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 former fixer, Michael Cohen, testifying against Trump today in a Manhattan

courtroom recounting how Trump told him to quote, just do it when it came to paying off a

porn star to shut up about an affair at a time when the Axis Hollywood tape had shaken Trump's 2016 campaign.

Joining us as Adele Stan, an independent journalist who is a longtime chronicler of the right wing of U.S. politics,

a winner of the Hillman Prize in Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

She has an article at the New Republic, How Freedom Works paved the way for Trumpism and its own demise. Then we'll look into

massive protests in the former Soviet state of Georgia as a Kremlin-style bill known as

the foreign agent's law is about to pass in Parliament, in spite of the vast

majority of Georgians wanting closer ties

with the EU. Joining us is Lincoln Mitchell, who teaches in the School of International

and Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

An expert on the former Soviet states, he's the author of the popular substack kibbutzing with Lincoln,

where his latest article which we will discuss is Tbilisi and the 2024 elections.

An authoritarian turn by the Georgian government could help Putin and Trump.

Then finally we'll get an update on the investigation into the outside mob that stormed the

pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, which finds some of the counter demonstrators were

neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, proud boys, and three percenters, which is ironic given that

the pro-Israel mob claimed they were combating anti-Semitism. Joining us is John Brandstetter,

a political science lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was manhandled

and arrested by the LAPD, who were firing rubber bullets at students as they routed the encampment,

...