Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm me and

Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Iran's almost theatrical retaliation against Israel's April

the first strike against its diplomatic compound in Damascus,

which is clearly a limited tit-for-tat meant to placate Iran's hardliners

while giving Israel and its allies plenty of warnings that the drones and missiles were on their way,

contributing to the 99% success rate of shooting them down.

Joining us is Nicholas Harris, the Senior Director for Strategy and Innovation at the New Lines Institute,

and the former Middle East Security Program Manager at the Institute for the Study of War.

From 2016 to 2017, Nicholas served as the 10th First Lieutenant Andrew J. Basevic Jr., USA Fellow at the Center for New American Security,

and he is the author of From the Bottom Up, a strategy for U.S. military support for Syria's armed opposition.

And he's conducted an extensive study on Iran's proxies in the Middle East for the National

Defense University. Then we'll look into the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoena that finally

is directed at Leonard Leo, the architect of the far-right takeover of the

federal judiciary and the stacking of the Supreme Court to enact the moral authoritarianism

and laissez-faire capitalist agenda of an extreme minority fueled by billions of dark money.

Joining us is Lisa Graves, the executive director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research.

She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government,

as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department,

as Chief Counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

and as a chief deputy of the Article III Jud' division for the U.S. courts.

Then finally we'll assess the records of achievements from the consecutive terms of Trump, then-Biden,

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