-Welcome back to "Late Night." We're here with Jake Tapper.
As we mentioned, you're doing your show at 9:00 p.m.
through the midterms.
-Yeah. -This is going to be --
You know, I think people have said this a lot.
This is the biggest midterm in our lifetime.
This does seem like a big one,
and I'm wondering how you approach covering it
because it seems like you have one party
digging their heels in, in advance,
about, "This election might be stolen from us again."
-Yeah. In fact, Kari Lake,
the Republican nominee in Arizona,
has basically said she's only going to accept
the results if she wins. -Yep.
-Which is an interesting guiding principle.
-A nice piece of honesty, yeah.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah, it's weird.
I mean, there's a bunch of election liars,
election deniers who are in competitive races
and could very likely win, Kari Lake among them.
In Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona.
And it's something that I think people in the media
just need to be honest and up-front about.
-What about how the returns come in?
Because I think -- You've obviously been through
so many of these election nights, and sometimes
certain places report early, and, you know, all of a sudden,
you have a candidate who is leading 80-20.
But people there, people in the room know
this isn't a real number yet, right?
We have -- The bluer areas of the state haven't reported.
Like, do you have long discussions about
how you put up the results?
-Well, when the results come in,
we try to make sure people understand
these are early ballots
or this state has these kinds of rules.
You know, it's very frustrating for me
because I'm from Pennsylvania, and the legislature there,
which is Republican-led, will not let the election boards
not only count them ahead of time,
the votes that come in in early voting or absentee ballots,
but even prepare them,
meaning you can't even take them out of the envelope.
So a whole bunch of votes will not be counted that day
just because of how the rules are.
And yet people will then complain
about how inefficient the system is
as if there's some hijinks going on.
And Trump took advantage of this in 2020.
He made it very clear he was going to declare victory early,
knowing that there were still going to be
millions of votes to be counted.
-I want to ask what your take is --
Obviously very early days of Elon Musk in charge of Twitter.
But we've already seen a few things where he's magnifying --
he's magnifying news stories
that are sort of unsourced and poorly reported.
-They're not "unsourced and poorly reported."
They're nuts! -Yeah.
-They're crazy. -Thank you.
-He -- Okay.
[ Cheers and applause ]
No, but it's --
There's bad journalism, and then there's crazy, right?
-Right. -I mean, this is crazy.
So, Hillary Clinton cited something about the attack
on Nancy Pelosi's husband being due to right-wing rhetoric,
and isn't that unfortunate, et cetera?
And Elon Musk wrote back to her on Twitter,
"There might be something more --
a little bit more to the story."
And linked to a website that literally --
Well, that had a smear campaign about Paul Pelosi,
but, more importantly, had declared
that Hillary Clinton died in 2016...
-Yeah. -...and that a body double
had actually debated Donald Trump.
That was the -- That was the source.
That's the source material that we're dealing with here.
-So it's actually good that Elon said there might be more
to the story than you think... if you are who you say you are.
-Right. Right. "Hillary Clinton."
-But I think -- Right.
That's the scary thing about this early approach,
is it does seem as though he likes to throw things out
and say, "Just worth mullin' over."
-Yeah. -And that is not very helpful
as far as moving forward the political discourse.
-Yeah, look, I'm generally on the freer-speech debate,
that the solution to speech you don't like is more speech.
But generally speaking, the idea that not only
was he allowing this to be on the platform,
which you can make a decision about that one way or the other,
that he was actually pushing it out as a guy
with 110 million followers on Twitter
is not cause for confidence
about what the platform's gonna be like in the future.
But we'll see. It's early days yet, early days.
-It is early days. I think he's gonna turn it around.
[ Laughter ]
-You're not even on it that much anymore.
-Look, I'm not going to pay
20 bucks a month for a blue checkmark.
Are you kidding me?
[ Cheers and applause ]
Look. I am -- Let me explain why.
I have a severe gambling problem.
[ Laughter ]
I want to talk about this, not to --
-Yeah. -This is a very serious
and incredibly well-reported piece of journalism
that you have a family connection to.
So, this is a story about a young man
who was convicted for a crime
that he very likely didn't commit.
But the one thing you make clear in the story
is, whether you think he committed the crime or not,
no one would agree that he got good legal representation.
-He had a horrible lawyer. My dad was his pediatrician.
This is C.J.
C.J. Rice was 17.
C.J. had been shot, and my dad
saw him in his pediatric office in South Philadelphia,
and C.J. could barely walk.
Five days later, there was another shooting,
a horrible thing, and I think it's kind of shady,
but ultimately somebody said that C.J. did it,
even though the shooters had been seen running.
And C.J., my dad, other people who knew him thought,
"Well, there's no way they're going to convict him of this
or even charge him for it.
He can barely walk, much less run."
-He turned himself in. -He turned himself in.
-Because he was so confident that based on the fact
that he could not run, this would be a situation
where they would just let him walk out of the police station.
-Right, and his mom worked for the District Attorney's office, et cetera.
He gave them his phone, thinking,
"Well, they're clearly going to check to see
that my phone was actually in West Philadelphia
that day, not South Philadelphia where the shooting was."
But none of that happened, and instead he didn't get a --
He wasn't lucky enough to get a public defender.
He's poor, so he couldn't afford a good attorney
that you or I would have been able to afford.
He didn't get a public defender,
which are generally pretty good lawyers, public defenders.
He had a court-appointed attorney,
and some of them are great.
But the records, statistically and according to studies,
is much worse, and she was just a horrible lawyer, horrible.
And one instance after another, she failed him,
making -- you know, having it be in juvenile court
because he was 17, going to the crime scene,
challenging the one piece of evidence
against him over and over.
And going through this case, which my dad asked me to
look into after years of trying to get him out of prison,
it really just opened my eyes about how --
I mean, we know it intellectually,
but there really are just two systems of justice,
one for people who can afford it --
I would never have even been charged with this crime,
and if I had been, I would have gotten a lawyer
who would have gotten it thrown out of court.
But this kid, you know, he got the bad end of the stick
when it comes to this sort of thing.
And he couldn't afford a good lawyer,
and he had a horrible one.
And now he's just in prison for 30 to 60 years for a crime
in which nobody was even seriously wounded,
much less killed.
And it's just -- it's not justice.
And so, you know, I hear a lot about crime on TV ads,
and, you know, I'll be doing a piece about it on my show.
But, you know, the idea
that anytime anybody challenges a conviction
that they're "soft on crime" -- I'm not soft on crime.
I want anybody guilty of a shooting offense
in jail -- in prison.
But I don't think he did it,
and that means the people who did do it,
they're still out there.
-Well, it's a really wonderful piece of reporting.
The connection to your father and the role he played,
the really noble role he played, it should be noted, as well,
makes for great reading. Thank you for being here.
It's always a pleasure to see you.
-So good to see you in person. Yeah, thank you.
-You guys, that's Jake Tapper.
"CNN Tonight with Jake Tapper"
airs nightly on CNN through the midterms,
and his cover story for "The Atlantic" is out now.
We'll be right back with Sheryl Lee Ralph.