Hello and welcome to background briefing available 24 7 at background briefing. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We begin with the government running out of money on Saturday,

meaning that the Departments of Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Education, Agriculture,

and Housing and Urban Development will shut down.

Joining us to discuss today's meeting in the White House between President Biden and Vice President Harris

and Senate Leader Schumer and McConnell and House leaders Johnson and Jeffries is Michael Lofgren.

He has spent 28 years working in Congress, the last 16 as a senior analyst on the House and Senate

budget committees, which gave him ringside seats on top, Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, debates on the Pentagon budget and the amazing antics of various deficit reduction commissions.

He's the author of The New York Times bestseller.

The Party is Over.

How Republicans went crazy.

Democrats became useless and the middle class got shafted.

Then we'll speak with the veteran of the U.S. Senate, Jim Manley, a Washington, D.C.

based independent public affairs consultant, Democratic strategist and a 21-year veteran of the

U.S. Senate, where he served as a senior advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for

the last six of those years and before that served 12 years as an aid to the late

Senator Ted Kennedy. He joins us to

discuss what Senate Majority Leader Schumer describes as an intense exchange about aid to Ukraine

with everybody in the room piling on telling Mark Johnson to quote, get it done. Then finally, we'll get an update on the various trials Trump is

facing and whether they will happen before the election and how much time they will take up as the all

but certain Republican presidential candidate campaigns to return to the White House. Joining us is

...