BuzzFeed published a damning exposé on President Donald Trump saying that he instructed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow. The report cites “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter,” as sources. Additionally the report found that, “Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. ‘Make it happen,’ the sources said Trump told Cohen.” All of this was apparently happening while Trump was telling the public that he had no business deals in Russia. But Cohen, who was put in charge of the development of plans for a Moscow tower apparently gave Trump and his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka, regular updates about the real estate plan. After Cohen was in the cross hairs of the Special Investigation, “the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.” The Washington Post said, “BuzzFeed’s Michael Cohen story, if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump.” The Post also speculated that the report presents, “An event so cut-and-dried that even Republicans would be hard-pressed not to consider impeachment.”

The BuzzFeed report came on the same day that the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen hired a technology firm during the Trump Presidential campaign to try to rig online polls in favor of Trump. A man named John Gauger told the Journal that he was promised $50,000 to falsely show two online polls in support of Trump for President. According to the report, “Mr. Gauger owns RedFinch Solutions LLC and is chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia, where Jerry Falwell Jr., an evangelical leader and fervent Trump supporter, is president.” Cohen publicly acknowledged the veracity of the report tweeting, “what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.” Michael Cohen has been confirmed to testify in front of Congress on February 7th.

Meanwhile the President continued his game of brinksmanship in the on-going impasse over the border wall funding which has resulted in the longest government shutdown in US history – now at 27 days. On Thursday he wrote a letter dripping with sarcasm to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi canceling her Congressional delegation to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan saying that the shutdown makes the trip inappropriate. The move was clearly in retaliation for Pelosi’s letter a day earlier asking him to deliver his State of the Union address from the Oval office or in writing, in light of the shutdown. Then on Friday morning Pelosi’s spokesperson Drew Hammill announced that, “In the middle of the night, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service provided an updated threat assessment detailing that the President announcing this sensitive travel ha...

FEATURING CHASE AND TOKATA IRON EYES – Friday January 18th marks the first Annual Indigenous People’s March, a major gathering in Washington DC expected to draw at least 10,000 indigenous activists from all over the world. There will be smaller solidarity marches in cities around the country.

Indigenous-led movements have been on the forefront, especially in recent years, of the fight for climate justice, and for greater sovereignty in their stewardship of the land and air. There are many common threads in the struggles facing diverse tribes and First Nation’s peoples the world over. The marchers at the First Annual Indigenous People’s March intend to highlight those common causes.

For more information visit www.indigenouspeoplesmovement.com.

Chase Iron Eyes, leading indigenous activist and member of the Standing Rock Sioux, former Congressional candidate in North Dakota, and his daughter Tokata Iron Eyes, youth activist who was deeply involved in the Standing Rock actions against the Dakota Access.

FEATURING CARROLL MUFFETT – More than two-dozen major multinational corporations in mid-January announced a billion dollar effort to tackle plastic waste and pollution. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste includes chemical and plastic manufacturers, as well as retailers and waste management corporations. David Taylor, the President and CEO of Procter & Gamble is chair of the Alliance.

But environmental groups are skeptical of the creators of plastic being sincere in their effort to reduce pollution and waste. Plastics production is a massive and very lucrative industry and one of the main drivers of fossil fuels use.

Plastics are so widely used and discarded in today’s world that pollution has devastated our oceans and contaminated our food and water. Yet plastic production and use continues unabated.

For more information visit www.breakfreefromplastic.org.

Carroll Muffett, President & CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law.

Acting Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, faced Senators on Wednesday at his confirmation hearing for the permanent position. Wheeler was the EPA’s Deputy Administrator when Scott Pruitt, the previous EPA head resigned in disgrace under a cloud of ethics violations and other scandals. Wheeler testified in front of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and was interrupted by protesters during his opening remarks saying “Shut down Wheeler, not the EPA,” during Andrew Wheeler’s opening testimony at Wednesday’s Senate confirmation hearing. Like his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, Wheeler is antagonistic to regulations protecting the environment, even though he is vying for the position of chief environment regulator. Until just a few years ago he was working as a lobbyist for the coal and natural gas industries.

Senator Bernie Sanders aggressively questioned Wheeler during the hearing about climate change. Wheeler responded to Senator Bernie Sanders’s question saying climate change was not the greatest crisis facing us. Sanders also questioned Wheeler about California’s wildfires. Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist vying for the top job at the EPA, toed President Trump’s discredited theory that poor forest management is to blame for California’s wildfires.

In other news, the longest federal government shutdown in history stretches on with no end in sight. Democratic Representative Raul Grijalva on Wednesday wrote to the Interior Department saying that drilling permits for the oil and gas industry should be put on hold during the shutdown. The Interior Department has apparently been changing employees’ work descriptions in order to continue processing oil lease sales, seismic permits, and more. Grijalva wrote to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, saying, “One of the most striking features of the current government shutdown, brought about entirely by the President’s insistence on building an entirely unnecessary border wall, is the way the administration has bent over backwards to ensure that the pain of the shutdown falls only on ordinary Americans and the environment, and not on the oil and gas industry.”

Among the hardest hit workers in the government shutdown are those working for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), providing security at airports and other ports of entry. TSA administrators have announced that growing numbers of TSA workers have not been showing up, opposed to the idea of being made to work without pay, and stressed about their finances. Airports are having to bring in other workers to fill their positions and wait times for security are increasing.

Meanwhile Republican Newt Gingrich who oversaw the nation’s second longest government shutdown during his tenure as House Speaker in 1995, advised President Donald Trump to not negotiate with the Democrats to end the shutdown. He said during a CNN interview, “My advice would be: Why don’t you schedule three rallies in three Democratic districts and have people show up — see how Democrats feel about that kind of direct pressure? He ought to start planning right now. Reaching out to individual Democrats and ignoring Pelosi and Schumer.” In 1995 Gingrich was perceived by the public as being responsible for the ...

FEATURING MARJORIE COHN –  William Barr, the nominee for Attorney General, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. He will replace acting AG Matt Whitaker who was put in place after President Donald Trump fired Jeff Sessions. Barr had served as AG in the George H. W. Bush administration.

A big part of the Tuesday hearings focused on what Barr thinks of the Special Counsel investigation as it is assumed Trump fired Sessions over his refusal to control that investigation.

Barr asserted that he was friends with Robert Mueller and would respect his work. But he was not quite forthcoming on wanting to release the results of the report to the public, and said he would not recuse himself from overseeing the Special Counsel probe. Democratic Senators are concerned about a 19-page memo that he wrote to the DOJ last year criticizing some aspects of the investigation.

Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and a writer for Truthout.

FEATURING DEDRICK ASANTE-MUHAMMAD – Ahead of what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 90th birthday, there are obligatory memorials and retrospectives remembering his critical work on civil rights. But near the end of his short life Dr. King took on the project of economic inequality and led the “Poor People’s Campaign.” There has always been a racial wealth gap in the US but that gap has not closed. In fact since the 1980s it has doubled.

A new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, titled Dreams Deferred, has found that, “Between 1983 and 2016, the median Black family saw their wealth drop by more than half after inflation, compared to a 33% increase for the median White household. Meanwhile, the number of households with $10 million or more skyrocketed by 856%.” The report links the ever-rising fortunes of the obscenely wealthy with the on-going racial wealth gap.

Download the report HERE. 

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-author of the report Dreams Deferred: How Enriching the 1% Widens the Racial Wealth Divide.

William Barr, the nominee for Attorney General, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and was questioned at length about various issues – in particular how he expected to treat the Special Counsel’s investigation. He asserted that he was friends with Robert Mueller and would respect his work. Barr also said he didn’t think the final report from the Special Counsel’s investigation should be released to the public and that he would not recuse himself from overseeing the investigation if asked by ethics advisors to do so.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal later asked him about his views on what constitutes “obstruction of justice,” and here is how their exchange went. 

In what was one of the most disturbing moments of the hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Barr about his views on prosecuting journalists.

In news of the on-going federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump invited some rank-and-file Democratic Congressmen to the White House on Tuesday for lunch to discuss the impasse over funding for the border wall. He was attempting to bypass House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, but it didn’t work and the Democrats turned him down. There are reports of a new refugee caravan from Central America heading toward the US-Mexico border. The caravan originates in Honduras where about 2,000 people are fleeing together to escape rampant violence under a US-backed government.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it had called 50,000 furloughed federal workers back to their jobs despite them not getting paid for their work. The workers fulfill essential functions such as processing tax refunds, overseeing air traffic safety, inspecting food and drug supplies, and more. Unions representing the workers asked a judge to force the government to pay them if they were required back on the job but the judge denied the request. Almost nothing has changed since the beginning of the battle over the federal spending bill and there appears to be no end in sight to the shutdown. On Wednesday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Trump to postpone his State of the Union address, or issue it in print instead.

The freshman New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won a coveted position on the House Financial Services Committee. That committee is now headed by veteran Congresswoman and progressive stalwart Maxine Waters, and is one of four committees overseeing Wall Street. Ocasio-Cortez has been a rising star in the Democratic Party, taking on Republicans and conservatives with ease on social media, and now will apparently extend that fighting spirit in legislative chambers. It is highly unusual for a newly elected member of Congress to serve on top committees.

FEATURING CRISTINA LOPEZ – The GOP has stripped long-time Republican Congressman Steve King of his leadership role in the House Judiciary and Agriculture committees. The drastic action came in the wake of comments that King had made in a New York Times interview last week where he said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” He later said he was a “nationalist” and defended “western civilization’s values,” but that he was not a backer of “white nationalist and white supremacist” ideas.

But it is strange that the GOP is only now discovering King’s racism. The Times explained that King, “helped write the book on white identity politics that are ascendant in Mr. Trump’s Republican Party,” and King himself boasted, “Yes, Mr. President… I market-tested your immigration policy for 14 years, and that ought to be worth something.” King has been elected 9 times in his Iowa district.

Cristina Lopez, Deputy Director of Extremism at Media Matters.  

FEATURING ROBIN MARTY – Among the things that House Democrats are vowing to do with their new political power is to roll back the increasing restrictions on abortion access under President Donald Trump. In particular they want to reverse the ban on federal funding for organizations that offer abortion services.

But already there is bleak landscape across the US when it comes to abortion access. Anti-choice activists have had great success in restricting a woman’s right to abortion at the state level with new bills being proposed all the time. They have their eye on reversing the popular and critically important Supreme Court decision Roe. Vs. Wade.

What would happen if abortion became illegal in the US? My guest Robin Marty asks and answers that question in her new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America – a guidebook of sorts for women who might see an end to abortion rights in their lifetime, but also for those who currently live in states where abortion access has been effectively decimated.

Robin Marty, Activist and writer and author of Handbook for a Post-Roe America.

President Donald Trump’s Attorney General nominee William Barr is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for his confirmation hearings. Barr has already served as Attorney General in the George H. W. Bush administration. He is likely to face scrutiny over a 19-page memo he had written in June 2018 to the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about his views on the Special Counsel’s investigation into election wrongdoing, and specifically his narrow definition of “obstruction of justice” charges. On Tuesday morning Hawaii Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono spoke to CNN ahead of Barr’s confirmation hearing.

Also on Tuesday, Elizabeth Holtzman, former Democratic Congresswoman who was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon Watergate scandal, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about Barr. Holtzmann takes issue with Barr’s analysis of the Nixon impeachment saying, “Barr’s misguided and clumsy attempt to rewrite history is his broader effort to elevate the president into a kind of unaccountable monarch. This is part of a quiet Republican campaign over the past generation to locate in the Constitution grounds for a powerful ‘unitary executive’ who is virtually above the law.”

Meanwhile the longest US government shut down in history continues with no end in sight as Donald Trump tweets his days away. On Monday Trump retweeted an article that his son Donald Jr had posted from the extremist right wing website Daily Caller, which claimed to be an anonymous op-ed written by a senior government official praising the shutdown because it is, “an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.” On Tuesday morning he tweeted, “Why is Nancy Pelosi getting paid when people who are working are not?” Meanwhile the repercussions of the shutdown are being felt far and wide. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers are not being paid and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which is apparently the nation’s busiest airport, just announced that travelers should allow 3 hours to clear security because of the shortage of TSA workers.

Trump gave a speech to the Farm Bureau on Monday even as the US Department of Agriculture was going without funding in the shutdown. Farmers are unable to get their loan applications processed and are awaiting their farm subsidy payments as the shutdown continues. But during his speech Trump defended the shutdown and his demand for a border wall by repeating the many debunked assertions and outright lies he has been touting. He also claimed there would be immigration policies friendly to agribusinesses seeking cheap farm labor. 

In other news, the GOP has stripped Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa of his leadership role in the House Judiciary and Agricultu...