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

I'm Ian Masters, and today on this New Year's Eve, we'll be looking back at 2025 with guests we were in touch with over the year as major stories evolved chief among them the increasing power of the Supreme Court.

Joining us to examine how John Roberts orchestrated the capture of the Supreme Court by a right-wing oligarchy to perpetuate

Republican rule is Lisa Graves, one of the nation's foremost experts on the right-wing

influence on the U.S. Supreme Court and other levels of power. She leads True North

research and co-hosts Legal AF and has served as 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 deputy chief of the Article III

judges division for the U.S. courts.

She's the author of the new book Just Out, Without Precedent, How Chief Justice

Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismantled our rights. Then we look

into the ongoing war in Ukraine, which we covered as it evolved this year, and speak with

Aram Shabhanian, a national investigative reporter and the former

open source information gathering manager at New Orleans Institute. He recently taught in

nonproliferation and terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies

at Monterey, where his research focused on the Cold War and contemporary histories of Eastern

Europe and the Middle East. He has just returned from Kiev and we will discuss the battlefield stalemate and how the Trump

administration is pulling back support for the embattled country in favor of a

so-called peace deal which asks nothing of Putin while pressuring Ukraine to

make concessions. And before we begin as this this year ends, and you can make tax-deductible donations for 2025,

I'm hoping you consider backgroundbriefing.org slash donate and publictruthmedia.org

for your charitable giving since we produce a daily news analysis program covering the major stories in the news

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