Background Briefing: July 21, 2022

 

The Powerful Case Against Trump Must Result in an Indictment and a Trial Even If There Will Be Trumpsters on the Jury

We begin with President Biden coming down with Covid on the eve of the January 6 hearing featuring the former White House Deputy National Security Advisor and the former White House Deputy Press Secretary. Joining us to discuss what tonight’s testimony could add to the powerful case against Trump that has emerged from the hearings so far is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research.  She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts. We discuss the need to indict Trump and put him on trial even though in this divided country a unanimous jury might be hard to find since there are more than one in twelve Trumpsters in the land.

 

Will Putin’s Strategy of a Long War With Ukraine Work?

Then, with the CIA Director announcing that “Putin is entirely too healthy”, we look into whether Putin’s strategy of a long war with Ukraine designed to erode support from the West in the hope NATO resolve will start to fray will work. Joining us William Arkin, a Senior Editor at Newsweek and one of America’s premier military experts whose investigative work has appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He served in Army intelligence in West Berlin during the Cold War and has been a consultant to wide-ranging organizations, including the US Air Force, the United Nations Secretary General, Human Rights Watch, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including and The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars, his latest book is On That Day: The Definitive Timeline of 9/11. We discuss his article at Newsweek, “Why Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky Won’t Say Ukraine Is Winning the War.”

 

If the Crimes Revealed by the Jan. 6 Hearings Go Unpunished, Unacceptable Political Behavior Could Become the Norm

Then finally we examine the the concern that every crime that the January 6 Committee shows that goes unpunished moves the line of acceptable political behavior in the US a little lower and speak with Stephen Marche, a novelist and culture writer who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Esquire, and many other outlets. His books include The Unmade Bed and How Shakespeare Changed Everything and his latest book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, and we discuss his article at The Guardian, “The January 6 hearings are a brilliant spectacle. That’s also their danger.