January 15 - What's the Matter With James Comey?; The White House Press Corp's Shameful Lack of Solidarity; Obama's Legacy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the contentious intelligence briefings that took place last week which left Democratic members of the House of Representatives fuming at FBI Director Comey for apparently stonewalling on investigating Russian connections to the Trump campaign while being all too eager to release unverified and damaging information about Hillary Clinton which she claims cost her the election. Nick Akerman, a former Federal Prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York as well as an Assistant Special Watergate Prosecutor, joins us to discuss whether James Comey is intensely partisan or spectacularly incompetent since members of Congress leaving the intelligence briefing accused him of having no credibility, of being condescending and arrogant, while the ex-MI-6 intelligence officer responsible for the explosive dossier on Trump was frustrated by the lack of response from Comey who apparently sat on his dossier, a digest of which was recently presented to the president and the president-elect in a major intelligence briefing on Russian meddling in our recent election.

Part 2

Then we look into the lack of solidarity shown by the White House Press Corps who submissively sat by while president-elect Trump refused to let a journalist ask a question while accusing CNN of broadcasting fake news. Jeff Jarvis, a Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, joins us to discuss how the press has allowed Trump to established a standard where he decides which questions to answer and which news outlets he favors and the similarities between the incoming Trump Administration’s treatment of journalists and how Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian regimes manage the press.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with James Kloppenberg, Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition” and his latest, “Towards Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought”. We discuss Obama’s legacy and his recent farewell address and assess his successes and failures given that Obama has a deep commitment to bi-partisanship yet during his terms in office, the country became much more polarized.