Background Briefing: April 1, 2019

 

House to Subpoena Barr to Hand Over Full Mueller Report

We begin with the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler saying today that he is proceeding to authorize a subpoena for the full unredacted Mueller Report as well as the special counsel’s underlying evidence which Nadler argues in an op-ed in The New York Times published Monday that “We require the report, first, because Congress, not the attorney general, has a duty under the Constitution to determine whether wrongdoing had occurred…it is not the attorney general’s job to step in and substitute his judgement for the special counsel’s”. Lisa Graves, Co-Director of Documented, and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department and a Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, joins us to discuss whether the April 2nd deadline Democrats set for William Barr to turn over the full Mueller report to Congress will be ignored by Barr who has promised to deliver his redacted version of the report in mid-April or sooner. With battle lines shaping up over whether the public will get the full report or the one censored by Barr, and since grand jury testimony, along with sensitive intelligence material appears to be the primary obstacle to a public release, we will look into why Barr won’t have a judge determine the extent of grand jury material which could be made public as has happened before.

 

White House Whistleblower Reveals 25 Clearance Denials Overruled

Then we speak with Jeff Stein, National Security Correspondent at Newsweek where he writes the Spytalk column, about the testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee by an 18-year veteran of the White House security clearance process Tricia Newbold, who revealed that 25 security clearance denials were reversed during the Trump Administration. With Chairman Cummings’ Committee about to vote on a subpoena on Tuesday to compel testimony from Carl Kline, Newbold’s politically-appointed boss who overruled her, it remains uncertain whether the White House will comply.

 

Trump Appoints Medicare and Medicaid Mega-Fraudster to Head GOP Healthcare Push

Then finally we investigate the most brazen example of Trump putting the fox in charge of the hen house with the appointment of Rick Scott to lead the GOP’s healthcare reform effort to replace Obamacare which Trump promises “They are going to come up with something really spectacular”. Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist for The Los Angeles Times, where his latest article is “Trump putting Rick Scott in charge of his healthcare push is a sick joke”, joins us to discuss how Scott led a company that paid a $1.7 billion fine, the largest recovery ever reached, for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, meaning the American taxpayer.