Mara Gay

With the integrity of our elections on the line, let's bring in MS Now national security reporter David Rohde, who has new reporting on this today.

Mara Gay is an opinion writer for The New York Times and an MS Now political analyst.

Dan Kanavin is a Democratic strategist who worked on both the Harris campaign in 2024 and the Clinton campaign in 2016.

And Joyce Vance is a former US attorney, law professor at the University of Alabama, an MS Now legal analyst.

He posted on Facebook, quote, "I've been deeply troubled by Paxton's conduct as Texas Attorney General, particularly his decision to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election in other states in an effort to help Donald Trump remain in power." He goes on to say, "I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles.

But character matters more than party affiliation.

Our democracy depends on leaders who respect our institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability, and seek to unite rather than divide." Dan Kanen and Margay are back with us.

I mean, what is notable here to me, Mara, is the fact that in Texas, if Democrats wanna win, they're gonna need some Republican voters to peel off.

The BBC's Katty Kay, opinion writer at The New York Times.

Mara Gay is with us and politics bureau chief and senior political columnist.

At Politico, Jonathan Martin.

Jay Mart is here today.

And for years, Donald Trump's made baseless claims about the security of voting by mail, even though he himself has voted by mail twice in Florida this year.

Uh, Jonathan Lemire, Mara Gay, Pablo Torre, and David Drucker still with us.

David, you know, we've ta- you and I have talked about this before.

The four times I ran for Congress, I juiced that vote by mail, man.

And there you have it, the end of former special counsel Jack Smith's testimony on Capitol Hill.

Let's bring in Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel, former senior member of the Robert Mueller probe, Liz Oyer, former DOJ pardon attorney, MSNAS senior investigative reporter, Carol Lennig, and our political analyst, New York Times opinion writer, Mara Gay.

All right, we only have about 46 minutes left on air.

I don't think that's enough time to fact check everything that we heard in that hearing.

It's going to make him really angry going into midterms if they can't make this case.

So I think Grassley was trying to be helpful there, but it really did not work.

Liz Weir, Carol Lennig, Mara Gay, thank you all so much for talking us through this.

Next, we're going to take a turn.

Uh, looks like a fantastic Q&A, by the way.

Mara Gray, Mar- excuse me, Mara Gay, who is, uh, I love her, uh, from The New York Times opinion section, and also, I, I don't know if she's still a regular on MSNBC, but people are-

Yeah, Mara, Mara's great.

Yeah, we're excited to have her.

It's been that way since, you know, the 1860s.

But man, there are tens of millions of Americans that Mo- like Mara was just talking about-

Yeah

... that all say the same thing, "I don't have a party.

Yeah, and we, we never sh- obviously should have done it historically.

We're doing it again, and this is not about border security.

Mara's point is spot on.

It was one thing to legitimately close the d- border to people who were not authorized to be here.