Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin laid out the four criminal referrals the January 6th Committee made to the DOJ recommending that Donald J. Trump and others be investigated for the events relating to the attack on the US Capitol. The report included some startling new disclosures including testimony from a former White House staffer that is a potential case of witness tampering. How do we assess the report from the Jan 6 Committee and where do the investigations go from here? We talk to Rep. Raskin and one of the Committee's star witnesses, retired Federal Appellate Court Judge J. Michael Lut ..read more

In the Pantheon of American conspiracy theories, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy is the gift that keeps on giving. For nearly 60 years it has been dissected and debated by partisans of countless conspiracy theories. So what does the newly released material on the matter show? And what are they still keeping secret? We talk to two leading experts on the subject, former New York Times reporter Phil Shenon and former Washington Post Reporter Jeff Morley. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ..read more

On this episode of the podcast, we sit down with Ron Deibert, who runs the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, to discuss the “mercenary spyware” industry - and its proclivity for providing “almost god-like” spyware programs to governments who’ve been proven to use them to surveil “opposition politicians, human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers, and political dissidents. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ..read more

The violent insurrection at the Capitol last year was a sobering day for American democracy, and yet many people thought that - at the very least - it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and push it to separate itself from Trump and move on from his repeated lies with respect to “the big steal.” That is not what happened - instead, the past two years represented a pivot point between “this is not normal “ and “this is dangerous and not going away” as we’ve all been witness to GOP taking the “plunge deeper into a Trumpian cult of compulsive dissembling and conspiracy mo ..read more

“I have been accused of having obstructed the war. I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone. I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace.” So said Eugene Debs on September 12th, 1918 to members of a jury tasked with deciding whether he had, as prosecutors argued, during a speech given a few weeks earlier to a crowd of socialists attempted “to promote insubordination [in the military]” and “propagate obstruction to the [military] draft.”  Debs - a socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of, among many leftist groups, the ..read more

“Every so often over the past quarter-century, analysts have predicted that Iran was on the cusp of major change. They always turned out to be wrong. Now, unrest is engulfing the country yet again.” So writes Jason Rezeian in a recent piece for the Washington Post about the threats the Iranian government is facing, what people are saying - and why this time could be different.  For the past three months, Iran has been rocked by protests prompted by the death of a young woman - Mahsa Amini - while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” for the alleged crime of wearing an improper hijab ..read more

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday announced what amounts to a legal bombshell in the two most high profile investigations being carried out by his department. He's appointing a Special Council to oversee the ongoing probes into whether Donald Trump illegally sought to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. And whether he violated federal law by taking classified documents from the White House and then refused to turn them over in response to a court approved subpoena. Garland named Jack Smith, a career department prosecutor who once headed the Justice Department's Int ..read more

Donald Trump on Tuesday night announced to no one’s surprise that he will once again run for President. By Trumpian standards he seemed subdued as he described America’s decent into war, crime, and economic catastrophe ever since he left the White House twenty-two long months ago and Joe Biden took office. And yet the timing seemed curious. And to many Republicans infuriating. The party had just suffered un-expecting setbacks in the midterms. Once again losing the Senate and it seems just barely taking back the House as Trump endorsed candidates fell by the wayside one by one. And if ..read more

Even while still reeling from their disappointing performance in Tuesday's election, Republicans are bracing for more turmoil, as they prepare to likely take over the House of Representatives with the thinest of majorities. Instead of celebrating the election results as he had expected, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is now facing serious unrest within his ranks, threatening his prospects of taking the gavel from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when the new congress convenes Jan. 3rd. And even if he does ultimately prevail, how much power will McCarthy actually have? And what should we expect from ..read more

When Vivian Schiller signed on as a Senior Executive at Twitter in 2013, she was excited to be joining a company that seemed poised to remake the world. It was a heavy time for the social media start-up. Just a few years early, it had been messages on Twitter that connected Democracy activists throughout the Middle East leading to a revolutionary moment known as the Arab Spring. But Schiller soon became disillusioned and has long since left the company. In the years since, Twitter was increasingly hi-jacked by purveyors of hate and disinformation, fouling democracy instead of spreading it. Now ..read more