We begin with the Republican tactic of manufacturing scandals to attack Democrats while ignoring the serial scandals of their front-runner and Fuhrer such as keeping alive Durham’s “Russiagate” nothingburger for 5 years and Hunter Biden’s imaginary crime spree for 5 years while one of the House GOP’s head witch hunters Congressman Comer promised an FBI whistleblower will expose the Biden so-called “crime family” but when it came to delivering evidence, the witness apparently disappeared. Joining us to discuss Hunter Biden’s plea deal over misdemeanor taxes and gun possession charges and how the point of ginned-up Republican show trials is not to prove cases but rile up the rubes is David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author of The Making of Donald Trump. A 13 year veteran of The New York Times, he is the co-founder of DCReport.org, and his latest book is The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.
Then we look into why right wing tech billionaires and Trump operatives like Bannon are funding and promoting the campaign of Biden’s Democratic challenger for the presidency, the conspiracy peddler Robert Kennedy Jr and speak with Jacob Silverman, a contributing writer for The New Republic and a contributing editor for The Baffler, covering tech and national security. He’s the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, and is currently working on a book about cryptocurrency. We discuss his article at Slate, “What the Powerful Men Boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really Want.”
Then finally with President Zelensky cautioning that the war in Ukraine is not a Hollywood movie and that “what’s at stake is people’s lives”, we get an update on Ukraine’s offensive and whether the Russians have learned from their past mistakes and speak with William Arkin, a Senior Editor at Newsweek and one of America’s premier military experts whose investigative work has appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The bestselling author of more than a dozen books including The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars, his latest book is On That Day: The Definitive Timeline of 9/11.