Tag: john bolton

Background Briefing: June 22, 2020

 

Strands of Incriminating Evidence Against Trump are Coming Together

We begin with the release of portions of the unredacted Mueller Report to Buzzfeed as a result of a FOIA suit relating to Roger Stone’s communications with Wikileaks in which Stone appears to be the Trump campaign contact to Assange and by extension the Russians. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing editor at Harper’s in legal affairs and national security joins us to discuss the many strands of incriminating evidence against Trump exposing his ties to Russia coming together from revelations by John Bolton in his new book, from Catherine Belton in her new book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Took on the West and from Luke Harding’s forthcoming book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West. With Russian money having rescued Trump after multiple bankruptcies and propped him up for decades, evidence is emerging in the U.K. that the Russians have also thoroughly infiltrated the British business sector and corrupted their political class managing to cover up parliamentary inquiries into covert Russian financing of Brexit and quite likely the current Prime Minister himself, Boris Johnson, who was one of the leading architects of Brexit.

 

An Update on the Pandemic as Trump Pretends it Has Gone Away

Then we get an update on the pandemic which Trump is pretending has gone away, even suggesting to the well short of a million of his 6,000 followers at his rally in Tulsa that we are testing too much and should test less, the opposite of what would stop the rising death toll. Dr. Kavita Patel, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution who is a practicing physician and was Director of Policy for the White House under President Obama where she played a critical role in health reform and pandemic response joins us to discuss how Trump has capitalized on the public’s frustration with the lockdown and is leading us in the wrong direction which will result in a prolonged pandemic, more infections and many more deaths.

 

Trump and Miller’s Relentless Drive to Hurt Immigrants and Their Families

Then finally we look into Trump’s executive order issued today to stop foreign workers and curb immigration using the pandemic as an excuse for him and Stephen Miller to further their racist policies while pandering to Trump’s nativist base. Andrea Flores, Deputy Director of Policy at the ACLU’s Equality Division who served in the Obama Administration in the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security where she coordinated policy for the implementation of DACA, joins us to discuss what can only be described as cruelty on the part of Trump and Miller as they relentlessly find ways to hurt immigrants and their families.