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Presented by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Earthjustice
With Daniel Lippman
VAN GRACK’S NEW GIG: Brandon Van Grack, the first-ever head of the Justice Department’s FARA office and a lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, has left DOJ after more than a decade to become a partner at the law and lobbying firm
having thought of the next step which as evan suggests is kind of the m.o. of the time. the other big story, the one that actually affects everyone in this country, republicans, they pushed through the president s goal of getting a budget through but what they want to do now is get tax reform through and they re closer to the finish line. there was a big vote in the house yesterday. here s the question. will they get this tax reform through asap? nbc s kristen welker join us from the white house. they want this done by christmas we heard. now they re saying thanksgiving. kristen, it was two weeks ago the president said hold your horses, it took the reagan administration a year and a half, let s wait. why are we rushing it now? i think there s an immense amount of urgency. republicans weren t able to repeal or replace obamacare. it s all hands on deck when it comes to tax reform. i think that s part of why you re seeing this stepped up time line. the president was tweeting about thi
important than making it public. that s the case that the cia, the fbi and some other agencies made to the president according to administration officials. there was lots of back and forth between the white house and these agencies, pushing back. why do you want to redact so much. and finally, the president said, okay, i will let s chew over this redaction some more. let s let out the things that they don t want redacted and let s give them six more months to try to work out the redactions. what the cia says is that all no single document that it s responsible for will be withheld in full. there may still be some redactions. what they say is they still need to protect people who were giving information to the u.s. back at the time or since or relations that we had with other countries for sharing information. some don t want that known, stephanie. all right, the president says let s chew on it some more. our panel this morning, evan mcmullin, former cia operative and former chief
executive director of the puerto rico federal affairs administration. sir, let s start before we get to the audit. how did this contract come to be in the first place? originally we heard, you know, it was they were the only ones out there, whitefish was the only one who wanted to do it, but prep ra turned down the american association of american utilities that also offered no strings, no upfront. so how did whitefish get the deal from the get-go? the director of preppa has been saying basically they were they awarded the contract during an emergency procurement process, which basically allowed for him to talk directly to those companies that could do the work in puerto rico and whitefish was the one that didn t require, didn t request a $25 million downpayment but apu, same thing people on the ground, said that that s not true, sir, the
insight into the assassination, i think the answer to that is not much. most of this information had come out before. it s little things like that i just showed you. but nothing overall to change the narrative of what we ve known about the assassination. all right, well, the narrative did change yesterday because the president said everything was getting released and then suddenly that wasn t the case. is 54 years later, if the administration decides let s release this information and then suddenly at the last minute they hold back thousands of documents, what s the deal? so let s just start with what the assassination law says. this is the jfk records act passed in 1992. and what it says is after 25 years, everything shall be released, unless the intelligence agencies make a persuasive case that material must be withheld to protect national security, military operations or foreign relations. and that withholding it is more