Category: Uncategorized

I live-blogged on Twitter the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on closing Guantanamo today. The biggest takeaway was what didn’t happen: the Biden administration didn’t send any government witness, in keeping with its low-key (and not particularly active) approach to its nominal policy goal of closing the prison. Although the revitalized Periodic Review Board has been […]

With the New York Times, I have filed a new lawsuit against the United States Central Command seeking public disclosure of surveillance footage related to the tragically botched Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul. Specifically, the lawsuit — filed under the Freedom of Information Act — seeks aerial footage starting five minutes before the drone […]

I posted the below thread in response to this tweet from Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) promoting a blog post that mainly critiqued an article that has gotten supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange excited. Her post included an aside about “propaganda” from “Pulitzer Prize winning NYT reporters” that turned out to link to this June 16 […]

Here is a short guide to the complex issue of what kinds of communications-related metadata that prosecutors could have seized from Apple with grand jury subpoenas, including about Schiff, Swalwell and McGahn: /1 These are some types of metadata that can be subpoenaed: when one used apps like Facetime & iMessage, & one’s IP addresses […]

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 […]