Author: Charlie Savage

The New York Times has published the first review of Power Wars. They commissioned James Mann, a non-NYT staffer and the author of Rise of the Vulcans and The Obamians, to write it to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Mann’s review is generally very positive, and he engages thoughtfully with some of […]

Read it here in the New York Times.

We are six days out from the publication of “Power Wars,” an investigative history of the Obama administration’s national-security legal policymaking. It goes behind the scenes to explore the space between these two Obama quotes in its epigraph:

A Federal District Court judge today threw out the ACLU-led challenge to the NSA’s warrantless upstream surveillance of one-end-foreign Internet communications under the FISA Amendments Act, ruling that the plaintiffs, including Wikimedia Foundation, had not established standing. The case touched on an article that I wrote in August 2013, early in the post-Snowden leak era, […]

Here is the relevant part of his veto message to Congress.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has issued what appears to be a significant ruling in the ongoing NYT/ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for legal memos related to targeted killings — but we can’t see it yet. The court has made certain redactions in its opinion, and the government now has 30 days […]

It’s a team effort to bring national security issues to light. Here are some non-NYT colleagues I thank in Power Wars:  

It bothers me to read, in your standard Bob Woodward style insider book or personal memoirs by retired officials, dialogue from private conversations that has quotation marks around it. To me, quotation marks are for verbatim comments. In reporting out behind-the-scenes stuff, we journalists can reconstruct approximate dialogue drawn from people’s memories (ideally, cross-referencing multiple […]