Latest in Politics & National Security
From “forever wars” to cyber operations, today’s national security challenges are proving vexingly complex for both Democrats and Republicans. Boosting budgets and restructuring security agencies has not helped surmount the challenges. But there’s one thing that could: improving gender diversity in leadership teams.
In July 2017, we began a polling project to measure public confidence in government institutions on national security matters on an ongoing basis. This post provides our data for the month of May 2019—and includes previously unpublished data for the previous two months as well.
In 1957, Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in resolving the Suez Crisis. Pearson was the first to push for the idea of a large-scale peacekeeping mission, and Canadians have since celebrated Pearson as the father of peacekeeping. The world today is radically different than the one Pearson inhabited—but his exploits demonstrate that Canadians have long charted their own solutions to global security issues, even while working closely alongside the United States and within a multilateral framework.
The attorney general has now directed John Durham, the U.S.
With a purge of the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, President Trump seems poised to toughen U.S.
March 21 to March 22, just prior to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s delivery of his report on the Russia investigation to Attorney General William Barr, we conducted a nationwide survey asking respondents a series of questions regarding Mueller’s investigation. From March 26 to March 28, after the release of Barr’s letter with his top-line summary of the investigation’s conclusions, we conducted another nationwide survey asking respondents the same series of questions to gauge how the report’s release and subsequent media coverage affected the public’s opinion of the investigation.
There is a tendency to think of impeachable offenses as like landmines. If the president accidentally or purposefully steps on one, then it explodes and he must suffer the consequences. Constitutional lawyers might find this line of thinking particularly attractive because it would allow them to get to work on identifying a finite set of actions as high crimes and misdemeanors and to set Congress about the business of determining whether the president has actually committed such offenses.
Do you like watching the clerk of a congressional committee call the roll over and over again? Then you might want to tune in to Wednesday’s appearance by Michael Cohen before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
On Feb. 5, President Trump gave his third address to Congress. Below are the excerpts most relevant to Lawfare readers, organized by topic, in the order in which they were mentioned. A full transcript is available here.
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On investigations of the president and associates:
With the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives sporting an aggressive oversight agenda on national security and foreign policy issues, it’s only a matter of time before a raft of congressional subpoenas are fired off from Capitol Hill. Also only a matter of time is resistance to those subpoenas based on the assertion of executive privilege by the Trump administration.