In this week’s episode of our Useful Idiots podcast, Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper talk with guest John Kiriakou on his experience in the CIA and being charged with breaking the Espionage Act for speaking out about the torture program in 2012. Kiriakou also gives his opinion on the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower. …
Read More »
While civilians tried to stop a U.S. military convoy from leaving the Syrian town of Qamishli on Monday — standing in the streets, pelting the armored vehicles with vegetables as they passed — Iraq, where those troops were headed, is not welcoming them with open arms. En route to Afghanistan …
Read More »
One of the ways politicians can shape media narratives in their favor is to feed anonymous quotes to reporters. Another, as we learned on Sunday, is to correct them on Twitter from a secret account with a debonair French alias. As was revealed by Slate’s Ashley Feinberg, Mitt Romney has …
Read More »
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO — Margaret didn’t know what was going to happen when she approached the bridge between Juárez and El Paso, but she knew she couldn’t wait anymore. Six months since fleeing her home after being raped and repeatedly beaten for the crime of being a lesbian, the 20-year-old …
Read More »
President Donald Trump’s eldest son was up to his usual antics on Twitter on Friday night. Donald Trump Jr. loves to revel in right-wing memes, perhaps in a desperate attempt to finally win daddy’s love, and so he shared a video compilation of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) …
Read More »
Donald Trump has insisted, repeatedly, that there was no quid pro quo in his administration’s negotiations with the Ukranians and his pressing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for the “favor.” But there’s a quid pro quo hiding in plain sight in the cache of text messages released Thursday night by the …
Read More »
Bernie Sanders is recovering well from a procedure to place stents in a blocked artery, according to a statement put out by the candidate’s wife, Jane Sanders, on Thursday. “Bernie is up and about,” Jane Sanders reported, adding that the 78-year-old Bernie has been “cracking jokes with the nurses and …
Read More »
The floodgates are open. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced “an official impeachment inquiry,” including an investigation of demands President Trump reportedly made of Ukraine to hamper a 2020 political rival — Joe Biden — while simultaneously holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the Eastern …
Read More »
The radical Republican plan to gut Medicaid as we know it is alive and well in the state of Tennessee. Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, unveiled on Tuesday a plan to make his state the first in the nation to overhaul its Medicaid system into a so-called block grant program. …
Read More »
After almost a year of negotiating, President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a planned meeting with the Taliban at Camp David via a tweet on Saturday night. The president cited a recent deadly Taliban car bomb that killed an American soldier as the reason, but officials told the New York Times …
Read More »