Now That Trump Has His Roy Cohn, Will the Senate Confirm Todd Blanche to be the Nation’s Attorney General?
We begin with Trump’s intention to nominate his former criminal attorney now Acting AG Todd Blanche to become the Attorney General of the United States and assess whether he could be confirmed by the Senate as well a how the DoJ has already been corrupted by Trump’s appointment of unqualified loyalists as US Attorneys across the country. Joining us is James Zirin, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the host of the critically acclaimed television talk show, Conversations with Jim Zirin, which airs on PBS. He is the author of Supremely Partisan: How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court and Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3500 Lawsuits. He is a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly where his latest article is “Todd Blanche’s Hobson’s Choice.”
The Impact of the Latest Scandal Swirling Around Graham Platner on the Democrat’s Chances to Win Back the Senate
Then we look into how much the latest scandal swirling around the oysterman Graham Platner could impact a must-win senate race for the Democrats in Maine if they are to win back control of the US Senate in November. Joining us is Amy Fried, a Professor Emerita and former Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. She is the author of Pathways to Polling: Crisis, Cooperation, and the Making of Public Opinion Professions, and At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump and most recently, More Than Blue, More Than Yankee: Complexity and Change in New England Politics.
Having Turned Russia Into a Police State, Who is Left to Topple Putin?
Then finally, with Putin hosting his Davos at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum with a pall of black smoke over the city from a Ukrainian drone strike on an oil refinery, we assess the future of the Russian dictator and speak with Michael Kimmage, Director of the Kennan Institute. He is a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America and from 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy and Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, and we discuss his article at The New York Times, “Putin Has No Good Way Out of His War.”