MAGA members of Georgia election board advance another step in Trump's election subversion scheme
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I know this is a weird time to see me. You are not used to seeing me right now, but do not be alarmed. I know I'm not usually here on Fridays. I'm not usually here at 8 p.m. Eastern. But tonight I am here because I really wanted to be here for the debut of my new movie. One hour from now, 9 o'clock Eastern, here on MSNBC, it's going to be the broadcast premiere of the first feature documentary from Surprise Inside, my production company.

The movie is called From Russia with Lev. It is, broadly speaking, about the first Trump impeachment. We made the film with director Billy Corbin and producer Alfred Spellman from Raconteur Pictures, and we made it with them in large part because they are very, very funny.

And as disastrous and terrible as this scandal was, what Trump did to get himself impeached the first time is basically forgotten now, but it was really terrible. But in equal measure to how terrible it was, it was also ridiculous and stupid and hilarious.

And so that story is the story of the film. Anyway, it starts at 9. We've got a normal show for you this hour. Lots of news to get to. I've got a couple of really good guests that I'm really looking forward to talking to on two stories that are very much developing right now live as we speak. But as soon as this hour is over at 9 p.m. Eastern, it's going to be the movie. And just so you know what you're in for, if you do not mind, I'm going to show you the trailer for the movie right now. It's only two minutes.

We'll just do that, and then we'll jump right into the news, but I just want you to see the trailer. Two minutes. Here it is from Russia with Lev. I was as close as you could get to the most powerful man in the world. I really thought it was like a bromance made in heaven. What conversations have you had with Lev Parnas? Boy, was I wrong. We immigrated to the United States when I was four years old. While other kids were going to school, I was on the streets hustling. I was a salesman. There he is.

We were invited to the huge fundraiser. We were like two seats away from Trump. And Lev said something, and instantly it was like no one else was in the room. He wasn't a politician. He was a New York hustler. And we could relate.

This is a guy who's an immigrant who is in a state of shock that he was at this level. In a year and a half, I went from not knowing anything about politics to now being in the inner circle of the president. It was hilarious to see mafia kingpins, oligarchs, interacting with all these Republican congressmen and senators. All the president's putzes. ♪

How are these thugs meeting with our political leaders? Trump's biggest nightmare was Joe Biden. Let's go after Joe. Let's go after Hunter. And that is how I was recruited by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

Trusting Lev to run around Ukraine. It's ridiculous. He's not qualified. No guardrails. No oversight. This is right out of a spy thriller. This was a mission impossible. Mission stupid. I don't know which one, but maybe both. Lev Harness was a key player. Know nothing about him.

This wasn't a normal presidency. I betrayed Ukraine. I betrayed America. I just hope one day I can say I'm sorry. I hope one day Hunter Biden could really forgive me. They turned you into this supervillain. Just so you know, I wasn't very sympathetic. Oh, I'm sure you weren't.

So that's it. From Russia with Lev is going to get its broadcast premiere right here on MSNBC at the end of this hour, nine o'clock Eastern. After the movie ends, I'm going to be on the 11th hour right here on MSNBC to talk about it a little bit. So I, anyway, I hope you will stick around for it. It's been a real labor of love. It's my first documentary feature. Thank you for indulging me. All right. But here's where we are.

Vice President Kamala Harris is just wrapped up a big rally in Swing State, Wisconsin tonight. This is just moments ago. Earlier today, she was in Swing State, Georgia, doing yet more big campaign events. She also did a really splashy high profile campaign event last night in Swing State, Michigan.

with Oprah Winfrey. You may have seen clips from that today. It was a dramatic event. One of the students who was recently shot in that horrific school shooting in Georgia, she was there last night at that event with her mom. Both of them spoke very emotionally at that event.

Also, the mother and sisters of a 28-year-old Georgia woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, who's a mom and a medical assistant, she died because of Georgia's Trump abortion ban.

Ms. Thurman needed a medical procedure that has now been effectively criminalized in Georgia because of the state's abortion ban. A Georgia hospital would not do that procedure for her until the infection that she had had advanced so far that it was impossible to save her life. She's being called possibly the first woman to be killed in

by one of the Trump abortion bans after the judges he appointed to the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Ms. Thurmond's family are completely bereft at her loss, and they were there last night, tearfully, at that Harris event in Michigan with Oprah Winfrey. It was a very emotional thing. I'm not sure I've ever seen a presidential campaign event quite like that, but it was really something.

For what it's worth, the polling averages right now in all those three swing states I just mentioned, Michigan, where Kamala Harris held her event last night with Oprah, Georgia, where she was earlier today, Wisconsin, where she just wrapped up her event tonight, in all those three crucial swing states, Harris and Trump right now are all within two or three points of each other, if not just outright tied. So,

The race is tied. The presidential race is tied. Nationally, it's tied. In the swing states, it's tied. And that is clearly why Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning her heart out. Three major swing states in 24 hours, all very high-profile events. Now, how are things going on the Trump side of the campaign?

Well, in contrast to Harris jetting from Michigan to Georgia to Wisconsin in this one 24-hour period, Trump in this 24-hour period has kind of gone fallow today. No events, no travel, no appearances. I don't know what he's doing.

That said, that may potentially be for the best for his campaign. I say that because the last event he did for his campaign was yesterday, and it produced headlines like this all day today. This was at Huffington Post today. Don shocks. If I lose, blame the Jews. Now, I should say, in fairness, in fairness, I need to note that this headline from our friends at Huffington Post says,

is entirely accurate. I mean, you may think they are exaggerating with a headline like that, but they are not. Here's what it looks like at the Drudge Report tonight: "Trump: Blame the Jews if I lose." And again, in fairness to the people who operate the Drudge Report, that headline is accurate because that is a fair characterization. That is actually what Trump said. And he did it twice.

It started at an event that was supposed to be against anti-Semitism. Stick a pin in that amazing fact just for a moment. But he got up at this event yesterday and he said this, he said, quote, I am not going to call this a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss, meaning they'd have a lot to do with an election loss by him.

That was the first event. Then he went to a second event the same night, last night, and he said it again even more pointedly, just in case people didn't get it the first time. He said at the second event, quote, "If I don't win this election, the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if it happens." These were not closed-door events. These were not off-the-record events. This is him putting it on the record for the American people. "Hey, if I lose the election,

Blame the Jews. I'm not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss. If I don't win this election and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens. Right? I mean, what can possibly go wrong? Jews are like 2% of the American population. But according to the Republican candidate for president and former president,

If anything goes wrong in this next election for him, blame the Jews. It'll be the Jews' fault. Jews are like 2.4% of the American population. Put it on them.

As I mentioned, the first comments from him were at an event which is supposed to be an anti-antisemitism event. What is antisemitism again? Well, most of the time, it's people saying, hey, pay no attention to who's ostensibly in charge, because really, it's the Jews in charge, and so you can blame them for all bad things. Most of the time, that is what antisemitism looks like, which is exactly what Trump is doing, just that.

Just astonishing. We're 46 days out and the Republican candidate for president is telling America, if I lose, blame Jewish people. That is really where we are in the campaign right now. And it turns out it's worse because this is not just a couple of comments at a couple of adjacent events. This is turning into kind of a theme week for them. Remember when he used to declare infrastructure week all the time and nothing ever happened? This is a different kind of week, a much worse one.

All in the space of a few days, we've got Trump saying twice, if I lose the election, blame the Jews. Within a day of that, we also get the release of an interview that his running mate did with an RNC primetime speaker, former host from the Fox News channel, who very famously just did a celebratory, laudatory, totally uncritical two-hour fan fest interview with a Holocaust denier.

in which the two of them talked about how Hitler wasn't the bad guy in World War II. I mean, this is a guy, to be clear, who says we need to be more understanding of the fact that really, Hitler was just looking for a solution, in his words, for, quote, an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem. That's all he was doing. Why can't we be more understanding of that? He wasn't a bad guy. He was just looking for an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.

After this former Fox News host and the primetime RNC speaker interviewed him for two hours and praised him as the best public historian in the country, his own podcast, The Holocaust Denier Guy, went to number one in the country. And the most notorious, famous godfathers of Holocaust denial in this country all praised it, said they wanted credit. Finally, their words are getting out there. Number one podcast in the country on Apple Podcasts.

On the day the White House had to put out a denunciation of that guy and the fact that an RNC primetime speaker just did a laudatory two-hour interview praising him, on the same day the White House had to put out their denunciation of that, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, taped an interview

with that same RNC speaker and Fox News host who had just celebrated America's best public historian as America's best public historian, this Holocaust denial guy. So now that J.D. Vance interview, which was taped at that auspicious time, it's just come out, great timing, right in time for Blame the Jews Day from his running mate.

In that interview, which again has just come out, J.D. Vance makes the case that we don't really have a democracy in this country. And not we shouldn't have a democracy in the future. It's not making that argument, although he kind of is. What he's saying is that we don't have a democracy now. And why is it that he thinks we don't have a democracy now? Because he says there's a secret powerful group who really controls things behind the scenes. So we should blame them.

In reality, right now, we don't live in a real democracy in this country. Right. The people who call the shots in this country have further and further divorced themselves from any kind of real democratic accountability. Right. It's like a junior high school class and how this stuff works.

Why exactly do we always get, like, Holocaust denial and weird blame-the-Jews stuff going along with anti-democratic movements and movements to end democracy and to install a strongman or a fascist form of government instead? Hmm. Why do these things go together? Well, wouldn't you know it, that specific idea also came up.

So if you guys win and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander in chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover. That's exactly right. So the question is, do you care? Well, I think we have to not care. We have to not care. Yes, yes, what we're going to do, some people will call it a fascist takeover, but that's not, you know, any concern to us. It's what we're going to do. So we're not going to care about

when they call it a fascist takeover. Because after all, our so-called democracy is a sham anyway. Would it really be so bad to give it up? Since we all know who's really in charge, right? And Trump says you can blame them if he loses. I mean, this is the worst theme week ever.

Trump did his "blame the Jews" thing yesterday, twice, just after the "yes, it's going to look like a fascist takeover and no we don't care" interview came out. Now, today, they're doing nothing, neither of them doing any campaign stuff at all. Tomorrow, J.D. Vance is going to do a live appearance with that same interviewer, a for-profit ticketed event.

And Trump is going to go to North Carolina tomorrow, where his campaign says he has no plans to distance himself from or denounce the Republican candidate for governor who Trump endorsed there. The same candidate who reportedly announced himself online years ago as, quote, a black Nazi. Quote, I'm a black Nazi.

The all capitals on the word Nazi and the exclamation point at the end of it, those are not my embellishments. Those are his. According to online posts that CNN has somewhat meticulously documented as those of Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for North Carolina governor, Mark Robinson. In other online posts, he said he preferred Hitler to any American politician in Washington. Now the latest reporting tonight is that, um...

His online remarks also include him explicitly praising Mein Kampf.

So, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is denying all of this. He is rejecting calls to quit the governor's race in North Carolina. No Republicans in the state appear to have denounced him for these specific posts in which he praises Hitler and proclaims himself to be a Nazi. No Republicans in the state apparently feel the need to distance themselves from it, and apparently neither does Trump. The deadline for removing Mr. Robinson from the ballot passed at midnight last night.

So apparently they are they are sticking with him. I told you this is the worst theme week ever. But it continues. Trump is standing by the guy who calls himself a Nazi and praises Hitler, praises Mein Kampf. He's going to be going to North Carolina tomorrow. Tonight here on the show, we're going to be speaking with the Democratic Party chair from North Carolina. She's a real force of nature, one of the Democratic Party's young rising stars.

And North Carolina is super interesting. Democrats don't usually win the presidential race in North Carolina. In my lifetime, it has happened precisely twice: once in 1976 with Jimmy Carter and once in 2008 with Barack Obama.

That's it. But the Republicans do have this guy, Mark Robinson, at the top of their ticket, literally calling himself a Nazi. And Kamala Harris and the Democrats right now are running a pretty phenomenal and innovative campaign in North Carolina.

So, as I mentioned, we're going to be checking in on that over the course of this hour as the Republican implosion in that state continues to develop as a news story tonight. We're also going to be checking in tonight on Georgia, because it's one thing to talk about how we don't really have a democracy. Democracy isn't real. There's some secret cabal enemy within that's really in control.

You know, elections are all a ruse and a rigged game. It's one thing to talk about it. It's another thing to see them really trying to put it into action. And that is why for weeks we have been focusing pretty intently on Georgia, where pro-Trump Republicans have been telegraphing more than anywhere else in the country that they are going to refuse to certify Georgia's election results in November. They're going to refuse to say what the vote totals are.

And it started in Georgia, as it did in many states, with individual pro-Trump Republicans in the counties refusing to certify individual election results. But in Georgia, even though they had already got a pretty good head start on the rest of the country, there were more certification refusals by Georgia Republicans than in any other state. Georgia then went one step further, though, when they installed pro-Trump people as a

And since that pro-Trump majority has taken over on the Georgia state election board, that board has furiously been changing all the state's election rules, among other things, to make it seem like it's a legal and allowed thing to refuse to certify election results. It is neither legal nor allowed. But these dynamics and the worrying implications of them, this is why I wrote a New York Times op-ed a few weeks ago about what I'm most worried about on election night and after,

I mean, we should really be prepared as a country, regardless of where you live. Local Republican elections officials in multiple states are going to refuse to sign off on election results and certify them.

It's going to happen in Georgia. It's going to happen in other swing states. It's going to happen all over the country, anywhere Republicans have power. When that happens, when those Republicans refuse to certify, it's going to generate tons of bogus press reports and social media reports that are all designed to create the impression in the American public that something went wrong with the election, that the results of the election somehow can't be known.

And if we can't know the results of the election, what does that mean? Well, there's going to have to be some other way to resolve who's the next president. We'll have to figure that out with state legislatures or the Congress or the courts or the streets. Because they're going to say, look, there's no clear results.

Or at least there are Republican officials contesting the results in all these disparate places. It must mean that something's wrong, right? And it's all because the Trump movement, very broadly, wants you to believe that American elections are bad, right? They're not hiding this. They are very blunt about it now. Our elections are bad.

Say it more bluntly. That was him at the debate. Our elections are bad, right? This is their basic message about the American system of government heading into the election a month and a half from right now. And the way that looks in Georgia is that Republicans have been refusing to certify previous elections since 2020, and they've been gearing up to not certify in November.

in order to create the false impression that elections are somehow bad and there's no clear result, we're going to have to decide this some other way. That's what I've been worried about and writing about and talking about and trying to raise the alarm about for weeks now. But now today they have gone one important step further.

Because it is one thing to try to convince people that there's something wrong with election results when there really isn't anything wrong with our elections. That is what the certification refusal stuff is about. To try to create the false impression that something's wrong with an election that actually was fine. It's something else entirely to actually mess with the election. To actually try to prevent the timely and normal tallying of the results.

And that is what happened today in Georgia. Today, in a marathon meeting in Georgia, the new pro-Trump majority of the Georgia state election board, they passed a whole bunch of new rules, yet more new rules today, 46 days out from the election, including one that requires a hand count of ballots. I mean, reminder here that Georgia has 11 million people. I'll quote here from the Washington Post's coverage of this

shock decision today in Georgia. Quote, democracy advocates accused the board of intentionally injecting chaos and uncertainty into the presidential contest. Election supervisors and poll workers said hand counts would take too long, cost money, and almost certainly produce counting errors. The office of the Republican state attorney general, which is responsible for advising the board, wrote in an opinion that the change was, quote, unlawful.

Nevertheless, the board voted 3-2 to approve the measure. Quote, "Research and practice have shown again and again that hand counting ballots is less accurate than machine tallies and that it can take days, weeks, or months depending on the size of the jurisdiction." Again, 11 million people in Georgia. Quote, "Critics say because the hand counting requirement would almost certainly inject error into the tabulation process, it could give county boards the evidence they need," meaning the pretext they need,

to delay certification. Some questioned whether it amounts to intentional sabotage of state elections. Yeah, it's one thing to say falsely that there's something wrong in the elections. It's another thing to actually monkey wrench the works so that Georgia really can't count its vote.

Radical stuff going on in Georgia. Not just creating false propaganda about election problems that aren't there, but now moving on to actually creating real election problems for real. They're going to try to make Georgia take months to count? It's not just going to test our patience. It would break the system. Because if it's going to take months, at that point the deadlines for Georgia and every other state producing their electoral votes will have long passed.

The good news here is that Georgians turned out in significant numbers today to say no to this. The opposition of this event was sustained and articulate and very, very present, and I can't help but believe that that matters. But I'll ask somebody who knows. A member of the Georgia State Election Board is going to join us live right here next. Stay with us.

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The idea that you're not going to listen to the individuals that are charged with conducting elections is absurd to me. We all have given our lives, most of us worked decades in these career paths, and to say that we don't know what we're talking about, you wouldn't say that to any other professional. I've stayed at a lot of Waffle Houses in my life, but that does not qualify me to operate a Waffle House. Listen to the experts.

Listen to the experts. That was the local elections director from Douglas County, Georgia today, speaking before the state elections board in Georgia, before that board voted on a whole bunch of new rules today that aim to pretty radically change the way elections are run in Georgia just a month and a half before Election Day. The board held a public comment period today before taking the vote. Dozens of people showed up to do

What is essentially a civic duty in a circumstance like this to tell the board face to face to be on the record opposing these radical changes to essentially undo the state's election rules and processes right before the presidential race. The recent actions of the board sow chaos and dramatically undermine trust.

and our constitutional republic and its democratic processes. I'm glad to serve as a poll worker, even though it can be cumbersome, tiring, and stressful at times. All of these proposals are attempting to remedy problems that don't exist. This timeline is not just tight. It is impossible. Imagine the uncertainty and the confusion and the added burden on election workers and county budgets. These rules do not exist.

protect our elections. They undermine them. Your actions attempt to stack the deck for a particular outcome and that is the definition of anti-democratic. I think what is happening is we are setting up our counties to fail and when these counties fail, when there are inaccuracies, if there is a result of the election that some of the members of this board do not like,

They will be able to point to those inaccuracies and they will say that the election is inaccurate, that there is a lack of integrity in the election.

Last speaker there is a state representative in Georgia named Syra Draper. She's telling the Georgia election board there essentially, hey, I'm on to you, that she believes the motive behind what they're doing is not just to create an illusion that there's something wrong with Georgia's election results, but actually to set Georgia elections up to fail, to make the administration of this election so chaotic and so impossible to

that Georgia actually won't be able to produce a clear result. And then they can point at that and say, ah, see, look at all these problems in our elections. We should throw out the vote. Or at least we should fight over this and have this tied up in court so long that maybe the state's votes for the Electoral College never make it in time, never make it to Washington in time for the Electoral College count.

Joining us now, I'm happy to say, is Sarah Tyndall Gazelle. She's the lone Democrat on the Georgia State Election Board. She voted against the rule change today that requires hand counting the ballots. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's been a very, very long day and this has been a very stressful period. Well, I'm happy to be here.

Can I just ask you if you feel like, if I've been mischaracterizing anything that's happened at the election border, if you feel like the public understanding broadly as the nation's eyes sort of turn to Georgia, if there's been any fundamental misunderstandings about what's happening there, if you feel like those of us observing this from afar pretty much understand what's going on.

Well, the one thing I want to make sure is clear is we're not hand tabulating the ballots. We're simply hand counting the number of ballots. But again, you know, we're just weeks away from the election. So, you know,

For counties to try to retrain their poll workers and their poll managers, for them to hire more workers because workers who've been out there for 14, 16 hours a day and are not in any shape to count thousands of ballots accurately. It's just absolutely untenable. So I don't see any other option.

explanation for this other than exactly as Representative Draper said, which is setting counties up for failure.

I think a lot of people who've been watching what's been happening in Georgia, particularly now that the Secretary of State has weighed in and advised that some of these proposed changes seem to be in contravention of Georgia law, now that the Attorney General's office have weighed in and said some of these changes are beyond the statutory authority of the board. I think a lot of people are looking at that and thinking, well, the board is doing all these things, but none of it will stand, that this will all get blocked by the courts, that Georgia's elections

won't be affected by the chaos that these rules, at least on paper, would seem to be injecting into the process. Do you share that confidence? Do you think the courts will essentially come to the rescue here and keep Georgia's normal election procedures in place?

Well, I certainly have hope that they will do that. Confidence, I'm not nearly as confident as some of the commentary that I've seen and read because it's a really narrow window, both in terms of time and in terms of the legal theory, because there is...

It's hard to sue the state. There's sovereign immunity questions that come into play. The fact that my colleagues are willing to completely disregard advice of our counsel, we are represented by the attorney general's office. We were told flat out that this was not a lawful use of our authority. That I found actually quite shocking.

I wondered when I saw that today, especially when the chairman of the board, who voted the same way that you did on most of these rule changes, when he explicitly noted at today's hearing, we are taking this action. If you vote in favor of this, this is in contravention of the legal advice we have been given about what we are legally allowed to do. I wondered if there might actually be potentially worries among the majority of the board that voted for those changes that they might have been

contravening Georgia law simply by taking this vote and trying to take actions that they're not legally allowed to take.

You would think, but I also would suspect that if they were actually concerned about it, they would have voted differently because this counting the ballots is theater. Frankly, it doesn't add actual security. There are so many backups and ways of making sure that we know how many ballots were cast. That has confirmed three different ways. So it seems that they have some other motive.

Sarah Tyndall-Gazelle, the lone Democrat on the Georgia election board. As I said, I know that you're in a very difficult spot on this board. The eyes of the nation really are on Georgia. Thank you for taking time to talk to us again. I hope you wouldn't mind coming back and talking to us again as these things evolve. It's going to be a really, really important next 46 days to see how this all resolves in your critical state. Well, I hope I'll have better news next time. Yeah, me too. Thank you. Thank you for your service and thank you for being here.

My pleasure. All right. We've got much more ahead here tonight. Stay with us.

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In 2008, Barack Obama won North Carolina by less than a third of a point. It's the only time a Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina in the past 48 years since Jimmy Carter did it.

But for the first time in years, Democrats are optimistic right now about their chances in North Carolina. And that is thanks, in some part, to Republicans' decision to nominate Mark Robinson as their candidate for governor, a man with more offensive positions than all of North Carolina's college football teams combined.

As I mentioned earlier, new CNN reporting has found that Mr. Robinson allegedly posted in an online porn forum years ago that he considers himself to be a, quote, black Nazi, exclamation point, that he wants to bring back slavery, that he enjoyed a personal history of spying on women in public gym showers, etc.

They've also described his history of disparaging civil rights icon Martin Luther King in starkly, starkly racist terms. And it goes on and on and on. Latest reporting includes Mark Robinson's apparent praise both for Hitler and for Mein Kampf. NBC News has not independently verified those posts. Mr. Robinson is denying making them. His denial kind of weirdly was, quote, these are not our words. Who else's words are they not?

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is already out with a new ad featuring her opponent, Donald Trump, heaping praise on Mark Robinson. North Carolina Democrats seem to be increasingly optimistic about what they may be able to do here. The party's Democratic Party chair in the state, Anderson Clayton, told The New Yorker today, quote, What is Kamala Harris's biggest fight in the state? It's getting people to believe that winning it is possible. That's what will turn people out to vote.

Clayton, looking to the margins in rural counties like the one where she grew up, is leaning on the Harris campaign to schedule an appearance by the vice president in places like rural Wilson and Nash counties. She said, quote, I was like, give me a day. People get excited when they see her. People are ready to run through a brick wall. Joining us now from Raleigh is Anderson Clayton. She is chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Ms. Clayton, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate you coming back. Thank you for having us.

So the Mark Robinson news is bad and weird and keeps getting worse and weirder. I wanted to ask your reaction as chair of the state Democratic Party to these new revelations about his past online statements. Well, we know that this is no different than the Mark Robinson that's been campaigning across the state of North Carolina for the last year, spewing hateful rhetoric and really going after half of the state's population with attacking women in the state, attacking the LGBTQ community in the state and

also looking at attacking public educators in the state. Mark Robinson has said that folks are indoctrinating our children in public schools, as has his counterpart, folks like Michelle Morrow, who's running for superintendent of schools this year as well, against Democratic candidate Mo Green. We've got this Republican extremism up and down the ballot, and it starts with Donald Trump, and it doesn't end with Mark Robinson, honestly.

The Democrats were always going to try to contest North Carolina. Ever since 2008, they have really felt like North Carolina ought to be in their column. The Republican slate this year, everybody knows, is going to help in those efforts.

What about the Democratic ground game? The New Yorker's reporting that the Harris campaign has more than 230 paid staff members in North Carolina, at least 170 assigned to 26 field offices around the state. Are you pleased with the way the Harris campaign and the Democrats more broadly have been able to structure an organization to try to win the state?

Absolutely. We've been really in coordination with our campaign this year from the Harris operation and also down the ballot, making sure that candidates across the state feel the impact of this election and ensuring that we've got a ground game with our Project 100 team through the state party, making sure that every county is going to have a GOTV or get out the vote staging location this year that's going to help with door knocking and canvassing efforts and phone banking efforts across the state because we want to make sure from Cherokee County to Dare County, we have GOTV efforts happening.

We know that the 74,000 votes that Joe Biden lost his state by in 2020, that it brought down the margins that, you know, we saw Hillary Clinton lose the state by in 2016. We know we can bring those margins back with every single voter across North Carolina coming out. And if anybody would like to get involved with those efforts, they can go to ncdp.org to help us out.

Anderson Clayton, North Carolina State Democratic Party chair, changing the narrative in a lot of ways about whether or not rural areas should be written off as Republican areas, changing that narrative around the country by doing the work in rural North Carolina. Ms. Clayton, thanks very much for being with us. Look forward to having you back. Thank you. All right. We'll be right back.

So just in time for the lawsuits that are sure to follow this chaos that was created by the Georgia State Election Board today. Today, we also got this friendly reminder for attorneys in Georgia, a reminder from some of their fellow lawyers, quote, don't lose your law license because of Trump. This ad is now running in Georgia, right? Reminding lawyers there about what happened to Trump lawyers in the last election when they took part in his attempts to overturn the election results.

The ad comes from a legal watchdog group called the 65 Project. It's named after the 65 failed lawsuits that pro-Trump lawyers filed in 2020 to try to overturn the election results that year. Many of the lawyers involved in those lawsuits and involved in other Trump election subversion efforts in 2020, like the fake electors plot, many of those lawyers have faced ethics investigations and disciplinary hearings and judicial sanctions. Some of them have been criminally charged for what they did, top

Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman had their law licenses suspended. So now the 65 Project is reminding lawyers that that's what happened. They're running web ads in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Soon print ads like this one will be appearing in legal journals in those states. You see the headline there, don't let partisan politics endanger your standing with the bar.

Lawyers take an oath to stand as officers of the court, bound by a code of conduct and ethical obligations that require them to speak truthfully to the court and the public. Lawyers cannot uphold that duty while bringing factually and legally baseless claims. Do not risk your law license by joining an effort to subvert democracy. This is lawyers talking to lawyers.

In historian Tim Snyder's essential little handbook on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, lesson number five of the 20 is this. Remember professional ethics. Quote, when political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It's hard to subvert a rule of law state without lawyers or to hold show trials without judges.

In other words, when Trump comes to your state looking for lawyers to file frivolous, baseless lawsuits to monkey wrench the election or overthrow election results, if the legal profession is doing its job, he should have a hard time finding lawyers to say yes to that. Among all the other institutions we have in our country, professional organizations have a part to play in maintaining their own standards, policing their own members so they don't participate in anti-democratic schemes.

That's what Project 65 is doing, providing a very concrete example of how to do just that. Their first ad in Georgia lands on this warning, quote, we and the public are watching. This is one very specific form of democracy in action, democracy being defended by people, by citizens who are not worried about going on offense to do it. That's what it looks like. I'll be right back.

I'm a little nervous and excited and basket full of butterflies behind this desk tonight. This is something I've never done before.

But here it is. This is a project, a movie that I've been working on for a while now. It is called From Russia with Lev. It is the first feature documentary from my production company, Surprise Inside, along with director Billy Corbin and producer Alfred Spellman from Racon Tour Pictures. You're about to see the film is centered on a guy named Lev, a hustler, really, who grew up in the world of Russian organized crime.

He ended up in the White House, the Trump White House, of course. Lev is repentant about what he did. He also recorded and took pictures of everything he did as he did it. And what he did not only put himself in prison, but it led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, which is much forgotten right by now because of everything that happened thereafter. But it's still very important and also very stupid.

All right, From Russia with Lev is about to have its broadcast premiere right after the movie on the 11th hour. I'll be here to talk about it. So will Lev Parnas and his wife Svetlana, who is about to become your new best friend. So stick with us after the film for that. But now it is time for jittery me to stop jabbering and let's roll the film. Here it is. From Russia with Lev starts right now.

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