00:01 Donald Trump Tonight on All In. 00:03 If a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it. 00:08 The president wants to run elections in the places he didn't win. 00:13 Rigged, crooked elections. 00:14 Take a look at Detroit. 00:15 Take a look at Philadelphia. 00:18 Chris Hayes Tonight, Donald Trump's latest threat to choke off democracy was Senator Chris Murphy. 00:24 Donald Trump The federal government should get involved. 00:28 Chris Hayes Then the Democratic push to rein in ICE. 00:32 These people, every single one of them, has to be held accountable. 00:38 Congressman Robert Garcia on today's hearing with the family of Rene Good. 00:43 Soundbite Rene Good is our sister. 00:45 We're here to ask for your help. 00:49 Chris Hayes And with Congressman Ro Khanna on his new calls for more investigations of the Jeffrey Epstein files. 00:55 Donald Trump You know, when Epstein was alive, nobody cared about him. 00:58 When he's dead, they care about him. 01:00 Chris Hayes An All In starts right now. 01:07 Good evening from New York. 01:08 I'm Chris Hayes. 01:09 As you know, it is already 2026. 01:11 We're in the midterm election year, nine months away from Election Day, nine months today. 01:16 And Donald Trump and members of his administration are already making moves to try to illegitimately take control of the American election system. 01:25 Now, Trump doesn't want Republicans to lose the House and the Senate. 01:29 One big reason in particular, I think, that he keeps making very clear. 01:34 Donald Trump You got to win the midterms because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be. 01:40 I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. 01:45 I'll get impeached. 01:47 Chris Hayes I don't think he's wrong. 01:49 And I really think he's very obsessed with legacy right now that he does not want to go for his third impeachment. 01:54 He's obsessed with keeping control of Congress, I think, honestly, primarily for that reason, because it's not like he cares about passing legislation or cares about other people's electoral fortunes. 02:03 But the thing is, he's obsessed about keeping Congress and he has no real plan to do it normally or legitimately. 02:10 Right. 02:10 I mean, despite all the bravado and the constant boasts about never being more popular, they know the score. 02:16 The administration actually understands that Trump is in trouble. 02:19 The Republican Party is in trouble. 02:21 And it's not just polling. 02:23 Look at this. 02:23 You might have seen this over the weekend. 02:24 A Texas special election that happened over the weekend in which a Democrat flipped a red state state Senate seat, winning by 14 points in a district Trump carried by 17 points in 2024. 02:40 That's a 31-point swing. 02:42 That is almost literally unheard of. 02:46 Now, don't expect a blowout like that in November. 02:49 You're going to have turnout that's going to be much higher. 02:51 That was a low-turnout election. 02:52 Democrats tend to do better in those. 02:54 But even a 10-point swing in the midterms would wipe out the Republican majority. 02:58 Heck, a 5-point swing in the midterms would wipe out the Republican House majority. 03:05 So they know what they're facing. 03:06 They see the writing on the walls. 03:08 And they know they don't right now, unless things change dramatically, have a path to just outright winning a free and fair election. 03:15 I mean, most normal incumbents who are Donald Trump see their party suffer losses in the midterms, right? 03:22 So Donald Trump is exploring other plans. 03:25 The first plan was to gerrymander congressional members. 03:29 Why leave it up to voters to choose Republicans when Republicans could simply choose their voters? 03:35 And so Donald Trump tenaciously, constantly pushed red states to redraw their districts to be even redder, right? 03:42 To change their congressional districts mid-decade. 03:45 This never happens, right? 03:47 Texas did it. 03:48 Missouri did it. 03:49 Ohio still may. 03:51 But Trump's pressure generated a backlash, first among Republicans in, for instance, Indiana, who just told him to take a hike, wouldn't do what he wanted, despite J.E. 04:00 Vance going there in person and inviting him to the White House, right? 04:02 And also in blue states like California, which defensively redrew its maps. 04:08 And so when all is said and done between California, what's happening in Virginia, maybe Maryland, the fact that Indiana wouldn't do it, the whole thing made the gerrymandering war a wash. 04:18 It could actually, in the end, end up net benefiting the Democrats because Donald Trump started this fight. 04:24 So now midterm election year is upon us. 04:26 That gerrymandering plan has really failed. 04:29 I think they thought this was like their secret weapon, right? 04:32 Their ace in the hole. 04:33 No. 04:34 So now it's time for the Republican plan B. 04:37 And that is, and they're saying this out loud, to fully seize the machinery of American voting. 04:45 I mean, last week they started moving on this project in Fulton County, Georgia, where FBI agents raided the election office and left with nearly 700 boxes of ballots. 04:57 That's all under the watchful eye of Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. 05:01 Her spokeswoman told MSNOW Trump has ordered Gabbard to investigate election security nationwide, even though she has no domestic law enforcement powers. 05:10 And even though after the 1970s, we have a bunch of laws and regulations to separate domestic law enforcement from international intelligence. 05:18 That's actually really important. 05:20 Now, former officials say that this is preposterous, and they also fear it's part of a plan to attempt to steal the midterms. 05:28 Remember, Fulton County in Georgia, which contains Atlanta, was ground zero for Trump's 2020 election lies. 05:35 Those were lies pushed by people like, for instance, former Trump aide Roger Stone, who posted a photo of himself with J.D. 05:41 Vance just yesterday. 05:43 Stone said they chatted, but didn't say what they chatted about. 05:46 Also, lives pushed by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, remember her, who was seen just after the Georgia raid last week with Trump DOJ official Ed Martin. 05:55 Remember, it was Powell, along with disgraced former National Security Vice-O Michael Flynn and the former CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, remember that guy, who all marched into the Oval Office in December 2020 and told Trump to seize voting machines and declare victory. 06:11 Well, late last month, the former Overstock guy, Patrick Byrne, reportedly accepted an invitation to the White House. 06:16 And over the weekend, guess what? 06:18 He praised the Fulton County raid. 06:21 Soundbite It looks like maybe you and Sidney Powell and a couple other people had the right idea way back when. 06:28 Patrick Byrne Yes, it's it's it's oddly enough, it's exactly what we were asking him to do December 18th, 2020. 06:35 And what I thought he was going to do the first week he was back in power took him a year and a week. 06:40 And that's a measure not of Trump, but of the deep state. 06:42 Right. 06:43 Chris Hayes Now, you might be asking yourself, I particularly asked myself this when I saw Roger Stone post that photo with J.D. 06:48 Vance. 06:50 Hmm. 06:50 Why are all the usual suspects from the 2020 attempted coup back in Trump's orbit now? 06:56 maybe to give it another run, to try to rig future elections in the name of the 2020 election. 07:02 I mean, just yesterday, Donald Trump was complaining about winning more states in 2020 on the podcast of his former FBI number two, Dan Bongino. 07:11 Dan Bongino, who hated his job, apparently actually doing like government work and now wants to go back to podcasting. 07:17 Trump adding, quote, we should take over the voting, the voting in 15 places. 07:22 The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. 07:25 Now, that, of course, is illegal. 07:26 It's a violation of all sorts of state federal statutes and constitutional principles of federalism. 07:32 But today, of course, Trump just doubled down. 07:36 What exactly did you mean when you said that you should nationalize elections? 07:39 And which 15 states are you talking about? 07:41 Donald Trump I want to see elections be honest. 07:43 And if a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it. 07:48 Because, you know, if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. 07:52 I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyway. 07:55 But when you see some of these states about... 07:57 how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is. 08:02 I think the federal government, when you see crooked elections, and we had plenty of them, and by the way, we had them last time, but go to 2020, look at the facts that are coming out, rigged crooked elections. 08:13 If we have areas, take a look at Detroit, take a look at Pennsylvania, take a look at Philadelphia. 08:20 You go take a look at Atlanta. 08:21 Look at some of the places that horrible corruption on elections. 08:26 And the federal government should not allow that. 08:28 The federal government should get involved. 08:31 These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. 08:35 If they can't count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over. 08:41 Chris Hayes Now, keep in mind, these are all lies, right? 08:43 And this is a guy who has said he thinks he won California multiple times. 08:49 I mean, it's like meeting someone and then telling you, like, they can fly like Superman. 08:55 Or me just, like, telling you, like, oh, yeah, I'm seven feet four inches. 08:58 Like, what do you do with that? 08:59 That's a person who is... 09:00 I don't know, diagnosable in some way, something, right? 09:03 This is the guy who told Georgia's election supervisor to find him 11,000 votes. 09:07 He's worried about the states counting their votes. 09:09 You can see why, right? 09:10 Because they counted them accurately. 09:12 So last week, Republicans unveiled a Make Elections Great Again bill to put new limits on voting by mail and voter registration drives, as well as mandate voter ID issued by the federal government, as well as new voter surveillance programs. 09:25 Who's going to stop it? 09:25 Well, definitely not the Speaker of the House, a guy who voted against certifying the 2020 election, who is an election denier, and got back to his election truther roots on Capitol Hill today. 09:37 Mike Johnson We know it's in our system. 09:38 The states have been in charge of administering their elections. 09:40 What you're hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections. 09:51 We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle. 09:56 And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. 10:02 It looks on its face to be fraudulent. 10:04 Can I prove that? 10:05 No, because it happened so far upstream. 10:08 Chris Hayes OK. 10:10 I mean, the reason they lost was because the votes came in that had more Democrats voting for the person. 10:14 But they don't like that. 10:15 Right. 10:15 I mean, that's the key thing. 10:16 Right. 10:17 Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, all of them together agree on this point. 10:20 They don't want people to choose who gets to win elections. 10:23 They want to say who wins elections so that they never have to lose an election. 10:28 And the entire definition of a democracy is a system in which the ruling party can lose an election. 10:34 That's it. 10:35 That's the one sentence democracy. 10:36 They don't like it. 10:38 And remember, in addition to all this, masked armed federal agents are disappearing people off the streets of multiple cities. 10:44 They're terrorizing people into staying homes. 10:47 They are shooting law-abiding observers, killing them in some cases, while the administration tells states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania, 10:55 They'll call off the dogs if those blue states hand over their most private, granular voting data. 11:01 Pam Bondi gave away the game here, right? 11:03 Those masked agents running amok in your city who've killed two of your citizens, who account for 66% of the homicides in the city of Minneapolis, yeah, maybe we can tell them to leave if you give us the voting data. 11:14 So again, connect the dots here. 11:17 They're not exactly like, you know, using excessive subterfuge. 11:21 All of their eggs are now in this basket. 11:24 The gerrymandering didn't work. 11:26 They just got their butts kicked in a plus 14 Trump district. 11:31 Donald Trump and his allies are not planning on getting more popular before November. 11:36 They are now hellbent on going farther than they could in 2020. 11:40 Senator Chris Murphy is a Democrat of Connecticut, and he joins me now. 11:44 First, just reality check from where you said, am I being alarmist here? 11:48 Chris Murphy I mean, I don't know. 11:49 I think you're probably a werewolf. 11:51 Can I prove it? 11:52 No, but you probably are. 11:54 I mean, these guys are just wild, right? 11:57 I did a video today, Chris, where I said the same thing that you said. 12:00 I said, let's connect the dots. 12:01 And I kind of felt silly saying that because... 12:05 Like they've connected the dots for us. 12:07 I mean, he is telling you that he wants to federalize national elections. 12:12 He's telling you that he thinks he won Minnesota and Georgia and California, that the 2020 elections were rigged. 12:21 Yeah, he's explaining to you exactly what he wants to do, because for him, the 2020 election is the original sin. 12:26 Right. 12:27 He hates the fact that he lost and he lost publicly and he lost in a landslide. 12:32 He does not want to accept that. 12:35 And so everything he does is an effort to explain away that loss and make sure that it never happens again. 12:42 And I do worry that the scope of this obsession that he has right now with rigging the 2026 and the 2028 elections so that he doesn't lose again is all consuming. 12:54 Right. 12:54 You're seeing him use every piece of federal power right now, stealing the ballots so that he can, you know, come to some new conclusion that he actually won in Georgia using the leverage of ICE in Minneapolis to get access to their voter lists, but also maybe leveraging the power of the U.S. military. 13:12 Why did Tulsi Gabbard say that she was in Georgia? 13:16 She said she was in Georgia because she has a duty to weigh in when there's outside foreign influence on an election. 13:24 What's the right wing's theory about foreign influence in the 2020 election? 13:29 It's Nicolas Maduro taking control of American voting machines. 13:34 There's plenty of reporting to suggest that that's part of the reason that Trump wanted to go into Venezuela. 13:40 This doesn't feel that conspiratorial any longer, that everything Trump is doing from his policy on Venezuela to his use of ICE officers in Minneapolis to the entire operation of the FBI is in service of two goals, trying to rewrite the 2020 election and trying to get ready to make sure that nobody other than him and his allies win in 2026 and 2028. 14:05 Chris Hayes Now, there's one level of that, which is this actual legislation, right, which would federalize some parts of voting. 14:11 And it's unclear to me whether it would survive constitutional challenge. 14:15 It obviously has support in the House. 14:17 Some of his most sort of like... 14:19 What's the right word? 14:21 Out there members in the House were saying that they had gotten Thune to kill the filibuster to pass this thing in the Senate. 14:27 I just want to read what Thune said today, because this is the first level. 14:32 It would be a really bad piece of legislation and probably help them, although I think maybe not do the thing they wanted to. 14:37 But here's what Thune said. 14:39 He reject Trump's call for GOP to take over nationalized elections. 14:42 I'm not in favor of federalizing elections. 14:43 No, I think it's a constitutional issue. 14:45 He told reporters. 14:46 I'm a big believer in decentralized and distributed power. 14:49 I think it's harder to hack 50 election systems than it is to hack one. 14:52 In my view, at least, that's always a system that has worked pretty well. 14:55 Where do you think that part of this story stands in the Senate? 14:58 Chris Murphy Yeah, I mean, I think that the Save Act, which is the piece of legislation that the House is referring to today, is probably the beginning, not the end. 15:08 Because you're right, the Save Act in and of itself is a terrible piece of legislation, but probably doesn't give the president the power he wants to come in and take over an election. 15:18 But I do think the president is going to put the screws to John Thune and his allies in the Senate because his options to steal the election are going to continue to narrow. 15:28 And so he is likely to want a piece of legislation that may not be constitutional, but at least 15:34 tests the question to the Supreme Court of whether there are circumstances where he can come in and take over a state election. 15:42 I don't think Trump yet has really put the screws to Senate Republicans on getting rid of the filibuster. 15:49 He's made references, some vague threats, but he hasn't worked the phones. 15:54 The one thing that he will work the phones on 15:57 when it comes to getting rid of the filibuster would be a piece of legislation to give him the power to at least attempt to take over these elections. 16:06 So I just don't think this story is written yet. 16:09 I think at some point over the spring or the summer, Trump is likely going to try to get the Senate to give him the arguable power to come in and intervene in these elections. 16:18 That question will probably go to the Supreme Court and we may end up having to rely on 16:23 John Roberts and Amy Cohen Barrett to step in and say, yes, the Constitution is just crystal clear. 16:30 No piece of legislation can take away the power to run elections from the states. 16:35 Chris Hayes Last question for you, because I always don't want to subscribe to Doomerism when this is the topic, because I do think there's a useful lesson in the gerrymandering fight. 16:42 I mean, that really did look like an insidious but sort of deviously clever way. 16:50 way of trying to come up with an extra seven seats or eight seats, which, you know, is significant. 16:56 It's been basically knocked back. 16:57 I mean, really, like the mobilization by the various Democratic states, what happened in California primarily, but also the resistance in Indiana, what we're seeing come out of Maryland, Virginia. 17:06 And it seems to me there's a playbook there for the same thing here. 17:09 Like this is I mean, 17:10 Do you agree with me? 17:12 I'm not being naive in thinking this is not some fait accompli. 17:15 There are lots of levers and mechanisms for for state officials, county officials, all sorts of folks to fight back against this. 17:23 Chris Murphy Yeah. 17:23 And again, we have the benefit of the Constitution being crystal clear here. 17:28 Right. 17:28 The Constitution has a specific clause that reserves the power to run elections to the states. 17:33 But there's another piece here. 17:34 The Georgia senators were actually reminding a handful of us today that when Georgia tried to make it harder for people to vote, it had the opposite impact. 17:44 People got so upset in Georgia that their right to vote was being taken away or there was an attempt to take it away that they turned out in record numbers in 2020. 17:55 And so the same thing may happen here. 17:58 That is, the word gets out in states that Trump is targeting, that he is trying to steal from them the right to cast their ballots. 18:06 People may be absolutely determined. 18:09 government people that maybe didn't have previous plans to vote to come out and make sure that they make their voice heard, no matter what barriers are put in front of them, no matter how many federal officials or ICE agency throws at the polling places. 18:21 So, no, this can backfire on him just like the redistricting ploy did. 18:26 And that ultimately will be up to American citizens as much as it is to members of the Senate or constitutional lawyers. 18:33 Senator Chris Murphy, Connecticut, thank you for your time tonight, sir.