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The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 1/22/26 FULL SHOW | ️ Breaking Reactions
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00:00...illiterate, that he actually thinks you can sue a newspaper for commissioning and
00:05publishing a political poll.
00:08And now he's threatening to do it again, because the New York Times published a poll showing
00:13only 32% of Americans think they are better off with Donald Trump as president than they
00:19were with Joe Biden as president.
00:2349% say they are worse off, and 19% say it's about the same.
00:29The New York Times poll published today that has provoked Donald Trump's newest absurd and
00:34empty threat to sue over a poll shows that 56% disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling
00:43his job as president.
00:45The poll shows that Donald Trump has lost the voters that gave him the electoral college.
00:50The swing voters who swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024 have swung back
00:56away from Donald Trump.
00:59Donald Trump has lost them on the most important issues in the poll.
01:04And so you are not alone tonight in America if you disapprove of the way Donald Trump is
01:10managing the federal government.
01:13You are part of the 56% majority who thinks that.
01:19You're not alone tonight if you disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling Venezuela.
01:24You are joined by 53% of the country.
01:28You are not alone tonight if you disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the Israeli-Palestinian
01:34conflict.
01:35You are part of the 54% who feel that way.
01:39You're not alone tonight if you disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling immigration
01:44and the economy and relationships with other countries.
01:48A powerful 58% majority disapproves tonight of how Donald Trump is handling those three issues.
01:55That is the same amount of disapproval Donald Trump faces now in how he's handling the war between Russia and Ukraine.
02:1068% disapproval and on the final two numbers, the number, the final two issues, the numbers get much worse on the issue that was widely considered the most important issue in the last presidential campaign.
02:25Donald Trump now has a 64% disapproval rating because 64% disapprove of the way Donald Trump
02:35is handling the cost of living.
02:39That's what the last campaign was supposed to be all about.
02:42The cost of living and the swing voters reportedly swung to Donald Trump because of the cost of
02:48living and now they all disapprove of what Donald Trump has done to them.
02:53What he has done to their cost of living.
02:57And there's only one number in the poll that is even worse for Donald Trump.
03:04It's the worst number in the poll.
03:06It's the kind of sky high number that is seldom seen in issue polls like this.
03:13And it is the reason this program has focused so much attention on this issue over the course
03:21of the last year.
03:22It is the issue that has separated more voters from Donald Trump than any other issue.
03:33You are not alone tonight in America if you disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the Epstein files.
03:44Sixty six percent disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the Epstein files.
03:50Seventy four percent of independents disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the Epstein files.
03:55And that is as high a disapproval among Republicans as it gets for Donald Trump.
04:08There are Trump voters who support Donald Trump on every issue no matter what.
04:13A 77 year old man in Dedham, Massachusetts told the New York Times in his response to the polling
04:18questions, quote, I mean Donald Trump could look at me in the face and tell me to go screw myself and I'd say thank you.
04:25Separating Trump voters from Donald Trump is the most difficult political exercise anyone has ever tried to do.
04:33But a dead man is doing it.
04:36From the grave Donald Trump's old friend Jeffrey Epstein is separating more voters from Donald Trump than any issue ever has.
04:47Donald Trump's.
04:48Donald Trump's relentless campaign to keep the Epstein files hidden has ended up revealing the real Donald Trump in a way that his voters can now easily understand.
05:00Tonight, Donald Trump is in his 33rd day of violating the law that requires the release of the Epstein files, full release, all the files.
05:13It is part of the long list that proves Donald Trump's sheer hatred of the rule of law.
05:22It's not that Donald Trump doesn't respect the rule of law.
05:25It's not that Donald Trump doesn't understand the rule of law.
05:28It's that he hates the rule of law.
05:31The law must never apply to him.
05:34Donald Trump has abused every concept of the rule of law that has been observed by all other politicians throughout our history.
05:41He has done it on the civil side of our law and on the criminal side of our law.
05:47Suing the Des Moines Register for issuing a poll in the last presidential election.
05:52That's Donald Trump's hatred of the civil rule of law that says you can't do that.
05:58There's a first amendment.
05:59Can't do that.
06:01Donald Trump wants to close down television networks.
06:03If anyone on the network says anything negative about Donald Trump, because he hates the rule of law that prevents that from happening.
06:11Today, the man who tried to force Donald Trump to submit to the criminal rule of law by indicting him for a conspiracy against the United States in trying to overturn the presidential election,
06:23and for violations of the Espionage Act in his illegal possession of classified documents, explained the aspects of his investigation of Donald Trump that he is allowed to discuss publicly at the House Judiciary Committee.
06:41And while former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was testifying, Donald Trump from Air Force One issued a social media post saying, quote,
06:50Jack Smith is a deranged animal.
06:53Republicans on the committee who defend language like that all the time, only when it comes from Donald Trump and whose relationship to the truth is identical to Donald Trump's kept insisting that Jack Smith was an unfair prosecutor who took orders directly from Joe Biden, even though Jack Smith has never spoken to Joe Biden.
07:15And all of the pathetically lying Republicans on the committee support Donald Trump's public instruction to his own and operated federal prosecutors now at the Trump Justice Department to prosecute people in that same post.
07:34Donald Trump, of all people, called Jack Smith a deranged animal.
07:39He said, quote, hopefully the attorney general is looking at what he's done.
07:44Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and every president you can name between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump never did that, never thought about doing that.
07:56They never told the attorney general who they should be investigating and prosecuting.
08:00Donald Trump violates that principle all the time, and he does it publicly.
08:04Three hours later, Donald Trump said, quote, there is no question that deranged Jack Smith should be prosecuted for his actions.
08:12You could not ask for a more flagrant, screamingly obvious proof of a president personally ordering prosecutions than what Donald Trump put in writing today while lying Republicans on that committee were trying to pretend that Joe Biden or any other president would ever do anything like that.
08:31The Republican questions of the committee today ranged from the ignorant to the idiotic.
08:38I want to start by saying that starting out, I was not real familiar with this issue.
08:46In fact, when the chairman of the committee told me we had Jack Smith coming in, my first response privately was, who's Jack Smith?
08:53And so my one question for you, Jack Smith, is, are you familiar with the Vietnamese city of Ben Trey?
09:01I love my country.
09:31He has said, he has said, he said in his testimony that he has no party loyalties.
09:38And then Jack Smith said this.
09:42President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law, the very laws he took an oath to uphold.
09:52Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned.
09:59Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.
10:10After leaving office in January of 21, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Social Club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.
10:26Highly sensitive national security information was held in a ballroom and a bathroom.
10:33Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity.
10:40This is what Jack Smith said about the principle he has dedicated his life to, the rule of law.
10:51After nearly 30 years of public service, including in international settings, I have seen how the rule of law can erode.
10:58My fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted.
11:10The rule of law is not self-executing.
11:14It depends on our collective commitment to apply it.
11:19The collective commitment to apply the rule of law was not present in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room today.
11:25The Republican side of that committee, along with almost all of the Republican House of Representatives and almost all of the Republican Senate,
11:33have abandoned the rule of law to embrace the rule of Donald Trump.
11:38And for that, history will reward them with nothing but disgrace.
11:46Leading off our discussion tonight is Professor Lawrence Tribe, who has taught constitutional law at Harvard Law School for five decades.
11:52Professor Tribe, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
11:55And I want to begin with you tonight on this point that Jack Smith raised that we just heard him say, his fear.
12:02He says, my fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted.
12:12I think that certainly applies to me, certainly at the beginning of the Trump era.
12:15I had come to take it for granted.
12:17He said the rule of law is not self-executing.
12:20It depends on our collective commitment to apply it.
12:25What is your assessment of the status of the rule of law in America tonight?
12:32I think the rule of law is in great danger.
12:37It's in danger in part because, as Jack Smith so eloquently said in his closing, we take it for granted.
12:49We assume, almost as we assume that there is air to breathe and land to walk on, we assume that the rule of law is just there.
13:00And for most of us, much of the time, it is.
13:05We obey the rules of traffic.
13:07We file our taxes, even though the tax collector doesn't come knocking, except very rarely.
13:16But there are people in this country for whom the rule of law has ceased to apply.
13:22The president of the United States, those immediately around him, those who take his orders, those who commit violent acts and storm the Capitol, only to be pardoned en masse by Donald Trump.
13:43Now, that's extremely dangerous.
13:45And one of the reasons that it's happened is that we have gotten accustomed to multiple realities.
13:56There is the reality that most of us see with our eyes, hear with our ears.
14:01And there is the reality that is fed to us through fake issued statements through Donald Trump and his truth, ironically named, social.
14:15It was so surreal to have Republican after Republican today, lying about things we all saw, things they saw about January 6th in a room full of people, including both members of Congress and Capitol Police who were there.
14:39Some years ago, that would have been breaking news.
14:48Members of Congress obviously lying about things that happened in front of them.
14:55And when you look at the questions they asked to try to dent the powerful summation that we heard today of the overwhelming evidence of four grave felonies by Donald Trump related to overturning a lawful election,
15:16and 40 more felonies involving stealing highly classified information and hiding it in bathrooms and ballrooms and other places where foreign spies could even see it.
15:33The kinds of questions that they asked to deal with that calm, compelling testimony had nothing to do with actually undermining it.
15:45They quibbled in some questions about exactly what details accompanied the first taking of the oath by Jack Smith, perhaps when he was overseas.
16:00But if there was any technical problem, it was irrelevant and it was cured.
16:05They asked questions, really amazing questions about wasn't it odd that it was only the telephone records of Republicans in Congress that were subpoenaed by Jack Smith.
16:22You would have obviously expected that when he was looking for the people that Donald Trump telephoned to find out when he called them and how long the call lasted.
16:37Sure, he would have expected that he would have sought the phone records of Democrats.
16:43He would be very likely to have called Democrats when it was Republicans that he was trying to force into helping him stay in power.
16:57On top of that, there was all this nonsense about Cassidy Hutchinson.
17:02She was talking about what others told her.
17:08That's called hearsay.
17:10Of course, the rules that apply to the January 6th hearing didn't include a rule against hearsay.
17:17And anyway, all she was trying to do was prove something that Donald Trump admitted himself,
17:23namely that he wanted to accompany the mob to the Capitol.
17:28Well, the way she tried to prove it was that somebody told her that he reached for the wheel of the limo.
17:36Well, maybe he didn't, but that was only relevant because it was another way of showing that he wanted to go with his mob to the Capitol.
17:47And he's admitted that he wanted to.
17:49So big deal about Cassidy.
17:52She almost certainly wouldn't have been called as a witness.
17:55There were things like, oh, another one that just amazed me was, yes, it wasn't Donald Trump who was responsible for trying to overturn a lawful election.
18:09It was Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol police.
18:15They're the ones who should have called the National Guard.
18:19But the law makes it absolutely clear that the one National Guard that is under the exclusive and complete control of the president is the National Guard of Washington, D.C.
18:32He doesn't have the right to call in the National Guard as a kind of military force to occupy Minneapolis, the way he's tried to do, or other places.
18:46The place he does have the power to call the National Guard is D.C.
18:51So what we witnessed was a bizarre saga in which we have a career prosecutor, no axe to grind, never talked to Biden, never talked to Garland, doing his job.
19:06The Republicans accusing him of being a partisan puppet, doing the bidding of the government, of the White House, at the very same time that the person who now occupies the White House is directing his Justice Department in the most partisan way possible to prosecute people like Jack Smith who are just doing their job.
19:35So we've got, it's a kind of split-screen reality, but what's at stake is not just these theatrics.
19:42What's at stake is the future of our country.
19:46Because what happened in 2020 when Donald Trump conspired to stay in power despite losing, according to all 60 courts that looked at it,
19:59was a kind of dress rehearsal for what might happen in 2028, when it is not Kamala Harris or anyone like her who's going to be in the driver's seat,
20:14it's going to be J.D. Vance, who as vice president will be in charge of counting the ballots.
20:22So I worry that as the rule of law is on the chopping block, that our whole democracy is on the chopping block as well.
20:33We have to step up.
20:34We have to be courageous.
20:37Talk about courage.
20:38There was enormous courage witnessed today by Jack Smith, who's been threatened, his family's been threatened, but he does his job anyway, and he tells the truth.
20:50We have to be courageous.
20:55We cannot allow the rule of law and the Constitution that we take for granted to simply fade away.
21:04They are not self-executing.
21:06They take human effort to preserve.
21:10Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe, thank you very much for starting off our discussion tonight.
21:16Thank you, Lawrence.
21:17Coming up, the thing Republicans feared most in today's testimony by Jack Smith.
21:24That's next with Andrew Weissman.
21:26Trump committed crimes, and so not one Republican had any response to this line of questioning from Democrat Pramila Jayapal.
21:38Did he pressure state officials to ignore true vote counts in those states?
21:45Yes.
21:46Did he spread lies and conspiracies to his followers to make them believe that the election had been illegally rigged against him?
21:55Yes.
21:56Did he pressure DOJ officials to stop the certification of the election?
22:02He did.
22:04Did he pressure his own vice president, Mike Pence, to stop the certification against the oath of office that he had sworn to the Constitution?
22:12He did.
22:13And when all of this didn't work, did he, Donald Trump, motivate and inspire an angry mob to the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification?
22:23Our proof showed that he caused what happened on January 6th, that it was foreseeable, and that he exploited that violence.
22:34Did Donald Trump know that his allegations of election fraud were lies when he spread them?
22:39Our proof was that he did, and we intended to prove that at trial.
22:46Joining us now is Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel and an MSNOW legal analyst.
22:51Andrew, I want to go to the last point that Jack Smith made, and that is, did Donald Trump know that he was lying when he was talking about the election?
23:00And Republicans on the committee, as you saw today, that was one of their favorite things, was to claim that Donald Trump believed his lies.
23:11And if Donald Trump believed what he was saying, then there's no fraud here.
23:16Yes, well, Jack Smith had an answer for that.
23:23So he pointed out the substantial evidence of people within his own administration, within his own campaign, who told him that he had lost.
23:36He pointed to evidence that Donald Trump was willing to believe anything that was as far-fetched and fanciful as could be imagined, if it would keep him in power.
23:51That he deliberately, according to Jack Smith's testimony, didn't seek out the advice and the opinions and the facts from people who actually would be able to tell him there was no fraud in the election.
24:06And that pattern happened over and over again.
24:09If it was information that would keep him in office and keep him in power, then he sought it out.
24:17If it was something against him, he did not.
24:19And that was, to me, very compelling.
24:23We, of course, do not have a trial.
24:26Unlike other countries that have held leaders to account, we get a giant F in terms of holding Donald Trump to account, at least federally, on both of these indictments.
24:40The other issue that they were stuck on was the idea that only phone records of Republican members of Congress were subpoenaed by Jack Smith, which, of course, harkens back to Watergate, where 40 people, 40 people were convicted of committing crimes for and with Republican President Richard Nixon.
25:02And all of them were Republicans.
25:05Big surprise.
25:06There were no Democrats conspiring with a Republican president then to commit crimes for and with the Republican president.
25:14And it looks like this case is the same thing.
25:17There were so many efforts to distract and to make arguments that just don't pass the straight face test and not deal with the actual evidence.
25:33There was there was there was just a dearth of dealing with what most of the members today experienced and witnessed themselves on January 6th and knew that there was a violent attack on the Capitol.
25:48What they themselves said about it at the time, about it being a crime and the president being responsible and the necessity for him to be held accountable.
26:00So this the sort of cognitive dissonance that was going on was was truly remarkable.
26:07I think that maybe the lowest point was one Republican turning to the Capitol police and saying this was all their fault as if that even if let's assume that was true.
26:22Of course, it's not.
26:24That doesn't mean that it's their fault that the Capitol was attacked because they attacked the Capitol.
26:30What they were saying, what this person was saying is that these are Capitol police that could have prevented this from happening.
26:38Well, you know who was in charge of the Capitol police?
26:42You know who was the president at the time?
26:44Donald Trump.
26:46And Donald Trump didn't do anything beforehand to prevent it.
26:49And he certainly didn't do anything at the time to prevent it.
26:53It took hours and enormous convincing by people within the White House to get him to do anything, even after he issued a tweet that Jack Smith testified truly endangered his own vice president.
27:07Are we going to see the second Jack Smith report on the classified documents case?
27:14Wonderful question.
27:15That is a report that Judge Cannon has had issued an order that has been pending for about a year that has precluded that report from being seen.
27:33Now that is supposed to be it's supposed to be released in February.
27:39However, Donald Trump has now made an application to Judge Cannon to have it never be released.
27:48So we don't know what Judge Cannon will do with that.
27:52But I do suspect even if Judge Cannon were to grant that motion that she will be reversed for a third time by the Court of Appeals that oversees her.
28:03So that's a long way of saying that although Donald Trump is taking this last gasp to have it continue to be hidden from us, I think that we will see it, that I think the Court of Appeals there won't tolerate any more nonsense.
28:19Remember, it is the Court of Appeals that said to Judge Cannon, you really cannot sit on this motion and let it linger.
28:27You have to issue an order here so that if we disagree with it, we can we can overrule you.
28:35Andrew Weissman, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
28:38And I still believe Cassidy Hutchinson, even though today Republicans tried to discredit some, just some of Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the January 6th committee,
28:49because it was technically within the legal definition of hearsay, which does not mean that it wasn't true.
29:01When you returned to the White House in the motorcade after the president's speech, where did you go?
29:06When I returned to the White House, I walked upstairs towards the chief of staff's office, and I noticed Mr. Renato lingering outside of the office.
29:15Once we had made eye contact, he quickly waved me to go into his office, which was just across the hall from mine.
29:21When I went in, he shut the door, and I noticed Bobby Angle, who was the head of Mr. Trump's security detail, sitting in a chair, looking somewhat discombobulated and a little lost.
29:31I looked at Tony, and he had said, did you effing hear what happened in the Beast?
29:39I said, no, Tony, I just got back.
29:42What happened?
29:45Tony proceeded to tell me that when the president got in the Beast, he was under the impression from Mr. Meadows that the off-the-record movement to the Capitol was still possible and likely to happen, but that Bobby had more information.
30:00So once the president had gotten into the vehicle with Bobby, he thought that they were going up to the Capitol, and when Bobby had relayed to him, we're not, we don't have the assets to do it, it's not secure, we're going back to the West Wing.
30:15The president had a very strong, a very angry response to that.
30:24Tony described him as being irate.
30:28The president said something to the effect of, I'm the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.
30:34To which Bobby responded, sir, we have to go back to the West Wing.
30:41The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel.
30:48Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel.
30:54We're going back to the West Wing.
30:56We're not going to the Capitol.
30:57Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel.
31:03And when Mr. Ornato had recounted this story to me, he had motioned towards his clavicles.
31:11And was Mr. Engel in the room as Mr. Ornato told you this story?
31:16He was.
31:17Did Mr. Engel correct or disagree with any part of the story for Mr. Ornato?
31:25Mr. Engel did not correct or disagree with any part of the story.
31:29Did Mr. Engel or Mr. Ornato ever after that tell you that what Mr. Ornato had just said was untrue?
31:37Neither Mr. Ornato nor Mr. Engel told me ever that it was untrue.
31:43Joining us now is Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
31:46He's a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and former U.S. attorney, federal prosecutor in Rhode Island.
31:52Senator, from your federal prosecutor perspective, I want to get into this issue of hearsay.
31:58We all use hearsay in our lives all the time.
32:00Someone tells you, hey, I heard that house might be available.
32:03They haven't listed it yet.
32:04And sure enough, it is.
32:06It's hearsay.
32:07But now you have a new house.
32:08It was good hearsay.
32:10There are reasons why that kind of testimony is not allowed in court.
32:13But in congressional hearings, hearsay testimony and testimony like that is very common, isn't it?
32:21It certainly is.
32:23And in fact, it's actually allowed fairly regularly in court when there are circumstances that justify the admission of the hearsay testimony.
32:33You've got a ruling from the judge that says, yeah, you can go ahead with that testimony and then you can.
32:40I think this whole episode of the Republicans trying to rebut Ms. Hutchinson's testimony in the January 6th commission is a little peculiar because this was a hearing about Jack Smith.
32:55And the prosecution of his criminal case against the president, which he has never had a chance to actually put before a jury because it has been obstructed by Republicans and by the Supreme Court, saying peculiarly that this president has an ultimate immunity.
33:18So that's an issue that would be worked out before trial had Jack Smith's case been allowed to proceed.
33:28And the real key with Jack Smith is his sworn testimony that I had the evidence sufficient to convict Mr. Trump beyond a reasonable doubt.
33:40And whether or not he used Ms. Hutchinson's testimony to do that is really beside the point.
33:47It shows what a struggle the Republicans were having today to try to deal with Jack Smith, that they had to go back to the January 6th commission and to testimony that may or may not have even been offered in a criminal case of United States versus Donald Trump.
34:04Yeah.
34:10Yeah.
34:40Yeah.
35:10Yeah.
35:40Yeah.
36:10Yeah.
36:11Yeah.
36:12Yeah.
36:13Yeah.
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