Background Briefing: June 7, 2020
The “Adults in the Room” Finally Speak Out Against the Fraud in the Oval Office
We begin with the dam breaking as senior military officers voice their alarm at Trump’s autocratic actions with former Secretary of Defense General Mattis decrying the lack of “mature leadership” coming from the White House. Then after Trump claimed he fired Mattis accusing him of being overrated in the way he accused the award-winning actress Meryl Streep of being “overrated”, former White House Chief of Staff General Kelly came to Mattis’s defense pointing out he was not fired but resigned over Trump’s sellout of the Kurds, going on to warn the American people that they need to “look harder at who we elect”. Peter Bergen, Vice President at The New America Foundation where he publishes The Coronavirus Daily Brief as well as national security analyst at CNN, joins us to discuss his latest book Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos and his article at CNN, “Why Mattis’ verdict on Trump is devastating“. We assess whether those who were the so-called “adults in the room” will start telling the American people who this ignorant and unqualified man in the Oval Office actually is, and how this insecure narcissist behaves with childish impulses demanding flattery or festering in grievances. Could these four star Admirals and Generals who all held top posts at the Pentagon now speaking out, eventually end up either in negative TV ads against Trump or taking to the stump to campaign against his reelection?
In Dropping the Flynn Case, Barr Sets up a Confrontation Between the Executive and Judicial Branches
Then we speak with Jennifer Taub, a professor at the Vermont Law School about her article at The Washington Post co-authored with Joshua Geltzer, Neal Katyal and Lawrence Tribe, “Trump’s authoritarianism in the streets is being matched in the courts“. She joins us to discuss how in dropping the Flynn case AG Barr is telling the judge the case should just go away no questions asked before the American people learn what happened. In setting up a constitutional confrontation between the executive branch and the judicial branch, it seems Barr’s zeal to cover up for Trump from the Mueller Report to letting Flynn off the hook, knows no bounds.
With Fauci Silenced, an Update on the Pandemic From A Leading Expert
Then finally with the coronavirus now claiming 110,000 American lives with close to 2 million U.S. cases, we get an update from a leading expert on where the pandemic stands given the lack of press attention and the White House’s banishment of Dr. Fauci as Trump makes the absurd claim that because there was a dip in the rising unemployment numbers, the threat is over and the American economy will come roaring back. Dr. Ian Lipkin, the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University who assisted the WHO and China during the SARS outbreak and investigated the MERS outbreak and whose team has discovered and characterized more than 500 infectious agents, joins us. We will discuss how the premature openings are causing spikes in coronavirus infections as the nationwide protests turn into seeding events for the virus.