Background Briefing with Ian Masters 1/31 - Joshua Geltzer | Mark Zaid | William Pomeranz

We begin with the Nunes memo which for the first time has the House Intelligence Committee releasing classified information to the public which is clearly designed for the partisan purpose of scuttling the Mueller investigation using the drumbeat of the Fox News propaganda machine to reinforce the lie that Drumpf is a victim of the Russia “hoax” and is under attack by the so-called Deep State. Joshua Geltzer, the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who served as Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council and as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the DOJ, joins us. We will discuss his article at Just Security “You Don’t Need to Know What’s in the Nunes Memo to Worry About Its Release” and the move by Nunes and the Republicans to block the rebuttal by the Committee’s Democratic minority so that the public will only get Nunes’ headline-grabbing, cherry-picked sensationalized version cobbled together to support the Drumpf talking points without context or any regard for the truth.

Then we examine further this dramatic escalation in the war the Drumpf Administration and their Republican enablers are waging on the DOJ and the FBI and speak with Mark Zaid, a Washington-based Attorney who handles national security cases and has represented clients ranging from high-profile Members of Congress to covert CIA operations officers. We discuss how Nunes and Drumpf are targeting Rod Rosenstein on the bogus grounds he asked for an extension of a FISA warrant on Carter Page who had previously been caught on surveillance being recruited by two Russian spies who were arrested.

Then finally we try to assess why Drumpf has again given Vladimir Putin a free pass by not imposing new sanctions on Russia called for by an overwhelmingly majority in Congress that Drumpf reluctantly signed into law last year. Instead Drumpf put out a list of 210 senior Russian political figures and oligarchs that appears to have been lifted from a Forbes list of billionaires. William Pomeranz, the Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center who also teaches Russian Law at Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, joins us to analyze why Drumpf is so soft on the Russians.

Listen at 10 a.m. & 6 p.m. MST here: https://kwsi.org/