Background Briefing: November 3, 2019

 

Why Trump is Moving to Florida

We begin on this November 3, exactly one year away from the 2020 election, and discuss the presidential campaign ahead which promises to be vicious, venomous, vituperative and fact-free as Trump and the Republicans outspend the Democrats and make more effective use of social media, in particular Facebook. And since Mark Zuckerberg is clearly aligned with Trump, Facebook along with Wall Street and the Health Insurance Industry, will do whatever it takes to defeat Elizabeth Warren who is looking more and more like the Democratic frontrunner.  Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, a 13 year veteran of The New York Times who recently co-founded DC Report and is the author of “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America”, joins us. We discuss his latest articles DC Report.org “How Trump Will Try to Derail the Impeachment: Following the ‘Roy Cohn Playbook’. He Will Delay, Lie, Destroy Evidence, Attack Patriots…Anything to Save Himself” and “As New York Prosecutors Close In, Trump Flees to Florida: Facing Disclosures of His Fake Fortune, He Declares Potentially Bankruptcy-Proof Mar-a-Lago His Primary Home”. 

 

Trump Is Bought and Paid for By the Russians

Then we speak with Kenneth McCallion, a former Special Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department who worked on numerous sensitive counterintelligence investigations involving Russian espionage in the U.S., coordinating between and among the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI agents with the CIA and the U.S. State Department. He is the author of the new book, just out, “Treason & Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual – 1”, and we discuss the extent to which Trump is bought and paid for by the Russians, and how difficult it is for Americans to accept the remarkable fact that their leader is both a criminal and a traitor.

 

Will McConnell Cut Trump Loose Before Losing the Senate?

The finally we examine the possibility that Senate Majority Leader McConnell, when faced with the possibility of losing the Senate as vulnerable Republicans likes Senators, Collins, Tillis, Gardner and McSally drop in the polls, might cut Trump loose to save his majority. Jim Manley, a Washington DC-based Democratic strategist and a 21 year veteran of the U.S. Senate where he served as senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the last 6 of those years and, before that, served 12 years as an aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, joins us.