The Washington Post now reporting that text messages related to January 6, from Trump`s Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, have vanished. Ally of Jeffrey Clark, Ken Klukowski, is cooperating in the Department of Justice`s January 6 probe. On the morning of October 27th, 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing 11 people and wounding six. Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab is being paid for his services by the Republican party`s nominee for governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano. Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indiana provided an abortion to a 10-year-old girl who was impregnated by her rapist and could not get an abortion in Ohio following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST (voiceover): You are the woman. Excellent, excellent job. You won the week. Great job. And by the way, that is tonight`s "REIDOUT," but next week, I know a lot of y`all are talking about this crime bill thing that is sort of rolling through the House of Representatives, we don`t know where it`s going. Next week, we`re going to do a little I`m just a bill, yes I`m only a bill. We`re going to explain how the sausage is made and why this sausage might not be so tasty.

But I`m going to leave you with that tease as I now pass you along to ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES which starts right now.

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voiceover): Tonight on ALL IN.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): I just don`t know why everybody`s texts and emails were suddenly disappearing all over the place. So, I assume it`s not just a technological problem.

HAYES: More missing texts leading up to January 6, this time from the heads of Homeland Security. Tonight, Carol Leonnig on the missing data and the accusations of a secret service cover-up.

Then, new details on the new Trump guy now cooperating with the Justice Department. Plus --

JOSH SHAPIRO, ATTORNEY GENERAL, PENNSYLVANIA: This isn`t a big tent. This is a Christian movement full stop.

HAYES: The Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania finally responds to the scandal over his anti-Semitic allies.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don`t want people who are atheists. We don`t want people who are Jewish.

HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.

HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. Well, there are even more missing texts. The Washington Post now reporting that text messages related to January 6, from Donald Trump`s Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, have vanished. Now, that is in addition to all those Secret Service text messages related to the sixth that have also gone missing.

For an ostensibly apolitical organization like the Secret Service, this has become an enormous scandal. And it`s the latest institution caught up in Donald Trump`s attempt to overturn the will of the voters, to end American democracy. The January 6 Committee has provided quite a bit of evidence showing that Trump wanted to use the Secret Service as a kind of personal armed guards, that he wanted to lead the mob personally to the Capitol during the insurrection in order to effectuate his coup to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and make that the final step and basically, like, crowning himself President again, and he wanted the Secret Service to help them.

Now we know that Trump was aware of the fact that much of the mob was armed because Trump apparently wanted the Secret Service to remove the metal detector from his speech at the Ellipse where he incited the riot.

REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY): Ms. Hutchinson, what we saw on those clips we`re playing were photos provided by the National Archives showing the President in the off-stage tent before his speech on the Ellipse. You were in some of those photos as well. And I just want to confirm that that is when you heard the President say that people with weapons weren`t there to hurt him and that he wanted the Secret Service to remove the magnetometers.

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, FORMER AIDE TO MARK MEADOWS: That`s correct.

HAYES: We also know that Secret Service tried to find a way to get Trump to the Capitol.

CHENEY: When the President said that he would be going to the Capitol during his speech on the Ellipse, the Secret Service scrambled to find a way for him to go. We know this from witnesses and the Secret Service, also from messages among staff on the President`s National Security Council.

HAYES: So, the Secret Service ultimately decides that it could not comply with the ex-president`s demands.

HUTCHINSON: So, once the President had gotten into the vehicle with Bobby, he thought that they were going up to the Capitol. And when Bobby had relayed to him we`re not, you don`t have the assets to do it, it`s not secure, we`re going back to the West Wing, the President had very strong, very angry response to that.

Tony described him as being irate. The president said something to the effect of, I`m the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now. To which Bobby responded, sir, we have to go back to the West Wing.

HAYES: OK, now, a few things about this. It`s possible Secret Service, Bobby, who was the point man on that detail there didn`t want to go along with the disruption of the peaceful transfer of power, that they understood that they were potentially being used as kind of authoritarian guard for a would-be fascist.

But it seems more likely that in that moment, the President`s security simply could not envision a safe way to bring him to the middle of an armed insurrection, especially considering that there were already Secret Service agents, their own colleagues who were on ground at the Capitol guarding the other protectee, Vice President Mike Pence, who was actively under siege from the armed mob chanting it wanted to hang him.

And on top of that, we also know that Marc Short, Pence`s chief of staff, had warned the sea conservators on the fifth, called one of them into his office, that Trump might put his own vice president`s security at risk.

REP. PETE AGUILAR (D-CA): The dispute between the President and the Vice President had grown to the point where the vice president`s chief of staff Marc Short was concerned that the President could, in Mr. Short`s words. "lash out at the Vice President on January 6." In fact, Mr. Short was so concerned about it that he talked with the head of the Vice President`s Secret Service detail on January 5. Here`s Mr. Short.

MIKE SHORT, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF TO VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: The concern was for the Vice President`s security, and so I wanted to make sure the head of the Vice President`s Secret Service was aware that that likely, as these disagreements became more public, that the President would lash out in some way.

HAYES: All this speaks, of course, to how central the Secret Service was to the full picture of Donald Trump`s attempted coup. We know they were deeply involved in tracking and planning for both Trump and Pence during, before, and after the insurrection. But despite their centrality, it appears as though the January says committee knows surprisingly little about the Secret Service`s internal deliberations from that time, what the agents were doing and saying.

Last month, for example, committee member Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy of Florida said that Tony Ornato who was a key figure because he served as both the Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Operations and as the head of Trump`s Secret Service detail, that Ornato was not exactly forthcoming in his testimony to the committee, especially when compared to former Mark Meadows aide, Cassidy, Hutchinson.

REP. STEPHANIE MURPHY (D-FL): Mr. Ornato did not have as clear of memories from this period of time, as I would say, Miss Hutchinson did, if that`s a fair assessment there. But we`re always happy to have folks who have recalled things to come back and talk to us.

HAYES: I mean, you can read between the lines there, right? They didn`t get a lot out of Ornato. Now, the internal Secret Service communications leading up to and during that day on the sixth are possibly the most revealing pieces of contemporaneous evidence you could ask for. But of course, those text messages are by all accounts gone, as are the texts from as we mentioned, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli.

And there are basically two theories for what happened here. Either it was a cover-up. These messages were intentionally erased or wink, wink, nudge, nudge erased, purposely not archives properly. Now, that theory makes some sense in the broader context when you consider the black hole that seemed to consume much of the White House evidence that day.

For instance, the missing call logs, no call logs or the dismissal of the White House photographer. There were pains taken by certain people, Trump and others, to close down the information around what was having on the sixth. That`s one theory. The other theory there is just gross incompetence, which is essentially what the Secret Service is arguing when it says the texts were accidentally erased as part of the system transfer.

And for what it`s worth, both Wolf and Cuccinelli say they did not erase any messages, that any missing evidence is again, the results of an error by the Department of Homeland Security. Chris Krebs, who`s the former Trump cybersecurity expert who worked at DHS, who was fired quite notably back in November 2020 by Trump for daring to say again and again the 2020 election was the most secure in history. Well, Chris Krebs came out yesterday endorsing the idea that the issue was with DHS and not individual actors.

This is Krebs` take. He said, "This is a DHS tech issue, not an individual official issue. DHS issues iPhones but can`t centrally manage iMessage because they`re encrypted on the device and Apple makes it hard to access messages. Messaging should be disabled, which is what the White House does."

So, if all this is true, if the Krebs account is true, it`s a massive screw-up by DHS. I mean, retaining government documents is an incredibly important part of governing, particularly around the White House. Everyone who works around there knows it. So, then you have to ask, well, how and why was it allowed to happen? And that brings us to a guy named Joseph Cuffari who maybe you`ve heard of. He`s the Inspector General for DHS. That`s the person in charge of oversight the agency. And to be honest, he`s exactly the kind of oversight guy Donald Trump would want.

First, he appears to be well, habitually dishonest, much like his previous boss. For instance, his official government biography claimed he has a doctorate in philosophy, and he would sign his emails Joseph V. Cuffari comma, Ph.D. Mother Jones found that Cuffari`s Ph.D. in management is from an unaccredited school known as the California Coast University, a school has been investigated by the Government Accountability Office, and was found to run a diploma mill where students essentially pay for a degree with little or no actual work required.

But more materially relevant is the fact that Cuffari seems entirely uninterested in doing any actual oversight. The Washington Post reports his office was regularly empty during work hours even before the COVID pandemic. According to the House Oversight Committee, the Inspector General`s office under him issued fewer reports in the first few months of 2020 than any point in the agency`s tenure. So, it comes as little surprise that Congress is now saying Cuffari knew about the missing tax as early as last December despite not telling Congress until this month.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York who chairs the Oversight Committee and the January 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi now both say they want Cuffari to step aside from the internal investigation into the missing messages. Whether or not he does, it`s clear he oversaw the mishandling of what could be some of the most important evidence in the entire investigation into the January 6 attack on American democracy.

I`m joined now by Carol Leonnig. She`s a Washington Post national investigative reporter. She literally wrote the book on the Secret Service, particularly in its modern incarnation. It`s called Zero Fail. And Carol, it is great to have you on. Let us start with the Ken Cuccinelli, Chad Wolf missing texts. What are -- what do we know about that? And what are we to make of that?

CAROL LEONNIG, NATIONAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST: Well, Chris, it was a surprise to me and my great partner and colleague, Maria Sacchetti, when we discovered that not only were secret service text are missing, tons of them, for the period that is considered one of the most calamitous and closely investigated moments in our democracy, at least in this century.

They were missing, but also we learned that the inspector general who didn`t mention to Congress for almost a year that these documents were missing also didn`t happen to mention that he was notified in February that the senior most leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, their texts were also missing in a reset, surprise, surprise, a reset of phones. It sounds very similar to the Secret Service situation.

Chad Wolf was the Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump. Ken Cuccinelli was the Acting Deputy Secretary. Both of them were under intense pressure from Donald Trump in the days leading up to January 6 to help him claim that the election -- falsely claimed that the election was rigged. And in the case of Cuccinelli, President Trump called him on New Year`s Eve to pressure him to cease voting machines in swing states, claiming falsely that it was his job to grab these voting machines so that the election could be "rerun." So, their records could be really important.

HAYES: So, we don`t know the source of this, right? But I guess when I saw the Wolf and Cuccinelli news, I thought, well, this can kind of cut into two directions, right? One is that there was sort of a mass intentional purge because a lot of shady stuff was going around, they want to get rid of it. The other is that you can view it as more in-line with the kind of like, enormous screw-up if, in fact, the same migration that lost these texts for the Secret Service agents was the one that lost the text for these individuals as well, which I guess is right. That is the -- what DHS and the Secret Service are saying at this point?

LEONNIG: I wish I could say that the DHS was being as extended in their explanation as what you`ve provided. What they`ve said is that they are looking into this deeply. They`re trying to figure out whether these records can be recovered. The thing that we`ve investigated here at The Washington Post is, well, what did Cuffari learn from the Department last year? What did they learn last year? What did they learn this year?

And the answers are very partial. It`s basically, I`m sorry, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli`s texts are no longer available because of a reset of their phones when they left. That`s not very expansive, you know. So, we don`t know exactly what happened. Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli have said today that they handed over their materials. They were -- to use Chad Wolf`s comment on Twitter and to quote him directly, he said his devices were fully loaded when he turned them over and questions should go to the department about what they did.

I don`t think we can reach any conclusions about whether or not this was one big massive screw-up or whether people in I.T. were happy to see some of these documents go or that these were handled very distinctly and separately, and a criminal investigator is going to have to start issuing subpoenas to figure out what really happened.

HAYES: You mentioned Cuffari who seems like a strange figure and all this and I know he`s been a controversial one. I mean, this does seem like, obviously, the view of Carolyn Maloney and Bennie Thompson, that there -- that he was asleep at the wheel here. It does seem odd that he did not notify Congress about this, particularly given what we just said before about the obvious material relevance of this -- of these records.

LEONNIG: Chris, so a tune of you to say it that way. And I think you`re going to see that there`s more to -- a lot more to say about Mr. Cuffari`s office and what they knew and what they didn`t do with that information. But I would just add to the context about Mr. Cuffari. Here`s what we know so far and what the Washington Post is published. And I was involved in some of these report and some of these stories a good while ago.`

Mr. Cuffari blocked investigations that his staff recommended were warranted of the Secret Service and how the Secret Service appeared to behave in an improper and enabling way of Donald Trump`s political agenda and political shenanigans. The first investigation that Cuffarishutdown that his staff wanted to do was about how the Secret Service went along with super-spreader events that the President wanted to hold to help get reelected.

Cuffari blocked a second secret service investigation that his staff strongly recommended as important for, you know, good governance and also potential referral for criminal investigation, how the Secret Service played a role in the clearing of peaceful protesters, Black Lives Matter, and George Floyd death protesters on June 1 from Lafayette Square. Also, the President could have a photo-op of strength.

Now, we are learning bit by bit and there are more bricks to come, that Mr. Cuffari`s team knew multiple texts were missing, didn`t ask for justification of why these documents had been deleted from the Secret Service and now from the senior most ranks at the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for assessing domestic terror threats, right, was responsible on January 6, for alerting people to the potential, you know, efforts to shoot police by people who were storming the Capitol and coming to Washington on January 6.

He knew those checks were missing, didn`t press for people to find out why and to justify their removal, how did this happen? He didn`t alert Congress and then he didn`t follow up with any of those departments to demand that they provide some proof of what they were alleging. That`s sort of basic, you know, reporter 101, much less government watchdog 101.

HAYES: Well, we`re going to stay on the story. I know that you will. And we`ll have you back to talk more about it. Carol Leonnig who is seriously one of the best in the business, one of the great American reporters we have. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

LEONNIG: Glad to be here.

HAYES: Up next, new reporting that a little-known Trump world figure is cooperating with the Justice Department. We`ll explain why it might be a big deal and have the latest on that investigation next.

HAYES: Among the cast of characters in Donald Trump`s coup attempt is this guy who we`ve talked about him a lot, Jeffrey Clark. Remember, he was a Department of Justice official who was a sort of like middling upper person who tried to engineer a mini coup within the department to basically take it over.

And back in October 21, 2021, he was subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee. He appeared before the committee pleading the fifth. Here he is last month answering his front door in his underwear just before 7:00 a.m. as federal law enforcement showed up to raid his house.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Can you sit down with me? We`ve got a search warrant and we need to speak to you next. I need you to step outside for me.

JEFFREY CLARK, FORMER OFFICIAL, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Can I call my lawyer?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure. Come on outside with me.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. Let`s step outside and we`ll --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just real quick. We got to clear the house and make sure it`s safe. Is your wife home?

CLARK: No, nobody`s home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. So, no one is there?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can absolutely call your lawyer but you got to step outside with him real quick.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`ll put you over here behind your car so no one will see you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Go ahead and step on out here for me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on. This way.

CLARK: Can I put pants on first?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, we got to clear the house.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We got to clear the house. And as soon as we clear the house, we`ll get to talk to your lawyer an d we`ll get some pants on, OK.

HAYES: Can I put pants on first? Not an unfair question. During that raid, federal agents took his electronic devices including his phone. Yesterday, we learned there`s even more bad news for Jeffrey Clark. This guy Ken Klukowski, a lawyer who joined the Depart of justice briefly in the very waning days of Trump administration and reportedly worked with Clark as his -- on his part of the coup, almost like he`s kind of like, associate on it, that guy Klukowski is fully cooperating with the Department of Justice probe according to Klukowski`s lawyer. Adding, he "would continue to do so."

Joining me now is Joyce Vance who is the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Joyce, the Klukowski character rose very late in the hearings. I had not seen any mention of him. But it was clear that he was basically over there kind of helping Clark. He was -- he was Clark`s collaborator on this plan to take over the Department of Justice, use it to send out these ridiculous letters that would, you know, give the states the pre-tax to effectuate the coup and named new electors. It doesn`t seem like great news for Jeffrey Clark that he -- his own lawyer is on the record saying yes, he`s cooperating.

JOYCE VANCE, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: It seems like really bad news because Klukowski fills in a little bit of a mystery about Jeffrey Clark. Clark is, as we all know, infamously from Eric Hirschmann`s comments, he`s an environmental lawyer. He`s not someone who has expertise in election law. So, it`s always been a little bit curious that he managed to come up with these letters directing states to, you know, pick fake slates of electors in order to get this plot moving.

Klukowski sort of answers that because he does have expertise in election law. He was also working with John Eastman. It`s possible that he`ll be the link between those two, Clark and Eastman, when his cooperation is complete.

HAYES: It also strikes me when -- every time I hear new developments I think about the just the sheer scope of this undertaking for the Department of Justice. I mean, they`ve got hundreds of individual criminal cases, then they have some higher order ones like these seditious conspiracy cases. And now, they have you know, they have Eastman in their sights, they have Clark in their sights. There`s reporting that Donald Trump, right, is subject to the questions they`re asking criminal investigation.

NBC news reporting there are folks the Department of Justice just worried about their capacity. More than a dozen sources familiar with the sprawling investigation expressed varying degrees of worry about whether the resources DOJ has allocated the effort are sufficient for such a vast criminal investigation." You were a U.S. Attorney. What do you -- what do you think about that concern?

VANCE: The resource concerns are very real. On the one hand, you have to look at this case, and it`s sort of like what you tell your kids and what I would often tell my prosecutors, you know, how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time, right? This is probably the biggest, most complicated case DOJ has ever done. But you`ve still got to break it out into its component parts.

It looks like they`re separate conspiracies. There`s the fake elector conspiracy. There`s a conspiracy surrounding Mike Pence. There`s a conspiracy surrounding January 6 itself. So, you don`t know for sure if those are criminal cases that you can make, but you investigate each one looking at all the players and that takes personnel. So, this is an issue for Merrick Garland.

And he may will reach the point where he has to look at the U.S. Attorneys, there are 93 of them across the country. He can go to his extra-large and these large offices and say I`m going to need you to give me maybe your top public corruption or white collar crime lawyer to devote to this case because DOJ has a lot of witnesses that they have to work through, a lot of areas of investigation to complete, and they have to do it quickly.

It`s more important that DOJ put its resources against this situation than it do other cases that might be done out in the field. I know that won`t make me popular with my U.S. Attorney colleagues in the Biden administration, but at some point, you`ve got to set aside doing a large quantity of cases in favor of doing the more significant ones.

HAYES: Yes. And there is some precedent for that. Obviously, Merrick Garland has some experience having been a prosecutor on the Oklahoma City bombing case, which was obviously an enormous case and an enormous input -- import. Joyce Vance, thank you so much.

All right, coming up, the white nationalists and the would-be governor of Pennsylvania. Why the Republican candidate is finally responding reporting on his anti-Semitic allies next.

CHRIS HAYES, NBC NEWS HOST: On the morning of October 27th 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing 11 people and wounding six.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shots rang out just before 10:00 a.m.

Authorities are identifying the shooter as 46-year-old Rob Bowers and say this was a hate crime.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Members of the Tree of Life synagogue conducting a peaceful service in their place of worship were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bower`s social media rife with anti-Semitic messages.

HAYES: Now, for many, I think this massacre has faded a bit from memory. It`s run together perhaps with the incomprehensible number of mass shootings we`ve seen in the years since. But it was uniquely horrifying as the deadliest attack in the Jewish community in the history of this country.

As we`ve learned in the immediate aftermath, the gunman aired his hatred for Jewish people on a social media site called Gab that has become a haven for white nationalists, Neo Nazis and other extremists.

On Gab, he shared anti-Jewish images and conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. His bio on the site read "Jews are the children of Satan".

Shortly before he attacked worshippers, the Tree of Life synagogue, he wrote this final message, claiming that a Jewish refugee organization "Likes to bring invaders in that killer our people. I can`t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I`m going in."

Of course, we have seen extremism explode on social media. And it`s not always clear if the platforms can or should be held responsible. That`s not really the case with Gab. Gab is kind of another category.

Gab was founded, and it is run by an explicitly anti-Semitic Christian nationalists named Andrew Torba. Torba is very open about who he is and what he is trying to do.

ANDREW TORBA, CEO, GAB: We don`t want people who are atheists, we don`t want people who are Jewish, we don`t want people who are non-believers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement, because this is an explicitly Christian country.

Now, we`re not saying that, you know, we`re going to deport all these people or whatever, you`re free to stay here, right? You`re not going to be forced to convert or anything like this, because that`s not biblical whatsoever.

But you`re going to enjoy the fruits of living in a Christian society under Christian laws, and under a Christian culture. And you can thank us later.

HAYES: Andrew Torba regularly spews vile, hateful ideas suggesting that Jewish people are evil, and that they should not be in positions of power.

TORBA: Look at the fruits of what happens when we allow Pagans, Jews, non- believers, atheists to run our country. OK, what happens? What is the fruit of that?

Well, the fruit of that is massive inflation, a border invasion, billions and billions of dollars being sent to foreign countries, you know, a suicide epidemic in this country, deaths of despair, like look at these people. These are the people -- like they just look evil, like, look at them, just look at the screen. They look evil, you could just tell.

This is a Christian nation. Christians outnumber you by a lot, a lot. And we`re not going to listen to two percent -- you represent two percent of the country. OK, we`re not bending the knee to the two percent anymore.

HAYES: In case it`s not clear, that`s the head of the anti-Defamation League, the oldest Jewish civil rights organization in the country that he`s saying they won`t bend the knee to.

So, disgusting stuff. You would think someone with such despicable beliefs would have no place in polite society and certainly no place in mainstream politics, right?

But guess who Andrew Torba, that guy, CEO of Gab is being paid by? Paid for his services. The Republican party`s nominee for governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano.

Mastriano you weill recall is a himself far-right conspiracy theorists who helped Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He was at the Capitol on January 6th, he rented buses for people to go there, he believes the election was stolen or so he says.

And earlier this month, Media Matters uncovered this filing showing that Mastriano campaign paying Gab $5,000 in April for campaign consulting.

Mastriano who supports Christian nationalist ideas himself is running against a Jewish man, Democrat Josh Shapiro in a state where the Tree of Life massacre occurred and where its memory is horrifically fresh.

And for weeks, he has not bothered to address this scandal until now. We`ll have his response, next.

TORBA: You`re also not want to back down, you know, the press has gone after you extensively. You know, all the -- all the usual smears, right, the racist bigot, conspiracy theorists, you name it, right. All the same things they`ve called me, all the same things they`ve called Donald Trump. So, what I really liked about you is that you have a backbone, you have a spine, and you`re a fighter.

HAYES: That was Andrew Torba, the voice of him, CEO of a social media network Gab known as a haven for white nationalists heaping praise on the Republican nominee that you saw there for Governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano.

Weeks ago, we found out that Torba had been paid for consulting. Well, Gab had been paid for consulting for Mastriano`s campaign, but Mastriano refused to comment on it until now.

In a new statement, he says in part "Andrew Torba doesn`t speak for me or my campaign. I reject anti-Semitism in any form. Recent smears by the Democrats in the media are blatant attempts to distract Pennsylvanians from suffering inflicted by Democratic policies."

Notably, Mastriano does not denounce Torba or his anti-Semitic Christian nationalist views. He does not deny that he paid his company $5,000 to consult for his campaign.

Trip Gabriel is a National Correspondent for The New York Times where he has been closely covering the Mastriano campaign and this scandal and he joins me now.

First Trip, let`s just start with Gab and Torba. Because I think -- look, I mean, like there`s a lot of sites, right? And people might have some bad view about like, oh, I hear Reddit is bad, but like, there`s a million things on Reddit, right? There`s a lot of stuff on Twitter.

Gab really is its own sort of thing. And it`s a -- it`s an emanation of Torba`s politics. Is that fair?

TRIP GABRIEL, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, that`s fair. I mean, you know, he started -- he started talking about the Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life synagogue shooter back in 2018. The kind of things that Bowers was posting is not -- I mean, he was violent, but that kind of extremism and replacement theory. You know, ranting is not unusual on Gab, and some of it you hear from Torba himself.

He`s for example, call on people to -- white people to have lots of babies, you know, as a way of preserving the Christian identity -- the white Christian identity of the United States.

And obviously, he`s a virulent anti-Semite. There`s so many examples of that. And he`s, you know, the face and the leader of the social media site.

HAYES: Now, Torba released a statement, which I should read here, he says, I want to make clear, I do not work for the Mastriano campaign. I`m not the consultant. The campaign paid Gab as a business for advertising during a primary. My words are my own. My ideas are my own. They are not representative of Doug or Doug`s campaign. I stand by everything I have said about Christian nationalism as a movement being explicitly Christian.

Even if you bracket that, just to be clear here, like there`s more of a relationship between Mastriano and Torba than just this -- his campaign writing this check, right?

GABRIEL: Yes, it`s a little unclear actually, what he wrote the check for it was $5,000. You know, some kind of consulting work. Reporting is indicated that what he was paying for was extra followers on Gab, there was some indication for every new person who signed up for Gab, they were made automatic followers of Doug Mastriano and Mastriano`s followers zoomed into the tens of thousands since he cut that deal back in, actually it was in April with Gab.

And, you know, there was a lot of kind of mutual praising of one another. Gab endorsed Mastriano in -- back in the primary campaign in Pennsylvania. Mastriano returned the sentiment, he said, thank God for what you`ve done.

There was, you know -- the statement by Torba said it was for advertising, but it was clearly more than just the Mastriano campaign, you know, putting up ads on a social media site.

HAYES: You`re covering this New York Times, obviously, it`s a contested race there. It`s the state where obviously the Tree of Life synagogue massacre happened where that person was an active user on Gab and also it`s a state where the attorney general is running as a Democratic nominee who himself is Jewish.

How much has this erupted onto the campaign in the last week or so?

GABRIEL: It seems to have had a pretty significant impact, it has been covered all across Pennsylvania. There have been press conferences in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh, organized by the Shapiro campaign. But you`ve seen not just Democrats but Republican Jewish officials calling Gab cesspool of anti-Semitism and calling on Doug Mastriano to get off.

You know, he didn`t respond for a long -- for at least two to three weeks. But the pressure was rising as Mastriano comes out of his kind of far right-wing shell where he has campaigned, you know, as a primary candidate and now into a general election. You know, he`s under some pressure to broaden his appeal to certainly the many independent voters who have an important influence on general elections in Pennsylvania.

And, you know, he was at a fundraiser two nights ago in Montgomery county outside -- excuse me, in Delaware County outside of Philadelphia by a very mainstream donors from the Republican Party and one of the hosts was the National Committee man for Pennsylvania, you know, told me that he thought that Gab was shameful. And he -- and he called on Mastriano to denounce it so -- or to get off it I guess. It`s a little unclear. I guess he`s off it.

There`s some -- there`s some speculation that what he did was just make his account, private. But he, you know, that seems to have led to the statement that came out late last night.

HAYES: Yes, the quote is from Andy Reilly, National Republican committeeman for Pennsylvania, who hosted a fundraiser for Mr. Mastriano at a suburban Philadelphia home on Wednesday. Said in an interview Gab was shameful and shouldn`t be part of the usual dialogue, although he was of course, as you note, hosting a fundraiser for an individual who has relationship with the site.

Trip Gabriel, thanks for your reporting on this and thanks for joining us tonight.

HAYES: Still ahead, shades of Viktor Orban-style authoritarianism, taking root in the Hoosier State, the unbelievable new investigation of an Indiana abortion doctor for doing her job, next.

NORAH O`DONNELL, CBS EVENING NEWS ANCHOR: There were Republican lawmakers, there was the Wall Street Journal editorial page that doubted the veracity of that case. To those that doubt the veracity of children needing abortions. What would you say?

DR. CAITLIN BERNARD, OBSTETRICIAN AND GYNECOLOGIST, INDIANA: Come spend a day in my clinic. Come see the care that we provide every single day. The situations that people find them in -- themselves in and in need of abortion care are some of the most difficult that you could imagine.

O`DONNELL: Have you felt threatened?

BERNARD: Yes, it shows how, you know abortion instead of being part of healthcare, which it is, a needed lifesaving procedure, which it is, has been used to create a wedge between people politically and personally.

HAYES: That was Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indiana last month, she provided an abortion to a 10-year-old girl who was impregnated by her rapist and could not get an abortion in Ohio following the overturning of Roe v. Wade and that state`s law banning abortion immediately kicking in.

Dr. Bernard is now speaking out about the insane backlash she has faced that`s been whipped up by Fox News and Republican politicians and anti- abortion activists.

In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Bernard said "physicians who provide abortion have been harassed, they have been murdered. And for too long, I think because of that, they`ve had to be silent to protect their families and it`s created an idea that we`re doing something wrong or something illegal and we`re not."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times and one of the reporters who spoke with that Indiana doctor, she joins me now.

So, Sheryl there -- when this story first came out, the Attorney General Todd Rokita went on Fox News to basically said we haven`t heard hide, nor hair of this, basically we don`t think it exists.

Then, it came out that it exists. In fact, the man who`s accused of this was arrested and indicted. He -- what is the Attorney General Todd Rokita doing now in terms of his office, his posture towards Dr. Bernard?

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, he`s investigating her and he`s been pretty open about that. In fact, we talked to him the other day, and he said to us that he is going to see this through to the very end, but just what this is, is unclear because Dr. Bernard does not seem to have broken any laws. Records show that she required or submitted the required forms after she cared for this girl. There`s no evidence that she violated the child`s privacy and her lawyer says that the attorney general has provided them with evidence of six consumer complaints against her but that none of those people filing those complaints were actually her patients or had ever spoken to her.

HAYES: In fact, let me read from the IndyStar reporting on this. It says the complaints behind Todd Rokita`s investigation into the doctor are a "nonsensical waste of time and filled with inaccuracies". The attorney for Dr. Bernard said Thursday.

In a statement, Bernard`s attorney said the six consumer complaint investigation notices came from individuals who reportedly reside throughout the U.S. and did not have direct contact with the Indianapolis doctor.

So, this seems like people that found out about this woman through the internet, and then filed these complaints, essentially pre-texturally, right? I mean, that seems to be the strong indication, or at least the case the attorney is making.

STOLBERG: Yes. And in fact, the attorney said that one of the people who filed those complaints has his or her own criminal history. So, it doesn`t seem like they had anything to do with Dr. Bernard.

HAYES: OK, but I mean, so what this looks like is the attorney general is investigating an individual who provided care under the law, it was legal, the care that she provided in the state of Indiana at the time, that`s not even in question.

And then who under the First Amendment, talked to reporters and spoke about it. And is now -- I mean, now facing the state attorney general`s investigation into her. That`s basically what we have so far, right?

STOLBERG: Yes, so, I think we should actually be clear about this. She did not talk to reporters and speak about this specific case. In fact, when I interviewed her, she was very clear that she was not going to talk about this case.

But she has been very outspoken throughout her career. And she feels that it is important, and it`s an imperative for doctors like her to speak out because states that are passing these abortion restrictions are imperiling her patients and impeding her own ability to practice medicine in a way that is right and proper.

And I think that in a way is why she`s being targeted. The attorney general called her an abortion -- an abortion activist acting like a doctor.

In fact, she`s an OB-GYN and abortion is just a small part of her care, or of her practice.

HAYES: Yes, one of the -- one of the things about this story, there`s a lot of aspects of it, you know, obviously they`re incredibly troubling and the story at the core of it is horrible as anything a person can contemplate, honestly.

But the fact that, you know, abortion care, reproductive health care, is as intimate and experience as anything. And so, reporting on it is always going to -- you know, it`s going to be pretty shrouded in secrecy and it`s going to be a hard thing to report on.

I mean, part of what made this story explode was we knew about it, but you know, it`s a big country. And it seems like she`s been -- she`s taken the step affirmatively to talk. And that means that she has become a target.

STOLBERG: Yes, that`s right. And I think she`s kind of on the -- she`s really a symbol of a war against doctors, a war that medical professionals have really been dreading for a long time. And we know that abortion providers have been targeted for a long time, right?

Some have been murdered. They`ve been threatened. Dr. Bernard has received threats on her cell phone, and there was a kidnapping threat against her daughter in 2020.

But now, doctors are being targeted for legal threats and political attacks. And that`s where she sits right now. And it is because she`s been outspoken.

HAYES: And that`s also been -- we`ve also seen that a doctors practicing in the states that now have newly restrictive bans on abortion, or bans after six weeks, are also practicing under a kind of legal shadow when it comes to health care they provide to women.

STOLBERG: Right, they have mounting requirements. A lot of states, including Indiana had requirements that a lot of requirements for filing certain forms or requirements that doctors talk to patients about things like fetal pain, which is under great dispute. So, it`s a hard environment for these doctors.

HAYES: All right, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, thank you very much.

That is all in this week. "THE BEAT`S SPECIAL REPORT: INSIDE TRUMP`S ELECTION PLOT" starts right now.