Matt Welch
Life comes at you fast, particularly if you're trying to follow the news this week. Late yesterday afternoon, CNN broke the serious news that four senior U.S. intelligence chiefs briefed both President Barack Obama and President-Elect Donald Trump about "allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." On the subway ride over to record The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael C. Moynihan, Buzzfeed made the more questionable decision to release an uncorroborated report from an anonymous self-described intelligence source that included, among other allegations, that Trump hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed one slept in by Obama. And at the moment we stopped recording, the outgoing president delivered his farewell address.
So obviously the podcast spent the first 15 minutes talking about Costa Rica beaches and British holiday barfing habits. But THEN we get into the nitty gritty, including sober policy talk about Obamacare, the government-aggrandizing senatorial hysteria during Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearings, and, yes, the peeing story. The news cycle has since thundered on, but you can listen to the snapshot reaction here:
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