The Beat With Ari Melber 5/18/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 18, 2026

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]at an Islamic center in San Diego.

[00:00:02]Officials indicating three victims dead, a security guard and two staff members.

[00:00:07]The two suspects in this incident are also now dead. Here is some of what we heard just in the prior hour here from the briefing by the local police chief.

[00:00:19]There is no further threat. Both suspects in this case are deceased. We have three confirmed adults that are deceased at the Islamic center. We began to receive calls from just a couple blocks away that we had more active gunfire.

[00:00:36]Officers were called to that location where they found a vehicle in the middle of the street with who we believe to be the shooters in this incident, both deceased.

[00:00:47]Uh police indicate they view this and are proceeding with investigation on it as a hate crime probe given the clear location, the targeting uh of this religious center. The two suspects are believed to be 17 years old and 19 years old. Uh according to the initial information that's been provided by authorities, they appear to have both died of what looked like self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Uh [snorts] this was a harrowing day. There were many young children inside this Islamic center at the time of the shooting. Uh the scenes, of course, reminiscent of other terrible days where Americans have watched children, minors, sometimes small children being evacuated from schools.

[00:01:27]Uh we can tell you, as we look at this tonight, none of these kids were hurt.

[00:01:31]They are now safe.

[00:01:35]All of the kids are safe. I'll tell you what got me.

[00:01:42]Watching the kids come running out.

[00:01:48]Just thankful to be alive.

[00:01:51]I want to bring in our experts today. Uh joining me at me now is Rob D'Amico, former FBI supervisor, who's done hostage rescue team work, and MSNBC national security analyst Michael Feinberg, uh who's an intelligence analyst for us.

[00:02:04]Uh Rob, when you look at this type of incident, uh what is in your mind about both the the problem set, because you had this attack and we have this danger, uh including to children, uh and what did the authorities do? How do you view the response?

[00:02:20]Yeah, the problem set, obviously, uh any school, any occupied territory like that is really tough to secure. I do security assessments all the time, and you can have it so that you have so many different things involved to keep these shooters out. Um and but do they work all the time? In this case, I think something happened in front of the school. Security uh guard was was deceased there, two other adults deceased there. They may have stopped these teenagers from getting into the school, which again is is heroic, um but it's something that you can't always count on. You constantly look at what defenses can you use, how can you mitigate the possibility of someone get getting in there, and was that the turn of them not to get in the school? Did they They Did they encounter the security guard and the other individuals, and then figure out they weren't going to get in the school, and then fled? And then, of course, they fled uh They did supposedly shoot at this landscaper. What that was about, I'm not sure, but I think the fact that they they died by self-inflicted uh gunshot wounds in that street meant they were probably fantasizing that they had uh an idea to do something at school, and that they were going to die in that school. That's a lot uh how these happen. Uh they had these these ultimate fantasies. The fact that there were two of them is a bit different. It goes back to some of the school shootings that we've seen, but lately we haven't seen multiple shooters involved in some of these incidents. And so, Rob, your assessment is that well, here we have a security guard who who gave the you know, these individuals gave their life. Uh we often hear about this being deterrent that you have people out front of target locations and that might deter. Uh here your assessment is beyond that capacity. Uh you actually were able to, with tragic loss of life, prevent uh these individuals from getting in where you think what could have happened. It could have been worse.

[00:04:13]Oh, absolutely. If if they were determined and they got in, don't know what security was behind those those three individuals. Don't know if the the security guard was armed. You have to always look at that. Some states it's harder to get armed security than others. Um as we saw in the in the in the synagogue that the the security actually engaged the the guy who drove in there. Um so you have to all look at that and and and see what happens because so many times like with these that you have deterrents out there. You have some security in there. And a lot of times it's a people like uh we we when we do security assessments, I'll walk up to a door to a say a company with four coffees in my hand and I'll pretend I can't get my badge and someone always opens that door for me. Hopefully now on these school side things that people are understanding you just don't let someone in because you're nice person. That's what harms security. Uh it's one of those things. People want to be nice. They don't want to slam a door.

[00:05:09]They don't want to ask someone for their badge. But in schools now you really have to look at it and say, "Look, uh if someone's trying to get in, you have man traps. So if they get in one door, they can't get in the other or you don't let people what we call backpacking to get in uh happen. So I think those might have worked in this case, but you have to be vigilant. You have to do it all the time and this just shows that it's everything everything nowadays is is becoming a target and and security is getting harder and harder because it's so hard to really truly lock something down and it's still be operational.

[00:05:43]Yeah, people listening uh can sometimes feel a sense of hopelessness. What do we all do? Sometimes we talk about larger change in policy. And you are reminding folks that we're not powerless. We're we are a civil society. When people are targeting a mosque, a house of worship, a school, uh thinking about yourself as part of the the civilian team uh and making those smart choices. I I appreciate the point. Uh Michael, your view on all this tonight.

[00:06:06]Yeah, I want to highlight something that Rob just mentioned, which is that they were outside of the building and serving as a deterrent. And you sort of asked, "How is it a deterrent when they can be engaged so readily?" And I want to point something else out that's applicable not just to schools, but really to any area we as a society decide needs to be protected.

[00:06:30]And that is your weakest point is always going to be the outermost layer of your security coordinate. So, think about an airport, for example.

[00:06:41]It is virtually impossible to do anything violent these days once you have passed through the security apparatus.

[00:06:51]It is a little more difficult to do it at the ticketing gate simply because while you haven't gone through security, there are masses of TSA officers, there are cameras, there are dogs trained in certain types of detection.

[00:07:06]But when you're at the curbside drop-off, there's really nothing. And it's a sort of standard design of security that the closer you get to the center, to the potential target, the harder things get. But there is always going to be a point, no matter how well you plan, that there is going to be a weak link in that chain. And we saw that tragically today.

[00:07:31]And it's a good reminder of something that I'm sure Rob remembers very well from his days too at the FBI Academy, when we were taught, you can never fully eliminate a risk. You can mitigate it.

[00:07:44]You can lessen it.

[00:07:46]But it's always going to be there. And in a society that is unfortunately as immune to violence and unwilling to talk about this as a policy issue, that's something of which we need to remind ourselves of constantly.

[00:08:01]>> Yeah.

[00:08:01]Yeah, and and Michael, given your intelligence background, your view on what authorities have said and what we know about what appears to be the targeting, of course, showing up at an Islamic center in America right now.

[00:08:14]I mean, look, I think it is entirely reasonable to assume that some sort of anti-Islamic animus was at work here.

[00:08:24]That's not a definitive statement. These could have been two teenagers out for a sort of thrill kill joyride, and I don't mean that to sound glib. I mean, it just could have been nihilistic, and that was the facility they chose. But San Diego is a large city.

[00:08:41]There are probably hundreds of schools and community community centers.

[00:08:46]And it is a natural question as to why they chose this one. And for that reason, I was glad to hear the chief of police say that they're going to treat it as a hate crime until it's not.

[00:08:58]Understood, and our viewers know we have been on this story here since it broke today, and we will have more updates tonight. Rob D'Amico and Michael Feinberg, thanks to both of you. I will tell folks coming up there are some other very big stories. We have Michael Steele and Joyce Vance on them, the Trump crash, a polling disaster for the president while he tries to [music] take over a billion dollars in your tax money and give it to convicts. It is a huge scandal. It is a big story, and Michael's here on that when we're [music] back together in 90 seconds.

[00:09:32]Corruption scandal today. It's one that first broke with uh News journalists reporting that the president of the United States wants to seize over a billion dollars in your tax money.

[00:09:46]Wants to seize over a billion dollars in your tax money and give it to convicts, to people who attacked police, to people who have been convicted of violent crimes potentially or other partisan crimes.

[00:09:58]We have never seen anything like this in our nation's history. And if you're watching and say, "Oh, there's the news again telling me we're in unprecedented times."

[00:10:06]Well, yes, we are. The nature of the Watergate crimes, which ultimately expelled Nixon from office, changed our entire approach to political corruption, passed the campaign finance regime, those involved, compared to this, small sums of money and relatively minor, largely non-violent political quote dirty tricks, they called them then.

[00:10:28]Here, we're talking about funding the people who battered police, tried to assassinate public officials, including Republicans, they openly admitted to it, uh and were convicted of in some cases sedition against the United States.

[00:10:42]Now, I'll show you that headline. Over a billion dollars for what they call a fund to those people.

[00:10:48]Now, this comes after a ploy. And I say that because as I we reported on this last week, these two things are not very related, but this is a classic Trump trick. And I will always level with you about what we're witnessing. Donald Trump filed a lawsuit that was so weak and shaky that the judge said there may not even be the real type of controversy required to have a lawsuit. And under that pressure, he now says he's pulling it, but that's the pretext for now taking taxpayer money. The New York Times reports Trump is trying to free his hand to reach a deal without oversight again, moving this out of the courts. Potential recipients include the people who did the insurrection that was so heinous at the time that remember, Donald Trump was only impeached for it, but then Trump, first term Trump, didn't those people at the time when he technically had the power. In fact, he said in public at the time that the violence was bad, and it was. Now, we are being lied to and gaslit, and now he wants to not only reward the people he freed, but fund them in case he might try to do this again. Remember how that news broke.

[00:11:50]Some breaking legal news this morning.

[00:11:52]President Trump has moved to voluntarily withdraw his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. They're creating this massive fund of taxpayer money. Outrage by Democrats and a lot of questions from taxpayers for $1.7 billion fund to pay what a lot of people assume will be largely his friends and allies. It's the president's personal attorneys negotiating with the attorneys at the IRS, the Justice Department, and the White House, which are all, of course, under the Trump administration's power.

[00:12:24]An absolutely astounding development.

[00:12:27]Bigger than Watergate, and as a factual matter, it relates to a far more dangerous, physically violent type of political crime. For this big story, I want to bring in Michael Steele. We booked him specifically to discuss this problem. He is, of course, our colleague, host of Weeknights. He's also been the chair of the RNC. So, in a time where people claim that these things are just red and blue, they're not. You you, as someone who served as a Republican, were never obviously affiliated with anything like this. How do you view this scandal?

[00:12:58]>> Republicans that I worked with at the time would would be finding falling over themselves finding microphones to condemn it.

[00:13:07]Um certainly, if Barack Obama or Joe Biden came out and said, "I want to create a billion-dollar fund for people that crimed here in America and just give it to them." They'd lose their you you know what. But, I thought the the interesting thing about your intro was the outrage from the Democrats, questions from the American people, crickets from Republicans.

[00:13:27]Nothing. There's no There's no concern.

[00:13:30]They're ready to give him 1.8 billion dollars. They're ready to sign off on it. Where is the congressional role here in in reappropriating money that they have designated for other things? Where does the money come from? I mean, there's a budget line for everything that we spend supposedly. Even when we spend extra, there's a line. There's a bill. There's legislation. Where is all of that? I really wish these damned Republicans would get off their Trump heiny and focus on the country and the fact that you have spent well more in the one year that Donald Trump has been in office than than Joe Biden did in his last couple of years, right? So, we're spending trillions of dollars. You're proposing a 1.4 trillion-dollar budget for the Defense Department. Why?

[00:14:24]Why? We're in a war that Donald Trump created spending hundreds of billions of dollars a day. So, all these Republicans who beat the hell out of Democrats for years over the spending, the big government programs, all of the waste, fraud, and abuse. Y'all heard that term before, right? What are they engaging in? The ultimate waste, fraud, and abuse on the American people.

[00:14:45]>> Yeah.

[00:14:46]Yeah. And we still care about the Constitution.

[00:14:50]Some people don't. If you could just hand out money without Congress, you could get up to all kinds of things. Cuz if you can do it for a billion, you could do it for a hundred billion. And there's either a legal limit in our constitutional order or there is not.

[00:15:04]Or there is not. And so, if they go forward with this, right now they're they're as always, they're claiming and testing. They've got a sham lawsuit.

[00:15:11]There's a Norm Eisen and others are suing. They're going to test this in court. So, it could still get gummed up in the courts. But it What they're going to try to do is take this money and give it as I said to these convicts. And if they're doing that in the spirit of overthrowing future elections, it could be a part of a crime. And some people say, well, he could re-pardon or pardon these people again. But, let me show you this. It also could be a high crime. I just want to read Sure. The Constitution says the president can be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. Um is this something that you think a serious Congress would take seriously as potentially impeachable if the money goes to convicts?

[00:15:46]>> A serious Congress would. Um I don't I I'm not hanging my hat on that hook. I appreciate the constitutional principle and the norm that it tries to establish, but that requires a a branch of government that's willing to engage.

[00:16:01]The the the times that Trump has been impeached, um particularly the last time, the stopgap was the Senate. And the fact that Mitch McConnell could have done the right thing then Hm. to avoid all of this now. But, the grift in the game and and and the sort of protection of the institution, such as it was at the time, outweighed the constitutional requirement that you do what you are obligated to do, and that is to convict for the high crime of engaging in insurrection, invoking it, stoking it.

[00:16:36]Now, we're at a point where the where this president is prepared to shave off 1.7, 1.8 billion dollars of American taxpayer dollars, and Congress is not even blinking. Yeah. And and give it to whom? Give it I mean, talk >> to them. They're going to give it to the convicts. Convicts. And what does this say for the future? What if What if a next presidential administration decides all these pardons? Here's the problem.

[00:17:00]You You pay this money now to these folks, what are they going to do? Their loyalty is baked in. And so, they will be available to engage in all kinds of nefarious activities starting this fall and into the future. It is a very deliberate effort to fund the shock troops, the militias, and the political violence. We have a political violence problem in this country. This is the funding for it.

[00:17:21]>> As evidenced today is by today's shooting. Uh Michael, always good to have you and important on this topic for sure. I want to fit in a break later.

[00:17:28]There is new testimony from a key Epstein prison guard uh who [music] also received some suspicious payments during the Trump DOJ's first term. We also look at the blowback to this slush [music] fund with Joyce Vance.

[00:17:42]This is so extraordinary that he ran on draining the swamp, and this is the swampiest thing I could possibly imagine is a slush slush fund for your allies.

[00:17:50]It feels so wrong um and and it's it's just disgusting, and it's unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment specifically provides that the government cannot provide compensation to insurrectionists.

[00:18:04]Outrage over the story we've been covering that finally broke here today after leaks last week that Trump, through his DOJ, was preparing to try to loot taxpayer money to spend it on the convicts who did January 6th and other types of people tied up with MAGA. This is the story Michael Steele and I were discussing, and we discussed the problems with it, whether it's unconstitutional or illegal.

[00:18:27]Is obviously not yet been tested in court, but there are multiple avenues. It could be impeachable. It could be abuse of the appropriations power. It could be the 14th Amendment. House Democrats are acting on this. They're urging a judge to prevent it from happening. They argue that this would force the American people to put money into these pockets and the pockets of Trump's family and friends. They warn that it creates a spectre of corruption unparalleled in American history. Some Democrats also argue, and you heard this there in that quote from The View, that this could violate the 14th Amendment because of its reference to insurrection.

[00:19:05]To the extent that he wants to give a million dollars to each of 1,600 pardoned rioters and insurrectionists, we think that that's an unconstitutional uh use of money. Only Congress has the power to appropriate money, and Congress never voted on creating this $1.7 billion political slush fund at the Department of Justice, and Congress would never pass that. There's no way he could get that through Congress. So, this is just an invention on his part.

[00:19:33]Fact check, true. Congressman Raskin is saying something that actually isn't blue or red, left or right. If a sitting president can take a billion or more dollars, as we discussed earlier tonight, then there's no limit. They could take 10 billion. They could take 100 billion. They could start appropriating their entire separate budget from Congress.

[00:19:52]Either you have rules and a constitutional appropriation power, the so-called power of the purse in Congress, or you don't. So, that's one thing. That's the Congress money thing.

[00:20:00]Then there's the 14th Amendment thing.

[00:20:01]There's the impeachable defense thing.

[00:20:03]There's also the question about whether courts would view this as a lawful exercise of DOJ's powers to compensate individuals. I mean, the lawsuit I mentioned you was a ploy, but it was a lawsuit by one individual against the government that he also runs, Trump against the government.

[00:20:19]Compensating a bunch of other people doesn't necessarily fit with any precedent that we're aware of regarding how to settle a case.

[00:20:26]And this case has been so absurd that Trump himself mused about the kind of existential or unlawful nature of suing yourself because you run the IRS when you're the sitting president.

[00:20:42]You're suing the IRS.

[00:20:44]Talk a little bit about what it's like to be on both sides of a lawsuit. It's very interesting. I have another one where, you know, I personally won the Mar-a-Lago break-in suit.

[00:20:53]And uh, you know, I have to work out some kind of a settlement. I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself. Now, with the country, it's interesting cuz I'm the one that makes the decision, right? And uh, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk, and it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages?

[00:21:17]No. People don't have those cases because it's a conflict of self-dealing.

[00:21:21]It is, according to many experts, corrupt. Uh former US attorney and MS now legal analyst Joyce Vance is here.

[00:21:27]Joyce, uh we talked about the outrage of this, the problem of incenting political violence. I turn to you strictly here to now on the legality. There's more than one legal challenge uh avenue. Um but do you see this plan as likely constitutional and lawful or not?

[00:21:45]Well, I I think I'll sign on with the folks who view it as corrupt, Ari, which is to say that it's not legal. And the question is who reaches that conclusion and how do we get there? You know, you've already mentioned Congress. If I was running strategy in a situation like this, the first thing I would do is go to Congress and ask them to pass a law that says Trump can't spend 1.7 billion dollars to do this because Congress has the power of the purse. They can prohibit him from doing this. And so it's their obligation in the first instance. But I think you're more interested in legality in the courts.

[00:22:21]And that's a great place to start because Trump takes the position that as long as he moves to dismiss this case, that's the end of it. It's over and done with. And although under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the case is in a posture where he could dismiss it, he's not really talking about dismissal here. He's talking about settlement, which is a somewhat different thing. And you've just paid played the clip where he talks about being on both sides of the V, right? In essence, this case is Trump versus Trump, an inherent conflict of interest. And it's not even a good lawsuit. The judge in this case, it was filed in the Southern District of Florida, they clearly hoped to get Eileen Cannon, but they didn't. The judge, Judge Williams, actually expressed concerns about that. And so, she appointed three highly respected amici, a former solicitor general, a former judge, asked them to say what they um viewed as the merits of the case. They identified multiple reasons that it was a non-starter. It was brought too late under the statute of limitations for one thing. There were no traceable damages, no proof that $10 billion or $1.7 billion were actually at stake. And Trump's argument was that because of the release of the tax information, he'd suffered reputational damage. But, you know, he was still reelected on the one hand, and there are plenty of other things that could have caused him reputational damage, including January 6th. So, there are so many problems with this case. I think the right place to start is to let the judge consider whether she's willing to dismiss it, and whether she's willing to let it be settled on these terms.

[00:24:10]Right. And the the Trump lawsuit looks like a ploy. They went to court creating this uh potential or fake controversy.

[00:24:19]Then they ran into headwinds and tried to get out of court. And I was speaking to a lawyer today who made the analogy that the judge still oversees. Yes, settlement is a a quite common way to to end a civil controversy, but it's a court overseen process. And if a plaintiff who files a case then seeks to drop it, and the judge finds out, this lawyer uh analogized that that there was coercion, or there was violence, or there was a kidnapping saying you have to drop the case. Well, the court would still have a very vested interest in making sure that there was lawful regular order, uh and not some other problem. So, what do you think of the DOJ, which in any other administration is supposed to hold the line on these things, um joining in what might be a nefarious abuse of that civil court process to begin with?

[00:25:09]Well, it's deeply concerning. You know, we have not seen all of the moving papers, I don't believe yet, but it does have the appearance of DOJ saying, "We want to dismiss this case with prejudice." And then only subsequently creating this judgment fund. Now, look, they happened close together in time and the judge isn't obligated to put on blinders and ignore the settlement fund, but the fact that they did not disclose that to her up front is very troubling.

[00:25:38]They're litigating in the 11th Circuit, that's my my circuit. We take candor to the court very seriously here. And if in fact the appearance bears out into reality and DOJ was less than candid with the court, there should absolutely be consequences.

[00:25:56]Uh I'm curious your view of I said this is bigger than Watergate because the sums are larger and it relates to now convicted political crimes. The president has the lawful power to pardon. Um history may look at it as one of the darkest stains ever to pardon the the attacks on police, the sedition against the United States. I mean, we'll we'll have a long a long time, we hope, as a country if if our republic holds, as Ben Franklin would say, uh to make sense of all that. But but those were grave, violent crimes against the United States, the storming of the capital, the calls to hang Mike Pence, um that rival and are larger, I think, in any measurable way, certainly legally more felonious, um than the even terrible issues in Watergate. And so, when Watergate was reaching its actual conclusion in in the interbranch tension between the Congress and the White House, you had bipartisan group of lawmakers saying they they would impeach and convict over this. And so I say it's larger.

[00:26:57]We'll see what happens in the midterms cuz we know what the current Congress is like, but here's again for the for the country and the viewers tonight what the Constitution says. The president shall be removed, impeached or convicted for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. That's a process that starts in the House as people remember.

[00:27:17]If the House actually viewed this going forward, for example, if money were given to seditionists, to the Proud Boys, to the people who attacked police with an ongoing effort to incent or encourage future such violence combined with Donald Trump's reported promise to pardon everybody in the future. Um do you think this could be a case for a high crime or is it is it too early to tell?

[00:27:42]Well, look, it absolutely would be qualifying for impeachment for all of the reasons that you've suggested, but because presidents can't steal from taxpayers. You know, that's just the bottom line here. This is the president taking your money, my money, all of your viewers' money, and doling it out to people who have supported him, to his friends.

[00:28:04]That it you know, almost seems by definition to be how banana republics operate, not how the United States of America operates. But the impeachment question is one of political will.

[00:28:15]Congress has not shown that will so far during Trump's time in office. Whether or not that changes after the midterms, you know, is perhaps a call to arms for American voters.

[00:28:26]Yeah.

[00:28:27]Uh Joyce uh sober as always uh relevant of even to the the circuit that we're discussing. Joyce, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:28:35]Uh I'll tell folks coming up we turn to another story. One of the last guards to see Epstein alive testifying [music] today. We have that story with new questions swirling about Bill Barr and the Trump DOJ's oversight during what were [music] Epstein's final days.