The Rachel Maddow Show Season 18 Episode 110 Dec 1

Rachel Maddow relays the details of a new Washington Post report that Donald Trump's secretary of defense, former weekend cable news host Pete Hegseth, gave orders to kill everyone on board a boat he accused of running drugs to the United States, which meant finishing off the survivors of an initial strike that destroyed the boat — the literal textbook definition of an illegal order. Rep. Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee joins to discuss a new, bipartisan push to investigate Hegseth's orders.

Rachel Maddow talks with Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of Russian dissident activism group Pussy Riot, about what it means that the Putin administration has declared her a member of an "extremist" organization, and the parallels to Donald Trump using a similar tactic to give himself the tools for targeting people he doesn't like.