Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo and speak with Robert Litt, the former General Counsel for the Director of National Intelligence who is now with Morrison and Foerster National Security and Global Risk and Crisis Management Practices. He joins us to discuss whether our intelligence agencies will continue to confide in Congress and the increasing pressure that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is bringing to bear on Paul Manafort whose business partner Rick Gates is now cooperating with Mueller. We assess whether Manafort will break under the mounting pressure of spending decades in prison or hang tough and fall on this sword for Trump in the hope of a presidential pardon and examine the reasons why Rick Gates lied to Mueller as recently as February 1^st after his proffer to make a deal in an apparent attempt to cover up for the Kremlin-friendly Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher who Gates met with but lied about the 2013 meeting.

Part 2

Then we look further into the Democratic memo from the Minority Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and the extent to which it reflects the total breakdown of an oversight committee that was traditionally bi-partisan. Loch Johnson, the Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia who served as staff director of the Senate Committee on Intelligence and is the author of a new book just out, “Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States”, joins us. We discuss Trump’s Republican enablers apparent willingness to destroy the DOJ and FBI in order to cover up for Trump and distract the public from the Russia investigation.   

Part 3

Then finally we look into the Janus v. AFSCME case before the Supreme Court on Monday which could strike a major blow to public sector unions and dry up Democratic Party funding before the 2018 midterm elections. With Janus predicted to win the case thanks to Neil Gorsuch, we speak with labor expert and University of California, Berkeley professor Dr. Harley Shaiken, about how this conservative assault could set a precedent for workers’ invocation of the First Amendment to essentially free-ride on unions without having to pay dues as well as further limiting workers bargaining rights, like the restrictions Scott Walker passed in Wisconsin in 2011.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the looming showdown between White House Chief of Staff Kelly and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who is resisting giving up his access to the nation’s top secrets which, although he does not have a permanent security clearance, Kushner is the biggest consumer of in terms of top secret information, much of which could be highly profitable to private business interests. Jeff Stein, who covers spy agencies and foreign policy for Newsweek and wrote the Spy Talk column for the Congressional Quarterly, joins us to discuss how vulnerable the Trump White House is to foreign spies with 130 staffers with access to top secrets unable to get security clearances. We also speculate why the intelligence community does not want to give Kushner a security clearance and why he is getting his hands on as much vital intelligence as possible, even though he has not qualified for a permanent security clearance.

Part 2

Then we investigate what could be the most amazing power play and greatest coup by the Koch Brothers who are poised to rewrite the entire U.S. Constitution according to their policy preferences and ideological whims and wishes. Joining us is Lisa Graves, the co-director of Documented, a new investigative website at documentedinvestigations.org who served in all three branches of the federal government – as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief for the U.S. Courts. We discuss how the entire U.S. Constitution could be up for grabs if the Koch-funded effort to bring about a Constitution Convention via the ratification of 34 states is successful.

Part 3

Then finally we explore further the possibility that the laws of the land and the very foundation of American democracy are about to be rewritten by the Koch Brothers who already have 28 of the 34 states needed to convene a Constitutional Convention in their pocket, so it would seem that the billionaire right wing donors are well on their way to pulling off the ultimate coup. Alex Kotch, an investigative journalist focusing on money in politics who was until recently part of the Political Capital investigative unit at the International Business Times, joins us to discuss his article at the Center for Media and Democracy, “Kochs Bankroll Move to Rewrite the Constitution”.