Month: January 2020

Trump’s Last-Ditch Effort to Stop the Publication of Bolton’s Book

We begin with what appears to be a last-ditch effort by President Trump to stop the publication of John Bolton’s new book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir due out March 17. The formal threat to Bolton came in a letter dated January 23 from NSC lead counsel John Eisenberg who buried the phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky which led to Trump’s impeachment in a top secret server and ignored complaints from NSC officials who later testified before the House impeachment inquiry while Eisenberg himself defied a subpoena to do so. Katrina Mulligan, the managing director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress who served as an attorney adviser and director for preparedness and response in the National Security Division of the Justice Department and also served on the NSC staff as director of disclosure response to unauthorized disclosures of classified information, joins us. We discuss how Trump is suggesting that Bolton might reveal how Trump feels in private about other world leaders which has nothing to do with exposing the nation’s secrets and what chances the White House has of blocking Bolton’s book if they can find anything at the last minute that warrants redaction. And if as it appears increasingly likely, the Senate will vote to hear John Bolton’s testimony in the impeachment trial underway, what tools does the White House have to block his testimony?

An Update on the Last-Minute Campaigning in Iowa

Then we speak with The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel who is on the ground in Iowa covering the 2020 Democratic presidential race which is intensifying in the final stretch ahead of the first caucus in the nation on Monday. He writes The Trailer newsletter and has an article at The Washington Post “Warren and Klobuchar get more frank about electability” and he joins us from Council Bluff, Iowa for an update on the last-minute campaigning in which Senators Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar are disadvantaged being stuck in the senate impeachment trial while Biden and Buttigieg make their closing pitch.

Mayor Pete’s Problems Attracting Minority Voters

Then finally we look into the problems Pete Buttigieg appears to have attracting minority voters and speak with Steve Phillips, the podcast host of “Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips” and the author of The New York Times bestseller Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority who is the Founder and Director of Democracy in Color. They have released a new report “South Bend, Indiana Hiring & Contracting Diversity Under Mayor Pete Buttigieg” and we discuss that and whether the Democrats can win back the Senate.