February 18 - Is Donald Trump a Traitor?; Could the Young Student in Florida Revive Gun Control?; How Growing Inequality Threatens the US Constitution

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the latest indictment in the Mueller investigation announced on Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein which accuses 13 Russians and 3 Russian entities of intervening in the 2016 election to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.  James Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winner former investigative reporter with The New York Times who is now the Senior National Security Correspondent at The Intercept where he has an article “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?”, joins us. We discuss what could be the most consequential covert operation since Germany put Lenin on a train to Petrograd in 1917 and how much Russia’s new Czar, the former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin, has created a state run by a consortium of spies, gangsters and oligarchs in which Putin regulates the oligarchs, handing out state assets and government contracts in exchange for political favors and off-the-books covert operations and influence campaigns which are augmented by legions of trolls and self-financed Internet criminals.   

Part 2

Then we look into the possibility that something might actually be done in response to the latest mass shooting beyond the usual sop of “thoughts and prayers”, this time led by the young survivors at the Florida High School who held an impassioned rally over the weekend calling out President Trump and lawmakers on the NRA payroll with chants of “shame on you” and “vote them out”. An expert on the 2^nd Amendment, Saul Cornell, the Chair of History at Fordham University whose latest book is “The Second Amendment Goes to Court”, joins us to discuss the planned march by the students on Washington on March 24 and how the 2nd Amendment has been misinterpreted to give unlimited rights to a small minority of gun fanatics at the expense of the rights of Americans to have, as the founder fathers intended , “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state”.

Part 3

Then finally, we speak with Ganesh Sitaraman, a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and a longtime advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren who is the author of a new book just out, “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic”. We discuss how the United States was uniquely set up as an egalitarian democracy in opposition to the feudal rule of the British aristocracy and that if rising income inequality is not addressed, it will destroy the American Constitution.