Inside the Right-Wing Campaign Against Robert Mueller

Coming up on today’s show:

• There are about four million Americans who have some kind of housing assistance, either through a section eight voucher or some other program. Now, those families have an opportunity to move into more affluent areas. Susan Popkins, a senior fellow at The Urban Institute, and Suree Barnes, a mother of three who has relied on vouchers and moved from a poor neighborhood to a more affluent community, discuss the shift. 

• FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged four Trump aides in his investigation into Russian collusion in the campaign — but if you’re following conservative media, you may not know it.  Max Kutner, senior writer at Newsweek who covers the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Russia investigations, says there’s an expanding effort to delegitimize the investigation and its consequences by undermining the FBI, and Mueller himself.

• Right now in Berlin, there’s at least one person piecing together what could be the world’s largest puzzle. Millions of documents shredded in 1990 by the Stasi, the state security service of East Germany, who spied on its citizens for more than 40 years with a single mission: To protect the ruling party. Dagmar Hovestädt is a spokesperson for the Stasi Records Agency. She explains the process, and why the technology isn’t quite up to the task of stitching these documents together. 

• The Golden Globes are this Sunday, but watchers are talking more about the politics around the awards ceremony and the #MeToo movement than who the winners and losers might be. Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday and The Takeaway, has the details. 

• On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the reversal of an Obama-era directive that paved the way for marijuana legalization in states. Pat Jehlen has served as a Democratic Massachusetts State Senator of the 2nd Middlesex District since 2005, and is chairperson of the Joint Committee on Marijuana Policy. She discusses the impact this could have in Massachusetts, which is set to open legal marijuana shops this July. 

• Megan Clement is managing editor of News Deeply’s “Women and Girls” site, and she says 2017 brought some large victories for women. She has rounded up some of the changes brought to countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Tunisia, which this year abolished what are known as “marry your rapist” laws. Those allowed rapists to escape punishment by wedding their victims. 

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich