Welcome to Talking Feds, a round table that brings together prominent former federal officials

and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important legal topics of the day.

I'm Harry Littman. We've had a week with dramatic action on multiple fronts.

Two hearings in Congress brought home the divide between what the president and administration

have been telling the American people in daily briefings and what the country's best

scientists and doctors believe. Predictably the president and congressional Republicans largely

blamed the messengers and questioned the motives and bonafidees of both experts.

We had continued terrible economic news, three million new claims for unemployment last week alone,

and began for the first time to hear dire predictions from some experts that the economy is in such a

structural free fall that it may never fully recover. On the political front Trump continued to

treat the Michael Flynn case as a cause-alab of deep state corruption, but that portrait seemed to

put the federal judge in Flynn's case out of joint, and a showdown looks likely when the judge

looks at the Department of Justice's motion to dismiss charges. And the president coined a new

line of attack, which so far seems to be more of a bare slogan, Obama gate, but suggested somehow

Flynn's having been unmasked inappropriately at the end of the Obama presidency. Finally,

at the end of the week, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr found himself ensnared in a federal

investigation for trading on confidential information about the virus that threatened to quickly end

his political career. He's resigned the chair of the Intelligence Committee, but in leaving,

he has declassified the Senate Intelligence Report, substantiating Russia's interference in the

2016 election. To discuss, as many of these major developments as a fast-moving talking feds episode

will allow, we have a cracker jack panel of prominent experts and commentators. First, Asha Rangapa,

who I'm happy to say we can almost call a regular on talking feds, Asha's a senior lecturer at the

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