Day: January 30, 2023

Secretary of State Blinken’s Meeting with Netanyahu and Israeli Drone Strike on Iran

We begin with Secretary of State Blinken’s meeting today with Prime Minister Netanyahu who leads the most far right government in Israel’s history and like former President Trump who is running for the presidency to stay out of jail, Netanyahu is using the power of his office to strip Israel’s Supreme Court of its authority so that he can be in charge of the law and stay out of jail. Joining us is Lara Friedman, the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Previously she was the Director of Policy and Government Relations at Americans for Peace Now, and before that she was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, serving in Jerusalem, Washington, Tunis and Beirut. Lara is a leading authority on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, with particular focus on the Israeli-Arab conflict, settlements and Jerusalem, and on the role of the U.S. Congress.

Was Top FBI Agent Involved in Comey’s Nothingburger and the NY Times’s Dismissal of Trump’s Russia Ties That Helped Elect Him?

Then we look into whether the recently arrested top FBI counterintelligence Agent in New York who was at the center of two contradictory but highly consequential events that tipped the scale in 2016 to elect Donald Trump, was doing so at the behest of his Russian paymasters. Did Charlie McGonigal influence Comey to go public with a bogus story about HRC’s emails on Weiner’s laptop while dismissing the real evidence of Russian interference to the New York Times who just a week before the 2016 election citing “intelligence sources”, gave Trump a clean bill of health in an October 31 article “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia?” Joining us is Will Bunch, an award-winning national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who blogs at attytood.com. He is the author of The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream and, most recently, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. We discuss his latest article at the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The NYT should tell readers whether it helped crooked FBI agents get Trump elected in 2016.”

The Systemic Problems From Elite Police Units and Militarized Policing

Then finally following the disbanding of the Memphis Police’s Scorpion Unit we look into whether getting rid of a few bad apples addresses the systemic problems from so-called “elite” police units and the militarization of American policing. Joining us is Stuart Schrader, Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and an Associate Research Professor of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on: security, policing, and counterinsurgency; the entwinement of foreign and domestic policy; and urbanization, and he is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.