February 11 - The Creeping Coup is Underway in America; Making the Case for Impeachment; Could Clashes Between Israel and Iran Lead to a Wider Escalation of the Syrian War

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with revelations in The New York Times that American intelligence agents tried to buy back NSA and CIA hacking tools stolen by the so-called “Shadow Brokers” but were instead offered dirt on Trump cavorting with six Russian prostitutes in Moscow’s Ritz hotel. Trump has seized on this story to claim vindication tweeting out that “the Russians sold phony secrets on Trump to the U.S…Its all starting to come out now - DRAIN THE SWAMP!”  We will examine this bungled operation with a former CIA operations officer Robert Baer who is now the national security analyst for CNN and discuss whether there is a creeping coup underway in America as Trump appears to be winning in his efforts to change the subject from investigations into him, his family and his business activities by turning the tables with constant calls for investigations of the press, the intelligence community, Hillary Clinton, the FBI, the DOJ and Democrats on the Intelligence Committees. Now that Trump has fired or forced out almost every official in the FBI and DOJ in change of investigating him, as he sits on the Democrat’s rebuttal to the phony Nunes memo, we will assess whether Trump will be able to either delay, neutralize or shut down the Mueller inquiry.

Part 2

Then we speak with the American political historian Allan Lichtman, who has studied both the American right and the presidency and is the author of the national bestseller “The Case For Impeachment”, just out now in an updated edition. He joins us to discuss the apparent determination if not desperation on Trump’s part to prevent the evidence against him that Mueller has collected from seeing the light of day, and whether in terms of comparisons to Watergate, the reverse is true that this time Trump’s crimes are worse than the cover-up underway.

Part 3

Then finally, we look into whether the Iranian drone incursion into Israel and the punitive airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria that followed the downing of an Israeli F-16, could lead to a wider escalation of the many-sided war in Syria. Asher Kaufman, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Contested Frontiers: Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict at the Syria, Lebanon, Israel Tri-Border Region”, joins us. We will discuss Russia’s fear of an escalation and the further complication that two NATO allies Turkey and the U.S. could also be drawn into a confrontation over the Kurds.