Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

We are going to look today at what investigations are not being done currently that probably should be done

and the way investigations of course we're talking about investigations of political corruption, investigations in Washington, D.C.

Special councils are a thing.

We used to have independent councils, but investigation, those are extraordinary cases.

It's not just a matter of a criminal investigation, but cases where the actual, the normal

chain of command and the Justice Department is seen as having some potential conflict of interest

and they go for a special counsel. The real way that oversight

investigations happen is through Congress and unfortunately at the moment we have a Congress that has

almost totally abdicated that responsibility.

Always when you have Congress in control of the same party as the president that often creates a

situation where the oversight is less aggressive but they're actually if if you, you know, you go back not too far,

there's the difference between not that, you know, not as aggressive and like non-existent,

we're pretty close to non-existent now. So I'm here with my

colleague David Tainter. Hey, how are you? I'm good man. How are you? I'm good

I'm good. And we also we're not going to hear from him yet, we have a special guest today. We have Matt Schumm, who is one of our newswriters and is the guy who writes our weekly primer. And you're not a if you're not a prime

subscriber yet at TPM you really should be I mean you're listening to the

podcast like why are you not a prime subscriber but it yeah it's it is time But our weekly primers are these once a week sum-ups of all the relevant

information on a given topic. So for instance, we have one about the Russia probe. We have one about

health care policy and the ongoing battle over Obamacare. We have another one about

voting rights and democracy and the one that Matt runs is the one basically about all the corruption in the Trump administration.

And the idea behind these primers is we all have a shortage of time, not just in the broad

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