Full Program

Part1

We begin with the hearing today before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Russian interference in our election at which former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence General Clapper testified. Michael Fuchs, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as deputy assistant secretary of state and as a special advisor to the secretary of state for strategic dialogues and as a member of secretary’s policy planning staff, joins us. We discuss President Trump’s attempt to intimidate the key witness Sally Yates and her testimony about efforts to warn an apparently unconcerned White House that the National Security Advisor Michael Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians. This following President Obama’s personal warning to the president-elect in their first White House meeting that Trump should not hire Flynn as his NSC Advisor, a warning that fell on deaf ears.

Part 2

Then we speak with Uri Friedman, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers global affairs and was previously the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy. He joins us to discuss his latest article in The Atlantic “Is France’s Political Crisis Just Beginning?” and how the hacking of the French election was brought up in the hearing today in the context of what the U.S., France and Germany can do to prevent further Russian interference in their elections. We assess what leverage the Europeans have given their dependence on Russian energy and what measures the U.S. might take.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the firing of 5 scientists on the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors with the likely purge of up to a dozen on the 18-member board who are to be replaced by representatives from polluting industries because, according to the EPA spokesman, Scott Pruitt the Administrator “believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community”. Joining us is Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with others on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is the author of ”The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”. We discuss a Stalinist takeover of the government by climate deniers who are imposing fake science on a dangerously real problem.   

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with yesterday’s apparent attempt by Republican senators in the Comey hearing to make the case that there is no evidence of connection or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, even though today before the House Intelligence Committee Comey and the head of the NSA gave secret testimony about the further extent of proven Russian interference in our election directed by Putin to help elect Trump. James Henry, an investigative economist and lawyer who is a Global Justice Fellow at Yale and co-founder with David Cay Johnston of DCReport.org, joins us to discuss how the opposite is true to what Senator Grassley tried to dismiss as the disproven Steele dossier. In fact the Steele dossier continues to be proven factual by press investigations and presumably inside the intelligence agencies there is even more supporting evidence that has yet to come out.  We also look into a just-released Dutch investigative documentary that reveals connections between Giuliani, kleptocrats from the former Soviet Union, and Trump.

Part 2

Then we examine the passage today in the House of the second attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare on a vote of 217 to 213, with 20 Republicans voting against it. A leading authority on the politics of healthcare and healthcare reform, Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of Social Medicine and Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina joins us. We discuss the passage of what is essentially a tax cut bill which has nothing to do with healthcare reform since it punishes the poor by cutting Medicaid in order to make up for a tax cut for the rich. And while conservatives argue Americans have no right to healthcare, there is a right not to die in the street and to get emergency care treatment, which is the least effective and most expensive form of healthcare.

Part 3