Skullduggery

• Many chilling images and voices were displayed by the January 6th Committee on Thursday Night including audio tapes of some of the rioters talking among themselves about hunting down and possibly even killing members of Congress. The Rioters wreaked havoc on the US Capitol, smashing windows, detonating smoke bombs, assaulting police officers, while President Trump sat watching Fox News in the White House dining room, indifferent and unmoved, rejecting repeated pleas from his top White House aides, the Republican Leader of the House, his friends at Fox News, and even members of his own family to speak out and call off the mob. We learned for the first time that members of Vice President Mike Pence's own security detail feared for their lives and were frantically calling home to their loved ones during the attack. And we heard for the first time from yet another incredibly strong young woman, White House Press Aide Sarah Matthews, describing how she was so repulsed by Trump's profound derelict of duty that she drafted and submitted her resignation that very day. How powerful was the committee's summertime finale? And perhaps more importantly, how will it be assessed at DOJ? We're joined by Mary McCord, Fmr. top National Security Official in the Department of Justice.

GUESTS:

• Mary McCord, Fmr. Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division in the Department of Justice

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"The point with Trump is he's in on the joke." So said South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham about his odd relationship with the 45th President as quoted by veteran journalist Mark Leibovich in his new book Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the price of admission. The idea that Trump's entire chaotic rollercoaster presidency was a giant joke and his army of Republican enablers were in on it all along is a continuing theme of Leibovich's book, as he charted how one after another top Republicans who privately had utter contempt for the occupant of the Oval Office, never the less fell loyally in line. Concluding, that it was all just some harmless charade that Trump himself was fully a part of. But what happens when the joke, including absurd claims about the results of a Presidential election leads to violence. Threatening the lives of even Trump's own Vice President. As the January 6th Committee plans to wrap up its summer hearings with a primetime special on Thursday night, we'll talk to Leibovich about his book and what happens when the big Washington joke stopped being funny.

GUESTS:

• Mark Leibovich, (@MarkLeibovich), The Atlantic, (Fmr NYT), Author of Thank You For Your Servitude

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Liz Cheney dropped one more nugget at the end of Tuesday’s January 6th Committee hearing, new evidence that Donald Trump may be contacting witnesses who are being called to testify in an apparent effort to influence what they might say. If true, it’s a federal crime. And Cheney’s statement that the Department of Justice had been alerted immediately set off speculation about another possible avenue for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s prosecutors to pursue. As the committee moves to wrap up its extraordinary series of hearings next week in primetime, the path to a possible prosecution of Donald Trump only seems to be expanding. Not just in Washington, but in Atlanta where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is accelerating her own investigation. We’ll talk to someone who has their own unique perspective on the Willis probe, Charlie Bailey, a former prosecutor who used to work for Willis, and is now running for Lieutenant Governor against a Republican lawmaker deeply involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

GUESTS:

• Charlie Bailey, (@charlie4georgia), 2022 Democratic LG Nominee, Atty at Cook & Connelly, Fmr. Senior Assistant District Attorney

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RESOURCES:

Follow us on Twitter: @SkullduggeryPod

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"Nobody on planet earth was more horrified by the notion of Donald Trump as President." So writes Tim Miller in his new book Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. Miller was a longtime GOP operative, a spinmeister, a dirt disher, who worked for the McCain and Romney and Jeb Bush Presidential campaigns. And also served as a top spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. But his revulsion towards Trump knew no bounds and caused him to sever ties with virtually everybody he used to work with. Miller's book seems to answer an enduring question that persists to this day. Why did so many go along? "I felt like everything I ever knew and believed about my country, my career, my colleagues were a lie," he writes. The Americans I most despise had taken over the country I loved, bringing almost everyone I had once looked up to along with them. Miller joins us to discuss his book and more.

GUESTS:

• Tim Miller, (@Timodc), Writer @bulwarkonline, Host “Not My Party” on Snap, @msnbc analyst, author

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On Friday, the most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades came down, a 6-3 ruling overturning Roe v Wade. For nearly half a century women have had a Constitutional right to abortion, now they don't. Because, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, Roe was, "egregiously wrong from the start." Informed by what he called, "exceptionally weak reasoning." The new ruling from the court ditching what seemed like well settled precedent is certainly to inflame passion. And as Biden insisted, the fight is not over. His administration, with the backing of virtually every Demacrat in Congress, will seek to pass a Federal Law codifying the right to an abortion. But even if such legislation could overcome a near certain filibuster from Senate Republicans and actually pass, would that supersede the actions of more than a dozen State legislatures that now seemed poised to ban abortion outright? Veteran Supreme Court watcher and author David Kaplan as well as former Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, a former Supreme Court Clerk himself, join to discuss this alongside the extraordinary testimony in front of the January 6th Committee this week.

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An excerpt from one of the video clips played at Monday's January 6th Committee Hearing in which Donald Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, recounts the debate that went on within the White House on election night. Stepien and other top campaign aides were telling Trump to hold off on declaring victory that night, that there were still lots more votes to be counted. And that his slender but steadily slipping margins were starting to fade away. But Trump would have none of it and listen instead to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, "obviously intoxicated," according to his campaign aide Jason Miller, who told the President to claim he was the rightful winner in an election marked by rampant voter fraud. It was a critical moment when Trump's bogus claims of fraud, pushed in turn by his drunk lawyer, became amplified to the whole country resulting ultimately in the tragic events of January 6th. Is the committee building an air-tight case against the former President? We get perspectives from two veteran legal observers - Matt Miller, the former Chief of Public Affairs for the Justice Department during the Obama Administration and Sol Wisenberg, a criminal defense lawyer and a former top Deputy to Whitewater independent council Ken Starr.

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“Stay the hell out of it!” Those were the key words from the so-called smoking gun tape, the conversation between Richard Nixon and his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman about how to get the FBI to back off its investigation into the Watergate break-in that occurred fifty years ago this week, June 17th, 1972. The plan they came up with in the days after the burglary was to get the CIA and its powerful director Richard Helms to tell the then head of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray to back off, to stay the hell out of it, to drop the probe into the financing of the break-in unless dark agency secrets would be revealed. It was a lie of course, the Watergate break-in had been bankrolled by Nixon campaign donors and not the agency spooks at Langley. But as Jefferson Morley writes in his new book, Scorpions Dance: The President, The Spymaster and Watergate, Helms was prepared to do what Nixon wanted, at least first. He drafted a memo instructing two deputies that the agency needed to instruct the bureau to quote, “Confine themselves to the personalities already arrested.” And “desist from expanding this investigation into other areas.” Helms may have later gotten cold feet, but as Morley reminds us it was just one of many examples of the exceedingly strange and still mysterious relationship between Nixon and the Spy Master, a dynamic in which each man seemed to have abundant blackmail material against each other. As the country prepares to commemorate the half-century anniversary of Watergate, we’ll look back at the events of that era and get a fascinating new take on why they matter more than ever as Morley joins us.

GUESTS:

• Eric Holder, (@jeffersonmorley), Author, Scorpions Dance: The President, The Spymaster and Watergate

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Congresswoman Liz Cheney Thursday night laid out the case that Donald Trump orchestrated an attempted coup to block the peaceful transfer of power. And then sat back and watched in apparent approval while his supporters ransacked the US Capitol. It was the opening night of six public hearings on the January 6th attack that committee members will hope galvanize the public to what they believe is an on-going threat to American democracy. The hearing was marked by a compelling new video, illustrating the role that the extremest Proud Boys played in the attack and how Trump's own words inspired them. A Capitol Police officer told of slipping on the blood of her colleagues while trying to defend the Capitol that day. But did Cheney make the case that Trump was criminally responsible for what transpired. We're joined by the former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder, author of the new book Our Unfinished March, to discuss that and more.

GUESTS:

• Eric Holder, (@ericholder), Fmr. Attorney General of the US, Author of Our Unfinished March

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Follow us on Twitter: @SkullduggeryPod

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They may be the most anticipated and consequential of congressional hearings in decades. After eleven months of work and over one thousand interviews the committee investigating the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol will premiere this week in primetime on Thursday at 8pm. With all the TV networks except for Fox News of course planning full coverage. The committee is touting evidence of what its members are calling a criminal conspiracy led by Donald Trump to subvert the will of the people and overturn the results of the 2020 election. But as Washington gears up for the extravaganza and outside groups plan watch parties with free ice cream, there are still questions about just how strong the committee’s evidence is. And perhaps more importantly whether a public pre-occupied with soaring gas prices, mass shootings, and shortages of baby formula, will tune in. We’ll talk to Yahoo News’ Tom LoBianco about what to expect from the hearings. And then we’ll hear from Norm Eisen of the Brookings Institution on why they matter.  

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• Yahoo News' "What You Need To Know" about the Jan. 6th Hearings - Here.

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Uniquely Nasty, a Yahoo News documentary from 2015, explored the little known story of the US Government’s relentless persecution of gays in the Cold War era, focusing in part on how the FBI under Hoover’s direction, tracked the names of tens of thousands of suspected gays and lesbians working for the Federal Government. And then took steps to have them fired. It was just one piece of a so-called lavender scare that left in its wake a trail of fear, paranoia, and destroyed lives. The full story of the US Government’s jihad against gay America is now being told in a landmark book, The Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, by journalist James Kirchick. Kirchick’s book brings to life the largely invisible stories of senior government officials at the State Department, the White House, and in Congress, who lived in fear that their secret lives would become publicly known. And how their careers were shattered when their homosexuality was exposed, often for political or bureaucratic advantage. It’s a shocking story that is a reminder of how much about America’s dark past of persecution has been obscured yet remains highly relevant to themes in our current politics. Kirchick joins to discuss the excruciating agony that denizens of the secret city experienced. And why it is a crucial chapter in American history. 

GUESTS:

• James Kirchick, (@jkirchick), Author of the book Gunfight.

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