Author: Charlie Savage

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has disclosed another batch of internal shooting incident review reports in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the New York Times (pursued by the NYT’s lawyer David McCraw and the annual NYT First Amendment fellows, currently Tali Leinwand). The names of the people who were shot are redacted unless […]

When you write a book–missing a lot of time with your family and flirting with walking away from a job you love in order to get it done–it is sincerely gratifying to see it find an audience. The first wave of that, of course, is reviews. The flurry for Power Wars are subsiding, although Barron’s published a nice review earlier this month by the FIU […]

UPDATED Jan. 28, 2018 with Strava fitness map data visualization insight UPDATED Sept. 18, 2017 with updated Google Earth satellite images UPDATED Apr. 6, 2021 with archival Google Earth satellite images *** Today I read on TechCrunch that Google had figured out a way to make its satellite maps clearer, and checked Camp 7 of […]

With the help of the New York Times‘ legal guru, David McCraw, I have been using a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to assemble a massive public library of internal Federal Bureau of Investigation shooting incident reports dating back to 1993. We’ve just updated that library with about 700 pages of such reports […]

Several prominent law professors who were formerly members of the Obama national security legal team are debating the “dissent memo” signed by 51 mid-level career State Department diplomats about the administration’s current policy toward Syria. The diplomats think the United States should carry out airstrikes against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, not just […]

UPDATE: FBI/DOJ reverses course, releases uncensored version of 1st Orlando shooter 911 call (what about the others?) pic.twitter.com/WudWiLR9V3 — Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 20, 2016   The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a partially censored transcript of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s 911 call in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and […]

C-Span has now made available the video of last weekend’s panel discussion on executive power at the American Constitutional Society for Law and Policy annual convention, which I moderated. The all-star panel included Walter Dellinger, Marty Lederman, Sai Prakash, Neomi Rao, and Hina Shamsi. Here is the description from ACS: The Imperial Presidency? President George W. Bush […]

The text of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s version of the 2017 intelligence authorization bill has finally been made public. The panel is chaired by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina. The bill has been getting some attention because, as first reported by Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept, it has a provision that would expand (or, depending […]

This doesn’t have anything directly to do with national security (or does it?), but this is such a marker of the incoherence of the 2016 presidential race that I can’t resist sharing it. A friend just passed on the below e-mail, which the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out today to the mailing list of “Romney for President, Inc.” […]

Don Verrilli is stepping down after five years as the Solicitor General. News accounts of his departure, like this one by my colleague Eric Lichtblau, are understandably focusing on the big domestic law cases he argued before the Supreme Court – particularly the ones on Obamacare and same-sex marriage rights. But Verrilli’s impact on governance […]