Contributing Writers

President Biden’s formally announced plan to visit Saudi Arabia next month is a dramatic reversal of earlier promises to treat the Arab nation as a “pariah” in light of its repeated human rights violations. Calls are growing for Biden to hold the Saudi government accountable for the brutal murder and dismemberment of American resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

President Biden addressed the economy and labor rights in an address Tuesday to the AFL-CIO convention as delegates elected Liz Shuler to become the AFL-CIO’s first female president and Fred Redmond to be its first African American secretary-treasurer.

The 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary in 1972 this Friday comes as public hearings are underway by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. We speak with Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” about critical lessons and historical parallels between the defining controversies of the Nixon and Trump presidencies. Rather than isolated crimes, Watergate and January 6 should be seen as culminating events of U.S.

Monday’s January 6 committee hearing ended with closing statements from January 6 committee vice chair, Republican Liz Cheney and Democrat Zoe Lofgren describing how the Trump administration raised over $250 million from his supporters, off of the lie that the 2020 election results were fraudulent, for an election defense fund that didn’t exist.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack heard live testimony Monday from Al Schmidt, the sole Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the 2020 election. He described how he found no evidence of voter fraud in 2020, and said he and his family received death threats after Trump lashed out at him on Twitter for not halting the vote count due to false claims of fraud.

One of the key witnesses who testified live at Monday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who led the the Fox News decision to become the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in November 2020. Fox fired Stirewalt months later. Answering questions from Congressmember Zoe Lofgren, Stirewalt said Trump’s chance of winning was virtually zero.

We spend the hour featuring highlights from the second public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Main witnesses were ex-President Donald Trump’s former inner circle, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, Attorney General William Barr, campaign adviser Jason Miller and his own daughter Ivanka Trump, who all said Trump ignored them on election night in November 2020 when they argued against declaring victory.

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.

The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee.

The January 6 committee released new footage Thursday night showing a detailed timeline of the day of the insurrection.

As the Summit of the Americas wrapped up in Los Angeles with President Biden announcing a plan to address migration in the Western Hemisphere that includes a series of so-called bold actions, we spend the hour with Democracy Now! co-host, professor, longtime journalist and author Juan González, who has just released the newly revised edition of his landmark 2000 book, “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.

The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee.

The January 6 committee released new footage Thursday night showing a detailed timeline of the day of the insurrection.