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Yesterday, the NYT and I filed a new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking communications in January 2017 between the Trump team (transition team, then post-inaugural White House) and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about the legality of proposed executive orders and executive actions, including its blessing of the first travel ban order and […]

Edward Jay Epstein wrote a second letter to the New York Review of Books and I wrote another response. Here they are. (Here’s my original review and here’s his first letter and my first response.)  

My Denver-based colleague Julie Turkewitz and I have been taking a look at the relationship between Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court nominee, and Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz. The New York Times published it tonight and it will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. One thing the article deals with briefly is the question of whether Gorsuch will recuse himself […]

Last night, President Trump announced nominees for two key posts on the national security interagency lawyers group: John J. Sullivan of Mayer Brown to be general counsel of the Department of Defense and Courtney Simmons Elwood of Kellogg Hansen to be general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency. This post is about the latter. Elwood was a […]

Late yesterday, Judge J. Paul Oetken of the Southern District of New York handed down an important ruling in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the Times and I have been pursuing over memos about the criminal investigation into the C.I.A. torture program. The memos were written by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham, who oversaw the […]

The last iteration of the Obama administration’s ambivalent  “look forward not back” attitude toward the defunct Bush-era CIA torture program — banning it, but not investigating what happened — was the Obama Justice Department’s resistance to an effort to get a copy of the full, still-classified Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report about that program […]

Today the NYT published a deep-dive I wrote about why Breezewood – a notorious gap in the interstate highway system at the intersection of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 70 that is familiar to the millions of people who drive between the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest each year – exists and has never been fixed. […]

Eight years ago, this AP pool photo was taken at Guantanamo Bay’s base headquarters building, and it became iconic, showing up in a million blog posts: This weekend the base public affairs staff (with encouragement first from my friend Carol Rosenberg, it turns out, and then also from me) took and released this one:

Late last evening, in the waning hours of Obama administration control of the national security state, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report about counterterrorism drone strikes and other bombings away from “areas of active hostilities” for 2016. It said there were 53 such airstrikes, and they killed between 431 and 441 […]

The New York Review of Books asked me to review Edward Jay Epstein’s book about Edward Snowden, “How America Lost Its Secrets,” and the essay I wrote extended to the Oliver Stone biopic. Spoiler: I’m not a big fan of either. The essay is now available online. Last year I also wrote a NYRB essay […]