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 a two-hour phone call Trump had with Putin today, which he described as

yielding, quote, great progress, with a second summit after the Alaska fiasco to take place soon

in Budapest, which the Kremlin has confirmed. Tomorrow, Trump meets with Zelensky in the Oval Office to talk about Ukraine getting

Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike deep into Russia, and we'll assess how much that is likely

or has been leveraged to get Putin to the table and speak with Michael Kimmage,

director of the Canon Institute, who is a professor

of history and department chair at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2017,

he served on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department,

where he held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio.

He's the author of the Abandvant of the West, the history of an idea in American foreign policy,

and collisions, the war in Ukraine and the origins of the new global instability.

Then, with the Trump administration secretly authorizing the CIA to conduct covert actions in Venezuela

against the Maduro regime, with Trump announcing on Wednesday, quote, we are certainly

looking at land now because we got the sea very well under control. Joining us is David

Smaldi, a professor of human relations and senior associate at the

Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. He has published five books on

Venezuela and studied the country for over 30 years living there for most of that time,

and is the co-author of The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela, Revolution, Crime and Policing during Chivismo.

He has an article at the dispatch, the false pretenses behind the naval operation off the coast of Venezuela.

Then finally, we'll look into the bipartisan disgrace of friends and relatives of political leaders cashing in

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