February 20 - How the Right Wing Media and Bots Took Down Senator Al Franken; Mueller Closes in on Manafort as Putin Sacrifices His "Cook"; Nikki Haley's Snarky Rebuke of the Palestinian Leader

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the explosive revelation in Newsweek from new research which has found that the case against Senator Al Franken was largely manufactured by right wing operatives and then amplified by bot networks and orchestrated and disseminated by the right wing echo chamber in the media. Nina Burleigh, the National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek joins us to discuss her latest article at Newsweek “How an Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken”. We will trace the roll of Trump’s dirty trickster Roger Stone and the right wing media network surrounding the alleged victim, the Hooters pin-up model Leeann Tweeden, along with the Japanese bots. We will also look into how the Democrats folded thinking Roy Moore would be elected to the Senate and that they’d need to take the moral high ground by sacrificing Senator Franken while in the rush to judgement, not investigating who the women who came forward accusing Franken were and whether they were for real and their stories based in truth.

Part 2

Then we get an update on the Mueller investigation following today’s announcement of a guilty plea from a former attorney at an international law firm charged with lying to federal agents about work he had done for Paul Manafort on behalf of Putin’s puppet in Ukraine Yanukovych.  Anders Aslund, a professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, who served as an economic advisor to the governments of Russia and Ukraine, joins us to discuss the ties between Manafort, Rick Gates and the lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, who is the son-in-law of a powerful oligarch and co-owner of Russia’s Alfa Bank.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with a former editor of The New York Times, Dulcie Leimbach, the founder of Pass Blue that covers the United Nations, for which she writes and edits. We discuss the address today to the U.N. Security Council by the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that was followed by a snarky rebuke from the U.S. Representative to the U.N. Nikki Haley who castigated the Palestinian leader reminding him that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was a done deal, even though Abbas had left the chamber before she made her speech.