Lawfare Daily: Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S., and We May Not See It in Time

Summary

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The Lawfare Podcast

Episode: Lawfare Daily: Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S., and We May Not See It in Time
Host: Michael Feinberg
Guest: Troy LT Edwards
Date: March 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the escalating threat posed by Iran to the United States, focusing on Iran's long history of using proxies, terrorism, and cyber operations to retaliate against perceived adversaries—including plots on U.S. soil. Host Michael Feinberg interviews Troy LT Edwards, a Lawfare Public Service fellow and former DOJ official, about his new article exploring the past, present, and future of U.S.-Iran conflict, recent Iranian-linked plots, and how the degradation of the U.S. national security apparatus impacts the nation's ability to detect and prevent attacks. The conversation highlights concrete case studies, institutional challenges, and what could go wrong as U.S. capacity wanes.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. A History of Iranian Retaliation and External Operations

• Iran's Historical Tactics
  • Iran has a longstanding pattern of using proxy actors—including militias, terrorist networks, and even organized crime groups—to extend its reach and retaliate against threats.
  • There have been two notable spikes in Iranian external operations: after the 1979 Revolution and in the five years following the 2020 drone strike on Qasem Soleimani (03:00–05:24).

“This pattern is a bimodal spike in external operations from Iran: one around the 1979–1980 timeframe, and another in the last five years during the most recent escalation after the Trump administration engaged in a drone strike…which kind of lays out this history of spikes in two different timeframes.”
—Troy LT Edwards (03:54)

2. Notable Iranian Plots Targeting the U.S.

• Mariam Thompson Case
  • After the Soleimani strike, a DOD linguist passed classified information to a Lebanese intermediary working for Iran within days, demonstrating Iran’s speed and reach (06:00–09:03).
• Naji Zindashti/Hells Angels Case
  • Iranian handlers recruited Canadian members of the Hells Angels to assassinate a dissident in Maryland—using criminal groups with less direct control, but effectively creating plausible deniability and expanded reach (09:26–11:33).
• Asif Merchant/IRGC Case
  • Merchant, tasked by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), attempted to build a network of U.S.-based assets and connect with the New York Mafia (11:33–14:41).

“Iran’s willingness to connect with these groups that they likely have less control over, and yet they did… It’s reflective of this expanded network of local and organized crime that Iran is willing to tap into, which I think extends its reach considerably in the United States.”
—Troy LT Edwards (10:07)

3. The Unique Challenge of the IRGC

• The IRGC is both an intelligence/security agency and a State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization—requiring different U.S. response strategies and complicating countermeasures (11:33–12:08).

“The IRGC is one of the more unique organizations…the only organization that is an intelligence and security agency for a foreign country that is simultaneously listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.”
—Michael Feinberg (11:33)

4. Degradation of the U.S. National Security Apparatus

• Resource Depletion
  • DOJ, FBI, and related agencies have suffered leadership attrition, forced retirements, and redirection of resources, leaving remaining personnel stretched thin (14:41–20:17).
  • Specialized national security sections (CES and CTS) face steep personnel losses—impacting both counterterrorism and counterintelligence capacity.

“On a systematic front…systematically and individually, we have had our national security apparatus gutted by this administration.”
—Troy LT Edwards (16:11)

• Lowered Standards and Loss of Experience
  • Lower hiring standards for Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) risk long-term institutional capability (20:17–22:40).
  • The traditional pipeline of highly experienced AUSAs is eroding, and both DOJ and FBI are facing increasing failure rates in indictments and prosecutions.

“A first-year agent right out of Quantico is not going to work at the same level as somebody with 5, 10, or 15 years of experience…there’s just a sort of inherent understanding of how these cases should work that you don’t get with anything other than time.”
—Michael Feinberg (23:45)

5. Complexities of National Security Prosecutions

• Classified Predication and Investigation Hurdles
  • Many national security cases are predicated on classified information, requiring prosecutors with both clearance and experience to safely handle evidence and coordinate with agents (32:13–35:58).
  • Loss of experienced personnel hinders the ability to handle complex interagency processes.

“The more you lose this experience in the national security space… the more you lose folks who may be able to be qualified to be what’s called ‘read in’ to certain compartmented information.”
—Troy LT Edwards (33:30)

• Turnover’s Impact on Prosecution and Prevention
  • High turnover in the CES means some cases cycle through multiple lead attorneys, undermining continuity and institutional memory (36:49–37:58).

6. Prosecutions vs. Intelligence Operations: Which Tool is Better?

• Debating Deterrence
  • Is it better to focus on criminal prosecutions or covert/intelligence operations for countering Iranian plots?
  • Consensus: The U.S. must do both—successful prevention relies on a collaborative, dual-hatted approach, yet resource depletion jeopardizes the ability to do either effectively (41:06–44:39).

“There is no reason that the American public should not expect its national security apparatus to do both [prosecute and conduct intelligence ops]. And in a normal world, we do. The question is why has the administration gutted the apparatus so much that we are skeptical right now that we can do both?”
—Troy LT Edwards (41:23)

7. The Loss of “Muscle Memory” and Team Culture

• Impact of Personnel Loss
  • The most experienced agents and attorneys—who pioneered close FBI-DOJ cooperation—are the ones most likely pushed out, eroding the collaborative culture needed to catch complex national security threats before they materialize (44:39–46:49).

8. The Present Danger

• Heightened Threat from Iran
  • As conflict intensifies (e.g., Operation Epic Fury), and national security institutions are gutted, the risk that Iranian retaliation will evade detection increases significantly (46:49–48:29).

“Our eye is no longer on the ball. Right. The administration seems to be hell bent on taking a mirror and whatever eye is still on the ball and shining as much sunlight as they can in it. And that gap in coverage, that darkness worries me as we intensify our conflict with Iran because of Iran’s history in retaliating and not only saying it, but trying it on U.S. soil.”
—Troy LT Edwards (48:07)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Iranian reach via organized crime:
  “Iran’s willingness to connect with these groups that they likely have less control over…and had two members of the Canadian Hells Angels travel into the United States with a goal of killing an Iranian dissident…”
  —Troy LT Edwards (09:26)

• On institutional decline:
  “DOJ as a prosecutorial machine is really in a bad place right now…there’s almost a death spiral in that. Every time you lose a case, you lose a little bit of credibility. And the more credibility you lose, the harder it is to win future cases.”
  —Michael Feinberg (23:03)

• On the unique risk of classified cases:
  “You need prosecutors who have the clearance to be able to go in that facility…and the more you lose this experience…the more you lose folks who may be able to be qualified to be what’s called ‘read in’…”
  —Troy LT Edwards (33:16)

• On fractured collaboration:
  “We were able to do that because people like us over the past few years have worked together throughout the entire lifecycle of a case…one of the really terrible things that has happened…is that those of us who have the muscle memory…are exactly the generation that has been most pushed out.”
  —Michael Feinberg (44:39–46:49)

• On the national security risk:
  “That gap in coverage, that darkness worries me as we intensify our conflict with Iran because of Iran’s history in retaliating and not only saying it, but trying it on U.S. soil.”
  —Troy LT Edwards (48:07)

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Important Timestamps

• Early context and history of Iranian operations: 03:00–05:24
• Case studies—Thompson, Zindashti/Hells Angels, Merchant: 06:00–14:41
• Discussion on IRGC’s unique threat: 11:33–12:08
• Breakdown of U.S. institutional capacity: 14:41–20:17
• Challenges posed by loss of experience: 20:17–25:21
• Complexities of classified investigations: 32:13–35:58
• Strategy debate—prosecution vs. intelligence ops: 41:06–44:39
• Cultural/team “muscle memory” loss: 44:39–46:49
• Summary of current risk and closing: 46:49–48:55

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Conclusion

Edwards and Feinberg provide a sobering, clear-eyed account of Iran’s persistent threat to U.S. security—one that transcends traditional terrorism to include sophisticated intelligence, criminal proxies, and cyber tactics. As U.S. national security institutions lose personnel and know-how, the ability to anticipate or intercept Iranian plots diminishes, amplifying the risk to Americans at home. Their call to rebuild lost expertise and reinforce the collaborative culture of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies is timely and urgent.

Recommended: Edwards’ article—“Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S., and We May Not See It in Time”—at www.lawfaremedia.org.

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Transcript

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[Troy LT Edwards]

These litigating components are developing their own identities over the last 20 years, particularly in a post 911 threat landscape. And the leadership there was doing a phenomenal job at developing a culture of both excitement and aggression, leaning it forward and dispersing across the country to lead U.S. attorneys offices and help AUSAs navigate this classified information space and this hyper specialized foreign adversary space.

[Michael Feinberg]

It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and today I'm speaking with lawfare Public Service fellow Troy LT Edwards.

[Troy LT Edwards]

To lose all of that is to not only put us at risk now when we face a heightened threat risk from our conflict with Iran, but it's also to put us at risk moving forward because it's now losing progress at developing that culture and adjusting with the ever malleable threat landscape that exists. It took me a long time to pick that back up and start rebuilding.

[Michael Feinberg]

Today we're discussing his new article which talks about the past, present and future of the conflict between the United States and Iran, previously consigned to the shadows and now in the open. We are here today to discuss your recent article Iran Will Retaliate in the US we may not see it in time. The very title itself is a little ominous, but I suspect that was the intention. And we're going to get to why you think that is the case that Iran may strike the US in some form or fashion and we may not be able to get ahead of it. But before we really delve into that argument, I was hoping you could give a sort of overview of what you understand is the history of Iran as a state sponsor of both terrorism and sort of malicious Cyber activity.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, of course. So thank you for having me. The history of Iran is what actually prompted some of the concern here because of its unique focus on extending its reach and engaging in external operations around the world. So my last two years in the Department of Justice was focusing on Iran's weapons smuggling during the time of the military and terrorist attacks in the red Sea in 2024 and 2025. And so knowing that Iran has historically extended its reach by developing proxy relationships with militias and terrorist groups in the Middle east led me to be concerned that, you know, they're going to continue to do that, but at a time when close colleagues of mine and yours and people around the country and our national security apparatus were being fired or forced out. So that's what prompted the kind of deep dive here. The history extends back to the founding of the early revolution in 1979, 1980 time frame. And then if you look at a really useful tool, Matthew Levitt has an interactive map available that allows you to see the history of Iranian external operations and filter by the countries they reached out to, the countries impacted by it and the timeframe around the world. You see a pattern emerge in that data set which is developed extensively by open source information. This pattern is a bimodal spike in external operations from Iran. One is around 1979, 1980 timeframe in the founding or after this revolution. And that also had an impact on the United States, including one successful assassination in the Maryland area and then another spike in the last five years during the most recent escalation in U. S. Iran tensions after the Trump administration engaged in a drone strike that successfully killed the General Qasem Soleimani, who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which is the military organization out of Iran that specializes in these external operations. And so that that kind of lays out this history of this spike in two different time frames. It's that latter timeframe that gave me paus to kind of dive in and see what is a more recent reflection of what Iran's capabilities are if we and what do we face from moving forward.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, so given that history and given the animus that has existed between Iran and the United States since 79, and particularly among the other spike you mentioned as well, after the US Led targeting of a high ranking IRGC member, what have been the major cases that stand out to you that the Justice Department has prosecuted that really illustrate how dangerous Iran's use of proxies for global reach is to the United States?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, so before diving into the DOJ cases I want to be clear about the narrower scope of what I focused on in this piece. Iran obviously has the capabilities to engage in a conventional response in the region. And we've seen that play out after the beginning of Operation Epic Fury. Iran has these ballistic missile and anti ship cruise missile components that they're able to use in the region and engage in their own military strikes. We also saw that after the strike of qasem Soleimani In January 2020, within days, Iran attacked a military base in Erbil that I think led to some casualties of military servicemen and women. And so there is that category of conventional response. Take that, set it to the side. What I focused on was this less conventional, more asymmetric response that Iran is known for, coupled with its long term memory and its willingness to engage in retaliation long after an incident that prompted this anger. And that's what we saw play out in the last six years since the strike on Soleimani. Right. We saw a number of DOJ and FBI foiled plots that seem tied to retaliating against this strike against Soleimani. And so a few that stick out in my mind. One is this case, Mariam Thompson, who was the defendant. And the reason it sticks out of my mind is it was within days of the Soleimani strike in January 2020 that this Lebanese individual that Mariam Thompson, who was a contract linguist in the Department of Defense, had been interacting with since 2017 and allegedly engaged in a romantic relationship remotely with. It was within days that this Lebanese individual contacted her, soliciting information specifically on human assets that helped America target Qasem Soleimani. Photographs, names, information. And that stands out to me because of the speed with which Iran started acting and its reach to collect actual intelligence from United States individuals that may have access to it. And they were successful. Miriam Thompson successfully passed secret documents, national defense information that revealed certain human assets around the world that may or may not have helped the United States, but passing it nonetheless just shows the successful reach Iran had within days. Another one that sticks out in my mind is Naji Zindashti, which was about a year later, January of 2021. The reason it stands out is because it was a different flavor of proxy that Iran clearly has developed over time that is less the traditional militia and terrorist groups in the Middle east region. Because Zindashti a year later ends up recruiting and paying Canadian Hells Angels members. And to be fair, maybe it's my ignorance, I wasn't aware that there was a Canadian element of the Hells Angels.

[Michael Feinberg]

They are Actually a criminal organization with global reach, believe it or not. And this is not the only case of which I'm aware, in which Hell's Angels or other outlaw motorcycle gangs have been willing to work for fairly nefarious foreign actors in exchange for money or favors.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, it's just. It shouldn't have surprised me. It did. And. But what also surprised me is Iran's willingness to connect with these groups that they likely have less control over. And yet they did successfully and had two members of the Canadian Hells Angels travel into the United States with a goal of killing an Iranian dissident in, I believe, the Maryland area and this dissident's spouse. And look more than when we went into in the piece. There is a gruesome side to this. I mean, the Iranian handler was communicating with these Canadian Hells Angels in an effort to make the deaths gruesome and to make a point in the national public that this Iranian dissident had in some way violated an Iranian code. Right. And by stepping out, Iran needed to suppress that voice. It's reflective of two things that stood out to me. One I've already mentioned, which is this expanded network of local and organized crime that Iran is willing to tap into, which I think extends its reach considerably in the United States. But two is Iran's willingness to engage in this transnational repression at a time when they are also attempting to retaliate against the United States folks to them that they view are speaking out against the Iranian regime, they must silence. And I suspect that there is some argument to be had that Iran views that as a domestic problem, not an international problem. To an American lens, this is an international problem. This is Iran's reach into the United States and particularly harm. Potential harm to American citizens. So the third one that sticks out to me is a more recent one, which is this Asif Merchant case that just went to trial and had a defendant convicted for material support to terrorism and a couple other charges. Merchant, more recently in 2023, allegedly was sent by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Again, this designated foreign terrorist organization and highly skilled subset of Iranian military.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, and we should. We should actually pause to point out the IRGC is one of the more unique organizations that. That the US Operates against in the national security sphere, because it is the only organization that is an intelligence and security agency for a foreign country that is simultaneously listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. There is no other country which has that very dubious honor.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Right. And it makes it a complicated target than American national security apparatus because it can be viewed through the lens of an intelligence apparatus that you should counter, but it's also a terrorist organization that you should counter. And both of those, as you know, require very different approaches and skill sets. And we'll get to that in a little bit about where that skill has gone from the bureau. But when you approach the irgc, you are approaching an agency that is highly skilled at doing what it does, which is inflicting terror around the world. And, you know, some counter to this may be that isn't at the point that these strikes on Iran have weakened the IRGC considerably. And I'm not going to comment on that because I'd be speaking out of turn. But what I will say is the IRGC's networks that it's developed over the last 40 years are precisely for moments like this where Iran wants to have this reach and these folks planted around the world. And that brings me to this Merchant case, where in 2023, allegedly the IRGC and the jury agreed with this. The IRGC had tasked Merchant with traveling to the United States to collect a network of assets that could work for the IRGC but remain in the United States. And that should give us pause because now that's an entity, a state sponsor of terror that we're engaged with in a kinetic campaign. And so we should be worried that Iran may use this or deploy this weapon that they've developed over the years. And in 2024, Merchant was then tasked with coming back to the United States and connecting with again, this example of local and organized crime. He connected with who he thought were New York Mafia members and those I did know existed. And he unfortunately for him, Right. And fortunately for the United States, we had a national security apparatus in law enforce place that those folks were actually undercover law enforcement officers who were able to track intelligence that coming from Iran and sources from Iran, likely from the outside, looking in at the descriptions from the DOJ and know that they had to infiltrate this individual who was here to what he claimed was attempt to kill political leaders, including President Trump. And so those three cases really stand out to me as an example of both intelligence collection and potential harm and the extended reach that Iran has around the world, including in the United States.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, so you alluded to something that is going to touch up on our own personal situations tangentially as well, which is that the national security apparatus, of which you and I were both apart until very recently, might not have the same resources that it used to when the cases you mentioned were originally investigated and prosecuted. I mean, I remember when the Thompson case was going on. You were at DOJ, I was at the FBI's Washington field office. That was a five alarm fire. And our respective agencies, I know mine was technically a part of yours, but you don't like to admit that you

[Troy LT Edwards]

have your own email addresses.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah. Our respective agencies were able to surge resources to that case in a way that, frankly, I don't know is possible right now. So I was wondering if you could sort of talk about the part of your piece where you elaborate what has happened to the agencies writ large that would normally be tasked with combating these sort of activities? And can we also sort of zoom in on a more granular level with what has happened to the specific personnel who would normally be tasked to deal with these matters?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, yeah. So on a systematic front. Well, first of all. So those threats that we've talked about here in the beginning, those all capture the first half of the title of this piece, that Iran will retaliate in the United States. And that was intentional. Because if we are to use, as we all do, right, intelligence collection and prosecution efforts, we use history as our guide. If we are to believe the data coming out of these five years after an escalation in the strike against Soleimani, then we are to think that Iran is both capable and willing to retaliate by reaching into the United States. The second half of this title, stating that we may not see it in time, is supposed to do two things. One, it's supposed to qualify it because there still are dedicated men and women who are serving our national security apparatus, though we'll talk about how they're distracted and stretched thin. But it's also to raise a point that we still may be unsuccessful, even though we're qualifying. And we may be unsuccessful because of exactly what you're saying here, that systematically and individually we have had our national security apparatus gutted by this administration. So from an institutional perspective, just on these cases alone, it involves FBI, it involves DOJ's National Security Division and CES and CTS, two of the litigating components.

[Michael Feinberg]

Could you spell out what those acronyms refer to?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, sure. So the CTS acronym refers to the NSD's counterterrorism section, which is a litigating component out of that division that focuses on terrorism matters around the world and runs those organizations, or leads them by helping the U.S. attorney's offices with their expertise. And then CES, the counterintelligence and Export Control Section, which focuses on the counterpart to the national security threat, the espionage, the Counterintelligence, which are two different things, as you well know, and foreign adversaries on US soil. And so those two sections in the National Security Division have been gutted. The Law and Policy section of the National Security Division, which is more focused on creating this interagency relationship between DOJ and the National Security Council that has been gutted by almost two thirds. Then there's the Civil Rights Division, which I think fewer people think about when they think about the national security apparatus. But it's important to remember that their portfolio of hate crimes investigations is really important because they've developed critical sources around the country and around the world in sensitive demographics where they can sense whether or not something is going to happen to a particular group of people. And here, particularly relevant Jewish individuals across America, as we've seen in one attack already on a synagogue after the Operation Epic Fury began. And then there's the law enforcement apparatus, there's the FBI. Right. The Bureau, and you can speak to this much better than I can, is split across multiple divisions at headquarters, but then in each field office, they're split across sections that focus on these parallel pieces to nsd. Right. The counterintelligence, the counter espionage, the counterterrorism. Not only have they been gutted of leadership and experience across ranging hundreds of years collectively, but they've been stretched thin and rediverted to immigration efforts and other efforts that kind of stem from White House priorities. And so that's a systematic lens. And one I forgot to mention was obviously the U.S. attorney's offices around the country, which are experiencing historical drops in numbers and an inability to fill those ranks. So much so that we're now seeing, you know, avenues open up to become AUSAs by tweeting some person's DMs or by just picking out your favorite executive order, regardless of whether you have any legal experience. And so I worry about the health of the institutions as they continue to drop standards to bring people in. And then you asked a second question, the individual side, and I've talked a lot. I want to kick it to you to see if you had a follow up on some of what I just said.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah. So I think what you're saying is absolutely true. I'll talk first about Main justice, particularly as it applies to the U.S. attorney's offices. That was traditionally a place of employment where if you went to be a line a usa, you couldn't get in off the street. Nobody graduated from law school and except in very rare circumstances, immediately became an assistant U.S. attorney. It was the sort of thing where you had to sort of prove your mettle and get some trial experience, either at the state and local level as a prosecutor or at one of the large white shoe law firms. And I would say generally, most of the people with whom I work worked both at the U.S. attorney's office and within the Counter Espionage and Export Control section, probably had three to six years at a minimum as practicing attorneys before they entered government service. So there was a reservoir of experience that I don't know, you're still going to get if you lower the requirements, as they did this week, to only be one year of work experience prior to joining. And it's less an issue of institutional culture and knowledge in the abstract than it is, I think we're seeing for the first time since the department's founding, they're losing cases and they're not getting indictments. I don't know if the general public knows this, but for DOJ to not secure an indictment when it went before a grand jury was almost unheard of. And for DOJ to lose a case at prosecution happened in something like less than 3% of its cases. But both of those things are occurring with some degree of regularity now. And that might be solely a reflection on the type of prosecutions that DOJ is trying to bring in line with the new White House priorities that you've mentioned. But it can also be a reflection that with this huge loss of personnel and with the lack of experience, they're just not able, on a tactical level, to win cases. And there's almost a death spiral in that. Whereas every time you lose a case, you lose a little bit of credibility. And the more credibility you lose, the harder it is to win future cases. So I think DOJ as a prosecutorial machine is really in a bad place right now. And to speak for my own former agency, the FBI, there has been an unprecedented loss of expertise through firings, forced retirements, and people just getting fed up and retiring years earlier than they expected to. And that's a problem because, as you know from working with us, Agents aren't fungible. A first year agent right out of Quantico is not going to work at the same level as somebody with 5, 10, or 15 years of experience. And that is particularly true in the national security realm simply because those more experienced agents, based on their time on target, have things like increased cultural knowledge that allows them to build rapport with sources and witnesses. They might have language skills. They might have dealt with the terrorist organizations or counterintelligence operations in the past. There's there's just a sort of inherent understanding of how these cases should work that you don't get with anything other than time. And one thing that the public, and I fear the leadership of DOJ and the FBI doesn't understand either, is that investigations are also not fungible. To build a national security prosecution is orders of magnitude more complex than building many criminal prosecutions. And it is difficult to continually attack those complex problems if 25 to 30% of your time as an investigator is you being farmed out to another agency to deal with immigration roundups. So, you know, what you said is 100% true, and we could have a friendly debate about which agency is worse off, but for the purposes of the American people being safe, you don't want any of these agencies firing on anything less than full cylinders.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah. And what's so problematic, and that I'm not sure is easy to see from the outside, is that there is this two pronged element to what the administration has done to the national security apparatus. On one hand, it has removed the leadership and experience, and on the other hand, it has put the folks who remain in the position of having to shoulder all of this responsibility without either the experience or at the very least the bandwidth, because there are so few people and the resources. And something that's different about the national security space, which you touched on than say, for example, a standard narcotics operation or prosecution, is the complicated nature of the front end before something goes boom or before national defense information is transmitted unlawfully into foreign adversary hands. All of these steps ahead of time that the public never sees depends in part on this leadership and this experience and the muscle memory of knowing how to do it and having the interagency relationships in place such that if it becomes a reactive case or a surge moment like you mentioned, then we have the people in place, the relationships in place such that it's firing on full cylinder. And when it does, it can stop this threat. And we saw that for five, six years of a barrage of Iranian incidents and all those cases that I put in, almost all of them, we stopped it before the target was harmed. We stopped it before the assassination. We were able to stem the tide of classified information flowing to Iran and other hands. That only happens because we have just the bare bones resources, but also that unspoken for quality of everyone who knows what they're doing, knows the relationships in place, and knows how to do this before it goes boom. And I think that we've lost that. It's really hard to quantify that until something goes wrong.

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[Michael Feinberg]

Really?

[Troy LT Edwards]

You can have another one.

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[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, so let's flesh that out a little bit. Let's talk about a specific example for the benefit of our audience. Not a specific case, but a specific type of problem set that could affect these prosecutions. Is the predication for a lot of these investigations classified or unclassified?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Classified.

[Michael Feinberg]

And can you sort of walk us through? If you're a prosecutor handling one of these cases and it's opened based on classified material, maybe it's a human source reporting from overseas, maybe it's signals intelligence that another agency has collected, what problems does that immediately create for you as a prosecutor? How do you ameliorate them? And what role does experience play in that amelioration?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, man, that's a useful exercise. So completely hypothetically, this walks in the door, which is likely not now in your office, you've been asked to go into the skiff.

[Michael Feinberg]

Just for people who don't know is a specially outfitted room within certain government buildings that allow you to receive, retain, and work on classified material in a way you cannot in a less secure

[Troy LT Edwards]

space, which is already the first hurdle, because you need prosecutors who have the clearance to be able to go in that facility and hear the information the agent needs to present to you. And it's even more complicated than that. The more you lose this experience in the national security space across the country, the more you lose folks who may be able to be qualified to be what's called read in to certain compartmented information. And so in these tiers of classified information, you have secret, top, you know, lower than secret, secret, top secret. And then you have particularly compartmented information, which is limited to a select number of folks who can potentially gain access to this information for very short amounts of time. And then when you gain access to it for short amounts of time, you've now removed someone else who's on that billet or list. I highlight this kind of hyper technical space because it is already a hurdle that the department may face if they have fewer and fewer people who can gain access to that compartmented information. And that may exist in trying to combat foreign adversaries like Iran or the irgc. And so if that exists, then the agent needs to be able to talk with the AUSA about that. Then the agent, AUSA needs to think through how to develop legal process with the agents as a team that can go before a judge. How do I work with the agent? Because it's two parts here. The agent who is experienced enough to know how to discover information in an unclassified manner to maybe either replicate or at least reveal some of the danger, and then the ausa, who knows how to work with the agent to guide this process to a product that can now go in an unclassified way to a judge to seek a search Warrant or a 2703d order, which is one step below a search warrant and to build an investigation to either stop a threat before it becomes materialized, or in your mind, do it in a way that then will eventually lead to a successful trial where you can present this stuff to a jury. And so those are the kinds of things you're doing at the step 0 and step 1 with agents. Step negative number before 0 is the agents have to have already had the experience and relationships with sources around the world and intelligence agencies around the world where they can collect that information and know how to splice through it, know how to filter it and see what's actionable and what's not before they can even predicate the case and bring it to the ausa.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, and I just want to sort of hammer home an earlier point that RA relates to what you just said. To the extent there is a reservoir of this sort of knowledge and know how at the Justice Department, it's in the Counterespionage and Export Control Section and in the Counterterrorism Section of the National Security Division. And as you mentioned, the turnover there has been astronomical. I prosecuted counterintelligence cases for close to 16 years in my career and I only know one person who still remains in that entire division that I worked with. I worked with dozens. The outflow of talent has been nothing short of astounding.

[Troy LT Edwards]

And you know, you get more specific. We're talking, you know, some cases that could not have a CES attorney that were ongoing because the CES attorney would either be fired by the administration or would resign. And you'd cycle through CES attorney after CES attorney in one case. And that is a danger both to that case, but also to the wider national security goal which we used to talk about in a zero tolerance policy. We had no tolerance for mistakes. Nothing could go boom. Classified information could not leak or be unauthorized into other hands. And CES is a perfect example. It has lost over 50% of its personnel. It has lost almost every single supervisor that existed down the ranks from chief down to deputies at one point. There was a three week span in 2025 where it had three different heads of CES. And at some point that musical chairs experience landed on someone from a U.S. attorney's office that didn't have the clearance enough to to sit in the scif.

[Michael Feinberg]

Andrew, I believe had less than five years experience as a prosecutor.

[Troy LT Edwards]

That's unheard of and puts us at risk. And I think we ignore too the progress that that section and other sections had made in the last few years. Think about it. NSD is relatively young, right? It started in 2006. And so these litigating components are developing their own identities over the last 20 years, particularly in a post 911 threat landscape. And the leadership there was doing a phenomenal job at developing a culture of both excitement and aggression, leaning it forward and dispersing across the country to lead U.S. attorneys offices and help AUSAs navigate this classified information space and this hyper specialized foreign adversary space. And to lose all of that is to not only put us at risk now, but when we face a heightened threat risk from our conflict with Iran, but it's also to put us at risk moving forward because it's now losing progress at developing that culture and adjusting with the ever malleable threat landscape that exists. It's going to be a long time to pick that back up and start rebuilding.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, so with our last few minutes, I want to bring us back to an Iran specific topic. We've talked a lot about sort of the degeneration of the national security apparatus in general and how that affects us now that Operation Epic Fury is ongoing. But I'm going to spring a question on you that is completely unfair. Because your article does not touch upon it, and you and I have never discussed this before, but I'm going to sort of bring our institutional rivalry to the four a little bit and make an argument that only an FBI agent who spent his entire career in counterintelligence would make and can only really be argued against by a prosecutor who spent most of his career in the national security space. And I'm going to do it by asking you a question. Every example we've talked about of trying to stop Iran from conducting operations on US Soil has been in the context of something that was also ultimately prosecuted. Is that a good strategy? Prosecution makes sense. Does it have a real deterrent effect on a nation state the same way it would on a domestic criminal organization? Or should we be focusing our efforts on more on things like double agent operations, recruitments in place, signals collection, intelligence, interdiction of technology before it gets to Iran? Like in an ideal world where we actually had all the prosecutorial resources we need, how much should they be leveraged in actual prosecutions and criminal investigations versus what somebody in our old organizations would call sort of the Secret Squirrel side of things?

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I recently got my children a Secret Squirrel T shirt. And so it resonates with me. No, it's a good question. I'm going to answer it in the most lawyerly fashion and I'll resist the urge to snap. Like this is a Sharks versus jets moment.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah,

[Troy LT Edwards]

both. There is no reason that the American public should not expect its national security apparatus to do both. And in a normal world, we do. The question is why has the administration gutted the apparatus so much that we are skeptical right now that we can do both? That's the hardest question, I think, to be answered. And so let me put some flesh on that from two lenses. One lens as a prosecutor, and then two, kind of more programmatically as the prosecutor. Part of my goal when I started managing in the national security space was to radically change the way we think about ausas. In the national security space, at least, yes, we are good and can be helpful at prosecuting the case afterward and bringing it into court and making sure that we seek justice both for both victims, but also for the defendant to face accountability when we capture that person. There is no world in which we can't also aid the national security mission well before a courtroom, and even if it doesn't even reach into a courtroom, because we have the ability to work with our interagency partners in the intelligence community and the law enforcement community to Help with legal process that may supplement an investigation or may be able to think through how to navigate something and stop it, but be involved early on just in case it gets to a courtroom. I think that we can do both. And ausas ought to view their job. In fact, I would talk about it as kind of wearing two hats. You should think about wearing it as two hats. Right? Agents do all the time at the FBI, whether they are an intelligence hat or a law enforcement hat. And we'd often talk about which hat are you wearing when we talk about that? This AUSA should do that too. Okay. Programmatically, we should do both. Right? And the national security apparatus, for those listening, they will all vigorously nod. Right now we do both. Right? We should be stopping Iran by focusing on what materials we should interdict and stop from reaching Iran in the first place. Right. We should be focused on signals intelligence. We should be focused on affirmative cyber operations from Cyber Command and from the nsa. We should be focused on collecting that intelligence and making sure that we can't be caught flat footed moving forward. It's only when activity crosses a certain threshold of materializing, certainly on the United States soil, that we should then kick into gear and say, okay, well, maybe how should we stop this and bring it into a courtroom? But to focus only on bringing defendants into Article 3 courtrooms, I think is one layer to a lot of layers of how we operate in the national security space. NSD was getting quite good at doing this, the Secret Squirrel stuff that we talked about a second ago and integrating itself into other agencies. Before we even think about a criminal investigation or prosecution, that apparatus is significantly damaged when the administration fires all the folks who had had enough experience to think creatively how we should do this better. That's another unmeasurable quality that we've lost right now.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, And I want to hammer home that point by building on something you alluded to earlier, which is the relative newness of this whole apparatus. You and I give each other grief quite frequently in morning meetings about investigators versus prosecutors and who has the primary ticket on something or is the best at a certain task. But we're able to do that because people like us over the past few years have worked together throughout the entire lifecycle of a case. The public has an idea, probably based on the 15,000 varieties of law and order shows that are on time, that, you know, investigators carry things up to the 50 yard line and then they hand it off to the prosecutors who finish. And that certainly was the case for much of FBI and DOJ history. But I think really in the years, maybe probably starting five years after 9, 11, when things really got up and running, that wasn't how you and I were trained.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Right.

[Michael Feinberg]

When I had a case that I thought might go to prosecution, I'd bring in an attorney as early as humanly possible, and we would have a frank conversation that, hey, we're looking at this guy, he's working for bad people. And we haven't decided yet whether we want to recruit and turn him or if we want to stop him and prosecute him. But we would talk about that from day one and make sure that if we went down the first path, we didn't do anything that would preclude the second, if the first one did not work out. And one of the really terrible things that has happened from the point of view of our nation's safety is that those of us who have the muscle memory of working in that fashion and those of us who've done that extensively are exactly the generation that that has been most pushed out.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Yeah, that's right. And the folks who remain are still largely skilled, dedicated public servants who want to do this work. In some ways, maybe they can't because they've not had that experience and so they don't know how to develop those relationships. Or they do, and it's just going to take time, time we may not have. In another way, they're stretched thin. The byproduct of removing all of these folks from the FBI and DOJ and other institutions is that it reduces the capability of everyone who remains to shoulder the immense responsibility of preventing a terror attack on United States soil or an espionage or intelligence failure in the United States. And when they've been stretched thin and then diverted in attention to immigration efforts or surges into D.C. for the Safe and Beautiful Task Force, which 100 agents are still being tasked to every day from Washington Field office or hundreds of NSD attorneys over the holidays to redact Epstein documents. Our eye is no longer on the ball. Right. And the administration seems to be hell bent on taking a mirror and whatever eye is still on the ball and shining as much sunlight as they can in it. And that gap in coverage, that darkness worries me as we intensify our conflict with Iran because of Iran's history in retaliating and not only saying it, but trying it on U.S. soil. And so that's not a knock on the folks who are still left. It's a worry for them because they are still operating with the mission of zero tolerance, but given fewer resources to do it.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well on that slightly less than wholly optimistic note, I think we will leave things and I will recommend your article to all of our listeners who want to fully understand what has happened in the past in this sort of shadow battle between Iran and the United States, and who are concerned now that that warfare has broken out into the open.

[Troy LT Edwards]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Michael Feinberg]

Mike the Lawfare Podcast is pretty produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare material [e-mail] support supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows including Rational Security, Al Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written [e-mail] the podcast is edited by Jen Pacha with audio engineering by Kara Shillin of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music and as always, thanks for listening.

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