James Comey Indicted by Trump DOJ

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0:42That's why they offer quality insurance designed for your ride, whether that's a boat, RV, or motorcycle. Adventure with confidence. Visit Progressive.com and see how easy it is to protect your favorite way to get away. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in D.C. Prices vary based on how you buy. Welcome to Beat Everyone. I'm Ari Melber. There's a lot going on. We have updates on Jimmy Kimmel continuing to ride this big wave, beating back the Trump censorship crackdown. We begin with Trump DOJs in crisis, though. And remember, much of what Donald Trump says and admits in public involves Watergate-level confessions if they were only in private.

1:22And he has turned that into something of a kind of political propaganda art because what he has already admitted is a scandal for the DOJ in pursuing his perceived foes. Now we have more detail about the DOJ faced with the crisis of Trump's own making. After their own career prosecutors did not find evidence to indict Jim Comey, they are still considering whether to indict James Comey, of course, the former FBI director. And there's new details about all of this. The Washington Post reports prosecutors have already presented the new U.S. attorney with a written record about why there was not evidence to charge Comey in the first place, meaning they already looked into this and there isn't a case.

2:07Now, that could come back to haunt this Trump White House if they force a case which their own review found wasn't valid. Trump's most loyal allies also expressing some doubts. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump pushed the adjoining general to bring the charge against Comey and that, according to the Journal reporting, whatever you think of Ms. Bondi and her conservative history, as a legal matter to the extent that she may be looking at actual evidence or whether the case is winnable, quote, she's expressed reservations about the Comey case. This is a scandal from the DOJ to the White House.

2:44And while I know we live in a time where Donald Trump pretends everything's going exactly as he planned or just throws different words out and is accompanying with other distractions, we have indications that he knows this is bad and it looks bad because he is misleading about or at least disagreeing with what voluminous reporting and his own posts online have showed. Listen to him hours ago. I think I'd be allowed to get involved if I want, but I don't really choose to do so. I can only say that Comey's a bad person. Fact check. False on the involvement. Donald Trump is involved. That's according to his own words.

3:25Pryor stated through his voice, through his mouth, and recently posted online. He is involved. When you are the leader of an organization, let alone the entire United States government, and you publicly say, directed at an employee like Bondi, that she should go after Probe or get the indictments done of Comey and Schiff and others, you're involved, obviously. So he's denying it now today because the heat is on and it looks bad. The second part of what he said, that Comey's a bad person, I don't have a fact check on that. In politics, people are free to express themselves, their opinions of others.

3:59Comey has said negative things about Trump. Trump's saying negative things about him. That's both well within their free speech rights. So part two, their debate. Part one, false. The president stating blatantly false denials. The Times also reporting, separate from his public post, that Trump was demanding bonding move faster in indicting opponents. Now, the DOJ also has a legal timeline, which again, if you live in a world where you say, okay, Ari, I guess Trump will just do what he wants. Well, when it comes to what he says and certain things, sure, he'll try it. When it comes to actually having a case that sticks, that doesn't get tossed out or disqualified immediately, law and rules still matter.

4:44And Trump's DOJ knows that because if they want to use the claim or what many lawyers say is a pretext, a kind of legal lie about why they're going after Comey, not because Trump asked for it, but because of his congressional testimony, there is a sharp deadline for that next week, after which they can't bring a case related to that issue. That expires Tuesday, five years to the day after Comey gave the testimony that they are now scrutinizing. But you can't just look at this in the isolation of Comey or Trump's misleading denial today, which contradicts his own recent claims in public. Take a look at the wider perspective here.

5:20We've updated a chart that could come out of any tin pot, banana republic, autocratic agenda. Because as you see from the upper left, you have members of the opposition party indicted. That case goes on. The second one against the mayor, the charges were already dropped. Again, as I say, a reminder that if you just throw complete baseless charges at the wall, they won't last. Mr. Comey in the middle was already interviewed on a different case, the seashells issue. If you remember that MAGA era thing, they were making a big deal out of a social media post he did of seashells that they said was a type of threat.

5:54That was why he was interviewed by the Secret Service. He's obviously being also pursued on this other matter as they review the testimony I mentioned. If you look in the lower right, John Bolton, a lifelong Bush neocon conservative. He was considered too controversial and conservative to get confirmed in a prior administration, served under Trump. But now he's also on that critics enemies list, along with many other people here that Trump has publicly agitated to probe or indict. This is not lawful. If they prove that the cases were only brought or indicted because Trump personally demanded it, that's selective prosecution.

6:30It's not legal in America. Judges will continue to toss it. There's also reporting that he has his sights on the New York Attorney General Letitia James, who's also in that chart I showed you. You may remember she brought a civil fraud case against Trump. And legally, I can tell you it wasn't a perfect case. Didn't involve ever trying to jail Trump. It was civil in nature. And the system grinded forward. People heard evidence. He lost the first round, but got some better treatment on appeal over the size of the fine. That's how things work in America. And plenty of people in business or politics could end up in a civil case facing fines.

7:07But in response to that, again, this would be illegal if they indict her only for this reason. There is firm reporting in the financial press that they're still at the federal level pursuing her with one of the most controversial and lately partisan figures in the Trump administration. One Democrat says this is an unlawful revenge tour. He's doing it every single day. I mean, it grows and grows, right? I mean, he's on a revenge tour right now, and there's no question about that, whether it's obviously at the DOJ with Comey, with Attorney General James, what he tried to do with Jimmy Kimmel. It's constant.

7:46We've always known that Donald Trump wanted to do all this because he said so, because he admitted it. He said it before he ever came into office. It was considered one of those breaches in the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump when he said to Hillary Clinton's face, quote, you'd be in jail if I were president. I'm going to go after my opponents. This is how he campaigned. And in the first term, he tried to do some of this, although if you think back and remember, there was nothing like the chart I just showed you. There was nothing like this breadth. And so if you say, well, is the frog slowly boiling?

8:23Does the lobster know that it's in hot water? And all the other autocratic food analogies we might make, not to make you hungry if you're watching on the East Coast approaching dinner. Well, I can tell you legally, the frog is already boiled. The indictments have already begun. The idea of pursuing Mr. Comey again, based on what publicly we're told is a case that Trump's own DOJ this year found baseless, is not a new breach. It is a continuation of the Banana Republic indictments that we have seen and that grind forward. The frog is dead. What do we do about it? I want to bring in former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance and Maya Wiley, former SCNY civil prosecutor and president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

9:10Joyce, I make that point tonight because we always strive in fairness to look at open cases with an open mind. But this is, according to a lot of the evidence we have, not a very open case, Joyce. It's a case that the DOJ already closed, in effect, I'm using these words loosely, not technically, because of insufficient evidence, according to the best reporting we have. How should that affect our understanding of what I call the dead frog, the fact that we are in a period of what looked like improper cases? You know, Ari, during the first Trump administration, you and I used to talk a lot about Trump's conduct that we would categorize as lawful but awful.

9:55Now we're in unlawful territory. That's the shift that we're experiencing just whatever we are nine months into this administration. And so when prosecutors have a case, particularly a complicated, difficult case that they're going to decline prosecution in, most offices require them to write a memo documenting that declination so that if there's ever a question down the road, somebody can go back and say, this was the fault. This was the evidence that they didn't have, or perhaps they didn't think a crime had been committed, whatever the reason. It sounds to me, and we don't know, we're basing this on reporting, but it sounds like prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia wrote a memo declining to prosecute the case, not just because they didn't think they could get a conviction at trial, but because they didn't believe they had enough evidence to obtain an indictment, a much lower burden of proof.

10:51And so that, I think, is why we're hearing reports of Pam Bondi's hesitation. She's got experienced career prosecutors saying, there's no case here. And to go ahead in that setting would clearly be unlawful. Maya? Well, yes. And let's remember that we're talking about people that Donald Trump himself appointed. So these weren't people that he originally said could not be trusted or were somehow biased against him or his administration. These are his picks saying, we don't think we have enough evidence. And as Joyce said, even for indictment. But I would take it one step further because, yes, Donald Trump promised retribution.

11:33when he ran for office. Remember that both Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, for that matter, refused to actually say that they wouldn't do his bidding when it came to retribution, when they were in their confirmation hearings. So they never said they wouldn't. But I think even more importantly, what is the work that this kind of weaponization of government is trying to do, because he also today just signed, appended an extraordinarily dangerous and propagandistic, I say that out loud, it's propaganda, executive order that is literally calling lawful organizing and protests something that should be investigated and treated as domestic terrorism.

12:16And that, that is really part and parcel to what weaponizing the Department of Justice and its criminalization of his foes is for. It's whether they get James Comey or not, whether they indict him or not, whether he's convicted or not. Part of the work here that they are trying to do quite effectively as not effectively as administration is scare people out of doing what they have a lawful right to do, which is to disagree with this administration and with Donald Trump. Hmm. Here's what the National Review headline says. Trump DOJ poised to indict Comey over 2016 moves that helped Trump win, which is by Andrew McCarthy, former prosecutor.

13:01Obviously, it's one of those headlines that really resonates. You're going to indict Comey over the things that helped him win. And then the enemies list, so to speak, the headshots I'm going to put up again.

13:18When you look at this, Maya, what do you see? I see the weaponization of government against people you disagree with. I see several people who were doing the jobs that they were allowed to do, stating facts as they saw them, expressing opinions. And I see a very diverse group of people who don't even necessarily agree with one another. So this goes back to my point about why do you go after these people? I mean, Monica LaMondica McIver, the congresswoman from Newark, was literally trying to do oversight to look at conditions in a detention facility. That's accountability. That's actually part of her job as a member of Congress.

14:07I say that because every single thing we're seeing really is saying, don't do anything I don't like or you will pay a price. And it is not only to silence powerful people, it is to silence all of us. And that's why we can't have it. And Joyce, do you see any link here between what you described as potentially unlawful prosecution, if it's proven to be selective prosecution, there's no case there, that's one of the legal limits, and this blatant crackdown on the First Amendment? People who minimize Donald Trump or don't take him literally are finding that the second term is literal and measurably more extreme than the first term, partly because so many of the guardrails have been systematically decimated by this same literal anti-democracy agenda.

15:00So, Ari, it all looks like it's part of this same trajectory Donald Trump is on, this effort to suppress any kind of opposition to what he's doing. You know, that picture that you put up and that Maya spoke so eloquently about also looked to me like that was evidence that Donald Trump has seized the reins of the Justice Department and is using the awesome powers of government that have been entrusted to him to serve the people in order to quell dissent. He's using it for petty political purposes, and that's not what our criminal justice system is supposed to be. So on all fronts, anyone who opposes Donald Trump is under attack.

15:41And he's trying to send out messages. Maya points out, this is a diverse group of opponents. No matter who you are, and I think ultimately whether you're powerful or whether you're someone out protesting in the streets, Donald Trump wants you to be afraid to argue back against him, which, of course, makes it incumbent upon all of us to exercise our First Amendment rights and speak out. We have a right to criticize this administration like we had a right to criticize the administrations before it. We need to use it so we don't lose it. Yeah. Joyce Vance and Maya Wiley on exactly what we see there.

16:18Very important. Thanks to both of you. Tonight, we have new reporting on the secrecy around Epstein. As for Jimmy Kimmel's return riding a big wave, he came out swinging again. We're going to show you that and why South Park is going at not only Trump, but FCC Chair Brendan Carr when we're back in 90 seconds.

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18:23We've been tracking late night even more than usual. Kimmel, on his second night since the return, responded to President Trump, who rather than de-escalate, is vowing to continue the censorship agenda, threatening to shake down Disney, threatening to sue them over their editorial decisions, which would be a very likely losing case. Here was Kimmel just last night. moments after we taped our show last night the mad red hatter wrote i can't believe abc fake news gave jimmy kimmel his job back

19:02you can't believe they gave me my job back i can't believe we gave you your job back last time i went after them they gave me 16 million dollars this one sounds even more lucrative of a true bunch of losers. Only Donald Trump would try to prove he wasn't threatening ABC by threatening ABC. The punchline is the truth. Remember, this thing has backfired so much on Donald Trump, drawing out all kinds of rebuttals, including from some Republicans, that he is both denying it, as we showed you recently, he admitted a censorship agenda, then blatantly misled about it and said it was just a Kimmel ratings problem, then double down on the censorship with this threat.

19:47Oh, I'll sue you over this if you don't do what I want. So Kimmel's referencing all that and basically saying, just look at him to understand what he's doing. And none of this, of course, is going to stop Kimmel. Whatever you think of him, I've said before, supporting the First Amendment rights of all of us is different than agreeing with everyone. You don't have to think he's funny. You don't even have to like his style of politics. but he is certainly getting the better of Donald Trump in reality, staying on the air, and often in the war of words. They both are, of course, longtime entertainers.

20:20They've both been on TV a long time. Roasting Trump over the very thing that he cares so much about, the ratings. This was his big closer, let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad ratings. And he does no bad ratings. He has some of the worst ratings.

20:43on behalf of all of us welcome to the crappy ratings club mr president little self-deprecation while saying the ratings that count what the public thinks of donald trump are still of course relevant to a second term that in this early era which sometimes would be a honeymoon is anything but you can see him completely underwater people do not approve of the Trump presidency. And remember, as we've said, he did win 49 % or so popular vote last year. So he has, by any measure, gone from that to underwater, which means people who voted for him don't approve of this, to say nothing of so many others.

21:21As for Kimmel's victory lap, his ratings were bonkers. Usually he does just under 2 million on a normal weeknight. Well, tripling that at six plus million in live coverage, and that is even with about a fifth of affiliates, not airing Kimmel, sorry to do the math, but even larger is the 20 million views he additionally got online with YouTube, a younger audience flocking to what Kimmel had to say. And remember, that doesn't mean everyone agrees with what he had to say. It just means people were understandably curious to hear from this famous comic who was briefly pushed off the air by your government.

22:03And that interest and this cultural conversation is a reminder of something we've discussed and covered so much, that culture matters. Our politics today is very culturally engaged and the First Amendment does not play favorites. It protects dumb jokes and smart jokes, political jokes and silly jokes, serious statements and all kinds of expression. Some people like to talk. I'm one of them. Some people like to write. Some people nowadays express their ideas through pictures, memes, and emojis. The First Amendment basically protects all peaceful, expressive speech, even if your sitting president wish it did not.

22:42And that brings me to something that is on the sillier side. It may not be your style of humor, but millions of people love South Park, and it is still under the umbrella of the same parent company that has ousted Colbert and gutted 60 Minutes, But apparently, something that you can't say on 60 Minutes, Trump criticism to some degree, you might still get away with on South Park, where their newest episode dabbles in many of these issues, including going at the president, his censorship FCC, and this MAGA war on your free speech. If it's offensive, you probably need to speak with the FCC. The FCC?

23:22Yeah, they're dealing with all the offensive stuff now. Here, let me connect you.

23:31An offensive government app? I better go speak with the president right away Will the head of the FCC be okay, doctor? If you continue to interfere I will make things very difficult for you We can do this the easy way Or we can do it the hard way As a top Trump official making a threat We can do this the easy way or the hard way There it's a mockery of J.D. Vance, the vice president, speaking to the FCC chair. Is that just silly, hyperbolic language in a cartoon? Or is it what Trump's FCC chair literally said, trying to kick Kimmel off because they can't take a joke and they don't respect the First Amendment?

24:17It's as serious as a South Park episode. We're going to get into it with Al Sharpton and Margaret Carlson next.

24:27I talk about Trump more than anything because he's a bully. I don't like bullies. I played the clarinet in high school, okay? Donald Trump is an old-fashioned 80s movie-style bully. Rooting for this bully, I don't care what side you're on, it's like rooting for Biff from Back to the Future. And this is who people are cheering for? I don't know about you, I'm with Marty McFly. And of course, McFly. We're back with MSNBC's Al Sharpton and Semaphore's Margaret Carlson. Rev, what are we learning here? I think that Kimmel is right. As you know, I've fought with Donald Trump 35 years here in New York.