On today's BradCast: Maybe now Jack Smith will start investigating the multi-state criminal plot by MAGA conspiracists to breach voting system software? Now that we know the unlawful scheme actually began in Donald Trump's Oval Office, as overseen by Trump himself, back in December of 2020? [Audio link to full show follows below.]

We have been reporting on the unlawful, criminal breaches of sensitive voting and tabulation system software by MAGA rightwingers following the 2020 election for nearly two years at this point. Most notably, we've focused most closely on the incident that occurred in the rural, right-leaning Coffee County, Georgia, where local GOP Board of Election members, County Commissioners and Republican Party officials allowed outsiders organized and funded by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, to come in to the elections office to make illicit copies of the County's sensitive, proprietary election management software made by Dominion Voting Systems. The software in rural Coffee County also happens to be the exact same software that is used across the entire battleground state, thanks to the insistence of Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger.

We first learned about the Coffee County breach last year, thanks to Marilyn Marks, founder of Coalition for Good Governance, which has a long-running federal lawsuit against the state, seeking to the ban the use of Raffensperger's 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems made by Dominion. She received a bizarre phone call --- which we previously aired on this program --- from an Atlanta-area businessman named Scott Hall, essentially confessing to the unlawful breach in Coffee County on January 7, 2021. He thought Marks was a fellow MAGA traveler. She wasn't. She is a non-partisan election integrity advocate. A real one.

Since that breach, which included the participation of folks like Doug Logan of Cyber Ninjas (the clowns who ran that phony audit of the 2020 Presidential election in Phoenix, Arizona in 2021), was revealed, thanks to Marks' ongoing civil lawsuit, Sec. Raffensperger seems to have been working very hard to cover the entire thing up and, according to our guest today, DoJ Special Counsel Jack Smith does not appear to be investigating.

Hopefully, that may have changed as of Friday, when two major media outlets ran scoops based on a new letter [PDF] sent by our guest today, SUSAN GREENHALGH of Free Speech for People, to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

First, CNN reported Friday morning that text messages obtained via Marks' lawsuit revealed two of the software breaching Trump operatives discussed whether to somehow use information gleaned from their unlawful actions to try and prevent the certification of Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff's January 5th, 2021 U.S. Senate runoff victory over Republican David Purdue, or whether they should "hold it for a bigger moment."

Then, later on Friday, the New York Times ran a report detailing Greenhalgh's discovery that the plot to breach voting system software in several states --- which we already knew had been organized and funded by Powell --- was actually hatched during the infamous "crazy" meeting in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020. That, based on testimony to the House January 6 Committee that Greenhalgh documented from several Trump aides who were in the room where it happened that night. Attendees at the meeting included Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO (and plot funder) Patrick Byrne, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others. It went on for hours and was presided over by Donald Trump himself.

So, maybe Smith or Garland or Wray will be interested in investigating the multi-state conspiracy plot now?!

Greenhalgh explains that cybersecurity experts are concerned that the stolen software "can be used in disinformation campaigns, which we are already seeing happen. It could be used to fabricate evidence." She notes that "in 2020 when all those [Trump] lawsuits failed, it was because there wasn't any real or credible evidence. But software is mutable. You can play around with it. Could this be used to try and fabricate some false evidence to say, 'Look, this is what we found on some voting machines and look they stole the election?'"

"Most ominously," she warns, the software could be used to "to develop and tailor malware that could be deployed to actually start stealing votes, in the very way that we had people arguing was done in the 2020 election --- but now it's coming from the very same people that actually made those outrageous and baseless claims. Now [they] have the ammunition and basically the keys to the vault that could enable them to do much more nefarious things like actually hack an election."

So, why hasn't this been investigated by the Feds before now, as a response sent by the FBI to Greenhalgh in January [PDF] indicates, claiming the Bureau can only investigate after "a formal request for assistance" by "local authorities"? Why does GA Sec. of State Raffensperger, wrongly viewed as a hero for not stealing the 2020 election for Trump, seem to be working so very hard to cover up what happened in Coffee County? Why have corporate media been so reticent to dig into the story? Why have Greenhalgh and Marks had to do the bulk of the heavy lifting to even get us to this point? Why haven't members of Congress jumped in to demand a proper probe at the federal level? And will a proper federal probe finally happen now that the matter has found its way smack dab into Smith's purview by landing, via the New York Times, in Trump's Oval Office? (All thanks, of course, to the indefatigable work of Susan, Marilyn and their nonprofit organizations!)

"There's a lot more to this story to report," Greenhalgh insists. "As you know, it's still just the tip of the iceberg and there's a lot more information underneath that can still be reported. Greenhalgh's February follow-up letter to the FBI's response [PDF], for example, notes that, contrary to the assertion from R. Joseph Rothrock, Chief of the FBI's Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, the Georgia State Elections Board says that it has, in fact, "requested assistance from the FBI." That, according to a public statement from its Chair in September of 2022

Tune in for answers to all of the above questions and many others on today's BradCast, which also includes some cameo call-ins from both Marks (who suggests listeners contact their U.S. Senators to ask them to demand a DoJ probe) and GA election integrity advocate Jeanne Dufort!...

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Well, Merry Christmas from The U.S. House and The BradCast, Mr. Trump! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

In their finale hearing on Monday, the bipartisan House Select Committee investigating the former President's incitement of insurrection on January 6, 2021 and his multiple failed attempts to steal the 2020 Presidential election, voted unanimously to send criminal referrals for the former President on four different, very serious crimes to the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

Those criminal referrals include:

• Obstruction of an official Proceeding. For corruptly attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
• Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. For his efforts to block Joe Biden's victory by lying about fraud, despite being told by all his top White House legal advisors and his own DoJ there was no evidence to support his false claims.
• Conspiracy to Make a False Statement to Congress. For participating in the scheme to send phony certificates in support of fake Electors on January 6th.
• Insurrection. For inciting, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to those attempting to overthrow the United States government.

If eventually indicted and found guilty of that final "very grave charge," as Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) described it today, Trump would become ineligible to hold any future federal office.

In our Special Coverage of today's hearing, we step through extended clips highlighting the Committee's case, as presented and summarized on Monday, including additional information from new witnesses interviewed by the panel since their last public hearing in mid-September.

The meeting ended with the presentation of the Committee's final report (Introductory Summary: PDF, HTML) and their unanimous, 9 to 0 vote to send the unprecedented criminal referrals to the DoJ for the former President of the United States, one of his corrupt attorneys (John Eastman) and others.

Whether these referrals result in actual criminal indictments is, of course, a separate matter. But, as discussed today, they will at least force the DoJ to review the evidence of these serious crimes as collected by the Committee from hundreds of witnesses over the past two years.

We close today with a few callers ringing in on what (if anything) happens next, and if these referrals may finally result in real accountability for the unspeakably corrupt Donald John Trump...

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As another exhausting week wraps up on The BradCast, we've got a number of follow-ups today on several stories we've been covering throughout the week, and a few all-new reasons to be concerned about the critical upcoming midterm elections. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among the stories covered today...

• Newly-released footage from January 6, 2021 reveals then 80-year old Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she wanted to "punch out" Donald Trump after he had sent insurrectionists to attack the U.S. Capitol. Tom Fitton, rightwing operative, conman and Trump henchman, is just outraged by that! Curiously, he is not at all outraged, by yesterday's House J6 Committee revelation that he wrote a speech for then President Trump, days before the 2020 election, instructing him to declare victory on Election Night --- whether he'd actually won or not --- and then demand the counting of all ballots immediately be stopped. "We had an election today, and I won," the memo suggested Trump declare, as detailed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on Thursday. The memo then instructed Trump demand only votes counted by the end of Election Day be allowed. That, of course, would disenfranchise millions of lawful American voters. The disgraceful Fitton serves as President of the far-right Judicial Watch activist nonprofit and reportedly also advised Trump that he was legally allowed to steal thousands of classified documents from the White House upon leaving office.

• Meanwhile, Trump's allies in Congress, lead by Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, are pretending to be furious that the bipartisan House Select Committee investigating Trump's insurrection and failed attempts to steal the 2020 election voted to subpoena the former President for documents and testimony on Thursday. House Republicans were so eager to demonstrate their clownish fury that they even attacked one of their own employees, as "just another liar and pawn in Pelosi's witch-hunt"...until they realized she worked them, and quickly deleted the tweet.

• Of course, there was Trump's own hilarious, 14-page response [PDF] to the subpoena (which has not actually been issued to him yet). Clearly written for his duped followers who he hopes haven't watched any of the J6 hearings, it offers his usual tired bogus claims and long-ago debunked nonsense to falsely insist (in all-caps, because that makes it extra true): "THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!" Will he actually answer the subpoena and testify under oath before the Committee? The cowardly liar failed to say as much.

• One of the millions of dupes who were dumb and incurious enough to buy into Trump's evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him is a woman named Genevieve Peters. She helped encourage J6 protesters to attack the Capitol in D.C. on January 6, participated in other so-called "Stop the Steal" rallies, and hung around with the leader of the Proud Boys, according to social media posts that she has been furiously removing from her own Facebook page. She has now been hired by Macomb County, Michigan, its third most populous, to recruit and train pollworkers for the 2022 midterms.

• More than two weeks after Hurricane Ian made its devastating landfall in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis finally issued an Executive Order [PDF] on Thursday expanding early voting and vote-by-mail in the state's three hardest hit counties (Lee, Charlotte and Sarasota). On Monday's BradCast, we discussed the delay in approving the plan sought by Lee County, home of Fort Myers, and others where Ian made landfall, with the now-retired, legendary 30-year Florida election official Ion Sancho, who was very worried about whether many Floridians would be able to vote at all this year. We checked back with Sancho to get his reaction to DeSantis' newly-issued EO. He lauds the plan for granting "the flexibility sought by the election officials in three of the most damaged counties," before noting that "Counties further inland had record flooding," leaving still-displaced citizens completely ignored by DeSantis' order. "The counties granted flexibility are heavily Republican," Sancho told me. "The hurricane hit counties further inland are much more Democratic leaning."

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with her usual mix of bad (more billion-dollar weather disasters than ever and wetter storms than ever) and good (an explosion of investment in renewable energy and EV manufacturing in the U.S., and Joe Biden's first declaration of a new national monument) news...

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Today's BradCast starts off with a show-stopper! Everything else thereafter, well, you'll decide for yourself. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

On today's program...

• Since it's, apparently, National Voter Registration Day today (yes, that's a thing), we thought we'd celebrate by starting off with a fantastic new lyric rewrite video from the cast of Broadway's Hamilton. They've updated a song from the show called "The Election of 1800" to a new version called "The Election of 2022" to raise awareness of the importance of voting this year. Their effort is in partnership with Michelle Obama's When We All Vote and Vote Riders. But for help in registering to vote, checking to make sure your registration still exists (and is at the address where you actually live), and for information on the type of ID required to vote where you live, I recommend either the DNC's IWillVote.com app or the federal government's Vote.gov. Both sites allow you to check your registration or register to vote without having to give information to a third party. And, since merely voting is no longer enough, we are officially enlisting you to spread the word to others on all of this! Ask your friends, co-workers, neighbors etc., if they are registered to vote; help them do so, if not; make sure they get to the polls to vote by November 8 this year, etc. etc. Yes, it's that important this year!

• There is a weird beer shortage looming! Why? Lack of carbon dioxide due to contamination at an extinct volcano in Mississippi. Yes, I realize that sounds bizarre --- especially given the deadly over-abundance of CO2 in our atmosphere, causing our deadly climate crisis --- but, well...tune in for the full bizarre explanation.

• On yesterday's program, we detailed some of the apparent federal criminal statutes, such as kidnapping, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have violated when he shipped 48 Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio, Texas to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts on behalf of the state of Florida. We noted that requests had been made to the MA Attorney General U.S. Attorney's office in the state to investigate whether laws were violated. But shortly after airtime yesterday, news broke that Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas Sheriff's office has opened a criminal investigation into the matter. Good news!

• As to what actually happened --- versus what DeSantis is claiming --- TPM's Josh Marshall has been trying to do some digging, after first noting that the initial story "Doesn't Add Up". Why did DeSantis hunt down migrants in Texas seeking asylum to entice (with false promises) to go to Massachusetts? Are there no migrants in Florida that could have been similarly abused, since the Florida state legislature has set allocated some $12 million to use to transport migrants out of the state (as opposed to out of the state of Texas)?! Who is this mysterious "Perla" character who has been identified as having recruited the migrants and organized luxury corporate jets to fly theme to MA? And, though the Florida Governor and Presidential hopeful is refusing to offer specifics, what clues can be gleaned about all of this from some of the statements that he has made, referencing a "contractor" or "vendor" who seems to have been hired for all of this, rather than government workers. In other words, what the hell is really going on here?

• Then, in some election law related news today, the House January 6 Select Committee Vice-Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) detailed proposed reforms to the Electoral Count Act, over the weekend. The Committee, they explain, hopes to make it more difficult in the future to steal elections via the Electoral College, as Donald Trump attempted to do on January 6, 2021. The new measure, officially introduced by the Committee in the House on Monday, is called the Presidential Election Reform Act. It would clarify the role of the Vice President on January 6 as purely ministerial; increase the number of Representative and Senators required to challenge any state's Electoral College votes; offer legal options to Presidential candidates in the event that a state fails to certify its Electoral Votes (as a number of GOP candidates for Governor and Sec. of State this year have said they would have done in 2020, had they been in office at the time); and prevents state legislatures from changing the rules for determining election results after the election has already started. The House measure is similar to one recently introduced by a bipartisan group in the Senate, and would need to be reconciled with that version if both versions are successfully brought to a vote in each chamber.

• Some good news --- and some troubling news --- for disabled voters. New voting restrictions adopted by Republicans in several different states have made it literally impossible for some disabled voters to vote at all without breaking the law. For example, a Wisconsin law had mandated that nobody other than the voter him or herself could place an absentee ballot in a mailbox. That means that those without use of their arms --- such as voters suffering from advanced multiple sclerosis or who may have been injured --- might not be able to vote absentee at all. A recent federal court victory in WI will at least allow disabled voters in that state to receive assistance when casting their ballot. But several other states, such as Kansas, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri, still have measures in place that could make it impossible --- and/or illegal --- for some disabled voters to vote at all in 2022 and beyond.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as three major storms made simultaneous, catastrophic landfall in Puerto Rico, Alaska and Japan over the weekend; a new report finds climate change made Pakistan's recent catastrophic flooding much much worse; better news in Australia where the nation, until recently controlled by climate change deniers, is finally moving to reduce carbon emissions; and, in Louisiana, a court has blocked the construction of a massive, toxic plastics plant in area of the state known as "Cancer Alley"...

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On Day 2 of public hearings in the U.S. House, Donald Trump's greatest con continues to unravel. On today's BradCast, we get you all caught up on today's public hearings by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the attempt by the former President to steal the 2020 election by defrauding the nation. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The witnesses who testified live today, as our guest HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo pointed out, were all Republicans. And they all made clear that Trump not only lost the 2020 election, but he lied over and again about fraud, even though he was told...over and again, by his closest campaign advisers, top government officials and even his own family, that he lost fair and square. He knew his claims were, as his own Attorney General Bill Barr described it, "bullshit". Nonetheless, he kept barraging his supporters via email for more and more money for his "Official Election Defense Fund". But, as the Committee's Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) pointed out: There was no "Official Election Defense Fund" and the $250 million in small dollar donations Trump raked in all went to him, not to legal challenges of the 2020 election.

Once again, a mix of live and videotaped witness testimony put the lie to Trump's Big Lie fraud claims and the false notion that he believed them to be true. He didn't. He knew better. He just didn't care. Live witnesses today who underscored those points: Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox "News" political director who made the correct Election Night call that Trump had lost Arizona; BJay Pak, Trump's own U.S. Attorney in Georgia who investigated all of the many claims by Trump supporters of fraud in Atlanta, finding none of them to be true. He was forced to resign thereafter; Trump's own 2020 Campaign Manager, Bill Stepien, was scheduled to testify, but his wife suddenly went into labor on Monday morning, so the Committee relied on his video taped testimony in which he explained that he repeatedly told Trump that his claims of fraud were bogus; Philadelphia's Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt who debunked Rudy Giuliani's false testimony to the PA legislature that more than 8,000 "dead people" voted in the state in 2020. "Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania," Schmidt testified, "there wasn't evidence of 8."

The most damning testimony may have come from Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said on tape that he and the DoJ tracked down every claim made by Trump and his supporters and found none of them to be true. "Boy, if he really believes this stuff," Barr testified thinking, "he's become detached from reality." No matter how "crazy" he told Trump the allegations were, it made no difference. Barr debunked the notion that the Dominion Voting systems company stole the election for Joe Biden, and even went on to dismantle the easily-debunked 2000 Mules movie which pretends to document tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots cast unlawfully by thousands of people in swing-states. Barr's debunking of that film, which he laughs out loud about, was suspiciously similar to our own debunking on this program several weeks ago.

Even longtime, top GOP election attorney Ben Ginsberg --- who successfully lead the RNC's fight to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush --- testified live on Monday that there was "no credible evidence of fraud produced by the Trump campaign or his supporters." He also made clear that dozens of lawsuits rejected by the courts (including by many Trump-appointed judges) did, in fact, examine the merits of the challenges and found no basis for them.

"I think what is important, and I was really glad to see, that they decided to take one of these hearings and really attack the Big Lie itself," Parton tells us today. "Because I don't think you can really prove the case about Trump's coup plot without attacking that as well. They went from the very beginning. Trump was undermining the election 18 months before the election took place."

Parton also praised the panel's highlighting of Trump's "'willful blindness,' in which he is shown to have been told by everyone that the election was not stolen. We're talking about his own campaign team, people in his family, the Dept. of Justice, various officials around the country. They all said the same thing. Ginsberg pointed out the courts also said the same thing. [Trump] refused to see it, and in fact continuously got more and more angry, apparently, continually ignored what they said, and went toward the people who told him what he wanted to hear."

"That's actually a legal concept, where someone does have an obligation --- they have a responsibility to at least have some recognition of the facts of a case. You're not allowed to go into a court and say, 'I didn't know,' when you've had dozens of people telling you something. So that's leads to maybe a potential criminal referral."

She also explained how she was "shocked" by the Big Lie fund-raising scam. "We all sort of knew this but it hadn't really been a focus until now," she observed. "But I think this is super-important, because this could go toward a real fraud investigation, a real case of wire fraud, where they defrauded millions of devoted followers with a Big Lie. And, in fact, a lot of the people who were involved in that fundraising, they also knew it was a Big Lie because they just testified to it. This is kind of a big deal."

Finally today, we open the phones to see how listeners are responding to what the House panel has been unpacking over the first two hearings, with at least another four still to come...

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On today's BradCast: After a disastrous four year mistake by the name of Donald Trump, the United States, under the leadership of Joe Biden, is taking the lead once again on our global climate emergency on Earth Day 2021. Or, at least, trying to. [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Global tensions were greatly eased on Thursday with the announcement that Russia --- which had been amassing more than 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine --- plans to deescalate and pull most of its troops back by May 1. The tensions continue to simmer, however, amid the years-long, ongoing conflict in the region, between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists, where 14,000 have died over the past 6 or 7 years of war. And, of course, the U.S. and Russia remain at odds over any number of things. But today's announcement at least lowers figurative global temperatures just a bit.

• As to lowering literal global temperatures, more than 40 world leaders --- including Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jingping --- met today for Day 1 of a virtual global climate summit hosted by Joe Biden and the White House, as the U.S. rejoins the landmark Paris Climate Agreement and hopes to assert its critical leadership role once again after Trump left the pact, increased the dangerous production of fossil fuels, and dismissed deadly global warming as a "hoax". President Biden, on the other hand, doubled-down on President Obama's previous commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement today, by announcing today that the U.S. vows to cut deadly greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Desi Doyen binge-watched hours of today's worldwide Zoom conference and shares both key details and those that may not make the corporate media headlines. Including desperate pleas for help and funding from some of the nations most effected by --- but least responsible for --- climate change, and from young climate activists who urge the nations of the world to stop making excuses and take far more decisive action to meet the true, scientific urgency of the moment.

• Back in D.C., Republicans continue to block the formation of a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to examine the deadly, Trump-fueled insurrection on January 6th, despite a rapidly growing number of troubling new questions about the disastrous failure to protect the U.S. Capitol from the angry MAGA Mob while Joe Biden's 2020 Electoral College victory was ratified during a joint session of Congress. Last week, an Inspector General's report found that both DHS and the FBI had warned Capitol Police, days before the attack, that "Congress is the target". And yet, Capitol Police leadership instructed officers NOT to use their most effective methods to defend the Capitol. Why? A Washington Post investigation subsequently found that D.C. Metro Police --- out-manned by 58 to 1 on the west side of the Capitol --- radioed for emergency back-up at least 17 times over 78 minutes at the height of the attack, but received no response. Why? New evidence has been emerging from more than 400 indictments made in the days following the insurrection to reveal that the assault, which injured and hospitalized more than 140 law enforcement officials, was far more violent than many have understood. And, on Wednesday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) revealed during a hearing in the House Administration Committee that she chairs, that undisclosed internal investigations suggest Capitol Police were instructed to seek out anti-Trump protesters, but not pro-Trump protesters. Why? We ask those questions and many more, as the chaos and confusion of disparate investigations continues while the GOP obstructs the formation of an over-arching commission that might be able to make sense of what actually happened on January 6th, and who should actually be held accountable.

• Finally, Desi returns for our latest Green News Report on Earth Day, documenting new commitments to stave off the worst effects of our climate emergency by world powers; Rep. AOC and Sen. Markey reintroduce their Green New Deal; And Nobel-prize winning climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann offers his thoughts as to whether the latest actions may be enough to save humanity...

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Day two --- the final day --- of the Questions phase in the Senate Impeachment Trial of Donald John Trump was perhaps best characterized by lead House Manager Adam Schiff on Thursday, when he described the new defenses offered by the White House Counsel's team as "a descent into Constitutional madness" and "the normalization of lawlessness." Those comments were echoed by the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, who joins us on today's BradCast. She called Trump's new line of defense as "insane". [Audio link to show is posted at bottom of article.]

On Wednesday, the first day of written Questions from the U.S. Senators, as read to both legal teams by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Trump's defense attorney Alan Dershowitz made an extraordinary argument: "If a President does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." He went on to offer an analogy. "If a hypothetical President of the United States said to a hypothetical leader of a foreign country, 'unless you build a hotel with my name on it, and unless you give me a million dollar kickback, I will withhold the funds'." That, he said, would be an "easy case" and "purely corrupt". However, he continued, a more complex case was one where a President says: "I want to be elected. I think I'm a great President. I think I'm the greatest President there ever was and if I'm not elected the national interest will suffer greatly. That cannot be an impeachable offense."

In other words, he seemed to argue, it's just fine for a President to solicit a foreign power for help in an election (which is a violation of the law), so long as he or she believed it was in the best national interest for him or her to be elected. Dershowitz has spent a lot of time since those remarks, on Twitter and elsewhere, attempting to defend himself by saying that he did not say what he said. But he absolutely did say it, and so we share audio of some of his extended argument saying as much today, so you can hear it for yourself.

It wasn't the only way in which Trump's team of defense counselors moved the goal posts to accommodate his well-documented Abuse of Power, the basis for the first Article of Impeachment against him. Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin on Wednesday astonishingly charged that "mere information" about a political opponent, even from a foreign source, "is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws."

“Apparently it’s okay for the President to get information from foreign governments in an election," House Impeachment Manager Zoe Lofgren responded with alarm. The California Democrat who worked on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon Impeachment added, "That's news to me!" The new lines of argument from the President's team is what led Schiff to charge Trump's defense has become "a descent into Constitutional madness," adding "that way madness lies," before citing a similar, then-rejected defense from Richard Nixon who claimed "when a President does it, it's not illegal," before he eventually resigned the Presidency in disgrace. "Have we learned nothing in the last half century?," asked Schiff in response to Dershowitz today.

We share all of those assertions and counter-assertions today, before we turn to someone with no small amount of authority on all of this, ANN RAVEL, who served four years on the Federal Election Commission and as its Chair for two years before leaving her post in 2017. Prior to that, she chaired a similar state commission overseeing campaign finance matters in California.

"There are so many things wrong with [Dershowitz'] argument it's hard to know where to start," she tells me, charging that the claim that a quid pro quo is "somehow justified because it's important for the nation is ridiculous. It would be like saying, for any elected public official, that because it's so important for them to be re-elected that they can commit any criminal act. That's not what the framers of the Constitution intended with regard to the Presidency, and it's exactly why they have the laws relating to impeachment procedures."

"The law does not have an exception for people who think they are so important, that their worth is necessary for the whole country and therefore they can act with illegality and with impunity," she opines, before similarly torching Philbin's argument that there is nothing unlawful about soliciting a thing of value from a foreign power --- an express violation of campaign finance law.

Ravel, who is currently running for office herself in the California State Senate, laments the fact that "there is no FEC in existence now" with only three members currently seated on the six-person panel, and at least four required for a quorum to vote on enforcement of federal law. Similarly, she warns that Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, responsible for overseeing criminal violations of campaign finance regulations, "is not acting as an Attorney General who would act with integrity to enforce the laws fairly and evenly. Instead, he seems to be biased in favor of assuring that he supports this President, so he remains in office I presume. As a result, we do not have any enforcement whatsoever of campaign finance laws."

Ravel offers alarming insight and a grim assessment as voting in the critical 2020 Presidential election begins just days from now in Iowa. "This is like sending a flare up indicating it's open season for illegality in our electoral process," she warns, along with many other thoughts, including on what she has come to learn about elections now that she is on the other side of the issue as a candidate herself. Running for office, Ravel tells me, has led her to be believe that "more constraints" are needed on electoral campaign finance, not less. She would like to see publicly financed elections in the future.

Finally today, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report, with a few encouraging signs (though not nearly enough) on how some institutions are attempting to step up and deal with our worsening climate crisis, both in the U.S. and around the globe...

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Our special BradCast coverage of the Impeachment Trial of Donald John Trump continues on Day 2 of the Democratic House Managers' opening argument --- which could well be their closing argument as well, if Republicans continue to block subpoenas for contemporaneous documentation and first-hand eye-witnesses like Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton and Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. [Audio link to show follows summary below.]

Before we get to our impeachment coverage today, however, some less-than-fantastic news from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who have, for the first time in the more than 70 year history of their infamous "Doomsday Clock", moved its minute hand inside the two-minute mark (where it was set in 2018 and at the height of the Cold War) before "midnight." We are now, according to the Bulletin's board of advisers, just 100 symbolic seconds from "midnight", thanks to growing threats of nuclear weapons following the dissolution of landmark arms control pacts and the ever-increasing acceleration of our climate crisis. "We are now expressing how close the world is to catastrophe in seconds --- not hours, or even minutes," according to Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin's president and CEO. "We now face a true emergency --- an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay." The Bulletin also cited the increasing threat of cyberattacks in their explanation as one of "multiple existential threats."

Meanwhile, one of world's greatest threats, Donald Trump, stands trial for removal from office in the U.S. Senate. Not that many who watch Fox "News" would understand exactly why, given that the pretend "news" outlet has, unlike CNN and MSNBC, been cutting away from their exceedingly truncated live coverage of the proceedings to carry their regular programming, on which they are lying about what is happening in the actual trial. What their viewers have not heard was the detailed, granular evidence revealing how Trump abused the power of his office to withhold nearly $400 million in military assistance from Ukraine in hopes of extorting the war-torn nation to agree to announce an investigation of Joe Biden and an evidence-free, Russia-generated claim that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. It was done in hopes of cheating in the 2020 election.

The chronology of those events was expertly detailed by lead House Manager Adam Schiff on Wednesday, along with the other House Managers. At key moments in their presentations, each pointed out how existing documentation and eye-witness testimony is currently unavailable to the trial, being withheld at the orders of the President, and how that information should and could be made available now, if Republican Senators agree to do so. If not, Schiff warned, "the truth will come out" eventually anyway.

But GOP Senators have clearly calculated that, for most of them, it will be better to have that damning information come out later, after they have voted to acquit, rather than before they cast such a vote. All of this, ironically (or hypocritically) enough, as a number of Republican Senators have been complaining to Fox "News" (where viewers have no clue what's actually going on) and elsewhere, that they have not learned anything new from the Democrats' presentation.

On Thursday, Democrats detailed the legal and Constitutional underpinnings of the first Article of Impeachment against Trump for Abuse of Power, with House Manager Jerrold Nadler describing the allegations as "overwhelmingly supported by the evidenced amassed by the House" and "among the most serious charges ever brought against a President." The Chair of the Judiciary Committee went on to detail how the President's conduct in attempting to pressure a foreign nation to help him cheat in an American election is without precedent since the nation's founding and is "wrong, dangerous and captures the worst fears of our founders and the Constitution." Nadler characterized Trump's extortion scheme as one that "puts even President Nixon to shame," as the President and his defenders offer the "terrifying" argument that they see "no limits on his power or on his ability to use his public office for private gain."

He also played clips of Trump's own impeachment attorney, Alan Dershowitz, from before the Bill Clinton impeachment in 1998, when he argued that a violation of a statutory crime is not necessary before bringing charges of High Crimes and Misdemeanors and then-Representative, now-Senator Lindsey Graham making a similar case during his own presentation against Clinton while serving as a House Manager during that 1999 Impeachment Trial.

That's just some of our special coverage --- and debunkery --- in today's packed program, which ends with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report as Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as an opponent of climate change (hold your laughter); Trump beclowns himself again at Davos; a new study finds far worse drinking water contamination in the U.S. than previously estimated; and teen climate action superstar Greta Thunberg dresses down the elites at the World Economic Conference in Davos by telling them to end their investments in fossil fuels and start behaving as if they actually love their own children...

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