May 8 – Senate Testimony From Sally Yates and General Clapper; What Can Be Done To Prevent Further Russian Interference?; A Stalinist Imposition of Fake Science on the EPA

Full Program

Part1

We begin with the hearing today before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Russian interference in our election at which former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence General Clapper testified. Michael Fuchs, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as deputy assistant secretary of state and as a special advisor to the secretary of state for strategic dialogues and as a member of secretary’s policy planning staff, joins us. We discuss President Trump’s attempt to intimidate the key witness Sally Yates and her testimony about efforts to warn an apparently unconcerned White House that the National Security Advisor Michael Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians. This following President Obama’s personal warning to the president-elect in their first White House meeting that Trump should not hire Flynn as his NSC Advisor, a warning that fell on deaf ears.

Part 2

Then we speak with Uri Friedman, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers global affairs and was previously the deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy. He joins us to discuss his latest article in The Atlantic “Is France’s Political Crisis Just Beginning?” and how the hacking of the French election was brought up in the hearing today in the context of what the U.S., France and Germany can do to prevent further Russian interference in their elections. We assess what leverage the Europeans have given their dependence on Russian energy and what measures the U.S. might take.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the firing of 5 scientists on the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors with the likely purge of up to a dozen on the 18-member board who are to be replaced by representatives from polluting industries because, according to the EPA spokesman, Scott Pruitt the Administrator “believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community”. Joining us is Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with others on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is the author of ”The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”. We discuss a Stalinist takeover of the government by climate deniers who are imposing fake science on a dangerously real problem.