Who is this guy and what do we need to know?

Well, first, I would say this signals a lot about what you can expect from the second half of the second Trump administration.

Donald Trump had a lot of different options to signal where he wanted to go in the wake of the Democratic victories this week.

I think you can say unequivocally that this decision suggests that the president is going to be in a hostile, confrontational and power wielding disposition through the rest of his presidency.

I've spent 25 years working in Washington, D.C., and there's no single person I have met who is more focused on power maximization than Stephen Miller.

You could credit Miller with really being the person to cement the president's view of his expanding his constitutional powers to their apex and beyond.

In fact, Greg, I'll share with you the last conversation I ever had with Stephen Miller.

But my question to you is, Miles, you take all that away, And what does the Stephen Miller version of MAGA have left?

Just a moment.

There was the possibility, Stephanie, that today that that documentary would be absolutely meaningless and it would have had a one week runtime and no one would have cared.

It's suddenly become a lot more relevant because the one hundred percent.

instances of corruption that we documented as part of that are now going to be partly the roadmap for congressional investigations that we will see start on January 3rd.

And if people want a sense of what that looks like, we published all the data out there for free at corruptionland.org. There's this interactive map there, Stephanie, that shows a lot of these major instances of corruption that the Democrats say that they are going to look into.

Now, that sparked sort of a fake debate within the Democratic Party there.

Were these claims yesterday that Hakeem Jeffries was saying we're not going to go that direction while Robert Garcia, who's going to take over the House Oversight Committee, is telling Republicans and the Trump administration to lawyer up? The reason I say that's a fake debate is because the likely incoming speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, was not saying we're not going to investigate.

And three days before the election, we had limited strikes.

But they've somehow managed to work out how to make, if not Democrats, at least their own races feel a little bit more in touch, a little bit more cool, a little bit more plugged in to what normal people are thinking.

Well, and you saw it in the response from young voters.

Millennials and Gen Z, by double digits, swept towards the Democrats last night.

And it just showed that they have tapped into a younger demographic, a little bit cooler demographic.

The Barack Obamas will say the Democrats kind of have got their swag back.

And of course, the former president appeared with a lot of them.

He's the last time Democrats remember feeling like they had swagger, that they had the youth vote.

Grainger, for the ones who get it done.

But they've somehow managed to work out how to make, if not Democrats, at least their own races feel a little bit more in touch, a little bit more cool, a little bit more plugged in to what normal people are thinking.

Well, and you saw it in the response from young voters.

Millennials and Gen Z, by double digits, swept towards the Democrats last night.

And it just showed that they have tapped into a younger demographic, a little bit cooler demographic.

The Barack Obamas will say the Democrats kind of have got their swag back.

And of course, the former president appeared with a lot of them.

He's the last time Democrats remember feeling like they had swagger, that they had the youth vote.

We'll be back after this break.

But I also think, Miles, to what you've been working on passionately, voters are really upset about the way Trump has enriched himself, his friends, his family since coming back into office.

I think that is going to be the watchword of this election is corruption, corruption, corruption.

And we're seeing it.

We saw it in the surveys and the lead up to this election.

We are seeing it in the exit polls in many of them.

Voters are saying that their number one issue is corruption.

And Jim, as you and I have talked about, we did the analysis on that a few weeks ago and found this would be the first election in American history at the national level, at least since polling began in the 1930s, where the number one issue for voters is corruption.

Do you think that voters really resented that as well, and that maybe was part of this anti-corruption vote?

If we're sitting with more oil than Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran combined, I think, Why are we not drilling and supplying? Why do we not make China dependent on the United States? Why don't we become energy efficient on our own without having to buy Saudi oil, without having to buy Russian oil or Venezuelan oil? And we have that capability.

We do.

We absolutely do.

And let's start with where things stand at the moment.

I mean, just today... we saw news out of the international energy agency that russia could lose up to a third of its oil output within weeks because right now they're being cut off not just by the united states but by other western countries and by major corporations and so there's definitely a crisis for the russians we've created a crisis no one wants to buy their oil anymore and so they're being forced to offer it at these huge discounts so that means the supply has got to be made up somewhere else.

And as you note, Michael, the most obvious immediate place that it could be made up is with countries like Saudi Arabia, countries like the UAE.

Right now, we haven't seen as much willingness out of Saudi and the UAE to make up the difference.

Where is this all coming from?

Did you feel naive that maybe you thought along the way, you know, when you were getting out of the system that maybe it was never going to be replicated in terms of the corruption and the grift? And was it kind of a gut check for you? Like, shit, where are we now? You know, like, where are we?

It was, so the original pitch for this piece that we made to a lot of different people was very simple.

It was, we want some sort of face, a famous person or a news personality to go do a walk along the National Mall and just do a big loop around D.C. And we'd mapped out here's what the loop should look like to prove the point that all you have to do is a lap through the nation's capital to see how endemic the corruption is, that you can walk by the Justice Department with the president's face on it.

Then you can walk by the FBI building that's been co-opted.

And then you can see the ballroom being built and you can walk by the reflecting pool and you can see where the arch is going to be.

And you can just do this big loop And if that's what you can see in the nation's capital, it should tell you the story about what's happening across the country.

And that was our original pitch.

But I also feel like we sometimes don't give our collective groups and ourselves enough credit to think about how we have been defiant in the face of all of the corruption and the grift and the illegality.

A lot of

these people who have broken away from Donald Trump and said, this isn't an anti-Jewish thing.

We're allowed to have opinions on America's relations with foreign governments.

And you got a lot of anger among blue collar voters about getting sucked into another forever war.

And you see it in this race of people saying, I can hold two things in my head at the same time.

I can be great with the Jewish people and I can be furious that the United States government is once again following the lead of the government of Israel.

And I say that as someone who three times I sat across from Netanyahu in negotiations, I was deep in the Republican party where we worked very closely with the Israelis.

But,

Miles, what do you make of that?

I mean, look, I am less, look, I'm not a registered Democrat.

And so it actually makes it easier for me to opine about the Democrats.

Let me just give you a strong opinion here.

I'm pretty sick of the bedwetting Democrats in this race.

And I have been on set with a number of them, a lot of them that are still wringing their hands about El-Sayed and saying, hey, we shouldn't have made him the nominee.

Get your shit together, Democrats.

be hard to imagine still but has a chance and he's been out there campaigning uh with republicans um and it works when you can disarm them and uh so we could have done more but you know we're we're gonna have to wash our hands and take more showers after this

Miles, what do you make of that?

I mean, look, I am less, look, I'm not a registered Democrat.

And so it actually makes it easier for me to opine about the Democrats.

Let me just give you a strong opinion here.

I'm pretty sick of the bedwetting Democrats in this race.

And I have been on set with a number of them, a lot of them that are still wringing their hands about El-Sayed and saying, hey, we shouldn't have made him the nominee.

Get your shit together, Democrats.

be hard to imagine still but has a chance and he's been out there campaigning uh with republicans um and it works when you can disarm them and uh so we could have done more but you know we're we're gonna have to wash our hands and take more showers after this

When you look at Trump's, for lack of a better phrase, friends that you feature in Corruptionland, what's that reveal about him?

Well, I think it reveals a lot You know, one of the things that I would say that was surprising to me is as we went around the nation's capital and interviewed folks for this documentary, and a lot of that had to end up on the cutting room floor because we needed it tight and propulsive and to grab folks' attention.

There were a lot of folks who were longtime Trump supporters who had grown just frustrated with this administration, but so fed up.

They said they couldn't support Trump or any of his enablers ever again.

I mean, there's one story that stands out to me is we were walking by the White House and just interviewing any tourist that was coming by with these sort of cranes in the background, the cranes that were building the billion-dollar bunker ballroom complex that Trump is constructing.

And we had a guy from Texas that was standing there, and he was talking to a group of tourists, and by the sound of it, it sounded like he was a Republican.

And okay, so we thought we were going to get a pro-Trump take, and so I put the microphone in his face.

How much of the blame rests with those who give way and surrender to Trump, especially in Congress?

Are we really having a discussion about blocking the certification of the vote four days out from Election Day?

Yeah.

And I think you're right.

I think we're also probably going to be having that for three months if this doesn't go the way the administration wants it to.

I mean, I think that that's the worry here is there's at least now one Senate election that potentially could be stuck in limbo for a very long period of time.

And that's just one.

I mean, Alicia, we've got a number of other races here that potentially, if they are close, are going to be on the receiving end of Trump Justice Department action, lawsuits from local Republican groups.

Is that by design, right? Like, are they happy to just continue the appearance of the chaos?

That is how Donald Trump is playing it in this race.

You know, when I before I went to work in the first Trump administration, my first experience with the man was I was sent up by House Republican leaders to go meet then candidate Donald Trump in 2016, who was then running for the presidency and was our party's nominee.

And I had a mandate.

which was Trump had been on the trail saying the words Muslim ban, that he wanted a Muslim ban.

And GOP leaders were shocked by this.

None of them thought Trump would win the presidency, but they were convinced that his rhetoric would destroy the GOP brand once he lost the race for the presidency.

And so they sent a group of us to advise Trump on what to start talking about instead of Muslim ban, right? And we went and explained to him, no, you don't wanna ban people from a largely peaceful religion from coming into the United States.

at nothing to still do what he wants just just on your lame duck i mean i don't think that's the right metaphor i think he's going to be a wounded beast which lashes out which has still got some strength and you don't know what the hell he's going to do next yeah yeah

Well, look, I mean,

one of the examples, Tom, was actually in the production of this documentary itself.

I mean, I hate to say that we are now another data point on this map, but Donald Trump's National Park Service threw us out of a public place for even filming this documentary.

We filmed part of it in the Washington Monument where you are permitted to bring cameras and And video cameras every day, members of the public and social media influencers film from up there in the Washington Monument.

We were allowed in with our filming equipment.

It was determined to have met the standards.

But once we were up there, once we started talking about dialogue.

You're saying not so much.

What did you learn through making this film that helps explain some of the numbers we saw there, that Americans really are focused on this now?

Well, look, there's a Watergate scandal a day, and JD Vance even joked about that a few weeks ago at the Nixon Library, of all places.

So what we didn't want to do is just go episode by episode.

What the American people want to know is, why is this happening? Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.

But he has refilled the swamp.

And so we looked at the anti-corruption filters that are supposed to exist in Washington, D.C., from the ethics officials and lawyers at the White House to the prosecutors and agents at the FBI and DOJ.

to the inside watchdogs like the inspector generals and the outside watchdogs like the free press, all the way to Congress.

Do you think it's true that nobody cares?

How much of your work do you think could be a roadmap for that work?

Well, I will say that's also one of the galling things about all of this is this tracker that we put up over there at corruptionland.org isn't just Trump and Trump's grift and graft.

It's that his lieutenants have taken it upon themselves to mimic the behavior of the boss.

And of course, whenever that happens, as you have covered, Nicole, the boss gets mad.

He doesn't want the people under him to be corrupt.

He wants to be the king of corruption.

corruption but you go in and you see those names throughout the tracker you see how far this has spread but to what we can do about it i've got to agree with the ambassador because as much as vladimir putin is exporting corruption to this country Alexei Navalny and others are exporting courage from the grave to inspire people on how to fight back.

What does it say that Harmeet Dhillon's office is the office that's not willing to do it at all?

Are any of these viable legal strategies by which Trump could, in effect, try to steal, try to halt a Democrat victory? Or is it kind of legally fanciful and will get knocked down just like all the other legal cases were knocked down in 2020?

Well, it's probably both.

I mean, if you think back to 2020, it seems fanciful that Donald Trump would attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

But for all intents and purposes, it really came down to one person, his own vice president of the United States, who wouldn't go along with it.

Otherwise, the United States would have truly been thrown into constitutional crisis on the eve of the inauguration of of another president.

Now, in this case, it does seem like Donald Trump and team are preparing to at least buy time and maybe in their most optimistic scenario, get a few of these races challenged in the long term such that Republicans can keep control of power and Donald Trump can hold off investigations into his misconduct and his corruption.

But here's the thing that people should be looking out for, because the predicate that they have laid is all around the phantom menace of the non-citizen voter.

Is there a chance, do you think, that this talk of the blue wave is overhyped, that he knows what he's doing, that when he goes to Texas, when he goes to Alaska, when he goes to Montana, all these places that we think should be completely safe He does see movement there, and he is actually reaching voters that might have given up before he started entertaining them on the stump.

How'd you get to that number?

It's a shocking number, Stephanie.

Well, people can go see it for themselves at corruptionland.org.

If they want to see the map, if they want to tally up the data, we made it available.

We made the documentary available.

But this is everything from the monuments he wants to build to himself to the money his businesses are making from taxpayer dollars.

It was breathtaking even to me.

Where did they go?

The stories are coming out, man.

They are coming out.

And I just got word this morning that a White House aide says they're in a full panic about this documentary that we're releasing next week.

Amazing.

And they should be panicked about the corruption catching up to them.

And there's a reason we're making this free for people to watch.

We want folks – to be reminded of everything that they've forgotten about this corruption because it's coming so fast.

all seen the

The stories are coming out, man.

They are coming out.

And I just got word this morning that a White House aide says they're in a full panic about this documentary that we're releasing next week.

Amazing.

And they should be panicked about the corruption catching up to them.

And there's a reason we're making this free for people to watch.

We want folks – to be reminded of everything that they've forgotten about this corruption because it's coming so fast.

all seen The

And in your reaction, do you expect Trump and DHS to comply or are we headed toward another fight over whether this administration believes the law applies to

them? We'll see.

This could be a constitutional showdown.

The judge was very clear that if – the judge didn't say that DHS agents cannot go investigate crimes.

If they have reasonable suspicious that a crime has taken place, someone is engaged in a legal voting scheme, they can investigate it.

But the judge said they can't be doing these – you know, knock on door interviews with people who might be or would reasonably suspected to be US citizens.

They can't just go out there door to door and hustle people about how and where and whether they've voted and asked to see their papers.

Let me explain this to people because there's been almost no

What could go wrong?

They are.

People who were the election deniers in 2020, people who engaged in helping to foment that insurrection are now working for the federal government.

It's something that you said many years ago, Nicole, after this happened, that it would be the goal of those insurrectionists next time to do it from the inside, not run from the outside of the building.

And they've achieved that.

They are on the inside now.

I think that the attorney general probably regrets what he just said, not because he doesn't mean it, but because he gave up whatever element of surprise they still had.

Miles, what do you what do you think about this question that we're batting about? Do you think he cares about Republicans winning?

What does that gap tell you about the scale of the operation compared with what agents are actually finding out there in real voter fraud? Let me explain this to people because there's been almost no

coverage about how this actually happens.

Within DHS, there's an agency called U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Within USCIS, there's an office called Fraud Detection and National Security.

Within that office, FD&S, there's a tiny sub office that basically runs a database system to check fraud.

whether employers have hired people who are illegal or not, right? There's a program that employers around this country can use to run checks on their employees to make sure that they're not hiring people who are undocumented across the country.

Are the scandals coming so quickly that people are becoming numb to it? And does that help?

What surprised you most in making this documentary?

I think what surprised me most is how hard it was to characterize the breadth and depth of it.

It's what we spent so much time trying to figure out is how do we take this breathtaking series of three water gates a day and condense it into something that people can see? And then the answer became obvious.

We don't talk about every episode of corruption in the second Trump administration.

We should talk about what were the layers of corruption filtration that are supposed to stop this stuff? Where are those at? And what we saw is systematically every one of those protective layers that's existed under every president in the modern era has been systematically eliminated by this president.

What do you want people to take away from this?

Well, first, people are gonna be able to interact with these episodes of corruption.

They can go to corruptionland.org. That's where they can screen the documentary for free, completely for free.

And I'm assuming that somewhere, some- someone somewhere has done the polling that says that is gonna be really effective, and they may be right.

They may have been right before the ad hit the public airwaves.

I mean, here's the thing that Amy Acton's got cutting in her favor.

In just about every poll, she's been leading in the race in Ohio, and some of those polls, she's up by 750 to 43.

I think there's only one poll out there that shows Vivek with a slight lead within the margin of error.

That could have shifted in the past 24 hours or so, and I would imagine it's shifted in Amy Acton's favor.

But here's what I think has happened since this came out there, and you heard that with the heckler.

[laughs]