Day: October 1, 2020

Background Briefing: October 1, 2020

 

Will Law Enforcement Protect Voters From Trump’s Private MAGA Army Harassing Them at the Polls?

We begin and go to Portland. Oregon to speak with Robert Mackey, a Senior Writer at The Intercept who was previously a reporter and columnist at the New York Times. He joins us to discuss his latest article at The Intercept, “Neo-fascist Proud Boys Exalt Over Trump Telling Them to “Stand By“, Not Stand Down” and we discuss what appears to be an election strategy by Trump to unleash his own private army of armed followers to steal the election. Trump is calling on white nationalists groups like the Proud Boys along with militias and Q-Anon followers and the Boogaloo Movement who are intent on sparking a civil war, urging them to show up at the polls to “monitor” what Trump has told them will be Democrats casting illegal ballots. We assess what voters can do and whether law enforcement will protect citizens’ right to vote from harassment by heavily-armed, dangerously delusional, hate-filled devotees of Trump answering his call to arms

 

Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett all Worked to Stop the Count in Florida 2000, Will They Do It Again?

Then we look into the brazen nature of Trump and AG Barr’s exaggeration of the mishandling of 9 mail-in ballots by a temporary untrained election worker who was fired and the ballots recovered. With Trump openly calling on the need to seat Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to stop mail-in ballots from being counted, we speak with Lisa Graves, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department and as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She joins us to discuss whether Barrett and the right wing majority on the court will follow orders to stop the count of mail-in ballots since Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett all worked to stop the count in Florida in 2000.

 

 The Hidden Cost of White Collar Crime

Then finally we speak with Jennifer Taub, a legal scholar who has testified as a banking law expert before Congress and was a visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and is the author of the new book just out, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. With white collar crime costing Americans a fortune up to $800 billion annually, while street level crimes like burglary and theft cost about $16 billion a year, according to the FBI, we discuss America’s outrageous double standard of unequal justice.