Day: June 13, 2022

After Manufacturing the Big Lie, Trump Engineered the Big Ripoff to Fund His Comeback and Intimidate the GOP Into Supporting the Big Lie

We begin with the second of the hearings by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection which today focused on the 2020 vote count and how all of Trump’s top aides, with the exception of a drunk Rudy Giuliani, told him he had lost the election which Trump refuse to accept because he had no intention of handing over the presidency and is now mounting a comeback to regain power. Joining us is John Bonifaz, the co-Founder and President of Free Speech For People who previously served as the Executive Director and General Counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute, and as the Legal Director of Voter Action. A distinguished attorney, he has been at the forefront of key voting rights battles across the country for more than two decades, and is a winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award. We discuss the strong case presented by the committee that made clear Trump not only manufactured the big lie, but he was also behind the big ripoff which raised hundreds of millions from his gullible followers that is funding his comeback while intimidating Republican primary candidates into supporting the big lie.

Are the Hearings Meant to Educate Americans or Get AG Garland to Indict the Criminal Behind the Coup?

Then we investigate further whether we are witnessing what appears to be an effort to educate the American people about a coup attempt against our democracy that almost succeeded and is in effect continuing since the same coup-plotter now controls the GOP and is busy working on the next coup. Or are the hearings designed to convince one man, Attorney General Merrick Garland, that he must charge the criminal behind the coup, Donald J. Trump? Joining us is Daniel Weiner, who serves as director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, where he helps to lead the Center’s work on money in politics, election security, government ethics, and other democracy and rule of law issues. He previously served as senior counsel to Commissioner Ellen Weintraub at the Federal Election Commission and we discuss his article at The Brennan Center, “Measuring the Success of the January 6 Congressional Hearings.”

What is In and What is Out of the Senate’s Bipartisan Gun Safety Reforms

Then finally with Sunday’s announcement of a bipartisan deal among senators to do something about gun violence following the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings which 10 Republican senators signed onto, we speak with John Donohue, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has written numerous publications on gun control policy and is the author of Shooting Down The More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis and joins us to discuss what is in the Senate’s gun safety package and what is not.