SEASON 4 EPISODE 52: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: It's the Big Lie Redux. Trump appears to be planning some kind of SHOW TRIALS over the 2020 Election - and Nicolas Maduro might be his key “witness."

He let it slip at the World Economic Forum yesterday. He told the audience in Davos that he will be prosecuting people over the 2020 Election. Never mind that there's nothing to prosecute anybody for; never mind that he lost; never mind that this has already been through the courts: "It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That's probably breaking news." In the last week, he has twice insisted Joe Biden and his administration ‘should be arrested’ and he has now said "we caught 'em." In his fugue state News Conference Tuesday, Trump had a question planted about ‘finding things out’ from Maduro about 2020. And Maduro's role in some nonsensical conspiracy theory may be the real reason Trump had Maduro renditioned from Venezuela – not drugs.

Regardless: all the tea leaves suggest Trump is going to roll out the Big Lie again, this time perhaps with a phony confession from Maduro in exchange for a pardon or something. Trump is insane and desperate, so now he will actually try to focus the Department of Justice and all elected Republicans on prosecuting Biden and others.

You think his Greenland Clown Show is crazy? You think his terrorism in Minnesota is crazy? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

And god help us if it gets any traction. If media pushback were insufficient to counter the tsunami of propaganda Trump and his criminal gangs could generate, he might try to use the subsequent unrest as an excuse to interfere with the midterms or even rationalize violating the constitution and seeking another term.

B-Block (32:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anchors Aweight, Buffalo Bills' owner Terry Pegula, who has fired his coach even though he thinks Sean McDermott did an "admiral" job. Then there's Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer and the accusations of an affair with a staffer on the public dime. She's chosen to be represented by a lawyer named Dr. Nick. And then there are America's two most overrated journalists Jim "What Is A Woman?" VandeHei, and Anderson "You Really Think Trump Is Insane?" Cooper and yes they each actually asked those questions this week.

C-Block (45:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: How different was flying nearly half a century ago? There we were, the president of Cornell University and I, waiting to board a plane from New York to Ithaca and there they were, two airline employees, trying to fix a problem in the undercarriage by stuffing paper towels up into it.