Coronavirus cases are surging in parts of the country with Florida, Texas, and Arizona yesterday setting new records for the number of confirmed new cases. Indeed, hospital beds in Arizona, Alabama, Texas, and elsewhere are filling quickly. But Vice President Pence, in a call with governors, suggested that governors should stop testing their citizens, which would cause the number of “confirmed” cases to decline. And he told those governors to tell their constituents that the Administration has the pandemic under control.
President Trump yesterday signed an executive order on policing reforms calling for additional police training and a new database to track police misconduct. Progressive groups immediately dismissed it as not worth the paper it is written on. Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing their own reform bill but it appears to be stalled in the Senate, where Republicans are suggesting reform measures won’t be voted on until after Congress gets back from its July 4th vacation. Daryle Lamont Jenkins, executive director of the organization One People’s Project, joins the show.
An internal CIA report prepared by then-director Mike Pompeo and his deputy, Gina Haspel, that was obtained by the Washington Post, concludes that the 2016 theft of top-secret computer hacking tools known as Vault 7 was the result of a culture in which the Agency’s elite hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own weapons. The CIA did not even know that the information had been stolen until it appeared on the Wikileaks website in 2017. Officials call it the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA’s history. Brian and John speak with Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, founded by the late Robert Parry, and the author of the book "How I Lost, By Hillary Clinton."
The Trump Administration yesterday filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block next week’s expected publication of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s memoir. Bolton has been working for months with the NSC’s publications review board to ensure that the book does not contain classified information. But once he got the book cleared, someone at the White House, presumably the President, put the final clearance on hold. Bolton then said that, clearance or not, he was publishing the book. It’s supposed to come out on June 23. Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor lawyer who is the author of the book “The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World,” joins the show.
Wednesday’s weekly series, In the News, is where the hosts look at the most important ongoing developments of the week and put them into perspective. Sputnik news analysts Nicole Roussell and Walter Smolarek join the show.
Wednesday’s regular segment, Beyond Nuclear, is about nuclear issues, including weapons, energy, waste, and the future of nuclear technology in the United States. Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear, and Sputnik news analyst and producer Nicole Roussell, join the show. The webinar for comments on the proposed radioactive waste dump affecting Native and Latino communities in New Mexico is on Tuesday at 5 pm EDT, with information posted at beyondnuclear.org.
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