February 1 - Trump's Brazen Desperation to Kill the Russia Inquiry; Trump is the Gift That Keeps on Giving to Putin; Is Turkey Becoming More of an Ally of Russia Than a NATO Ally?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the White House signing off on the Nunes memo without any redactions ahead of its release on Friday, in spite of objections from the DOJ and the FBI which issued a statement “the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it. As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy”.  Andrew Cohen, a senior editor at the Marshall Project and a fellow at the Brennan Center as well as a legal analyst for “60 Minutes” and a contributing editor to The Atlantic, joins us. We discuss his article at The New York Review of Books, “The Nunes Memo Kremlinology” and assess whether the brazen acts of the Trump Administration and their enablers in Congress will finally get the attention of the American people. With Nunes obstructing justice while the White House obstructs justice to aid the Russian who Trump just let off the hook by defying Congressionally-mandated sanctions against Putin’s oligarchs and cronies, when will it become clear that our president will stop at nothing to prevent the Mueller inquiry from revealing whatever ever it is that Trump is so desperate to hide? 

Part 2

Then we speak with Max Bergmann, a Senior Fellow for national security and Director of the Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress. He served at the State Department as special assistant to the undersecretary for Arms Control and as a speechwriter for Secretary of State John Kerry and we discuss how Trump is the gift that keeps on giving to Putin and how crippling FBI counterintelligence is a gift to Russian spies and as long as Nunes is Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, allied intelligence agencies will not cooperate with U.S. intelligence, which is another win for the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin.

Part 3

Then finally, while Washington is being torn apart by America’s enemies within, foreign policy challenges abroad grow more acute as the U.S. stands poised to lose all of the blood and treasure it has invested in the Middle East in Iraq and in Syria to the Russians and Iranians. David Phillips, the Director of Columbia University’s Program on Peace-Building and Rights and the author of “An Uncertain Ally: Turkey under Erdogan’s Dictatorship”, joins us to discuss his article at Axios “Turkey’s Widening Rift with the U.S.” and how Turkey appears to be more of an ally of Russia than our so-called NATO ally.