'BradCast' 10/23/2019 (The Desperate Panic to Defend the President)

On today's 'BradCast':  Donald Trump needs a LOT of defending -- on virtually every front – and he's still got quite a few willing chumps, suckers and patsies willing to go down with his ship. Trump's shameless lawyers offered a remarkable argument in a federal appeals court today in an attempt to block the release of his tax returns to state prosecutors probing his hush-money payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign – asserting that a sitting president may not be indicted or even investigated at the federal or state level. Republicans are launching flailing, desperate attempts to defend Trump following Tuesday's "damning" testimony to House impeachment investigators by Bill Taylor, Trump's acting Ambassador to Ukraine. Trump's former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker took to Fox "News" to declare that "abuse of power" is not actually a crime. Trump's far-right allies in the U.S. House stormed a secure room in the basement of the Capitol in a faux "riot" (reminiscent of the infamous "Brooks Brothers Riot" in Florida in 2000) in an attempt to derail the impeachment deposition of Defense Department official Laura Cooper, expected to testify that Trump's withholding of Congressionally-allocated military assistance to Ukraine was, in fact, unlawful. Also today:  in a House Oversight Committee hearing, former ExxonMobil scientists confirmed that executives in the oil giant knew decades ago that the use of their product was endangering humanity by causing dangerous global warming, even as Exxon invested millions in an "immoral" public relations campaign to confuse the public that the science on the matter was in doubt...