Transcript of Maddow: After Hegseth, watch for impeachment of Trump's A.G. Todd Blanche

"We honor the service and sacrifice of our commander in chief, Donald J. Trump. He is a soldier in spirit who marched to the front lines of dodging the draft, armed with a perfect diagnosis of bone spurs. We salute a leader who knows you can't spell sacrifice without 'I', and a warrior who reminds us that sometimes when you're called to stand up, it's best to just sit down and rest your feet." Then it ends with an actual quote from Donald Trump, when he once bragged online about having, um, had, quote, "high rank" at his military-themed boarding school in high school.

He said at the time, quote, "I can be very military." Despite going to boarding school, um, Trump did in fact cite bone spurs as the purported justification for the deferment he got that prevented him from serving his country in the Vietnam War. Um, I should mention that alongside this new statue that went up today, there's something a little different this time. There's also a guy in a full-body costume, kind of looks like a baseball team mascot or something, but he's called Toey, T-O-E-Y, and Toey is a giant toe.

And he has, like, for bone spurs, right, and he has been, um, Toey has been posted up at the statue on the National Mall all day, reportedly saying things to people like, quote, "I'm the biggest toe. The hugest toe. Huge. Hugest toe. Largest toe that anyone's ever seen." Toey has also reportedly been saying to people, quote, "This little piggy went to, well, not the military, that's for sure." I should also mention, to my regret, that, um, Toey, the giant toe, also has toe hairs.

Nine long hairs that kind of look like chest hairs because, you know, there's a person in there, but they're toe hairs in the first joint of that walking, talking Trump big toe for his bone spurs. So, Happy Veterans Day, everybody. Veterans Day is the day after tomorrow, Wednesday, November 11th. And the secret handshake, folks, the people who brought you the January 6th commemorative statue on the National Mall, which created a replica of a congressional office complete with a pile of feces left behind by the Trump-supporting mob.

Also the people who brought you the statue of Trump and Epstein gleefully kicking up their heels together, hand in hand. Also the people who brought you the video game Operation Epic Furious about Trump's botched launch of the Iran war. Now, just in time for Veterans Day, just in time for the likely impeachment of his defense secretary. Those same folks bring us this new statue, the Foot Soldier, celebrating Donald Trump's purported bone spurs.

Outgoing Republican Congressman Thomas Massie filed his resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. The Republicans are technically still in control in Washington until January 3rd. They do, because they're in control, they do have some limited options for how they can handle this resolution, but bottom line, there probably is a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives right now that probably does support the impeachment of Pete Hegseth. I mean, choose your weapon, right?

Um, Hegseth leaking highly sensitive operational war plans to not one, but two group texts, which variously included not only a journalist from The Atlantic, but also his personal lawyer, and also his brother, and also his wife. When Trump started bombing Iran, Pete Hegseth not only apparently forgot to put in place force protection measures at U.S. bases that were obviously and easily within range for Iran's inevitable retaliatory strikes, leading to more than a dozen Americans being killed and dozens more wounded in Kuwait, Hegseth also apparently forgot to order the evacuation of military families from the U.S.

Navy's major hub in Bahrain, which was then inevitably and easily hit by Iran's, again, very predictable retaliatory strikes. Hegseth's neglect and then lying about the historically dire conditions U.S. sailors were subject to, thanks to his orders on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which became a medical and sanitary emergency before the families of those on board finally succeeded in raising enough of a clamor that that ship had finally to be brought home. Pete Hegseth's apparently quite blatantly illegal bombing of civilian boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which has led to hundreds of deaths, and which appears to have led the head of Southcom, the head of the U.S.

military's southern command, to be forced out of his office, but nobody's quite been able to figure out why exactly that was, because nobody's been able to question that former Southcom commander about him being forced out. I mean, there's, there's a million of them. How long do you want to go on here? His mass firings of senior military leaders without cause. MS Now is reporting just today that Hegseth appears to have illegally intervened in military officers' promotion lists. Apparently, by the evidence, it appears to have been because he desired to purge non-white and female officers from the senior ranks of the, of the, the service branches.

Oh, also losing what has turned out to be a disastrous failed war of choice in Iran. Right, so, so yes, this impeachment resolution was filed today against Pete Hegseth. The House is going to have to deal with it one way or another, and for so many reasons, there really is good reason to believe that the impeachment articles filed against Hegseth will have majority support in the House, which will mean that Pete Hegseth will be impeached. Then there will be the question of whether Pete Hegseth will go on trial in the United States Senate.

Again, a real open question. Republicans currently have a slim majority in the Senate, which means they control that chamber, but Democrats are going to control that chamber by a lot as of January 3rd. Now, you need a two-thirds vote to convict. They would still need a number of Republican senators to vote to convict Pete Hegseth after a Senate trial. Something roughly in the neighborhood of a dozen Republican senators would have to agree with Democrats in order to convict Hegseth. But it doesn't seem impossible that those votes might be there.

I mean, you're going to act to try to stop a crime in progress, to try to stop some of the criminal behavior of the first two years of this term in office for Donald Trump, so that the next two years look better. 90% of American, 90% of Americans told the National Voter Poll that corruption was important to them in deciding how to cast their vote this year. That was even higher than the cost of living. It was higher than the war. It was higher than anything. So if the mandate was to stop the corruption, stop the crime wave, clean this stuff up, then yeah, I think some of the administration officials who have overseen the worst of this stuff are about to face impeachment.

I think Pete Hegseth may get impeached this week. I think Todd Blanche at the Attorney General's office is likely to be next. But I got to say, it's a, it's a little different at the Justice Department than it is at the Defense Department with Pete Hegseth, and let me explain why. It's because at the Justice Department, yes, there are things that Todd Blanche has done, that Todd Blanche has overseen at DOJ, that make for just as terrible a list as I just gave you about the Defense Department, that make for just as tidy a set of potential articles of impeachment as anything that we saw that Pete Hegseth is about to start to face.

I mean, like, you know, just off the top of my head, Todd Blanche going and, and he goes and personally meets with Jeffrey Epstein's convicted co-conspirator in Epstein's child sex trafficking ring. Blanche asks her at that to please say things about President Trump, and Ghislaine Maxwell reads the room, responds with factually uncorroborated, out-of-the-blue praise for Donald Trump, saying, "Oh yeah, he's lovely and a gentleman and definitely never had to do any, had never had anything to do with anything bad.

He's definitely super innocent." Ghislaine Maxwell is then apparently rewarded immediately with a transfer to a minimum security prison, where she, among other things, can have a puppy. The Justice Department says it's just a coincidence that Todd Blanche's visit with Ghislaine Maxwell coincided with her transfer to minimum security, that it was a totally normal, independent decision by part of the Justice Department that really, it was a matter of course. Was it normal? Was it a coincidence? Should that maybe be investigated?

I mean, Todd Blanche has orchestrated some of the totally, some, some sort of totally unprecedented deal for the president and his family, in which they're apparently going to be exempt from scrutiny by the IRS, no matter what they do. The Todd Blanche era at DOJ was just found, uh, the Todd Blanche era at DOJ was just found to have illegally fired the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, a federal judge ruling that her firing violated the separation of powers and federal administrative law and Maureen Comey's due process rights.

Another federal judge just excoriated the Todd Blanche DOJ for having tried to bring charges against former FBI officials right before the election in a way that was both procedurally totally bogus, not predicated on any probable cause, and the judge said seemed pretty clearly timed and designed to try to improperly influence the election. Under Todd Blanche, the DOJ really did try to insert itself into the counting of ballots in both California and Alaska and in Washington State as well.

The, the botched and bogus prosecution of U.S. Olympian Davey Hearn, who Trump apparently wanted to be a scapegoat for his reflecting pool disaster, even though the government possessed very clear evidence that Mr. Hearn had nothing to do with it at all. A judge is currently investigating whether under Todd Blanche, DOJ lawyers lied to the court in the botched and collapsed case they tried and failed to bring against anti-ICE protesters in Chicago. While another federal judge is investigating whether DOJ lawyers under Todd Blanche lied to the court even in the freaking golf course case in Washington, DC.

The New York Times Today reports that federal court orders have been routinely ignored by the Trump administration in its deportations of people who federal judges have ordered cannot be sent back to the countries from which they fled. These people are nevertheless being sent there in violation of U.S. court orders. As of tonight, the DOJ federal prosecutor's office in Western Washington State has written to the federal court system there, announcing that it can no longer handle its own workload, and so federal prosecutors from that office just aren't going to represent the government side in immigration cases there anymore, unless they really feel like they need to.

They're just giving up. They're just asking judges to please decide those cases without the benefit of a federal prosecutor participating on behalf of the government. Your honors, just, just do what you got to do. We actually can't be there, but just decide it without us. This is not a normal thing for a federal prosecutor's office to do. This is not a normal thing for the U.S. Justice Department to fail at. I mean, I mean, the killing of Renee Good not being investigated, and under this DOJ, they instead tried to launch a federal investigation of Renee Good's widow after a federal agent murdered Renee Good.

The killing of Alex Pretty. Oh, they said that one would be investigated. It does not appear to be a real investigation, not by the feds, and they are reportedly at the federal level blocking the state from investigating that killing too. I mean, take your pick. I could go on. All right, that's all stuff that's happened within DOJ in the Todd Blanche era, all of which he should answer for unless we want him to continue doing things like this. But there is something else, something worse and unique about Todd Blanche's position, which is not just what he's done, what he has overseen, what DOJ has done while he's been there as the number one or number two person in charge.

What might be worse, and what is important to think about with Todd Blanche, is what he hasn't done. Because the Department of Justice is different than every other part of the government. This is a man named Harry Dorothee. Harry Dorothee had Todd Blanche's job a hundred years ago. In the 1920s, he was attorney general. I have a book that comes out tomorrow, and in that book, I describe the Department of Justice under Harry Dorothee as a multi-story bribe department store, meaning you could visit various floors of DOJ headquarters to pay Harry Dorothee various bribes for all sorts of services and favors that you wanted from him.

Harry Dorothee was well off when he got to Washington, but he got much, much, much, much more well off very quickly once he was installed as a very bribey attorney general. But what got Harry Dorothee in the end was not just his own corruption and the corruption of the Justice Department under his leadership. It was Harry Dorothee as attorney general essentially presiding over wild and over-the-top corruption on the part of the whole administration that he served.

He had been the president's campaign manager. He was the president's very close friend. But that presidential administration that he served was wildly corrupt, and there was one really big corruption scandal in particular under Dorothee's watch, one that cost the American people tens of millions of dollars in 1920s dollars. Just a massive theft of public resources. It was an, it was an oil thing. It was called Teapot Dome. And Congress and the press discovered it. They investigated it, turned it into a huge scandal, a huge political debacle for the administration.

But what happened to Harry Dorothee? This is from the book. Quote, "The Senate wanted the Interior Secretary and the oil executives and everyone else involved prosecuted. But there was one serious hitch in that plan. Any federal prosecution would, of course, have to be brought and managed by federal prosecutors. And federal prosecutors were, by definition, employees of the U.S. Department of Justice. And senators knew there was very good reason to believe that the U.S. Department of Justice under Harry Dorothee couldn't be trusted to do that job."

The scandal had been in the news for almost two years. Of the 607 staff persons at his disposal in DOJ's Bureau of Investigation, Attorney General Harry Dorothee had assigned exactly no one to work on this case. Not while the plunder was happening, not when it was first publicly exposed, and not even when the Senate riveted the nation and led every newspaper in the country by laying this lurid scandal bare. At the end of January 1924, the U.S. Senate asked for and got the appointment of a special counsel operating outside of and independent of the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation and to prosecute if necessary.

But the Senate also soon voted to open its own select committee investigation, not into the oil scandal, but into Attorney General Harry M. Dorothee and his failure to prosecute or investigate it at DOJ. For good measure and for good reason, they would investigate Harry Dorothee's entire three-year tenure as attorney general. Quote, "Now we're getting somewhere." I think that is a really solitary lesson from history.

Under Todd Blanche, it's not only what's been happening inside the gutted institution that used to be the U.S. Department of Justice. Under Todd Blanche, it is two tobacco lobbyists delivering a $5 million check to the president's PAC, and then nine days later, the president forces the FDA to approve fruit-flavored vapes because the kids love them. It's a woman in Florida paying a million dollars to go to a Mar-a-Lago dinner for Trump, and then three weeks later, huh, her son gets a full and complete pardon from Donald Trump.

Ka-ching. It's the news today that the Trump administration has awarded a giant, hugely lucrative brand new contract for doing Ebola testing, including in Africa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company they gave this big new contract to is a company that, quote, "Last year made most of its money from waxing salons and airport spas that offer manicures, massages, and something called chakra beds." This is a company that has never worked with Ebola at all.

It has never worked internationally. It has definitely never worked in Africa or specifically in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The CEO of that company's parent company told ProPublica today that he doesn't even know if his company can do what they're about to get paid to do. He literally told ProPublica today, quote, "I'm not sure we can do it." But nevertheless, that's the company that got a $40 million taxpayer-funded contract. Why them?

Why not some other company that has, say, ever worked on Ebola, that has ever worked in Africa, that has ever worked in the DRC? Why this company? Why the airport chakra bed and massage company? Why did that company get it? I don't know. But they got this contract, quote, "Just months after a firm linked to Donald Trump's elder sons invested in its parent company." And this is only the latest, right?

There was the Podunk drone company that got a $90 million Air Force contract just after Don Jr. and Eric bought into it. There was the Podunk mining company that got the massively lucrative U.S. government support to go mine for tungsten in Kazakhstan. Do you think that's because Don Jr. and Eric, the blonde one, are the smartest guys in the country when it comes to mining for tungsten in Kazakhstan? Think that's a real area of expertise for them? Or do you think that them taking a stake in that mining company might have had something to do with the U.S.

government deciding that company in particular should benefit from the largesse of the American taxpayer when it comes to mining for tungsten in Kazakhstan? Under Todd Blanche and this Justice Department, the president buys stock in Dell before he goes out as president and tells people to buy Dell computers. This president buys stock in Intel before having the U.S. government take a government stake in Intel. Think that'll be good for his stock holdings? This president buys bonds from SpaceX just before announcing that the U.S. government will financially bolster companies that specialize in space transportation.

Companies like, oh, I don't know, SpaceX. That Navatech alleged bribery scheme, right, that surfaced in a late-breaking scandal in the Suzanne Collins Senate race in Maine, remember? It was a federal contractor effectively paying members of Congress to steer contracts their way. Well, an FBI anti-corruption team was investigating it until the FBI and DOJ's anti-corruption units were all but shut down. When Todd Blanche was one of the top two officials at the U.S. Justice Department and that investigation just evaporated.

Last year, a private prison company called CoreCivic told Minnesota it would sell the state of Minnesota an old prison it had in the state. They'd sell them that prison for $75 million. Minnesota didn't buy it. It didn't seem like a good deal, apparently. But then that same company, CoreCivic, which had lustilily donated to things like the Trump Inauguration Slush Fund, CoreCivic found that the Trump administration would like to buy that prison, after all. This sort of white elephant prison that they couldn't unload for $75 million to the state.

The Trump administration decided they'd buy it from CoreCivic instead, but they wouldn't pay CoreCivic the $75 million that CoreCivic was asking for it. No, they'd pay CoreCivic $495 million for it. For the same place. Huh. I wonder why companies keep making these donations to Trump and keep going into business with the Trump family. The companies involved in all of those things I just mentioned, including the Trump sons, they all deny wrongdoing, right?

The president, for his part, denies any wrongdoing with regard to his own financial holdings. But just this weekend, a guy who worked at Health and Human Services resigned. You might have seen this. His name was Cali Means. He went on the Joe Rogan podcast, and then he went on CBS's Face the Nation this weekend. And he made really specific allegations that his experience in the Trump White House, which again, only ended a few days ago, his experience working in and around the Trump White House was that the White House chief of staff under Donald Trump was running a scheme in which paying her family, hiring her daughter's lobbying firm, was widely understood to be the way you could guarantee U.S.

government attention and action, and everybody knew it. The White House chief of staff allegedly involving paying her family for official action by the U.S. government. Todd Blanche was asked about those very serious allegations, Oval Office corruption. He responded that he did not care. He said, quote, "No, I do not listen to that. Quote, absolutely not." People in this country say that corruption was the thing that most motivated their vote this year.

With votes motivated because of corruption, they voted Democrats into Washington and into power across the country in record numbers. Democrats have the opportunity now not only to investigate and try to clean up the corruption in the Trump administration, but also to investigate and potentially impeach cabinet officials like the attorney general specifically for having let that corruption run wild. The Department of Justice is a different kind of cat.

It is a different kind of thing in our government with different kinds of responsibilities, and it should be treated that way. I wrote this new book, Department of Fate, which comes out tomorrow, to tell the history of this part of the government that really is just different than other parts of the government that I think needs to be treated that way. I think it has set the course of the nation in a way that no other institution ever has. But right now, in our chapter of history, in our time, in our generation right now, the Justice Department under Todd Blanche is a metastasizing, sulfurous pit of scandal.

And Donald Trump is going to be president for two more years, and he very well may want Todd Blanche to be his attorney general for those next two years. Why wouldn't he? But investigations and potential impeachment of Todd Blanche, those are things that are within the power of the Democrats who are now taking over Congress. Investigations and ultimately impeachment of Todd Blanche would let Todd Blanche know that whatever he thinks he's gotten away with in these last two years, he's not going to get away with it any longer. He's not going to get away with it for these next two years. It would also tell voters that Democrats were moving to clean this stuff up like the voters say they want more than anything else.

So far since the election, the Department of Justice is the one cabinet agency that has seen almost its entire top leadership resign. The head of the Civil Rights Division resigned. The head of the Civil Division resigned. The head of the National Security Division resigned. The former head of the Office of Legal Counsel resigned. He's the one who tried to bring the botched prosecutions against Tish James and James Comey. The attorney general who tried to bring the so-called grand conspiracy case against all of Trump's ghosts of Christmas past, he resigned too.

They have all jumped. They are all fleeing, which means none of them can be impeached. But Todd Blanche is still there, and Todd Blanche can for everything that has happened there under his watch. So yes, watch Pete Hegseth first. Yes, that's this week. But watch Todd Blanche next. Keisha Lance Bottoms is here with us tonight. Peter Struck is here with us tonight. We got lots to get to. Stay with us.

Joining us now is Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms. Madam Governor-elect, congratulations, belated congratulations, and thank you so much for being here. It's really nice of you to make the time.

The previous governors have just, for whatever reason, not wanted to do it. So I believe that the will will be there, and we have taken the House. We are one seat away from having a dead even Senate, and I believe this is something that both sides of the aisle can get around.

But I can tell you, I believe it will make us all more creative and more thoughtful as leaders because we've never had to maneuver in this way with a federal government and a president in the way that we have had to do over the past couple of years. But we're going to get done what we can get done with bipartisan support and the rest. You know, we're just going to have to agree to disagree and push the envelope as far as we can.

Go look at Georgia. Go look at Texas, but in particular, go look at Georgia to see what it means to do the work to turn a state from one political direction to the other by sheer force of hard work and good organizing. I wondered if you've had any thoughts just reflecting on that with the nation's eyes really turning to Georgia, seeing the incredible political feat that you and your Democratic colleagues have just pulled off, what you think the lessons are for the rest of the country and for other places that are still red states today but may not be forever.

We carried, I believe it was Whitfield County, a county that Trump carried heavily, and we moved the needle by 17 points, and it was based on focusing on the issues that mattered to the people, but also meeting people at their point of need just in terms of how we communicate with them. And it's not an either/or proposition, and I hope we remember these lessons in '28.

A big part of the reason that I decided to write this book, a big part of the reason I came to believe that what happened in Trump's first term was so important was the treatment of one guy in particular, the treatment of FBI senior counterterrorism official Peter Struck. Peter Struck was at the FBI for more than 20 years. His expertise was in Russian espionage. He played a lead role, for instance, in the operation that dismantled a Kremlin-run sleeper cell that had burrowed inside the U.S. for years. Mr. Struck rose to be deputy head of the FBI's counterintelligence division when the FBI opened an investigation into Russia interfering in the 2016 election and Russia's support for Trump's presidential campaign.

Struck naturally had a prominent role in that investigation given his position in the bureau. When Trump became president, it said about doing everything he could to undermine and discredit the Russia investigations. He and his Justice Department decided they would ruin Peter Struck's life in part by secretly and selectively releasing excerpts from his personal text messages. The Department of Justice did that. Trump railed against Peter Struck online, railed against him at political rallies, railed against him even while Trump was standing next to Vladimir Putin.

He repeatedly accused Peter Struck of treason. Struck became a punching bag for Republican lawmakers and Fox News. He and his family had to flee their home because of a barrage of death threats. Internal investigations found that Mr. Struck's professional work was untainted by any bias, but nevertheless, he was fired. What happened to Peter Struck is what happens when the Department of Justice makes itself an instrument for protecting a president's friends and interests at all costs and destroying a president's chosen enemies as gruesomely as possible.

And now we know that what happened to Peter Struck was really a very visible prelude to what we're living through right now, which is an effective collapse of the Department of Justice. And that is something that I really want to know what Peter Struck thinks about it. Joining us now in what seems to be potentially the dawn of a new day for DOJ is Peter Struck, former deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division. Mr. Struck, thank you so much for being here. I know this is somewhat unusual circumstances.

I mean, there's no doubt with his pardons that he is still protecting people, but by all the prosecutions that you mentioned earlier in the show, he has radically unleashed the Department of Justice against those who he perceives as against him and against his agenda.

Whereas the Justice Department really seems to have fallen apart. It's certainly its halls are a lot more empty than they were, and its weakness and its incompetence have combined so that the Justice Department, to me, feels dangerous in the way that like a broken gun is dangerous or a broken or defective firecracker is dangerous, but it doesn't seem like he's used it to make it doesn't seem like he shaped it into a very effective weapon.

So, you know, if there is a silver lining, if there is a positive aspect to this, it is a reflection on those people and their character who choose to leave rather than have any part of it. And so what you're left with are, you know, malcontent, you know, marginally competent people who bring cases that are immediately thrown out of court, and it's, you know, it's a sham, it's a travesty. But if anything, I do take some solace in the fact that he was not able to turn it into some juggernaut going after every last person that dared cross him.

2,517 votes is her current lead. We expect another round of absentee ballots tomorrow. Whether that one will be definitive, we do not know. The number you're watching for here is actually the percentage number. In Alaska, if one candidate hits 50%, this could be it. But if nobody hits 50%, Alaska begins tabulating its ranked choice results, and that starts next Wednesday on November 18th. So eyes still open on the Alaska Senate race.

In terms of the Mississippi Senate race, Democrat Scott Calum is also ahead by just about 2,500 votes. With updates still coming in, the Calum campaign is expressing real confidence that they are going to win this thing. But in terms of the count, all 82 counties in Mississippi will have to have reported their results to the state secretary of state on Friday. While we're all waiting for Alaska and Mississippi in those Senate races, we're also keeping a keen eye on the governor's race in Kansas. Right now, Democrat Cindy Hulscher leads Republican Ty Masterson by a little more than a little more than half a percent, just under 8,000 votes.

This very, very, very exciting election is also not over yet. We'll bring you the latest as updates arrive here on MSNow. Watch this space. Real quick, I'm going to be on with Lawrence on The Last Word coming up next hour. I'm also going to be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. I would like to see you in both of those places. Also, if you'd like to come to one of the live events I'm doing for my new book, Department of Fate, now is your chance.

A bunch of these events are sold out, as you can see here, but not all of them. There are a few tickets left in Boston on Wednesday, day after tomorrow. I'll be in Boston with the great Nicole Wallace. On Thursday, there's some tickets in Milwaukee. Saturday, I'm in Boise, Idaho. Next Wednesday, I'm in Salt Lake City. And then the last one is Long Island, New York. If you're in the New York area, you were hoping to see me in New York City, but you couldn't get tickets to tomorrow night's event. Long Island is not far. All the details at mattoblog.com.