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Welcome to Talking Feds. A round table that brings together prominent former federal officials

and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of

the day, I'm Harry Littman. It was a week when the good, the bad, and the ugly were on full

display in the United States Congress. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sought to place two

flame throwers on the select committee to investigate the insurrection of January 6th.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promptly vetoed the selections at which point McCarthy took his ball

and went home, promising to form his own committee to look into the true causes of the

cataclysmic events. The Democrats and the US Senate moved on two different tracks on infrastructure,

attempting to pass separate packages, one huge, with fairly strong bipartisan support,

and the other ginormous with Democrat support only. The Republican minority

filibustered the smaller of the two, yet Democrats insisted they had a path forward for enacting both

bills. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were irate on receipt of a letter from the FBI,

sent in response to an inquiry they made two years before. The members claimed that the FBI and White

House had pulled the wool over the eyes of the Committee in the country in the 2018 investigation

of the candidacy of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. To break down both the substance and

the politics of these developments, we welcome to Talking Feds, a blue ribbon group of expert commentators.

And they are. In her first appearance on Talking Feds, Jane Mayer, the chief Washington correspondent

at the New Yorker where she has worked since 1995, before which she was the White House correspondent

for the Wall Street Journal. She's the author of multiple books, including the 2016 bestseller Dark

Money, the hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right, which the New

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