Max Blumenthal breaks down the shadowy network of billionaires, Democratic elites, and Russiagate profiteers behind the Shadow app that ruined the Iowa caucuses, and a wider effort to stop Bernie Sanders' progressive momentum.

Iowa's voting debacle has renewed fears that the DNC is again working against Bernie Sanders and his grassroots campaign. Iowa Democrats slowly released the tallies from areas that favored Pete Buttigeg - allowing him to falsely claim an early victory. DNC chair Tom Perez called for a recanvassing of the vote amid widespread uncertainty about its accuracy. And the firm behind the Iowa Democrats' faulty voting tabulation app, Shadow, is tied to veteran Clinton and Obama operatives, and a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires.

Guest: Max Blumenthal, Editor of The Grayzone and author of The Management of Savagery.

I have written several times about the continuing NATO preparations for an attack on Russia, a second Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. Circumstances prompt me to write about it again, for as of the last week in January the Americans and their gang of lieutenant nations in NATO have commenced the biggest military exercises in 25 years to take place in Europe. The code name for this operation is Defender-Europe 20 but we can interpret that as Attack-Russia 20; in effect a preparation for an attack on Russia comparable to the Nazi invasion in 1941 that killed 27 million Soviet citizens, wounded countless more and destroyed everything west of the Urals and led ultimately to the crushing of the Nazis that launched the attack.

For the past several years the US has been building up bases in Eastern Europe, building up their logistics systems, prepositioning vast amounts of munitions and weapons of every type and calibre, securing convoy routes from the USA across the Atlantic and across Europe right up to Russia's borders for the rapid movement of military equipment and formations, installing nuclear capable missile systems in key locations from Poland to Romania, increasing intelligence flights in the Baltic, particularly with regard to the Russian base at Kaliningrad and the approaches to St. Petersburg, and the Black Sea, Crimea and Ukraine as well around the Russian bases at Vladivostok, all the while, in their propaganda talking about false flag operations they could use to blame Russia and provide the pretext for their attack. Kaliningrad has been mentioned several times by US generals and officials as one possible scene for staging a false flag operation for this purpose. But the number of scenarios they could use is limited only by their imagination and capabilities.

A US has envoy warned Israel not to declare sovereignty over West Bank land without Washington's consent, pushing back against calls for immediate action by ultra-nationalists within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition.

US President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan, unveiled on January 28, envisages Israel keeping key swathes of the occupied territory where Palestinians seek statehood. But the question of timing has opened up a rare rift between the allies.

Netanyahu initially pledged a speedy "application of Israeli law" - de facto annexation - to Jewish settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley, delighting his religious-rightist base ahead of Israel's March 2 election, where he hopes to win a fifth term.

Moscow is ready to prolong the crucial New Start arms control treaty without any preconditions - and even negotiate on its new, state-of-art weaponry - yet the US is dodging the talks, Russia's FM Sergey Lavrov has said.

One of the last obstacles on the path of the unhinged nuclear arms race, the US-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is set to expire in a year. Still Moscow and Washington have been unable to engage into any meaningful discussion on it yet, since the US has been ignoring the repeated calls for dialogue, Lavrov said during an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

Moscow's position is clear - it's ready to extend the existing treaty right away - and it has been repeatedly voiced by the top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin. Instead of discussing the existing pact, however, the US has been insisting on dragging China into it.

NATO fans fears of the "resurgent" Russia and drags neutral countries into its orbit, but the fact is that Moscow's military potential is only half the size of the bloc's forces in Europe, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

Although the European continent has already been "oversaturated with military facilities and weapons," NATO is "continuing to merge with the European Union," and has its sights on those EU nations that declared themselves neutral, Lavrov told Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

"NATO states are trying to conduct joint exercises, attracting neutral states, such as Finland and Sweden, under the pretext of [their] EU membership," Russia's chief diplomat explained.

The unexpected alliance between Turkey and Libya is a geopolitical earthquake that changes the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East. Turkey's audacious move has enraged its rivals in the region and cleared the way for a dramatic escalation in the 9 year-long Libyan civil war. It has also forced leaders in Europe and Washington to decide how they will counter Turkey's plan to defend the U.N-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), and to extend its maritime borders from Europe to Africa basically creating "a water corridor through the eastern Mediterranean linking the coasts of Turkey and Libya." Leaders in Ankara believe that the agreement "is a major coup in energy geopolitics" that helps defend Turkey's "sovereign rights against the gatekeepers of the regional status quo." But Turkey's rivals strongly disagree. They see the deal as a naked power grab that undermines their ability to transport natural gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe without crossing Turkish waters. In any event, the Turkey-Libya agreement has set the stage for a broader conflict that will unavoidably involve Egypt, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia and the United States. All parties appear to have abandoned diplomatic channels altogether and are, instead, preparing for war.

An attack that killed two US troops in Afghanistan illustrates that the American military is no longer welcome in the country, a senior Iranian adviser has said, adding that US forces will be forced out of Iraq and Syria.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top international adviser to the leader of the Islamic Revolution, said that Saturday's incident in Nangarhar province signals that "it is time for the Americans to be expelled from Afghanistan," Iranian media reported.

The Pentagon confirmed that two US service members were killed and six others injured after an individual in "Afghan uniform" armed with a machine gun opened fire on a joint patrol in Afghanistan.

Protests against India's new Citizenship Act have hogged headlines and filled the streets for two months — but Prime Minister Narendra Modi's approach to the crisis may actually tame the beast many thought could spur his downfall.

The seemingly innocuous act, passed by parliament in December 2019, fast-forwards the citizenship process for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis, and Jains — all of which are persecuted minorities in the three neighbouring Islamic states of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The law, however, was branded "anti-Muslim" by Modi's detractors who argue that it puts Muslims seeking to immigrate to India at an unfair disadvantage. The propaganda effort turned out to be very successful.

While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico's new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks were not serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom's left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-​wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico's 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico's "first full-fledged left-wing experiment," AMLO's election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book A New Hope for Mexico, "In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers.... Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites."

In January, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-advertised Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at a press conference attended by American and Israeli officials. The deal de-facto recognises Tel Aviv's claims to sovereignty over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, considered a violation of international law by the UN.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country is in the process of mapping areas of the West Bank that would be subjected to an extension of Israeli sovereignty, following the publication of US President Donald Trump's peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Times of Israel reported.

Netanyahu reportedly said during his party's campaign event on Saturday:

"We're already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel. This won't take a lot of time and we'll complete this."

"Don't be mistaken, the Americans will go along with this, President Trump will go along with this," the Israeli prime minister purportedly added.