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- [00:00]
A
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B
Molly, I hear you had a very exciting weekend, perhaps not in a good way, this past weekend. Tell us what went down.
- [01:37]
C
So I'd been out of town for my 10 year college reunion, which was sort of spooky in its own way. And upon returning home. So I had left my dog under the care of my husband who always a mistake.
- [01:49]
B
Number one.
- [01:50]
C
Yes. So he went golfing. He had left the house to go golfing. And I came in the house. This is only maybe a one hour gap. And there were just grapes everywhere. It was grape carnage. My dog is sitting there wagging and bopping around with his face all wet with what seemed to be grape juice. And so I think, oh no, I think I read something about grapes being dangerous for dogs and called the vet. They said bring him in right away. And they asked how many grapes did he eat? My husband, to his credit, immediately drove back from his golf to meet us at the vet. I don't want to be maligning my husband here. And they asked how many grapes did he eat? And we filled out the form and we just wrote a lot. So they induced Vomiting.
- [02:33]
B
The correct answer would have been a bunch, but that's fine.
- [02:36]
C
Yeah, well, perhaps more than a bunch. I don't. There were grape stems all over the ground. I mean, like this was.
- [02:40]
B
Oh, man.
- [02:41]
C
Truly like a battlefield, post battle grape apocalypse. They produced from my dog. They came back to us and had, you know, on the take home instructions, 140 grapes.
- [02:56]
B
Wow. Did they have to count?
- [02:58]
D
Really?
- [02:59]
B
It seems like a weird job for the summer intern at the vet's office to count the grapes the dog threw up.
- [03:04]
C
It felt a little bit like a dig too. Like you let this dog eat 140 grapes. But honestly, it was good news. Right. Because that suggested that they had gotten all the grapes out, presumably, hopefully. Well, he's alive.
- [03:17]
B
So this whole grape thing, it was. So I learned this well after I became a dog owner and it was like not. I felt like it was not common knowledge when I was growing up, at least that this was like a thing that grapes really bad for dogs. So I asked my vet and she said, oh no, we discovered this in like 2011. Like this is totally new knowledge. Somehow we just had never put together grape plus dog equals problem.
- [03:37]
E
What is the nature of the problem?
- [03:39]
C
They don't really know, which is part of what's so crazy about it. So it causes kidney failure, but they don't know what it is in grapes that does it. They don't know how many grapes. They don't know if it depends on the type of grape.
- [03:50]
B
And also some dogs, certain species are like more susceptible.
- [03:53]
C
Some are susceptible and some dogs aren't. And they don't know why they can't test for it. It's a complete mystery. So this is. You know, I was thinking that if I were going back to school and choosing a different path of study or career, I could devote myself to figuring out why and how, what the mechanism is, and I could save a lot of dogs. But my husband didn't know the grapes were toxic, which is part of why the grapes were out. Again, I don't want to be maligning him here. Also, our dog had never displayed any interest in grapes until this day.
- [04:23]
B
Forbidden fruit. There you go, you get a taste. You have 139 more foreign. And welcome back to Rational Security, the show where we invite you to join members of the lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories. I am thrilled, as always, to be back here with several of my colleagues to walk through the week's big headlines, much in the kind of weaponization Rule of Law, Department of Justice Lane this week. Joining me are lawfare Senior editor Molly Roberts, back on the beat on Rational Security after a few weeks off. I should never have given you that many weeks off. But we appreciate, appreciate it. Molly. Thank you for joining us.
- [05:04]
C
So happy to be back.
- [05:05]
B
You bring a little springtime spirit with that shirt. I didn't know it's how colorful it was. I couldn't see it. You just adjusted in frame.
- [05:11]
C
I think it's actually what they advise against wearing on camera, but what can you do?
- [05:15]
B
Hey, you know what? It's springtime. We gotta lean into it. Why not? Why not? Also joining me is lawfare Senior editor Mike Feinberg. Mike, thank you for joining us. Not quite as colorful in your attire, but that's fine. I'm assuming your shorts are paisley and colorful.
- [05:28]
D
You're assuming I'm wearing shorts. Use your imagination however you want.
- [05:33]
B
This is the secret of home offices. Exactly right. Exactly right. And of course joining us as well is lawfare Rational Security co host emeritus lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes back on the show. Ben, thank you for joining us. I feel like you have two more cactuses behind you than the last time I saw you.
- [05:46]
E
They mate and proliferate.
- [05:49]
B
It's not like an amoeba. They don't just like, just separate. I actually think actual cactuses do.
- [05:53]
E
They just propagate more of an egg laying situation.
- [05:58]
B
I don't want to have Rob Mueller is involved, the polar puppet. That's okay. Well, regardless, thrilled to have you guys back on the show. Let us get into it. We've got a couple of big topics to talk about this week. Topic 1 Blanch check. DOJ may soon have a new permanent leader as president. Trump has now formally nominated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch to the role permanently. But to secure Trump's support, Blanche has indulged some of Trump's most concerning instincts, as evidenced by the attempts to establish an anti weaponization fund for Trump allies and renewed indictments of figures like former FBI Director Jim Comey. Meanwhile, do has seen scandal after scandal during Blanche's tenure over the rapidly declining quality and credibility of its work, exemplified most recently by evidence of grand jury tampering, arguably in the broadview six prosecutions. What should we expect of DOJ under a confirmed Blanche? And how enduring will some of the potential harm that may result be for the department? Topic to Tinker Taylor, Realtor spy President Trump's decision to dual hat Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pult, a man with no national security experience who is best known for using his role at the FHFA to facilitate some of Trump's most transparent attacks on perceived political enemies as acting director of National Intelligence, has triggered strong reactions across the political spectrum. This includes a threat by congressional Democrats to kill renewal of section 702 surveillance authorities if polls remains in the acting position. But Trump thus far has refused to back down. What does Pulse appointment and the potential expiration of section 702 mean for national security? And topic three, prat falls. The open primary in the Los Angeles mayors race is over and Trump endorsed candidate Spencer Bratt finished just outside. The final two will proceed to the general election. But U.S. attorney Bill Saley, a Trump loyalist, has suggested that voter fraud investigations are ongoing, leading some other Republican officials and leaders to call the results of the election into question. I think specifically about Speaker Mike Johnson, who suggested as much in comments earlier this week. What do we make of these unsubstantiated allegations and are they a preview of what people have planned for 2026? For our first topic, let me turn to you on this one first, Mike. We now have a formal nominee for the attorney general position. We talked about this a few times on the show. I think you've been on a few of those episodes. We talked about it as the kind of beauty contest for who will finally get the nod to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general was playing out. We had a couple of candidates, all of whom seem to be really trying to reach and do things to put them on President Trump's positive side of the ledger. Whether it is, you know, Harmeet Dhillon being involved with a bunch of social media campaigns, you know, lobbying the president, essentially arguing in favor of some of the specific causes involving herself in a variety of litigation, whether it is a variety of other people who've kind of thrown their hat in the ring. But Todd Blanche kind of always had the inside track. He is already in the acting role. He already was a deputy attorney general. Trump knows him well. And I think most of us would have put said at the outfront if I had to pick somebody who's going to get it. It would probably Blanche part of that, though, at least for me at the time I think I said this on the podcast was that Blanche seems like a little bit more conventional a candidate and might be an easier sell to, you know, otherwise skeptical Senate Republicans, of which there are a few. But I'm not sure that is as true now as it might have been a few months ago, because we have seen Blanche do things like endorse and elect to move forward the proposed 1776 compensation fund, which has now been put on the back burner and killed, as we think, because of congressional opposition, in part, we don't 100% know, and a variety of other measures that Blanche has kind of co signed. It's been a much more of a YOLO season at the Justice Department than, frankly, it was under Pam Bondi's tenure. And that was not a high bar necessarily. So talk to us a little about what you think ultimately put Blanche over the edge and where the dynamics of that go under this new schema. I mean, are there breaks on this? Does once you get confirmed, does that give you a little bit more leverage and a little bit of inclination to push back? Or is that just not Blanche's inclination? As far as we can tell, this
- [09:44]
D
is a really difficult question to answer for the sole reason that it's hard to talk about this concept without it devolving into something that very much sounds like an attack on someone's character or reputational assassination. So I'm going to sort of back into it by describing the transformation I saw in longtime DOJ and FBI employees in terms of how they viewed Blanche. When the announcements for who was going to be who at DOJ first came out, there was skepticism about Pam Bondi. She did not have any of the traditional federal law enforcement or prosecutorial experience you normally expect from an attorney general. But the feeling that Todd Blanch was going to be there, a veteran of SDNY, which is arguably the most prestigious U.S. attorney's office in the country, there was a feeling that he would at bring some respect for institutional norms and a knowledge of how the department was supposed to operate with him when he arrived. And according to media reports, that very much was the case in the early days of the administration. But with Bondi out, it does appear that ambition has overtaken prudence. And Todd Blanche really is willing to do things that a lot of people who knew him at SDNY never would have predicted. You've named some of the politicized prosecutions which have occurred under him. You mentioned what people are referring to as the slush fund, or less politely, the thug fund. And there's also what's most remarkable to me are public statements that fundamentally misstate the law that would appear to be uttered solely for political gain. I'm thinking in particular of his comments that he saw nothing wrong with armed ICE agents being at the polls to guarantee election integrity. This struck a lot of us as wrong because there is an ex, there's a federal statute Specifically forbidding armed federal agents from being at polling places during the election. And for the Attorney General to either be unaware of it or to pretend it doesn't exist for the purpose of a press conference is really abnormal. And that's the sort of thing that could call into question whether the public can trust DOJ pronouncements at all. And once DOJ can't be trusted to tell the truth, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the entire criminal justice system sits on a precipice.
- [12:41]
E
Yeah, I want to not back into this subject. And I want to say this.
- [12:47]
B
That was an aggressive backing in. Regardless. I don't think we got to the subject.
- [12:51]
D
But I say I was backing in slow. I was backing in.
- [12:54]
E
Todd Blanche is in every formal sense very qualified to be Attorney General. He is morally unfit for the position. And the last year and a half of his service demonstrates that on a serial and repeated basis. So for those who don't understand the structure of the Justice Department, the day to day operation of the Justice Department is managed and run by the Deputy Attorney General. Every single decision by the United States Justice Department that you profoundly disagree with, you can lay at the door of Todd Blanche. Because the Deputy Attorney General's job is to harmonize the positions of the department and direct the operations of the Department in a fashion in which it doesn't do things like make up nonsense about the former FBI Director to indict him repeatedly make up bullshit about the Attorney General of New York to indict her repeatedly maliciously prosecute a guy like Kilmar Abrego Garcia because he embarrassed the President, because he had the temerity to get deported wrongly to a dungeon in El Salvador, not to mention the hundreds of situations in which the Justice Department has violated court orders. All of this is the fault among other people. It's not solely to blame. These things don't happen when a Deputy Attorney General of a certain moral character and caliber is in office. And when somebody has that record of degree of moral failing in the position, the idea that he should be elevated to be Attorney General and confirmed should be unthinkable. And that said, it is not unthinkable. And we already have had repeated demonstrations of this Senate's willingness to confirm Tash Patel and Pam Bondi herself, and by the way, Todd Blanche himself. Now, that question, the question of whether he was demonstrably unfit 18 months ago or two years ago, is a much more complicated question. And as Mike describes a lot of people, including myself, by the way, considered Blanche to be not an attractive figure, but, you know, certainly a relief compared to alternatives. But, you know, he has a record at this point and the record is one of unremitting impropriety across a lot of different vectors. That's before you get to the destruction of the department itself, the firings of enormous numbers of people. The. And remember that everything people objected to about Emil Bovey was actually the office. Emil Bovey is an arm of Todd Blanche. He was the principal associate Deputy Attorney General. He's like the arm of Todd Blanche. And so this is not a close call whether this is an appropriate nomination. It is not. And I think we should assume that there probably are the votes to confirm him.
- [16:42]
C
I was going to say I agree with Ben and car in drive and foot on the gas. As far as talking about Todd Blanche goes, I think that the initial feeling that he was going to be an adult in the room and the initial sort of reporting on, oh, he's acting like the adult in the room. He doesn't like Ed Martin. He made Ed Martin move down the hall and then he made him move to a totally different building. And he didn't like the Letitia James prosecution and he advised against it. Okay, sure. But it seems to be that while he advised privately, quietly against stuff, once the President decided I want to do this, it's not like he made any real effort to stop any of it from happening. Similarly, now, the New York Times reported that on the weaponization fund, he advised privately against that, but he was willing to go to Congress and take a lashing for it. And he said, we're backing down from that, but then defend without any reservations, seemingly the part of it that immunizes the Trump family from any audits, or at least as our colleagues Eric Columbus and Anna Bauer concluded in their most recent piece about it, from any action that the IRS or Treasury at the least could bring against them. So it seems to me that. That maybe he's more of an adult in the room and that he doesn't just yes, sir everything, but when it comes down to it, he'll say the yes, sir. He just might not say it right away. And as far as the confirmation goes, yeah, I think probably he gets confirmed. Probably he has the votes, the people to look out for. I would guess, besides the usual Susan Collins might have concerns would be Thom Tillis and probably Bill Cassidy, which is a sort of self inflicted thing for Trump.
- [18:30]
E
And Thom Tillis, remember, was one of the Senate's most vocal supporters of Kash Patel for the FBI director position.
- [18:41]
B
Yes, that's true. He was not. I don't think he announced his intention to retire at that point, had he? No. Which I do think is a little bit of a game shift. And Tom tell us notice that he's also the co sponsor of legislation to kill the weaponization fund. So it's a little bit of a split kiss on.
- [18:57]
C
Hey.
- [18:57]
E
I mean, look, I am always happy to be pleasantly surprised if you look at Thom Tillis record on confirmation of demonstrably inappropriate Justice Department officials. It is not a good one.
- [19:12]
C
I think the way it works for Tillis is he says I want to get this weaponization fund killed. And if they say the right things about killing the weaponization fund, they get his vote.
- [19:20]
B
That's enough. Yeah, I think that might be right. Like there's a lot of trade and hustle going in here now. I looked up, I just pulled up just for comparison, Blanche's last confirmation, which was 5,246 with one Republican not voting. So presumably you could have gotten 53 votes if you needed it. That's actually not, I mean that's the margins of the Senate. Right. Like that's not terribly shocking. Straight party line vote. It's not overwhelmingly. I don't know, I, I tend to agree. It seems like this is the sort of thing where they're not going to want the president exiting without an Attorney General. I think people will be able to talk themselves more easily into Blanche than maybe Harmeet Dillon and others still because he has that conventional resume even if it doesn't been acting in a way that one might expect that to lead him to go. That's not a real comfy margin. It is going to be interesting to see what exactly pounds of flesh that senators try and extract. Especially because you do have Tillis, Cornyn not coming back, Cassidy with a B for the administration. Collins and Murkowski always people who have, you know, at least are willing to buck the administration a little bit. Might have a little more incentive at the moment with. Have a little more company. Yeah, I don't know. I mean it is tricky. I tend to agree just because we've seen a lot of discipline. But this administration has really shot itself in the foot with the Senate and with its own congressional delegations a number of times in recent weeks. So I don't know. I don't know. Let's wait and see. I do think a lot of it comes down to like what they trade out.
- [20:43]
E
There's an old Russian expression, pray to God, but row to shore. And I think this applies.
- [20:50]
B
That's probably right.
- [20:51]
E
To the way one should think about Senate confirmations in the second Trump administration.
- [20:57]
D
All right, can I suggest that we might be thinking about this the wrong way in that. First of all, I cannot believe I am in a recording studio being the closest thing to a defender of Todd Blanche that the show has.
- [21:14]
E
Life is full of choices, Mike.
- [21:18]
D
I find him, frankly, a reprehensible human being as a lawyer, as a orator or rhetorician, and just as a human being in the way he has comported himself with sycophantic servitude to this administration. But I don't think the question is, should Todd Blanch be confirmed? I think the question is, is replacement value Todd Blanche, who we would get in his place, going to be better or worse? And I just, you know, if it's between Hermeet Dillon and Todd Blanche, that's not a question for me. I'm not happy about this state of affairs. I don't want any of them near a law enforcement and prosecutorial apparatus. But in this administration and with this weak need and milquetoast of a Senate majority, I just don't think we're going to do any better.
- [22:22]
B
I think that might be right. I frankly think that is probably a logic that a number of other senators who might have issue with this nomination will find persuasive. Republican senators, I should say, for kind of two or three different reasons. Right. One, Blanche, you can still talk yourself into him having some sort of conventional knowledge or instincts or that's relevant. He hasn't. We haven't really seen it manifest in a meaningful way so far, but maybe people will say, well, once he's confirmed, particularly once he's confirmed and working for a Trump administration which has been understands it doesn't have the leverage over Congress that it used to have, maybe he'll have a little more leeway to push back on things. I think that's strictly hypothetical. Nobody has any idea what he's going to do when it gets to the office at this point. The other fact to go in is, you're right, there are these questions of who else they can put forward. And you also have the problem that you really cannot get away with not having an Attorney General. You can't just do the acting attorney General thing indefinitely. We saw that during the first Trump administration with the Matt Whitaker experience, it's going to cause lots of problems with more vacancies down the line. It is going to make people concerned about not having someone confirmed. To that role because it's going to break down prosecutions and things like that. So you've got that kind of countervailing pressure where you might not for other cabinet or other senior past positions. And the third factor is, and we're going to talk about this, one of our other topics, if you want to stick your thumb in the eye of the Trump administration, if you're a Republican senator who says I'm sick of these guys and I'm sick of their weaponization and crap, you've got a lot of lower hanging fruit to hit before you get to Todd Blanche. Well, like, you know, legislation for the weaponization fund or like Bill Pulte who we'll talk about in a little bit, whether you formally kill him or you vote against him if he ends up being the nominee. So you know, I do think or 702 for so like, you know, when you have that sort of situation, senators in this situation, often I think their calculus is I'm going to use my votes to communicate something to the voting public and to the administration. And you've got lots of different channels of communication. And the AG role is one that has certain institutional downsides that may make it just harder for people to be the one that, that hold out on. Given that, as you say, Mike, who is the best replacement, like who's waiting in the wings that's going to be better than this? I'm just not sure they have a clear answer.
- [24:25]
D
I want to add a really depressing corollary to my analysis, which is the Justice Department is already gone and the rest of you may disagree with me in terms of degree, but I don't think you'd contest the main point, which is we are already in a situation where it is going to take a generation, if not longer, to restore the functioning of DOJ and also to restore the trust in it of the American people. And so I think whether Todd Blanche gets confirmed versus Harmeet Dillon or you know, let's just go back to the early days of the administration, somebody even like Matt Gaetz, I don't know that there's a salvage operation that could occur in the next two and a half years, even if you got somebody of the absolute highest integrity, which you're not going to under this president in this Senate, like we can't dig ourselves out of this hole given the state of the entire government. And any pushback that an AG might give the president is going to be almost entirely performative and without effect. And you know, my defense of Blanche as the best option should not be taken as cheerleading for Blanche. It should be taken as a lamentation for how bad the department is already.
- [25:56]
B
So that's a good pivot point to bring in. Another aspect we wanted to touch on a little bit that's kind of linked in here, which is this Broadview 6 case that we've gotten pretty, like, shocking revelations about about how prosecutors in, I think, the Northern District of Illinois, am I remembering correctly, engage with the grand jury, basically vouching for their own evidence. Engaging. A very frank term. Basically saying, you can trust us, you can trust all sorts of things that read bizarrely. Although I will not, I will confess, I have never really actually engaged with a grand jury. So maybe that's more common than I. Than I know. And perhaps more profoundly, you know, was enough of an issue that you had the Justice Department ultimately say, we're going to drop charges against. I think it was four remaining people who still had charges against them a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty damning. Mike, first of all, I just want to know what you kind of make sense of this. My sense is that you have the greatest experience with grand juries of any of us. Although, Ben, I know you've been following the sort of issues long enough that you've got a good sense of how these things are done. While you might. You might have better experience than I do as well. But, like, more fundamentally, also, like, how much of this is attributable to the Trump administration and how much of this is more of an endemic problem, either with the US Attorney's office there or with some leadership team, some. Some iteration of that office, because just seems, like, profoundly problematic. But. But some of the people involved were not Trump people. Right. Some of them were queer prosecutors. Some of them had gone. We know one person had gone since to go work for, I think, with Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. Right.
- [27:20]
D
It's the same prosecutor, actually, who presented in front for the Broadview.
- [27:24]
B
Exactly.
- [27:25]
D
The grand jury was detailed to Dick Durbin's office, and then when her role in the Broadview six grand jury indictments came to light, she was removed from Dick Durbin's office.
- [27:40]
B
Exactly. Now, it was a detail. It's not like she, like, resigned and took a different job, but it's still indicative of this is not the perception that this was a person with, you know, on the kind of, like, Trump administration bandwagon that was going to help her get a political position in the Trump administration. Right. So, Mike, I'm just kind of curious what you make of this case. Now that these additional details have come out to light, like how bizarre are some of these interactions, which certainly strike me as bizarre as a non person without a lot of experience to base it against. And where does the, you know, where does the rot come from in this case?
- [28:09]
D
So I want to attack a couple of the assumptions baked into your question, but do so in a way that actually gives a lot of credence to your skepticism and belief that this is not normal. First of all, I don't think you can disentangle the leadership at the head of the Justice Department from the leadership of any given U.S. attorney's office from, and I know Ben and I have discussed this and have slightly divergent views on this from the line level workforce that remains. Leadership flows down tones are set from D.C. they are picked up on and assimilated within the U.S. attorney's office. And the fact is that I think a lot of the Assistant U.S. attorneys who generally have zero problem getting jobs in the private sector sector at the drop of a hat, the ones who would object to the sort of prosecutions that we see, whether it's the Broadview Six or some of the more famous political figures who have been indicted, the people who would object are gone already. They saw this coming or they saw it firsthand and they left. And by definition you're going to be left with a certain group of people. I think you really have three people, three types left. You have the good intentioned, good hearted people who are going to try and do the right thing and leave when they're forced not to. I don't think those people were involved here because the indictments went forward and I didn't see any reporting of anybody withdrawing from the case or leaving the office like we saw in Minneapolis after the refusal to investigate the deaths of Renee Good and Alex predicted. The second group of people you're going to be left with are people who are okay with what's happening. They might not be enthusiastic supporters, but for some reason I can't fathom they don't see violating the rules of grand juries as inimical to the oath they took. And then the third group of people that you're going to get are people who joined after this administration came in to fill the vacancies of those who departed on matters of principle. And of those three groups, the good people, ironically, aren't really a break because they're going to leave when put in a position to do something bad, they might do so noisily. They might try and throw up roadblocks but they're going to be gone. The people who are okay with what's happening or who joined specifically because of it, are also not going to throw up roadblocks for the obvious reasons. So you're left in a position where for the first time in DOJ's history, you have judges claiming that they can't apply the presumption of regularity anymore. You have attorneys who are going to get disciplined for violating basic rules of criminal procedure. And, you know, equally importantly, I don't think we should ignore this like the Justice Department is losing, is getting indictments. No build on a regular basis. That is unheard of. And that is going to further erode trust in the department, which is going to have the second order consequence of making it difficult to get indictments for even legitimate investigations and prosecutions. The skepticism with which people are going to approach DOJ's pronouncements, while probably healthy for the next two and a half years, is going to be deleterious for the department afterwards.
- [32:04]
B
And that brings us to the last issue I want to touch on before we move on from this. And Ben, I'll come to you on this. I know you've done something about this, although Molly and Mike, I'm sure you guys have used like, how endemic is the harm that's coming out of this? We've seen this undermining of the presumption of regularity we're now seeing as a result of the Broadview Six revelations, people who are involved in other politically adjacent prosecutions, like the Southern Poverty Law center, other folks saying essentially, look, we need judicial scrutiny of grand jury processes. We can't just take these as a given that these were, you know, pursued normally in these sorts of cases. Something weird is being like, you're saying, Mike, potentially driven down to these field offices, that maybe they do normal work 90% of the time, but they're being compelled to do very abnormal things, at least in these cases. And maybe more broadly, how do you build back from that? And what is the trajectory from that? And are there parts that can happen under AG Todd Blanche, or is this a strictly 20, 29 and onward problem? Meaning what do you do to prepare the ground in the next two and a half years?
- [33:05]
E
There is no part of it that can happen under Todd Blanche. And that's the reason fundamentally why Todd Blanche is unfit to be Attorney General. You can't imagine that process happening under Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche went on national television to defend the Southern Poverty Law center indictment, which is facially invalid if there is a single person in the United States who is a walking exemplar of everything Mike just said. It is Todd Blanche, down to the fact that he's there to replace people who wouldn't do things. And by the way, that person was Pam Bondi, you know, who's herself completely unfit to be attorney general. But there was a limit to what she would do. And Todd, Blanche is willing to do the things that she won't do well. So no part of it can happen under Blanche. Look, there are multiple elements to that question, and it's a much longer conversation than we're realistically going to have here today. But let me just flag some of the elements of it. The first is you need Justice Department leadership that actually reflects the historic values of the department. And not merely that does so quietly, but that will speak for those historic values and that judges can hear them speak for those historic values. And you need somebody who's going to say instead of every judge who disagrees with us as a radical activist, you know, they should be impeached. The judges actually need to hear the Justice Department leadership saying there will be zero tolerance at the department for factual inaccuracies, lies and misstatements of the law in our filings. Right. That a judge is entitled to rely on the factual representations of the United States in court. So there's a leadership level. There is also, as Mike points out, a very troubling line level set of issues here. And this is true both in the department and in the FBI that you have to ask. I'm going to use Mike as an example. Who is the person who was willing to take Mike's job after Mike left the FBI because his friendships were considered untoward? Who is the person who's willing to say, don't mind me, I have no untoward friendships that are going to bother Donald Trump. Right. You have to ask that question. You have to ask the question, who are the AUSAs who are willing to appear in certain cases? Now, some of those are honorable people and some of them are not. And there's going to have to be some hard thinking about how you in a fashion that respects the civil service and the fact that you don't want political people interfering with the basic functioning of the civil service. How are you going to restore honor and integrity to a department that has willfully gutted its own? And those are going to be very hard questions. They will not begin to happen until you have some kind of Ed Levy figure, since we're focusing on Chicago. Ed Levy was, of course, the president of The University of Chicago, who Gerald Ford named to run the department after Watergate and began a long process of renewing public confidence in the department. And it was a complicated one that took place over really three successive administrations. And so I'm not sure that I agree with Mike that it requires generations, but it certainly requires years. And it requires a cross ideological, cross partisan commitment that I don't know that we have right now.
- [37:32]
C
I know we want to move on tonight, say something really fast about Todd Blanche, which is that last week, week before last, maybe he went on Sean Hannity for a long interview where he talked about the grand conspiracy investigation, as it's called, at length, called it the grand conspiracy investigation, named a lot of the people who are under scrutiny, confirmed that they have two grand juries that are working on it. I mean, that has all got contrary to Department of Justice policy and is very clearly part of exactly the kind of erosion that we're describing here.
- [38:06]
E
Have you ever noticed that there are these things that your financial advisors don't tell you? Like by the time the news is telling you to buy gold, it's already too late. I mean, we all have this feeling that we're on the edge of some kind of financial apocalypse. But by the time the apocalypse comes and you're like, I wish I'd put some money into something stable and long term that holds its value over time, like gold and silver and precious metal, you've already lost a bunch of your equity in whatever it is that has crashed in value. So whatever it is, you're waiting for the ceasefire, waiting for the straits to open up, waiting to see whether the AI apocalypse is coming for us all and we all lose our jobs. Whatever it is, I'm just telling you, gold isn't waiting for you. It has already priced in the uncertainty. It moves on. Fear, instability and the unknown. And goodness knows, we've all had enough fear and instability and the unknown. And right now we've got all three everywhere you look, in spades. So if you've been wondering whether gold should be part of your portion portfolio, this is exactly the kind of moment when it makes sense to speak with someone who understands the market. Noble Gold Investments has been helping investors protect their savings with physical gold and silver for nearly a decade. And here's what sets them apart. I'll tell you one thing that sets them apart. It's that the founder of the company, guy named Colin, cool guy actually, like when he was, gets people to advertise for Noble Gold, we have a call and he tells me about the company and he told me why he's passionate about it. And I gotta say, he made a really compelling case. And that's an example of the sort of white glove service from start to finish. It doesn't matter if you're a podcaster who's gonna be, you know, doing copy for them, or if you're the customer. They'll walk you through how physical gold and silver work, whether you're considering a direct purchase or rolling over part of an ira. Everything's transparent. They're not pushy, they're not high pressure. They're there to educate you and they explain exactly what you're buying and why. They genuinely put customers first. And their team makes it simple to gain real investor level knowledge and insight. They've built a reputation on being trustworthy and reliable. They give you the answers you need to stop guessing and decide with confidence. So don't wait for certainty that may Never come. Visit. Noblegoldinvestments.com lawfair that's noblegoldinvestments.com lawfair and download the free investor kit. No pressure, no obligation, just the information. Noblegoldinvestments.com. Have you ever thought I really should be doing something to protect myself from stalkers, scammers and hackers? But you're not sure what you know. But I already took care of myself in this regard. And I'm going to tell you how you can do it too. Here's what you do. You go to www.joindeleteme.com lawfare20 and you. You enter the promo code lawfare20 and you will get 20% off. Delete me. Delete Me removes your personal information that's being sold online. In the age of AI, we're all vulnerable to scammers using our personal data. And it's just floating out there in the Internet and they're sucking it up and they're using it against you. You don't believe me? Google yourself and you're going to find your home address, your phone number, the name of family members. It's really unsettling. But the good news is Deleteme can help. It was named the top pick for data removal services by wirecutters. And it has never been more affordable. Lawfare listeners can get 20% off at www.joindeleteme.com lawfare20 with. With the code lawfare20, you can get an individual plan for a little over $8 a month. I use DeleteMe. I used Delete Me before they started advertising with Lawfare. I actually endorse this product wholly sincerely. I have an online presence and there are people out there that don't like me and this helps take control of your data and keep your private life private. By signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to www.joindeleteme.com lawfare20 and use the promo code lawfare20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to www.joindeley deleteme.com lawfare20 and enter code lawfare20 at checkout. That's www.joindeleteme dot com lawfare20 code lawfare20.
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- [45:58]
B
Well, let us go on to our second topic, where we have another institution under threat from the top on down. In this case, has the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. President Trump indicated that he intended to appoint FHFA Director Bill Pulte as the in addition to keeping that role as the Acting Director of National Intelligence, we All kind of thought that might or presumed, I guess that would last be after June 30th when Tulsi Gabbard indicated she was going to be resigning. It appears to have jumped up a little bit. President Trump said Pulte would be assuming that role immediately earlier this week. And we're in a situation where Pulte is not only not have no national security experience, his number one thing he's known for is facilitating a bunch of these transparently vengeful prosecutions of Letitia James and James Comey over alleged mortgage fraud. And that's not the Comey case. In Letitia James case and a handful of other cases, alleged mortgage fraud and then also being involved and facilitating, initiating a bunch of those. Obviously a inclination that if you have access to the resources of the intelligence community would be much more concerning. A number of Republicans, in addition, Democrats have come out said this is a real problem. We've even had John Thune say we don't need weaponization of odni. That's not a great sign for how Pulte's pseudo nomination appointment as acting director has landed on the Hill. But perhaps most importantly, we now have Democrats saying we're not going to move forward on 702 reauthorization, which is up, I think this week or next week is due while Bill Pulte is anywhere near the Office of Director of National Intelligence. So Ben talked about this. I mean, you have a long history of Section 702. I think you have spoken out publicly about the importance of it as a general matter for the US Government for national security purposes. How does that assessment ring in a moment like this with this leadership fight happening? I mean, is what Democrats are doing inherently risky? Is it reasonable in light of this possible leadership at the Office of Director of National Intelligence? This other angle? I mean, how does this enter into this, what has always been a heated and highly contentious debate over 702 every time it comes up, this just seems to throw it into a whole other dimension or maybe into another dimension with a lot more consensus around an outcome that people would never get on board with otherwise because everyone gets worried about this authority in the hands of someone like Bill Pulte. Where do you come out on this?
- [48:20]
E
All right, so this is a super complicated question and was before Bill Pulty was nominated. For me, I will leave the merits of Bill Pulte as a nominee to Molly Roberts, who has for her sins in some past life had to spend a lot of quality time with Bill Pulte's corpora of mortgage fraud work. But let me talk a little bit about 702 in the context of a nomination or an acting head. That is not merely inappropriate in the fashion that Todd Blanche is inappropriate, but also completely unqualified in every formal sense for the position. So if you do not reauthorize 702, Americans will die. And it is not appreciably more complicated than that. 702 is the single most important collection tool in the legal arsenal of the US Intelligence community. It forms material from. It forms a large percentage of the President's daily brief every morning. I believe it is the largest single contributor to the President's Daily Brief. It is still, because of frankly civil libertarian misrepresentations about the bill, controversial that the authority is important and productive. It is not a controversial among anybody who has access to what the not just counterterrorism but leadership level intelligence take is across a wide range of U.S. collection priorities. So I think it is fair to say it will hobble important U.S. intelligence interests at a lot of levels of government, a lot of levels of important areas up to and including ones that are that involve, you know, human life and death. If that doesn't make this clear, I am a supporter of 702. My fundamental belief is that 702 is right now over regulated, not under regulated. We should be renewing it on a permanent basis and we should be renewing it with fewer little sort of niggling over regulations than it currently has. That's my bottom line position and it has been for several years now. That said, I could not in good conscience tell a Democratic member of Congress that they absolutely should vote for this. And the reason is that I have zero confidence that it is not being misused right now. Let me give you an example of this. There's every reason to believe that intelligence priorities have been shifted in directions that for example, boat strikes in open waters in Venezuela, all kinds of counter narcotics activity that I would think of as not necessarily in the traditional intelligence space, I suspect have been prioritized within the intelligence acquisition world. I'm not confident this isn't being used to plan an illegal invasion of Cuba, for example. And so I could not tell anybody what I could say very confidently the last time this authority was being reauthorization was being contemplated which was look, there's mistakes happen in every collection authority. We know of the ones that happen in this. But we also know it is not being intentionally misused. There's a lot of oversight. And by the way, the whole system relies on Certifications that invoke the personal credibility of the FBI director, the attorney general, and, yes, the dni. And I don't believe in the integrity of any of those people. Also, one of the things that people like me have always been able to say to civil libertarians is, you know, this has court oversight, unlike a lot of other intelligence programs. But we also know that this government lies to courts on a routine basis, makes misrepresentations, and defies court orders. So why is that now supposed to be reassuring? All of that is the reason before Bill Pulte that I have not gone on a Crusade to get 702 reauthorized as I have in every previous iteration, including in the first Trump administration. I was more enthusiastic about renewing 702 than Donald Trump was the time that he did it. I have had very little to say about this because I can't make a good faith case for it based on the premises of the way the statute works, except to say that the consequences of not doing it will be dire. Now, you put in charge of the intelligence community somebody who is. And by the way, this is not only marginally different from Tulsi Gabbard, who was herself manifestly unfit to be in that position, but you have somebody who believes in lying to target people's political enemies. That's what Bill Pulte is famous for. What is the basis on which a Democratic senator or House member should vote to create, you know, reauthorize a program that is predicated on the presumption of regularity with respect to intelligence community and Justice Department representations to courts? You know, I can't think of one. And so all I will say about this is, you know, as Kierkegaard once said, if you hang yourself, you will regret it. And if you don't hang yourself, you will regret it. And if you marry, you will regret it. And if you don't marry, you will regret it. And if you renew 702, you will regret it. And if you don't renew 702, you will also regret it. This, gentleman, is the essence of all philosophy.
- [55:24]
B
Molly, let me come to you and take up Ben's invitation there. I mean, you have spent a lot of time with Bill Pulte's work at the fhfa. Well, I don't know, actually, but I don't believe you have much exposure to the intelligence community. But talk to us a little about what he has done. Remind people there and how big a stretch of what he did at the FHFA was from what people have previously done. And from the factual record, you've written a number of pieces about this in a number of different contexts. Talk to us about what exactly Bill Pulte's qualifications might be for this sort of role from Trump's perspective, not necessarily conventionally.
- [55:58]
C
I thought you were going to say you've spent a lot of time with Bill Pulte. And I was going to say, thankfully, not literally. Donald Trump certainly has. Bill Pulte is often on Donald Trump's plane with him, telling him to do bad things, like, I don't know, take over the D.C. golf courses or go after Letitia James. So Bill Pulte comes from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and you might think, what is there even to weaponize there? And yet he has managed it. And so, I mean, I think that that, in my eyes, is his primary qualification as far as, like, practically why he's getting nominated for this job is Donald Trump wants someone to weaponize the intelligence community. And Bill Pulte has shown you can weaponize anything. It's a lot easier to do, honestly, with the intelligence community than with the Federal Housing Finance Agency. So what Bill Pulte did at the FHFA was he made referrals and kind of ginned up the necessary information to make these criminal referrals against people who were purportedly engaging in mortgage fraud. So from Lisa Cook to Letitia James, he's been investigating Adam Schiff as well. Investigating, not really his job, first of all, there's even a question of whether he has the authority in that role to make these referrals. But the way that he made the Letitia James referral in particular, which is probably the. The best way to think about him, the one which we have the most information, because we got a lot of it out of discovery in the case, is he, it seems, again, I don't want to say he did, but he may have unlawfully accessed Fannie Mae files, kind of overriding the processes that he's supposed to follow to do that in order to find forms where there were possible irregularities, apparent irregularities, that he then transformed into these criminal referrals. He kind of would get evidence from these fringe bloggers, and then he would go get the Fannie Mae files to try to back up what the fringe bloggers were saying. And in the Letitia James case, he also seems not to have ensured that that potentially exculpatory evidence was passed along. It seems like it didn't make it to the grand jury and also the Inspector General at the Federal Housing Finance Authority was ousted when he was trying to provide some of this evidence, which might have been about the unlawful access of the files or might have been about the communications among Fannie Mae investigators, asking whether there was indeed clear and convincing evidence of occupancy fraud, which is ultimately what the referral was about. So basically improperly accessing information to create these criminal referrals and then not being fully forthcoming about information that undercuts the referrals. In the Adam Schiff case, it gets even a little weirder. And there hasn't been an indictment in that case, but there was this very strange moment where everyone was sort of waiting for an indictment to be handed down. And then it was revealed that this woman, another sort of fringe blogger who was sharing information about Adam Schiff, that she had been contacted by people who were purporting to work with or for Bill Pulte, but were also saying they worked for the Justice Department. So again, misrepresentations, just total departure from the way that this agency is supposed to work. So that's the sort of stuff that he's done. And I think it's pretty clear that if you're willing to go against norms, regulations, whatever, in your position at the fhfa, what could you do with the far greater resources that would be available to you as Director of National Intelligence? So that has concerned people, rightly, and created, as Ben was talking about, this section 702 crisis where there's sort of a weird coalition. Right. Because you have a bunch of Democrats who otherwise would be on board with reauthorizing Section 702, but now might not because they see it as leverage when it comes to Pulte.
- [60:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's really a remarkable case. It is somebody so uniquely, not just unqualified, but qualified in such a deeply problematic way and something indicative. I mean, this is a question I have for historians and journalists who might be able to dig into this. It actually goes back to Pam Bondi, too, which is the fact that after Pam Bondi is removed, all the nominees who want to be attorney general feel that the way to cater to it is to be willing to weaponize the Justice Department. And now here in this case, President Trump has removed Tulsi Gabbard. It seems maybe she resigned, maybe not. But regardless, she's gone and removed her at least 11 days earlier than they originally planned. And the first thing he does, the person who comes to mind saying, well, who's going to solve my Tulsi Gabbard problem is somebody who's very Susceptible pursuing weaponization in his current role. There's like an indicator here, right? Like both, I think are indicators of what the underlying problem was. It may show that again, Pam Bondi and maybe Tulsi Gabbard too, were not willing to do certain things or push back on certain things, were unenthusiastic about certain things that the President wants to do. But you wouldn't see this beauty contest we saw in the AG's race case and we wouldn't see Bill Pulte getting put forward if that, that weren't part of the calculus the President is looking at for both of these roles. It's a deeply problematic process on the AG front and person in the Pulte case. But it should be even more problematic because the only reason he would be put in this role is to weaponize it because he has no other qualifications at all whatsoever. It's really astounding. Mike, I want to pull you into this conversation. You have experience with 702. Talk to us about your perspective on that and then Pulte for dmg, you can do it. Odni. One thing I said last week, and I think this is kind of true and still is that I'm like somewhat less worried about Bill Pulte at ODNI than I would be at like CIA director. Because you've got a smaller set of personnel that can do things.
- [62:07]
E
A less lower set of DNI is a nonsense position to begin with.
- [62:11]
D
Well, I think you're, I think you are both wrong in the assessment of where he can do more damage.
- [62:17]
B
Well, that's the question is, I mean, dni, he can't, you know, he, his ability to like task out people to seize that primary danger. But it's about collecting information.
- [62:28]
D
No, it's not about any of that. Let me preface this by saying I am one of the few people on earth who might be a bigger cheerleader for 702 than Ben. I used it literally every single day, either as a primary investigator or as a leader and manager during 16 years in the FBI. I think the arguments against it are specious. I think the most well known critics of 702, whether a very specific senator from the Pacific Northwest or a number of think tanks and advocacy groups, rely more on insinuation and bad faith than they do facts in their criticism. But if I were a Democratic senator or Democratic House member, I would not hesitate to hold 702 hostage to ensure that Bill Pulte does not get this position. And it's because ODNI gives him a unique ability to do damage to the fundamental fabric of our democracy in a way that even the Director of the FBI or the Director of Central Intelligence cannot. And that is as the dni. Bill Pulte is going to have access to almost every agency's intelligence reporting that exists already, and he is going to have the ability to selectively declassify it and make it public. And you can do as much, if not more, damage to a person's reputation selectively releasing true classified information than you almost can if you were releasing something that was made up out of whole cloth. And we see this in a number of arenas. We've seen it in the way Chuck Grassley has released random, not random, but isolated context free documents from the investigations into Trump to make it seem as it was, as if it was a political conspiracy. Bill Pulte could choose to release an over here of an American talking to a foreign official in which the foreign official pitches the American, but then choose not to release the portions of the over here where the American turns them down. And I have zero doubt, based on all the reasons that Molly stated that he would hesitate to do that. The second reason he's unqualified, apart from just being a vindictive person who would manipulate extant intelligence, let alone tasking other resources to gain it in the future, is that he doesn't meet what the statute requires. Unlike the Director of Central Intelligence, unlike Dernissa, unlike the Director of the FBI, the statute which creates ODNI requires explicitly that any nominee have extensive experience in the intelligence community. I don't think Bill Pulte has ever stepped foot in an intelligence community building. He is manifestly unqualified by the founding charter to sit in that office. There is no conceivable justification for confirming him to this role. And Ben is 100% right. If we do not renew 702, Americans are going to die. I don't think it is hyperbolic to say that. I don't think it's exaggeration. I think it's a fact. But if we put somebody like Bill Pulte in the role of dni, it's not an exaggeration to say that democracy itself might die because he is going to manipulate intelligence collection and extant reporting to undermine free and fair elections. And it's as simple as that to me.
- [66:29]
B
Well, we will see where this conversation goes. S702 is set to expire the day this podcast comes out. That's Friday, June 12th. Day, day later than usual this week for the podcast. And we will see where the Conversation around Pulte and some of to go from here. Before we do that, before we part, we have one more topic want to get to and that is the recent elections in Los Angeles related investigations that appear to be percolating. Molly, I want to come to you on this. We've seen this very contentious Los Angeles mayor's race. The city has a kind of open primary system where people from a variety of candidates come forward. I believe the top two go continue. On the general election, we had three final candidates come in. We had Karen Bass, the incumbent got I think the plurality of the vote. Close. Second is a woman whose name's escaping me at the moment, who's a second in race but also a Democrat, kind of a progressive wing Democrat who kind of came to the race relatively late. And then third we had Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, somebody who President Trump had endorsed, who is Republican, has more conservative views, whose house was burned down in the Palisades fire, had been kind of organizing around that and building a public platform around that to some extent narrowly missed out on the primary. I think they were all in the 20. I think Karen Bass may have had closer to 30% Pratt and the second woman in second place had, you know, in the mid-20s, so relatively competitive. But Pratt was a serious candidate. I guess he did come in third among all the other candidates. But we are now have these allegations that the election appears or has caused some sort of irregularity. Part of this relates to California's weird election system or not weird election system, slow method of tabulating the final results. Some of it relates to how they Associated Press reported different returns at various points causing certain jumps in certain numbers that are kind of partisan allocations. In its public reporting of this, we've seen the U.S. attorney in California, Bill Asali, who I think is actually was a career, is a career prosecutor, but nonetheless has been very lean forward advancing parts of Trump administration's agenda has come forward. And I should say he's acting, I believe he's not actually confirmed or he's
- [68:33]
C
not even acting his first assistant because he was, he was acting too Long did as U.S. attorney.
- [68:39]
B
Exactly. He is in the office. I leave it was there before the Trump administration as well came out and said they have a number of active voter fraud investigations happening. Now that's different from saying the results were different. We don't know what exactly that means. But he came out and said the statement that has now caused a sort of echo chamber effect. So talk to us about what we do know, what we don't know what it seems to be saying about what these different investigations, where they're leading and why it's a significant enough story for us to talk about here, where none of us live in California or Los Angeles. And so we're good removed from the direct election, but it has potential implications in other contexts.
- [69:13]
C
Yeah, sure. So you gave the basic outline. Spencer Pratt is famous from MTV's the Hills. He was sort of a villainous figure on there, and he was running for Los Angeles Mayor Trump endorsed him and ultimately he didn't make it to the general election. The first two candidates get to it had looked like he was ahead, and then it looked like he was falling behind and falling behind, and ultimately he didn't make it. And so this is what prompted the allegations of fraud. It's pretty typical in California that the votes can change because election day votes get counted first, then the mail ballot votes get counted. California lets anyone who wants to vote by mail ballots. So there are a lot of those, and they also lean Democratic. So not that surprising that this is what happened. But it prompted all these kind of conspiracy theories about fraud, the basis for which, at least initially, was basically that there was one update that showed that a bunch of new ballots had come in, 24,000, I think, and there was not a single one for Spencer Pratt. And it turned out that was just a data lab. But conservative figures online seized on this and said, look, they're updating the votes and as they update them, they're putting no votes in for Pratt. And so it's fraud. And President Trump was one of the. Well, he was the first to say that local officials were cheating. He did that in this Meet the Press interview that he stormed out of. And then on his heels, Bill Asali, the first assistant U.S. attorney, said, Yep, we have these multiple fraud investigations underway and give us some tips. So it is not clear that there are indeed fraud investigations underway. Celia's kind of walked this back a little. In other interviews, it seems like nothing has formally been opened. They're asking for tips, they're looking around. He kind of said, you have to wait till we certify these. But more are going to come. You can be sure that we're going to get charges done eventually. Which seems sort of just a satisfy Trump angle. There's not any there there. As far as the evidence shows, there's one individual, there's a past case of this woman who was paying people on skid row to go vote. But otherwise there's nothing systemic. So there's no reason to believe this is real, but why be concerned about it? Well, because it's kind of an example of these various. What I think is reasonable to. To view as trial balloons. Maybe some of them will literally end up being trial balloons. When it comes to claims of fraud in elections, you can tie it in with what's going on in Fulton County. You can tie it in with what they're looking into in Wisconsin, Maricopa. There are just lots of places where the administration is pointing to these other ones are in 2020. This is obviously now. But it's this idea of trying to seed uncertainty in the elections. And the question is, what will that lead to around the midterms? What will it lead to around 2028? Will it just intimidate election officials? Will it make it so that if they're trying to delay certification of elections, then they can either actually seize ballots and break the chain of custody, making it necessary to run a new election in a contested district, or. Or can they just get a delay long enough, that sort of thing. So it's sort of the general idea of the administration experimenting with raising fraud claims of various sorts in relation to elections. So I think that that's the kind of broader picture here.
- [73:00]
B
Mike, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, you've been on the variety of investigations over your FBI career. There's obviously some shady language that Saley's using in regards to what we're doing here. Maybe what he was talking about, the investigation says, well, we've had complaints and we're looking into it. And yada, yada, how much shade, how much areas of gray is he capitalizing on here? And how much is he. Is he just lying? And is either appropriate necessarily?
- [73:24]
D
I don't know that I have a ton to add what Molly, to what Molly just said, except to say that nothing that he is doing is remotely appropriate. In fact, it's just a seemingly unending parade of violations of DOJ policy. First of all, doj, with the Public Integrity section as the gatekeeper, which functionally no longer exists, is not supposed to, by their own policies, open any investigations into electoral fraud until after the election is certified. If you think about it for a minute, that makes logical sense. Until the election is certified, you don't actually have a finished crime. So you should not be investigating something until you know how it's going to turn out. But apparently the U.S. attorney's office for the Central District of California is willing to elid that requirement. The second violation, which is a rule now observed more in the breach is that if there is an ongoing investigation, you are not supposed to comment on it. And that is what the U.S. attorney here, regardless of whether he was a career official beforehand, is doing every time he talks about this. And it's really difficult for me to disentangle this from what is a much larger conversation, which is the DOJ turning into an active underminer of the electoral process anytime the results disadvantage the Republicans. And that gets back to what we were talking about earlier today, which is that we are getting to the point where people are not going to be able to trust DOJ's pronouncements. And that is going to have effects that long outlast Todd Blanch his tenure if he's confirmed. And it's going to have effects that long outlast the aftershocks of the way California counts its votes. Undermining that confidence in particular, trying not to do so is exactly why these policies exist and they're just being ignored wholeheartedly.
- [75:45]
C
I also should have added that Israeli explicitly connected these investigations, these fraud claims, with the need for a wide scale audit of the California vote roll. He was saying that's what he and Harmeet Dhillon have been trying to get done. That's separately in litigation. It's part of the administration's broader effort to get these voter rolls. And the sort of strategy that seems it's materializing there is get the voter rolls when there's a result you don't like. Well, first of all, you could conduct a purge of the voter rolls ahead of time, but also get the voter rolls when there's a result you don't like, try to compare who voted to the voter rolls and say that there's, there's illegal voters voting. And so again, I think that it's kind of all it makes it clear that it's all tied together to the elections. And of course, asserting fraud here when it comes to the litigation for the voter rolls. The idea would be, well, that can support the argument for we need these.
- [76:44]
B
So before we move on, Ben, I want to get your sense on this from a particular perspective. There is a genuine complaint people have about the California tabulating system, right. Like this has been a recurring thing for years and years and years. It is slow to come in as particularly susceptible to the types of claims that President Trump has made multiple times, which is that, well, when you see vote totals change suddenly in reporting, that's indicative of fraud, while in reality it's often indicative of the method of counting and the method of reporting. Right, because people count up A certain bundle, they send it in. Sometimes they count up bundle votes in different bundles from different districts that different voting inclinations. People have looked into this time and time again. They really haven't found it as being systematically a problem except in the optics element. How much do you think people or policymakers need to start responding to these optics elements, though? You know, there is this issue saying there's the defense, and I think it's a totally valid defense of a lot of efforts to crack down on voter fraud are quote, unquote, voter fraud, which may not be real, is that there's no real evidence of actually being at a significant scale or significant problem problems. And the impact on the flip side is, well, you make it harder for certain people to vote or various people to vote. You could say a similar thing here in California. Some of the slow process is there because they have a process they think produces fairly reliable results. It's slow, but you get to a place that's relatively stable at the end, more so than you might get when you're faster. But is there something to be said about saying we maybe need to start shaping our electoral rules to address not just the substance of voter fraud, but also these optics or perspective, the ability, the susceptibility they have to these negative framings? Or is that kind of taking the bait too much, lending too much credibility to these specious, as far as we can tell, critiques that have been brought a regular feature of our elections?
- [78:33]
E
Yeah. So I would answer this question in a somewhat different presentation than the way you just organized it. If I were a voter in California, I would find California's system absolutely outrageous and maddening. It takes weeks to get an answer to a question that, you know, Georgia and Florida get in a few hours. And it is not clear to me that, you know, Florida has a lot of absentee remote voting. Right. And, and so it's not really clear to me that the, that you're getting a lot of bang in terms of voter access for your buck in terms of endless process. Other big states know how to get answers to election the same day or within 24 hours. And I would find it outrageous if I were a Californian or an Arizonan. By the way, Arizona has a, is another one one of these states, but I'm not. I'm a resident of the District of Columbia. And you know, I actually believe in federalism and different states can organize their election systems in different ways. And California owes me nothing as a non resident who thinks they count their votes in ridiculous ways. And you Know, maybe if I were going to move to California, I would say, no, I'm not going to move there because, you know, they've count their votes in silly ways. But now Congress does have a role in establishing certain minimum standards. And so I suppose we could say as a society, hey, we want a general rule about these sorts of vote counting questions. I am frankly hesitant to do that because I think it imports the gamesmanship that people are playing in election counting controversies into an effort to make it harder to vote nationally. That said, I would rather do it as a national policy conversation than as a contest to individual election results every fricking time. So if you have a policy objection to the way California counts its votes, the first question to ask is, is it any fucking business of yours? And the second question, if you think the answer to that is yes, is should be directed at Congress, not at, if you're not a Californian, at the question of who the mayor of Los Angeles should be under current rule rules. That's my instinct, but I really don't want to. To me, the fundamental issue is not the optics of fraud. The fundamental issue is the length of time that it requires to get an answer to the question of who won an election in California. And I feel like I have an equity in that question only in presidential races. And actually, it doesn't matter in California because California is so reliably Democratic. It matters in Arizona.
- [82:02]
B
Well, with that, we are out of time for today's episode. But this would not be Rational Security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Mike Feinberg had to step away before we get to the end of this episode, but he did submit his object lesson remotely, which we'll cut to now.
- [82:17]
D
Today I actually have an object lesson in progress. In one hand, I have a toy squid that sings and moves, and in the other hand, I have a stuffed animal Cthulhu. I plan to combine the two in the best style of Herbert west reanimator into an animatronic HP Lovecraft themed stuffed animal toy for my child. So stay tuned as I progress on this project.
- [82:51]
B
Thanks, Mike. Ben, what did you bring for us this week?
- [82:54]
E
I brought you Lawfare's newest public project, Semi Public, which is a crazy little scheme that I have spent the last few months developing, which we call Ragtime. Ragtime was released this week in limited public beta only for Lawfare material supporters. And so if you're not a Lawfare material supporter, first of all, shame on you. You should be. Go Become one at once. And the moment you do become one, you will be eligible for Ragtime's limited beta release. And I know what you're asking yourself. You're asking yourself, what is Ragtime? And all I'm going to say is it's super cool. It's the kind of thing you want to play with, and it can answer all your questions, including a question that it answered for Scott the other day, which is, are there any instances in the Eisenhower administration of the United States in diplomatic communications with foreign interlocutors citing constraints on presidential war powers as a reason why we might be limited in our ability to use or threaten military force? We posed that question to Ragtime the other day. And Scott, how did it do in getting us an answer?
- [84:21]
B
It was very good, I have to say. This was a topic I looked into. I asked that question because I'd written a paper about this a couple years ago and knew at least some of the answers. And I will say it found a couple of additional instances that I wasn't fully aware of. So it's impressive and I'm looking forward to playing with a little bit more. It really is, you know, still in beta. We're still working out the kinks, but a pretty phenomenal product. So if you are a Patreon supporter, material support, I should say, you know, check it out.
- [84:45]
E
And if you're not, become one and check it out.
- [84:49]
B
Exactly. Well, for my object lesson this week, I have. That I'm a culpa. Exactly. But I have a confession for listeners. Longtime listeners will know that I spent a lot of the warmer months grilling a lot of pizza. I have a whole method for grilling pizza involving sheets of iron and fireproof bricks that I built on top of my gas oven to simulate a pizza oven. It was pretty great. It worked really well, particularly for New York style pizza, which you want like on the 500 degree mark, 5 to 600, something that. Which is about as hot as I could get it maybe a little north of 600 if I really preheated it. But I did that because I didn't want to spend all the money on one of those backyard pizza ovens. But I finally pulled the trigger and spent all the money on one of those backyard pizza ovens. I have to say it's pretty amazing and awesome. So. So I got, after having looking at this for a while, the Gosney, one of the Gosney models, which are these kind of beautiful little dome pizza domes, gas fired, you can get wood fired. I got one of the gas fired ones. I have to say it's kind of amazing. It is the only way after finding enough research that you can really get like the kind of Neapolitan like puffy dough. That's really what you're going for. Very hard to get on any sort of like not sub 800 degree temperature oven. And to get over 800 you really need something that's designed for it. It's kind of amazing and I've been using it to cook all sorts of stuff. I frankly, I've only opened my grill like twice so far this year because I've been using the pizza oven not just to grill pizza, but to make calzones and fire roasted vegetables and a bunch of other stuff. And it's kind of amazing. I suppose you can bake bread in it too. I haven't gotten quite around to that. And I will say they've got a really cool like travel pizza oven which now I kind of regret not buying because it'd be cool to be able to take this on the road. Regardless, I thought it was cool enough to check recommend it. It is a bit of an investment. But if you really, if I persuaded you through my years of advocacy to start making pizza more of a barbecue occasion, which it absolutely should be for more people. This is a great, great compliment to that if you really want to take it up at a notch.
- [86:29]
E
And how did it do when you asked it about Eisenhower administration communications about war powers?
- [86:38]
B
Completely flamed him. It was brutal. But it is. Yeah, it is. It's a fun summer toy. I will say for anybody out there who's. Who's of the culinary inclination. Molly, bring us on. What did you bring for us this week?
- [86:50]
C
Yeah, I have to say also I endorse both of your endorsements. Although I have an ooni pizza oven.
- [86:55]
B
Ooni also very nice. People like to do the wood pellet one or the gas one.
- [86:58]
C
Wood pellet. Well, we use wood chips. The Ooni Karu 12 I believe. But yeah, we use wood chips for. It works well. Haven't asked it about war powers and ragtime is great. So what I brought is really apropos of nothing though. We were talking briefly before this about Graham Platner and the Maine election. And this is Maine related, so that's kind of why I brought. It was just summer. This is a. This is a hyper realistic. Like you could call it a pillow, you could call it a toy. I'm not gonna let the dog have it. I'm not gonna let him have this. Or grapes. But It's a mallard and I think it's very carefully done to look like this particular type of mallard. And the artist is a main artist and I could not figure out what her name was. I think it might be Kathleen Bird, but I think that might just be that this is a bird and that Google got confused. But it is from a shop in Rockland, Maine called Archipelago. So if anybody goes to Midcoast Maine this summer, which you should do, this is also an endorsement of going to Maine in the summer. You should check out Archipelago for sure.
- [88:11]
B
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful suggestion. I love regional suggestions. It's good. It's summertime. It's a great time to see visit the Maine coastline. Check it out.
- [88:19]
E
By the way, asked about the Eisenhower administration's war powers, that duck said
- [88:27]
C
that was a hyper realistic duck sound.
- [88:30]
B
It's well done, it's well done. Well folks, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to Visit us@lawfaremedia.org Our show page for links to best episodes for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on lawfair's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfair on social media. Wherever you socialize your media, be sure to leave a rating review or wherever you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits including Ragtime in Beta. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineering producer this week was Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan and we were once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests Mike, Molly and Ben, I am Scott R. Anders and we will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye. Ever been at the checkout wishing you had more cash to spend?
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