I'll try to make this brief today, so you can get right on to actually listening to today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our stories today, as Donald Trump officially becomes the lowest-rated President in U.S. history during his first 100 days in office since polling began in the FDR Era...

• The Trump Administration has now gutted the Voting Rights Unit in the Civil Rights Section of the Dept. of Justice. All of the senior managers have been reassigned elsewhere and all pending cases from the prior Administration have now been dropped. So much for the DoJ's "crown jewel"...and enforcement of voting rights.

• After losing one case after another after another in lower courts since taking office, the Trump Administration is hoping to change their luck by turning the tables by arresting a sitting state judge in Wisconsin for allegedly helping an undocumented migrant avoid arrest by ICE when he was in her courtroom for a completely unrelated case. The state judge, Hannah Dugan, was hand-cuffed at the court (as opposed to, for example, Trump being allowed to turn himself in at an appointed hour for his two felony indictments) and Trump's FBI Director, Kash Patel, posted a photo of the perp walk on social media in violation of DoJ's long-standing policy. The case against Hannah, however, may not turn out to be a very good one, according to Marcy Wheeler.

• And now they're "deporting" U.S. citizens. At least children. With their mothers. Late last week, two mothers were both deported to Honduras after showing up for a scheduled check-in along with their kids, one of whom is 2-years old, one who is 7-years old, and one who is 4-years old...with Stage 4 cancer. The children are all U.S. citizens. Neither of the mothers were reportedly allowed to speak to a lawyer after being handcuffed and shipped out of the country. One of the women was reportedly allowed to speak to the father of her children for 1-minute before the call was cut off by ICE and the women and their children were all deported. And yet, when asked about it on Sunday, Sec. of State Marco Rubio had the gall to say that, while both citizens and non-citizens alike are entitled to Constitutional due process, "if you're in this this country unlawfully, you have no right to be here and you must be removed." But, how do you determine if someone is in the country unlawfully without due process? Clearly, neither of these women --- OR THEIR CHILDREN --- received it. That, by the way, is according to the far-right, very Trumpy, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge in Texas overseeing their cases. Even he is not happy about it!

• So, is this what Trumpers were hoping for when they voted for him last November? I had hoped to talk to a few of them as I asked such listeners to give us a call today. But, right as we finally got to the phones, the entire phone system here at KPFK crashed. [Please consider giving them a donation to help upgrade the phone system! And please tell them Brad sent you when you do!]

• Oh, well. That gave us some time to walk through at least a few of the major new polls out over the past few days in the run up to Trump's 100th Day in office this week, finding him with the lowest rating at this time in office of every President who has served over the past 100 years. And it's not just his overall approval that has crashed --- into the 30s in some of the polls --- but, on every single issue of note, more Americans oppose him than support him...by huge margins...

• And also, some time to enjoy the schadenfreude of a whole bunch of MAGA folks who seem to now deeply regret their vote for Donald Trump...

This seems to be the worst fascist takeover ever. But he's doing it anyway...

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This one is really a debacle. It's likely criminal as well, on several levels, according to today's guest on The BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

You have likely heard by now about the group text chat that The Atlantic's Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was somehow invited to over the commercially-available mobile phone app called Signal, in which top-level Trump Administration cabinet officials, including Donald Trump's Defense Secretary and former Fox 'News' weekend host, Pete Hegseth, discussed specific U.S. attack plans for bombing Yemen,

Goldberg detailed on Monday (free link) how he was invited into the group chat by Trump's National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz. Classified information was discussed in the conversation. But, while Goldberg knew better than to publish specifics, he explained: "What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing."

Other Signal accounts participating in the group included those for JD Vance (Vice President), Marco Rubio (Secretary of State), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary), John Ratcliffe (CIA Director), Stephen Miller (Deputy White House Chief of Staff), Susie Wiles (White House Chief of Staff) and Steve Witkoff (Special Envoy to the Middle East). That, as NPR reported today, the Signal app was cited in a Dept. of Defense email last week to all Pentagon employees, warning of a "vulnerability" exploited by "Russian professional hacking groups" that makes the app unsuitable for use by the military, even for non-public UNclassified information.

As luck would have it, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had a hearing already scheduled for today, with witnesses including Gabbard and Ratcliffe --- both members of the Signal chat in question --- and Kash Patel, Trump loyalist and wildly-unqualified FBI Director. While most Republicans on the Committee were interested in discussing anything but this matter, Dems were rightly laser focused on it, including the fact that Witkoff was apparently at the Kremlin for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this month when the text list, detailing plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen and reportedly revealing the identify of a senior CIA officer, were discussed.

We're joined today by our friend and longtime independent national security journalist MARCY WHEELER. In her piece today at Emptywheel.net, she detailed "Seven Reasons Trump's Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace" following the signal debacle. We step through each of those reasons with her today.

Wheeler was amazed that, even though the identities of everyone in the group were available to all members, nobody seemed to notice, or be troubled by, the inclusion of a journalist. Especially a journalist who Hegseth would go on to try and smear as "a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist whose made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again." That, after Hegseth revealed classified war plans to him in the Signal chat and the White House has already confirmed the matter.

Wheeler charges that Trump's entire national security team in the group appears to have potentially violated Section F of the Espionage Act, which, in her words from her today, "makes it a crime to so negligently mishandle National Defense Information that someone not authorized to receive it does receive it."

"If you are so stupid as to share attack plans on a Signal thread that a journalist happens to be accidentally added to, that may be criminal," she tells me today, detailing how Section F of the Act bars the sharing of National Defense Information "through gross negligence", etc. "In other words, Pete Hegseth shares information about this attack with somebody not entitled. Because Pete Hegseth is so stupid, that might get you to [Section F]. And you had the entire national security establishment just sitting there watching Pete Hegseth do that!"

There is also the matter of violating both the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act by setting comments in the chat group to automatically delete after a week. Moreover, she observes, the fact that Trump claimed on Monday afternoon to know nothing about the matter, even after the story was published in The Atlantic, means that either critical NatSec information was withheld from the President, or he was simply lying when he claimed to have known nothing about it when asked for comment by a journalist at the White House. Wheeler argues that's "not plausible, because if he hadn't been told in advance, he would be firing [group chat member and Chief of Staff] Susie Wiles right now. He'd be firing Mike Waltz right now. JD Vance. He would be firing everybody who knew this was going to come out and didn't warn him. He hasn't fired any of them, so we have to assume he was lying when he pretended he didn't know anything about this." She goes on to add: "But if he didn't know anything about it, it means that he can't trust anyone around him. That all the people who are running his national security are not keeping him in the loop."

Also, the fact that Witkoff was in Russia, at the Kremlin, as a member of the group chat means that all of the accounts of other members on the list may also be compromised. "You bring a phone into Russia, they are going to compromise the phone. Sitting in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin is really close to the top of the list of stupid things you can do with a phone when you're planning war strikes," says Wheeler. "The timing on it is quite clear. He was in the Kremlin when that list was started. Was his phone compromised? And if so, what else was on his phone? That's, to my mind, one of the most pressing questions Democrats should be asking every minute."

Tune in for much more on all of this from Marcy, including the outrage that FBI Director Kash Patel claimed during his Senate Intel Committee testimony today that he only just learned about the matter himself late last night, and that Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is likely too busy doing Fox "News" hits to be troubled with enforcing the rule of law against fellow members of the Trump Administration, no matter how much danger they may have placed the country in with their negligence and/or incompetence.

ALSO ON TODAY'S PROGRAM: Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report, covering a new round of wildfires in the very dry, very windy Carolinas this week, as Trump dismantles FEMA; a new warning about dwindling fresh water supplies thanks to disappearing glaciers as the climate continues to warm; and the fossil fuel industry calling in IOUs from Congress to block liability lawsuits from being filed against them for their roles in knowingly causing our worsening climate crisis...

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On today's BradCast: What's in it for Donald Trump? Seriously. Why does he want to break the government? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

I know why Elon Musk wants to dismantle and destroy the federal government piece-by-piece (so his government contracts can't be policed or businesses regulated, etc.) And I understand Trump's need for retribution against his perceived enemies. But why does Trump want to seemingly dismantle damn near every federal agency, from the U.S. Forest Service to USAID and beyond, no matter how ham-handedly? No matter how much it grows (not shrinks) the national debt, no matter how many Americans (including his own voters) it puts out of work, and no matter how much the chaos he is wreaking continues to sink his approval ratings? No matter how much none of his flailing lowers the price of eggs.

It's certainly not in the name of "efficiency" or cutting "waste, fraud and abuse", as the evidence makes plain, no matter how many lies and quickly disproven claims about "million and millions" of dead people receiving Social Security checks or Musk's DOGE Bros claiming to have "saved" at least $55 billion in Government contracts to date. (It's more like $2 billion.) All false claims that both Trump and Musk repeat, only to have to walk them back when proven wrong, time and again.

We discuss a lot of that at the top of the show, along with a bunch of related news headlines from over the weekend, before opening up the phones today to listeners for answers to that simple question: What's in it for Donald Trump? Why does he really want to dismantle the government?

We talk to a lot of callers with a lot of differing explanations (though being controlled by Vladimir Putin seems to be a listener fave...even if it doesn't fully answer all of my questions about Trump's behavior here.)

Perhaps Trump's recently-confirmed Sec. of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, gave away the truth on Fox "News" over the weekend, when he falsely claimed that Trump ran on "reprivatizing the economy". He didn't run on that. Though Project 2025 --- which he pretended to disavow during the campaign --- certainly called for it. Is that his game? Cripple federal government so private corporations can then fill the gap and offer the same services to the American people for a higher price that includes profit to those private corporations?

Please tune in for lots of interesting discussion today. And, if you have a better explanation for why Trump wants to kill the U.S. government by gutting hundreds of thousands of government jobs and services, seemingly at random, for no easily discernible reason, feel free to let me know in comments below...

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We can't fight every stupid, idiotic, dangerous or perilous thing during the Trump Era, can we? I know I can't, personally. But I don't speak for everyone else. And one person's stupid or idiotic may be another's dangerous or perilous. An interesting debate over picking battles and who gets to decide which ones should be waged is at the heart of today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

FIRST UP... however, speaking of dangerous, Donald Trump lackey and MAGA merchandiser (or "sycophantic suck-up" as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse accurately described him today), Kash Patel was confirmed for a ten-year term as FBI Director by cowardly, sycophantic suck-up Republicans in the U.S. Senate today. All Democrats voted against him. Just two Republicans (Collins and Murkowski) joined them.

Aside from being wildly unqualified and publishing an "enemies list" of so-called "members of the Executive Branch deep state” that he vows to target, Patel also pleaded the Fifth to avoid implicating himself in crimes during grand jury testimony regarding his role in Trump's theft of thousands of pages of highly classified national security documents; was paid $25,000 by Russian propagandists to appear in an anti-FBI documentary series; appears to have millions of dollars linked to Chinese interests through shell corporations in the Cayman Islands; and, according to whistleblower allegations cited by the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, appears to have committed perjury during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Other than that, he sounds like the perfect choice for FBI Director! Donald Trump has done it again! Did I mention Patel also publicly vowed, as recently as last December, to "come after" journalists "who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections"? (So much for the First Amendment, even if Patel remains a fan of the Fifth.)

THEN... Speaking of the First Amendment and protection of the free press, we recently reported on the Trump White House's attempt to violate the First Amendment by barring the Associated Press from White House events unless and until the 178-year old international media organization agreed to change its Style Guide to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".

On the surface, it seems like a pretty minor fight, given everything else the Constitutional order is up against. But, upon closer examination, it really is fight over basic Constitutional rights. As NYTimes' opinion writer Jamelle Bouie accurately characterized it at Bluesky, "your willingness to accept this gulf of america nonsense is an indication of your willingness to accept much worse things coming from this administration."

Meanwhile, over The Atlantic, Senior Editor Gilad Edelman doesn't have any such concerns, and even appears to be victim-blaming by suggesting the fight is one that "the AP probably should never have picked in the first place."

That brief article by Edelman recently touched off our guest today, longtime media critic, political strategist and writer, JAMISON FOSER, who wonders, in a recent article, who Edelman thinks he is to decide which fights are worth waging in the Trump Era and which are not.

"I think the nature of the situation that we're in," Foser tells me today, "and the breadth and depth of the ways that we are in trouble, and things are stacked against us --- an autocratic movement has control of our entire government, much of the news media, much of the ways that people get information online --- things are really stacked against us."

"We are not in a situation in which there are obvious, clear, easily discernible, winnable fights we can choose. So this idea that people should only choose fights that they can win --- I think people should choose the fights that feel right to them. We should all be doing a little less trying to police what fights other people are choosing to engage in, and more finding a place where we can stand up and pick a fight where we can," he argues.

"We will probably lose it," he concedes, "because we will probably lose most of them. But sometimes in the loss there is some value. In this one [AP's defense of First Amendment freedoms] there is some value. There's value in saying, 'We can't stop Donald Trump from ordering his government to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. But we can say we are not going along with that. It is racist, and dumb, and he can't make us say it. There's value in saying that to ourselves, in not giving in to his attempt to control the English language. And there's value in showing our fellow Americans that we are not going along with that."

In AP's case, all they were doing was following the Style Guide they have used for decades. And Edelman still characterized it as a "fight" they "should never have picked."

We've got much more to discuss along those lines today with Foser --- including how elected Democrats might wage more productive fights --- in what I think is a really interesting conversation. Please give it a listen.

FINALLY... Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, covering the heroic senior DoJ official who quit this week rather than violate the law by following Trump Admin orders to claw back money lawfully granted to clean energy initiatives under Biden; climate change now tripling the price of coffee and cocoa; and Trump declaring himself 'King' to cancel New York City's very successful, first-in-the-nation congestion pricing...

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Hey! Happy "Certificate of Ascertainment of Appointment of Electors" Day! I know, it seems like it comes earlier and earlier every election year doesn't it? We take the festive opportunity on today's BradCast to discuss a few related points, including a bunch of new state criminal filed charges in the GOP's 2020 fake Electors plot and whether the convicted felon who is now our incoming President actually won a governing "mandate" (or not) in 2024. [Audio link to full show follows this link.]

FIRST UP... The wildfire we discussed briefly yesterday out here in Malibu, California, amid exceptionally dry and windy conditions, expanded by nearly 40% overnight and was reportedly just 7% contained as of airtime. At least 7,500 structures are threatened and more than 12,000 people are under evacuation orders, including wealthy homeowners and celebrities such as Cher and Dick Van Dkye, students at Pepperdine University, and thousands of middle class and working residents in the community. The area is a geographic haven for such fires for a number of reasons discussed today, all of which has been exacerbated in recent years by our worsening climate crisis.

THEN... FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Donald Trump after he fired James Comey for investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election, has decided to "obey in advance" by announcing he will resign in January when Trump takes office again, three years before the official end of his term. The incoming President has threatened to fire Wray and replace him with loyalist stooge and avowed government weaponizer Kash Patel. Still, there are reasons to be critical of Wray's limp decision to "bow out in advance."

NEXT... Not all law enforcement officials are willing to roll over. In Wisconsin, state prosecutors added 10 felony charges each to three different Donald Trump accomplices who attempted to help him steal the 2020 election. The new criminal charges [PDF] were filed on Tuesday against 2020 Trump attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as Trump's 2020 Election Day operations director Mike Roman as part of the failed fake Electors scheme in the state that year. Troupis and Chesebro are said to be the original architects of the plot. Each of the Trump dupes had previously faced just one felony count apiece, with their first court appearance set for Thursday. Now they will each face 11 counts and a potential 6-year prison sentence and/or $10,000 fine for each count if found guilty.

FINALLY... In the early morning hours following the November 5th Election, Donald Trump declared he had won an "unprecedented and powerful mandate." Members of his transition team subsequently claimed a "MAGA Mandate" and "historic mandate for his agenda." But, Trumpian hyperbole aside, did he actually win any such thing?

Now that all states have certified their results and officially declared which slate of Electors will vote in the Electoral College in each state capital on December 17 --- (remember, I told you today was the "Certificate of Ascertainment of Appointment of Electors" Day!) --- the final results, with all votes said to be tallied, reveal that Trump defeated Kamala Harris by less than 1.5 percentage points and that a majority of Americans voted for someone other than him.

That doesn't seem particularly "unprecedented" or "powerful", much less a "mandate".

But what is a mandate anyway? Today, we're joined by JULIA R. AZARI, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, who happens to have written a book on that very topic, called Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate.

As Azari warned in a short article posted the day after this year's election, when Trump's margin over Harris appeared to be far larger than it actually turned out to be, "Be wary of anyone claiming an election mandate," given that "talking about mandates flattens public opinion, rather than lifting it up" and "elevates the president above the Constitution and gives him a popular power he was never meant to have." As she explains today, that goes for Republicans and Democrats alike.

"I've been pretty critical of the way that Presidents of both major parties have used that concept," she tells me. "Although I would also note that, in contemporary times, Republicans have been a lot more focused and ideological in their mandate claiming."

Azari argues, essentially, that voters vote for and against many different things in an election, and there is no clear way to establish that they have voted for any one particular policy, much less in an election with one of the narrowest margins in modern history and where the winner of the Electoral College actually received a minority of the popular vote.

When any President-elect declares themselves to be the winner of a mandate --- or when the media echo that claim --- "this gives the President a little bit of extra power, at least in their own minds, that they feel justified in taking," Azari says, "and it enhances that power over that of Congress, rather than thinking of Congress as a co-equal branch."

She also notes: "When that power is in the hands of somebody who isn't really keen on Constitutional constraints, we may see some serious consequences."

We've got much to discuss with Azari on all of those points today. But what about Presidents who actually do win a majority of the popular vote? Do they have justification to claim a governing mandate? How should media report on such claims no matter who makes them? And how have claims of mandates been expanding and changing over the years going all the way back to the first such President to do so, Andrew Jackson in 1832? Please tune in for all of that history, both past and present, and much more on today's BradCast!...

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Today on The BradCast: How "news deserts" are quickly expanding across the U.S. and how they played a disturbing role in this year's Presidential election. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

While finger-pointing continues in the wake of the stunning, if very narrow (less than 1.5%) popular vote victory of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris last month, we continue to focus on the many failures of the media that led to it, including corporate media, social media and independent media. And, in some cases, as discussed on today's show, a lack of local media in news deserts around the country.

According to the 2024 State of Local News report from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, "Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished." They are now said to be disappearing at "a rate of more than two per week", with some daily papers becoming weeklies, and many ending their print editions entirely. "As news organizations continue to contract, news deserts --- areas that lack consistent local reporting that fills critical information needs --- continue to expand."

Our guest today, 36-year former Washington Post media reporter PAUL FARHI, in an analysis of the Medill study with John Volk, finds that while Trump won the 2024 election "with one of the smallest popular vote margins in U.S. history", in 91% of news deserts he won by "an avalanche," by an average of 54 points in the 193 counties identified as news deserts where county-level results were available as of last week.

But, as Farhi and Volk note in their coverage, quoting Steven Waldman of the Rebuild Local News organization, "The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’”

What is the right way? Well, that's what Farhi is here to discuss today.

He explains that those voters who live in news deserts --- usually rural, though not always Republican-leaning counties --- do have access to national media outlets such as CNN, Fox "News", the New York Times, etc. But, without local news outlets to add context to national issues, they may end up voting against their own best interests. Those voters, for example, may not realize that the Trump/Republican call for tariffs might end up raising local prices or result in the loss of local employment. They may not understand that access to healthcare and the right to abortion may be lost in their own community.

"These issues have local resonance," Farhi tells me, "but they don't if you have no access to understanding how they affect your local community. So what happens? The research that's emerging is that people frame their choice around their partisanship. 'I'm a Republican, I'm going to vote Republican. I don't need any local news to modify that behavior because I don't have any news to modify that behavior.' It increases the polarization and the partisanship of the electorate, because they have no information to weigh it against what's happening in their local community."

Beyond politics, Farhi notes: "In news deserts, because you don't have a watchdog, you have more political corruption on average. You have higher taxes on average. You have lower bond ratings. You have a certain kind of social alienation and loss of community, because no one is covering the high school sports, or obits, or the community events, or the things that are not major stories, but they kind of give a community some cohesion and coherence, and common knowledge. Those things, when they disappear, which they do in news deserts, are disproportionately affecting Trump voters."

The disturbingly fast expansion of news deserts may also be leading to a growth in ticket-splitting --- votes cast for a Republican at the top of the ticket, for instance, but no votes at all cast for Senator, Congress or in local races. That's because voters may simply not have enough local information to know how to vote. Ironically, that may have helped Democrats win some of those Senate and House races this year in states where Harris lost the popular vote to Trump.

It's a fascinating conversation. And a disturbing one. Also, given Farhi's 36 years as a media reporter at Washington Post until leaving last year, I asked him for his thoughts on the decision by the paper's billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to nix the planned Editorial Page endorsement of Harris just days before the November election; how Bezos' ownership has affected the venerable news outlet; and whether he thinks it is a good or bad idea, for news in general, for people to cancel subscriptions to such outlets in protest. (More than 250,000 subscribers reportedly did exactly that just after Bezos spiked the paper's endorsement of Harris.) Please tune in for all of that and much more in our discussion today!

ALSO TODAY...

• The Dept. of Justice Inspector General released a report on the abuse by the Trump Administration's leak investigations that included spying on two members of Congress (Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell), along with 43 staff members of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. One of the staffers secretly caught up in the 2017 probe, was Kash Patel, Trump's proposed nominee to head the FBI. He served as a staffer, at the time, to a Republican Congressman and only recently learned that the Administration abused DoJ policies to obtain his email and phone records. Suffice to say the report may add reasons for Patel to be angry and seek retribution, but not of the media or Obama or Biden Administrations, despite his vow to investigate and jail both members of the media and officials of both Administrations. His problems, it seems, may be much closer to home.

• Finally, as yet another apocalyptic climate change-fueled wildfire threatens celebrity homes and Pepperdine University in Malibu today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with news on deadly back-to-back storms in the U.K. and Ireland; China's EV boom eroding the global demand for oil; and Donald Trump's plans to end Joe Biden's landmark loan programs to renewable energy companies and tax credits to consumers like you, for home improvements such as solar panels, weatherized windows and electric vehicles...

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It has been a very busy several days since we spoke with you last on BradCast! So it's another very busy show today. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• BREAKING before air: Law enforcement officials have arrested a "strong person of interest" in last week's Manhattan murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. A 26-year old man in Altoona, Pennsylvania --- said to have a gun like the killer's, a silencer for it, a fake ID and other related stuff --- has reportedly led police to believe they may have their man, though no official announcement has been made to that end as of airtime.

• Over the weekend, Romania's constitutional court nullified the results of the first round of voting in the NATO member nation's Presidential elections due to evidence of massive interference by Russia via tens of thousands of cyberattacks and a scheme to pay a coterie of TikTok users to post pro-Russia propaganda in favor of a longshot Presidential candidate. (Sound familiar?) The election will now be re-run. Imagine that. In the meantime, despite all manner of concern about Russian (and domestic) interference in the U.S. Presidential election this year, official certification of Electors in each state moves forward this week, without nary a hint of the hand-count or post-election audit that so many world-class cybersecurity and voting system experts have called for --- for very well-supported reasons --- following Donald Trump's reported victory on November 5th.

• Also, over the weekend, the Assad Family's barbaric, decades-long autocratic rule of Syria finally came to an ignominious end, following a lightning offensive by rebel groups at the end of a deadly, 12-year civil war on the long road to Damascus. Bashar Ashad and his family fled to Russia, Syria's top ally, seeking asylum and exile. Russia --- for its part, as President Biden noted during his remarks on the stunning fall of Assad's Syria on Sunday --- had been unable to come to the aid of its longtime ally, as they are stuck in their own quagmire following their invasion of U.S. and NATO-supported Ukraine. While Biden lauded the good news of the fall of Assad as "a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country," he was more cautious about what comes next and whether those now claiming power --- tied in years past to al-Qaeda --- can moderate their politics to govern Syria responsibly. Time will tell.

• And, with still more bad news for authoritarianism, South Korea's opposition Democratic Party continues to have the support of the people as it pushes back against the rightwing ruling party and its President following last week's auto-coup via martial law declared by President Yoon Suk Yeol. The declaration was called off just hours later amid a popular uprising and members of both parties fighting their way past military troops to open the National Assembly to a hold a vote to end the martial law declaration. In the days since, Yoon now clings tenuously to power. His party, the People Power Party (or PPP), blocked an impeachment attempt by the Democrats over the weekend and demonstrators remain on the streets as South Korean officials announced a travel ban for the President, and the PPP declared the party and the nation's Prime Minister will take over all foreign and domestic business from Yoon until he leaves office earlier than planned. So, with no power, why is he still hanging around? And with no constitutional basis for this shift of President powers to a political party and a Prime Minister, the opposition Democrats are describing it as a second coup and vow to continue their impeachment attempts on a weekly basis through the end of the year or until Yoon is deposed.

• Finally today, the Biden Administration has reportedly been considering issuing broad, unprecedented, preemptive pardons to a number of Donald Trump's self-declared domestic enemies. That effort kicked into even higher gear with the incoming President's announcement that he planned to nominate Kash Patel to head up the FBI. Patel has been outspoken about investigations and prosecutions against a long list of Trump's perceived enemies, listing some 60 of them by name in his recent book, including Joe Biden himself, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Sec. of State Hilary Clinton, former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, Trump's own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley and dozens more. Over the weekend, during an interview with NBC News, Trump appeared to up the ante yet again by calling for the jailing of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and other members of the bipartisan January 6 House Select Committee.

  So, should Biden use his Constitutional Presidential pardon power before leaving office to grant clemency to many of those who will likely be targeted by a weaponized Trump Administration? Or is it more important to maintain the polite "norms and traditions" that only Dems seem to follow as Trump and Republicans run rough-shod over them? My view is pretty clear: Offer them all pardons. If they want one, grant it. If they don't, they're on their own.

  We open up the phones to get the opinions from listeners on this matter and whether or not they would like to see Biden issue such pardons. Suffice to say, we remain a divided nation...

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Okay, we're back live for today's BradCast after a much-needed holiday break! Thank you for your patience. Of course, on Day One of our return, breaking news overnight shakes up our best-laid return plans. Welcome back. [Audio link to full story follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Before leaving for our Thanksgiving holiday, we had been covering, in some detail (see here and here for a start), concerns by longtime computer scientists and cybersecurity and voting systems experts about the accuracy of the results of the 2024 Presidential election. The bulk of their concerns center around unprecedented breaches of proprietary voting system software by Trump supporters in several different battleground states after the 2020 election. Systems were unlawfully breached and its software copied and distributed via the Internet to MAGA "Stop the Stealers". The experts have been calling on [PDF] Vice President Harris to seek hand-counts or partial hand-counts in several battleground states to confirm the accuracy of reported results. While we were off last week, another expert rang in. Jacqueline Singh served as the Lead Incident Response and Threat Analyst for the 2020 Biden-Harris Campaign. Last week she penned a brief, open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, urging them to seek "a comprehensive forensic audit" of the 2024 results, based on a number of issues that she argues "undermine confidence in the election results." Singh, "the cybersecurity lead" on Biden's 2020 campaign, explains why such an audit would "not only verify the accuracy of the vote count but also identify vulnerabilities that could threaten future elections." That said, I have neither seen nor heard any evidence that the Biden-Harris Administration, the Harris-Walz Campaign, or any other official body is even considering such a post-election audit beyond the few, minimal spot checks run by several states, much less a full or partial hand-count of paper ballots in states won by Biden in 2020 but reportedly lost by Harris in 2024.

• Over the weekend, Donald Trump appointed the fathers-in-law of his two daughters to top positions in his upcoming Administration. Tiffany's billionaire father-in-law Massad Boulos was named as Trump's senior White House advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. Trump didn't bother to note his familial relation when making the announcement. The day before, Ivanka's father-in-law, convicted felon Charles Kushner (Jared's dad), was tapped to become the next U.S. Ambassador to France. In 2005, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion; one count of federal witness tampering; and one count of campaign finance violation. His prosecutor, then-US Attorney (later NJ Governor and Trump ally) Chris Christie has described the case as "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he had ever prosecuted. Tune in to find out why. That said, Trump pardoned Jared's dad and his daughter's father-in-law for all of those crimes before leaving office in 2020.

• Also over the weekend, Trump announced plans to appoint longtime loyalist and MAGA merchandiser Kash Patel as the next FBI Director, even though the current Director, Christopher Wray (also appointed by Trump), still has three years left in his current term. The announcement suggests that Wray will be fired upon Trump taking office, unless he resigns first. FBI Directors serve 10 years in office in order to span Presidential administrations, in order to prevent the position from being politicized. Patel has vowed to weaponize federal law enforcement by bringing retribution against the so-called "deep state" and to prosecute Trump's perceived enemies at the DoJ, FBI and the federal government as a whole. He has also vowed retribution against Trump's perceived political enemies, promising to "go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media...who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections." Whatever, dude.

• And with all of that for context by Sunday night, President Biden issued a full pardon for tax and gun charges faced by his son Hunter Biden, despite previously vowing he would not do so. In his statement announcing the pardon, the President explained (correctly) that his son was selectively targeted by a Trump-appointed prosecutor for six years. "No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son --- and that is wrong," Biden explained. "There has been an effort to break Hunter --- who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me --- and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough."

  So, did Joe do the right thing in pardoning Hunter, as many are arguing today? Or did he set a troubling "precedent" for pardoning family members that Trump will subsequently abuse when he returns to the Oval Office, as others have argued? Even as they apparently failed to notice that Trump already did that when he was in office the first time, issuing pardons to his daughter's father-in-law and dozens of other personal cronies.

  Listeners ring in on all of the above on today's BradCast...

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For more than two months, the FBI has been rounding up and charging hundreds of Trump-incited insurrectionists who, in hopes of preventing the Congressional certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory last November, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

But a number of key questions remain wholly unanswered following the unprecedented attack on our very system of representative democracy. Central to several of those questions is Donald Trump's own, personal, behind-the-scenes machinations to help instigate the uprising and, perhaps, prevent the deployment of the military to help quell the rebellion he encouraged.

The March 3rd Senate committee testimony of Major General William Walker, Commander of the D.C. National Guard, describing a seemingly inexplicable delay in authorization for his troops to provide relief to the U.S. Capitol under siege, underscores the need to determine whether there is a connection between Trump's post-election November 2020 purge of the top civilian leadership at the Department of Defense (DoD) and the January 6th assault.

The purge at the Pentagon began two days after media outlets called the Presidential Election for Joe Biden, when Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Within days, four senior DoD officials either resigned or were fired and replaced by what CNN characterized as "conspiracy theorists and Trump loyalists." Christopher Miller became the Acting Secretary of Defense. Kash Patel, who had previously worked for the disgraced Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) on the House Intelligence Committee, was appointed to serve as Miller's Chief-of-Staff.

While one Pentagon official described the November purge as "scary", "unsettling" and the moves one would expect from a "dictator", CNN noted in its contemporaneous account that "no one at the Pentagon has an understanding as to what the grand plan is."

Walker's testimony before the Senate Rules and Homeland Security Committees earlier this month, together with other publicly known evidence, points to a distinct likelihood that, once it became clear he couldn't rely upon the U.S. military to carry out a coup, Trump's "grand plan" entailed a stand-down of the D.C. National Guard while his "personal army", an incited mob of white supremacists, stormed the Capitol on January 6...