CHRIS HAYES (HOST): There is a certain sector of the media Donald Trump appears to love,the ones willing to say the most outlandish things. Which may explain Trump's lunch earlier this week with author Ed Klein, perhaps best known for his anti-Clinton smear books. Here's how The Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi describes the reporting in one of Klein's recent books about the Clinton's “blood feud,” quote, “Unless Klein wired his sources and his sources were Bill and Hillary Clinton, none of this is likely to be even kind of true. It's possible Klein is a fabulist, or it's possible he has terrible sources. It's also possible he's a looney tune and the multiple sources he's interviewed upward of 70 times each are all in his head.” Joining me now, Alex Seitz-Wald, MSNBC political reporter. Alex, you've been reporting on the Clinton camp, and I just wonder how much they are thinking about, prepared for, the sort of, you know, vast right-wing conspiracy sorts of stories to start circulating that Hillary Clinton famously talked about back in the late '90s. .



ALEX SEITZ-WALD: Right, well Chris, it was Hillary Clinton who invented the term “vast right-wing conspiracy.”So, you know, this is the kind of environment that they've been operating in for decades. And a lot of these conspiracy theories that are being dredged back up again by Roger Stone and Robert Morrow and Ed Klein are stuff that's been floating out there since the 1990s, since the Clinton White House. So, you know, they have a very large communications team, very large apparatus up in Brooklyn that is going to do a lot of swatting this down. They had some practice in 2014, 2015, with a couple of earlier Clinton books that came out from other conservative authors. But it's just going to get cranked up to 11, as they say. And with Donald Trump, he's willing to go out and say anything, do anything, and Clinton aides that I've talked to have acknowledged that that's a challenge. You wake up every morning, have no idea what he's going to throw out there and how you're going to go after it.



HAYES: Part of it also is it's news what the candidate says, no matter what they -- how untrue what they say is. You cover what they say, which is a sort of way of introducing all sorts of things into the discourse. Here's today, Roger Stone has been giving all these interviews to conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Alex Jones on InfoWars, almost every day. Here he is today, suggesting that Hillary Clinton might kill him, take a listen.



[BEGIN VIDEO]



ROGER STONE: If in a couple of weeks they tell you that I committed suicide because I was depressed, or if I get hit by a truck crossing the street --



ALEX JONES: Or struck by a bolt of lightning.



STONE: Or tell you I was killed in a freak hunting accident, don't believe it. Hillary Clinton's the major perp, and she needs to be exposed.



[END VIDEO]



HAYES: That's one of Trump's senior advisers.



SEITZ-WALD: I mean, Donald Trump is the king of “just saying.” He can take any one of these myriad things in these books, from Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, Bill Clinton is a cocaine dealer, you know, just wild, wild stuff, he could throw any one of these out and buy himself an entire news cycle worth of coverage, and then immediately step back and just say, this is just what I've heard, it's out there, it's on the internet, it's being reported, it's in this book, I don't actually believe this. Like he did with Ted Cruz, saying that his father was involved in the JFK assassination, which is something that I never expected to hear on a presidential campaign trail. Trump is very good at this. He knows how to pull these things out, and he knows how to operate.

Previously:



The Daily Beast: Trump’s Anti-Clinton Playbook Was Written By His Discredited, Conspiracy Theorist Friends



A Comprehensive Guide To Trump Ally Roger Stone, A Racist, Sexist, Conspiracy Theorist

Jon Favreau: Trump “Parrots” “Conspiracy Theories That Are In Right-Wing Media” To Get Media Attention



Anti-Clinton Author Robert Morrow Posted Bizarre Sexual Writings About Clintons, Wished Death On Hillary