Early MSNBC Behind-the-Scenes Story

SEASON 4 EPISODE 63: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENTS: Trump should be in prison JUST for his new role in the new covering-up of the part of the Epstein files that are about him. Trump. The accusations are against Trump. The memos are about Trump. The investigations are OF Trump. They are missing.

There is a law saying Trump must produce them. He has not. That is, by definition, a cover-up. A conspiracy to BURY evidence. Even if somehow it CLEARED him.

SPECIAL COMMENT No. 2: As the Kash Patel Olympic Scandal expands exponentially, we have buried the lede.

Patel claims he was at the Olympics, working, running American security. Let's suspend our disbelief and say he's NOT lying. If he really was at the Olympics to run American security - WHY WAS HE DRINKING ON THE JOB? Why was he out-of-control drinking with the people he was there to protect?

The experts like my old MSNBC pal Juliette Kayyem are stunned: Security is not allowed to DRINK, during an event, during an Olympics. Not until the entire Olympics were over. ESPECIALLY if you are IN CHARGE of security! If you are hired for security, they put "no drinking" in your contract.

SPECIAL COMMENT No. 3: Why are the US Olympic men's hockey players not only still digging but digging new additional holes? Now it's not just drinking with Patel and laughing at terrible misogynistic jokes by Trump, but all but five of them were used as political props by Trump at the State of the Union, one (Tage Thompson) was photographed in a complete MAGA hat with the Press Secretary, the winning goal scorer is complaining everybody else made it political - and Auston Matthews (a Mexican-American who captains Canada's team and has thus had two of his three countries threatened by Trump) is standing there grinning behind Trump in the Oval Office, disgracing his team and its fans and his mother and his own relatives.

B-Block (47:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Fox's Jesse Watters doesn't want a president who struggles to read (prefers one who can't read at all). The popular internet delusion that the president the last time the Americans won Olympic hockey gold was Reagan (it wasn't). And MAGA internet disease victim Senator Mike Lee says ICE dresses like Mexican Cartels.

C-Block (58:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: As CBS continues to dissolve before our eyes, the sad truth that network news has been collapsing since at least the night in September 1997 when I was summoned by the president of NBC to have dinner with the chief of the MS part of MSNBC with instructions to humor and ignore him because all we wanted was his money.

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