The U.S. House just voted to force the Trump administration to release every document it has on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful associates. The move comes after Congress released 23,000 pages of Epstein emails and text messages, a data dump that references Donald Trump more than 1,500 times and has so thoroughly tarnished former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that he’s stepped back from public commitments. Now, many more revelations are likely to come.
In this special episode of Lever Time, David Sirota sits down for a live interview with two people who’ve led the long and brutal fight to expose the Epstein scandal.
First, investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, whose reporting originally broke open the Epstein scandal, joins the podcast to explore the revelations from the newly released documents. Then, David speaks with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been leading the bipartisan fight to force the government to release the Epstein files.
Click here for a transcript of this episode
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MONEYBOMB, Part 6: Did A Federal Judge Sink Super PACs? (With Larry Lessig)
Maine overwhelmingly voted last year to end Super PACs. A federal judge blocked the ballot measure — but left a kill switch inside the ruling. Larry Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and head of the nonprofit Equal Citizens, is ready to flip that switch and take his case to the Supreme Court.
In our final episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota speaks with Lessig about the legal battle against Super PACs and why he believes that we can stop Citizens United without touching it.
To read more about Larry Lessig’s case against Super PACs, click here.
Click here to order our new book, MASTER PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
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MONEYBOMB, Part 5: Why Populism Is Now Centrism (With Adam Bonica)
For the first time in the Citizens United era of billionaires and corporate money buying U.S. elections, change may be afoot. This week, Democrats campaigning on a populist message won resounding victories in the face of big-money opposition.
An aging party establishment is still calling for Democrats to be more moderate and centrist, but what if the center has moved? What if populism is the new centrism?
On this new episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota sits down with Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, author of the newsletter On Data and Democracy, to discover how the labels that we use in our political system are changing — and how this week’s election results could shift the Democratic Party’s battle against corporate power and the oligarchy.
For a full transcript of the episode, click here.
Want to hear more of this conversation? Click here for a bonus episode.
Click here to order our new book, MASTER PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
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MONEYBOMB, Part 4: How Zohran Mamdani Beat Citizens United
Ahead of the closely watched New York City mayoral race, everyone is looking for a lesson from progressive Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s rise to political stardom. The real answer may be a vastly undervalued political strategy: public money. Could public financing of elections overcome Citizens United and the flood of corporate cash and corruption in American politics?
In the latest episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, we explore the importance of publicly funded campaigns. David Sirota speaks with two people who have had front-row seats to how public financing is combating election corruption — Karen Wharton, democracy coalition coordinator for Citizen Action of New York, and Jillian Gilchrest, a Connecticut state representative now running for Congress.
For a full transcript of the episode, click here.
Click here to order our new book, MASTER PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
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BONUS: An Exclusive Interview With Graham Platner
This week, in a special live interview, David Sirota sat down with Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Platner is a military veteran and oyster farmer who is a first-time political candidate running in the Democratic primary in the race to challenge Republican Senate incumbent Susan Collins. His rough-around-the-edges campaign has resonated with Maine’s working-class voters, sending him surging in the polls. But his past social media comments have surfaced in the last few weeks, thrusting him into controversy and pushing voters to ask: does Platner still have a shot at winning the Senate seat, and should he?
As a special bonus episode, we’re releasing the unedited audio of that interview. Click here to watch the video on YouTube.
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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by the award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, expert analysis, ideas and opinions from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
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