Background Briefing: September 4, 2022

 

Trump Will Likely be Indicted But Not Until After the November Elections

We begin with the DOJ’s court filing in response to Trump’s amateurish efforts to delay the investigation into his mishandling of classified national defense secrets and discuss the incriminating inventory of missing documents including 43 empty folders which contained highly classified top secret documents. Joining us is Harry Litman, a former United States attorney and deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. A professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, he is the Executive Producer & host of the Talking Feds podcast and legal affairs columnist at the Los Angeles Times where his latest article is “The Mar-a-Lago search looks more like it could provide a way to hold Trump accountable.” We discuss the possibility that Trump will be indicted but that will likely happen after the November election.

 

Biden’s Speech to Save American Democracy Was Too Partisan for the TV Networks

Then we get an assessment of Thursday’s address to the nation on the MAGA Republican assault on American democracy by President Biden that the major TV networks and Fox News did not carry and speak with Alexander Keyssar, a Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School where his current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of poverty. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and previously he chaired the Social Science Research Council’s National Research Commission on Voting and Elections. His latest book is Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

 

Growing up Next to the Nuclear Plant Now Threatened by Russian Occupiers

Then finally we speak with Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk, a London-based author from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine and a special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London. She holds research affiliations at the University of London and we discuss her article at CNN, “Don’t wake the nuclear giant on our doorstep” that deals with the legacy of Chernobyl and the current dangers posed by the Russian occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant which Sasha grew up beside and toured as a young school student.