no time for a last thing, but i do wish you a good night. you can listen to every episode of "the 11th hour" as a podcast free. grab your phone and scan the qr code there on your screen. for now, i'm signing off. from all of our colleagues across the networks of nbc news, thanks for staying up late with me. i'll see you again tomorrow.

tonight on "all in." >> there's so many moving pieces i think it becomes harder and harder to see how one of these cases actually make it to trial other than the one in new york before the election. >> new york or bust as judge cannon delays the classified documents trial indefinitely. it is truly a disgrace that she is not doing her job. >> tonight the failure of the courts to hold donald trump accountable. then president biden heads to wisconsin to troll his rival fox con failure. >> they dug a hole and then they fell into it. and a rare moment of agreement on capitol hill. >> declaring the office of speaker of the house representatives to be vacant. >> boo. >> as democrats team up with

republicans to save speaker johnson's job. >> this is just another wednesday on capitol hill. "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. for all of donald trump's attempts to subvert and sabotage the democratic process, to steal the last election in 2020, overall the system held. i mean maybe barely, but it held. when push came to shove, the vast majority of people involved in the election and institutions stared down a novel attempt to destroy the rule of law and they did the right thing. the system might have bent, but it didn't break. in dozens of cases, for example, more than 60, judges up and down the system state and federal court including judges appointed by trump and other republicans ruled trump's claims of voter fraud were complete nonsense and individual lawyers and legal officials, republicans in and out of the white house stood up

against trump, too. >> there is almost no idea more unamerican than the notion that any one person would choose the american president. >> the president said, suppose i do this. suppose i replace jeff rosen with jeff clark. what do you do? and i said sir, i would resign immediately. there is no way i'm serving one minute under this guy, jeff clark. >> i told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bull [ bleep ], i mean that the claims of fraud were bull [ bleep ]. >> asterisk on that last one since the attorney general barr fled and resigned when the going got tough, but you get the point and it's important to point out because what we are seeing now just in the last few weeks are glimmers of what it looks like when the courts don't hold. yesterday federal judge aileen cannon, trump appointee who made a name for herself in an

egregious ruling in the documents case announces she was indefinitely postponing donald trump's criminal trial for stealing top secret government documents and she did so without much of a legal justification at all. she is opting not to settle open questions before her, which is her choice, and then pointing out the fact that they are not settled as the reason why she has to further delay. don't take my toward for it. here's "the new york times" in a news article, "while judge cannon stated reason for putting off the trial indefinitely was that a large number of legal issues remain up in the air, she never mentioned that she herself helped allow the logjam of motions to pile up." over and over judge cannon has treated seriously arguments that many, if not most, federal judges would have rejected out of hand. often her acceptance of trump's unorthodox claims have resulted in significant delays in bringing charges in the classified documents case in

front of a jury." because, of course, we all know this, aileen cannon knows it, everyone knows it, what donald trump wants most is this trial to be delayed until after the election and cannon has granted him that wish so far. i'm not a lawyer, but i follow this quite closely and a lot of very smart accomplished attorneys, legal experts with different ideological backgrounds said they have simply never seen anything quite like what cannon is doing by so transapparently putting her thumb on the proverbial scale to delay and thereby benefit the man who put her on the bench in the first place. as obama attorney general eric holder said yesterday, "let's just deal with the very disturbing reality here. this whole process in the documents case has simply not been on the up and up." some, like former george w. bush white house lawyer richard painter speculated judge cannon holds ambition for higher

office, maybe the supreme court. others like former trump white house lawyer ty cobb think she is both incompetent and in the tank for the ex-president. >> all she's really done today is make official, everybody including jack smith, already knew which was she had no intention of getting this case to trial and she wasn't competent to get this case to trial. the things that she has done here are really inexplicable and it's tragic as she talks about having honored the public's interest in the administration of justice by postponing the trial. no, she has not honored the public's interest for one day in this case. >> this obvious conflict of interest raises an important point. the rule of law which we talk about a lot on this show and network is really only as good as the people who are executing it in good faith. to be clear, the world over there are plenty of autocracies that have laws, statutes,

lawyers, judiciaries, bar associations, their version of it. they have all that stuff. they just execute the law in a way that essentially supports a predetermined outcome that is corrupted by the power of certain authorities. take the example of "wall street journal" reporter evan gershkovich who is currently incarcerated in russia under bogus espionage charges. he is not a spy. he is just a journalist. he has lawyers. he is accused in the russian system of violating specific laws. they didn't just say we're kidnapping him, right? his case is ostensibly going through the russian legal system. you see him here at these court dates he keeps having, but no one seriously believes this is anything other than trumped up to essentially take an american hostage to trade for someone or believes he's going to have a fair trial. the strategy there, too, is obviously to delay as long as possibly to keep this man hostage for political reasons and that's what keeps happening

court date after court date. we know what's going to happen. again, this is i mean i can't stress this enough, in many ways i don't think it's an overstatement to say that is the difference between a free society and authoritarian. it's not the presence of judges, laws, and lawyers. everyone has those, right? now to be clear, we're obviously nowhere near that level of judicial corruption that we're seeing in russia in this country or what we're seeing from judge cannon or the 6th district supreme court. these are totally different worlds. the court is entertaining trump's ridiculous claims of presidential immunity, we might be able to count the court as an impartial judiciary again, but in cannon the supreme court is a glimmer of what it looks like when you just can't really trust good faith is driving the process. that's what it is. the problem becomes what to do about it and the only answer i

can come back to at the human level is shame, norms because in the end remember that's what saved us the last time around. yes, the law helped, right? but again, if the doj had bent to trump's will if there had been three or four lawyers atop that department of justice willing to send the letter baselessly claiming widespread voter fraud or if mike pence had agreed to throw out the electors from swing states biden won, if his lawyers advised him he could do that, i don't know. no one knows what would have happened in the end. all we've got are individual people formed by the norms and institutions they're embedded in making decisions, hopefully coming to the right conclusions and acting in good faith or at the very least, bowing to some sense of public pressure or shame not to do the wrong thing. in this case the least we can do now is state plainly and

openly what trump-appointed judge aileen cannon is doing is a scandal. when our judges don't act in good faith and work only to weaponize the judiciary in an effort to achieve a desired outcome, we are in very dangerous territory, especially true with donald trump effectively running to finish the job he started on january 6th , a job that can only be completed if the judiciary allows itself to be corrupted. right now the signs are not promising. andrew weissmann spent years working in the department of justice, most recently as lead prosecutor for special counsel robert mueller's team. mary mccord served as federal prosecutor for the u.s. attorney's office in d.c. as chief of criminal division and they host together the award winning podcast "prosecuting donald trump" if you're following all this. great to have you both. here's the conundrum as i see it which is trump's view of all

this stuff is incredibly cynical. he has the authoritarian view. the laws are nonsense, no such thing as good faith. you tell me who the judge is and i'll tell you the outcome. i don't want to mirror that rule. so when he says of course, this judge merchan is ruling against me. he's a hack. i really want to bend over backwards to avoid that because i don't have that view and i do think good faith is a real thing and i think the law actually operates. am i wrong to be really unnerved by the actions of judge cannon? >> no, you're not. by the way, that phrase you quoted that donald trump says came from roy connolly. >> show me the judge. i'll show you the outcome. >> that essentially no one has principles, that you're not a nation of laws. you're a nations of men and

women. mary and i were both in the national security community and the alleged crimes in the mar-a- lago case are so important to that community to have them vindicated and you have donald trump saying he has all sorts of defenses. he says it's a witch hunt, it's politicized, they're his documents, a number of things. what remarkable is the department of justice wants to give him his day of court. >> to defend himself. >> this is a situation where they're saying we want to be held to our burden to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. we want to vindicate the public's right to speedy trial. >> in florida with a judge appointed by trump, not in a democratic city, et cetera. >> they played it totally straight where they brought the case. there were parts of the case they could have brought, but

they do what you're supposed to do, which is where's the locust of all the facts and brought it there knowing one out of three chance was this was who they would get. to say it's a disgrace, disappointing is too mild. i agree with you. it is fundamentally upsetting because there aren't a lot of checks in the system for a judge who behaves this way and whether it's because of partisanship, incompetence or a combination, it's kind of irrelevant because the result is the same. >> mary, i want to read from judge cannon's justification that the court determines the finalization of a trial date of this juncture before resolution of the myriad of interconnected pretrial and cipa issues, classified inspection protection act, remaining and forthcoming would be inconsistent with the court considering the various pretrial motions before the court and additional pretrial

and preparations necessary to present the case to jury. a lot of people point out all those motions stacked up because she hasn't resolved them. >> yes, that's right. she also in a lengthy footnote in a same order listed all the things she has resolved almost to sort of justify look, i've resolved a lot of motions and had a lot of hearings, but there's so many more because this case is so complex. in some ways it is. it involves a classified information procedures act. she had never dealt with that before. you know what she lacks besides some experience and competence as a judge, she also i think lacks mentors. by that i mean in the d.c. district court, for example, we have a very experienced bench and when a new judge comes to that bench, some of the more senior judges, people like judge royce lamberth and recently retired judge thomas

hogan, they take those new judges under their wing and particularly on a case that is sensitive like this or that involves classified information or that involves something beyond the run of the mill legal issues. they're a sounding board, somebody to sort of talk to them about here's how you should think about scheduling. here's why it's important to move this along. here's the kinds of things i think you need a hearing in. here are things you can rule on the papers and she's down there in a district with what, two other judges and so i feel like she -- i'm not going to try to get in her head about what her motives are. we all know the record. we know her early rulings when donald trump tried to prevent the department of justice from even reviewing the classified information or even having the intelligence community review the classified information to determine what damage it might have caused to our national security by being so improperly stored and subject to

potentially some visitors at mar-a-lago seeing it or getting information from what was stored there. beyond trying to discern her motives, there's just an utter lack of experience here and that shows every time she grants a continuance, every time she schedules things for more time than they need and every time that she refuses to just rule on the papers and instead has hearings when she doesn't. we see this i think time and time again. >> quickly and just to you briefly, andrew, to me there's a contrast with this and what's happening in new york. my feeling about new york is i sort of feel like whatever the outcome is, i feel this has been a good faith process. so maybe they'll acquit him. maybe it will be a hung jury, i don't know, but ultimately it feels like it's been a good faith process and that's what you want. >> absolutely. in many ways it's sort of an ideal trial. you have an experienced judge. he has the temperament of a

judge that you want, but you're also seeing collectively a very experienced defense team. you're seeing a very experienced prosecution team. just to be clear, a lot of defendants, 99.9, do not have that. they don't have the wherewithal to have that kind of defense. so you are seeing in new york the justice system the way it should be and i agree with you. the jury will do what the jury does, but this is the way it's supposed to go. >> thank you both, really appreciate it. coming up, a major embarrassment for marjorie taylor greene, why democrats today did something they haven't done before. they stepped in to save the republican speaker. that's next. has no idea she's sitting on a goldmine. well she doesn't know that if she owns a life insurance policy of $100,000 or more she can sell all or part of it to coventry for cash. even a term policy. even a term policy? even a term policy! find out if you're sitting on a goldmine. call coventry direct today at the

number on your screen, or visit coventrydirect.com.

i don't want you to move. i'm gonna miss you so much. you realize we'll have internet waiting for us at the new place, right? oh, we know. we just like making a scene. transferring your services has never been easier. get connected on the day of your move with the xfinity app. can i sleep over at your new place? can katie sleep over tonight? sure, honey! this generation is so dramatic! move with xfinity.

this afternoon georgia republican congresswoman marjorie taylor greene made good on her threat to oust republican speaker mike johnson. >> the form of the resolution is as follows, declaring the office of speaker of the house of representatives to be vacant. >> boo. >> this is the uniparty for the american people watching. >> general lady will suspend. order. order. >> looked fun banging that gavel, didn't it? things did not get better from there. after greene introduced her

motion republican majority leader steve scalise moved to table the motion which would effectively kill it. within about 40 seconds of the vote opening it had the support to pass and then some. in the end 163 democrats along with 196 republicans voted to save mike johnson's speakership. according to house minority leader hakeem jeffries, it was the right thing for his caucus to do. >> our decision to stop marjorie taylor greene from plunging the house of representatives and the country into further chaos is rooted in our commitment to solve problems for everyday americans in a bipartisan manner. we need more common sense and less chaos in washington, d.c. marjorie taylor greene, an extreme maga republicans, are chaos agents. house democrats are change agents. >> joining me now, nbc news

senior national political reporter sahu kapoor, first just as someone embedded in this story, what did you think of today's outcome? >> chris, it was a rather extraordinary and somewhat theatrical series of events here. the outcome has not been in doubt, but it's the first time in modern history we've seen a speaker of the house have to rely on votes from the minority party to save his job, to avoid himself getting overthrown. that was notable and that was ultimately why marjorie taylor greene did this. she wanted to make a point mike johnson cannot survive in that job without the support of democrats. technically this was a vote to table a vote to overthrow and that distinction is parliamentary gibberish, about the it was important to democrats because they can say they just prevented marjorie taylor greene from getting her

vote. that's very important because 163 democrats effectively voted to save mike johnson in this job, a man they described as an election denier, dangerous to democracy who earlier today they accused of scare mongering with this election bill standing with a bunch of other election deniers. what democrats are trying to do is present themselves as the adults in the room, as team normal against a bunch of squabbling children and extremists and that's a narrative they hope to ride this fall. >> the other thing i would note here is unlike mccarthy, johnson clearly negotiated with them. when i was covering the mccarthy stuff and we were on air together, the democrats didn't trust the guy and he never reached out, said hey, look, they're going to try to come after me. let's strike some kind of deal. i don't know if there was an explicit deal between johnson and democrats, but there were open lines of communication and some sort of traditional and transactional kind of deal making happening. >> there's certainly no

personal animosity to mike johnson the way there was to kevin mccarthy for a whole bunch of reasons, but there was no explicit deal. we looks for any signs of a handshake deal made. ultimately what convinced democrats to save mike johnson was the fact that mike johnson followed through with certain promises like funding the government on the basis of that bipartisan deal, like putting ukraine aid on the floor, which was a very difficult thing for him to do. he went up against the marjorie taylor greene wing of his party. he also did the fisa vote against coalition of right wing and some progressive members who wanted changes to the surveillance law. what democratic leaders saw was a speaker that was essentially giving them the bipartisan votes they wanted and to look at that and say from now until the rest of the year, there's not a whole lot of must-pass bills to be done. there's faa reauthorization and everyone thinks government funding and farm bill are

probably getting punted after the election. this is the last train leaving the station and that's where marjorie taylor greene didn't have leverage to push her demands. her series of demands didn't exactly add up, including by the way the hastert rule, the majority of the majority principle, which she didn't have close to a majority for this vote. >> i'm not going to get into who the hastert rule was named after, but you should google it. donald trump's weighing in on this was hilarious because everyone, of course, says they have his -- marjorie taylor greene, i'm fighting for trump. trump waited until after it happened and then is, "vote to motion to table," after a lot of gobbley guk which was so funny because it says to me the maga party doesn't care that much about the actual guts of spending legislation. on the whole donald trump doesn't care that much. they take their cues from him. it's not the same kind of austerity party it once was.

they just can't get that amped up about it. >> candidly, chris, trump made himself irrelevant to this motion to vacate drama. it began about six weeks ago when marjorie taylor greene wrote this on a piece of paper, kind of dangled it in front of mike johnson and said don't do ukraine aid and he called her bluff. trump never weighed in in a firm direct weigh. trump is very clear when he wants to be when he really cares about a certain outcome like killing that bipartisan border deal. he makes it abundantly clear that republicans need to do this or there will be consequences. he didn't do anything like that when it comes to mike johnson and marjorie taylor greene. johnson went to mar-a-lago and trump stood with him and praised him, praised her, but there was never a clear indication from trump which way to go, which was way republicans voted as they pleased. >> sahil kapur, thank you very much. still ahead, the folks at trump tv keep insisting you

were better off four years ago. >> mr. president, you said recently you would, if necessary, be the first person to get a vaccine. how important do you think a vaccine ultimately is? >> well, i didn't say i wanted to. that's not a correct statement. i feel about vaccines like i kneel about tests. this is going to go away without a vaccine. it's going to go away and we won't see it again. >> the latest look back at why donald trump can never return to the oval office ahead.

hi, i'm chris and i lost 57 pounds on golo. golo isn't complicated. i don't have to follow a restrictive diet, and i don't have to spend a lot of time making meals. using golo was truly transformative. it was easy, and inexpensive.

today president joe biden was in racine, wisconsin, announcing a $3.3 billion investment by microsoft to build a new artificial intelligence data center. the project is expected to create 2,300 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs in a state that has been hit hard by the decline over the last several decades in u.s. manufacturing. there was a particular reason why biden made the trip to wisconsin today to highlight this particular investment. the location of the new microsoft project has special significance. to understand that story, got to go back briefly to 2016. that election was a big shock for a lot of the country and not just because donald trump won the electoral college and the presidency, but because of the way he won, flipping former democratic voters in states democrats had carried like wisconsin. the idea was to many voters in the industrial midwest donald trump, among other things, sold himself successfully as a kind of middle finger to the

neoliberal free trade agenda of the last few decades, an agenda that really did gut industry and manufacturing jobs across the region that trump was able to flip. as we now know, of course, donald trump was all talk and no results. that was clear back then, too. his vow to bring about a manufacturing renaissance in the united states was a transparent con. his empty promises to invest in new infrastructure became a running joke. he imposed a slew of new tariffs that cost americans more than $200 billion to date. by the time trump left office there were over 150,000 fewer people employed in manufacturing than when he was inaugurated. one of the first moves after his election when he announced he'd saved 800 jobs at an indianapolis carrier plant that were set to move to mexico, that turned out to be a total from as well. over 600 other jobs at the plant ended up being eliminated along with 700 more at a second

indiana plant. that was, of course, the signature trump move, right? a big glitzy announcement that turns into nothing. perhaps the most egregious example in this crowded field of this came in 2018 when then president trump wielded a literal golden shovel for the groundbreaking of what was supposed to be a $10 billion project in racine, wisconsin. trump claimed to have negotiated a deal with fox con, the taiwanese company that manufactures iphones among other things that would bring 13,000 jobs to the state. >> we're restoring america's industrial might and thanks to the hard working patriots like you, we're making america greater than ever before. it's greater than ever before. to fox con and to all of the amazing wisconsin workers with us today and all over this state, i want to wish you good luck and congratulations on

truly one of the eighth wonder -- i think we can say the eighth wonder of the world. this is the eighth wonder of the world. >> can you say that really? well, it soon became clear this was all an outrageous almost comically ludicrous boondoggle as it was reported on by the verge. the factory, tech campus and thousands of jobs simply never materialized. the building fox con calls an lcd factory, about 1/20 the size of the original plan is little more than an empty shell. the handful of jobs said to be created are less than real, many held with nothing to do hired so the company could reach the number of it required to get tax subsidy payments from wisconsin. many employees sat in their cubicles watching netflix and playing games on their phones. the whole thing was a fiction,

but there was a real idea embedded somewhere deep in donald trump's rhetoric of america first. the idea of a rebellion against the specific version of outsourced globalized capitalism that we've experienced that hit certain sectors of this country very, very hard. when joe biden came to office, he and his team began implementing economic policy that basically asked what if we took all that seriously? what if we took seriously the concern that a whole lot of people in this country have been left behind, that the era of outsourcing really did have incredibly damaging effects? what if we tried to change that? so he began with the infrastructure act which is which has funded over 50,000 projects, the industrial act which visited over $3 billion,

the chips act to bring back manufacturing in semiconductors and today coming full circle president biden unveiled that real plan for the site of donald trump's failed fox con project. >> my predecessor had the claim of reclaiming our manufacturing legacy. we had manufacturing day every week for four years, didn't build a thing. came here with your senator ron johnson literally holding a golden shovel promising to build the eighth wonder of the world. are you kidding me? look what happened. they dug a hole with those golden shovels and then they fell into it. fox con turned out to be just that, a con. go figure. >> even fox & friends had to admit joe biden has succeeded where donald trump failed. >> so, peter this, new a.i.

microsoft thing, $3 billion, big job creator, that's in racine. isn't that the same town that fox con said -- i don't know, five, six years ago -- we're going to build a big plant and never did? >> yes. that was a huge trump announcement back then and he said the factory was going to be the eighth wonder of the world, but fox con decided to really scale back their plans and the land is still available. so microsoft is going in. >> it's going to be good for those people. >> ducey to ducey for the alley- oop dunk. the story of these two plans for racine, wisconsin, is the story really of donald trump versus joe biden on domestic political comedy. donald trump's policy was a con job while joe biden and the democratic party have really taken across the entire state a very serious granular project to rebuild america's manufacturing base, to create good paying off unionized jobs for people across the country

even in and specifically in areas that didn't vote for joe biden and the project is having real results. it is succeeding. today that contrast was on full display. only purple's gel flex grid passes the raw egg test. no other mattress cradles your body and simultaneously supports your spine. memory foam doesn't come close. get your best sleep guaranteed. save up to $800 during our memorial day sale. visit purple.com or a store near you

remember ronald reagan talking about jimmy carter. >> ronald reagan used to ask are you better off -- >> not whether we're better off. it's whether they're better off. >> better off. >> better off. >> better off. >> better off. >> better off.

>> than you were four years ago? >> believe it or not every single week multiple times a week conservatives keep asking the question are you better off than you were four years ago? here's fox news on monday. >> that's exactly what this election's about, whether you're better off than you were four years ago or you could be bamboozled into believing you don't know the difference. >> i know the difference. let's try to remember, shall we? what was life like for you four years ago as the u.s. unemployment rate jumped to its highest rate since the great depression, as the white house rejected strict cdc standards for reopening the states, even as white house staffers with top access county catching the virus while more than 1,000 americans a day were dying and divisions in anger were growing nationwide? president trump held a putin- esque summit at the white house where congressional republicans took turns praising him. >> thank you, mr. president, for all the support for new

york state. >> i appreciate your work ethic. i know how hard you work for the american people. >> this man goes 18, 20 hours a day. he's the most transparent president in history. >> thank you for bringing us back here to show the american people that we can be here and do our work. the democrats are cowering at home right now. >> meanwhile vice president pence, the public face of the administration's covid effort, made a show of delivering boxes of ppe to doctors and joked about the situation. >> well, can i carry the empty ones just for the camera? >> absolutely. they're a lot easier. >> now listen to the reporting from four years ago versus what donald trump and the white house were saying. >> the virus is again hitting home at the white house where two staffers have now tested positive. >> mr. president, is there a reason why people just aren't wearing masks at the white

house? >> well, they are. >> they're not, sir. >> people that are serving me are. >> the number of deaths still climbing at over 1,000 a day now to over 78,000. >> mr. president, you said recently you would, if necessary, be the first person to get a vaccine. how important do you think a vaccine ultimately is? >> well, i didn't say i wanted to. that's not a correct statement. i feel about vaccines like i feel about tests. this is going to go away without a vaccine. it's going to go away. we won't see it again. >> with new cases surging in state like minnesota, nebraska, iowa, and wisconsin health experts say expect a spike in covid cases as states loosen restrictions. >> if it really picks up, it's very hard to stop again. >> mr. president, you were with seven american heroes earlier today, these world war ii veterans. >> i was. >> all in their 90s. did you consider wearing a mask when you were with them given their -- >> no. because i was very far away. >> did he consider wearing masks while he was with these

veterans? >> they made the choice to come here because they've chosen to put their nation first. >> you didn't worry about me. you worried about them, but that's okay. >> the trump administration is rejecting drafted guidelines by the cdc about how and when to reopen public places. >> you can have it and get through it very easily. some people have a harder time. >> american families going hungry, thousands lined up at food banks, 3 million more americans filing for unemployment as the jobs situation grows increasingly bleak. >> unemployment is at 14% now, perhaps going as high as 20%. where do you think that will be? >> i think the number is going to be a great number. i'm not going to say exactly what. i call it the transition to greatness. we're going to have a great year next year. you'll see. >> you want to go back there? that what you want to do? tell me are you better off

today than you were four years ago? if you spit blood when you brush, it could be the start of a domino effect. new parodontax active gum repair breath freshener. clinically proven to help reverse the four signs of early gum disease. a new toothpaste from parodontax, the gum experts.

her uncle's unhappy. i'm sensing an a underlying issue.om

it's t-mobile. it started when we tried to get him under a new plan. but they they unexpectedly unraveled their “price lock” guarantee. which has made him, a bit... unruly. you called yourself the “un-carrier”. you sing about “price lock” on those commercials. “the price lock, the price lock...” so, if you could change the price, change the name! it's not a lock, i know a lock. so how can we undo the damage? we could all unsubscribe and switch to xfinity. their connection is unreal. and we could all un-experience this whole session. okay, that's uncalled for.

tonight president joe biden articulated for the first time what appeared to be a direct warning from him personally to the israeli government if they launch a full scale invasion of rafah, the southern city in gaza. the u.s. will halt certain weapon shipments to israel. >> civilians have been killed in gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers. i made it clear that if they go into rafah, they haven't gone in rafah yet, if they go into raf arks rafah, i'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with rafah, to deal with that problem. >> the statement comes the day after the u.s. said it already paused one shipment last week that included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound

bombs. the white house is concerned the 2,000-pound bombs in particular could be used in rafah where over 1.4 million displaced palestinians are sheltering. ben rhodes served as deputy national security adviser to president obama and joins me now of ben, there's been so much back and forth about the biden administration not happy with netanyahu and anonymous things, things the president has said. this seems to me like a pretty big deal him saying it himself, but we've been here before. what do you think from your perch? >> no. i think it is. i think we reached the breaking point, chris. that has been building for several months. the administration which has backed israel, they've had rhetorical differences with netanyahu but haven't put any real hold on weapons shipments or used our leverage at the united nations, for instance, but for months they've been saying rafah is a red line. that was literally a term president biden used. they sent people over to israel at every level of u.s.

government to counsel them to not do this invasion of rafah. there's over 1 million people in rafah, over 600,000 children in rafah. already the rafah crossing used to get the bulk of fuel into gaza is shut down that. fuel is necessary to sustain hospitals, to drive trucks, to get aid around. this would be an exponential increase in the humanitarian crisis and i think biden said, "i finally reached my substantive breaking point. you go into rafah, we're not sending weapons." >> netanyahu believes to eradicate hamas, which is the stated aim of this war effort, one must go into rafah because that is where the last battalions of hamas are hiding and yes, that will be bad for civilians, but that's just war and you have to get the last of

hamas. the other is that they're trying to gain the maximum amount of leverage in the negotiations over a ceasefire and the imenence of a rafah incursion. >> they set themselves an unachievable military objective. that's always a dangerous trap to fall into. >> yes. we know it well in the u.s. >> we do. hamas is an idea, ideology, hamas' political leaders who israel is negotiating with are outside the country in qatar, some in turkey. i do think they want to be able to say they took out the leader of hamas' military wing in gaza, sinwar, and like to take out other top military figures, there's no guarantee they can do that and to do that

they'd probably do the kinds of things they've done in other places which would kill tens of thousands of palestinians, not just killing the people they drop bombs on, but the famine conditions could accelerate and children starve to death. i do think ceasefire plays into all it. the challenge is israel's position in the ceasefire negotiation is we'll accept 40 days of ceasefire in exchange for 33 israeli hostages released in exchange for palestinian prisoners, but they want the capacity to go back into rafah. we've seen this before. they had a ceasefire pauses early in the war and just resumed it kind of full tilt and that's what hamas is not agreeing to. i think president biden is trying to salvage the ceasefire with this comment and send a message look, you have to take the ceasefire deal and maybe in a month, two months, you get intel on where sinwar is, you can take a shot at him, but you're not going in the way you

have these other places. >> the reporting from nbc tonight is that israel is demanding rafah be walled off from a ceasefire deal according to four current and one former u.s. official familiar with the discussions and a source familiar, which again if that's the demand, you're saying you don't want the deal which if they don't want the deal, they'll do what they do. the question is whether the u.s. actively supports and supplies the weapons for something like that. >> yeah. i think the thing is watch is one way, they go in and ignore is. another way is they say we'll take a ceasefire deal and allow space for diplomacy. there's a third way in which we see what israel has done in recent ways. they do these incursions, tanks roll in, take some airstrikes and say we're not doing the full scale invasion and then it becomes this kind of question by the biden administration what is a full scale invasion of rafah, you know? that may be where we end up, a

kind of murky middle here where, frankly, there's a slow motion invasion that doesn't have the drama of what we saw in gaza city and other parts of the gaza strip. in any case, i think we moved into a new phase where the u.s. has finally said look, that's it. we're out. we're not going to provide you with the weapons to drop bombs on civilian populations or provide you with the small arms to do this. the question is does that salvage a ceasefire in the coming days or not or do we go into a tenuous status quo where everybody's interpretation about what's happening is different? >> we should note there are already people being told to evacuate from different parts of rafah to others leaving their things behind in camps and relocating. that is "all in" on this wednesday night. coverage you're doing. it w