Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
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We begin with the breaking news from ABC News that the special counsel Robert Mueller has been questioning Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen extensively in interviews in Washington D.C. and New York and that Mueller has primarily been focusing on Trump’s dealings with Russia. Scott Horton, a Professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing editor at Harper’s in legal affairs and national security, joins us to discuss how Mueller has been wary of dealing with Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis since Davis represents prominent Russian oligarchs and organized crime figures. But apparently Cohen’s alleged visit to Prague to pay off Russian hackers involved in meddling in the 2016 campaign, which was first noted in the Steele dossier, has been part of the discussions. And since Cohen himself has ties to Russian and Ukrainian gangsters that preceded Trump’s ties to the Russian and Ukrainian mob, and Cohen first met Trump when he bought condos in Trump properties for his Russian and Ukrainian criminal clients, the combination of what Cohen knows about who funded the Trump Organization together with what the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization knows and is telling Mueller, could prove fatal to Trump. |
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Then with today’s email from the lawyers for Kavanaugh’s accuser to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that Christine Blasey Ford “would be prepared to testify next week” if the senators offered her “terms that are fair and which ensure her safety”, we speak with Mike Zubrensky, Chief Counsel at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. He was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Obama Administration working on judicial nominations for the Department of Justice and joins us to discuss his article at Medium “Judicial Nominee Background Investigations – Fact vs. Fiction” and how flimsy and fatuous Trump’s and the Republican’s excuses are for why the FBI can’t do a quick investigation of Dr. Ford’s charges against Kavanaugh. |
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Then finally we speak with Daniel Bessner, a Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies who has an article at The New York Times “What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think About the South China Sea? The rising left needs more foreign policy. Here’s how it can start”. We discuss the sweet spot in American politics the left has yet to discover in which you can be an idealist on domestic issues while being a realist on foreign policy.\ |
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