{"id":12540,"date":"2018-04-10T18:13:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T01:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=12540"},"modified":"2018-04-10T18:35:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T01:35:02","slug":"unharmonic-convergence-trump-cohen-bolton-syria-mueller-and-our-perilous-moment-bradcast-4102018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=12540","title":{"rendered":"‘Unharmonic Convergence’: Trump, Cohen, Bolton, Syria, Mueller and Our Perilous Moment: ‘BradCast’ 4\/10\/2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

On today’s BradCast<\/i><\/a>: It is “a very dangerous time”, as longtime White House reporter and historian Paul Brandus may have understated last night. “Objectively speaking,” he observed in a “difficult to write” tweet<\/a>, he has “never seen, or known of, a President as unhinged and unstable as” Donald Trump appeared during remarks at the White House before his Monday meeting with his military team.<\/p>\n

On Monday evening, following FBI raids on the office and residences of his personal attorney Michael Cohen, President Trump lashed out<\/a> at law enforcement, calling the court-approved searches “disgraceful”, “an attack on our country”, and falsely<\/a> claimed that the search warrant approved by a federal judge and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, amounted to a “break in”. Trump’s remarks also included musings<\/a> about the possibility of firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose office is said to have shared information with the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, leading to yesterday’s raids.<\/p>\n

Trump’s friend, attorney and business partner Cohen is currently embroiled in the scandal involving a $130,000 hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, made just days before the 2016 election. The lawful raid, however, which may involve far more serious crimes, comes at a particularly precarious moment.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday — one day after Trump’s new and extraordinarily hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton’s first day on the job — longtime White House Homeland Security Advisor, Tom Bossert, was abruptly fired<\/a>. His dismissal came after Bossert, while making clear that all options were on the table, had argued<\/a> in favor of Trump’s recent position on Syria over the weekend, in opposition to increased U.S. military action in the war-torn nation. But, after a recent chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma, Trump has now cancelled<\/a> a scheduled trip to Latin America and appears to be readying military action against the sovereign nation — a close ally of both Russia and Iran — even without authorization from Congress. Such action would likely, at a minimum, mirror the missile attack Trump unleashed on a Syrian airbase last year, which both Congressional Republicans and Democrats lauded at the time, even though Republicans had threatened<\/a> President Obama with the possibility of impeachment when he considered doing the very same thing during his<\/i> term in office. This time, however, the action could be much larger, more deadly, and far more dangerous for the region and the U.S.<\/p>\n

At the same time, nobody seems to be certain as to exactly why Cohen was raided in the first place. Speculation<\/a> ranges from the Stormy Daniels affair, to bank and wire fraud, to alleged schemes and payouts from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, to Cohen’s taxi business in New York.<\/p>\n

We’re joined today by the great HEATHER DIGBY PARTON<\/b> of Salon<\/a> and Digby’s Hullabaloo<\/a> blog, to try and make sense of all of the above. Wish us luck. “It’s like there’s this unharmonic convergence happening with all this news,” she tells me. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not good.”<\/p>\n

“In this situation, when you’ve got Syria there and Trump under the gun, feeling Robert Mueller breathing down his neck, this is something that a guy like Bolton — if he is smart enough to suss that out about Trump, and I have a suspicion that he might be — he could be feeding that into Trump and we’re going to see some kind of — what do they call it these days? — ‘kinetic violence’. That’s another word for war,” she says.<\/p>\n

We’ve got a lot<\/i> to discuss about all of this on today’s show with ‘Digby’, including what is likely to happen if (when) Trump moves to fire Mueller, as well as how this entire long national nightmare may finally end.<\/p>\n

Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report<\/i><\/a>, as the scandals involving EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt continue to mount, and with some good news, once again, for pipeline protesters, this time in Canada, but more bad water news for Michigan. Also, we’ve got a bit some more late-breaking<\/a> Pruitt\/EPA news, as well…<\/p>\n

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!…<\/a><\/i><\/b>
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On today’s BradCast: It is “a very dangerous time”, as longtime White House reporter and historian Paul Brandus may have understated last night. “Objectively speaking,” he observed in a “difficult to write” tweet, he has “never seen, or known of, a President as unhinged and unstable as” Donald Trump appeared during remarks at the White […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,239,89,675,223,479,930,451,227,178,134,185,619,477,1114,305,107,540,977,534,900,1097,611,1150,736],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability","category-barack-obama","category-media-appearance","category-bradcast","category-dept-of-justice","category-donald-trump","category-election-2018","category-epa","category-fbi","category-impeachment","category-iran","category-john-bolton","category-keystone-xl","category-kpfk","category-michael-cohen","category-michigan","category-national-security","category-oil","category-robert-mueller","category-russia","category-scott-pruitt","category-stormy-danielsstephanie-clifford","category-syria","category-tom-bossert","category-water","bb-type-bradcast"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12540"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=12540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}