Background Briefing: June 17, 2020

On By gram

 

Trump and Barr’s Frantic Last-Ditch Effort to Stop the Release of Bolton’s Book

We begin with what appears to be a frantic last-ditch effort by Trump and AG Barr to block the release of John Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir which has already been printed and sent out to reviewers ahead of next Tuesday’s release to the public. Bolton’s 592-page memoir, according to The Washington Post, is the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far, coming from a conservative who has worked in Republican administrations for decades and is a longtime contributor to Fox News. It portrays Trump as an “erratic” and “stunningly uninformed” commander in chief, and lays out a long series of jarring and troubling encounters between the president, his top advisers and foreign leaders. Among the many damning revelations is that Trump tried to get China’s Xi Jinping to help his reelection by pleading with him at a private dinner to buy more soybeans to help out the American farmers who lost their biggest customer thanks to Trump’s trade war with China. Joshua Geltzer, the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who served on the National Security Council as senior Director for Counterterrorism and as Deputy Legal Advisor to the NSC as well as Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the DOJ, joins us. We discuss how Bolton’s book was cleared for publication by the NSC then political appointees like Devin Nunes’s protegee Michael Ellis and Trump’s enabler the National Security Advisor Robert O’Brian, using intelligence to advance political goals, are now trying to stop the book with the desperate claim they are protecting classified information when they are clearly acting to protect Trump.

 

Trump’s “Law and Order” Photo Op Dressed up as Police Reform

Then we assess yesterday’s photo op in the Rose Garden where instead of addressing the need for police reform, Trump surrounded himself with police officers and gave a Nixonian “law and order” campaign speech to his “silent majority” of voters who Trump claimed don’t even know how much they want the police. Lara Bazelon, a Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law joins us to discuss the House bill, the Justice in Policing Act, which Senate Leader Mitch McConnell declared dead on arrival.

 

Democratic Candidate’s Race in Kentucky to Unseat McConnell Tightens  

Then finally we look into Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary election in Kentucky where the competition between the two candidates hoping to unseat Mitch McConnell is getting tighter as Charles Booker eats away at Amy McGrath’s lead. Joshua Douglas, a Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law and author of Vote for US: How to Take Back our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, joins us to discuss how Charles Booker’s “from the hood to the holler” campaign is catching on while the well-funded former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath remains the favorite of the Senate Democrats.