Day: May 9, 2021

Briefings

Background Briefing: May 9, 2021

On By gram

 

Bill Barr’s and Rudy Giuliani’s Growing Legal Troubles

We begin with the legal troubles facing both former Attorney General Barr and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and speak with Harry Litman, a former United States Attorney and deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department who is the Executive Producer and Host of the Talking Feds podcast and a columnist at The Los Angeles Times where he has an op-ed “Rudy Giuliani’s outrage is the refuge of the scoundrel.” We discuss the efforts by federal judge Amy Berman Jackson to force the Justice Department to release the memos that reveal the legal advice behind how Barr spun the Mueller report which the judge noted the former AG hardly had time to skim before misleading Congress and the American people that the report had exonerated Trump. We also examine Barr’s role in twice blocking search warrants of Giuliani’s electronic devices and the irony that had the second attempt at getting a search warrant after the election been approved, then Giuliani would have sought and Trump would have approved a blanket pardon, something that Rudy had asked for but Trump had refused because he was mad at his lawyer for charging $20,000 a day for his so-called legal “services”.

 

Genocide is Underway Against Tigrayans in Ethiopia

Then we look into the genocide underway in Tigray in Ethiopia which the world has been ignoring for the last six months as the Ethiopian army in concert with the Eritrean Army are slaughtering civilians and destroying their livelihoods in order to starve the Tigrayans to death. Dennis Wadley, the Director of Bridges of Hope International, a community development organization working mostly in Africa, joins us to discuss how he recorded the head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s message that has now gotten out to the world announcing that a genocide is going on in Tigray, not unlike what happened in Rwanda.

 

European Leaders Warn Production of Vaccines in the Problem Not Patents

Then finally we examine the backlash to Biden’s proposal to suspend vaccine patents which European leaders at a EU conference in Portugal oppose and at which French President Macron said that waiving patents should be fourth on the list of priorities and that the real problem is production and “The Anglo-Saxons must first stop their export bans”.  An expert on intellectual property and copyright, Shyam Balganesh, Professor of Law at Columbia University joins us to discuss the petition to the WHO from South Africa and India and what can be done to reverse the rampant pandemic in India since nobody on the planet is immune until everyone is immunized.