Ben Wittes: Talk About America in Decline

Glad to welcome back to the show editor and chief of law fair.

Senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. That's very serious work. His sub stack is dog shirt daily. He is a little less serious. He is in a what?

What shirt are you in? He's been with us. Is that a dog? It is. It's a kind of cubist dog shirt.

A cubist dog shirt. Where does that look like a castle? Okay.

Where does one acquire a shirt like that?

Well, the thing is if you buy enough dog shirts, then you get advertised to on Instagram whenever somebody releases a dog shirt in the world. The speed with which I get notified is really impressive. There's a single lady in Bangladesh who just has your number. That's right.

If I just, if I just print a new dog shirt, this one gentleman in America is short of buy it. That's correct. And she's right. I'm happy about that for you.

I'm happy about that for you. I'm happy about that for you.

“I'm going to start with this because this is a real news story that I think very”

much encapsulates where we are at and I think that many people wouldn't have believed. What I said, I had TDS if I told you this was happening, you know, a couple of years ago. The president of the United States had to take two Air Force ones to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. That is because the nation of Qatar gifted him his preferred Air Force one and he wanted

to ride on that fancy one. And simultaneous to that, he started a stupid war in Iran that has created some lack of safety in the region. And so he defy the old Air Force one there to get him out of Ankara, Turkey safely. And the new Air Force one and the new Air Force one, I guess, does not have the anti-aircraft

safety tools that the president would want. But it's fancy, it's got, as the president said, it's got luxury like no one has ever seen before. Really? That's what he said. It was a handy down from the nation of Qatar.

That's right. That's kind of like a minor, Sharia law, Petra State. That's right. But it's good on the, you know, bling.

“And I always thought, I think I wrote a column about this at the time that the plane was”

accepted that, you know, I objected to this deal because the president was getting a used second-hand plane. And I thought there was something genuinely weird about that. Look at the hand me down plane. I got from the Amir of Qatar.

Yeah. I mean, talk about American decline and decline being a choice. And this is what kind of broke the country we are now. We're taking hand me down planes. And then even still you and me, the taxpayer had to pay hundreds of millions of

dollars to retrofit the hand me down plane. To make it not usable to get the president to and from on. Correct. And then you and I, then also had to pay for both planes to fly to Turkey. It's a truly proposed situation.

The, the administration wouldn't admit this is what happened. They said that they brought the two planes because they wanted to show off the new one. To our troops stationed in Europe for now. Trump's also threatening to take them out of Europe. That is an obvious lie based on the fact that the president didn't fly on his preferred plane.

“Look, I think, you know, this is one of the things Trump lies about everything all the time.”

Accept his emotional state about which he is incapable of being dishonest. Because he just kind of wears it on his sleeve. And he has been nothing but honest about this plane, which is they gave me a really cool plane. And I want to use it.

And I'm going to keep it. And there's been nothing but transparency about that. And as a result, everybody kind of looks and says, well, there's not that much to see here. And the point that you just made, which is that Air Force One is not usable to get the president to and from safely. A NATO summit.

Somehow gets lost in it. But, you know, that is the reality of modern America. And by the way, it kind of metaphor or Trump's larger presence at the NATO summit, which, you know,

the New York Times ran a long story about, which I think is basically pretty accurate about

And just this kind of Trump show and attacking our allies.

And the other is the actual NATO summit where, you know, European NATO allies are kind of getting down to business, doing a lot of work planning for a post-America security environment.

“And, you know, what is a better symbol of this than the president flying in on a cuttory bling jet that he can't safely fly out on?”

Right, I mean, he's, and talking about Greenland, like acquiring Greenland on the way.

Liberty 24 is changing call sign. Liberty 24 is now Air Force One.

Get off my, I'm just going to quote Harrison Ford. Get off my plane. Anyway, I love Air Force One. Great movie. Anyway, to your point about what was happening in the actual meeting.

“I'm going to talk to you about Ukraine stuff, which we like to chat about.”

Russia's attacks on civilians continue earlier this week as we discussed. They were firing missiles at residential districts in Kiev, 27 people died for last night in Odessa. Trump and Zelensky met and, you know, it's just classic Trump stuff. That's kind of the weird exchange about whether you'd go to Moscow, Trump wanted to get him to Moscow. And then Zelensky kind of met a joke about how, well, you might not be safe in Moscow because of Ukrainian.

A lot of Ukrainian drones there.

“And I guess the, the positive item that came out of this is that Trump said the US will give Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptor missiles is a little bit of a, you know,”

Johnny, come lately situation. It's going to take a long time to produce these missiles. We're running out of Patriots because of our stupid war in Iran. But at least any sign that Trump is not going to actively be helping Russia, I guess, is a plus. Yeah, so there's three things going on here and they're related. And it is largely a good news picture, but it is a good news picture that produces a lot of collateral bad news. So the underlying good news is that the Ukrainians are making significant progress at the military front.

And that is not currently being seen in the lines moving, but it is being seen in the degree of degradation of the Russian economy and the degree of degradation of the Russian military presence, particularly in Crimea. And so, you know, you can't get 1100 people killed or wounded a month as the Russians are doing at the front and not be able to replace them and continue military progress. And so the Ukrainians have really done a good job in arresting and to some degree reversing the Russian military gains.

This has produced panic in Russian society, where it's hard to get a gallon of gasoline in a lot of areas now.

And where, you know, the capacity to continue the military campaign has really been eroded and that's an incredible accomplishment.

And the Russian response to it is to bombard cities because that is something that is easy to do and it kills a lot of people and it demoralizes people or at least they hope it does. And so, this is concurrent with a third development, which you just alluded to, which is that the Ukrainians have run out of Patreon interceptors and they're super low on other interceptors and so their air defenses against particularly ballistic missiles, but also some drones are less good than they were a few months ago.

And the result of that is that you have ballistic slamming into apartment buildings and killing a lot of people and the last week in Kiev has been awful. And it's a direct result of the progress that the Ukrainians have had both at the front and in their medium and long range missile strikes into Russia. So, this has put a real premium on the question of whether they can get or make new interceptors and that has happened at exactly the moment where, as you also pointed out, Trump has largely depleted our supply of patriots and put us actually in a really unfortunate military preparedness situation, these are the our own missile defense.

And so, the solution that the Ukrainians proposed and to Trump's credit, he seems to have accepted is that they want to make their own.

It is a good solution. The Ukrainians have an increasingly robust military industrial complex that's capable of acting very quickly in a way that the Western and Eastern European and American defense bases are not for a variety of reasons.

“So, it's a good outcome, what did it happen a long time ago and what did it could be done even faster than it's going to be done, but I think it is a good outcome of this meeting between Zelensky and Trump.”

I do think there's a relationship also as you're saying kind of in Trump's brain between all of the what's happening in the actual battle and his willingness to go along, I mean, Trump has a baby brain.

He likes to see things go boom, and his hey, we're going to swan rodeos very impressed by the page or attacks.

It seems like they've been able to impress Trump. It's like, oh, look at the Ukrainian technology, look at how successful they are, look at how bad the Russia economy is, Russia economy is getting very sad and like that has an impact on the way he sees things. I think that's right and I think he also does not ever want to be on the side of the loser and when it looked like Ukraine was going to get run over in three days, he was low to criticize the invasion and when it looked like it was a grinding stalemate, he would just say he wanted the word a stop. He wouldn't say who he wanted to prevail. And when it looked like Russia was grinding away and eroding the Ukrainian lines over time, you know, he would say you have no cards, right?

And they eventually Ukraine is going to lose and now that it looks different from that and whether it looks like eventually Ukraine is going to win or whether it looks like Russia's collapsing or whether it looks like it's going to be a stalemate on terms more favorable to Ukraine. And I leave it to military analysts to make that prediction. I try not to do predictions, but it doesn't look like we're heading toward an inevitable grinding Ukrainian loss. And I think his interest in being on the side of the plucky underdog that's now a little bit on top is much higher.

And you see that in others, Laura Lumer has conspicuously switched sides and now declares herself pro Ukraine.

“She might just be on the take, but you know, whatever it takes, like I think there are a lot of people who thought was going to win because they believe evil is cool, but evil when it's losing like nobody's pro victor or bond.”

Well, Chris Rufel trying to think pneumonia is a couple of people, but not too many. I do have some bad news for Trump. Things seem to be looking worse and worse for the Nobel Peace Prize that he wanted. I need to get the FIFA Peace Prize, but just this week, maybe there's other bombings happening that I'm not monitoring, but Ukraine has been bombed. Levenants have been bombed, Gaza has been bombed, Bahrain and Kuwait have been bombed. And did I mention Iran yet? Iran has been bombed.

So let's always darkest before the dawn.

We're solving of all the wars. The situation in Iran, we launch strikes for a second day. We being the U.S., I don't know if everybody's written for this listening. At 90 Iranian military targets, Iran said carried out coordinated missile and drone strikes in response. As mentioned, hitting Kuwait and Bahrain bases, they threatened other bases. Getting traffic is once more come to a halt in the straight cutter is pausing efforts to rapidly revive production at the world. So I just look at the financial gas facilities there worried that that's going to get hit again too soon.

So I mean, we've really kind of groundhogged the situation in Iran and we're back to where we were six weeks ago. Which is exactly what you would have predicted six weeks ago.

“And I think on this show repeatedly, you did predict I'm about three weeks behind in my podcast listening chronically.”

So but like, did you ever doubt? That's going to fun for you.

Oh, I'm always about two three weeks behind.

And so I've ever ever really bad miss.

You know, the thing is, these calls have been so easy like listening to JVL crow about how he got the the memorandum of understanding exactly right.

Who didn't get that right? You know, like, but I do like think that the fact that this was not going to be a stable climb down was deeply knowable and known by like nobody was fooled and thought, "Ah, peace in our time. There's no, there was no Neville Chamberlain here." I mean, there was a Neville Chamberlain here, but anyway, that's me either here and over there.

“Well, he tried to be a Neville Chamberlain, but he didn't declare Neville Chamberlain got six months out of it before Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia trump got six weeks, right?”

There was never any doubt in any reasonable person's mind that this wasn't going to lead to a stable deescalation.

And we're facing now a long-term standoff over the navigation rights in the streets of Hormos and Lebanon. And what the hell Israel's obligations with respect to his Bala are if anything. And whether we are going to continue bribing the Iranians with their own frozen assets or not.

“And I think that's going to take months or years to resolve in a stable direction and I don't care what pieces of paper people sign in Switzerland in the meantime.”

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“I've been spilled about the grand platinum situation this week and so I'm not doing that on this podcast we've covered up one of them has been spilled by me. Here's the thing though that I have been saying since this war started.”

I do think that the democrats could steal one thing from the way that platinum talked about the war and that is I think this is a good moment for a populist railing against the waste of our resources overseas and at home and you know sometimes this is kind of a hackney bumper sticker you know where you know our money is being spent on bombs that should be spent on hospitals and there's like varying degrees of truth to that and you know sometimes that argument is is used in bad faith but like it's really apt right now.

I was just watching the you know the US put out the some propaganda videos of all the things that we blew up yesterday and all I could see what I was looking at it is like what what. Like why are we spending this money and so much money is being wasted right now on bombs on material in and around in the middle east of the reporting from people who are experts on this indicate that we're also running low on the types of things that we need if a real war did. So I'm going to put that up in the next year and like all of this waste is happening at a moment when people at home are concerned about.

Prices and costs and it just it feels extremely frivolous and they are totally unable to not see anything even bordering on a rationale for like this type of commitment of resources from our country.

If you have to answer the question what did you accomplish with reference to things you blew up rather than strategic objectives.

“You've wasted money right what did you accomplish well we obliterated the irony and navy.”

And the States of Formus are closed oil traffic right if you can't answer the question. Without reference to the things you destroyed then you actually haven't accomplished anything because the goal unless you're a child like Pete Heggseth.

The goal is never to make things go boom right.

Closer that's didn't say politics is the continuation of war by other means he said the opposite right the goal is to achieve a political objective and you're using violence to achieve a political objective now you can measure the value of the political objective in terms of dollars.

“We prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon if we did right how do you compare that to the value of 300 hospitals but you can't compare we blew up this stuff.”

We obliterated this stuff the dollar value of that is always negative and like the amazing thing about this war is that they've never even tried.

We are particularly what the non obliteration value of it is what are we trying to do and now the irony is that what we're trying to do is to get back to something like the steady state that we had before the war that's called strategic failure. Something worse than that it's like great it's so great so we just you know blew up tens of millions more of my money in the hopes that we can get back to where we were before the war started but plus Iran gets an environmental fee. And the straightest quite as open as it was it's like okay and our allies are more upset with us just across the board it's just been an utter strategic failure. Sometimes I just I do feel like a fair critique of the establishment Democrats is like when they're talking about this it's very it's sort of in the in the language of diplomacy and and Washington and military terms and academic terms and and a lot of times the right message to this is.

Stop spending our fucking money on these bombs right or if you can't answer Bernie Sanders or Graham Platner with the it was worth it because we accomplished this it was worth it because we kicked. kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait right it was worth it because we stopped a genocide in cuts of all it was worth it because we did something right we accomplished something and that was worth the expenditure of money if you can't say that. They're right. Right they're very right in here in this case and maybe you should talk like. I get it's true that they're cutting funding for rural hospitals and we're just like recklessly bombing random shit in Iran and killing people right and they're they're it's not just rural hospitals that they're cutting funding for their cutting patriot interceptors available to.

Defend Kiev they're cutting all kinds of weapons we would need to defend Taiwan it's military objectives that we are undermining as well as rural hospitals.

“I will give the Graham Platters and Bernie Sanders is of the world the comparison to domestic priorities but I also want to give the neocons the comparison for other military priorities because those are important to.”

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It's like make a wish FBI director news story from kind of leaning over to MS now FBI director cash betell out we've covered some of this but it's kind of these capturing even more and and now even.

This is a given center of grassley is kind of wanting to learn a little bit more about what has been covered you're a Republican FBI director and you're losing truck grassly you know you got a problem yeah among the perks helicopter tours jet ski excursions.

“I'm a center will summer's uncovering the many plane trips to go pick up his dealest country music singing girlfriend from her concerts opening up at amateur wrestling matches etc.”

I don't know you've got you know relationships and the bureau I feel like he's catching a little bit out of the news like what's what's the state of play over there.

The state of play is that he seems to be completely unashamed by petty you could say it's corruption but what it really is is you know like stealing the dinner silverware at the restaurants you go to right it's. And stuff that you simply can't imagine Chris Ray or Jim Komi or Bob Butler doing and it's unabashed except that they then sort of deny it and I have no explanation other than like petty theory why they think this is a good idea for the FBI director to do.

“It does seem like even Chuck Grassley is a little irritated with it and you know you'd think that after he goes along the beer video incident.”

Got under Trump's skin that cash might be a little bit more careful but he doesn't seem to be. I'm not sure what else to say about it. Yeah the other thing came across my radar about the cash just maybe chuckle about all this was. The Tyler Robinson preliminary hearings is underway for his trial and then has Margaret Charlie Kirk allegedly and maybe this was known already but you know I've been kind of trying to monitor the case I'm mostly monitoring the conspiracy theories about the case that you're seeing on the right.

“But I don't know if I realize it's still the hearing where they showed the video of it like Tyler Robinson himself literally turned himself in. Yes, I thought that the dad had done that and he like he walked in.”

And like they have the video of him like kind of walking into the building to turn himself in and then kind of pacing around a room there they have kind of the law and order camera that you can see that you see in the TV shows of the suspect alone in the room. And like cash didn't even do that. It's a kind of funny embarrassment for cash. So like all of the news about him is about his jet ski trips and his corruption and his competence and the challenge coins that he hands out. And in like the one case you think you care the most about like he totally botched it on the front end and like the the suspect ends up just turning himself in. There is no way to run the FBI in the fashion that he has run it which is involved decimating the.

Senior and even middle management of people who have served honorably and that the the purge has been dramatic.

And there's no way to do that without having significant operational consequences most of those operational consequences are and will remain invisible because they just take the form of crimes that go unsolved or take much longer to solve. And then how do you know that a crime that goes unsolved would have been solved under the previous iterations of FBI leadership or how do you know that one that took six months may have taken three and a half months right. And so most of it is completely invisible, but there are these things that are not invisible and one of them is the behavior of the director who you know be clowns himself in all kinds of really ass and I in ways and also behaves in ways in private that become public because they so discussed the people in the bureau that you know people talk about it and there's a lot of that.

There are these things that are super visible but the larger impact is invisible and just is you know the justice system at the investigative level working less well than it should.

Well and that's why the visible thing about the robins things so embarrassing and it's like you have cash putting on his costume and not going on the plane to get some of his costume and him tweeting the wrong suspect out you know this is just stuff that never would have happened.

“And you saw the same thing with John Bolton the raid on John Bolton's house that that was announced in the New York post the moment it was happening and then.”

Patel tweets FBI agents on mission no one's above the law I have known FBI directors personally during their times as FBI directors this isn't the way the institution is supposed to function and it isn't.

The public role of the FBI director to be an influencer much less a you know an influencer with merch.

“I'm going to go through some of the other law fair stuff and I guess we'll start with that maybe an FBI director you may have known when he is an office.”

And then I'm going to end to our stuff what the latest is with Komi I saw you guys were covering Brandon has a civil suit against the DOJ I haven't talked about that at all at the pod and just give us a little rundown of of the latest on the revenge tour. I'm going to start with Brennan because there's real news in it which is that Brennan and his lawyers have you know gotten fed up with this. You know, I'm going to talk about what exactly so they filed a lawsuit that is basically a demand for document preservation on the theory that any indictment that would precede against Brennan would be a vindictive prosecution.

The evidence of that has to exist and will be destroyed or maybe destroyed absent some requirement that the material be preserved and so I think this serves two functions one is maybe a bit of a hail Mary that you could get a judicial order to preserve all kinds of material pre indictment. Is just a warning a shot across the bow of the prosecutors who were thinking about this case that you know we're going to take your pants down if you bring it and this is what we can do without seeing any other records.

I think there's also an effort to you know get this thing in court in the district of Columbia where there's a reasonable bench and the effort to engineer on the part of the justice department to engineer grand jury investigations of this stuff in other jurisdictions anywhere but Washington right anywhere but northern Virginia where there's you know a good bench and a saying jury pool. This is an effort to force the DC bench to take a look at that stuff.

First of all, just for the record, I am not in touch with Jim Komi these days for reasons.

If not being in touch with Jim the state of the case is are the following the first one is on appeal this was the one for allegedly lying to Congress that was brought by Lindsay haligan who was ruled to be illegally appointed and both the case against Komi and the case against Latisha James were thrown out on that basis. That is on appeal by the government to the fourth circuit court of appeals.

“I believe they are currently working on scheduling oral argument which will be sometime in September or October.”

The case which is the you know very serious not ginned up by of course C-shell's case in North Carolina now has a briefing schedule the motions to dismiss are do I believe in an August and the briefing will finish in September there's an arrangement and then presumably one of those motions will be the.

There basically hasn't been a lot of movement in this case these cases since the time of the C-shell's indictment like the AYFKMM you know that's nice you know this is a new kind of motion and it includes you know the you maliciously tore up paint from the reflecting pool it includes the you 85 year old woman assaulted or the sandwich guy assaulted and I say.

“I think it's it's the motion to dismiss because are you fucking kidding me yeah with a poop emoji maybe.”

Yeah, I want to also some of the other law fair stuff you guys have a series on military at the ballot box.

Yes, this was kind of a big story a couple months ago because like Bannon was calling for this and Trump was doing the Trump thing where he's like well maybe we'll do it if we need to you know I'd some level like from a political standpoint I have been kind of on the side of.

“I'd like to see a try it a little bit because I do think that there's a backlash a lot of times in these cases not all the time sometimes voter suppression works and and it should be taken very seriously and I think it's important that they're.”

The political standpoint it can be of an effective actual political tool to fuck over the people that are that are doing at hand ablinks and motivates people to vote no actions they might not have been motivated vote in that said just as a rule of law matter it's serious and you guys like took it seriously and so just kind of wondering how that shook out. So this is a series by my colleagues Natalie Orpett and Lauren Voss and Molly Roberts and you have the psychology of the series exactly right which is hey it's a political people's job to use this as a motivating factor to get people to vote and to get people serious about the idea of.

Protecting their right to vote and getting people energized it is our job to take it seriously as a rule of law matter and so we did or my colleagues did and they did a two part series the first part of which is about the actual legal impediments to.

deploying the military and connection with elections which are extensive and turn out to involve a blink in era statutes that.

make it a criminal violation to put troops use troops to control access to the polls and a variety of other factors that reinforce the idea that military forces should not be playing a role in our elections so that's sort of part one is laying out the protective umbrella that exists. part two is laying out the holes in the fabric and the fact that you know you can get around a lot of things with the national guard and you can declare national emergencies and there are a variety of ways that the president if he's.

reasonably creative or has people around him who are reasonably creative and really push on the courts.

“to be excited just to say like go ahead and freaking try it is not our job to point out the go ahead and freaking try being that's you know the share along well to Miller job and I think both are important.”

I have kind of a little running series I was on Mark Elias show a little bit ago and we're on to call together often and I need to get him back on there is that push and pull a lot and trying to navigate the stuff because like. also it's hard to predict what will actually work and what won't work and it's important to challenge things and like we all don't have a crystal ball and also if you do intense voter suppression in one area and it works and it motivates people to vote.

and there in other areas is that success and for whom right and so like you know I think it is a really interesting question whether voter suppression essentially always backfires.

But that's a political science and political motivation question and obviously didn't backfire in the Jim Crow South for example I'm like you know like you're extremely likely there's a level at which you can do it that doesn't backfire and you know our.

I'm going to pick your brain on the spring court rulings are having on your vacation we're going to close with your vacation so in here about that too but particularly the one about the president's ability to fire people at these independent agencies with the one weird exception of the Fed.

“Because of something something reasons and it was around for a while and reasons reasons what I'm been interested in particularly the implications I would you know as important as the FTC is like for some of these other.”

Functions of the federal government that are used for accountability particularly independent councils particularly inspectors general obviously Trump's already fired a bunch of instructors general so anyway I'm kind of I'm curious that your macro view on the ruling and also in particular.

Those offices that weren't addressed as directly long before the FTC and the independent agencies were toast with respect to the president's ability to fire people who allegedly had.

Some job security the inspectors general were toast before that and the special council was toast from 2000 and from 2000 when the independent council law expired and you know the president could have fired Bob Mueller. He wanted or no reason at all and he chose not to and you know would have had to direct the attorney general or the deputy attorney general to do it but it was always an option right and it was something that he was contemplated and didn't do only for political reasons.

So the real question that these cases raise is not about inspectors general or a senior level people the real question is about junior level.

“The traditional way of understanding the president's appointment power and therefore his firing power is that every principal officer. If you run an agency if you're political appointee if you have Senate confirmation right you have to be.”

Fireable by the president but below a certain level what are called inferior officers congress has a lot of authority to create other appointment mechanisms for them so for example. The US attorney can be appointed by the court in the local jurisdiction under certain circumstances the civil service can have protection against firing without cause that you could never give to an agency head. This opinion is careful not to prejudge the question of whether all these civil service protections are actually vapor and I think that's the risk and so to go back to a different comi.

Marine comi was fired as a as you know jelaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's prosecutor Epstein was already dead but she was fired because literally the paper works at because article two right which is the dog pissing and licking his balls because I can. So the question this case raises is is that legit if congress can't make a forecaused protection or commissioner slaughter can it still make one for marine comi now there is a philosophical and constitutional answer to that question which lives in the nature of the appointment's clause and the inferior versus principal officer distinction.

“The fact that the court didn't say that worries me so I think we are going to see the question of how far down the civil service chain.”

Have there been any interesting rulings on that front from like the original doge firings and you know kind of at this so all of that stuff is in litigation and the question of.

To they have to go to the merit systems protection board first and can the marital you know like there's a lot of procedural nonsense that we're going to have to work through.

And I think one of the things like we'll find out in twenty twenty nine correct like actually they did have protections it's fine probably and then in twenty thirty two. And barren trump is a president will find out again that well now actually we're not not quite as not quite as sure it turns out they can be fired we looked at the subgloss of the appointments. We're going to find out eventually that all a huge amount of this firing was illegal that's what I think we're going to find out eventually but I believe that.

I think I know how.

The chief justice and Amy Coney Barrett will think about that case and maybe Brett Kevin or two but I don't know that I'm right right and and you know I have long since.

Developed the humility to know that my instincts about where conservative justices are going to get end up is not perfect are you more worried about that now than you would have been before this ruling with the independent.

“Yeah, yes because I think it would have been so easy for John Roberts in that opinion to include the sentence and of course the terms of service of inferior officers is regulable by Congress right that sentence would have cost him nothing to include.”

And instead he just said we're not commenting on that in that in this case we leave for another day right and that could be simply a desire to keep more justices in the opinion. Because they don't all agree about that or it could be reflecting his own desire to see that case come up so that he can rule in a different direction. As far as law fair business is concerned I was I was multitasking and listening to a law fair live stream and you know sometimes you guys get down into the weeds in areas that you know those of us that.

“You had a three point three GPA and undergrad and never went on to law school in a starts to get a little so it's a little peanuts currency for me.”

But they're they're always interesting nuggets that I gather from it.

The one phrase really part my ears up recently and it was during an ad read that you were doing and you said quote. I've spent a lot of time vibe coding lately then with us and I don't know if that's the kind of thing that you say in a madrid just to just kind of say to feel cool or if it's true that you spent a lot of time vibe coding lately.

“I want to talk about AI legal policy and the very big matters of states around that but but I want to build into that through the question of whether Ben with us is vibe coding.”

I am vibe coding I don't lie in my ad reads I sometimes you know exaggerate or declare my love for products that I merely appreciate. I don't lie I know I have spent a lot of time over the last few months it started as a project trying to develop data sets for one of my reporters. I want to talk about the fact that I have spent a lot of time over the last few months I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months. And I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months. I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months.

And I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months. Is this a her moment this does it's really a there were a lot of people who were using this stuff for ill and to undermine democracy and I want to use it to build tools that give journalists researchers and just everyday citizens insight into democratically sensitive data and I want to do it in a fashion that is.

It is free for the public to use and that is insanely powerful and so we call it rag time.

So rag time is upon the rag stands for retrieval augmented generation which is a type of use of LLMs within limited data sets.

“It also stands for a research across government and so we built for those who are technically minded.”

It's basically a giant rag of government records and it gets bigger every day.

It's kind of happening on its own and I kind of like just give me a little example because I don't I'm not as some most listeners don't vibe code so what like to square one. So yeah so the other day I plugged into it in response to the arrest of the Olympian at the reflecting pool I want to rip some paint up from the bottom of the reflecting pool what regulations enforceable by what. Criminal laws might I violate if I did so and it. Spat out. The answer to that question how long over how long oh it took about a minute, but it ran through the entire code of federal regulations and it ran through the criminal code figured out what they matched and so then I said okay I will try a different one.

“What if I asked it the question that I got in trouble for last summer I want to project pro Ukrainian slogans on the Washington monument what would that do and it got that one right to and then I thought okay let's do.”

The one that I just did and got away with because I couldn't find any law that it violated which was projecting on the Trump banner on the justice department and it got that one right to.

Okay but so that's the Q and A part how do we know how do you get to the next step from okay. You know Mr. Claude sir please you know scrape the history of diplomatic statements and now we want to turn it into a searchable database like how do you get from one to the other. So you don't have to know how to code what you do have to do is not be afraid of.

“Diving into technical areas that you don't know anything about I can't speak to codex or or any of the other models Claude code is astonishingly powerful and you know I started with.”

The concept which was I want to develop a data set of violated court orders in immigration, habeas helped me build this and it did and it we just it started with that and then we went to let's find Jay Sixers who've reoffended and it built a bunch of tools for that.

And then I was just like let's ingest every public piece of data we can get from the federal government and build a giant repository of the ability to ask questions.

It's pretty cool. That is cool and so you're we're in beta right now it's on the side I saw it on the side. It's there it's in beta and anybody who's interested in playing with it or helping us kick the tires on it feel free to email me Benjamin dot with us at lawfaremedia dot org. You know we're interested in having people play with it we're adding more data to it all the time come give us suggestions. So kind of giving back to that big question I am curious I made this as an inform your position and I'm at it all but it's come wondering how you're thinking about all the discussions now about the super powerful AI models that now.

Trump administration is going around Congress like putting rules on you know forcing either anthropic or open AI to come to them before releasing new models like do you have any any thoughts on all the controversy around that. So look the the administration's behavior toward anthropic is absolutely lawless and generally should be understood roughly the way we understand their behavior toward. Harvard University law firms that bother them Latisha James right like there is there is nothing to be said in defense of that said the mythos case is a it's a scary situation as anthropic will be the first to say and.

The idea that a private company can develop a product that can expose quickly thousands and thousands of vulnerabilities in existing software packages including in very sensitive areas is a that is a non trivial security problem.

And it's the mythos model which is called fable and it's commercialized form in a complex project it is awesome and I mean that in the sense of inspiring awe in the degree of its power and I have no doubt that it has significant security implications so what you would want in this situation.

“Serious group of people in the administration to interface with the serious group of people at anthropic to mitigate that risk.”

Unfortunately that is not the government that we have an understatement of the year on this podcast so I appreciate appreciate that all right you're back from Africa you're in Kenya do you have a highlight. Kenya with sometimes bulwark contributor Holly Berkeley Fletcher was once a CIA Africa analyst and now takes groups of people to these unbelievable safaris in Kenya and I spent two weeks with baby elephants and giraffes and leperds and.

“Fletcher and it was love you have a favorite megafauna now I got to say there is the baby elephants really stick with you.”

They're they're pretty wonderful seeing a leopard up a tree with its kill is is highlight but it's not cute the way the baby elephant playing with a stick is cute.

The baby elephant's kind of like the equine therapy but for elephant you just kind of want to go like hang with them nozzle yeah.

“I love that all right then what is any other any other deep thoughts wisdom anecdotes.”

I mean I went away while I was going away they hung the chart on in front of the Kennedy Center and I just want to say you do that in Lord lasers town and.

You're asking for it.

It's a fair warning to the Trump administration from Benjamin with us he's over at law fair go check out.

All the great work they're doing and rag time which he vibe coded apparently because hey why not it's twenty twenty six. Appreciate very much by the coming back soon we back tomorrow with another old friend of the show everybody then peace great to see you man. The board podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katy Cooper associate producer Ansley Skipper and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering. audio-engineering and editing by Jason Brown.