“Trump Has Appointed Himself, Judge, Jury, and Executioner”

In September, The Intercept broke the story of the U.S. military ordering an additional strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean.

Since then, U.S. boat strikes have expanded to the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept has documented 22 strikes as of early December that have killed at least 87 people. Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian national, was one of the dozens of people killed in these strikes. His family says he was just out fishing for marlin and tuna when U.S. forces attacked his boat on September 15. On behalf of Medina’s family, attorney Dan Kovalik has filed a formal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“We’re bringing a petition alleging that the U.S. violated the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, in particular, the right to life, the right to due process, the right to trial, and we’re seeking compensation from the United States for the family of Alejandro Carranza, as well as injunctive relief, asking that the U.S. stop these bombings,” Kovalik told The Intercept.

In the midst of this massive scandal, the so-called Department of War is cracking down on journalists’ ability to cover U.S. military actions. Back in October, Secretary Pete Hegseth introduced major new restrictions on reporters covering the Pentagon. In order to maintain press credentials to enter the Pentagon, journalists would have to sign a 17-page pledge committing to the new rules limiting press corps reporting to explicitly authorized information, including a promise to not gather or seek information the department has not officially released.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks to Kovalik about Medina’s case. Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse and Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at Arizona State University Law, also join Washington to discuss the strikes off the coast of Latin America, subsequent attacks on shipwrecked survivors, and the administration’s response to reporting on U.S. forces and the Pentagon.

“Americans should be very concerned because President Trump has appointed himself, judge, jury, and executioner,” says Turse of the administration’s justification for targeting individuals it claims to be in a “non-international armed conflict” with. “He has a secret list of terrorist groups. He decided they’re at war with America. He decides if you’re a member of that group, if he says that you are, he says he has the right to kill you.”

Leslie raised concerns about the administration’s attempts to erase press freedoms. “It’s just that fundamental issue of, who gets to cover the government? Is it only government-sanctioned information that gets out to the people, or is it people working on behalf of the United States public who get to really hold people to account and dive deep for greater information? And all of that is being compromised, if there’s an administration that says, ‘We get to completely put a chokehold on any information that we don’t want to be released,’” says Leslie. “You just don’t have a free press if you have to pledge that you’re not going to give away information just because it hasn’t been cleared. It just shouldn’t work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way. And it’s frightening that we’ve gotten an administration trying to make that the norm.”

“What’s to stop a lawless president from killing people in America that he deems to be domestic terrorists?”

With a president who regularly targets journalists and critics, Turse adds, “What’s to stop a lawless president from killing people in America that he deems to be domestic terrorists? … These boat strikes, the murders of people convicted of no crimes, if they become accepted as normal. There’s really nothing to stop the president from launching such attacks within the United States.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

Back in September, President Donald Trump made public that he and his administration had ordered a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean. On social media Trump claimed that members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, were transporting drugs on the vessel.

Reporter: And also the vote that you mentioned yesterday where 11 people were killed. What was found on that boat and why were the men killed instead of taken into custody?

Donald Trump: On the boat, you had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. And everybody fully understands that. In fact, you see it. You see the bags of drugs all over the boat and they were hit. Obviously, they won’t be doing it again.

JW: Since then, U.S. strikes targeting boats allegedly carrying drugs to the U.S. have expanded to the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept has counted 22 strikes as of early December. Those strikes have killed at least 87 people.

Members of Congress from both parties say these strikes are nothing short of extrajudicial killings targeting civilians that do not pose an eminent threat to the U.S. The administration has yet to provide the public any evidence that these boats are carrying drugs or affiliated with drug cartels, which the administration has also designated as “narco-terrorists.”

The family of one of those victims, Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian national, says he was out fishing for marlin and tuna when a targeted strike on September 15 killed him. Attorney Daniel Kovalik has filed a human rights petition on behalf of his family. Kovalik filed the petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And he joins me now.

Daniel Kovalik, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Daniel Kovalik: Thank you, Jessica. Thanks for having me.

JW: Daniel, I want to start with you telling us a little bit about Alejandro. Who was he?

DK: He was a fisherman. He was a father of four children, one adult child, three minor children. He was married, though he was separated at the time of his death.

He was close to his parents as well. And he was poor. They were a poor family and they relied on Alejandro to make ends meet through fishing. He was also, by the way, a member of the Fisherman’s Association in Santa Marta.

JW: What is known about the strike that killed Mr. Medina?

DK: It’s as much as we know about any of these strikes, he was out fishing for marlin and tuna and his boat was the victim of what the U.S. is calling a kinetic strike, which I think essentially means it was bombed and virtually obliterated. The president of the Fishermen’s Association recognized from the video that it was one of their fishermen association boats that Alejandro would normally use. And of course Alejandro never came back. That’s what we know about it.

JW: What is the complaint that you’re making?

DK: First of all, we’re bringing it against the United States as a state party to the organization of American States. They are subject to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is a body of the organization of American states. And we’re bringing a petition alleging that the U.S. violated the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, in particular, the right to life, the right to due process, the right to trial, and we’re seeking compensation from the United States for the family of Alejandro Carranza, as well as injunctive relief, asking that the U.S. stop these bombings.

JW: Can you tell me a little bit more about why you filed the petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and what your goal is here?

DK: Yes, so we felt that at least, at the moment it was the best place to get jurisdiction over the United States because the U.S. is a party to the American declaration, which by the way, I just note, is the oldest human rights instrument in the world. It was signed in Bogota in 1948. It’s also known as the Bogota Declaration. And the U.S. as I said, a petition can be brought against the U.S. as a country before the Inter-American Commission.

To get compensation from the United States and the U.S. Court is very difficult because of sovereign immunity issues. But the U.S. in this case, where the Inter-American Commission has agreed to, essentially, to waive those immunity issues. So we felt it was a good venue for us again, and we will be seeking compensation, as I said, and a finding that these killings are unlawful, and we hope that does play a role in ending these killings. That’s really a big goal.

And by the way, we have not foreclosed the possibility of a court case. We’re looking into that right now, as well.

JW: Can you tell us about the process of bringing the petition to the human rights commission and what’s coming down the pipeline in this case?

DK: Yeah it’ll be slow going for sure. But the commission will do their own investigation of the claims, which will include sending questions and queries to me, for example, about our case, but also to the United States. They will ask the U.S. to respond to the petition to give their petition on jurisdiction and on the merits to maybe give evidence. And so that those will be the next steps is an investigation of what happened here and why.

JW: Switching gears a bit. You were also hired by Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, who the Trump administration has sanctioned and accused of playing a “role in the global illicit drug trade.” What can you tell us about Petro’s Case?

DK: Yeah first of all, these claims of him trafficking the drugs are completely untrue.

I’ve known Gustavo Petro for 20 years. He’s been a fighter of the drug cartels through his whole political career, including when he was a senator in Colombia, and currently he’s also very active in fighting the drug trade. He’s bombed a number of drug labs. He has engaged in a lot of crop substitution programs, encouraging farmers to go from growing coca, the raw material for cocaine, to growing other agricultural products like food items, and that’s been very successful. He’s reclaimed a lot of land from coca production to again, legitimate crop production. He’s also engaged in interception of drug boats in the Caribbean, but he doesn’t kill people. He arrests people. He’s confiscated a lot of money, which he’s actually donated to Gaza.

So this is not a drug trafficker, but this is very politically motivated. It’s very clear, given the timing of all this, that the U.S. put him on the OFAC list to punish him. For one, being an advocate, a very outspoken advocate of Palestine. And for making it clear that he was against these bombings of the boats and also opposed to any intervention in Venezuela.

That’s what this OFAC list designation is really about.

JW: Petro has also spoken about making cocaine legal. Can you speak to that at all?

DK: Yeah there’s a lot of discussion about legalizing all drugs. You see in the U.S. that we now have virtually legalized marijuana in most places.

And I think that makes a lot of sense. The Rand Corporation did a study years ago that showed it’s 20 times more effective to deal with drug addiction at home than to try to destroy drugs at their source like in Colombia. The problem isn’t the drugs per se, but in the case of the United States, you have people who feel they need to be sedated most of the time. And instead of dealing with those underlying problems, of course all the social programs we have that might alleviate that need and desire are being cut, right? So there’s a lot of discussion about legalizing drugs so they could be better regulated and frankly, so they could be taxed so the sale could be taxed. You could gain revenue from those again, to deal with drug addiction and other social problems.

JW: Turning back to Mr. Medina’s case, I wanted to see if you had any final thoughts that you wanted to share.

DK: Just that, I’ve been asked by a few journalists, do you think he was innocent?

And do you know what my response is that I know that all of these people killed were innocent. You know why? Because where I come from, you’re innocent until proven guilty. None of these people were proven guilty in a court of law, and none of them were even charged, as far as I know, by the U.S. for a crime.

And by the way, even if they had been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, even in a death penalty state, they wouldn’t get the death penalty because drug trafficking is not a capital crime. So there’s nothing lawful about these. There’s no justification for what the U.S. is doing. And again, another journalist from CNN actually said how are you going to prove that Alejandro was innocent?

Again, I don’t have to prove he’s innocent. It’s the U.S. who had to prove he was guilty before meeting out punishment to him, and they never did. So those are the things I’d like people to keep in mind. The other thing is, if the U.S. can get away with this, if they can just murder people and that’s what it is, murder people based on mere allegations, then none of us are safe.

There’s no difference between what they’re doing in the Caribbean than if a cop went up to a guy on the street in America, in Chicago, for example, and said, “Oh, I think you’re dealing in drugs.” And he shot the guy in the head. There’s no difference. And that’s not a world we want to live in. And we’re starting to live in that world with the ICE detentions. So we’re fighting not only against specifically these killings or specifically for these families — we’re fighting for the rule of law that protects all of us — and people should welcome that no matter how they view the drug issue.

JW: Thank you, Dan, for bringing your insights about this case and about what happened to Alejandro to our audience. And thank you for taking the time to speak with me on the Intercept Briefing.

DK: Thank you. I’m a big fan of The Intercept. Support The Intercept people. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.

JW: Thank you.

Break

JW: Intercept Senior Reporter Nick Turse broke the story of the U.S. military launching a subsequent attack on survivors of a strike in the Caribbean Sea back in September. According to reporting from Turse, the survivors clung to the wreckage of the boat for roughly 45 minutes before being killed.

These strikes have horrified lawmakers on both sides of the aisles, including Republican Senator Rand Paul, who expressed his disgust with the attacks during a Fox Business Interview.

Rand Paul: It has not been the history of the United States to kill people who are out of combat. Even if there is a war, which most of us dispute, that a bunch of people who are unarmed allegedly running drugs is a war. We still don’t kill people when they’re incapacitated. People floating around in the water clinging to the wreckage of a ship are not in combat under any definition.

JW: Since the Trump administration launched its campaign targeting alleged “narco-terrorists” off the coast of Latin America, it has been laying the ground-work for a U.S. invasion of Venezuela without even the consent of Congress or again providing evidence for its claims.

Congress is now demanding the administration release unedited videos of the strikes to lawmakers or they will withhold a quarter of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget.

And against this veil of secrecy and war crime allegations, the Pentagon has effectively replaced its seasoned press corps with a new crop of right-wing influencers, including Laura Loomer, James O’Keefe and Matt Gaetz, who claim to be covering the military, but have been accused of acting as a propaganda arm instead of a press corps.

Joining us now to discuss the boat strikes and the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate critical coverage, are Intercept Senior Reporter Nick Turse and Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Nick, Gregg, Welcome to the show.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having me.

Gregg Leslie: Thanks.

JW: Nick, to start, can you tell us about this first strike and why it matters that the United States launched an additional strike against the survivors?

NT: Sure. This initial attack took place in the Caribbean on September 2. The United States attacked what they say are “narco-terrorists,” what’s come to be known as a drug boat.

They fired a missile at this boat. The boat was reduced to wreckage. Basically all that was left was a portion of the hull floating upside down, and there were two survivors of the initial attack. They climbed aboard that piece of wreckage and they sat there for roughly 45 minutes, while they were under U.S. video surveillance.

At the end of that 45 minutes, the United States fired another missile, which killed those two survivors. And then in quick succession, they fired two more missiles in order to sink that last remnant of the vessel. There are a number of reasons why I think it’s notable that there was a follow-up strike here.

First off, there’s a lie by omission behind all of this, and by extension, a Pentagon coverup. The Intercept, as you say, was the first outlet to reveal that this double tap strike took place. And when we went to the Pentagon about it at the time all we got was an anodyne response. So it’s notable that they wanted to keep it secret in the first place.

We of course went ahead and published, but it took the Washington Post, the CNN, the New York Times months to catch up. The question becomes, why did the Pentagon want to keep it under wraps, and why didn’t they admit this when we first asked?

The Department of War says the U.S. military is in a “non-international armed conflict” with 20 plus gangs and cartels, whose identities it’s keeping secret. And if this is true, if we’re engaged in some sort of secret quasi war then a double tap strike to kill survivors is illegal under international law. In fact, the Pentagon’s own Law of War manual is clear on attacking defenseless people, combatants that are incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or very specifically shipwreck, are considered “Hors de combat,” the French term for those out of combat, or those out of the fight. At that point, combatants have become protected persons. They’re non-combatants at that point, so that’s another reason why this matters. There’s also something viscerally distasteful about killing people clinging to wreckage. It’s a summary execution of wounded, helpless people.

What’s worse is that the U.S. had the survivors under surveillance for 45 minutes and only then executed them. But, I also want to be clear that while the optics of this are especially horrendous, experts say that those follow up strikes aren’t materially different than the other drug boat attacks. There have been 22 attacks thus far by the U.S. on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

The U.S. has killed 87 people. And experts on the laws of war, former Pentagon lawyers, State Department lawyers who are experts, say that those are 87 extrajudicial killings, or put another way, 87 murders. There’s no war, there’s no actual armed conflict despite what the Trump administration claims. So these aren’t crimes of war. They can’t be, there’s no war. They’re just murders. The president and the military are conducting murders, and in my book, that’s what matters most.

JW: So the administration has tried to justify these strikes by claiming the men that were killed were narco terrorists. Since your initial reporting has the White House or the Pentagon provided any credible evidence that the people killed were drug traffickers?

NT: Yeah, they’ve never provided the public with any evidence of this. You’ll recall there was a strike on a semi-submersible craft that left two survivors that the military did not execute. They didn’t arrest them, they didn’t prosecute them. They instead repatriated them to their countries of origin after blowing up their boat and sinking it.

And the question is why? And I think it’s because they didn’t have viable evidence to prosecute. What they have when they target these boats is advanced intelligence, signals intelligence, maybe human intelligence that is informants, but they’re not going to disclose those sources and methods in court, so they don’t have a court case.

Now, I don’t know if everyone on board these boats are drug smugglers. It’s a question of what that even means. Is a poor fisherman moving cargo that Americans want, love, and pay big money for a smuggler? I don’t know, but I do believe these boats are transporting drugs. That’s what my sources say.

But that’s beyond the point because these aren’t capital offenses. If the offenders were arrested, tried, or convicted they’d get eight or 10 years in prison. They wouldn’t face a death penalty. Much less be convicted or executed.

Even more of a farce is the legal theory that’s been advanced in a still classified Justice Department finding. And it differs from some of what President Trump and the Pentagon has said in public statements about these killings of supposed narco terrorists. This classified finding says that the targets of the attacks are not the supposed narco traffickers. The people on board are, in bloodless military speak, “collateral damage.”

The government claims that the narcotics on the boats are the lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for the cartels, which the Trump administration claims they’re at war with. And the cartels could theoretically sell the drugs, take the money, and buy arms to engage in this non-existent war with America. So it’s a farce based on a fiction.

JW: Nick, you touched on this a little bit, but why should people in the United States care about the legality of these strikes? Are there implications for how the government could engage with people it considers even domestic adversaries?

NT: Yeah, I think Americans should be very concerned because President Trump has appointed himself, judge, jury, and executioner.

He has a secret list of terrorist groups. He decided they’re at war with America. He decides if you’re a member of that group, if he says that you are, he says he has the right to kill you. And Donald Trump doesn’t just have a list of foreign groups either, under National Security Presidential Memorandum seven, the shorthand is NSPM-7, which he issued this fall, he has a secret list of domestic terror groups or, it’s being compiled as we speak, I think. So what’s to stop a lawless president from killing people in America that he deems to be domestic terrorists? If he’s doing this, close to home in the Caribbean or the Pacific. It’s the illegal use of lethal force that should worry Americans.

These boat strikes, the murders of people convicted of no crimes, if they become accepted as normal. There’s really nothing to stop the president from launching such attacks within the United States.

JW: Yeah, that’s really terrifying Nick, and we appreciate you explaining to us what this expanded scope could mean.

And Gregg, I want to pivot a little bit. In the midst of everything that we’re discussing here, the Pentagon has effectively replaced its original press core with a group of right-wing influencers. Gregg, does that make uncovering the truth here more difficult?

GL: Yeah, it always does, and we see this from a lot of administrations to different degrees, but they all know that controlling the information can get them what they want in the short term. So it’s a reflexive reaction that almost always backfires because people know when they’re being lied to or when they’re having information withheld from them. So what we’re seeing at the Pentagon where, yeah, amateurs are basically the ones reporting to us now, it doesn’t go without notice, so it’s not a good solution. It’s a blatant, blatantly unconstitutional, denial of rights. They’re actually keeping people out of covering the Pentagon for the American people because they won’t sign a pledge restricting what they can report on. I think it’s an overwhelmingly improper way to handle a government.

JW: Gregg, I want to push a little bit and ask, we’ve obviously seen reporters outside of the building break stories. Nick is one example, but there are countless others. Does it matter for the Pentagon Press Corps to actually be inside of the Pentagon?

GL: I think it does, and it’s not just the Pentagon. I’ve seen this at other agencies too, where the U.S. government has an incredible array of experts on every topic, and people who are fundamentally involved in the controversies that we want to know more about. And any official channel of communication never really tells the full story. There’s always somebody who wants to limit that flow of information. So you can always get better information if you know who the people are behind the scenes. And there’s nothing nefarious or wrong with that. You just get better information to tell the American people how their government is operating. So that’s the way it should work. You don’t sit there and wait for press briefings. You go out and find the information, and you can do that better if you’re in the building.

JW: Yeah. Nick, I want to get your thoughts on this. Does it matter to be in the Pentagon?

NT: You know it might seem odd coming from someone who’s covered national security for 20 some odd years, but never reported from the Pentagon. But I also think that physical access to the building matters.

Maybe I should back up. I never liked the idea of reporters having office space in the Pentagon. I never really thought that reporters should be sharing the same facility. But I firmly believe that reporters should have access to that military facility and every other one, by the same token. And, I’ve been known to grumble some about mainstream defense reporters from major outlets, sometimes being too chummy with Pentagon sources, and laundering too many Pentagon talking points, also failing to push back or call out Pentagon lies. But they also get information and tips that you sometimes just will not get if you’re an adversarial reporter outside of the building. I’ve always thought that there were better ways for folks on the outside and the inside to work together to share information. Sometimes that one or the other couldn’t use for whatever reason. But I still believe that even failing that there are people inside the building who can get scoops that I and other reporters outside just can’t. Being in the building can help that, it can help in building rapport.

I’d like to see them get back inside the building. But I also think that maybe this treatment by the Department of War will, in the long run, lead to less reliance on official leaks and maybe finding more dissenters inside the building.

JW: Gregg, I want to go back a second and ask you to talk a little bit more about the pledge. Can you explain for our listeners what the pledge was that outlets were being asked to sign in order to have permission to be in the Pentagon?

GL: It’s not a simple answer to that because it was a massive document they were expected to go through, and the big issue was they couldn’t print anything that wasn’t officially given to them or officially cleared through Pentagon officials.

And you would have to write in a pledge that I understand that I’m in violation of the law if I print anything that comes from somebody that hasn’t been, somebody gives me information that hasn’t been officially cleared. That’s just such an outrageous comment. It’s not just saying you can’t talk to people, you can’t go outside of this office, but it’s saying you have to agree that you will only print authorized officially released information, and that’s just not how journalism works or should work.

JW: Outside of the boat strikes, outside of the Pentagon, Gregg, what is the dangerous precedent that’s being set by replacing the Pentagon Press Corps?

GL: I think it’s just that fundamental issue of, who gets to cover the government? Is it only government-sanctioned information that gets out to the people, or is it people working on behalf of the United States public who get to really hold people to account and dive deep for greater information? And all of that is being compromised, if there’s an administration that says, “We get to completely put a choke-hold on any information that we don’t want to be released.” That is not in any way consistent with the American tradition and it just flies in the face of our well-established preference for a free press. You just don’t have a free press if you have to pledge that you’re not going to give away information just because it hasn’t been cleared. It just shouldn’t work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way. And it’s frightening that we’ve gotten an administration trying to make that the norm.

JW: Nick, do you have any final thoughts?

NT: Since the dawn of the Republic, the United States military has been killing civilians and they’ve been getting away with it. Native Americans in the so-called Indian Wars, Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century, Japanese during World War II, Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians.

And for the last 20-plus years, Republican and Democratic administrations pioneered lawless killings in the back lands of the planet during the forever wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and on, and on. The details of these wars were kept secret. Civilian casualties were covered up. And now this new extension of the war on terror melded with the war on drugs has come to our doorstep.

We have bogus terrorist designations that are being used to murder people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, and it could soon occur within the United States. The president has been killing people using the most specious legal reasoning imaginable. And, it makes a classic war on terror as unlawful and murders as it was look almost reasonable by comparison.

So I think Americans should be demanding answers and speaking out about a secret enemy’s list that’s being used to excuse summary executions or to put it plainly murder. And a domestic enemies list that the White House and the Justice Department just refused to say anything about.

JW: Nick, we appreciate your thoughtful analysis. And Gregg, do you have any final thoughts?

GL: Yeah, I think every few years something comes along that reminds us that we need a free press. If things are going too well, people take a free press for a given. They think of course we’re able to have reporters do what they want.

So in a sense, the bad news can lead to a good effect. We know that since the time of James Madison, when he said, “popular government without popular knowledge is a tragedy or a farce, or perhaps both.” Right from the start, we knew that kind of information has to reach the people to have a meaningful democracy.

And as a media lawyer, people get tired of me and other media lawyers saying this kind of access is fundamentally important to democracy, as if we’re saying every incident like this is going to destroy democracy. But in the big picture, they will. When this keeps happening and if this becomes an official policy, it fundamentally threatens how democracy works.

And so I don’t think we’re ever going to overstate the case here. Something like this where you’re actually removing reporters from the Pentagon just truly interferes with how the people of the United States learn about what their government is up to.

JW: We’re going to leave it there. But thank you both so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

GL: Thanks for having me.

NT: Thanks very much.

JW: On Wednesday, the United States intercepted and seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. President Trump bragged about the move, claiming the tanker was the “largest one ever seized.”

It was a shocking escalation in the United States’ aggression toward the country, as Trump increases pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Follow the Intercept for more reporting on this developing story.

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.