August 9 - The FBI's 4 AM Raid on Paul Manafort; Could a Paranoid Trump and a Paranoid Kim Unleash Nukes?; Next Time in October Will the Tea Party Shut Down the Government?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a raid by the FBI that took place at 4 AM on July the 26^th at the home of Paul Manafort who was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and was present in the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower which Donald Trump Jr. set up with representatives of the Russian government who were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton to help elect Trump. Harry Litman, a former United States Attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, joins us to discuss the significance of the raid in terms of the investigation underway by the special counsel Robert Mueller. And since Manafort, who took notes during the meeting with the Russians and was treated shabbily by the Trump family when they disposed of him, might be persuaded to cooperate with the investigation, could he avoid legal jeopardy by ratting out his former employers including Jared Kushner who callously fired him?

Part 2

Then we speak with an expert on the North Korean nuclear program, Paul Carroll, who has visited North Korea twice and previously worked on nuclear weapons issues at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the U.S. Department of Energy. He joins us to assess whether the Trump-Kim schoolyard exchange of belligerence with the bombast of the strong threatening the tyranny of the weak, could get out of hand. And could Trump, who is increasingly paranoid as the Russia investigation closes in on him, and Kim who is paranoid to the point he preemptively killed his own brother with nerve gas out of fear the Chinese might stage a coup against him, lash out with nuclear weapons?

Part 3

Then finally we assess the possibility that there will be a fourth attempt by the House Republicans led by the Tea Party Freedom Caucus, to shut down the government in October over the debt ceiling as they have tried to do in 2011, 2013 and 2015. Edward Kleinbard, who served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, joins us to discuss his article at The New York Times “The Debt-Ceiling Crisis is Real” and the likelihood that Mick Mulvaney, the Tea Party zealot who is now the White House Budget Director and his boss Trump, could destroy the full faith and credit of the United States and take away America’s greatest economic advantage of having the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency.