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Is Trump’s New Attorney General Nominee Just Another Jeff Sessions?

David Cole on William Barr, Dave Lindorff on Pentagon accounting fraud, and Marc Cooper on the revolution in Armenia.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

December 13, 2018

William Barr, former attorney general for President George H.W. Bush and President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Jeff Sessions.(Time Warner via AP)

Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, is more qualified to do the job than Matt Whitaker—but so are thousands of others. His record, however, show’s he as bad as Jeff Sessions—if not worse. David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU and The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent, explains.

Also: a report on The Nation’s investigation of massive accounting fraud at the Pentagon—Dave Lindorff found that $21 trillion cannot be accounted for. For decades, he says, the Pentagon has been “deliberately cooking the books to mislead Congress.”

Plus: the Armenian Revolution offers “a small light of hope and progressive democratic change in a Europe increasingly shadowed by authoritarian and dictatorial forces, especially in most of the former Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe.” That’s what Marc Cooper says—he’s spent months in Yerevan, where elections on Sunday confirmed the victory of the revolutionaries.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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