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

I'm me and Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the self-proclaimed, pious Christian Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, shutting

down the House to avoid having to vote on a bipartisan resolution to make the Epstein

files public in order to protect a president whose best friend was a pedophile and a sex

trafficker of underage girls, many of whom, as victims, claim he shared them with Donald Trump.

We will try to assess the possible breaking point with the MAGA base as these blatant cover-ups

proceed with reports now surfacing

that Trump's Department of Justice is trying to make a deal with Galane Maxwell to name

only Democrats on Epstein's alleged clients list. Joining us is Mike Lofgren, who spent 28 years

working in the Congress as a Republican aide, 16 of which

were as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget Committees. He is 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. And his latest article at Salon is,

America slides into totalitarianism,

and it won't be easy to reverse.

Then finally, as Trump dumps down America

and lives in his own reality, not the real one,

we'll investigate the decline of the intelligence community trying to survive in an anti-intellectual regime

and speak with Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former reporter for the New York Times,

where he covered national security issues and investigative projects focusing on the Central Intelligence Agency, the military, foreign policy,

weapons of mass destruction and terrorist gangs.

...