Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion On Justice Dept. Mission Intersection With Politics 20240712

National security at fordham law. Today, washington and the country seem embroiled in controversy and chaos. It seems very much at the department of justice are in the that at the department of justice are in the headlines about what is going on in the country, if not the protest in portland or kenosha, if it is issues about covid and restrictions and whether they should be followed or not, if it is not about the election and concerns about the legality of elections, procedures to the election, not to mention the number of cases involving Administration Officials and the doj role as those cases through the system. I think we have a lot to talk about. I want to start with the big question. Does it really look different to you . Does it look like a different environment when the two of you were at the department of justice . Are we just overreacting . Lets begin with you because you were there the longest time ago. And i have the gray hair. Of what has the department looked like, we are talking about National Security today in particular, what does it look like over the last number of years, bringing us up to the present moment. In getting ready for todays conversation, i decided to go and look at the recent press releases, recent announcements on cases, see what is being publicly announced. I went back to the beginning of august, end of july. Drowning this conversation in National Security, i saw any number of cases in the National Security realm that you could have taken the same snapshot from five years ago, 10 years ago. I saw a Material Support case, attempted Material Support case for isis, one about al qaeda, some very interesting cases involving the cyber threat, the takedown of cryptocurrency accounts related to terrorist organizations, and so forth. In that snapshot, on the one hand, you can say the study stream of National Security prosecutions that have been in place in one form or the other since september 11 and picked up steam with the founding of the National Security division in 2006 remains consistent. I have thought for a long time that the general public, who doesnt follow these issues on a daytoday basis, would generally be surprised to find that these cases are happening with some regularity. In august, there was an isis case or aq case, or what have you. On that level, there has been a remarkable degree of consistency. The second thing i would say is you place that in the context of how do you place those cases, what is happening on the daytoday line level with the larger context. To use a phrase from davids book, what is the difference between institutional government and the political class, or the political set of factors that weigh in on any administration . That is the interesting dividing line, if you will, that i think he will get into today. Do you think the National Security following up the National Security division in established in 2006, as you say, is sort of what is true for them is true for other departments in the department of justice, or not . If you extrapolate out, there is a steady stream of what i would call regular bread and butter cases being brought across the department. Of course, do you everyone is doj, everyone is well aware, unlike a lot of other executive Branch Agencies that have this dichotomy between the institution of main justice and individually appointed u. S. Attorneys separately president ial appointees and confirmed, of course in the , district around the country. Again, i think there is a tremendous amount of that work that goes on daytoday. Karen lets bring you in on this. Your experience is more recent, having worked for the Obama Administration. I am just wondering how you see this. Particularly talk about the department of justice in the whole, but also if you like the nsd. The amount of terrorism cases that joshua is referring to are down in numbers, have been since the end of the Obama Administration emma largely , largely because of the defeat of the caliphate, a number of other reasons. What is the National Security division doing these days . Are some of the politically charged issues like black lives matter protests, the threats to them, is that in the National Security interest or elsewhere . I want to thank everyone for setting this up. Its a pleasure to be doing this with david, josh, karen, tackling such an important issue. To maybe make a comparison and build on what josh said, when people ask is the Supreme Court divided or polarized . You sometimes hear people say there are cases that are nearly unanimous that the public does not notice. That feels like a comparison to what josh is rightly calling our attention to. Prosecutions and other matters done primarily by career officials that are roughly continuing a pace at least in the National Security space, maybe not in the Voting Rights section or the environmental book, but in the National Security state. What people say about the Supreme Court is there are some highprofile cases that are polarized. Those cases happen to matter a lot. Again the analogy holds up here. There are some highprofile cases that are being handled very unusually now, and they matter a lot. Let me zoom in and give 1 it may not seem like a big moment, but it reveals just how disruptive that Political Leadership of the Justice Department is to norms and traditions. Folks may recall when the Inspector General Justice Department, michael horowitz, issued his longawaited and just plain long report on the origins of the Russian Investigation, for lack of a better way to civil if i what he looked into. Simplify what he looked into. He found there was no political bias to the opening of the investigation, though, he did identify problems with the fisa process at a granular level. Within hours of it being issued, john durham, prosecutor in the Justice Department, issued a statement, saying he disagreed with horowitzs conclusions, and that his own investigation might yield something different. Again, that may seem like a few sentences, and it was. It was also completely wild. That a prosecutor would do two things, one, disagree with the work of his own departments Inspector General that had issued pages and pages after months of investigations. Wild. Second, that he would comment about what is going on with his own investigation while the investigation was still occurring. I would say not just wild but inappropriate. That is just a piece of what the Justice Department is doing right now, to go back to josh, and his efforts to situate us. At the same time, the things under that political magnifying glass seem to me to be handled friendly right now from how we used to see them handled, and frankly, how we would like to see them handled. Karen david, part of your recent book focuses on the longterm scope. You talk about changes from one administration to another. Cases where there were politicized issues within the department of justice, and then sort of a recalibration after. Do you want to put this in perspective in how you see it, given your knowledge of the history of the department . David i want to thank you as well for setting this up. I joined both joshs who know more than i do about the Justice Department. Thank you for the institutional government plug. [laughter] i still have more on that. And i am a nerd, so let me get that out there. I did not know him that much about the Justice Department, i had worked more overseas as a journalist. The key thing for me is understanding the modern Justice Department, and you understand it through the example of john mitchell, Richard Nixons attorney general, who used his office to investigate the vietnam war protesters, black panthers, and other groups, as a way to reinforce president nixons messaging about chaos in the country, the need for law and order. To be fair to mitchell, he left his post as attorney general and then famously chaired president nixons Reelection Campaign and then ended up going to jail for his actions as his role in the campaign. You had these massive reforms in the 1970s. You had president ford appoint edward leavy as attorney general. You know him, i think many love him. President of the university of chicago. Many people watching may know this already but he created this idea that the attorney general should carry out justice programs, Law Enforcement priorities that the president asks to do. Barack obama wanted to crackdown on environmental, or Voting Rights, lets say, violations, and President Trump wants to crackdown on crime, that is his right. He is a democratically elected president. But the difference is if the president wants to crackdown on pharmaceutical companies, he can say that to the attorney general, but it should not be mr. Attorney general, go after this certain pharmaceutical ceo because he did not give me a campaign donation. All of this is old to you, but it helped me understand the modern Justice Department, the modern attorney general, edward leavy embodied it. We can talk about the ups and downs from him all through bill barr. The point is to have people trust the politically neutral enforcement of the law. And i do think that is being questioned. I agree with josh, the institution is functioning. Dangerous people are being prosecuted across the country. People should not overreact to the headlines about what is happening, but i think the department is being used in a way to aid a president s Political Goals and reelection efforts in a way that it has not been used since watergate. Karen that is interesting. Are you all making a distinction between the doj on the one hand and the office of the attorney general on the other hand, that you can sort of separate them and assess them differently . Joshua i think this attorney general is making that more of a distinction that we are accustomed to seeing. We are having this conversation just hours after the attorney general gave yet another interview again, attorney generals sometimes give interviews, sometimes they speak, but to do so in the way that this is attorney general does the where he deliberately replicates words chosen by the president , whether that is how he described the russia investigation in 2016, how he talks about mailin ballots, despite telling congress under oath he had no evidence to support his characterization, and again saying it on national tv last night when he creates his mouthpiece as something as prominent as it is and as allied with the president as it is, i think it is the attorney general who makes that office and that person, in some ways, a distinction below from the department from a greater degree than we have been accustomed to in the past. Karen let me ask you to weigh in here. There have been attorney generals in the past that have been close to the president. John f. Kennedy had his brother as his attorney general. It is not the closeness in and of itself that matters but the office. Is there a distinction to be made . Maybe david can talk about this. In the past, there have been suggestions that the attorney general role and the department of justice role should be rolled out as a completely independent entity. Joshua let me try to answer that in the lens of National Security. One of the challenges when you talk about National Security is, in some ways, is more a subjective area than other areas of the law. We can talk about certain types of violent crime, homicide of course prosecuted at the state level. There is not a lot of debate around homicide. There is certainly debate around punishment and that sort of thing, but not National Security. The National Security priorities of the country are always changing. There are a variety of components that go into that. When you talk about National Security, you talk about the nature of the threat, the Threat Landscape has changed dramatically as always changed cyber, the area that i working a lot, is the biggest headline in terms of the changing nature of the threat. When you say, what do a prosecutions look like, what are the enforcement priorities of the department looking like at any given time . There are always prosecutorial choices being made. In the National Security arena, if you start with what are the priorities of the country, and how do you protect them, taking action and so forth . That will change over time. The example i would use in terms of saying what parts of the institution are consistent, what parts of the institution are dynamic across administrations, i think the sanctions regime is a good example. Enhanced sanctions, the increased use of sanctions is a well told story at this point since september 11, even though sanctions have been in place under different regimes before september 11. But the expanded use of sanctions has been moving in one direction under various administrations for quite some time now. So you have that line happening, but you have choices being made by different administrations at Different Levels about who will be sanctioned and for what purpose. The sanctions regime, as everyone knows, is incredibly complex, very dynamic, changes on a daytoday basis. For example, if you are on the backside trying to keep up with who to keep out of the u. S. Financial system. On the one hand, you see consistency. It is a tool that has been used by lots of different types of administrations. On the other hand, you are making strategic choices about who will be sanctioned when, and what purposes. Karen one of the questions that comes to us and it fits perfectly into this conversation is from johnny dwyer. Is the nature of national cu definition of National Security changing . We hear about the protests themselves being a National Security concern of major importance. What do you think about that . Do we need a rethink in terms of the National Security division . Has its portfolio become broader, is it focusing domestically in ways it has not before, how do we think about it . Joshua it is a great question from johnny, who has written about these issues. The recognition that it is not that there is a set of cases that is obvious and objective, that any Justice Department simply needs to pick up and do. Instead, there are policy choices, leadership choices about where to find cases in the first place. Or as josh said, to use an established tool but how to direct it. The Justice Department is not just a place that turns out law but also makes policy choices. A National Security division was created in part to enhance the Justice Departments policy role, voice in the interagency process. It is incumbent on the National Security division amidst the broader Justice Department to keep up. When i had the pleasure of working there, folks like lisa monico, mary mccord made sure the division, while never taking its eye off of the terrorist right, realized cyber thing was getting bigger and more consequential. Josh is the real cyber expert in this crew. But that is an important pivot ibut that is an important pivot to make, the expertise you seek, who you hire, what parts of partnerships you forged with the fbi, how you work with u. S. Attorneys offices. That evolution needs to happen. And johnny put his finger on what i think needs to be a big part of that evolution, dealing with this surging domestic terrorist threat, what i call the white supremacist terrorist threat. Increasingly it has transnational links. Unfortunately, it is global. We see a little bit of innovation on that front. We saw the fbi and the broader Justice Department disrupt a plot in colorado that the doj and fbi said was the first public manifestation of new cooperation between the counterterrorism investigators and hate crimes investigators. These are people that use different tools and tend to come at things differently. Domestic terrorism in some ways slices between them. So there was adaptation, a new collaboration in that which hate crimes investigators look to know for, and the tools that counterterrorism folks use, tools often focused on stopping a crime, or catching someone when they have committed a crime without people getting hurt, bringing that together in a useful way that may save lives. I think more is needed, and i think this Justice Department over all has not made that pivot toward addressing the rise of white supremacist threat as much as it could or should have, but you see some indications of that adaptation. That needs to be an ongoing process. Karen one of the things if you just sent to the normal educated reader of the media, what are the National Security concerns that the department of justice is involved in right now would mention the durham investigation. The durham investigation into the origins of the Russian Investigation taking about how that was handled, there is a thinking about how that was handled, there is a question about what the political dimension of it is. Attorney general barr has refused to say that he will not release the report prior to the election, when it is policy that within 60 days of an election, Justice Department does not do things that could affect an election. Do you have a sense, david, about how the durham investigation has brought a spotlight onto the department of justice and how maybe that is unfair . David it has. We are talking about hate crimes. How do you define a terrorist, how do you define a National Security threat. That can be a political thing. The president talking about these protests in terms of antifa, and that is the threat to security, so my revolutionary is your terrorism, so to speak, and Justice Department is a difficult position deciding who is a criminal and who is pushing for change. In terms of the durham investigation, it is surprising that barr will not rule out announcing what they will find before the election. That would be a clear effort to boost the president s reelection chances. Josh talked about barr, in the interview last night, talking about voting and voter fraud. What is amazing is the power of the Justice Department in so many realms, whether who is in a hate group, who is in a legitimate political movement. Im sorry to meander, but you all mentioned digital. I talked with senator mark warner. The media is at fault here, too. We have no rules of the road for the digital age. Everything from hate speech to disinformation to monopolies that is back to the Justice Department, antitrust division. It is vital for the institution to not be seen as political but it is also an extra ordinarily challenging time for the Justice Department. Even if biden is elected, it is a difficult time to navigate. Karen and we will get to that you before we go. We have a question that builds on what we were talking about from matt olson. What are the implications for the National Security division because of the fact that the ag has turned to other prosecutors like durham . I see you nodding, josh. Go for it. Joshua what i really like to do is get matt to answer his own questions because he will have more thoughts on all of us more thoughts than all of us combined in this area. It strikes me there are two things worth saying about it. I think it adds to the sense that barr wants a look not situated in understanding how these sorts of investigations tend to get open, the purpose, even the fact that they seem to be interviewing people in the Intelligence Community at the level of line analyst, providing an assessment of counterintelligence is a threat, all of this so adjusting the desire to upend how things are done properly, rather than grappling with how they are normally done. The other thing is this Justice Department is having to work to find people to carry out its will. When the president seemed like he wanted to take another run at adding a Citizenship Question to the census, after the Supreme Court knocked down his first attempt, they had to collect volunteers from across the department who would be even willing to try defending Something Like that before eventually backing down. It all speaks to, again, some highprofile cases, some very unusual approaches right now. Karen speaking of highprofile cases, there was a decision yesterday in the ninth circuit that went as close as you can to declaring section 215, the warrantless surveillance authority, unconstitutional. What do you think about that . I thought 215 was in the past. What is happening with that . Joshua i will just refer to josh on that. Joshua i saw that the ninth circuit handed down this lengthy opinion yesterday. It does feel like a blast from the past, talking about the telephone metadata program. Such things are still alive to the extent that things collected then, even under a program that has been reoriented since but if it is being used in a case, active litigation, the issue still remains. I want to sit down and read that opinion and see what it was. I gather the ninth circuit said this prosecution would not be affected by it but passed out on the locality of the program itself. Karen it also games on the heels of unrelated these two announcements of fisa reforms that attorney general barr put out. Did any of you get a chance to look at those . David i did not look at them in great detail. But i want to say, i think it is important for us to realize how Little People trust these surveillance programs, how little they trust the National Security division. This goes back to problems that go beyond the trunkbiden dynamic. I think there is a problem with the fisa process. It is not transparent enough. People dont trust me either. I am the definition of a mainstream journalist. Joshua i trust you, david. David writing this book, i met a lot of committed Public Servants who put in incredible amounts of time into these fisa applications, but what happened with the fbi lawyer, kevin kleinsmith, that is outrageous. There is a need for nsd to look at that and the fisa court being a rubber stamp, going back to edward snowden. The ruling yesterday will play into this, as i present in the book, these fears of improper government surveillance, a big brother government that is everywhere, a deep state that is victimizing ordinary americans. Karen what are we to make of the way that the flynn case has become a football being passed back and forth . That is also the kind of thing where people are confused. You can interfere with a case you can tell a judge what to do. That seems to many people, when you talk about trust, to violate certain ways in which we expect our courts to operate. Is that incorrect . Joshua i will jump in. Stepping back from the flynn case, there are lots of interesting questions from small criminal cases. To big criminal cases about what is in the discretion of the prosecution versus what the court can weigh in on. Right . Plead he deals, for example, are sort of rife with this sort of difficulty. When it comes to, again, if an agreement is reached between a prosecutor and a defendant and it is brought before a court, is the court obligated to accept that . Right . There are different regimes within different systems in this country, right . The federal system, for example, works differently than where i started, in new york, in the manhattan das office, in terms of how judges look at deals, please, and arrangements that are made on behalf of clients. In the federal season system you have these 11 c one c please pleas. Will it be in alignment with the guidelines . Right . So, im just saying that there are different regimes for thinking about this that sometimes dont have a clearcut answer. Karen so, with the flynn case, is there a clearcut answer or is that fitting into what you would describe as the more normal backandforth that we might on what might not understand is the public . Josh i would not want to put a word on it, normal or not, but i dont think its cut and dry in terms of the considerations. Those types of considerations happen all the time, i think. Karen you are saying we are getting a window into our department of justice that maybe we should have knowledge all around about. Making us extremely uncomfortable with the interventions in the flynn case. And i think a lot of people are. In and i think of it as an outlier, not as the normal course of events. Josh gelt sir, do you have a sense of that . Joshua i think its important to distinguish what a court might do, which is fraught with all sorts of hard questions. In fact judge sullivan sunday, is going to be confronting a lot of the hard questions that josh is describing so well. What happens in the Justice Department . This strikes me as very worrisome. I guess im close to you on this, karen, insofar as someone who pled guilty twice, as it were, and for whom the justification offered by the Justice Department for abruptly dropping the charges, ive never seen it on any other case. I dont think this Justice Department or any future ones could apply it to many other cases, that somehow the materiality element was missing because of the lies flynn told the fbi agents that were asking a question. It seems taken out of thin air and it seems like a ride for one day only. Thats not what justice should be. It should not be one day only, one defendant only. The interventions in these cases dont seem to be a coincidence or random. They seem to be happening stone, they are happening to flynn. They seem to be happening to people who are personal friends and associates of people who may know damming things about the president and i think there is every reason to worry about that, even if there are all of these hard questions for what the judge should do remain. But at a minimum, personally, the idea that he might hold a hearing, as he intends to, and have the benefit of thinking through the hard questions with the briefing advocate appointed, that strikes me as well within but the federal rules contemplate and that is what the d. C. Circuit judge said. That there wasnt a high bar for them to intervene and shut it down be been happened. That hadnt been met by the Justice Department. Karen so, it delayed what needed to happen in a way that represents the judge being able to do what he is empowered to do . Joshua at least ask questions. The federal rules says that a court can dismiss charges with leave. It raises the question of well, is there going to be something . Does a federal judge mean something other than a rubber stamp . At a minimum they might ask questions like why and what led to this conversation. In particular i dont mean just what theory of materiality is being offered up by the court to justify it. What led to this behindthescenes . That is in a sense what the stone case is all about. Just to go back to things that attorney general barr is saying, he got heated in his recent testimony before congress in the change in scenting sentencing recommendations under his watch in the roger stone case. He said look, the judge ultimately landed in the range we recommended, how could i have done everything anything wrong. To me thats a fundamentally wrong view of what the rest of us think has gone awry. The question isnt did the judge settle on a number that happened to fall into what you recommended, the question is why did you change. If the answer is because this is someone we all know the president wanted us to go easy on, thats not equal justice. Karen which kind of raises the elephant in the room, the election. These elections are coming up a few months from today. You referred to the interview yesterday with wolf blitzer in which he said that he didnt know if it was legal or not to vote twice or something of that sort. I think everybody was a little taken aback. It made people wonder why he said it. What was the purpose of saying it . David, i wonder if you, and i know you have, have given thought to what the challenges between the department of justice as it is currently playing itself out and what we are seeing and the election i want to go further than that, im going to ask the others of you to answer this, is there a way for the department of justice to actually help make people relax and trust in the election process . David, first to you. Do you think that this is a problem, the trust in the election coming up, what barr said yesterday, etc. . David hes increasing peoples distrust and anxiety about the vote counts, inflating the chances of fraud. That specific answer, though, where he said maybe you can vote twice, i think thats the moment we have all seen throughout the trump years, a cabinet member, fearing publicly disagreeing with the president we saw it with dan coats in intelligence hearings. He obviously knows that you cannot vote twice. But the president , again, im going to be very negative about the president here for a minute, but he has created a situation where the top Law Enforcement official in the country, the top intelligence chiefs are afraid of contradicting him in public and that is extraordinary. The intelligence agencies arent even giving testimony to do that. The other way the Justice Department can help or hurt is with dispatch of federal agents that we saw like an event. Clearly, trump wants to do this. This is where, again, bar helped him rhetorically, talking about dominating the streets, law and order, and in the initial days after the george floyd murder, talking about antifa and how they were deeply involved in these protests when they virtually had no cases involving antifa. Josh and josh can talk about this better. The institution should be reassuring, calming the american public. It could take weeks for the election to be decided. You know, the judicial system will work, have confidence in it, give it time, dont rush it. Barr isnt doing that. He is doing the opposite end that is what is so concerning about the situation. Karen are there ways that the department of justice can do what david said . Or should they stay out completely . Joshua i would go back to where i started, which is that there is a lot of good work that gets done on an institutional basis by career professionals and there has been a long history, again, in this country of folks of all stripes praising career officials. Its interesting, if you look at just any particular news story about a prosecution, National Security or otherwise, you typically dont see, i will at i would ask david for his perspective on this, you typically dont see the article site the names of the prosecutors, right . Its just prosecutors from this officer this district rot the case. The defendant is typically named in the charges and so forth. But the prosecutors are almost nameless, right . That to me is where you derive faith in institutions of government, right . Its not me, its not someone else. Its that the institution itself brought charges that were upheld in a court. There was a jury trial and someone. For those who think that means something in terms of reaffirming the institutions that matter. Karen josh, turning to you, you get the hard questions, i dont know how this happens. Larocco pointing to the fact that there could be mitigations after the election on a whole bunch of levels in terms of how the voting works, how the voting booth works, what the disinformation is, who knows. Cyber issues. What do you foresee there . How do you think this should be handled . Should it be handled within the Justice Department as some sort of special, whatever, administrative body that is set up . Judicial what do you think . Joshua i think the Justice Department should stay out of that. In fact, it is current Justice Department policy not to get involved in any sort of election resolution issues because because resolving an election inevitably means weighing in on one side of the other, directly or indirectly, just by the position adopted. Instead it is the less formal tool that this Justice Department seems to be using to put a thumb on the scale. Its not that they are actively fire it filing briefs in support of Trump Campaign litigation against drop boxes or mailin voting. I mean that would be abysmal if it were happening, but it is not happening and it shouldnt happen. One hopes it wont. That doesnt change the fact that things that are being said about whether there is some reason to worry about the legitimacy of an election, if mailin ballots have been used in higher numbers, that does its own damage. And thats, thats part of whats interesting about this particular attorney general. Not just the position he took in court. The bully pulpit, the mouthpiece function that is maybe even more political even then what the Justice Department itself is doing day in and day out, working there actual cases or enforcement actions, or the other things that they do. But i do think that the notion of what is being said, how it lines up with what the president , the candidate is saying, and whether things like the Durham Report are timed and designed to influence how people think about the election. Even the fact that we are referring to a Durham Report. Why is there a Durham Report . Hes an investigator. He has found the charges brought against one fbi lawyer. Why is there a Durham Report . The Inspector General put out a report covering the same territory. We shouldnt even normalize the notion that this is something where a report is a typical last step. Not to mention that attorney general barrs apparent interpretation of the 60 day and admittedly more norm than policy, something that davids wonderful book, deep state talks about, but the norm of not doing things in the last 60 day window, it seems from bars comments that he regards that is bringing charges against the candidate, whereas i would have thought most of us would have thought of that as doing things to help or hurt a candidate. Those have very, very different scopes. That is where i see this Justice Department actually intersection with intersecting with the campaigns and the election in the coming months. Karen forgetting whats going to happen in the election, if there was some structural change that could be made to stop the sense of politicization in a larger sense, can you recommend it . Like, if Congress Said to you or if the powers that be said we are going to reorganize things to make the optics if nothing else look better . What would be the structural change that should be made . Joshua speaking as pieinthesky journalist, i would say that the attorney general doing interviews is good. More interactions with the public and the press from the National Security division, its the pfizer court, if they could beam up more open. This is where now i wont criticize trump. We are facing, you know, the largest crisis of legitimacy for the Justice Department, you know, i think, since watergate. But it began, if trump is taking advantage of the suspicions that are there, in the stone case he talked about the four women in the jury being biased democrats. From my reporting, the president doesnt believe that nonpartisan Public Service exist. He doesnt believe that journalists try to write stories that are down the middle. I will describe this a bit more, but i think Many Americans agree with him and its vital for us to face that. You know, he thinks sure, there are career Civil Servants in the Justice Department, but they like some president s better than others and they work harder for others. He thinks everybody is selfserving and puts a spin on the ball. This is a little bit of him coming out of the new York Real Estate world. Its hurtful, it frustrates me as a journalist that we are all kind of making things up to make ourselves famous. Im sure its infuriating to career prosecutors and Civil Servants, but a lot of americans have always thought that and he is sort of voicing it. I dont have great recommendations here, but i think we are over classifying. Things are generally kept to secret. I have covered, josh, i dont know, you might have been in an elevator in manhattan with me [laughter]. [laughter] i covered the Robert Morgan office, the da in new york city. Im biased as a journalist, and the public looking at the u. S. Attorneys in these cases, they think more transparency would help. This is a problem that goes beyond trumps rhetoric. People dont trust of the press. Me too, im guilty. They dont trust the Justice Department, particularly the National Security division. Karen josh, what do you think . Do you think the National Security division, even a large part of it, what it does involves classified issues, National Security issues, classified information, is there a way to make it more transparent or is that just a pipe dream on davids part . Josh i dont think its a pipe dream at all. In 2020, we are 14 years into the story. , theret when i was there was a sense that it was still figuring out some of its mandates. Again, theres a complicated relationship not just between nsd and the u. S. Attorneys offices, but with all u. S. Attorneys offices in some respect and the main justice. So, you have that dynamic. You certainly have the dynamic of classification and over classification, which can present real challenges. In the nameis work of the people. You know classification is , required in certain instances , and then in certain instances, there is over classification. Generally anyone would be open to that interpretation, i would say. Going back to what david said, a general statement, this is not thisd. O. J. , you could say for a lot of institutions in government, the publics view is low of our institutions. But going back to 100 center street, one or two of the things i learned there is that you want to see similarly situated people treated in the same way. Right . Similarly situated defendants to be treated in a similar fashion. And i think that the closer you get to that norm we are talking about norms here in some regard then the institution is bolstered. Karen i want to turn a bit to the future and ask a few questions about what we might expect. To the future and ask a few questions about one is a little offbeat, but i have to ask it because i am who i am. Which is, if biden is president , i am curious what will happen at guantanamo or to guantanamo. The New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg has been told by the Biden Campaign that mr. Biden continues to support closing the detention center. Josh, you were there when obama tried to close the detention center. That plan is still probably on paper. Do you think thats possible . Le that biden could do this . Or is this a nonstarter . Josh i hope its possible, but it will take a change of in political will in congress. As you were kind enough to say, i put in a lot of hours alongside many, many other people in trying to first reduce the detainee population as much as possible consistent with , security and humane treatment developons, and then to a plan that was presented in early 2016 to congress, of what comprehensive closure would look like. It would involve those going to the military Justice System continue to go through that as it has been, extraordinarily slow as it has for those for whom criminal prosecution in civilian court might still be a possibility, have that go forward. And to the extent that there are still some number of detainees those final ones being held on , u. S. Soil, a step that not everyone likes but that frankly would be the only feasible path to closure. But even that wasnt feasible in the political sense. In the logistical and legal sense, but not in the political sense. To do those things, in fact to bring any detainees to u. S. Soil would require a change in law that only congress can provide and it would take a willingness , to acknowledge that those sorts of individuals can be held securely on u. S. Soil the way that some extraordinarily dangerous people are already held securely on u. S. Soil at wildly lowercost. To the taxpayer each year than the cost of each of the now 40 detainees at 110 so it strikes political much a problem at this point. Yes, there is legal complexity, there is even logistical complexity, but the biggest obstacle right now is the politics on capitol hill. Karen to follow up with you, does anyone you now have any sense that this is something that would matter to a President Biden . Joshua all i can say is that he was part of an administration that put a tremendous amount of effort into this when he was vice president. Focusay one, there was a on this. Famously day one executive , a order, even if closure didnt happen on the timetable. Hat was hope for then but the work didnt stop. Folks worked really right to the end. In fact, there were detainee transfers at the very end. The chagrin of president elect donald trump. The effort put in by the Obamabiden Administration on guantanamo was extraordinary, and i think it speaks to the effort made then to reduce the population as much as possible and then to create at least a comprehensive pathway towards closing the facility if congress would facilitate it. Karen david, any thoughts on this . David i think it will be even harder politically because of troubles in the media, and then we have the greatest crisis of this information i think in u. S. Has justi. E. The web grown even more important, so anyone who wants to argue to close guantanamo, there is going to be more false Information Online about the danger each of those 40 detainees represent. We are living in two sort of different realities and again, its not just President Trump. So, and i think congress has been a huge problem here in all these issues we are talking about, the need for legislation across the board on guantanamo, on cyber crimes, and privacy. Am hoping the election will be cathartic. I hope frankly, one of the two wins decisively. I hope people accept the results. Thats the goal of the democracy, right . Blow off steam and have a new consensus theoretically every four years, but the pandemic shows us that we are having trouble as a country and as a society agreeing on basic facts. How many people are dying do you need to wear a mask or not . Clearly guantanamo will be even harder. Karen my question to each of you is i always think went on them to close, by the way. Just so you know, im hopeful about it. In a Biden Administration do you , have a sense of who might be a candidate for attorney general . I cant say i do. I would say this about how biden has talked about the Justice Department, and i have loved what he said, especially in the following respects. He has been asked this question in a couple of different approachons what would you take to potentially investigating or prosecuting this, or how would you go at that . And he has said some variant of i look forward to having nothing direct to do with it and leaving that work in the hands of the Justice Department. That strikes me as such the right answer and such a return to norms. Again, those norms have been broken before, as davids book articulates so well and as he is saying in the course of this conversation. There were trends here. We cant treat the donald trump zero or the dust donald trump era the donald trump era or the barr Justice Department of just popping up without a basis of trends in the public, trends of disinformation, trends in politics. Theres a story behind this that wont go away when the Trump Administration comes to an end. But the idea that the Justice Department calls on prosecution, it not being the row of the the role of the Justice Department, i love that answer from him. Karen do you think that is possible . It seems as though there has not been much daylight between any of the president s and their attorney generals in history. You really think it is possible . Joshua i do very much think its possible. I dont want to overstate it. Sometimes people refer to a nocontact policy between the white house and the Justice Department. That is a misnomer. It is a policy of restricted contact for particular reasons through particular channels. Give you an example, if you are about to arrest a highprofile terrorism suspect, you want the rest of the National Security apparatus in government to know that, because this could lead to a tax on embassies, attacks on u. S. Soil, or military bases. It would be foolish not to have some people know about it. But you have to do is through the right channels. Prosecution in the channel, economic espionage, it has huge diplomatic ramifications for partners if in fact defendants are, for example, members of the chinese pla, which has happened. It would be foolish not to coordinate that. But there has to be a reason and there has to be a responsible way of doing it. And come up by a large, this should be left to the Justice Department. Only those particular complex ,ncidents, reasons, arrests cases, whatever it might be that you need to a backandforth with the white house. The Justice Department has Political Leadership. We wanted to be a lot more about politics there. I would love to see a republican federal judge from missouri, a person like william webster, who was chosen to be fbi director, not political or a a major figure in the Obama Administration, to restore confidence in the Justice Department. I think at that time in the 1970s, leavlevy, webster, church john tower, that , generation faced the same crisis of legitimacy that we face. They enacted reforms that restored credibility to the Justice Department and our government evolved. I think that is the kind of bold, nonpartisan appointment that needs to be made to restore confidence in the Justice Department and clearly in the National Security division. Karen josh, thoughts about the future. Josh i am going back to something david said that caught my mind, going back to pure National Security thinking, a which is, a lot of things karen, especially true to the work you have done at the center a lot of the questions that were top of mind we were talking about guantanamo and the issues , in some regards, they have become settled in the sense that they have been fully briefed. Everyone knows what the issues are, everyone knows their positions. If you are following National Security in this country, regardless of what side youre on, the you know what the issues are whe regarding guantanamo and prosecutions. David, what you said which i found particularly interesting is, how do you translate those issues which, if you lose my loose terminology of settled, generally speaking, to the way that we talk about things . To the way information is shared . To the way that we think about the threat environment, which, has changed dramatically again, thinking about certain cyber threats. To me, that is interesting. How do those issues are those conversations get updated to the moment that we are in . And i dont know the answer to that, but it has given me something to think about, right, which is, again, how do we think about the moment we are in and these issues with regard to National Security . That m to me is good food for thought. Karen and maybe we should think about the moment we are gonna be in as well. Because it seems to me that every time we think about something where things are moving so fast, changes are moving so fast potential threats , are moving so fast, as we discovered with covid, part of that become sort of guessing. Particularly in the National Security sphere. But not only. We are coming to the end of our time, or we are at the end of our time, but we always end Center Events with a question. Which is what gives you hope that we are going to work this all out . David, im going to start with you. David i think there is a huge opportunity in terms of National Security for a political consensus about five is in surveillance. I think the fire let consensus about privacy and surveillance. I think the farleft and the farright, you may not like either of them, between rand form the libertarian kentucky. I dont know if there are Workable Solutions or if transparency is just pieinthesky. Im optimistic. Again past generations have , faced these kinds of crises of legitimacy. If we are transparent and we enact reforms and go with nonpartisanship, you know, i think we can come out of this stronger. Im optimistic. Not all the time, but im optimistic. Not all the time, but i am optimistic. Karen nonpartisanship is what i am taking away, in part, from that. Josh larocco . Josh i will end where i started, which is, some faith in the institutional government that we have in this country. That is my experience and that is what i bring to the table for this discussion, and just having all it up front, folks of backgrounds, stripes, coming to the table to do their job. I was talking to a friend of mine who had a long career in government, and he said, you know, most people get up, they go to their office, they try to do the best job they can, they worry about their kids and their mortgage and what they are doing that we can. I think that is a very important tradition we have here, the people who are going to their career positions and doing the best they can. Karen that raises Something Else which is how much has the covid age sitting at home and , not having the regularity of our lives that you just referred to, made as focus on things in a more anxietyridden way than we might have done . Talking about changes, this is a very changed environment from which to view the world outside, your protective home, or your protective space. A final word of hope from you, joshua geltzer. Joshua if you will let me get away with it, i would like to say two. The first one really goes back to a point josh began talking about, which he has quite rightly emphasized throughout this conversation, which is, for all we talk about the political, for all the good and damage the political can do, the backbone are the Public Servants, military officers and intelligence officers. This will sound like a funny in,g to find good news that the arrests and charges brought against steve bannon, i dont have particular glee or lack thereof in seeing him charged, but, think about that. People had to work hours, days, weeks at the investigatory and legal levels knowing that they were going to rollout charges against steve bannon. They have seen what has happened to other people, even line prosecutors who worked on cases targeting Close Associates of President Trump, people who have been overruled, who had been forced off cases, who have resigned from government. But they still followed that work, still followed those investigatory leads and they still rolled out charges. Its not bannon getting charged, its that people did exactly what josh was talking about, they went and they do their job in if youre some and fraught political environment because that is what they signed up to do. At that that was the most important pot of that story and really an overlooked one. The other thing that gives me hope is that people are talking about law in ways they didnt used to. Having to talk about the hatch act a lot at the Party Convention is probably a sign something bad has happened. But they are talking about the hatch act, and why in that case we have the ethics of law and policy to act as guardrails. If that conversation about the hatch act or the impoundment act during the impeachment process, if those conversations speaks to a thirst for law in a sense, to understand the rule of law and to recommit ourselves to the rule of law as a country, i think that is good news. Karen i think you kind of nailed it with the there is an awful lot of attention to the law and also a lot of questioning of how firm can the . Aw hold so, yes, we should all be hopeful met in the end result, it looks like it looks just we arer, but right now in some kind of turmoil over that. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for this conversation. I will have you back after the election, and we are going to really talk, and then you will tell me who should be attorney general, right . Start working on that for now. Thank you all in the audience for joining. Website,out on the where you can see our full list of events, our daily and weekly publications podcasts, online , forums, and whatever else on the site that might interest you. Thank you so much everybody, for , joining us. We will see you next time. Here is a look at our live coverage thursday. On cspan, House Speaker nancy pelosi folds her Weekly News Conference at 10 45 a. M. Eastern. At noon, the governors of new mexico, minnesota, kansas and guam testify before the House Financial Services committee about providing Financial Aid to states and u. S. Territories during the coronavirus pandemic. Then on cspan two, the senate is back to vote on whether to move forward with the Economic Relief bill that the republicans introduced in response to covid19. Saw another installment in an ongoing series