00:00:00.000The dangerous and insidious lie about voter fraud persists as Donald Trump lays the groundwork to
00:00:05.980challenge the integrity of this year's election results as well. Today, the New York Times has
00:00:10.800some alarming and exhaustive new reporting on Donald Trump's campaign to tip the scales,
00:00:16.520rooted in the very same debunked conspiracy theories he's been peddling for years.
00:00:21.160That includes 19 official actions Trump has taken to question previous results,
00:00:25.840which began with granting clemency for nearly 1,600 charged insurrectionists
00:00:30.880while brazenly installing election deniers in the federal government.
00:00:35.040At least 15 actions to fire, indict, or revoke security clearances
00:00:39.020for people who have worked against the election denialism movement.
00:00:43.40021 actions to tighten voting restrictions designed to tip the scales in his favor.
00:00:48.440And 14 actions to nationalize elections, many of which have failed in court.
00:00:52.900But as the New York Times reports, quote,
00:00:54.920While many of Trump's directives have been blocked or delayed by the courts, election experts say that their potential harm remains significant and that some of the efforts have already eroded faith in the process.
00:01:06.260Do you agree that we are covering in real time an assault on our elections, the upcoming ones?
00:01:10.540I'm very concerned of what's going to happen in the next election.
00:01:13.460It's a different situation now based on, you know, the people who perpetrated January 6th.
00:01:18.400They probably learned from how they did that.
00:01:21.120My personal view is I think the state attorney generals have a tremendous role to play here.
00:01:27.160They can make sure the rule of law functions in their state.
00:01:30.620And I would also say that I think a thing that all of us can do is support election workers and election officials.
00:01:37.480From my perspective, I've seen a number of cases.
00:01:49.140I mean, so the only reasonable explanation is the president has it out for these people and he has people who his former personal lawyers who are going to do what he says, regardless of the facts of law.
00:02:02.360As a country, as a polity, we let this happen, which means that we cannot look to other people to fix it for us.
00:02:12.100So we have to do the hard work of democratic mobilization, campaigning, protesting, speaking and advocating.
00:02:20.860And on those last two counts, I'm really glad that those of us who made that choice months ago now have Jack Smith on our side.
00:02:28.280What do we have to push back with now that is stronger than it was then?
00:02:33.220We have the courts, and I think that Tim is right that facts will continue to matter because the courts are insisting on it.
00:02:39.240The courts are continuing to apply the facts and the law, and they are shooting down Donald Trump's efforts at every turn to interfere with the elections.
00:02:47.300He has tried to get voter roll data from, I believe, 10 different states, and courts have told him every single time no.
00:02:53.680There are two court decisions that recently said that Donald Trump cannot order the Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots to people in states who aren't complying with the demands for voter data.
00:03:05.820So the courts are really working overtime to protect our elections.
00:03:09.540And at the end of the day, the Constitution gives the president zero role in elections.
00:03:14.100The Constitution says that states have the primary authority over elections and that the federal government, through Congress, can make certain laws about elections.
00:03:23.680But those can only be legislated by Congress.
00:03:26.360The president himself does not, by executive order or any other means of interference, have any power whatsoever with respect to elections.
00:03:34.360What does it say, though, that he's sort of chipping around the edges everywhere where he may find an argument to seize some power away?
00:03:42.420Well, that's a very important point that you make, Nicole, because it's not about a winning
00:03:46.280legal strategy. It's about sowing doubt. It's because Donald Trump knows that there is a real
00:03:50.580risk that he will lose, his party will lose at the midterm elections, and he wants to be ready
00:03:55.600to sow doubt about whether the elections were fair. And he has every intent of doing that.
00:04:00.480He's laying the groundwork to do that right now. He's also still re-litigating the election that
00:04:06.140happened in 2020, which is something that I think is becoming very exhausting for the American
00:04:10.220people. But it is having the effect of stowing doubt and chaos because it's coming from the
00:04:14.960most powerful elected official in the country. As Director Patel is surging personnel to Fulton
00:04:20.900County to reinvestigate, let's be clear, baseless claims by the president of the United States
00:04:28.540about election fraud. What concerns you about what they might be doing for 2020
00:04:32.860and what they might be setting up for 26 and 28? Well, that's the key question. What are they
00:04:39.120setting up for this next election and 2028. You know, on its face, the pursuit of these baseless
00:04:47.600claims is fodder for Saturday Night Live and the humorous. But there's a deadly serious
00:04:54.020consequence, which is the waste of FBI resources, the compromise of this great agency's integrity
00:05:06.680Kash Patel is proving to be really the ultimate Trump sycophant,
00:05:10.920but there is an effect on the integrity of law enforcement
00:05:14.580and also, in effect, beginning the rigging of the next elections
00:05:21.620or attempt to do so by claims, unsupported claims,
00:05:25.740of some kind of corruption in these local elections,
00:05:30.200which will enable Trump potentially to call out militia, call out the FBI, try to, in effect, take over elections.
00:05:38.960And we are working hard in the United States Senate to prepare and fight that kind of threat to election integrity.
00:05:46.340The state attorney generals, and they have to be the nucleus of this effort that we must have in this country
00:05:52.560to pursue the large spread criminality of the Trump administration, because Trump's going to pardon everybody.
00:05:58.060And it's going to be up to the state attorney generals to go after Kristi Noem, to go after Stephen Miller.
00:06:06.440These are people that need to be on trial, not just the workers themselves.
00:06:12.380And look, anybody who believes that there's election fraud who was on the ballot, they should obviously resign because they were illegally elected.
00:06:21.100It doesn't work like part of the ballot is illegal, but the other part isn't.
00:13:38.240the landlords who would not rent to them,
00:13:39.800and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand.
00:13:43.220But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew.
00:13:49.360Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry,
00:13:53.920despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence,
00:13:59.660immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City.
00:14:04.360That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty,
00:14:09.620and the pursuit of happiness extends to them too is no relic of the past. It carried millions of
00:14:15.540black Americans north during the Great Migration. It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to
00:14:20.420New York City after the Second World War. It invited countless others from the West Indies
00:14:24.780and South Asia and West Africa and across the world. And it is what brought my family to the
00:14:29.460city when I was seven years old. My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue
00:14:34.520of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America.
00:14:39.620the promise of the beautiful patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more
00:14:45.620faithful to its founding ideals. There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those
00:14:51.060who have shaped it, American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom
00:14:56.100tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West,
00:15:01.740is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And yet the irony is that
00:15:06.720the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and
00:15:11.940influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional. For generation after generation,
00:15:17.660we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.
00:15:23.420It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying
00:15:28.160the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from0.99
00:15:34.600slums and shtetls, who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land.0.95
00:15:39.860It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had. We are told that America is0.97
00:15:45.360exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth,
00:15:52.340my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.
00:15:57.760The frontier may be closed. We may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values
00:16:03.400first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all.
00:16:09.760It belongs, too, to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were
00:16:14.680recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I, too, felt what you feel, the joy of no longer being just
00:16:21.060a New Yorker, but an American, too. You each hold a special power, the power to determine what
00:16:28.160America means. The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena
00:16:34.100of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America,
00:16:40.300if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs
00:16:46.180only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should
00:16:50.600be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.
00:16:56.940At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.
00:17:08.180Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest.
00:17:11.880But time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.
00:43:58.920In those years of formation, this is why they had
00:44:01.740the summaries of young men would go, the formation of character.
00:44:05.680That really important time between, I don't know,
00:44:09.80011 or 12 and 17 and 18, those critical years.
00:44:14.680This is why these people, you know, they have this website, this kind of anonymous website,
00:44:18.240talks about the prep schools in New York and what they're taught and who's teaching them.
00:44:25.140Remember, they're all radicals from Brown and all these Ivy League schools that are there teaching,
00:44:30.280forming these people that hate the country and hate the system and hate you as American citizens
00:44:34.960and want to invite the world here and invite more of the world here.
00:44:40.540Mandami, when he gets past the high rhetoric, he runs a sanctuary city.
00:44:43.700He just said the other day, they're not going to enforce anything that the Supreme Court backed on temporary protective status because the Haitians built New York.
00:44:52.920Of course, the Haitians built New York.
00:44:54.900I remember the age of Haitians in New York, building New York, building the skyscrapers, building the bridges, digging the tunnels to the subways.
00:45:02.980Of course, these iron men and women, of course, they built it.0.63
00:45:08.060Now, someone went to Springfield, Ohio and barbecued dogs, but no, they built it in New York City.