It's your democracy at work, for better or worse, on today's BradCast! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... At a lively rally at the Democracy Center here in Los Angeles on Thursday, California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled the "Election Rigging Response Act", legislation meant to push back against Donald Trump and the state of Texas' attempted mid-decade gerrymander of its already-gerrymandered U.S. House map. The new TX map, if enacted, would steal five Democratic House seats from largely minority voters in the Lone Star State in next year's midterms.

"We can't stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country," Newsom declared at the boisterous rally, announcing his plan to ask the Golden State legislature to quickly approve a ballot measure for November 4th that would allow CA to temporarily override the state's U.S. House map. Unlike in Texas, our maps are drawn by an independent redistricting commission. If Newsom's scheme overcomes several hurdles, a new map would be drawn by the Legislature to flip five currently Republican seats in CA. The Act must first be approved by two-thirds of the CA state Legislature. It would then have to pass muster with voters on November 4, and wold only take effect if Texas successfully rigs their map.

The attempted heist in Texas is currently on hold, with state Democratic lawmakers breaking quorum by leaving the state. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has insisted that he will call Special Session after Special Session until he is able to rig the map for Trump and Republicans who fear they will otherwise lose their slim U.S. House majority next year.

"We are not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future," Newsom told the crowd on Thursday, adding: "Donald Trump, you have poked the bear and we will punch back."

"We're giving the people of this state the power to save democracy, not just in California, but all across the United States of America. I hope we are waking up to this reality. Wake up, America. Wake up to what Donald Trump is doing," the Governor concluded. We share his remarks in full on today's show.

THEN... We're joined by veteran, award-winning journalist turned media reform champion SUE WILSON of the Media Action Center, for an update on a remarkable story she has been covering at The BRAD BLOG for at least five years.

Wilson initially reported in 2020 on a citizen Petition filed at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to deny renewal of Sinclair Broadcasting's TV stion license in Baltimore. The complaint alleged that Sinclair, one of the nation's largest (and most right-leaning) station owners, was violating FCC rules that limit the number of stations that can be owned in a single market by secretly controlling two other television stations in Baltimore. Those two stations are run, according to the well-documented Petition, by sock-puppet companies actually controlled by Sinclair.

Filed in late 2020, the Petition wasn't heard by the FCC during the remaining months of Donald Trump's first term. Over the ensuing four years, for reasons we discuss today, Joe Biden's FCC failed to review the matter as well. In the meantime, in 2023, the Petitioner passed away. Another Baltimore resident was quickly substituted on the paperwork.

Fast-forward to 2025 and the FCC in Trump's second term, now led by his hand-picked Chair Brendan Carr, dismissed the original complaint on the basis that the substitute Petitioner missed the chance to file a petition on her own back in 2020. Her substitution for the man who waited five years for a hearing --- and died waiting --- was not allowed, Carr ruled, even though the well-documented facts of the matter hadn't changed. The Sinclair stations in question have since been re-licensed, despite the companies apparent violations of both FCC rules and federal law.

The lawyer for both the late Petitioner and his substitute, has filed an Application for Review, hoping to appeal the Commission's absurd ruling. Wilson detailed the latest remarkable chapter in this long-running story at The BRAD BLOG this week, and joins us to both break it down, and light up a warning about the next scheme that the FCC's Carr now has in place to undermine federal ownership rules of local television stations nationwide.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with the usual litany of disturbing climate and energy news, as well as perhaps the dumbest, most disinformative comment ever uttered on Fox "News" regarding renewable energy --- and that's saying quite a bit!...

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Dead man tell no tales. But the evidence submitted to the FCC before he passed away, challenging dodgy, unlawful television station ownership by a major national broadcasting conglomerate, is still alive and well. Or, at least, it should be.

As covered at The BRAD BLOG in September of 2020, Baltimore resident Ihor Gawdiak and his attorney Arthur Belendiuk filed a Petition to Deny (PtD) the FCC license renewals of three TV stations controlled in Baltimore by Sinclair Broadcasting in apparent violation of both FCC ownership rules and federal law.

In brief, Gawdiak's petition detailed a complicated shell game carried out by Sinclair, one of the nation's largest owners of local television stations, to carry out the plot while staying beneath the FCC radar.

Sinclair claims ownership of Baltimore's WBFF-TV Channel 45, (which shares news reports from the Baltimore Sun newspaper, owned by Sinclair's Executive Chairman, David Smith, son of Sinclair's founder, Julian Sinclair Smith.) The David Smith family also controls both Cunningham Broadcasting and Deerfield Media which operate Baltimore's WNUV-TV and WUTB-TV, respectively. Both companies have very deep and direct ties to Sinclair. (Belendiuk found the "official" owner of Deerfield was Smith's personal banker, Stephen Mumblow, and the "official" owner of Cunningham is the company's former banker, Michael Anderson, who has no broadcast experience and actually served as a paid employee of Sinclair.)

The elaborate shell game, Gawkiak's complaint argued, is an effort to monopolize the information U.S. television viewers can access in their own local towns, by skirting FCC ownership limits in a single market. Petitioner Gawdiak's license challenge first went to Trump's Republican-controlled FCC during his first term, then was taken over by Biden's FCC. Now it is back in the hands of Trump's heavily-controlled Commission once again.

The FCC likely breathed a sigh of relief when Gawdiak passed away in 2023 before the matter was ultimately adjudicated. But then another petitioner, Baltimore resident Eleanor Goldfield, signed on to take his place. Finally, it would seem, someone at the FCC would have to take a formal look at the complex Sinclair scheme of forming sidecar companies under their complete control, designed to flaunt FCC rules with tacit approval of federal regulator.

After five years, Trump's Sinclair-friendly FCC finally responded formally to attorney Art Belendiuk on June 27, 2025, informing him that one FCC petitioner may not be substituted for another and, therefore, the Commission would not be taking up this longstanding case.

This is despite the FCC's own administrative law judge, in a related proceeding, demanding such an inquiry take place.

In 2018, Ajit Pai, Trump's Republican FCC Chair at the time, called an unprecedented public Hearing about deliberate untruths Sinclair made to the FCC in its effort to acquire Tribune Broadcasting. The hearing was scuttled after Sinclair went behind closed doors with the Commission. But it resulted in a stunning $48 million dollar fine. Still, the judge in that hearing, Jane Halprin, demanded these conflicts be thoroughly examined in a future hearing at the Commission, stating: "This alleged deception was ostensibly aimed at allowing Sinclair to bypass the Commission's multiple ownership limitations. ... the behavior of a multiple station owner before the Commission may be so fundamental to a licensee's operation that it is relevant to its qualifications to hold any station license."

The 2020 Petition from Gawdiak could have provided for the scrutiny Halprin called for in the earlier matter.

In 2021, Belendiuk filed a Freedom of Information Act request on my behalf to discover just what was said in those closed door meetings between the FCC Media Bureau and the FCC. It took two years, but following an appeal to the Federal District Court in Washington DC, the FCC finally caved and released those files, a treasure trove of an extremely complicated shell game. (I detailed the full story for Project Censored here.)

Later in 2023, Gawdiak passed away. In early 2024, Goldfield signed on to take his place in the case.

Lo and behold, on June 27, 2025, the FCC finally responded [PDF] by agreeing with the arguments from Sinclair's attorneys that "Goldfield missed her opportunity to participate in the proceeding when she failed to file by the September 1, 2020, deadline and that permitting the substitution here would 'make a mockery of the Commission's deadlines and processes.'"

(As if the FCC waiting four years 10 months and 27 days to respond to a legal petition doesn't alone make a mockery of Commission deadlines and processes.)

In the bargain, the FCC subsquently allowed Sinclair to renew its Baltimore licenses.

But it ain't over until it's over. July 28, 2025, Belendiuk, the original attorney on the case, filed an Application for Review of the FCC's "decision." He raises the following three questions:

1. Did the FCC Media Bureau err in denying the Motion, given Gawdiak's inability to survive the almost five years the Commission waited to act on the Petition?
2. Did the Media Bureau err in failing to address the Petition as an informal objection to the Applications?
3. Did the Media Bureau err in granting the Applications without addressing the substance of the Petition?

It is entirely possible the FCC will not be the ultimate arbiter of this case. It could go to the U.S. Court of Appeals. (If we live that long.)

Aside: In April 2025, public interest watchdog and advocacy group Frequency Forward and Wisconsin member Randy Bryce put still more pressure on Sinclair when they filed their own Petition to Deny the license transfer applications of Wisconsin and other TV station licenses held by Sinclair Broadcasting, using much of the information gleaned from my FOIA.

The FCC swiftly denied that challenge on July 1, 2025. Says petitioner Bryce, who ran for Congress in the Badger State in 2018 and is running again next year: "It's outrageous that the FCC has been changed from a nonpartisan entity to a political arm of the extreme right. Their purpose should be to protect free speech, not stifle it."

APTRA, RTNDA, PRNDI and Emmy-winning Sue Wilson worked at CBS, PBS, NPR and Fox before directing the documentary Broadcast Blues, writing the blog Sue Wilson Reports and founding the Media Action Center. Reach her at SueWilsonReports@gmail, or via Bluesky or Twitter.

How many times did the disgraced, twice-impeached, four-time criminally indicted former President tell us he would "absolutely" be taking the oath to testify in his own defense at his 2016 election interference trial in New York? More times than we can count. Each time was a lie, as discussed among other matters on today's BradCast, as closing arguments are set to begin next week, before jury deliberations in the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. President. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we get to today's "ketchup" konversation on Trump's first criminal trial, we touch on a few noteworthy results out of primary and special elections in Georgia, Kentucky, Oregon and California on Tuesday, along with problem reports for voters and tabulation out of Georgia, Kentucky and, from last week's primaries, in both Baltimore and Prince George's County, Maryland.

Then, we're joined once again by award-winning columnist HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, of Salon and Hullaballoo, and former attorney and lifelong Republican KEITH BARBER, who now regularly blogs on legal matters as "KeithDB" at the progressive Daily Kos.

On Tuesday, the Defense rested in Donald J. Trump's criminal trial in New York on 34 felony counts related to a hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 election, in a successful effort to help him cheat to win it. The trial has focused on the subsequent, allegedly falsified reimbursements made by Trump during his first year in the White House to his then lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen to cover it all up.

Last week, Cohen finished his testimony as the final witness for the Prosecution. This week, Robert Costello, a cartoonishly thuggish lawyer buddy of both Trump and Rudy Giuliani, took the stand as one of just two witnesses called by the Defense. After a turn last week before the GOP's U.S. House "Weaponization of Justice" Committee, Costello would be the final witness for the Defense, in what turned out to be a wildly failed effort to try and discredit Cohen.

We catch up on all of that today, as we discuss, among other things...

• Justice Juan Merchan's upbraiding of Costello during his obnoxious testimony as the Defense's star witness, turning what might have been a mild win for Trump following cross-examination last week of Cohen, into what both Parton and Barber characterize as a disaster for the Defense. According to Parton, "It was really stupid of them to call him, knowing that the prosecution already knew what he had to say...He was bombastic, he was rude. ... Costello looked like a hired gun."

• To the surprise of absolutely no one, Trump failed to take the witness stand in his own defense after all, following months of promising to do so. It may have been the only smart thing he has done to help his case during the entire trial. As Parton notes, "Trump saw him as a good stand-in for himself," as he was almost certainly testifying at the instance of Trump and against advice of counsel. It went at least as poorly for Costello as it would have gone for the former President turned current Defendant, had he taken the stand.

• Barber details what he sees as "the missing link" in the Prosecution's case and "the biggest weakness" in the Defense's cases; how the jury is likely to view Trump's lack of testifying in his own defense ("The jury will be strongly admonished by the judge to not consider Donald Trump's failure to testify"); and what exactly they will be charged with deciding when they are finally instructed by the judge --- likely beginning next week --- to begin deliberations.

• Parton discusses her biggest concerns about the case, and how the mainstream corporate media has failed, yet again, in its responsibility of accurately reporting on the threat to the nation represented by Trump. Barber casts more blame on his old party, the Republicans.

• And, in a related matter today, we turn to the federal criminal indictment against Trump down in Florida for stealing highly classified national security documents and refusing to return them to the Government. On Wednesday, earlier court documents related to the eventual search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago, were unsealed, leading Trump to lie about the FBI being "locked and loaded" in an attempt to "assassinate" him during the search...when Trump was in an entirely different state.

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The warnings came from safety experts, insurance companies and environmentalists. Years ago. So, of course, they were all ignored by both the then Republican Governor and big business, including Big Oil, who all got their way over safety concerns and the public interest, as discussed on today's BradCast. [Audio link posted below this summary.]

But first up, some other news of note...

• Ohio's Republican Secretary of State informed Democrats on Friday that they must change the date of their party's national convention this summer or Joe Biden will not qualify to be on the state's 2024 ballot under state law. Or, of course, the state's GOP legislature could simply change the law, as they did in 2020 when the Republican National Convention was scheduled too late for Donald Trump to qualify for that year's ballot. But the state legislature will have to do so by May 9. Mark your calendars.

• On Monday in Wisconsin, President Biden unveiled yet another plan, this a very big one, to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt, this time for 30 million Americans after the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court, last year, blocked his original plan to do so for 40 million borrowers.

• Also on Monday, Donald Trump released a rambling video on his social media cite purporting to be his new position on abortion rights. He takes credit for his SCOTUS majority overturning Roe v. Wade, but says nothing about whether he would sign a national abortion ban; have his FDA block the use of abortion medication; or allow his DoJ to block abortions entirely if he is re-elected this November. So, how did pretty much every single corporate mainstream media outlet headline the "news"? By falsely claiming that "Trump Says Abortion Law Should be Left to the States". But, of course, he didn't. And you wonder how it can be that so many Americans are so misinformed about the threat to the nation and world posed by Donald Trump? There's your answer.

Then, we're joined by investigative journalist HELEN SANTORO of The Lever, who has been digging deep into the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster ever since its deadly collapse two weeks ago, after being struck by a massive, 980-foot mega-container-ship in the Port of Baltimore.

We discuss two of her recent articles on the tragedy today, both of which underscore how corporate greed and industry lobbyists have been allowed to run roughshod over common sense, public safety, and corporate responsibility.

The first story, filed shortly after the tragedy which killed six bridge workers and has shut down all traffic in or out of one of the East Coast's largest shipping ports ever since, focuses on Maryland's Republican former Governor --- now U.S. Senate Candidate --- Larry Hogan, who ignored multiple, repeated warnings, year after year, in his continuing efforts to bring ever larger vessels into the Port. In doing so, he discounted safety warnings from an insurance giant and an international transit group, while accepting millions in federal funding from the Trump Administration to expand the port and push for still-larger cargo ships. Environmental groups also sounded the alarm about Hogan's efforts, as did a top state engineer as long ago as 1980, when he warned that the Key Bridge could not withstand such a crash, even by smaller vessels, without falling down.

"It seems very clear that [Hogan] really prioritized private interests again and again, wanting Maryland to be this point of business," Santoro explains. "And, it seems like, with prioritizing these private interests, the safety of the bridge was clearly not considered."

The second of Santoro's investigative articles that we discuss today focuses on the 173-year old federal Limitation of Liability Act which caps the amount that shipping companies may be held liable for in such disasters. It earned the nickname "The Titanic Law" back in 1912, when White Star Line, the British-owner of the doomed ship, invoked the Act to pay no more than $430 for each of the more than 1,500 passengers who were lost in that fatal tragedy.

The Act has seen some small reforms over the years, but most attempts in recent years to finally modernize the 1851 law have been stymied by Congressional Republicans at the behest of lobbyists from Big Oil and other industries in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling that same year.

"It was pretty crazy going back and seeing that people have been complaining about this law since the Titanic crashed in 1912," Santoro tells me. "And yet the reforms have been, I would argue, pretty minimal, in terms of upping the amount that a company has to pay."

"Big Oil has really latched on to the Limitation of Liability Act to get themselves out of paying a lot of money for the Deepwater Horizon fiasco and other issues," she says. "There's a lot of industry funding and interest that is big on keeping damage control and the amount they're paying out for damages as low as possible."

Will Maryland's popular former Governor Hogan face accountability in his Senate race to fill the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin this fall for dismissing years of warnings about the very tragedy that has now befallen his state (and the national economy along with it)? Will Congress finally update the antiquated Titanic Law when they return this week, so that major corporations --- which, unlike in the 1850s, are well insured to cover the costs of such disasters --- can be held to real account for the damage they cause in the name of greater and greater profit? Those are just some of the many questions we discuss with Santoro on today's program...

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As it is said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It continues to bend mostly in that direction on today's BradCast.

Among our many stories today...

• Donald Trump finally coughed up a bond for $175 million --- of the $454 million plus interest that he still owes in full --- in his New York civil fraud case as his appeal continues.

• The judge in Trump's New York criminal trial related to hush-money payments to a porn star to help him win the 2016 election, has expanded his gag-order [PDF] against the disgraced former President to cover family members of jurors, witnesses, prosecutors and the judge himself, whose daughter had been repeatedly (and fraudulently) attacked in recent days by the GOP's Presidential front-runner. His trial, on 34 felony counts, begins on April 15.

• Gov. Ron DeSantis' packed state Supreme Court in Florida tossed out decades of state constitutional precedent to allow his Big Government 6-week abortion ban to take effect. At the same time, the court also narrowly allowed a Constitutional Amendment to protect reproductive rights on this year's general election ballot in the Sunshine State. It, like a measure to allow the sale of recreational marijuana that the Justices also approved for the ballot on Monday, will need to receive support from more than 60% of voters this year to take effect. Democrats are hopeful that the ballot measures could help them win back the former swing-state for the first time in years this November.

• GOP state legislators in Arizona are on the verge of adopting a ballot measure for this November which would end most early voting and vote-by-mail in the state where more than 80% of voters currently take advantage of such conveniences as well as end the use of convenient Voting Centers in the state's two largest (and most Democratic-leaning) counties. Since the resolution will result in a ballot measure, if passed next by the state Senate, it can't be vetoed by the state's Democratic Governor. On the other hand, it'll be something for voters to think about as Dems are now just two swing-seats away from flipping each chamber of the state legislature from "red" to "blue".

• Ever since Republicans decided to pretend the Presidential election was stolen from them with massive --- if evidence-free --- voter fraud in 2020, almost every case of such fraud that has been found has been carried out by Republicans. Today, we've got two more examples of GOP officials caught having committing such fraud. One is from a state Representative in Alabama who was forced to step down after lying about his residency (his seat was filled last week by a Democrat in a Special Election), and another was by a high-ranking state Republican Party official and rightwing talk show host in Georgia who was voted illegally 9 times. Both got off with largely slaps on the wrist.

  Whenever these stories have come to light in recent years, we've found ourselves comparing the velvet glove treatment of white, Republican voter fraud criminals to the years-long hell on Earth faced by Crystal Mason, the black Texas woman [pictured above] who was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison for unknowingly casting an unlawful provisional ballot that was never even counted back in 2016. Last week, at long-last, Mason was acquitted of the charges she never should have never faced in the first place.

• Finally, Desi Doyen is back with our latest Green News Report, as an iconic cliff-side coastal road collapses amid heavy climate-change fueled rains in California; Republicans protest federal funding to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore; a new report finds our man-made climate crisis is taking a brutal toll on the economy; and the Biden Administration's EPA makes some major moves on methane leaks and truck pollution...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: President Biden vows to rebuild Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, Republicans say 'maybe'; New study confirms economic toll of man-made climate change; Heavy storms collapse a portion of California's iconic Highway 1 near Big Sur; PLUS: Biden Administration clamps down on Big Oil methane leaks, truck pollution, and more... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Bird flu has spread to dairy cows in ID, MI, and NM; Extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions hungry; Hay for cattle consumes nearly half of the water drawn from Colorado River; Thousands of abandoned wells in Louisiana threaten to leak CO2 from storage projects; Fish & Wildlife Service reverses Trump-era erosion of endangered species protections; Sinking coastal lands will exacerbate the flooding from sea level rise in 24 US cities; Ice loss and sea level rise are affecting Earth's rotation... PLUS: Antarctic sea ice 'behaving strangely' as Arctic reaches 'below-average' winter peak... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: President Biden touts climate action and infrastructure upgrades in State of the Union address; Surprise! BP weakens climate targets amid record profits; FBI disrupts neo-Nazi plot to attack Baltimore power grid; PLUS: Minnesota enacts ambitious law to go 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Embattled Adani embarks on coal fire sale to boost liquidity; Oil industry-backed effort puts new California oil well ban put on hold for voters to decide; Heat pumps are defying Maine’s winters and oil industry pushback; BP says demand for oil and gas will drop dramatically by 2050 in 'decisive shift';14 million Americans live near plants emitting cancer-causing gas; Communities on front lines of pesticide exposure fight for change; Drought may have doomed this ancient empire; Brazil pushes illegal miners out of indigenous Yanomami territory... PLUS: Drifting Toward Disaster: Breaking the Brazos

... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: A good answer to the question of how the hell we got here. We have an FCC that appears fully captured by the very (rightwing) corporate entities it is supposed to be regulating while overseeing control of our public airwaves. [Audio link to show follows below.]

But first, before we get to our main story today, which is a scoop you probably haven't heard about elsewhere, Donald Trump's own FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday that he is unaware of any evidence to suggest widespread absentee ballot fraud is underway. That runs completely contrary to the President of the United States' continued, persistent, repeated, evidence-free claims that Democrats are running some kind of massive absentee ballot fraud scam to steal the election from Trump.

On the other hand, Donald Trump was and is trying to steal the U.S. Census from the people of the United States. But on Friday, a federal judge ordered a stop to it, based on testimony and email from Census Bureau officials revealing that the Commerce Department's order for the Constitutionally-mandated decennial head count to be prematurely ended this month would result in fatally flawed headcount data. The Trump Administration has been trying to complete the tally in time to turn it over to the President for final approval by the end of this year, to avoid the current deadline of April 2021 when Joe Biden could be in office to approve it instead. The attempt to force an under-count, according to critics, would bastardized U.S. House seat apportionment, as well as thousands of state legislative seats and the distribution of some $1.5 trillion in federal spending for the next ten years. It would also result in the under-count of minorities and the shifting of political power to white, rural Republican districts.

And speaking of politically captured federal agencies, earlier this week at The BRAD BLOG, award-winning journalist turned media reform activist SUE WILSON broke the story of a "Petition to Deny" license renewals filed against three broadcast television stations in the Baltimore market. The petition, filed by longtime, D.C.-based Republican communications attorney and former FCC official ART BELENDIUK, charges that the giant, rightwing corporate TV station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group is unlawfully violating the Telecommunications Act [PDF] by secretly owning or controlling three stations in the Baltimore market, when they are only allowed to own one.

Belendiuk and Wilson join me on today's program to explain how the far-right Sinclair, which own Baltimore's WBFF, also secretly controls the ownership of Cunningham Broadcast, which nominally owns WNUV and Deerfield Media, which holds the license to WUTB in the same market. Belendiuk explains how that violates federal restrictions on media ownership, while noting that his "Petition to Deny", filed in Baltimore in hopes of blocking the stations' licensing renewals, is just the first such Petition, given that Sinclair is pulling the same corporate shell game scam with stations all across the country.

"You can have relationships with other stations in the market, but they're carefully regulated by the FCC," Belendiuk tells me. "But Sinclair has gone way beyond that, down to the point of setting the salary of the president of Cunningham. That's not the kind of thing you do at arm's length. Cunningham, which is the main partner of Sinclair, has twenty stations in twenty different markets and they're all paired with Sinclair. So this isn't a Baltimore problem, it's just that the petition had to be filed in Baltimore because of FCC reasons. The first place you could file was in Baltimore."

Wilson detailed in her recent report how, under the FCC's regulation of the Telecommunications Act, "In a single local broadcast market, one company may apply to own two stations --- if there are nine or more stations in that market. [But] Baltimore has just eight stations, and three of them are actually owned by Sinclair."

Sinclair, which officially owns almost 200 hundred TV stations across the county in more than 100 markets, largely in the South and Midwest, first came to national prominence when they mandated their hundreds of otherwise trusted local TV news anchors to read a script on air about "fake news" being a threat to democracy, back in early 2018. As their stations are affiliated with various networks such as ABC, Fox and The CW, local viewers often have no idea they are actually watching a Sinclair station, with a far-right corporate owner controlling the local station's newsroom.

"What's really at stake here are the diversity of voices that we the people get to hear on our local TV stations," Wilson explains. "Local television news is really the medium that most of us trust more than any other today for our news. This is really cutting away at that kind of trust, when you allow one company to own so many stations." She says "the law is clear," but the FCC, whose chairman Ajit Pai was appointed by Donald Trump, is failing to enforce it, even though the details of the sham ownership of the stations and companies controlled by Sinclair were discovered in both FCC and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents, according to Belendiuk's petition

"The commission is aware of this," Belendiuk insists. "Enough is enough. it's time for the FCC to stop looking the other way."

The self-described "political conservative" also shares the progressive Wilson's concerns about the dangers of the lack of diversity over our public airwaves. "In many markets --- take Columbus, Ohio --- they own two major network affiliates, Fox and I believe an NBC station. That means every day at 6 o'clock there are two local newscasts going out holding one political view. That's not what the Communications Act intended. The Communications Act intended that there should be a diversity of views. If there's a Sinclair with a clear rightwing view, there should be another station that has a middle-ground view, and one that maybe has a leftwing view. There shouldn't be one voice."

He goes on to discuss the serious "impacts" all of this has on our politics and elections. "It really, really matters to the people of Columbus, Ohio. And they're being deprived of the information they need to vote for the candidate of their choice. Whether you're voting Republican or Democrat, that vote should be an informed vote. When you control the local news, which is really what I see as the problem, then I'm no longer getting that kind of information that I need to make an informed decision."

Belendiuk notes that station license renewals, which come up every eight years, will also be happening soon in other markets around the country where, he says, "any citizen can file a petition saying why they don't serve --- and this is in the Communications Act --- 'the public interest, convenience, or necessity'," before he details how Sinclair has been repeatedly fined by the FCC for other violations over the years when they were found to not be acting in the public interest as mandated.

Sinclair has until October 1 to respond to the Petition, after which the matter will either be decided by the FCC or, if they ignore or attempt to whitewash the complaint, by a federal Appeals Court, Belendiuk vows.

There is much more on all of this in today's show, including information on how you can reach him and take action locally if you feel, like he does, that "enough is enough".

Finally today, because this week has been more than "enough", we end with the overdue return of one of our favorite Trump-era musical satirists! Randy Rainbow sends us off into the weekend with a tune that we dare you to get out of your head after you hear it...

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Baltimore's crowded TV market highlights the shell game that media goliath Sinclair Broadcasting plays across the nation to illegally dominate the information Americans can consume over our public airwaves. The agency tasked with overseeing those airwaves, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has long turned a blind eye to allow Sinclair, the very powerful purveyor of rightwing propaganda, to violate US law.

Congress passed the Telecommunications Act [PDF] so no single television company could dominate the news and information available to "We the People" in any single market or even nationwide. Under the law, a single TV company is permitted to reach no more than 39% of viewers in the United States over all. In a single local broadcast market, one company may apply to own two stations --- if there are nine or more stations in that market.

Baltimore has just eight stations, and three of them are actually owned by Sinclair: WBFF, WNUV, and WUTB.

Sinclair lawyers (who also represent Cunningham Broadcasting and Deerfield Media) will say Sinclair owns WBFF, Cunningham owns WNUV and Deerfield owns WUTB. But, in a September 1 legal Petition to Deny the renewal of all three stations' licenses, due to both the shell game and the lies Sinclair has told to protect its unlawful ownership, Republican attorney Art Belendiuk researched Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents to prove that both Deerfield and Cunningham are actually both controlled by Sinclair.

"Sinclair controls three television stations in Baltimore, while the FCC rules do not permit it to control more than one," the petition, filed on behalf of local viewer Ihor Gawdiak, argues, while detailing how the shell game of nominal ownership by the other two companies is simply meant to mask Sinclair's violation of federal law...

On today's BradCast: Two mysteries solved in one single, if hectic, show! [Audio link to full show is posted at end of article.]

The first is the mystery of who presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden would select as his Vice-Presidential partner. Now we know. Less than an hour before showtime today, it was announced that California's first-term U.S. Senator Kamala Harris will become the first black woman (and first South Asian American woman) to be part of a major party's Presidential ticket. On short notice, we were able to scrounge up the great HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog to join us for her "top-line, knee-jerk, hot-take" response to the big news and how she thinks it will play both among the electorate at large and the far, FAR more picky progressive electorate.

Parton, a progressive herself, who says she was rooting for Elizabeth Warren to be named for the slot, describes Harris as a "a very skilled politician"; argues that her selection "says something nice about Biden"; discusses the "legitimate concerns that progressives have had about Harris"; and whether she believes "the Left" will be able to "put aside their differences" to get behind the ticket, before "going to fight tooth and nail about the things that we care about" in the event that Biden actually becomes President next January.

Today's other solved mystery is much trickier. And it has to do with Georgia, which is holding primary runoff elections today, along with state primary elections on Tuesday in Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Wisconsin. (We'll have noteworthy results from all of those states, as available, on tomorrow's BradCast, of course). Naturally, because it's Election Day in Georgia --- a key battleground state which some believe could finally flip from "red" to "blue" this year for the first time in decades --- there are problems at the polls. While hopefully not as terrible as the meltdown caused by the state's new unverifiable touchscreen voting systems and electronic pollbooks that resulted in hours-long lines in largely Democratic-leaning precincts during the state's June primary, we have early indications that the same, new, overly-complex, computerized voting systems failed voters again today in at least some of the 94 (of 159) counties participating in today's runoffs.

Despite that distressing (if unsurprising) news today in Georgia, there was some good-ish news from the State Elections Board (SEB) there. They met on Monday to adopt new procedures in advance of the November 3rd Presidential election. The SEB unanimously agreed to allow voters to request absentee ballots for November via a new online webpage to go live by the end of the month. That's good news for those who have easy online access. But, shamefully, it comes along with the news that Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, after successfully sending out Vote-by-Mail applications to all of the state's active registered voters before the June primary, will NOT be doing so before this year's Presidential election. Apparently, that plan worked too well and allowed too many to easily vote from home, when they might otherwise have had to struggle with long lines and Raffensperger's failed electronic voting systems at the polling place in the middle of an ongoing global pandemic.

Also at Georgia's SEB meeting on Monday, the Board agreed to make a change to the state's new computer-tabulation systems that scan and count those hand-marked paper absentee ballots. (Voters at the polls are forced to use unverifiable touchscreen systems.) The SEB's change to a software setting on the systems came about, thanks in no small part, to our guest today, JEANNE DUFORT of the Coalition for Good Governance.

Following the June primaries, Dufort was on a bi-partisan citizens' panel reviewing digital images of hand-marked paper absentee ballots on which the computerized digital-scanners believed there were over-votes with, for example, more than one oval in a single race seen by the computer as being filled in. State law requires manual examination of such ballots to determine if the voter's intent is discernible or not. While reviewing those ballots, Dufort and the other panelists in Morgan County noticed that the tabulation system had marked some clearly discernible votes on many of those same ballots as containing "no vote". Why were those votes not counted by the new, $100 million tabulation system made by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting? And would elections officials manually examine ALL of the hand-marked ballots to count those "lost" votes? As Dufort told us on this program at the time she discovered the problem after the June primary, there were potentially tens of thousands of perfectly legitimate votes that had gone uncounted.

Well, today we finally have the answer to the mystery of why the system had failed to count some of those votes. It has to do with a sensitivity setting on the digital optical-scan tabulators that the Secretary of State's office claims they did not originally know about when they initially dismissed Dufort's concerns back in June. That setting, apparently, directs the computer to ignore votes in which less than 12% of the bubble was filled in. (Often, instead of inking in the entire bubble, voters will use a check-mark or an X. While the voter's intent is easily discernible to the human eye, the new computers that tabulate votes were set to record such marks --- that filled less than 12% of the bubble --- as a "no vote".)

"It assigns it a 'percentage of fill'," Dufort tells me. "In our case in Georgia, what we later found out was that these Dominion factory settings said if a vote was deemed to cover more than 35% of that area...if the threshold percentage hit 35% or above, the system said, 'Yep, that's a vote! It counts!' If the threshold was between 12-35%, it said, 'that's ambiguous, I'm not sure something is there, better get a human to look at it.' If it fell below 12%, it said, 'I see that, but it's not a vote, so I'm going to label it unvoted, and I'm not even going to call it to the attention of the humans.'"

While Dufort says that it is good news that the SEB has now agreed to lower the bottom of the software sensitivity range setting to 10%, the longtime Election Integrity advocate says that she and others in the state believe it should be set lower still, to avoid more lost votes, in advance of the Presidential Election. "We think 10% is still too high," she says. "So we're going to be out talking to them. This rule is out for 30 days of public comment. We'll be saying thank you, but you really need to take it down to 5, which we have learned is what Colorado uses. And they've been doing hand-marked paper ballots statewide for a very long time. We think that's a good benchmark for Georgia."

She also observes that the the old settings, less sensitive settings, are still being used to tally today's runoff elections, which could be a problem in the event of close races. Moreover, she explains, "the color of the ink [and] the brand of the ink in your pen can change how the computer measures it." We discuss all of that, how the changes may affect results this November, and whether we should be worried that such a software setting could be abused by ill-intentioned election insiders (or hackers) in the critical battleground state (or others that use similar systems) during the Presidential election.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with more deadly fossil fuel disasters, a warning about this year's already-record Atlantic Hurricane season, and some very disturbing climate change news out of Canada, where the last intact ice shelf has finally collapsed and broken away...

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(Or use "Click here to listen..." link below.)

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: More fossil fuel disasters --- Deadly natural gas explosion levels homes in Baltimore; Fuel spill creates ecological disaster for island nation Mauritius; Buckle up for a hyperactive hurricane season; July 2020 was the third hottest July ever recorded globally; PLUS: And then there were none --- Canada's last intact ice shelf collapses... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Trump EPA lifts controls on climate-warming methane; Interior proposes easing royalty calculations for public lands extraction; Deadly derecho leaves path of destruction across Midwest; Investors launch climate plan to get to net zero emissions by 2050; Warming world will be 'devastating' for frozen peatlands; Big oil remembers 'friend' Trump with millions in campaign funds; BP's green energy targets will be tough to meet... PLUS: 'As the tundra burns, we cannot afford climate silence': a letter from the Arctic... and much, MUCH more! ...

We've got a boatload of news today (for a change) on The BradCast. And yes, we still need a much bigger boat. [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Among the many stories covered on today's program...

• Democrat Kweisi Mfume surprises nobody by winning back his old seat in the U.S. House in Maryland's special election to replace the late Rep. Elijah Cummings in Baltimore (according to incomplete, unverified results.);

• Joe Biden surprises nobody by winning the first quickly conceived and rescheduled statewide almost-all absentee ballot primary election during the COVID era in Ohio (according to incomplete, unverified results.);

• Donald Trump's approval rating for his handling of the COVID crisis plummets in new poll, though his national head-to-head numbers against Biden remain the same;

• Andrew Yang sues New York state over this week's cancellation of the Democratic Presidential Primary by two Democrats on the State Board of Elections;

• In what could be game-changing news for the Presidential race (though how it will change the game precisely is still unclear), Michigan's Republican-turned-independent U.S. House Rep. Justin Amash announces likely plans to run for President on the Libertarian Party ticket;

• Kansas' former Secretary of State, long time GOP "voter fraud" fraudster and current Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kris Kobach loses again, this time at a U.S. court of appeals which upheld a lower court ruling finding Kobach's "papers please" proof-of-citizenship voter registration law to be in violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection clause and the National Voter Registration Act, after it prevented 30,000 legal Kansas voters from voting;

• New numbers from the Commerce Department confirm that the U.S. economy is in big BIG trouble;

• Steven Colbert explains why Trump can't lie his way out of the coronavirus disaster;

• And New York comedian Vic DiBitetto offers a rant FOR THE AGES (the uncensored version we couldn't play on air is here) in response to the federal government's pathetic response to the economic damage caused by the coronavirus...in a way that only a real New Yorker can...

I'm short on time tonight. So to find out my thoughts on any or all of the stories above, you'll have to tune in. Enjoy!

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On today's BradCast: As of today, more than one million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 58,000 in the U.S. have been killed by it, according to official counts (which are likely no more than half of the real number of those who have died either directly or indirectly because of COVID-19.) More Americans have been killed by the virus over the past two months than all of those who were killed throughout all of the years of the Vietnam War. The unprecedented crisis has also resulted in unemployment numbers on par with, and potentially worse than, the Great Depression. So, given the historic enormity of this moment, are the mainstream corporate media covering the failure of the Donald Trump Presidency with the unprecedented historic context warranted by what my guest today describes as 'Trump's Vietnam'? [Audio link to full show is posted below.]

Before we answer that question and many related others, a quick update on the voting that is concluding today in two different states. In Maryland's 7th Congressional District there was a Special Election to fill the U.S. House seat left vacant by the late Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings in Baltimore. In Ohio, voting is concluding across the state for the Democratic Presidential Primary, hundreds of local ballot issues, and a number of contested Congressional primaries in a state where, thanks to extreme gerrymandering of its 16 Congressional Districts, primaries often determine who goes to the U.S. House to represent the Buckeye State. The elections in both states (each with Republican Governors) are being held almost entirely by mail, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Complete results are unlikely to be known for several days as ballots are being quarantined for 24 hours in MD and may still arrive by mail for 10 more days in OH. Both cases, however, offer a glimpse of what elections are likely to look like in about 20 states which still have primary elections upcoming in the next several months, and potentially in all 50 states this November.

Then, we're getting a glimpse of how COVID infection rates could soon begin increasing again as some Republican Governors begin taking Donald Trump's advice to start lifting stay-at-home restrictions to allow businesses to reopen. Germany began lifting similar restrictions just last week, and early evidence suggests infections may be on the rise again there already.

Washington Post is reporting today that U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned Trump about the threat of the virus to the health of Americans and to its economy in "more than a dozen classified briefings" prepared for him in January and February. Despite the "drumbeat" of warnings reportedly in those Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs), Trump publicly ignored them and/or downplayed the dangers of the virus throughout those months and even into March. WaPo's report, based on sources that include "current and former U.S. officials", provides yet another data point underscoring the epic failure of Trump to protect the American people when he had the chance to prepare for and hope to contain the deadly pandemic.

We're joined today by longtime media analyst ERIC BOEHLERT, who, in his new thrice-weekly free newsletter, PressRun.Media, has been comparing this historic moment to the failure of leadership and years of deceptions presented to the media during the Vietnam War. Given that far more Americans have already been killed by the virus in about six weeks --- versus the 9 years of that tragic conflict --- the comparison seems apt, especially during an election year for reasons we also discuss today. "No President, obviously, in the history of our country, has ever tried to run for re-election with those staggering statistics on his resume," Boehlert explains, as he has been reporting on the media's failure to adequately cover "the truly historic and once-in-a-century events that have quickly unfolded this year" or even just how "unhinged the Trump Presidency has become."

We also discuss the corporate media's years-long and still-continuing obsession with reporting their "Dems in Disarray!" narrative, despite facts suggesting otherwise --- or, at least in comparison to their years-long downplaying of a Republican Party that is literally falling apart before our eyes with a President facing historically low approval numbers and his continuous losses in head-to-head polling with the Democrats' presumptive Presidential nominee.

Boehlert cites "this drumbeat of Joe Biden stories," from the New York Times and others. "'Joe Biden doesn't have enough money,' 'Joe Biden doesn't have enough YouTube followers'. Those are all fair topics, but when you do it against backdrop of a pandemic, and you do it against the backdrop of a sitting President with 30 million lost jobs, that seems pretty trivial. But they are just determined to stick with it," he says, before offering evidence from the Obama years and the Clinton impeachment of "the epic double standard that [the media have] used for years."

Finally, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, as the U.S. oil industry continues its stunning collapse and as the Trump Administration desperately tries to find a way to employ Big Government Socialism to try and bail it out...

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On today's BradCast: America continues to adjust to the pandemic, as the most critical election in our nation's history is now threatened by a virus, even as voters in three major states hit the polls on Tuesday. At least some of them did. [Audio link to show is posted at end of summary.]

We begin another bizarre day in the Coronavirus Era with just a spot of good news. California's wildly corrupt GOP Congressman Duncan Hunter, Jr., who, with his wife, was charged with more than 60 felonies, but pleaded guilty to just one in a deal last December after it became clear his wife would testify against him, was sentenced to 11 months in prison today. The couple had stolen as much as a quarter of a million dollars in campaign funds for personal luxuries during Hunter's six elected terms before he finally resigned in disgrace in January. He, along with New York's GOP Congressman Chris Collins (who was recently sentenced to 26 months for insider trading), were the first two members of the U.S. House to endorse Donald Trump's run for the Presidency.

And with that somewhat good news out of the way, it's on to the more disturbing news we must try and make sense of today. Even as Florida, Illinois and Arizona all decided to hold their Presidential primary elections on Tuesday amid quarantines, closures, lock-downs and social distancing directives, other states continued to take more responsible measures.

Ohio, which was also scheduled to vote on Tuesday, postponed their primary election today amid no small amount of chaos, with the state's Governor taking extraordinary measures to do so late Monday night after initially being blocked by a state court.

Maryland's Governor today announced that his state would join others, such as Louisiana, Georgia and Kentucky in postponing their primary until June. It was previously scheduled for April 28. They will, however, still hold the April 28 Special Election to fill the U.S. House seat left vacant by the late Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings in Baltimore. That election, however, will now be an all Vote-by-Mail (VBM) election. That as other states consider either postponing or changing to all-VBM elections for the foreseeable future during the virus outbreak.

The affects of the pandemic were seen in all three states which voted today, including poll closures, low turnout, and shortages of poll workers, many of whom are elderly and the most susceptible to the worst affects of the virus. Hundreds of them in South Florida, for example, decided to cancel at the last minute rather than be exposed to hundreds of people all day in crowded polling locations left open despite the CDC's recommendation to avoid all crowds larger than 10 at this time.

We're joined today by a guest well-accustomed to both chaos and elections. ION SANCHO is Leon County (Tallahassee), Florida's former longtime Supervisor of Elections as well as a champion voting rights advocate and opponent of private voting system vendors. During his nearly 30 years as one of the state's (and nation's) most respected election officials, he has held elections amid hurricane catastrophes and political ones. He was tapped by his fellow state officials in 2000 to oversee the eventually-aborted Presidential election recount between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Sancho has plenty of thoughts and insight to offer today amid the current chaos and challenges now faced by elections officials and voters alike. We discuss the likely necessity of all states moving to VBM elections for the duration of the crisis, and the steps that need to be taken to ensure such elections are carried out with integrity.

"The entire primary and elections process is going to have to be re-examined, given this crisis," he tell me. "This pandemic provides a challenge like no other in my lifetime. Mail ballots may be the way out of this, but mail ballots require machinery. Mail ballots require high-speed counting devices. It can be done, and it can be done excellently, but it can't be done cheaply. So if that's something we're going to need to go to, we're need to prepare for that." He warns that voters, many of whom do not bother to change their address on their registration when they move within a county, should check their registration record to assure it's up to date immediately, or else they risk not receiving a ballot at all, when and if states begin moving to VBM.

And while money will need to be spent to transition to high-speed optical-scanners to tally hand-marked mail-in paper ballots in many locations, the cost and benefits would still be far greater for voters than in jurisdictions such as Georgia which recently spent more than $100 million dollars for new equipment that will force all voters at the polls to vote on new, germy, unverifiable, touchscreen voting systems which violate voters' privacy by revealing secret ballots to everyone in the polling place. "The COVID-19 virus may be a blessing in disguise for the citizens of Georgia," Sancho explains. "Using a hand-marked paper ballot system is not only more secure, it's three to ten times more inexpensive to operate and maintain."

But in addition to money, guidance will be needed on the federal level to ensure a move to mail-in voting is done in a way that doesn't disenfranchise voters, since, he explains, it is so much easier for VBM ballots to be rejected by officials for dubious reasons and without notifying voters so that they have sufficient time to cure any perceived deficiencies on their ballots. VBM would be a "fair solution [during this crisis] if you have fair elections administration. Jurisdictions like Oregon, for example, which has pioneered mail voting in the United States, provide 14 days for an individual to present themselves to cure a problem, a deficiency, in the mail ballot. States like Arizona, Washington and California provide 2-3 weeks of days to allow the voter to cure a problem. Then you run into states like Florida, that had to be sued to allow voters to cure their ballot after the election. The deadline for Florida to cure all deficiencies --- so how could you know about it? --- is the day before the election."

While some elections officials, he believes, would be careful to institute best practices, others, he warns, would not. "They don't concern themselves with how actual machinery is working in other places. They just depend upon their voting vendor to tell them what to do. We don't really have any kind of mechanism nationally to provide the best practices, to give guidance. Our national elections administration is a debacle," he says, along with much more that you'll want to hear.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, as the coronavirus epidemic has now cleared the air in both China and Italy, at least as far as toxic greenhouse gas emissions go, and has given Donald Trump yet another excuse to try and shore up the oil industry amid crashing prices. And, though much of it has now been lost to time and the global pandemic, we also examine the substantive debate on Sunday night between Democratic Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders regarding our climate crisis...

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Before we get to the "crapshow" in D.C. today and much more related to it on today's BradCast, a few quick, important points. [Audio link to show follows below.]

First, the St. Louis Blues, incredibly enough, are going to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in 49 years. Okay, that's not all that important to most, but I've been waiting a really long time, so forgive me my momentary joy.

Second, and much more important (and disturbing): the City of Baltimore's computer networks have been crippled and shutdown by a ransomware attack for more than two weeks now, grinding all city services to a virtual halt and likely requiring a complete rebuild of everything from backup data onto new hardware. Baltimore is reportedly the 20th U.S. municipality to be hit by such an attack so far this year.

Among Baltimore city offices struggling to continue their work is their "dead in the water" Board of Elections, where all local computers are shut down with BOE employees now working remotely out of the State Board of Elections, as well as County Boards in Baltimore and Hartford. The ongoing disaster led the city Board of Elections' Deputy Director to opine: "Thank goodness it's not an election year." Um...yeah..."thank goodness" indeed. But what if it were? And shouldn't this be a much greater concern than, well, pretty much everyone is currently admitting, as city, county and state elections now rely, from top to bottom --- from voter registration to ballot programming to vote tabulation and election results reporting --- on similarly vulnerable computer networks? Without paper poll books at each precinct and HAND-MARKED paper ballots for all, it would be impossible to run an election under such circumstances. But...."thank goodness it's not an election year" and, otherwise, why worry about such crazy "conspiracy theories" as the ones we've been warning about for more than 15 years now?

In other, yes, related news: the Donald Trump Presidency continues to swirl still deeper into the bowels of its own disastrous making while the continuing stand-off with Congress intensifies and more bad news arrives from the federal courts for this President. Today, among too many other things, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Congressional Democratic leadership to discuss the growing cries for an official impeachment inquiry and emerged to declare that "the President of the United States is engaged in a cover-up". That completely unsurprising statement was used as a predicate for Trump to storm out of a planned meeting at the White House with Democratic leaders on an infrastructure bill after just three minutes. He then held what media falsely characterized as an "impromptu" news conferences in the Rose Garden where the President discussed "the i-word" and, with a straight face --- in front a pre-printed sign inaccurately declaring "No Collusion, No Obstruction --- claimed to be "the most transparent President, probably, in the history of this country" and that he doesn't "do cover-ups".

Hours later, his ongoing efforts to cover-up his financial records was dealt a second blow this week by a second federal judge who flatly rejected the Trump family's attempt to block Deutsche Bank and Capital One from turning over Trump financial records in response to a lawful Congressional subpoena. Earlier this week a different federal judge found similarly against Trump's attempt to cover up his financial records held by private accounting firm Mazars USA, which are also the subject of a separate lawful Congressional subpoena. And, all of that is related, as we explain, to the cover-up payments to Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen who was "directed" by Trump to give hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels just prior to the 2016 election to cover-up their alleged affair.

Of course, as Trump's administration continues to cover-up their own growing private email server scandals (remember that li'l problem they had with Hillary Clinton about that?), the man who has helped carry off Trump's greatest cover-up to date (at least that we know of, so far) is his new Attorney General, cover-up artist and personal fixer William Barr. Our guest today, author and media critic ERIC BOEHLERT argues Barr has not been appropriately held to account by the corporate media, even after being found in contempt by the House Judiciary Committee for failing to answer a lawful Congressional subpoena to hand over the full Mueller Report and its underlying evidence. Boehlert explains as he wrote this week, where and why he sees the corporate media dropping the ball.

"New York Times, Washington Post --- they haven't called for his resignation," Boehlert tells me. "It is inconceivable what Bill Barr could possibly do which would trigger major newspapers in this country to call for his resignation. People say, 'Well, who cares? He's not going to resign.' That's true, but, it sends this message that we are in a crisis. We are in a possibly defining crisis in American history. But these major news organizations don't want to go there. They don't want to raise the temperature."

The crisis he refers to, of course, has "been a problem since Inauguration Day 2017, [but] no one will break the glass on the alarm."

We also discuss whether Congressional Democrats are falling short as well, as the internecine debate among Democrats in the House over whether to begin a formal impeach inquiry continues to grow and intensify. Among the many points discussed in that conversation: whether the conventional wisdom that Senate Republicans would never vote to convict and remove Trump from office is actually true...

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