Day: December 9, 2019

Briefings

Background Briefing: December 9, 2019

On By gram

 

The Report by the IG of the DOJ Refutes Trump’s “Deep State” Lie

We begin the much-anticipated report from the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz which finds the FBI had sufficient reason to open an investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016 while it has some criticism for the last of a number of FISA applications to surveil the Trump campaign’s national security advisor Carter Page who was caught by the FBI being recruited by two Russian intelligence agents who were later kicked out of the country. Asha Rangappa, Associate Dean at Yale Law School who teaches National Security Law at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University and was an FBI counterintelligence investigator and is now a legal and National Security Analyst at CNN, joins us. We discuss the report which refutes Trump’s “Deep State” conspiracies and attacks on the FBI that they were a bunch of Democratic operatives who conspired to sabotage his campaign. Although the report exonerates the FBI and justifies the Russia probe, Attorney General Barr has again come to Trump’s defense claiming the report “makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation” while Barr’s hand-picked federal prosecutor John Durham who is investigating the origins of the Russia investigation, chimed in that “we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened”.

 

 The Futility of Trying to Educate Trump’s Base

Then we look further into the report with Kenneth McCallion, a former Assistant Attorney General with the U.S. Department of Justice who worked on numerous sensitive counterintelligence investigations involving Russian espionage in the U.S. The author of the new book “Treason and Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual-1”, he joins us to discuss the futility of trying to convince the one third of the country who are Trump’s base and to concentrate on educating the two thirds about the criminality and treachery of our president.

 

The Pentagon Papers of the Afghanistan Fiasco

Then finally, we assess the report obtained by The Washington Post after a three year legal battle called the Lessons Learned project by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction which found that after a trillion dollars wasted along with the lives of U.S. servicemen and women, there has been little to no progress made and that the American public has been continuously lied to and misled during our 18 years at war. A leading expert on Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, the President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, joins us to discuss this report which is being compared to The Pentagon Paper of the 1970’s.