On today’s briefing:
Trump’s Plan to Destroy US Intelligence and Steal the Next Election
We begin with Trump’s determination to destroy American Intelligence by placing an ignorant thug in charge of the ODNI who will have access to all of the nation’s secrets which will be manipulated and weaponized against Trump’s enemies at the same time augmenting the larger project of stealing the next election. Joining us is Paul Pillar, who served for 30 years as an analyst at the CIA, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Previously, he served as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. He has also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and was deputy chief of the center. He is currently a nonresident senior fellow of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow at the GenevaCenter for Security Policy and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy and we discuss his article at Responsible Statecraft, “Senate wants to force US to share sensitive intel with Israel.”
The Common Sense Coalition’s Warning of the Trump Catastrophe For Our Democracy, National Security, Economy and the Future of the Planet
Then we examine a new movement, the Common Sense Coalition, which is a broad bipartisan coalition of policy experts and former government officials who have issued a comprehensive indictment of President Trump’s second term, calling it “catastrophic” for American democracy, national security, our economy and the future of the planet. Joining us is Ira Shapiro, a lawyer, a long-time senior Senate staffer, and a former U.S. trade official. He spent 12 years in the United States Senate as Counsel to the Majority Leader and in other senior positions where he played an important role in implementing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Senate Code of Ethics. He is the author of a trilogy of narrative histories about the Senate, starting with The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the co-editor of the new book, just out, Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This.
Background Briefing offers an educational approach to providing information in an era of “fake news.”