Earlier this month, Donald Trump issued an Executive Order calling for the "Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production". As discussed with our guest on today's BradCast, it's difficult to see that separately from his buddy Elon Musk's recent declaration that "logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized." [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

BUT FIRST... A few items of note...

• It was amusing watching corporate media outlets tip-toe in their reporting around the facts of Tuesday's successful return to Earth by astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore after being stranded on the International Space Station for 9 months following what was supposed to have been an 8 day mission. The pair were safely brought home in a SpaceX capsule that splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. Can you see the dilemma for the nation's major news outlets yet? We discuss. And laugh. (And also point out that the mission was tasked to Elon Musk's SpaceX by NASA last August, under President Joe Biden. No, Donald Trump did not "rescue the astronauts", as his Administration seems to want you to believe.)

• In more important news, after covering a string of losses in federal court for Trump on yesterday's program, a few more came in after we got off air. One was a major ruling that blocked his Order banning transgender people from serving in our nation's military. (Try not to laugh at Trump's straight-faced assertion in his EO that service by transgender people, many of whom have received top military honors, "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life." Cuz if anyone knows about living an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life, it would be the Commander-in-Chief who was found liable for nearly $100 million for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Caroll and found guilty of 34 criminal felony counts related to hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to help him cheat to win an election and other honorable, truthful and disciplined living by Corporal Bonespurs.)

• In response to yesterday's program focused, in part, on the lower courts holding firm, for now, against Trump and Musk's rampant lawlessness, we received some interesting feedback from a number of listeners who seemed to view those victories for the Constitution and Rule of Law --- short-term or otherwise --- as hardly worth celebrating, given that all hope is now lost and, in short, America is all but over. While understanding the sentiment, I disagree with that thinking for several reasons, a number of which we discuss today.

THEN... Following news of yet another court loss for Trump late on Tuesday, in which a D.C. U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan blocked the Administration's attempt to claw back some $20 billion authorized by Congress and allocated by President Biden as part of his landmark climate initiatives before leaving office, we discuss a recent Executive Order signed by Trump that would massively expand logging and clear-cutting of our national forests and other public lands.

MATT SEDLAR, climate analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is here to discuss what this scheme is really about; how it relates to Trump's trade war with Canada; the various dangers it poses to both the economy and climate; and how it has little to do with improving forest management or wildfire protection, as Trump's EO falsely claims.

Sedlar explains how the Order appears to directly contradict pretty much everything else that Trump has been doing at the very same time.

"Laying off Forest Service workers, National Park Service workers, and putting out this Executive Order expanding logging, canceling leases for various offices and visitor centers for national parks across the United States," Sedlar tells me, "all point to the privatization of the public lands. Eliminating what we know of as national forests and national parks, and opening it up to making it into a revenue stream."

"It leans more towards that and less towards what he is saying, that this is forest management. Because the science simply does not support what he's saying. It didn't support it in the '80s when you had researchers and scientists warning against it, and it's definitely not going to support it now."

"These are all moves to generate revenue without a look at how this affecting long-term sustainable development. It's all short-term gain for long-term losses," he argues, citing both the costs to the fight against climate change and the bipartisan popularity of our National Parks and Forests.

Tune in, of course, for much more!...

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We've got a flood of news on today's BradCast. Unfortunately, some of that reference is also literal. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our many stories today...

• Last week's primary elections in Tennessee (which they hold on Thursdays in the state, because they hope voters don't turn out for them!) saw state Rep. Gloria Johnson win the Democratic nomination for U.S Senate to run against the far-right Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Johnson was one of the "Tennessee Three" who state GOP lawmakers tried to expel after Johnson and two others state Reps participated in a gun safety protest on the House floor following a deadly mass shooting at an elementary school shooting in Nashville. Johnson, who is white, was spared expulsion by one vote. Her two colleagues, Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both black, were expelled (though were subsequently returned to the House by their local constituents).

• Hurricane Debby made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida Monday morning, just 20 miles or so from where Hurricane Idalia came ashore less than a year ago. Desi Doyen joins us with details on the storm surge and catastrophic flooding that is expected in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina as the storm moves to the north painfully slowly. She also explains why these disasters are made worse and more frequent thanks to man-made climate change.

• Also today, Wall Street weathered its own storm, as investors have begun to panic that the U.S. could be headed into a recession and/or that the Federal Reserve waited too long to lower interest rates. In Japan on Monday, investors really panicked, as the Nikkei 225 plunged more than 12%. The major U.S. indexes, however, "only" fell by about 2 or 3% today. Still, it was a bloodbath. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

• After a months-long pause, Donald Trump's federal indictment for his several failed attempts to steal the 2020 election returned to the D.C. court of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. The pause was thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's absurd ruling that Presidents enjoy immunity from most crimes they carry out while in office. That ruling, of course, though contrary to any non-corrupt reading of the Constitution, could still further derail the case. For now at least, after receiving the case back on Friday, Chutkan issued several rulings almost immediately over the weekend, finding mostly against the Defense in several outstanding motions. The case is, nonetheless, not expected to come to trial before this November's Presidential election, since her eventual rulings in regard to "presidential immunity" will almost certainly need to make their way back up to the corrupted SCOTUS.

• In breaking news shortly before airtime today, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that she was dropping charges against Jenna Ellis after the former Donald Trump attorney agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against her 18 co-defendants. They were all charged earlier this year with fraud, forgery and conspiracy related to the Republicans 2020 fake electors plot in the state. Among those charged along with Ellis and still facing indictments are former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as his former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows. This could be very bad news for all of them.

• Also today, the corrupted SCOTUS did the right thing for a rare change in declining to halt Donald Trump's sentencing on 34 felony crimes in New York related to his successful scheme to cheat in the 2016 election by paying hush-money to a porn star with whom he was said to have had a sexual tryst. Trump's criminal sentencing will now move forward --- unless something else derails it again (which is always a good possibility) --- next month on September 18th.

• Over the weekend, Donald Trump backed out of the Presidential debate he previously agreed to participate in next month, as moderated by ABC News. He is proposing that he and all-but-certain Democratic nominee Kamala Harris debate before a live crowd on Fox "News" instead. The New York Times' coverage of that news over the weekend was wildly misleading and subsequently changed to eventually become accurate.

• In Virginia last week, a machine recount determined that far-right Republican state Sen. John McGuire did indeed defeat the far-right Republican Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Bob Good, by just over 300 votes out of some 63,000 cast during the GOP's June state primary. Good, a 2020 election denier, ultimately abandoned his evidence-free claims of massive fraud via drop-box and conceded the race to McGuire.

• Down in Venezuela, Socialist Party strongman Nicolas Maduro still refuses to release election results from tens of thousands of polling places after the nation's Presidential election just over a week ago. The National Electoral Council --- heavily stacked with Maduro loyalists --- announced on Election Night that Maduro defeated opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez by about 7 percentage points. Both the U.S. (a longtime Maduro adversary) and Maduro allies such as the leaders of Brazil and Columbia, have called for Maduro to release all precinct-based results from the election. Without the ability for the public to oversee the full results, however, analysts are citing the limited number of Election Night precinct results tapes obtained by opposition-aligned groups from about 1,000 polling sites. Separate analyses of those poll tapes --- by New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post --- suggest that Maduro not only didn't win by 7 points, he appears to have lost to Gonzalez in a 20-point landslide. We specifically detail the convincing NYTimes analysis and explain how Maduro could refute their findings by simply releasing the data that the voting public deserves to see. Democracy relies on the ability of the public to oversee its own elections. A fact that is equally true here in the U.S.

• While we ran long with all of today's breaking news, we still had time for a caller or two, one of whom who clearly hates democracy --- and is, apparently, no fan of me either!

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The quote in the headline for today's BradCast comes, according to one of our guests today, from former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who knows quite a bit about both Constitutional crimes and American history. Finally, Donald J. Trump is facing accountability for his worst (known) crime of all: Attempting to overthrow American democracy itself by stealing a Presidential election from the American people before our very eyes. Luckily, he was as bad at that as he is at everything else. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

"This is a momentous legal event. It's the most significant legal event of our lifetimes, one of the most significant legal events ever in the history of this country. It is up there with Marbury vs Madison, Brown vs Board of Education, Dred Scott as a defining case for the times," Katyal told MSNBC after the new indictment against the the disgraced former President was handed up in D.C. yesterday. "This indictment lays out a case that a guy who was President of the United States --- while he was President of the US --- leveraged his office, used his power to thwart the will of the people in the most solemn thing they do in our country, vote. This is the biggest constitutional crime in our history."

We're joined today discuss that crime and Trump's latest indictment (his third in four months, and his second at the federal level) for it by two favorite BradCast special coverage guests. HEATHER DIGBY PARTON is the award-winning columnist at Salon and founder of Digby's Hullabaloo blog; and our old friend "DRIFTGLASS" is otherwise known as both @Mr_Electrico on Twitter and simply "Bill" at home in "Flyover Country, Illinois" where he has long and proudly produced The Professional Left Podcast.

Following the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's new, very readable 45-page indictment [PDF] against Trump just minutes before airtime on Tuesday --- including four felony fraud, obstruction and conspiracy charges related to his attempt to steal the 2020 election before, during, and after the January 6, 2021 insurrection he incited at the U.S. Capitol --- we've had a bit of time to finally read the charges and evidence presented with them in full.

Also, we've had some time to learn about the judge assigned to the case, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. And, boy howdy, is Trump not gonna like her. She was appointed by President Obama, has been particularly tough on January 6 insurrectionists, and famously (and correctly) wrote, in a 2021 ruling allowing the bipartisan House Jan. 6 Select Committee access to documents from the Trump White House that "Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President."

As noted, he's not gonna like her one bit. Oh, well. Perhaps it balances out the Trump-appointed federal judge/stooge overseeing his federal indictment on 40 felony charges related to his theft and retention of national security documents and his attempts to obstruct the government's investigation and attempts to retrieve them down in Florida.

Among the topics discussed with "Digby" and "Driftglass" on today's special coverage...

• Why it took so long to bring this case, particularly as so much of it had already been revealed by the House Jan. 6 Committee last year.
• What either struck or surprised them about the new indictment.
• Who the still-unidentified "Co-Conspirator 6" might be.
• Will history better remember Mike Pence's moment of courage on January 6 or his pathetic turnabout ever since?
• Why this case feels so much different than the other two indictments filed against Trump.
• Why it seems that nobody in the media is able to describe what Trump did as an attempt to STEAL a Presidential election. (Though MSNBC's Joy Reid and Parton --- both of whom have long followed me on Twitter --- get well-deserved kudos for doing so today!)
• Whether, as folks on the Right like to claim, Tuesday's new indictment (and the others) actually help him in the 2024 election.
• And, would they support or oppose a plea agreement in which the disgraced former President was allowed to plead guilty, get some home confinement, pay a huge fine and, most importantly, drop out of the 2024 race and vow to never run for public office again in exchange for escaping prison time (akin to Nixon VP Spiro Agnew's deal with federal prosecutors)?

Answers to all of those questions and many others on today's BradCast Special Coverage! Enjoy!...

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