Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the assassination of Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey at the hands of an off-duty Turkish policeman who shouted “don’t forget Aleppo” and “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire. Aaron Stein, a Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Center for the Middle East whose research interests include U.S.-Turkey relations, Turkish foreign policy and the Syrian conflict, joins us. We discuss whether there is a disconnect between President Erdogan’s policy of stirring up anti-Americanism while cozying up to Russia, and how the Turkish people feel about Russian atrocities in Aleppo and Syria that are straining Turkish resources on the border as more and more Syrian refugees pour into Turkey to escape the Russian/Iranian/Assad offensive to capture Aleppo and the rest of rebel-controlled Syria.

Part 2

Then we speak with a veteran former CIA officer Mel Goodman, about Donald Trump’s continuing denial of Russian involvement in helping him win the election, now that it is the consensus of the Intelligence Community that Putin did indeed intend to hurt Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump. We will discuss whether Trump, who has trashed the CIA and refuses to take daily briefings, will continue on this collision course and reject the findings of a report on Russian hacking that Obama has ordered released before his term ends and Trump is inaugurated.

Part 3

Then finally, with today’s The New York Times report finding that there was next to no voter fraud in the recent election, we speak with David Jefferson, a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing who sits on the boards of the California Voter Foundation and Verified Voting. He was among the experts who conducted the recount in Wisconsin and was poised to do so in Pennsylvania and Michigan before the Trump campaign sued to stop the recount. We discuss whether the issue is settled and what remains to be done to secure voting systems in America. 

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the White House spokesman Josh Earnest today chiding Donald Trump over his dogged insistence that Russia did not hack our elections saying “Mr. Trump obviously knows that Russia was engaged in malicious cyberactivity that was helping him and hurting Secretary Clinton’s campaign…and it might be time to not attack the intelligence community but actually be supportive of a thorough, transparent, rigorous, non-political investigation into what actually happened”. A veteran U.S. intelligence operative, Malcolm Nance, the author of “The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election”, joins us to discuss how it has been obvious for a long time that Russian hacking has been going on yet only now are we learning that Vladimir Putin conducted a hate-filled vendetta against Hillary Clinton, personally handling the operation to help elect Donald Trump and defeat the woman against whom he harbors a bitter grudge.

Part 2

Then, with the fall of Aleppo to Russian, Iranian and Assad regime forces, we will look into the major geostrategic shift underway in the Middle East with what amounts to the so-called “Shia Crescent” becoming a reality with Iran, through its proxies, now effectively in control of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Nader Hashemi, The Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and author of “The Syria Dilemma”, joins us to discuss how the folly of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s war in Iraq has rewarded Iran at the expense of Saudi Arabia and possibly in the near future, Israel. 

Part 3

Then finally we speak with a former Swedish diplomat who served in Moscow and was an advisor to the Russian government, Anders Aslund, a professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. He joins us to discuss Putin’s next target, now that he has his man Trump in the White House, Germany’s Angela Merkel and her party up for reelection. With Putin’s cyber-warriors now switching their attention to sabotaging the German elections, we examine the Russian trolls farms now deployed to spread fake news and anti-immigrant paranoia to help elect right wing and neo-Nazi parties in Germany.