January 12 - Trump's CIA Nominee and His Boss's Battle With the Intelligence Community; A Leading Analyst of National Security and Executive Power; The Peculiar Symmetry on the Left and Right in Excusing Trump and Putin

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the growing rift between President-elect Trump and the Intelligence Community following the release of a devastating dossier on Trump’s potential for alleged blackmail and the testimony today from Trump’s nominee to head up the CIA, Congressman Pompeo. A veteran CIA operative Robert Baer, who is the current national security affairs analyst for CNN, joins us to discuss whether Trump and his new CIA director who does not believe in global warming, could construct their own facts and operate in an alternative universe while the rest of the world continues to convulse and erupt with daily outbursts of reality, many of which result in incidents or events that require understanding, if not attention and happen independently from whatever dogma or ideology presidents and Congressmen might be informed by.

Part 2

Then we speak with a leading analyst of national security and executive power, David Rothkopf, the CEO and editor of the FP Group and publisher of Foreign Policy Magazine and ForeignPolicy.com. The author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power”, his latest book is “National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear” and we discuss his latest article at Foreign Policy “There is a Cure for Fake News and Dangerous Leadership” and how thin the support is amongst Republicans on Capitol Hill for the erratic, insecure and unqualified president about to be inaugurated.

Part 3

Then finally we explore the peculiar symmetry between elements on the American left and the right who resist or dismiss the growing weight of evidence of Russian meddling in our election and the very real possibility that Trump has been compromised by Putin. John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies joins us to discuss his latest article “The Russian Honeypot: Russia has big plans for Donald Trump” and why leftists who should be alarmed by Trump’s fascist tendencies, make excuses for the authoritarian bromance between Trump and Putin.