May 3 - Comey's Lame Excuse For Costing Hillary the Election; Comey's Distinction Between Wikileaks and Journalism; Could Snowden and Assange Be Both Heroes and Traitors?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the testimony today of FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee and speak with Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who was an Assistant Special Watergate prosecutor and was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. He joins us to assess the answers to Senator Feinstein’s questions about Comey’s role in tipping the election for Donald Trump and his testimony that he went public with the letter that Hillary Clinton and Nate Silver claim lost her the election because failure to do so required an “act of concealment” that “would have been catastrophic”. However Comey did not elaborate and was not asked why it would have been catastrophic and, as he said, “disastrous for me personally”.

Part 2

Then we examine further Comey’s testimony, in particular his efforts to distinguish between journalism and Wikileaks which he labelled as “intelligence porn”, elaborating that “a huge portion of Wikileaks’ activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public and commenting on important public   controversaries, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the U.S.” Michael Kelly, an editor at Yahoo Finance who was previously the front-page editor at Business Insider where he reported on Military and Defense issues, joins us to assess how much Wikileaks has crossed the line between journalism and being a conduit for a foreign intelligence service.

Part 3

Then finally we are joined in the studio by Laura Poitras, who made the film “Citizen Four” about Edward Snowden. She has a new film coming out in theaters nationwide on Friday, “Risk”, which is about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. She joins us to discuss her film that has taken years to complete which explores the territory between the message and the messenger. We look into whether Assange is simply a publisher who is not responsible for the content he releases which the mainstream press eagerly prints, and whether, when it comes to Snowden and Assange, it is possible to be both a hero and a traitor.