Background Briefing: April 9, 2019
Barr’s Less-Than-Reassuring Testimony
We begin with Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the House Appropriations Committee today in which he promised the release of the Mueller Report “within a week” but ruled out the possibility of going to a judge to have grand jury testimony unsealed and along with redactions for classified material, he allowed himself considerable leeway in saying he will remove “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties”. Elie Honig, who served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8 years and is a Legal Analyst at CNN where he has an article “What is Barr trying to hide?”, joins us to discuss his concerns that Barr is not erring on the side of disclosure and transparency but rather is digging in in his role as the gate-keeper on how much of the 400 pages of a critically important inquiry with compelling public interest will be made available to the Congress and the American people. Furthermore, as an ironic coincidence, a circuit court just ruled that judges no longer have the discretion to release grand jury material which means that the House Judiciary Committee will have to initiate impeachment hearings to get what has been redacted from the Mueller Report and even then it is not clear that Chairman Nadler’s Committee will qualify as a judicial proceeding rather than a political inquiry.
Republicans Try to Deflect Hearing on White Supremacy
Then we speak with Jared Holt, a Research Associate at Right Wing Watch who attended today’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on the rise of hate crimes and white nationalism in America today. We assess the antics of the Republicans on the Committee who demonstrated how they will do anything to disguise the fact that white supremacy is a critical part of the GOP’s and Donald Trump’s base. With Republican’s Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz putting up witnesses like the African/American apologist for Hitler Candace Owens to make the case that the Democrats are the real racists, one of their witnesses described the mass murderer of Muslims in New Zealand as a “left-wing eco-terrorist” despite the fact that the mosque shooter cited Candace Owens as an inspiration.
Outside Backers are Driving Libya to a New Civil War
Then finally we get an analysis of the looming new civil war in Libya from Abubaker Saad, a professor of history at Western Connecticut State University who worked for the Libyan government as Qaddafi’s translator then plotted to overthrow him but had to flee the country when the plot fell apart. He joins us to describe how outside backers of the warlord General Haftar on his side Egypt, Russia and the U.A.E., and on the other side backing the U.N.-recognized government, Qatar, Italy and Turkey, are driving the conflict and preventing a peaceful settlement.