May 14 – Are the Rats Deserting Trump’s Sinking Ship?; The Man Whose Evidence Brought Down a President; The Escalating Global Ransomware Cyberattack

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the bizarre registered letter from Donald Trump’s lawyers that Trump claims exonerates him from accusations that he has had business dealings in Russia, even though the real questions are about deals with Russians here in the U.S. Investigative journalist Richard Behar, a Contributing Editor of Investigations for Forbes Magazine who also wrote on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune, joins us to discuss his latest article at DCReport.org “The Kazakhstan Connection: Trump, Bayrock And Plenty of Questions” and how the Russian-born mob-connected former “Senior Advisor” to Trump, Felix Sater, is threatening to rat on the Kazakh kleptocrat Tevfik Arif, whose Bayrock Group worked in close partnership for nearly a decade with the Trump Organization. We look into whether someone inside the shady deals behind the financing of Trump’s real estate ventures will spill the beans that could expose the president to impeachment.

Part 2

Then we speak with Alexander Butterfield who served as the Deputy Assistant to President Richard Nixon and revealed the existence of the White House taping system during the Watergate Investigations that provided the evidence that led to Nixon’s resignation as he faced impeachment. We discuss similarities between what happened in 1973 and what is happening at the moment with Trump firing the Director of the FBI who is investigating him and Trump’s threatening tweet to FBI Director Comey that their White House conversations may have been taped.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the global ransomware hacking attack that has crippled hospitals and other institutions forced to pay ransoms in bitcoin in order to retrieve vital data that the hackers have encrypted. Robert Morgus, a policy analyst with the New America Foundation’s Cybersecurity Initiative joins us to discuss the escalating threat of ransomware cyber-attacks that have affected more than 200,000 victims in 150 countries based on stolen NSA hacking tools that more people will find themselves infected by on Monday morning.