Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the Arizona Supreme Court's ruling to take Arizona back 160 years to before it was a state,

making an 1864 law criminalizing abortion, the law of the land in two weeks.

Joining us to discuss how Trump and the Republicans are trying to

weasel their way out of a situation of their making is Jessica Mason Piaklo, a senior vice

president and executive editor at rewire. News and co-host of the Boom Lawyered podcast. She is a writer

and a law professor in Boulder, Colorado, and is the

former assistant director of the Health Law Clinic at Hamline Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The recipient of the 2018 Excellence in Online Journalism Award, she co-authored Crow after Row,

how women's health is the new separate but equal, and how to change that.

Then with the left-right coalition of civil libertarians and MAGA Republicans refusing to reauthorize section 702 of Pfizer, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,

the latter because Trump thinks it was used to spy on

him. We will speak with James Reisen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author.

His investigative reporting has triggered a series of political firestorms, and among his best-selling

books are State of War, The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush administration, and pay any price,

greed, power, and endless war. The senior national security correspondent at the Intercept

and a former investigative journalist with The New York Times, his new book is The Last

Honest Man, the CIA, the FBI, the mafia, and the candidates, and one senator's fight to save democracy.

Then finally, we'll examine the true danger Trump poses from a combination of passivity in the

electorate on the one hand and the impunity of Trump's anti-democratic criminal clique of

kleptocrats on the other, which will be fatal for our democracy.

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