Background Briefing: February 24, 2019
How Trump’s Labor Secretary Got Trump’s Friend Off Child Sex Abuse and Trafficking Charges
We begin with the latest member of the team of grifters who make up Trump’s cabinet to have their seedy background exposed, this time its Alexander Acosta, the Secretary of Labor, who made a sweetheart deal with a billionaire money-manager Jeffrey Epstein, a serial child molester and sex trafficker, to escape justice while Epstein’s powerful friends Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew and others were given protection from exposure if they might be co-conspirators by the non-prosecution deal Acosta make with Epstein’s lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr. Marci Hamilton, Professor and Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and CEO of CHILD USA, a think tank dedicated to evidence-based research to prevent child abuse and neglect and author of “Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect its Children”, joins us. We will discuss the many cases of rich and powerful men preying on vulnerable and naive young girls who have escaped justice until now like Epstein and R. Kelly, and others like the owner of the Patriots and the former head of Citi Group who were swept up in a six-month sex trafficking investigation resulting in 300 arrests in Florida nearby where Epstein trolled for young girls to abuse and traffic.
A Would-be Assassin’s Hit List the Same as Trump’s Enemies List
Then we look into the plot by a Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson to assassinate a number of prominent journalists at MSNBC and CNN along with House Speaker Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and most of the Democratic challengers running against Trump in 2020; Senators Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, and Warren who Hasson describes using Trump’s racist pejorative as “poca warren”. Chip Berlet, an investigative journalist who studies right wing movements in the United States and is the co-author of “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort”, joins us to discuss the pattern of heavily armed right-wing white supremacists being influenced and enabled by authority figures, like President Donald Trump whose stated enemies happen to be the same as the one’s Hasson wanted to kill.
The Untold Story of How Americans Fought a Hidden War Against Russia
Then finally we examine a hidden chapter of our history which the American people are largely unaware of but which the Russian people remember only too well. James Carl Nelson, the author of the new book, just out, “The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia” joins us to discuss the untold story of the 5,000 American soldiers, mostly from Michigan, who fought the Soviet Union’s Red Army in the frozen Arctic region of Archangel in Northern Russia between 1918 and 1919.