December 15 - Putin Personally Directed the Operation to Elect Trump; The Shia Crescent is Now a Reality; Putin Now Targets the German Elections

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.