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 unprecedented monetizing of the Oval Office by the most corrupt president in U.S. history, Donald Trump.

Joining us is Frank Vogel, former Senior World Bank Official and Foreign Business and Economics Correspondent for the Times of London,

who currently teaches at Georgetown University.

He is the former chair of the board of directors of the Partnership for Transparency Fund

and the co-founder and former Vice Chair of Transparency International,

the global non-government anti-corruption organization.

He is the author of Waging War and Corruption

Inside the Movement Fighting the Abuse of Power, and his latest book is The Enablers,

How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption Endangering Our Democracy. Then we'll look

further into Trump's shakedown of law firms, media companies, and foreign governments

via his tariffs and

look into how this extortion by the Trump mafia family can be stopped.

Joining us is Will Bunch, a national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and author

of several books including The Backlash, Right Wing Radicals, Paranoia Politics, and High

Deaf Huxters in the Age of Obama, and The Burn Identity, A Search for Bernie Sanders

and The New American Dream.

He has won numerous journalism awards and shares the Pulitzer Prize for Spot reporting,

and we'll discuss his latest article at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Trump family is taking

crypto payoffs in the middle of Fifth Avenue, who will stop them?

...