Hey everybody, Harry here just a quick note on what you can find this week on our Patreon site at patreon.com

slash talking feds will complete our summer virtual book series talking to John Dean

former White House Council and the author of the authoritarian nightmare.

You'll also have one-on-one discussions with Jennifer Rogers on the Klein Smith case and with Steve Vlodick on

the president's announced plan to post sheriffs at polling places across the country.

Okay, check those out and now here's this week's episode about the Democratic Party's convention and so much more with a stellar group of three feds.

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 Litman.

The Democrats held their virtual coming out party for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who accepted their nominations in speeches at solitary lecterns in empty halls.

The four days balanced table of everyday Americans with speeches from all the party luminaries and upbeat visions of hope and progress with scathing attacks on President Trump.

His acceptance speech Biden told the country that we face a perfect storm of four historic crises, the virus, the economy, racial justice and climate change.

John Durham, selected by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the investigators of the 2016 probe of Russia's attempts to interfere with the election, secured his first conviction against a low-level FBI lawyer who altered an email.

Trump, as well as Trump cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham, were jubilant and predicted it was the first ripple in a coming wave of indictments of all of Trump's tormentors, other solid as isolated and inconsequential.

To the extent Durham is looking to serve Barr and Trump's goals of discrediting the Mueller probe and everything related to it, their efforts were sharply undermined by a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that found extensive contacts in 2016 and thereafter between Russia and the Trump campaign and administration and that brought new scrutiny to Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.

Meanwhile, Trump, preparing for his own acceptance party next week, took some lumps at the hands of the criminal justice system in New York.

A federal court dismissed his effort to keep New York district attorney Cyrus Vance from getting his tax records, calling Trump's argument, quote, as unprecedented and far-reaching as it is perilous to the rule of law.

In the Southern District of New York, the federal system indicted flamboyant Trump Swami Steve Bannon in a million dollar plus fraud in connection with a charity fund to help build Trump's wall.

Bad news of one sort or another seemed to crop up around every corner.

US, New Jobless Claims jumped back up over one million, even as the stock market hit record highs, confirmed corona cases now exceed 5.5 million and hundreds of wildfires raged across California.

We continue to live in extraordinary and tumultuous times.

We have only five home events and takeaways from this week's Flurry of News. We have a great panel of good friends and returning feds.

They are Laura Jarrett after a successful, if brief career in legal practice, Laura in 2016 made the jump over to journalism.

And since then, she has covered the Justice Department for CNN and is now an anchor of CNN's early start program.

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