Background Briefing: August 1, 2021

On By gram

 

Trump Shakes Down the DOJ to Declare the Election “Corrupt”

We begin with Friday’s release by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee of notes of a December 27 call from Trump to the then-acting Deputy Attorney General in which Trump told Jeffrey Rosen “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican Congressmen.” Joining us to assess Trump’s legal jeopardy which congress is looking into, is 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. We discuss whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which removes a lawmaker involved in insurrection from office by a majority vote applies to the Congressman Jordan and Perry and Senator Johnson who Trump refers to in his call to the DOJ as “fighters” who “get to the bottom of things.”

 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Could Have Been Written by Exxon

Then we speak with Basav Sen, the Climate Justice Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies about his article at MarketWatch “Biden should reject the infrastructure plan written by Exxon and invest in saving the planet.” Having removed $10 billion in public transit spending, $5 billion from electric school bus funding, and cutting electric vehicle funding by 96%, the infrastructure bill being hailed as bipartisan might well have been written by Exxon lobbyists.

 

Lawrence Wright on The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

Then finally, with Dr. Fauci warning that things will get much worse as the virulent Delta strain of Covid spreads amongst the unvaccinated, we speak Lawrence Wright, a staff writer with The New Yorker and author of The Looming Tower and the recent bestseller a novel about a pandemic, The End of October.  He joins us to discuss his latest book, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid. Due to Trump’s epic bungling and unconscionable delays, this deadly new Delta strain has been allowed to mutate inside of victims and making matters worse, wannabe Trumpsters, Governors DeSantis and Abbott, are banning masks and spreading lethal disinformation.