EPISODE 236: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:42) SPECIAL COMMENT: Donald Trump will be convicted for criminal violations of The Espionage Act. Because there are smoking guns, and then there are the smoking guns so profound and so productive that they turn the Eastern Seaboard sky orange. And this one is the second kind. CNN GOT the clip of the actual recording of Trump showing off classified Joint Chiefs of Staff military plans for attacking Iran. AND then The Washington Post got it. And then The New York Times got it. I haven’t yet checked my high school paper, The Hackley Dial.

First: It fulfills the first rule of Trump: everything is worse than you could possibly imagine – he’s laughing as he commits crimes prohibited by The Espionage Act, his flunky is making Hillary Clinton jokes, he’s making Anthony Weiner jokes, he’s ordering Cokes. Second: It HAS to have come from Mark Meadows. It HAS to have. Third: It fulfills the prophesy of Ryan Goodman from Just Security: it IS NOT just Trump committing a crime, it is Trump narrating his own crime, as he crimes. Fourth: the tape has a postscript, something that was for whatever reason NOT included in the transcript of the tape that was included in the charging document filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Meanwhile there are also huge developments in Smith's pursuit of a Trump indictment in the Fake Electors, Wire Fraud, and January 6th Coup strands of his perfidy.

B-Block (21:50) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: In memoriam: the former President of Current TV, and also my boss at CNN in 2001-02, the legendary television news producer David Bohrman. If you've watched it, it was something Bohrman dreamt up.

C-Block (41:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Bill Maher is back in the news as an Anti-Vax sympathizer, fawning over the demented Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I nearly got into a fistfight with him in 1978, didn't remember it until 2009, when we nearly got into a fistfight again. I clearly should've followed my first instincts.

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