Good evening tonight award winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. He's here to showcase his latest work on the life and turbulent times in Muhammad Ali.

But we'll also be talking about this troubled moment which he calls equal and magnitude to the Second World War, the Great Depression and the Civil War.

Having made widely acclaimed films on all three Ken Burns assessment about the state of democracy right now, we think is certainly worth listening to.

So is historian and Washington Post contributing columnists Robert Kagan's take. He writes today the United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence or breakdown of federal authority in the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

Now this is not some wild I radical by the way nor is former CI director Michael Hayden who was early with the warning that only a thin veneer of civilization as he put it protects any democracy even our own nor are reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa being outlandish or alarmist with the final line of their new book on the former president's assault on democracy.

The peril they write remains.

So tonight we're focusing on that peril from what continues to be a steady assault on the democratic process and democracy itself.

Today, assigned the current president considers the threat series enough to set aside decades of tradition in response to a question about invoking executive privilege to shield Trump error records from the House Select Committee on the insurrection.

The White House press secretary said this.

We take this matter incredibly seriously and certainly we are we have been working closely with with congressional committees and others as they work to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th and incredibly dark day in our democracy.

Well, moments later, so he said that President Biden was taking a eye toward not asserting executive privilege but that requests would be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Now just to underscore though, this is something few presidents do willingly if at all even when it's not their own records being sought.

No president wants to be the first to weaken executive privilege.

The president apparently determining that the times and the threat may demand it and there were fresh reminders of that today we got the results of Arizona's bogus partisan amateur review not even a real audit.

A presidential votes in Maricopa County and it reaffirmed that Joe Biden won which may have been good for you know an ironical aft or two but not much more than that because the so-called cyber ninjas who conducted this thing.

Were about as qualified to audit ballots as you were I the results had already been certified by Republican election officials and reaffirmed in several courts but but competently done or not in the end the count itself it hardly mattered.

The former president simply reacted of course to the bogus audit which had been launched by the big lie and lied about the actual results.

His statement reading quote massive fraud was found in the Arizona forensic audit sometimes referred to as fraud it the numbers are election changing.

It's a lie.

The fact that they're not election changing didn't stop in order to stop Arizona's top state Republican who ordered this so-called audit or review from firing off a letter to the state attorney general raising fresh doubts about election security which of course was always the real aim.

A point not lost in this Republican congressman who by the way is not one of the few who voted to impeach the former president.

Many of my Republican colleagues conservative colleagues that just don't trust the system they don't trust the media they don't trust the election process and that is a fundamental threat to our future existence and we have to overcome it and fanding these flames of this lack of faith in our institutions is problematic.

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