There is some point at which the president’s conduct is so egregious that the House has no choice under the Constitution but to begin impeachment proceedings. The only question is where to draw the line.
A presidential candidate’s promising a law enforcement outcome against an individual should be unacceptable—even to those who fervently wish to see Donald Trump in the defendant’s chair in federal court.
A blockbuster article by David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in the New York Times reports U.S. Cyber Command operations to hold at-risk at least some aspects of the electric power grid in Russia. The story raises a host of legal and policy questions.
The former general counsel of the FBI writes that he has come to believe that the best approach for him regarding President Trump—the only approach—is love.
The Mueller report describes numerous instances in which President Trump may have obstructed justice. Here’s an attempt to synthesize how the special counsel analyzed the evidence.
Now that the U.S. government appears to have decided that no additional charges will be filed against Julian Assange, it’s worth asking why the indictment doesn’t include anything about WikiLeaks’s release of information on CIA hacking tools.
The Trump administration is asserting a new and extreme theory of executive privilege, under which the executive branch has absolute constitutional authority to protect and further the president’s constitutional authority to assert that privilege.
Reading the report carefully and writing my thoughts as I go.
Editor’s Note: Below are the executive summaries of the two volumes of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report. Volume I deals with links between Russia and the Trump campaign, while Volume II deals with potential obstruction of justice by President Trump. This article is available in audio format on the Lawfare Podcast: Special Edition:
Not all of the material in the dossier has been proven. But none has been disproven. As a raw intelligence document, the Steele dossier holds up well.
The Ninth Circuit says the transgender service ban is subject to heightened scrutiny, vacates the district court’s orders upholding the preliminary injunction and compelling discovery, and remands for reconsideration.
The New York Times’s report that the U.S. has deployed code inside Russia’s grid casts doubt on the premise that a demonstration of an offensive cyber capability will destroy its future value as an operational asset.
Views might deviate along two axes: the debate about whether all uses of force constitute armed attacks and the debate about what requirements must be met before a state acts in collective self-defense of another state.
Companies holding sensitive personal information on individuals have little incentive to improve their cybersecurity postures. Congress needs to act.
Changes in congressional rules and procedures in recent years mean that today’s judiciary committee may not need the same kind of special powers it was granted as part of previous impeachment inquiries.
The Senate has a responsibility to do so—but not an express constitutional obligation. And in a time of disregard for established institutional practice and norms, the current leadership of the Senate could choose to abrogate them once more.
It's getting ugly in the Persian Gulf: Iran allegedly attacks two oil tankers. It announces that it's going to violate the JCPOA, the so-called Iran nuclear agreement. There's talk of military strikes. Europe is edgy, and the Secretary of State is on Sunday talk shows being edgier still.
Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney and Scott R. Anderson to talk it all through. They talked about whether the AUMF covers Iran, why Iran is doing this stuff, whether the Trump administration brought this all on itself, and where it's all going from here.
The United States needs to take the politics of the periphery more seriously if it wants to address radicalization abroad.
Two different groups of protesters have brought civil suits against Turkey in response to violence by Turkish security officials outside the ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. They have a surprisingly strong, if unconvincing, argument.
By 2021, more than half of the houses in the country will be smart homes. While smart home appliances bring benefits, there is a serious risk: the potential use of smart home devices by one person to monitor and harass another person.