Background Briefing: February 3, 2021

On By gram

 

The Democratic House Managers’ Impeachment Brief

We begin with deliberations in the House GOP over whether to demote the third highest ranking House Republican Liz Cheney or QAnon’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outcome of which will make it clear whether or not the GOP is Trump’s party in which conspiracy has triumphed over conservatism. Jennifer Taub, a legal scholar and advocate who is a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law whose latest book is Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, joins us. We discuss the impeachment brief filed by the Democratic House Managers which makes the case Trump is “singularly responsible” for the January 6 mayhem which was “a betrayal of historic proportions”, asking “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a Joint Session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be.

 

The Axios Report Inside the Craziest Meeting in the Trump Presidency

Then we speak with Chris Whipple a multiple Peabody and Emmy Award-winning producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes and the author of the bestseller, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency and his latest book, The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shaped History and the Future. He joins us to discuss his article at The Washington Post, “Mark Meadows has earned his title of worst chief of staff in history” and the explosive article at Axios “Bonus episode: Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency“.

 

Polluters Try to Blame Climate Change on Personal Responsibility Not the Fossil Fuel Industry

Then finally we speak with Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State who contributed with other IPCC authors to the award of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace and is the author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy and his latest book, just out, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet which follows on from the first climate war about denialism to the new climate war in which the polluters are shifting blame away from them onto the people as though global warming is about personal responsibility not the result of the fossil fuel industry.