Background Briefing: September 17, 2018

On By gram

 

Kavanaugh’s Accuser Ready to Testify and Take a Lie-Detector Test

We begin with the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford going public and offering to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and take a lie detector test to support her charge that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge held her down as Kavanaugh tried to sexually assault her in the upstairs bedroom of a home where Kavanaugh and his classmates at Georgetown Prep were having an alcohol-fueled party. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and a former Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan who is the author of numerous articles on rape and domestic violence, joins us to assess whether Kavanaugh will take a lie detector test since the issue before the Senate is likely to no longer be about sexual assault or attempted rape but lying about whether the incident happened or not. We also examine the credibility of denials by Mark Judge who has written two books about his teenage years at Georgetown Prep “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk” and “God and Man at Georgetown Prep”, which chronicle being “completely annihilated” while trying to “hook up”. The only likely reference to Kavanaugh in Judge’s writing comes in a passage where a girl at a party asked Judge “Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh? I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night”. To which Judge replies “Yeah he passed out on his way back from a party”.

 

Inside the Court Filings in the Manafort Plea

Then we look into the court filings in the Manafort plea deal with Robert Mueller to assess the extent to which Manafort was working for Russia against American interests and speak with Craig Unger, the author of the new book just out “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia”. He joins us to discuss how Manafort was not on the Ukrainian payroll but on Putin’s payroll all along with the only other person having stronger ties to Russia and the Russian mob being Manafort’s boss, Donald Trump.

 

Will FARA be Strengthened Because of Its Abuse By Manafort?

Then finally we speak with James Thurber,the University Distinguished Professor of Government at American University whose latest book is “Congress and Diaspora Politics: The Influence of Ethnic and Foreign Lobbying”. He joins us to discuss how much Robert Mueller is bringing attention to FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act which Congress passed in 1938 to go after pro-Nazi propagandists. Since then it has been allowed to languish as K-Street super-lobbyists like Manafort brazenly ignored it, until Trump’s former campaign manager was just about to be tried under it and made his recent plea deal with Mueller.