drug policy, and its arbitrary and pernicious results. The same song then briefly explores how pain fuels growth.
[18:35:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY-Z: All this pain from the outside, inspired all this growth within. So, new planes gettin` broken in. Highest elevation of the self. They done (BLEEP) around and gave the right (BLEEP) wealth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: Now those new planes could be just private jets. As Jay notes you would need the right people to buy them. The Wright brothers with enough wealth or a double entendre there apparently to the Wright brothers who invented plane travel. The same line sites and other Jay business the Paper Planes brand which tees off a sort of childhood imagination when you fold a paper plane.
Now, am I reaching? Well, art is always up for interpretation. But I can tell you Jay`s longtime producer Young Guru decodes this part of the verse in a new video that was just posted online.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
YOUNG GURU, AUDIO ENGINEER: You got to realize that everything being said it is a fact. It`s not aspirational anymore. New planes getting broken in. Yes. So, it`s like, it`s literally paper plane, right? The brand. So, new clothes, like, when you try new clothes, you`re breaking in your clothes. This man just ordered a new plane. But then as new planes getting broken or new levels of existence.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: All right. So, if you`re counting, that`s airplanes, the planes company Paper Planes, and planes of existence, quadruple entendre. This poetry like other great art takes more time to fully understand that it takes to just see or hear on a first glance. That is why many people say Jay remains the greatest of all time known by the acronym G.O.A.T.
By the end of this, dense poetic verse, which just dropped on Friday. Jay admonishes his would-be judges or competitors as donkeys a play on G.O.A.T, but then makes a reference that takes us all the way back to where we began.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY-Z: Next time we have a discussion who the G.O.A.T., you donkeys know this. Forgive me, that`s my passion talikin`. Sometimes I feel like Farrakhan talkin` Mike Wallace. I think y`all should keep quiet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MELBER: That`s his passion talk. Jay invoking that classic moment which showed you to offset his own grandiose talk, asking forgiveness for being so strident even as he meant every word. But notice what else is doing, ending this poem just as he began it when he asked forgiveness for dealing drugs in his youth.
And notice what else he`s doing. The Farrakhan parallel can apply just to proclaiming himself the greatest that would be like, I think a literal reading. Or maybe it could apply all the way back to this entire poem about America`s drug war and Jay`s own path. Think about it. Decades in this billionaire entrepreneur with proven success.
Measurable success in music, media, sports, business, law, and politics, still finds he must explain basic facts about American corruption and racism to elite and white society. And many leaders and people still don`t see it or refuse to face it. That kind of entitled ignorance which can cause real damage to real people`s lives.
But that might raise your ire. Might get your passion talk. And if the facts are talking, well, it`s a good time for people to listen. And then listen again. And make sure you got the point. That`s our report. We`re going to fit in a break. We have a lot coming up including a Secret Service agent with Donald Trump who retired we`ll explain why. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[18:43:23]
MELBER: We do news not coincidences, but I will tell you a Secret Service official at the center of one of the most explosive allegations in the January 6 committee hearings is now retiring. Anthony Ornato out. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified so she went under oath taking a risk others didn`t. And she said, she heard Ornato describe what became lore immediately, this allegedly out-of-control scene on January 6 inside a government SUV.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, FORMER WHITE HOUSE AIDE: The president said something to the effect of I`m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now. The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel.
Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We`re going back to the West Wing. We`re not going to the Capitol. Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engle and Mr. — when Mr. Ornato had recounted this story to me, he had motion towards his clavicles.
(End VT)
MELBER: That was a big deal for two reasons. One, it`s totally bonkers. Full stop. I mean, it would be bonkers if any president did that on any day going anywhere, they could be going to Disneyland. Two, and worse for Trump as he faces these possible criminal investigations that could lead to charges.
It shows that even after the worst of the worst was known about the insurrection unfolding at the Capitol, Trump`s reaction was not to stop them call the National Guard, wait, this isn`t what I wanted but rather let me go join them.
[18:45:00]
The Secret Service according to this account had to physically basically clash with the president to keep him from going like a rebel general to report to the scene of what was, yes, a crime, that part is not in dispute. And had he done that, well, he might be in even more legal trouble, which again, speaks to how president is different than other people and can be blocked from his worst instincts.
Now, that`s evidence under oath. That`s what we call probative testimonial evidence. But in an investigation, you gather all kinds of materials. So that`s under oath. Ornato has put out leaks and privately suggested that he disputes that. He is not to this date, as far as we`ve been able to confirm gone under oath.
Again, to give you all sourcing Ornato tells NBC that he`s still, quote, plans to cooperate, continue cooperating with the committee and other related investigations. As for whether he has testified or that material will come out, he didn`t say. If he puts any of his denials under oath, that raises the bar. And we, of course, will tell you as soon as we hear about it.
This is quite an update though, and interesting to follow where he`s headed. We`re going to fit in a break and then we are back with the legend Carole King. That`s next.
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[18:50:49]
MELBER: President Biden`s climate bill leads major initiatives to try to preserve among other things, trees. Some climate activists say far more action is needed.
And we turn to someone who is well versed, committed, and engaged on these issues and also full disclosure, someone we do like around here. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer singer-songwriter, Carole King, you know her as a four- time Grammy winner, Kennedy Center honoree, over 25 million albums sold, including Tapestry, classic songs like A Natural Woman, but she`s also known for more than one thing, as we mentioned in a broadcast tonight, artists can do more than one thing.
She has been working for a while on climate issues. Indeed, the New York Times just published this new piece where she urges the president to go further, including specifically in the area of saving trees. Welcome back.
CAROLE KING, MUSICIAN AND CLIMATE ACTIVIST: Hey, nice to see, Ari. Really good to be here.
MELBER: Great to have you. So, the Times published this argument, I invite you to share with us what you`re — what you`re saying based on your work in this area.
KING: Well, climate change affects every community everywhere in the world. And what a lot of people don`t know, you know, people focus on fossil fuels. But logging emits annually, an amount of carbon comparable to what is emitted from burning coal annually. So, there is that parallel and a lot of commercial logging is going on in American national forests.
And we the taxpayers are subsidizing it. There`s provisions in the infrastructure bill that give money for euphemisms like restoration, or hazardous fuel treatments, or forest management. We don`t need to manage our national forests, we need to preserve them, we need to leave them alone.
And the fact that we are not is causing a lot of carbon emission that, you know, we`re telling other countries not to deforest in their own country, but we`re doing it in our own country, and we are paying for it with dollars that could go to childcare, elder care or neighborhood schools, public schools.
So, I am really incensed about this, and I really want people to understand. We need to ask President Biden. His Forest Service facilitates this commercial logging, and we need to WhiteHouse.gov contact President Biden and tell him to stop commercial logging in our forests.
MELBER: Yes, let me read a little bit more from the piece consistent with what you`re saying. Forest preservation is a climate solution. Trees being destroyed, heavy equipment, which can saw through its strip its branches, set the tree on a pile of logs in the time it took me to type this sentence evocative. What do you say to what we sometimes hear from people regarding global statistics that because of logging industry and others, there are a lot of trees still around?
KING: Well, of course, I haven`t gotten them all yet. But they are really leveling them quickly. And I live in Idaho. I have friends that live in Montana, and the Montana forests, you can go walking and you just come upon an entire swath of cut forest and they`ve taken all the logs that are profitable, but they leave the parts that aren`t profitable, like the leaves and the branches.
It`s called slash when they leave it and it`s like a tinderbox. So that — on one hand, they`re talking about, oh, we have to cut trees to stop, you know, homes from burning. On the other hand, they leave all this slash around and the best way to stop homes from burning is from the home. If you clear defensible space around the home.
And you know, get the — if the government could help with this, with money for this to have fire-resistant materials on the roof, and ember proof the vents so the embers can`t get to the house That`s what protects the house. It doesn`t protect the house to thin trees in some forest miles away which is what they`re doing, and they call it you know hazardous fuel treatment.
[18:55:00]
MELBER: I have about 30 seconds left. What grade would you give the Biden bill, because you`re a climate activist, among other things, do you think it was a good start?
KING: It`s definitely a good start but they did not — they not only didn`t address logging, they actually allocated more money. So, I don`t know if I can give it a grade because that`s too arbitrary. It`s just not right. We need to stop subsidizing logging in our national forest. Private logging, we can`t stop and that — that`s not in our power, but we the people need to stop logging in our national forests.
MELBER: Right, as you say, there`s the business side of it and we have free markets and then there`s what do we do with the tradition and the real institution of America`s national forests which have protected a lot of land for a lot of good reason for a long time. Carole King, so good to see you tonight.
KING: You too, Ari. Be well.
MELBER: Absolutely. You too. We`ll be right back.
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MELBER: We broke down a song tonight, and we`re going to put it up on THE BEAT with Ari Twitter page. @TheBeatwithAri if you want to go listen to it yourself, is it @TheBeatwithAri. That does it for me. “THE REIDOUT” starts now.