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

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

We'll begin with

Trump's lawless, petty and vindictive purge of the Justice Department and the FBI, making a

mockery of pledges made by Pam Bondi and Cash Patel in their confirmation hearings to head the DOJ

and FBI. Joining us is Bill Yeomans, a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School,

who previously taught constitutional law, civil rights, and legislation

at American University of Washington College of Law,

and also served for 26 years in the Department of Justice,

serving in a number of management positions,

including Acting Assistant attorney general,

and he's now a senior fellow at the Alliance for Justice. Then we'll look into Trump and Musk's

fast and furious shock and all campaign to wreck and loot the U.S. government by stripping funding

from the programs the American people rely on in order to make up for the revenue loss as they give massive tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.

Joining us is Karen Dolan, the Project Director of the Poverty and Race Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,

whose work focuses on anti-poverty issues, local democracy and empowerment and peace.

She previously coordinated the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with the late New York Times best-selling author Barbara Aaron Wright

is author of The Poor Get Prison, the alarming spread of the criminalization of poverty,

and we'll discuss her article at other words.org.

Trump's freeze was a brazen, unlawful attempt to steal our tax dollars.

Then finally, with Trump slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, in a flurry of America

first nationalism, we'll assess how misguided and expensive his accelerated great power competition

...