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In this very special guest episode from Social Justice Warrior icon Rev. Jim Wallis, we examine one of Donald Trump's biggest legal battles regarding his alleged unconstitiutional efforts invading houses of worship. A historic lawsuit has been filed by the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, in partnership with the Center on Faith and Justice, on the behalf of a broad coalition of 27 national church and organization plaintiffs, whose combined membership numbers in the millions, to defend the teachings of Jesus and the traditions of all Abrahamic religions.  {Subscribe to weekly Jim's Substack column here to stay up to date with our progress.} Rev. Jim Wallis speaks with two important leaders involved in the case of Mennonite Church USA VS The Department of Homeland Security: Kelsey Brown Corkoran, the Supreme Court Director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, and Reverend Carlos Malave, the president of the Latino Christian National Network (LCNN), which is a broad Christian Latino network in our country, including Pentecostals, evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline leaders. On the first day of his second term as President of the United States, according to Fox News, Donald Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to upend a decades long practice honoring sacred spaces and “sensitive locations” to allow religious leaders and congregants to obey the commandment of Jesus from Matthew 25: “As ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Jesus’ words include “the stranger” which means immigrant and refugee in Greek. Immigrants and refugees, who rely on these sacred spaces for sustenance for their souls and bodies, are being deterred by the aggressive and unorthodox tactics from the Trump Administration that the lawsuit alleges are a violation of the First Amendment right to freely practice religion. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the aftermath of the virtual destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), millions will starve and millions will die around the world. In this very special episode of the Jim Wallis Podcast, we provide a window into the magnitude of the torment being inflicted upon those Jesus called “the least of these.”   You can read Jim’s Commentary on this subject here Rev. Jim Wallis speaks with an eyewitness to the desperation, devastation, and imminent death that is resulting from the Trump Administration’s vicious assault on people providing life-saving humanitarian aid around the world.  Rev. Tim Costello, a global expert on international humanitarian aid, is the former Chief Executive of World Vision Australia (WVA) and the current Executive Director of Micah Australia. He was in Kenya and Uganda when the Trump Administration inaugurated the irresponsible and unconscionable freeze on USAID funds. “Kenyan women, clinicians, doctors [were] in tears saying, ‘the medications, the U-S-A-I-D medications have dried up. This means we cannot treat the people who we've treated for so many years, poor Kenyan people without a chance without these medications.’” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this very speacial episode of The Asset, legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick (Slate’s Amicus podcast) exposes how Trump’s second-term agenda—and cases like Dr. Rasha Alawieh’s deportation and Mahmoud Khalil’s ICE detention—are testing judicial independence.  We break down: The "metaphorical weapons" courts still have against executive overreach;Why Chief Justice Roberts’ rare public warning matters now;Project 2025’s blueprint for reshaping the judiciary; andReal-world impacts on immigrants, academics, and civil liberties. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Donald Trump’s efforts to extort the Ukrainian government for his own political gain are now at the center of the ongoing impeachment proceedings. But how did we get here? To understand that, we’ll need to go back to the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and explore his efforts to get closer to the Trump administration.    In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explains Ukraine’s mad scramble to develop relationships with Trump and his inner circle after the 2016 election. As Russia sought to weaken Ukraine, in part by fighting a war, running disinformation and cyber attacks, and funneling money to fuel corruption, Ukraine increasingly found itself stuck between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Trump administration. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On October 9, 2019, two Soviet-born Florida businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. It would soon turn out that these two men had been involved for months in Rudy Giuliani’s quest to find dirt on the Biden family. In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann outlines the origins of Trump’s conspiracy theories surrounding Ukraine and Biden and explores the involvement of Parnas, Fruman, and exiled Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in pushing these theories. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On July 25, 2019, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and asked him for a favor: a public announcement of investigations into Trump’s political opponents. After he hung up, White House lawyers immediately sprang into action, burying the records of the incriminating phone call on a secret server and swearing those on the line to secrecy. That call was part of a broader effort, a shadow foreign policy agenda in which a coterie of Trump advisers—including Rudy Giuliani, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker—demanded political favors in exchange for first a White House meeting and, later, $400 million in desperately needed military aid. In this episode, host Max Bergmann outlines how that extortion scheme came to be, starting with the Trump administration’s attempts to build a relationship with the new Ukrainian government and leading to the infamous July 25 call that prompted a whistleblower complaint and launched impeachment proceedings.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Earlier in Season 2, we explained the backstory to the Ukraine scandal, tracing Trump’s efforts to extort a foreign government for his own personal gain. When a whistleblower complaint brought this scandal to light, it sparked the fourth impeachment investigation in our nation’s history. In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explains why Democrats finally moved forward on impeachment, and talks about how the Ukraine scandal grew out of an effort to shield Trump from the political fallout of his decision to collude with Russia in 2016. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this teaser episode of This Week in Impeachment, Max Bergmann breaks down the the latest news of Parnas and Pence. In the full episode available on Patreon, Max triangulates the Republican Senators' positions, projects the possible outcomes, and explains why any of them will be good for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. https://www.patreon.com/posts/33256671 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Max Bergmann sits down with Paul "Woody" Woodhull, the co-creator of The Asset podcast and president of the progressive podcast network, District Productive, to analyze the election outcomes and the future of Donald J. Trump. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 2016, Donald Trump conspired with a foreign government to become President of the United States.  On July 25, 2019, with the 2020 election around the corner, he decided to do it again. The first time around, it was collusion, aiding and abetting Russia’s attack on American democracy. This time, it was extortion, demanding the Ukrainian government manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents in exchange for help the country needs to fend off a Russian invasion and chart a democratic future free of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.  But then, a whistleblower inside Trump’s own government sounded the alarm. The White House tried to cover it up, but Democrats called out Trump’s extortion scheme and moved to impeach him. And Trump did the unthinkable: He confessed. How did we get here? We will provide the backstory to the scandal that launched the impeachment proceedings, from the original efforts by Ukraine and its former president Petro Poroshenko to cozy up to Trump’s inner circle, to Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents, to the whistleblower complaint that blew the whole thing open. Join host Max Bergmann, the Director of the Moscow Project at the center for American Progress Action Fund and a veteran of the State Department under Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, for season two of “The Asset.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Max Bergmann, Executive Director of The Moscow Project and host of The Asset podcast, blazes the trail that could lead to a trial in the Senate with full witness testimony, something Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is working to thwart. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The scandal of Russian interference became Topic # 1 in the first six months of 2017. In a whirlwind of bombshell stories and breaking developments, Trump’s Russia ties went from a fringe topic, ignored by the national media, to a national media obsession. During the 2016 election, candidate Trump’s laudatory comments about Russia were, frankly, weird. For 70 years, the Republican Party had defined itself by being hawkish on Russia. In the previous presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said Russia was “without question, our #1 geopolitical foe.” During the campaign, Trump had flip-flopped on a whole series of positions to align with traditional GOP values. But on the subject of Russia and Vladimir Putin, Trump remained steadfast. He unabashedly praised and defended the Russian leader. In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, rewinds the tape and takes us through the blurred timeline from the launch of Donald Trump’s campaign to the beginning of the Mueller investigation. Max brings into sharp focus the details of the greatest political scandal in American history: the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. The daily deluge of information makes Trump’s relationship with Russia seem even more confusing and complex. It is almost like reading a novel with the pages out of order. The Asset puts the pages back in order, starting just as the FBI would if it were conducting a counter-intelligence investigation. We’ll follow the money. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States with the help of a ruthless autocrat trying to undermine the United States and re-establish the glory of his fading superpower on the global stage. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Donald Trump’s businesses failed; a lot. He bankrupted hotels, casinos, an airline and—even an entire football league. And when they failed Trump needed someone to bail him out. And up until the late 1990s that person was his dad. Yet despite Trump’s businesses failures, he came to personify the image of American wealth and success in the 1980s. It was an era of a roaring stock market and Wall Street extravagance and no one seemed to embody the fabulously wealthy lifestyle more than Donald Trump. He cultivated that image and became a celebrity. In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows that when Trump wrote The Art of the Deal, when he was on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, when he was being listed in Forbes as one of the wealthiest people in the world, it was all a fraud. It was an act. As everything was falling apart around him, Trump proved a master at keeping up appearances – at living a double life. He convinced the public, the media, and banks that he was a great businessman when in fact, he was bankrupt. During this period Trump also rubbed shoulders with mobsters and even got on the radar of the KGB – even going to Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the United States. As the 1990s became the 2000s, Donald Trump’s dad was no longer around to bail him out. But traditional banks would not lend to him, coining the term “the Donald Risk.” Yet Trump was able to build project after project by turning to a new class of uber-wealthy buyers and investors from Russia and the former Soviet Union. The question would soon become: who was cultivating whom?   The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To understand the Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is essential to understand Vladimir Putin. And to understand Putin, you need to understand his KGB past, his rise to power, his fight for control of Russia, and the system--The Sistema--he created. The collapse of the Soviet Union set off a mad violent scramble to take control over its vast state-held industrial sector. Organized crime flourished and The Oligarchs were born: a new class of noveau-riche businessmen capturing all the wealth. They move their money abroad and are a force unto themselves. Until KGB drives its comeback with Vladmir Putin behind the wheel . In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows how Putin goes from political unknown to president in a matter of months, setting his sights on taking control. One of Putin’s first priorities: Bring the oligarchs to heel and put them under state control. As Putin’s power consolidates and strengthens over the ensuing two decades, an informal system or Sistema took root. This system is also staggeringly corrupt and makes Putin shockingly wealthy. A key requirement of operating in Putin’s Sistema is you have to be corrupt. That means that anyone and everyone in The Sistema is also compromised. The oligarchs become tools of Putin and the Kremlin. As Russian oligarchs went out into the world and spread their money around, bought property, made investments, built connections and developed relationships; they were also developing relationships and connections that could be seized and cultivated by Putin’s Kremlin. This would soon include a relationship being cultivated with an organization based in a tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.   The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Russian Money was pouring out of Russia into the US real estate market and Donald Trump was all about it. We follow the Russian money flowing into the Trump Organization, highlighting the shady cast of characters that surround Donald Trump and his businesses from the suspicious deals in the former Soviet Union, to “little Moscow” where Trump concentrated his properties in Florida, to the story behind Trump’s favorite bank. Trump may not have a lot of money in Russia but Russia sure has money in Donald Trump. In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows how Trump changed his business model to tap into the Russian market. Suddenly the Trump Organization wasn’t really in the development business. It was in the real estate licensing business, hiring all sorts of shady brokers to help it tap into the Russian market. Yet somehow after the worst real estate crisis since the Great Depression, Trump suddenly found himself with loads of unexplained cash. Trump went into the worst real estate market in real trouble and comes out on the other side able to spend absurd amounts of cash on golf courses, as well as having a new line of credit from Deutsche Bank, a bank that had just sued him for defaulting on his loans. This does not add up. Except, in many ways, it does. It just requires factoring in Russia.     The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.