Trump political appointee Michael Ellis has been named to an important career position. Congress should investigate the suspicious circumstances of the selection, and the Biden transition should think carefully about what to do on Jan. 20.
By storming the Capitol and disrupting the electoral-count certification, yesterday’s mob likely violated many federal criminal laws, including against seditious conspiracy.
On Sept.
A response to Judge Michael Luttig.
Though the facts of precisely what happened at the Capitol are still coming to light, it seems likely that prosecutors could file felony murder charges against at least some of the rioters.
A database of links to charging documents related to the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
The investigation as it developed should not have been conducted by a federal prosecutor, and Attorney General Barr’s public commentary has seriously (and somewhat mysteriously) damaged the credibility of whatever Durham uncovers.
William Barr has played a dirty trick on his successor—one that will put the next attorney general in a genuine bind.
Highlights from an overview of the NSA’s new document explaining the rules that govern the collection of signals intelligence.
The vote on whether to grant General Austin a waiver is a vote on whether the waiver will be a real constraint in the future.
The case against the constitutionality of self-pardons is strong. Beyond barring the president from pardoning himself, what else could Congress do?
How “imposing costs on our adversaries” has become the “Brexit means Brexit” of cyberspace
An updated tally of Donald Trump’s grants of clemency shows how extensively the president circumvented the normal pardon process to serve his personal and political goals and whims.
The NDAA created new programs for combating white supremacy and domestic terrorism, but it omits two important proposals included in earlier versions of the bill. The Biden administration should consider adopting both into its security strategy.
There appears to be some confusion surrounding the question of whether a president can pardon himself. There are many judgments to be drawn from the familiar forms of legal argument—history, text, structure, prudence, doctrine and ethos—all of which cohere around the conclusion that such a pardon is not constitutionally permissible, a conclusion also reached by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). These arguments are discussed in more detail in “Impeachment: A Handbook,” by Charles L. Black, Jr. and Philip Bobbitt, forthcoming from Yale Press in September.
The new agreement represents progress between Baghdad and Erbil, but will need revision to address the concerns of Yazidis and others in the disputed territories.
An attempt to sketch out the justification for a commission as well as the mandate, major areas of inquiry and legislative language that are needed to guide this effort.
If President Trump wants to follow through on his threats to deploy the military around the country, he may have to push one of America’s oldest emergency laws to its limits.
On Dec. 9, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The case may determine Congress’s ability to limit the president’s removal power.
President-elect Biden is expected to initiate the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement on Inauguration Day. But the hard part will be coming up with a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time.