March 13 - Trump Unceremoniously Dumps Tillerson; A Double Agent on Russia's Escalation of the Spy-Versus-Spy Wars; An Update on the Closely-Watched Race for Congress in Pennsylvania

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Trump’s crude and deliberately humiliating firing of Secretary State Tillerson today and speak with Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was appointed to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, the advisory body to the U.S. Department of State. She joins us to discuss Tillerson’s appalling record at the State Department which has been eviscerated during his tenure as the Trump Administration invests heavily in hard power throwing money at the Pentagon while cutting the State Department’s budget by 32%, purging seasoned diplomats and crippling America’s soft power. We discuss the many humiliations Trump has inflicted on Tillerson who once referred to the President as a “f***ing moron” and whether Tillerson’s condemnation of Russia for the nerve gas attack in the U.K. while Trump’s spokesperson Sara Sanders was avoiding blaming Russia, was the trigger to the firing of Tillerson in what appears to be yet another example of Trump’s fealty to Putin.

Part 2

Then, with another Russian dissident showing up dead in London today on top of the list by BuzzFeedNews of 14 suspicious deaths in the U.K. linked to Russian spy agencies, we speak with an American double agent who was recruited by Russia’s Military Intelligence the GRU but was all the while working with the FBI. Naveed Jamali, a Senior Fellow in the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, who spent three years as a civilian double agent working with the FBI, joins us to discuss Putin’s escalation in the previously bloodless spy-versus-spy wars and his book “How to Catch a Russian Spy: The True Story of an American Civilian Turned Double Agent”.

Part 3

Then finally we get an update on today’s closely-watched congressional election in Pennsylvania between a moderate Democratic challenger and Republican closely identified with Trump which many see as a harbinger of a possible Democratic takeover of the House in November. Terry Madonna, the Director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College who founded the Keystone Poll and is a pollster for the Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and television stations in Pennsylvania, joins us.