Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

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

We'll begin with today's closing arguments in the New York Hush Money trial that could be the

first to convict an American president of a crime and speak with an historian writing a book

about Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, whose shadow hangs over the trial since the apprentice

Trump has adopted Cohn's

mafia tactics of attacking judges, juries, witnesses and the legal system itself.

Joining us is Kai Bird, the director of the Leon Levy Center for biography, and a Pulitzer

Prize-winning historian and journalist whose books include American Prometheus,

The Triumph and Tragedy of Jay Robert Oppenheimer, which was the basis of the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer,

and The Good Spy, The Life and Death of Robert Ames.

He is working on a biography of Roy Cohn, and we will discuss his op-ed at the New York Times.

Will Roy Cohn save Donald Trump's hide one last time?

Then, as the war in Gaza grows more grim, we will examine the extent to which Biden is trapped

in a situation supporting Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia's Muhammad bin Salman, both of whom

want Trump re-elected.

Joining us to discuss this and how the Pentagon and the CIA have drunk the Silicon Valley

Kool-Aid is Andrew Coburn, the Washington editor at Harper's magazine, and the author of many

articles and books on national security,

including Kill Chain, The Rise of the High Tech Assassins, as well as a New York Times editor's

choice Rumsfeld and The Threat, which destroyed the myth of Soviet military superiority,

underpinning the Cold War. His latest book is Spoils of War, Power, Profit and the American War Machine,

...