'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Wednesday, March 4th, 2015

Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES
Date: March 4, 2015
Guest: William Yeomans, Nina Totenberg

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN --

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Some of those protesters were right.

HAYES: The Department of Justice report on Ferguson is out.

HOLDER: It is time for Ferguson`s leaders to take immediate,
wholesale, constructual corrective action.

HAYES: Tonight, inside the federal government`s jaw-dropping finding
of systematic discrimination in an American city.

Then, it`s like 1998 all over again.

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF THE STATE: Why would I ever want
to do email?

HAYES: The latest on the Clinton e-mail mess.

Plus, it`s like 2000 all over again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It does appear to be a 5-4 opinion.

HAYES: Why today`s Supreme Court Obamacare arguments could be the
most important since Bush v. Gore.

And it`s like 2003 all over again.

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT: The security of the world requires
disarming Saddam Hussein now.

HAYES: Why Americans are increasingly buying another war in Iraq.

ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.

And we begin with breaking news out of Missouri tonight, where the
city of Ferguson just fired one city official and put two others on
administrative leave and under internal investigation after a scathing new
report from the Department of Justice turned up racist e-mails.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR JAMES KNOWLES, FERGUSON, MISSOURI: Today`s report allows the
city of Ferguson to identify the problems, not only in our police
department, but in the entire St. Louis region.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That report was one of two released this morning by the
Justice Department. One document looked at the shooting death of Michael
Brown in which the DOJ decided not to charge Darren Wilson with violating
the civil rights of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Wilson shot and killed
Brown, who was unarmed, back on August 9th of last year.

That report said, quote, "Although no eyewitnesses corroborate
Wilson`s account of Brown`s attempt to gain control of the gun, there is no
credible evidence to disprove Wilson`s account of what occurred inside the
SUV. And there is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove
Wilson`s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety."

Although Wilson was not charged, a second DOJ report on the Ferguson
Police Department was scathing. And led to an incredible scene in
Washington, D.C., today, as the first black U.S. attorney general in the
history of the nation came before a microphone and described a police
department that has been running for years essentially an unconstitutional
racket on the black residents of Ferguson, Missouri -- a racket to extract
revenue, to harass them and intimidate them, and in many cases ruin their
lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLDER: This investigation found a community that was deeply
polarized -- a community where deep distrust and hostility often
characterized interactions between police and area residents, a community
where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement, not as a
means for protecting public safety, but as a way to generate revenue.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: This emphasis on extracting revenue through policing sometimes
led to multiple arrests, even jail time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLDER: In 2007, one woman received two parking tickets that together
totaled $152. To date, she`s paid $550 in fines, and fees, to the city of
Ferguson. She has been arrested twice for having unpaid tickets. And she
has spent six days in jail.

Yet today, she`s still inexplicably owing Ferguson $541. And her
story is only one of dozens of similar accounts that our investigation
uncovered.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: The full 105-page Justice Department investigation which was
released today also said that violating residents` constitutional rights
had become somewhat routine. One example came in the summer of 2012, a 32-
year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing
basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the
man`s car, blocking him in and demanded the man`s Social Security number
and identification.

Holder told this story today as the Ferguson police violating the
Constitution and the basic dignity of the people they are sworn to protect.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLDER: The officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile.
He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him to get out
of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect
that the man was armed. And when the man objected, citing his
constitutional rights, the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed
it at the man`s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. Now,
this arrest caused the man to lose his job.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: What Eric Holder did today was give voice with a full
authority of the government and the resources of the state to the complaint
I heard time and time again, day after day, from nearly every single black
person I talked to during my time in Ferguson.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Do you feel like you all have a story about an interaction
with a cop that made you want to come out here tonight? You all feel that
way? And how routine is that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A firefighter in my school allowed us to stand
on a truck. A police officer walked up with his gun drawn, yelling at us,
telling us to get off of the truck.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The police force, there`s three African-Americans
and 50 Caucasian Americans. We can`t have a situation like that. The
amount of citations, and stops.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: It got to a point when I was down there last year, as a white
guy coming from New York, that I thought maybe I was starting to lose my
mind, that I was losing my hold on reality. Could it actually be as bad as
it was being described?

And the answer is yes. Yes, it is. This is the reality. It`s the
reality of the Justice Department investigators, encountered over and over
again.

And today, the most powerful law enforcement officer in the country
reinforced what Ferguson`s black residents had been saying all along.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLDER: Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this
context, amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and
resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and
misguided practices, it`s not difficult to imagine how a single tragic
incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Joining me now, Trymaine Lee, national reporter for MSNBC.
This is quite a document.

TRYMAINE LEE, MSNBC NATIONAL REPORTER: To say that this report is
blistering would be faint. As I mentioned, spending time on the ground
there in Ferguson, talking to folks, they have all these stories about how
bad it is. And this actually illustrates that it`s actually worse than
almost you could actually understand.

HAYES: It`s like the most radical voices in the street, being like,
this is a -- you cannot imagine what`s happening down here. Now, the
Department of Justice, with their crest and seal on the front, 105 pages,
we looked into it, and yes.

LEE: Even the summary release that happened yesterday, we see the
actual percentage of folks stopped. Black folks 67 percent of the city but
93 percent of stops, and so on. When you read the anecdotes of the man who
was playing basketball, he ended up with a gun to his head, gets arrested,
loses his job, a woman who had been arrested and spent six days in jail, a
normal person, this is every day. It`s purely being African-American puts
you in danger.

HAYES: That guy, the story he told, the most infuriating detail is
the guy is cooling off after playing basketball, cop comes up on him,
demands, he ends up citing him for I think 11 violations, one being that he
gave false information, because he said his name was Mike, when it was
Michael.

LEE: Ridiculous.

And accused the guy of being pedophile, and when a guy say, you know,
tried to express his constitutional rights, that`s when the gun is pointed
at his head.

I mean, so when we look at these numbers is bad, but to actually have
the attorney general of the United States laying it out, it was scathing.
I said earlier it was almost like if there was ever a come to Jesus moment
for any law enforcement agency in the country, it`s this one. But as
protesters said and folks I talked to this afternoon said, the problem is,
you walk three blocks north, you`re in another municipality that looks and
behaves just like Ferguson. Go to the south and it`s the same thing.

HAYES: One more item on this report I want to take a second with.
The use of dogs, there`s an obvious resonance here historically. Use of
dogs by Ferguson police appears to have been exclusively reserved for
African-Americans in every case, in which Ferguson police records record
the race of the person bit by a police dog, bit by a police dog, that
person was African-American.

LEE: Made worse not only by the history, but the manner in which they
seem to be approaching and targeting African-Americans from this report.
We`re seeing so this indiscriminate, by simply your manner of walking.

HAYES: Yes, let`s look at this -- this is the 85 percent of all
traffics -- 67 percent of the residents are African-American, 85 percent of
all traffic stops, 88 percent of cases in which police use force, 90
percent of all citations, 93 percent of all arrests. In the court system,
this is the other thing, that the court system just sits there to process
people, watch them miss court dates and then have the money pile up so they
are in reverse arrears --

LEE: Right.

HAYES: -- to the municipality.

LEE: They`re all complicit in that they were actually using the
arrests and fines of the African-Americans to buoy the revenue of the
municipality. In fact, black folks were 68 percent likely to have their
charges dismissed.

So meanwhile in the same report, the police are doing whatever they
can to pull the strings for their own friends and family.

HAYES: That`s another part of that, right?

LEE: Exactly.

HAYES: Favor trading, making sure people got favorable treatment if
they knew the right people.

LEE: That`s right.

HAYES: You also have -- OK. So this comes out. You get Mayor James
Knowles, and he says, we`re going to -- he refers to the four racist e-
mails that were found, incredibly disgusting e-mails. One person`s fired,
two on administrative leave.

And then he basically says, we hired some -- we hired a few black
people, we`re going to do diversity training. Not a word about whether
they`re going to cooperate with what the Department of Justice has in store
for them. What was your reaction to Knowles?

LEE: I`m waiting for him to stand up and say, we have to change
everything we`ve been doing.

HAYES: Root and branch.

LEE: Top to bottom, because there are deep systemic, there are real
problems here.

But instead, it was so vague. He said we hired a few corrections
officers. She was African-American. We hired two court reporters, whoever
they are, who are African-Americans. There`s this program, that program.

HAYES: The idea that you would look at this -- at this report and
say, we have hired two black court reporters.

LEE: That`s it. No questions.

It might be telling, who knows at this point, we didn`t hear from
Chief Tom Jackson. Now, of course, do you want to put him up there and
have darts thrown at him, but still, the chief of police is going to say, I
stand by my guys?

HAYES: Does he keep his job? And elections coming up in April 7th.
That`s something we will be looking at on this program.

Trymaine Lee, thank you very much.

LEE: Thank you.

HAYES: All right. Joining me now, former deputy assistant attorney
general and acting assistant attorney general for the civil rights division
at the Department of Justice, William Yeomans.

You worked in the division that wrote this report. And I`m curious as
someone who was there for, I think, 20, 25 years, something like that, your
reaction in this report terms of where it stacks up. It read to me
incredibly forceful. I`m curious to hear your response.

WILLIAM YEOMANS, FORMER ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL, DOJ CIVIL RIGHTS
DIVISION: Well, Chris, I think it`s a stunning report. It`s breathtaking.
The detail that is contained in those 100 pages, it`s just -- it`s a
blueprint for bad policing, racially biased policing, for a police
department that has completely lost its sense of mission.

And as you pointed out, became more of a revenue raising institution
than an institution designed to protect the public safety. So the
department, I think, here now has its work cut out for it in ensuring that
Ferguson implements the 26 recommendations that are contained in the
report. And they are recommendations that cut to the core of the Ferguson
Police Department, if they are implemented.

And I think many of them will be implemented, they will completely
restructure the department, change the culture of the department, and focus
much more on community policing and far less on raising revenue.

HAYES: Let me ask you about the other part of the news today, which
is the Department of Justice sort of officially clearing Darren Wilson on
federal civil rights charges. We said from the beginning as we were
following it, that`s going to be a hard case to make.

That said, I mean, the Feds did come in in the wake of Rodney King and
the acquittal of those officers and they did successfully get federal
charges, I believe convictions, against those police officers, on violating
federal civil rights.

What is your reaction to that decision based on what you know, based
on reading the report from the DOJ today?

YEOMANS: Well, I think those of us who are experienced prosecutors in
this area have known from the start that this would be a very difficult
case in which to bring federal charges. You know, in Rodney King, one of
the big differences was that there was a videotape that actually showed the
violence, that actually showed the police officers hitting and kicking and
beating Rodney King with batons.

In this case, the -- we didn`t have that. And the facts were very
much more in dispute. But it`s also, I think, the case that it is much
more likely that there will be charges in the beating case than in a
shooting case. Police shootings very rarely end up in prosecutions.

But I think the overall point that needs to be made is the federal
standard is extremely difficult. And I think we`ve heard a lot about that
while this investigation has been pending. But when people look for the
various institutional reasons why there isn`t a prosecution here, they
really shouldn`t look much farther than the legal standard.

HAYES: So, we`ve talked about the particularities of Ferguson, and
not just Ferguson, but Jennings and other parts of county and other parts
of Metro St. Louis. As someone who worked in the department, and a
department that does this, reliably -- we saw the report from Cleveland --
it will look at patterns and practices of local police departments, I guess
my question to you is, if you threw a dart at the municipality police
departments across this country, you know, what would you find?

YEOMANS: Well, I think you would find a lot of disparity. So,
unfortunately, I think there are a number of other police departments out
there, like Ferguson, that are really rife for intervention. Of course,
the Department of Justice has limited resources.

There`s something like 18,000 police departments in the country. So,
it is not going to get to all of them. But I think it`s extremely
important to do high-profile cases like Ferguson, and use the leverage from
those cases to try to spread the good practices that come out of those
cases to other jurisdictions.

But I think it`s important for the Department of Justice to put more
resources into this area, and to come up with a targeted enforcement
program that will identify jurisdictions that are likely to have problems.

HAYES: William Yeomans, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

YEOMANS: My pleasure.

HAYES: All right. How is today`s King versus Burwell, the Obamacare
case before the Supreme Court, like Bush v. Gore? We`ll tell you, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: A terrifying scene in Seoul today, where the U.S. ambassador
to the Republic of Korean was attacked while giving a lecture. According
to South Korea police and media, Ambassador Mark Lippert was wounded by a
man with a knife who was screaming, quote, "South and North Korea should be
reunified."

That man has been arrested and according to police, he is known and
has a record in 2010, he threw a stone at the Japanese ambassador.
Ambassador Lippert`s injuries are reportedly not life-threatening. He is
treated at a local hospital. The White House says President Obama called
the ambassador tonight to wish him a speedy recovery.

Back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: All right. So, today was argument today at the Supreme Court,
which is always a big day. And today was a very big argument on Obamacare.
And to me, the details of it which we`re going to get to in a little bit
are less important than what this means for the court.

This is, I think, the biggest test of the court`s integrity since
another big court case, Bush v. Gore back in 2000. You`ll recall, of
course, as the nation watched, wrapped, wanting to know what the recount
would be in Florida. The court stepped in in 2000, and they basically,
well, they awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. And they did it by
the slimmest of margins, 5-4, with the five conservative justices basically
stopping a recount and declaring George W. Bush president of the United
States.

The reason that that decision was so frustrating, and the reason it
hurt the court`s credibility and was so damaging is that the rationale
those conservative justices used to do that was manifestly in opposition to
things they`ve been saying their entire career. And they even put
something in the opinion that was a kind of white flag, where they said
basically we`re making up here, we`re hacked.

They said this, "Our consideration is limited to the present
circumstances for the problem of equal protection in election processes
generally presents many complexities."

What that means in plain English is, we are ruling this way on this
case, so George W. Bush can be president, but please never cite our logic
here again, because we don`t agree with our own logic. Now, fast forward
to today, King versus Burwell before the Supreme Court, a challenge to the
Obamacare law, the second biggest one, and this one on whether states can
pay subsidies to people on the exchanges if they did not make their own
exchanges themselves.

Now, here`s the thing, like Bush v. Gore, if the conservative justices
on the court follow their own logic, the things they`ve been saying
forever, the precedence the court has stood, this never should have come
within 100 miles of the Supreme Court. This entire case was reverse-
engineered by people who hate the law in an act of tremendous and
historical bad faith to destroy it over a slightly ambiguous provision of
the statute. And yet here we are in front of the court.

And so the question is, does the court basically say, yes, we hate
Obamacare, and we`re going to knock it down, or gut it because we don`t
like it, or do they stick to the law?

I mean, Linda Greenhouse (ph), who is not a fire-breathing radical,
she covered the court for years in "The New York Times", she wrote this
piece. She basically said, "To reject the government`s defense of the law,
the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory
interpretation as well as their own often stated view of how Congress
should act towards the states."

In other words, they would have to pull another Bush v. Gore. They
would have to take all their previous legal rationale and throw it out the
window and basically say, we hate Obamacare and you`re going to have to
deal with it.

Now, the question is, based on oral arguments today, what are they
going to do?

Joining me now to discuss that, someone who`s there, Nina Totenberg,
NPR legal affairs correspondent.

Nina, you`re smiling.

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: I disavow all
connection with everything you just said.

HAYES: Yes, that was -- let`s just say, that was a slightly more
partisan and ideological take on this than the great Totenberg, who is
highly judicious and neutral in all these affairs would say. But I am
curious your sense today in that room, where the justices were on this
case.

TOTENBERG: Well, you really couldn`t tell in some ways, because we
had four of the more liberal members of the court who clearly were saying,
Congress wrote a law that was quite deliberate in its purpose, and you`ve
cherry-picked out a few words, challengers, that do not represent what the
law said. So, those are four votes for the Obama administration`s
interpretation of the law.

Then, there were two conservative justices, Scalia and Alito, who
pretty clearly agreed with the challengers. And I think we can probably
assume Justice Thomas, who didn`t say anything, will agree with them.

Then, the chief justice said barely anything. And Justice Kennedy was
left to sort of indicate that he has -- he`s more inclined perhaps to side
with the administration`s viewpoint than the challenger`s viewpoint, and
I`ll explain why in a minute, but he wasn`t certain at all. It was a sort
of hamlet-like performance.

And so, I always say that you`re a fool to make a prediction in most
of these cases, especially a big case like this. And everybody who made a
prediction that Obamacare would be struck down as unconstitutional lived to
rue the day. And I`m not about to make a prediction the other way just
because there were a few tee leaves that would suggest that the Obama
administration might prevail.

HAYES: Right. So, that`s a great example. Of course, the last
Affordable Care Act challenge, a lot of people thought there`s no way this
thing`s getting upheld. Of course, it was upheld. Roberts voting to
uphold it in a way that surprised a lot of people, even when the opinion
came out famously.

But here`s my question to you: how much do you think, as someone who`s
covered the court for a long time, knows the court as well as anybody else,
how much do the reputation of the players work on the justices? They say
their empires, balls and strikes, we just look at the law.

But they`re not. They are political actors. They understand where
they stand in relation to things, that they create some huge, you know,
nets for 9 million people, like that`s going to be a problem.

How much does that weigh on them?

TOTENBERG: Well, I think the chief justice and a number of other
members of the court have been very strong desire to protect the court as
an institution, and to protect its capital.

HAYES: Yes.

TOTENBERG: And if you go completely off the reservation, you do not
protect its capital.

And, therefore, I think the chief justice, because he`s chief, has to
consider that, even more than other people. But that`s sort of his
personal inclination anyway. And what is really interesting in some ways
is you look at this, is that, you know, Justice Scalia who is an amazing
legal mind, and wrote a tome this thick about statutory, and all briefs
cited his brief from that tome, and what that tome says is, you don`t look
at just a few words out of context, you look at the overall purpose of the
act.

And the sense I got today was that the solicitor general, Don
Verrilli, representing the Obama administration was pretty forceful in
making the case that the overall purpose of the act was to say to the
states, look, you can make these exchanges if you want, and if you don`t
want to, we`ll do it instead.

HAYES: Right. And a lot of people quoting Scalia back to him today.
It was pretty funny.

Nina Totenberg, thank you very much.

TOTENBERG: Thank you.

HAYES: There`s a new metric for deciding who among the possible
Republican 2016 contenders is the strongest on foreign relations and that
is how hard they clap. I`ll explain, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: On Twitter today, a reminder I saw that in North Korea,
citizens who didn`t cry enough at the public funeral of Kim Jong-Il, who
didn`t seem to be genuinely mourning the dear leader, were reportedly
sentenced to six months hard labor for their lack of appropriate mourning.

Now that story first came out in 2012, but the reason it resurfaced
today is because of this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That was Senator Rand Paul applauding as Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up his speech to congress yesterday.
And, according to some in the right-wing media, Senator Paul was not
clapping hard enough.

"Unenthused Rand Paul Lifelessly Applauds Netanyahu`s Speech", says
the Nation Review, which also made a handy GIF of the moment.

And Washington Post blogger, Jennifer Rubin, famous for boosting Mitt
Romney and for her well documented dislike of Rand Paul, seized on the
report tweeting, "Unenthusized Ran Paul Lifelessly Applauds Bibi. OOps..
almost like he`s been faking his support for Isreal until now.

And this morning, Fox asked Senator Paul himself about it.

UNIDENTIFEID MALE: We have some of your reaction during the speech
and you look less than thrilled hearing the speech.

What were you thinking?

SEN. RAN PAUL, (R) KENTUCKY: You know, I think what`s funny about it
is is that you have these gossipy websites who really just demean
themselves by putting stuff like out.

I gave the Prime Minister 50 standing ovations. I co-sponsored
bringing him here. An on the day that I also decide to co-sponsor the
Corker bill that says any final deal has to be approved, we have gossipy
websites looking up at, you know, the metric of how fast you clap.

I think they demean themselves by putting that out.

HAYES: And so it has come to this, America. Foreign policy politics
in the Republican primary are coming down to whether a potential candidate
claps enthusiastically enough when applauding a foreign leader.

And, if that`s the case, then perhaps next time, as Philip Bump points
out in the Washington Post, Senator Paul should take a cue on enthusiasm
from his dad.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: When it comes to any alleged scandal involving Bill and/or
Hillary Clinton, there are
always, always two stories.

And the first involves the actual issue at hand and the facts
surrounding them.

In this case, yesterday`s New York Times scoop that "Hillary Clinton
exclusively used a personal e-mail account to conduct government business
as secretary of state". Clinton did not take steps to have her official e-
mails preserved in realtime by the state department in an apparent
violation of regulations that
have been in place since 2009.

And while she turned 55,000 pages of e-mails over to the state
department two months ago, it was left up to Clinton`s advisers which of
those e-mails to release and which to hold back, raising significant
transparency concerns.

We learned from the AP today that Clinton was running her own e-mail
server, registered under her home address in New York, which may not have
been secure from hackers, and that despite her spokesman`s statement that
Clinton had, quote, "every expectation that her e-mails would be retained
because she was emailing State Department employees on their department
account, at least one top Clinton aide, Huma Abedine appears to have used
the same @Clinton email address that Clinton had set up for herself.

Okay. So, Hillary Clinton was also, we should note, not alone in using
personal e-mail for government business.

Jeb Bush, who she could face in the Presidential general election next
year, used a personal e-mail address as Florida governor. And, like
Clinton, Bush owns the server that runs his personal email address.

Republican representative Jason Chaffetz, who`s House oversight and
government reform committee is planning to investigate Clinton`s email use,
has an official House business card that lists a Gmail address.

We blacked it out, which is nice of us.

And that brings us to another new development, which speaks to the
other story you always have to discuss whenever the latest Clinton quote
"scandal" comes along.

For more than two decades, nearly uninterrupted, Bill and Hillary
Clinton have been, quote unquote, at the center of scandal.

Some of those have raised real and significant questions. Others were
pretty clearly drummed up and
ridiculous. But all of them are part of one big alleged scandal that runs
off into tributaries only later to return back to the mighty main river.

Case in point, Benghazi, which GOP lawmakers have tried over and over
to use to destroy Hillary Clinton, and despite multiple investigations,
flat-out refusing-- refuting the most damaging allegations.

But, no matter how often those claims were debunked, GOP kept digging.

Today, the latest house committee investigating Benghazi, chaired by
representative Trey Gowdy, issued subpoenas for Clinton`s e-mails, as part
of the ongoing effort to find a scandal that will stick.

And that gets to the fundamental dynamics.

You have, on one side, the Clintons and their team, who are
justifiably paranoid that people are out to get them, and who, perhaps as a
result, tend to act in ways that appear shady and evasive and
nontransparent.

And then people on the other side, the ones who are going after them,
point to that behavior as evidence that the Clintons are just as guilty as
they always thought.

Joining me now, McKar Coppins, senior political writer at BuzzFeed
News, and Jonathan Allen, D.C. bureau chief at Bloomberg News. Jonathan,
author of "HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton".

Jonathan, I`ll start with you. So, okay, why do they do this? You
wrote about Hillary Clinton`s time at state. Did you know about this? Was
this commonly known and why do you think they did it?

JONATHAN ALLEN, BLOOMBERG NEWS: I don`t think it was commonly known
that she didn`t have a state department e-mail address.

I think it`s commonly known, fairly commonly known, that she e-mails
with a wide range of people about a wide range of subjects, many of which
wouldn`t be considered government business, so it`s not surprising she has
a personal account.

But, to your point in your opening there, Chris, just because they`re
paranoid doesn`t mean people aren`t out to get them.

And I think that that`s what you`re seeing here.

It`s hard to know the chicken or the egg, which made which happen
first, but clearly there was an
effort here to evade at least the spirit of the open records laws and
rules.

This is a situation where Hillary Clinton didn`t want her e-mail to be
available to anybody else without her permission and also wanted to be able
to take her documents with her from the state department. And, you know,
most state department aides, former state department aides, you ask them
for their e-mails with Hillary Clinton, and then they say I can`t give them
to you, because I no longer have access to my state
department e-mail, which is what happens when they leave office.

But she, with this private server, now has all those documents.

And, of course, the result of this, we`re going to see a big tussle
over whether she has to turn those over to congress.

HAYES: Well, so today we got the Trey Gowdy, you know, subpoenas.
Which was inevitable. And, if I were Trey Gowdy, this is way off. I mean,
of course, you do it.

Are we now at the moment, everybody remember Kenneth Starr didn`t
start about Monica Lewinsky, right? It started about, I guess it started
off with -- did it start off Whitewater or did it start off Paula Jones,
and then it went, you know, like the river ran through a bunch of different
things.

This, to me, feels like, oh, we`re now at the point where the Benghazi
committee becomes the e-mail
committee.

MCKAY COPPINS, BUZZFEED NEWS: Right. Well, I mean, I actually, like
you said, I think that like, this is the obvious starting point for
Republicans, right? Like, we know that for the next year and a half, these
e-mails are going to be central to how Republicans talk about Hillary
Clinton, how the deal with her tenure at the state department.

The obvious starting point is they have this Benghazi committee that`s
already there, that`s looking for pieces of evidence that support their
view of how this was scandalous.

So of course, let`s, you know, let`s do this, let`s do the subpoena.

The question now is going to be, yeah, who knows what the Benghazi
committee specifically will focus on going forward, but certainly, I don`t
think we`re going to hear Republicans over the next year and a half keep
banging the drum on Benghazi. They`re going to be talking about the e-
mails.

And every time a new allegation comes up with Hillary Clinton, how she
handled one thing or another, the question is always going to be -- well
who knows what`s in these e-mails that we never got. They could, they could
you know support our entire theory of the case.

HAYES: Talk to me, Jonathan, about the sociology of the people in
Clinton world.

Because this to me is such a perfect example of a group of people who
were born into crisis, and basically live in the bunker. Like, they`re all
just used to being in the bunker. Like, people are trying to destroy us,
and we must act as if people are trying to destroy us or they will succeed
in destroying us.

ALLEN: That`s right, never give an inch, Chris.

These people were born into that culture, the folks around the
Clintons, most of the older generation of Clinton aides has moved on. Some
of them are still around. But, the next generation just grows up in it.

And look, they`re absolutely --. They`re absolutely secretive. They
absolutely want to fight over everything. And they want to sort of muck
every issue up.

And so, you know, that`s what we`re going to see.

HAYES: Philippe Reines, who is sort of famous, right? He is a famous
person in that world. A very, extremely smart, charismatic guy, has been
working with the Clintons for a long time. He`s sort of Hillary`s press
person.

And, he today, this amazing thing happened in which this story is
going on and he just picks a fight with, like nine different reporters.

He keeps CCing more and more of them, on the record.

COPPINS: Including my editor in chief.

HAYES: Including your editor in chief. Who, actually he got, right?
Because Ben said something which he had to retract, right? Which was, just
a little bit of a window into this, right? Where he basically makes a
factual case.

His point was, if you think we set this up to avoid FOIA requests,
which is what Gawker has alleged, you`re absolutely out of your mind.
That`s crazy. We would, of course, never do that.

And, he actually is persuasive, I think,in certain ways in that
thread.

But aside from the persuasiveness on the substance, is just the idea
of, like, the shear kind of like,
brawling bravado of this exchange is a remarkable thing.

COPPINS: Ben forwarded me that e-mail exchange, before it went
public, but as it was happening.

I was just reading through it, and I just kept thinking like, it is
amazing that Philippe and, in general, the Clinton circle feels when
they`re under siege in a moment like this, where they clearly --
there are serious allegations being brought and they know that this is
serious -- that their reaction
is, let`s start a huge brawl, with tons of different reporters, and just
like blow up the blogosphere and
Twittersphere with this.

And I think, you know their is certainly a case to be made that it`s,
it`s pretty savvy, right? Like, if you turn everything into a huge fight,
people have to pick sides, right?

HAYES: Yes, but the other thing, John, and I said this to McKay
earlier in the green room, I feel like with anything having to do with the
Clintons it`s like the visual effect, with, like, you can see the old
woman or the young woman depending how you, like, squint your eyes.

Which is like, I honestly, I genuinely often -- like on this case,
there`s part of me that thinks, yeah, well there`s a really serious
transparency issues, and there`s part of me that thinks like, if it`s just
like one of the, is this basically like this year`s version of cattle
futures? Remember cattle futures?Like, travelgate? The hair cut?

I can sit here for an hour and like, I was doing this in a meeting,
and our staff, who are not old enough, had no idea what the heck I was
talking about.

But like, that`s the thing is like, it`s very hard with the Clintons
to have any sense of proportion
between the trivial and actually important.

ALLEN: It`s like being very inebriated and trying to stick an arm or
leg off the bed to, like, balance yourself and trying to figure out what`s
up and what`s down. I haven`t experienced that ever, but--

HAYES: We get the idea, yeah.

ALLEN: But as far as Philippe being savvy, i think what he did today
is incredibly savvy because we`re spending a fair amount of the time
talking about the email exchanges, we`re talking about Philippe and not
talking about Hillary Clinton.

So he throws himself on a grenade. You would say there`s a method to
the madness, because clearly the e-mail exchanges with him are fairly odd.

But, in addition to that, you have all these reporters who are either
on the e-mail exchanges with him or watching this play out on blogs and,
you know, and on the internet and not actually doing the job of
investigating the e-mails.

HAYES: Final thought I`ll say here,

As a journalist, here`s what i want to know, why`d you set up this
whole system? Just tell us. Like, that`s the thing, right? What`s the
motivation? Why`d you set up the system? You`re going to get a state.gov.
Like, that`s what we need to hear.

COPPINS: Well and the fact that they haven`t answered that question,
I assume that there are probably legal issues that they have -- that
they`re working on. But that`s important.

HAYES: McKay Coppins, Jonathan Allen, thanks to you both.

All right. The results of months of media beating the drums of war
against ISIS, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Alright, Micheal Steele, I don`t even really know who is
left. We`re going to find out.

MICHEAL STEELE, FRM. RNC CHAIRMAN: Neither do I at this point.

HAYES: Heads or tails?

STEELE: Tails.

HAYES: Tails. Twenty. Here we go, Michael Steele, choosing the second
to last, otherwise known as penultimate candidate -- Martin O`Malley!

ANNOUNCER: Martin O`Malley. He is the former governor of Maryland
which makes him officially a Washington outsider. The inspiration for the
character Tommy Carkedy on The Wire.

It`s Martin O`Malley.

HAYES: Hometown boy. You know him.

STEELE: Yes, I do.

HAYES: You were -- governor of the state that he was the governor of.

This is nice.

STEELE: Yeah, I am left speechless.

HAYES: Oh, that`s right America, it`s time for yet another update to
our All In Fantasy 2016 Candidate Draft.

Because Martin O`Malley said this yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN O`MALLEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND: I`m very seriously
considering running in 2016.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So, no points for anyone yet, but boy things are getting hot.

We`ll continue to monitor all the latest developments to see how our
players fare with the draft picks as the race for 2016 heats up. For now,
you can check in on everybody`s picks and draft scoring system, where? At
our Facebook page, face.com/allinwithchris. You know, that page that you
just liked.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Today a stunning new poll shows a result of more than six
months of beating the drums for war against ISIS.

It`s a testament to the effectiveness of ISIS`s own monstrous
brutality and its slick propaganda machine. The endless loop of ISIS
imagery playing on TV screens across the country. And the increasing calls
from politicians and commentators for a full-on reinvasion of Iraq and even
Syria to vanquish the militant group.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, (R) ARIZONA: We`re going to have to put boots on
the ground, my friend, and we`re going to have to do a lot more things than
we`re doing now.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R) SOUTH CAROLINA: You`re going to need boots
on
the ground, not only in Iraq, but Syria.

GOV. BOBBI JINDAL, (R) LOUISIANA: Remove the ban on ground troops,
tell the political left we want our military leaders to do whatever it
takes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president should have the authority, he does
have the authority, to use all the force he wants.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 62 percent of Americans now
support sending
ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, majorities of both men and
women at 68 and 57 percent respectively, and that is a massive jump since
Quinnipiace last polled on this in November when just 37 favored sending
in ground troops.

Think about that, from 37 percent to 62 percent in just over three
months. There`s evidence that the kind of images we see on TV and online
may have a lot to do with it. A 2006 experiment, later published in peer-
reviewed journal Politics, showed two groups of people the same TV news
item about terrorism, one with neutral visuals and one with terrifying
visuals like the burning World Trade Center on 9/11. According to the
study`s author, quote, "respondents who saw the news item with scary
visuals were more likely than those who watched the version with
nonemotional imagery to support military solutions to international
problems."

Now, this is something we grapple with right here on this show every
day. In fact, we had a conversation about it earlier today before this
segment. We can`t avoid these images altogether, we have to show you
something. But where is the line between showing you the story and
straight-up fearmongering?

There seems right now to be a palpable turn towards darkness and fear
in the American political psyche, as the poll today reflects, fed not only
by imagery, but by a steady diet of maximalist rhetoric about Nazi level
threats whether from the murderers of ISIS beheading Americans and
slaughtering religious minorities, or from the evil regime in Iran calling
for death for America and the annihilation of Israel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Iran and ISIS are
competing
for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic,
the other calls itself the Islamic State, both want to impose a militant
Islamic empire, first in the region and then on the entire world. They
just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

So when it comes to IUran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your
enemy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: If all this feels uncomfortably similar to the run-up to the
last war in Iraq, it`s because we`re hearing from many of the same voices
who sounded the alarm last time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NETANYAHU: If you take out Saddam, Saddam`s regime, I guarantee you,
that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I
think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many
others will say the time of such regimes, of despots is gone.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Joining me now, someone who learned lesson of the last war in
Iraq, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Collin Powell.

Colonel, does it feel to you the way it does to me, that we are
entering as a nation, as a sort
of polity into -- of psychological place uncomfortably similar to what led
to that first Iraq war, second Iraq war?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FRM. AIDE TO COLONEL POWELL: Yes, it does,
Chris. And I want to say that if the polls show 62 percent of Americans
want to use ground forces against ISIS in Syria or Iraq or whatever, then I
suggest we have a draft and draft those 62 percent to lead the way.

HAYES: I absolutely agree with you that part of that 62 percent is
borne of the fact that a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans bear a
greater and greater share of the actual fighting.

WILKERSON: Absolutely the case. And we`re seeing what that`s doing
to that smaller percentage, and the fact that we have such a high suicide
rate and post-traumatic stress rate and so forth and so on.

We have got to -- if we want to succumb to these fears, and I agree
with the way you characterized it, it is a state of fear that we`ve created
for ourselves, and I must say the media has exacerbated majorly, if we want
to deal with that in the way that that 62 percent wants to deal with it,
then let`s have the draft back.

HAYES: The other thing that I -- that is striking to me is, I thought
we learned back as we watched Iraq develop, and even Afghanistan, right,
which was a far more justified enterprise in certain
ways than Iraq, to ask the question of what happens when we win, what
happens afterwards, what happens the next day. And yet here we are back
talking about vanquishing ISIS with it seems to me no one asking that
question.

WILKERSON: I agree with you.

And let`s just look at Mr. Putin for a moment, to change the subject,
but not to change the subject. Mr. Putin went to school on the Russian
experience in Afghanistan. He went to school on the Russian experience in
Chechnya. And he watched very closely the U.S. experience in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and look what he`s doing, he`s taking up guerrilla warfare in
Ukraine, that`s the kind of warfare that wins, that`s the kind of warfare
that Putin`s now taking up.

We do not need to get into this as a conventional force on the ground
in a region where we`ve
already been handed, really handed our rear ends. We don`t need anymore.

HAYES: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, we don`t need anymore, as good a
summation of that as anything. Thank you very much, sir, I always
appreciate it.

WILDERSON: Thanks for having me, Chris.

HAYES: That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show
starts now.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY
BE UPDATED.
END

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