Hello and welcome to background briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing. I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the New York Times bestselling author and intelligence analyst who thought that Trump was always Putin's winning asset, but now he believes Trump literally works for Moscow.

Joining us is Malcolm Nance, a career counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer

with the United States

government special operations, homeland security, and intelligence agency.

He has over 33 years of experience in combating radical extremism and is the author of the

plot to hack America, how Putin, cyber spies and WikiLeaks tried to steal the 2016 elections,

and the plot to betray America,

how Team Trump embraced our enemies, compromised our security, and how we can fix it.

Then we'll get an update on the Ukrainian withdrawal from the captured Russian territory of Kursk, which appears to be another treacherous gift from Trump to Putin

since the cutoff of U.S. arms and intel coincided with Ukraine losing the bargaining chip

of exchanging Kersk for Ukrainian territory Russia holds. Joining us is Aram Shabedian, the

open source information gathering manager at New Lyons Institute.

He recently taught in non-proliferation 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.

Then finally, we'll look into the fratricide among

Democrats with House Minority Leader Jeffreys, Pelosi and AOC, and the base, furious with Chuck Schumer

for falling into the trap set by Speaker Johnson's House bill, which Schumer and nine Senate

Democrats voted for to avoid a filibuster and a government shutdown.

Joining us is Sidney Blumenthal, the former assistant and a senior advisor to President Bill

Clinton, and a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for the

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