Josh talks to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about his new book, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.” Their conversation ranges from his early days in the military during Vietnam to the Obama presidency and President Trump’s perplexing relationship with Russia.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in my 50-plus years in intelligence,” he tells Josh, “but I don’t think anything that disturbed me as much as the magnitude and aggressiveness and multidimensional nature of the Russian interference in our election in 2016.”
Historian Rick Perlstein talks to Josh about how the 1960 presidential election helped catalyze decades of bogus voter fraud claims which we’re still hearing, constantly, today.
We talk to fabled Watergate figure John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel who was part of the cover-up and then went to the authorities. Find out why Dean trusted Nixon not to cross some lines he believe Trump will cross. Is Dean talking to Michael Cohen’s lawyer? And how do Watergate and Trump/Russia compare? Don’t miss this special episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast.
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Marcy Wheeler, the investigative journalist behind the blog Empty Wheel, joins the podcast to dig deeper into the infamous Trump Tower meeting. She also shares one aspect of the Trump-Russia story that people aren’t necessarily following closely enough.
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We attempt to pick up the pieces Rudy Giuliani left all over cable news this week. Did Trump’s lawyer inadvertently reveal damaging information about his client, or was his revelation of yet another Trump Tower meeting part of his master plan all along?
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Historian Gregory Downs discusses his feature article for TPM — the first in TPM’s ten-part series on voting rights and democracy. He discusses how today’s voter suppression battles date back to the post-Civil War period, how voter suppression tactics were developed not just to target freed slaves in the south but also immigrants in the north and west, and how modern-day Democrats could learn a lesson or two from Reconstruction-era Republicans.
John Sipher, a former member of the CIA Clandestine Service, helps us figure out what in the world is going on with Trump and Putin. Sipher draws on his decades of experience in the CIA to explain that matters of intelligence and tradecraft are not always black and white.
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Campaign data guru Ken Strasma joins the podcast this week to help us understand a key part of the new Mueller indictments: that Russian hackers accessed DNC campaign analytics information in September before the 2016 election. Strasma worked on data operations for John Kerry’s campaign in 2004, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign.
TPM’s lead reporter on the Russia story, Tierney Sneed, joins us from Washington D.C. to talk through the first of Manafort’s trials, getting underway in Virginia later this month. Manafort’s sneaky attempts to push back the trial start date haven’t worked out quite the way he hoped, despite a judge who was initially sympathetic. Tierney gives us the details.
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TPM managing editor David Kurtz joins the podcast to discuss how he came to the site and how it’s grown over the years. After that, we discuss some of the big upcoming stories on TPM’s radar and how we will go about covering them.
But before that, we take your calls. If you’d like to ask a question, call us at 646-868-8393.
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