Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the release of the long-anticipated report by the Department of Justice Inspector General who investigated former FBI Director Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email saga which Trump has relentlessly tried to build up as a criminal outrage worse than Watergate in order to distract from the on-going Mueller investigation into him and his family. Lisa Kern Griffin, a professor of law at Duke University who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner and spent five years as a Federal Prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney’s Office, joins us. We will discuss how the report’s main finding is that Comey was “insubordinate” in his handling of the Clinton investigation but it finds there was no “bias” in the FBI’s decision to clear Clinton. However buried in the 568 pages of this report are seven words that Trump and his Fox and friends media allies are blowing up into a smoking gun to proves the “Deep State” is out to get Trump, and that is an exchange of texts between a former Army officer and FBI agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend FBI lawyer Lisa Page who asked rhetorically “Trump’s not ever going to become president right? Right?” To which Strzok fatefully replied “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Part 2

Then we speak with Emma Brown, an investigative reporter at The Washington Post where her latest article is “Inside Casa Padre, the converted Walmart where the U.S. is holding nearly 1,500 immigrant children”. We discuss the first access the press has had to a detention facilities housing some of the 11,200 children now in federal custody. And while the excuse is given that the privacy of children is being protected, the U.S. public knows very little about the fate of children as young as breast-feeding babies who have been ripped from their mother’s arms at the southern border, and the conditions in which they are being detained under what the Trump Administration calls a “zero tolerance policy”.

Part 3

Then finally we get an update on the worsening situation in Yemen which is already a humanitarian catastrophe, as a Saudi-led force moves on the port city of Hudaydah to close off the only access to aid for a country under a merciless blockade which has resulted in a third of the country’s population facing starvation. An expert on Yemen, Dr. Sheila Carapico, a Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond and author of “Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf”, joins us to discuss the extent to which the U.S. has blood on its hands as a result of supporting and arming the Saudi war now threatening to destroy a city of 600,000.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the choreographed Kim-Trump photo-op that was very light on substance and even lighter on the takeaway, a one-page signed agreement which promised much less than the 1994 and 2006 joint communiques, which has left almost all specialists on Korea and U.S. officials who have dealt with the peninsula considerably underwhelmed. Grace Liu, a Research Associate at the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey, joins us to discuss what was left undone and glossed over and that is some kind of nuclear arms reduction agreement with North Korea in exchange for vague security guarantees offered by Secretary of State Pompeo who declined to describe what they might be. With no substantial action forthcoming on denuclearization the Singapore summit was hardly a victory for disarmament but now that the door is open for more meetings ahead, we will assess whether at the end of the day the best deal that could be arrived at between the U.S. and North Korea might end up looking a lot like the Iran deal which Trump tore up.

Part 2

Then we speak with Kyung Moon Hwang, a Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California who writes a bi-weekly column for the Korea Times of Seoul whose most recent study is “Rationalizing Korea”.  He joins us to discuss how the ego-driven amateur who talked of pristine North Korean beaches as real estate opportunities to build condos, might just be the best person to pull of this deal since clearly over the decades the professionals have failed. We will also look into the frightening signal that a desperately poor country devoting all of its resources to make nuclear weapons sends to the world; if you want respect and to be taken seriously, then get a nuke.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, Leo Panitch about President Trump’s new best friend the North Korean dictator he describes effusively as “a talented man who loves his country very much” compared to his newest global enemy Canada’s Prime Minister who Trump refers to dismissively as Justin. We discuss how China reaches out to the world by building roads while Trump builds walls.