Author: Charlie Savage

Fifty years ago next month, the NYT began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a seminal moment in the history of the Vietnam War and in leaks of Top Secret information. Its source, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure. /1 Ellsberg also copied a large amount of material about planning for nuclear war, intending to release […]

After neglecting this website for awhile, a recent technical mishap required me to pay attention to it again to fix it (with help once again from my friend John Musser of Digerati Designs). That’s a good opportunity to take note of two book-review essays I wrote as a freelancer for publications other than The New […]

In service of his schtick, @ggreenwald is again putting forward a series of bad-faith misrepresentations re the CIA Russian bounty assessment and the NYT reporting on it. I’m going to dissect various ways he is demonstrably gaslighting, after which I’ll ignore him. /1 At a hearing last year, various lawmakers brought up the recently disclosed […]

In my 2007 book, “Takeover,” I included a quote from a speech by Justice Antonin Scalia about his time as a senior Justice Department official in the Ford administration and during the Church Committee investigation. (Scalia was then the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.) I recently had a chance to listen […]

Over the course of about 15 months in 2019-20, I developed a special side project: a deep look at a political and culture-war fight that broke out in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, last year, over creating a new honor for the town’s namesake, who conquered the Native American tribes in the Midwest and […]

A few days ago, I wrote a piece analyzing Attorney General Bill Barr’s Federalist Society speech on his maximalist view of executive power, which I, argued, had more to do with Ronald Reagan’s 1980s than George Washington’s 1780s. I included a cautionary quotation from an internal 1986 Justice Department manifesto on separation of powers issues […]

It was once rare for Congress to go to court. But the number of cases House Democrats are now litigating is historically unprecedented — a Trump-era aberration that is accelerating a larger shift in governance whose seeds predate Trump. w/ @npfandos The House v. Trump: Stymied Lawmakers Increasingly Battle in the Courts It’s routine, of […]

I think some gotcha takes are missing the mark re Barr’s comments about the “hysterical” media insinuating that the Trump admin was thinking about adding the citizenship question to the Census by executive fiat. There is something here worth scrutinizing, but it’s different. /1 People are citing Barr saying Monday, after being asked about an […]

Today, in a victory against secret law, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has unsealed and re-issued a significant ruling it issued in May 2018 in the case of Doe v. Mattis, regarding an American citizen who was held without trial in American military custody for over a year as a suspected […]

On Friday, I emailed numerous presidential primary campaigns an invitation to participate in a New York Times survey project on executive power. Our intent is to publish the full answers of each participating candidate, alongside notations indicating which others were unwilling or unable to answer the questions. We gave the campaigns a one-month deadline of […]