Lawfare Daily: Censorship Incentives with Julia Curlee and Mike Feinberg

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The kick-based, a real, down-lord and a league. Good kick, and fun. Who actually have the most, they can say, and can shine the brightest light on what's happening. But the working for companies that have explicitly told them, or implicitly suggested, that under no circumstances, are they to do so.

It's the Laugh Fair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of Laugh Fair, with public service fellow Julia Curley and senior editor Mike Feinberg. But at the end of the day, you know, people have families, they have mortgages, they've got to send their kids to college, no one else is going to do that for them.

“And so, it is fully understandable why people would not speak, and that's what we're trying”

to describe this incentive system and the punishment system on the other side of that. We're talking censorship. Not the kind where the government tells you that you're not allowed to say something just the kind where you already know you're not allowed to say it. Why aren't more former intelligence community figures and FBI agents speaking out?

We're going to tell you why. So, Julia, I want to start with just having you articulate the issue that led you to write this piece. We're going to get into all the details and all the things that you argue in it.

But why did you sit down to write this piece in the first place?

So, there's this idea that everyone knows but no one is speaking. And it's a phenomenon that I spent a career studying at the CIA about foreign countries that I suddenly found applied to my own life where the things that I overheard at the Langley Starbucks that everyone took as a matter of faith God, everyone knows, no one was saying out loud in public and having gotten to experience it firsthand where having been purged

from the White House looking for work on the outside, I went through all of the categories that you'll find in this piece of attempting to land on my feet and move on with my life and finding that all the doors were sealed unless one condition was met which was that I kept my mouth shut. And so, I wanted to find a way of articulating that and of course, having landed in one of the

few places where it is possible to write in public and the latest and a storied line of individuals that are similar to me, I felt like it was important to put this down and to get the word out on this point and then to point toward things that we might do to make descent to make speaking more survivable for people like us. All right, so we're going to talk about the public service fellowship which you talk about in the

piece a little bit later, but let's start with some basic numbers. How many people, first Julia and then Mike, who had jobs in the general vicinity of yours,

“are in a position to speak publicly now and have done it?”

I think there's a time element so there are people in the intelligence community from many years ago who have spoken and I've been with them on podcasts. Right, but I don't mean, I don't mean the world of former, right, I mean people who come out of

been made clear to them that there's no future for their careers or because like in Mike's case,

“you know, he has the wrong friends and they've found out about it and they've made clear that”

either you're going to resign or you're going to go through an internal hell. I mean, there's some kind of dress in the last two years and who've come out and have spoken publicly about it. Yeah, so if you just look at in the intelligence community for CIA, DNI, DIA,

as far as I'm aware of the people who've left in the second Trump administration,

it's me and I don't know if that's true. I would love to believe it's not true, but I have not found anyone who was in a similar position as myself and has been able to both land on the outside and speak publicly about their experience. And Mike, what about you, how many we have us,

“there's a sense that lots of FBI people have spoken, but that's partly because Jim Komi is a”

famous public figure and because Andy McCabe has, right, there's this whole line of people over the last 10 years who've come out and has spoken, but what about the in the universe of people who like

you have, you know, lost their jobs and careers, either directly or indirectly, in the second

Trump administration, how many have spoken publicly? In terms of specific individuals who have spoken in the way to which you're referring, interviews, podcasts specifically about their own situation, I can think of offhand for, not including myself, then there is one more individual who spoke about it in two individuals who spoke about it in the context of political campaigns when they were running for Congress and primaries. And then there's a group of individuals that spoke out

in New York Times narrative history piece and a group of individuals who spoke out in a justice

connection video announcement. Now those last two groups probably share 75 if not more

percent of the same membership, but when you consider that we are well into the dozens if not hundreds of individuals who have either been fired voluntarily prematurely curtailed their careers under threat of being fired or left earlier than they had ever planned to simply because of the overall environment, it's not a high percentage. And Julia, what would you estimate? Mike estimates the number is for the FBI between dozens and hundreds, what would you estimate in the larger,

“in the larger intelligence community, how many people are we talking about?”

If we're talking about people that were like by name fired because of their association or purged because of who they are, it's a really small number, actually. But if we're talking, if you open the app, you're a little bit about the broader workplace cuts, whether we're talking about like state department, INR people or DNI where hundreds of people have been laid off for for no reason other than just a vague sense that there's a deep state enemy within and these

performative cuts for the White House. I mean, I think it's in the hundreds, but it's kind of a different. It depends on what you're talking about. But even among those people who were not by name fired for their imagined offenses, precious few of them have also not spoken out because of the same dynamic that we describe in the piece about the extreme difficulty of finding work in the Washington area in a company town with an administration that is willing to jerk your

clearance with a phone call and render you undemployable in your own profession. All right, so let's with that as a setup and you've now given away what the subject of this conversation is Julia. Let's talk about the atmosphere and let's talk about why people aren't talking. So sketch it out for us. You have person acts who's been either individually targeted, maybe named in an executive order as having their security clearance stripped or just is part of this large

dozed community or rift community that Bill Paltese cheerfully creating and is angry about it

making you guys unusual in being willing to sit in front of a camera and have a conversation with me

“describe what is creating that dynamic. So I think it is a few things, you know, one and maybe”

chronologically dealing with the phenomenon I was right. So the administration is led by people who during the Biden administration nursing their wounds from the first Trump administration became convinced that there was a deep state enemy within that had a lot, you know, lay and wait for the president and had a plan if they got back into office to go after their political enemies and so from day one alone they they discovered that among other things the clearance

is a powerful weapon to personally target individuals you deem to be opponents of the

administration and materially damaged their lives and so I was sitting in the White House as a director for intelligence programs on the first day of the administration when I find out in the press the dozens of names of people who have now lost their security clearances via executive order and announced via tweet. No review, no process, it clearly came in with a list of names that they were going to go after and that was the first thing that sent shockwaves through the

federal workforce sending notice that we will reach back in time. These were these were alleged offenses that either had something to do with a 2020 election or the 2016 election we will go back

“almost a decade find your alleged crimes and then we will strip you of your key fact ability to”

earn a living and everybody saw it there was no appeal certainly not at the time and lots of people who had their clearance is stripped had other material reasons to not contest what had happened to them in public what remained of their employability and I know many of these people personally and I won't talk about their individual circumstances there's still even if they lost their clearance there's

still working in a company town where ultimately the largest employers the federal government

the largest source of contract money is the federal government and if you're now relying on that income stream even if it isn't classified to pay your mortgage send your kids to college or in some cases you might have your own family members still left in the government who could be punished you're going to be quiet and they did and so the phenomenon has been that there were a series of retaliatory moves early in the administration and they have continued occasionally

but for the most part the message was sent and what we're describing in the piece is self-censorship

and it's what you're not seeing it's the piece that never gets written rather than the you know

the individual who's you know voice just you know who it's self-censorship is what I'm trying to say yeah so my how much of it in the FBI is a security clearance thing so this is where it gets a little bit interesting specifically for the FBI this was a trend I noticed actually in the waning days of the Biden administration in that when individuals would get what we called OPR which is you become the subject of an internal violation of some sort of

role or law and when they'd get investigated and the administrative penalty was not as stringent as it seemed the seventh floor the leadership of the FBI would have liked we started to see a lot of times them taking a second bite at the apple by once the OPR was finished having the security division doing entirely separate review of whether it was appropriate for the person to hold on to their clearance and what happened to not gonna say a lot of people but to at least some is individuals who

thought they had cleared the barrier of the internal investigation and while they got some form of punishment they knew they would keep their jobs would find all of the sudden that they were in some form of double jeopardy because what hadn't been done in the OPR investigation was being done in

“the context of their clearances correct and I think this was really short sighted by bureau”

leadership because it was the very sort of thing that a less principal administration could leverage to its advantage going forward and where it might have been a rarity under Ray and Biden I suspect it's becoming much more something regularly happening at the bureau now I would add in this

and the agencies personnel decisions in a way that that seemed very unprecedented and whether that

“was the purging of CIA officers on rotation to the DNI as in the case of the National Intelligence”

Council and the Trendar Iraq was assessment or whether that is CIA officers who had been participating in assessments ten years before in the Russia 2016 assessment the DNI not only reaching you know into to strip people of their clearances but the CIA leadership itself not standing up to block the DNI from interfering and from a CIA's perspective in basic personnel decisions in the agency and so instead of if there was an issue with these individuals and their analytic work

in the past which there was not but if there had been there would have been some review process they would have been parked in some administrative location for further adjudication and and then they would have gone through some sort of basic process and none of that happened

“instead the people I'm referring to were walked out of the building in a way that everyone else”

could see in a in a public act of retribution and because these people were some of our best officers who had been deeply admired and were close enough to the rest of the workforce the people knew their names you really sent a chilling message through the workforce that no one was safe and the leadership of the organization would do nothing to help you. Yeah if I could add something to Julia statement just now there's two interesting dynamics

and play here the first is the DNI is able to do this because for really the first time in US history that I'm aware of department heads are not what I would term as dual-headed in terms of loyalty previous cabinet officials and agency heads at least in the post-war modern era

have always had a certain amount of loyalty to the president who appoints them but at the same

time they realize they have to thread the needle and defend the turf in personnel of their own fight them otherwise they're not going to be effective there it's not necessarily because they're altruistic or good leaders it's self-interest to protect your people because ultimately you need them to make you look good that's gone the current leadership of the IC does not care what wit what the workforce thinks of them and as a result they're solely looking out for the

administration writ large and Julia's comments about the DNI pulling clearances explains what I think is a very clear difference between the FBI and the rest of the IC the FBI has to still operate in public to a degree that other intel agencies do not and as a result cash-patel Dan Bongino and Rubelli Chris Raeuh whoever's making the decisions in any given time they can come up with a public justification and say it's for investigative deficiency on matters x y and z with x y and z coincidentally

always relating to some previous investigation of Trump you can out a case officer by talking about

a recruitment in place they ran in a hostile territory if you're going to get rid of them and you want to do it in a way that sends a message it has to be based on something that does not

“implicate their still secret work so that's where I think the security clearance process”

becomes a very handy tool to enact a purge of the workforce there were a couple others so we're basically what Mike and I have been mostly describing is the direct purge or the the shock that sent to the workforce within the current workforce so that that workforce doesn't speak or doesn't go use it's with whistleblower channels there's a couple other in this category that are probably worth mentioning quickly not as much to the intelligence community but the overwhelming of what few

appeal places that there are for federal employees with tens of thousands of people appealing in offices that have themselves been dozed and really no recourse being allowed to them and the targeting of probationary officers who really have even fewer sources of recourse and then last this schedule effing of the workforce and so not as much at CIA at least yet but in other parts of the government especially in DOD you have individuals who have now had their positions

been converted into this schedule F where they will be evaluated against frankly political criteria

really not what they should be doing but what it means for your workers beneath the GS15 level is they

may now have a boss or a boss's boss who is in effect a political appointee who had never been

that way in the past and the broader effect in chilling workplace speech or providing ideas that that you know might not be welcomed by the administration it is now penetrating much deeper into the workforce which again adds to that censorship of people not willing to talk but a new dream with mobile functions in real life no ultra-franx one-farramobile function for 10 euro emonat inclusive EU roaming also in the Schweiz no frank mama papa can we get rid of it? I have that

“not yet said but I think I'm on the bottom of the world now that the road the new staff of”

generation verdines up so forth on YouTube and join in podcast can you talk about everything

but in the meantime for example over nagelpils is a lot of unknown you don't have to it but you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils if you have an extra nagelpils you can tell if you have an extra nagelpils to tell if you have an extra nagelpils with an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils or an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils or an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils

“or an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils”

or an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils you can't tell if you have an extra nagelpils but the normal career path actually matters here because it sets the bounds of expectations if you have a mortgage you're planning to send your kid to college at some point you know up until January 2025 what is the normal expectation of somebody like you Julia

and somebody like you Mike about what their career involves at the 20 year mark or 25 year mark what is it that people are trying to protect when they keep their mouths shut and don't talk about their experiences and what they've seen. Can I push back against one of the assumptions baked into that question? Yeah absolutely because at least for the FBI alumni there are a lot who want to speak out and this gets it a lot of what Julia was

applying in her earlier answers there are a lot who want to speak out but a condition of their

“private sector employment is that they do not. Well that's what I'm trying to get to and yeah so”

what what is this private sector employment that you work in the government for 20 years you retire and then you go work in the private sector where you're not allowed to speak.

So within the FBI I would basically say there are really three categories of post bureau paths

and I'm just going to talk about special agents here because otherwise we're going to go down a lot of rabbit holes. So the first is a lot of agents if they are in an area of the country with a relatively manageable cost of living do just retire the pension can be enough depending on your life circumstances to give you what you need for the rest of your life. There are other agents who want to continue working, who go on to do some sort of security consulting or investigative consulting

in the private sector at a sort of worker-be level or go work for another government agency and I'm not using OGA as its usual obfuscating meaning for referring to CIA or the I.C. What I mean is that you know the Department of Energy for example has a really robust counterintelligence portfolio. Health

just go work for another government agency as a contractor or as an employee and do what's called

double dipping, getting your pension while also continuing to work for the government at a remove

“as a contractor. Then the third category and I think this is what we're going to have to end up”

focusing on for this question are the senior executives who go on to do that sort of security consulting in the private sector but do so at something closer to the seesweet level. Being the head of security at some private Fortune 500 company or exact or some other company that has some kind of specialized often international security needs. Exactly or your attack company and you have an insider threat program to prevent industrial espionage and those companies those Fortune 500 companies

inevitably do some degree of business with the government and they are incredibly low to have any of their employees say anything that may get in the way of that relationship. Particularly when

“you're dealing with this petty and vindictive administration is this way. So the overwhelming majority”

of the senior executives who have been ousted from the FBI over the past year and a half, two years are in that position. They're the ones who actually have the most they can say and can shine the brightest light on what's happening but they're working for companies that have explicitly told them or implicitly suggested that under no circumstances are they to do so. And they're making salaries that make that accommodation. It's a it's a binary thing right you're getting

$400, $500,000 a year maybe or even I mean it could be even less but you're getting something that is making your life more comfortable. There's different ways to characterize this

some neutrally some flattering and some critical. Just like I just want to characterize it

factually. There's an enormous incentive structure not to talk. Correct and for the people who have actually retired and can talk a lot of those people if they weren't senior executives don't have the training or the know-how to enable them to do so. In other words they've never gotten media training, they've never interacted with the press, they haven't done any sort of public writing. So even if they wanted to speak out it's not like they have the intuitive know-how or tools to do so.

And I would just add to that as somebody who has tried to help a number of such people

communicate what they know. They don't always know what they know. You know there's an enormous

amount that happens in a bureaucracy that the people who were directly involved with don't always know what part of it is highly salient to the public debate and often what they think is highly salient is the gross manner in which they were treated which sounds a lot like the gross manner in which 30 other people were treated. But the policy discussion that they were involved in is really big deal right and they may not recognize that as readily as say somebody who's in

the news business does. Julia how about you what is your sense of like what does the

“median CIA officer have to protect in this conversation other than, you know, their dignity and whatnot?”

Yeah, very similar to the story Mike was saying, you know, there are very few employers left I think in America where a person could actually imagine spending 40 or 50 years working for the same employer and CIA is one of them where you could join in when you're early 20s and you could do 15 different things but at the end of the day you're still CIA officer until you reach retirement age and that's that's not common but it's it's it happens more often than you think and so

a person will usually do a full career at into their prime at CIA that that you know it's it's quite common to see folks leaving at the early ones leaving with 20 years of experience 30 years of

where they've traveled overseas quite a bit they want to spend more time at home with their

“family and so they'll take a position that leverages whether it's their security clearance or”

their, you know, foreign languages or their unique travel or contacts if they're a director of analysis officer they might find a position at a political risk firm working for a big defense company if they're a case officer with extensive experience overseas they might help a foreign government in many cases or they'll work on international business if they're a

science and technology officer they may have incredible technical skills that they can parlay to

a tech company and so it is quite normal for people to spend decades but then also to look for a government adjacent position on the outside and that that has continued to be the natural place even under this administration where folks to go but it's also happening in this environment where thousands of people like you have now also been dumped onto the job market exacerbating the few positions that might be there and this exactly what Mike said that the willingness of

private firms to tolerate political speech by their employees even going out under a separate banner I mean I know folks that have joined private companies but also have a non-resident

fellowship at a think tank or some other outlet where they have been basically forbidden from publishing

anything in their own names through those outlets and so there is great deal of fear that speaking or doing anything like what Mike and I are doing now will cut off the the primary normal exit plan for a person like us and they're right right they're absolutely right the point here is not that they're wrong and all these people are just gotless the point is that they're actually correct and that what we're talking about is a massive bureaucracy wide incentive structure

right and I would I would contrast the but we end up in the same place but you know in my case I've talked about it with you that you know when when I was loomored if you if you knew I was loomored you didn't want to hire me because you didn't want to be associated with that if you didn't know I was loomored you didn't know you didn't know enough about me too hire me most people are not in that position most people it's just simply the work has become intolerable there are

other opportunities on the outside they would prefer to take but the same censorship would apply to them with their with their on-word employer not being willing to let them speak what they

“know or express their views yeah Ben I think you and I discussed this in the first podcast we ever”

did together after I published the story with law fair of my resignation because I made the remark just that one article those five pages pretty much precluded me from ever getting a private sector security consulting job and normally you know I'm not saying this to puff myself up I'd be a good candidate I have well no let me let me let me amplify that a little bit yeah you are the prototype of a highly specialized type of expertise you have a background encounter intelligence

you speak Mandarin you have hands-on involvement in a whole bunch of I'm not saying anything that isn't public investigations of companies like Huawei you know you're the you're the sort of picture of the kind of person who can leave government and have a lucrative career in saying and whenever you're asked what you do you say something like I do some consulting what that means is people drawing on that precise certain skill set but you know there's a

“cost and I think when I first took the public fellowship we talked about this like going down”

this route meant that that world is now closed off to me and not just for the length of this

administration because there's always going to be the concern in four or eight or twelve years

does a similarly minded administration comes back and also is Mike Mike Fineberg's the kind of guy who talks right there's a there's a there's another side of that which is has more to do with a culture that does not value being public yeah I don't think that Facebook would want to hire as a security consultant somebody who they think might write the spiritual sequel to careless

opportunity for this administration you are for closing opportunities for frankly the rest of your

life and that's you know I'm usually very harshly critical of people who don't speak out but

I understand that's something a lot of people cannot afford to give away literally or figuratively yeah I think that I want to also jump in on this point that you know it could be perceived that what we're talking about is a criticism of people and I wish more people did speak out but at the end of the day you know people have families they have mortgages they've got to send their kids to college no one else is going to do that for them and so it is fully understandable why people would not speak and

“that's what we're trying to describe this incentive system and the punishment system on the other side”

of that and in in in my case and I think probably a bit in in Michael I don't want to speak for you they've already taken away most of what I had to lose and so they they in some ways have made it easier for a person like me to to make that decision in the in the unique case of a transgender person I can't use the bathroom in federal office buildings at my passport would be would was revoked and would be turned out like my CIA career was over and my ability to then work back with the

agency and a classified position where I'd be in the same restrictions that I faced in that side it was

done and so having lost already the most important thing that they could have taken they they

made it a bit easier for me in that in that way and if you are not a person who's been individually

“targeted and you do have a family you have to take care of it's understandable how people end up with”

they are it's just this collective action problem where everyone is making that same decision and then you end up with just a handful of us who are able or willing to speak yeah so in the article you identify three exit paths that are significant here we've talked about two of them which is you know if you talk you can't stay in government and if you talk you can't go to the private sector at least not in a capacity that could draw attention about what you talked about to the company

in question but let's talk about the third which is in some ways the highest profile of them

which is you know you go to some do-goodest civil society organization you know and of course there are famous examples of this including I don't know era's Ruvaney the whistleblower on a meal

“bovies misconduct is now working for one of the litigating groups that challenges administration”

policies so are so are several of the what at least one of the jacksmith prosecutors so some this this this option solved some problems for some people why is it not a bigger part of the solution to the larger and problem that you've identified a lot of it is the funding base I had had quite a naive conception that think tanks were places that people went to think between administrations and they they believed in speaking truth to power and and following the ideas where they took

them but what I could you just I don't know it sounds like me now I discovered very quickly this phenomena that perhaps they were even more riskabers than then private companies because of how razor thin their operating budgets are and that many DC area think tanks operate on federal grants or they have federal officers who are succunded to the military people that that do fellowships that are very well you know that are paid for it helps subsidize the rest of the

organization and if you get on the list that your organization is sponsoring the wrong kind of speech you could you could find yourself stripped of of your people that have been paid for that that are paying the bills you could have your funding based taking care of and also the funders themselves are scared because of for a number of reasons one the administration in its early days directed the IRS to do investigations of ensuring that that no tax example entity would indirectly

or directly finance and then they named the kinds of speech that they didn't want to finance and that had a chilling effect my understanding is that not a lot of that has actually materialized but it did deter the donors who then deter the then prevent the the fellowships that those of us who would want to speak would land in it and it made them very very riskabers and so I had this experience as you and I've talked about of of looking for work first in the private sector and

for the better part of a year applying for jobs you were the freaking senior director for intelligence

“at the NSA you're that's like for watching that that's a big deal job what did your job search”

look like well in in nine months of applying for probably over a hundred jobs I did not get a single interview not one it just whether that was based on you know not how to write a good resume actually probably not that just checking because I just I wonder if there's something wrong with your resume or maybe your cover letter needs fewer commas in it it's it's not that she types in comics sense true I mean in fairness I I was not advertising the the fact that I wanted

to be able to speak publicly but that was always going to be something that I was going to do

“and that eventually would have circumscribed my ability to take jobs or deterred employers but we didn't”

even get that far I didn't even call for an interview based on what I understood to be just widespread knowledge of the fact of what happened to me and that a person like me would also draw fire or just risk and raising the fire like you do you mean a trans person or do you mean a person who was subject to the purge well both yeah both and many of these these places were

themselves rolling back DEI programs which in effect were rolling back programs to ensure they had a

workforce that that looked like America or recruited people in in diverse areas of the country and

“and so adding a recently purged trans person to their to their numbers probably was not a high”

priority from those these area think tanks or private businesses so Mike you did not have a similar experience because your departure was very sudden and you came directly to us but is your perception that Julia's experience is relatively typical in the sense that you have these a large number of former FBI special agents or senior executives who are suddenly on the market and are flooding the world with unrecipricated resumes most of the FBI executives I know who've been pushed out

and wanted to get something have found something but it has been entirely dependent upon personal connections they built during what was in almost full career so you know not gonna name specific employers but there are Fortune 500 companies that buy necessity deal with the FBI or DOJ on a regular basis inevitably sometimes people from each organization hit it off with each other and you might be able to leverage that into a job after you finish but let's be clear the corporations are almost all

explicit to the people they hire that like we understand you have strong feelings you're not going to speak about that you are a private citizen you have nothing to offer the world of discourse from our perspective and one of the conditions of this job is that you don't vent your spleen and I know this because I've been explicitly told it I've taken part in a number of public accountings of what has been going on at the Bureau for the past two years and for every person

I convince to take part there are a half dozen who refuse explicitly for the reason they don't want to offend their employer and I'm going to be a little bit harsher than Julia was just now and one regard she referred to corporate risk evasion there's another word for risk evasion and and that word is cowardice you know there is not a single Fortune 500 company whose prosperity has not been made possible except for the rule of law in this country and the free market and discourse of ideas that we

have to now turn a blind eye to the shifts that are undermining that environment is fundamentally

you can maximize your immediate profits so I will just add to that with respect to the think tank

culture that Julia refers to there's an additional factor that is not the administration

“but is the congressional atmosphere you know I think if it were just the administration thinking about”

people's organizations tax exempt status that would be one thing but it is also the possibility that I mean there was a think tank based at Stanford that did that our colleague Renee Dresta was one of the principles of you know the internet the Stanford Internet Observatory and you know that was destroyed by a series of state agencies and congressional investigations that concocted a bullshit theory about them and has pressed it against the entity and the individuals

ever since and so I mean the think tanks are not wrong to think about their risk profile in this environment and yet unlike the for profit organizations they have a supposed public service mission and so you know I'm a little bit more forgiving of the people who's frankly who's duties or to their shareholders and who you know who have fiduciary obligations to maximize shareholder value than I am to organizations that supposedly stand for truth and justice in the

American way and you know are too afraid of you know the devil knew as his and Jim Jordan's of the world I mean it is interesting that you're positing there is a difference between the executive and congressional branches I'm just fascinated by this idea that they're not working in concert and have their own interest well I assume they are working in concert yes I was being sarcastic

“about the fact that Congress no longer exists yeah that doesn't happen but I think you know”

when you're thinking about which eye of sauron can reek greater hell on you as a research organization it's not necessarily the FBI right and because the FBI does is answerable to courts

in some ultimate sense they do ultimately have to produce the goods and you know when they

indict you for an Instagram post about seashells they make themselves a laughing stock whereas when Jim Jordan does the equivalent thing he doesn't make himself a laughing stock actually he just gets to throw out subpoenas and so I do think Congress actually poses some independent dangers here Julia you were very kind in your piece to talk about the law fair public service fellowship

“as you know this is an issue that like we created the fellowship in order in a very small way to”

address and it has been a kind of obsession of mine to try to get other organizations to create similar not necessarily fellowships but similar like counter incentive structures that allow people who are coming out of government with things to say actually to have opportunities to say

those things and then while transitioning to other lines of work I'm always hesitant to solicit

praise for law fair on our own shows and I don't want to do that here I do want to ask you about the general absence of such programs and what could be done to create more of them. Yeah well you're not going to I don't need much provocation to sing the praises of the public service fellowship for having given me a critical life raft and all of the work I've done in public whether it's for law fair or the Atlantic article I needed to be able to pay my

bills in my mortgage while doing it and without one place that let me get established on the outside so that I could have a track record of publications to then hopefully land future employment it would have been nearly impossible and my choice is probably would have been to stay in place until someone hopefully someday hired me in the next step censorship because I also have a family

similarity in my experience in my mind between what the public service fellowship is trying to

do and what historically the CIA and other intelligence agencies tried to do in order to create a structure in which it should not take an act of individual self-immolation or courage to have a GF-13 middle-evil officer tele cabinet secretary that they're wrong we create incentive systems protections that you'll be promoted at your next panel because you spoke up and you did you perform the values that we value and so it was a structural feature of the intelligence community that they

“did what we needed them to do despite possible personal incentives and what I think that what we're”

kind of doing on the outside here with the public service fellowship is to kind of create one of

these structural incentive systems where you have a place you have an outlet that you can publish

you have a salary that can that can pay your mortgage and in fact you're incentivized to speak up and tell the public what you know and so it's a very unique entity as far as I can tell in the broader media and and think tank world and there there are just a few places that I could name that are similar which we we listen the piece there's the democracy forward effort to higher people to work on civil service in innovation fellowship and I know some of them they're talking

about documenting the damage that has occurred into this administration and then charting the way

“forward into the next administration and their entities like the public service alliance which I”

personally have been benefiting from which provides discounted services to former federal employees

and helps you with with basics like defending yourself against the online mob that that could come for you if you speak out publicly and the public service alliance it's worth noting is an organization that was stood up entirely in response to the current situation it's not like law fair which you like we pre-existed this and created a program this is actually an organization that didn't exist three years ago and was stood up to do this thing and they've done remarkable work

and so just looking and I know you make a talk more about on the FBI side of the house and there have been a few other nascent efforts through communities of farmers in like the foreign

“service it's just not at the scale to really support active scholarship there's no reason why”

this couldn't be more common if there was a funding base and if in if DC area think tanks were able to carve this out except for you know the retaliation that they would face if fear of the eye of sauron right right and and so and before we go forward I just wanted to to state that there are enormous rewards in speaking positively of the administration both in in your in your think tank world whether you're doing scholarship related to you know a defense work that the

administration is championing and then if you're in the private sector world businesses that are encouraging their investors to make certain investments close to the president's personal family are being rewarded with contracts and and when this is all over I I don't doubt that investigations will find that prominent DC firms and consulting businesses have been giving people advice that borders on certainly the unethical but it will it will raise serious questions

over whether there was an effort to personally enrich members of the president's family and and steering contracts in such a way that that it would that it would benefit these individuals and those companies have then been been privately rewarded so that's on the other side so let alone taking risks by bringing in a person that's been fired they've been actively encouraging people to engage in behavior on the other side of it of personally enriching the president and his family.

Mike do you have thoughts on this? Look we're not at the point where we are living under an authoritarian jackboot yet there are places like Minneapolis during Metro Surge or Chicago during midway blitz where it may very much feel like that and in fact be that for discrete populations but that doesn't mean we're not back sliding either and you know when I was a student in school studying history you would look at all these different oppressive errors and you would think

how would I have reacted and I don't know a single human being who says to themselves I would have been on the yes I would have signed up with the essay and yeah I would have signed up with

people like me or Julia or give one of their employees the breathing space to talk publicly

“I would implore them to think on the fact that you're not asking yourself what would you do”

any more in a hypothetical manner you're in the thick of it and you might have kids you might have grandkids you might want to ask how you're going to explain your behavior and your individual choices however small and non-consequential to the country at large they may seem when this is all over and you know there I am contacted constantly now us have been writing publicly by people

“still on the inside I've lost track at this point but it's got to be at least a hundred of people who”

send me an individual message that says thank you so much for speaking I wish I could I can't because kids mortgage has job I'll be fired I mean it's just like it's like a form letter at this point and I really appreciate when people reach out but like you know this this is the moment when when you can really have an impact before the consolidation of a censorship regime

“an autocratic behavior becomes irreversible and I wish that more people would do it and I think”

that one of the things that the public service fellowship does is that you know it's not a permanent thing right we're supposed to find an onward effort onward employment so we can continue to do this and when you do that and when you land on your feet and speak for for months of the time in a matter of critical of the administration and you survive you show people not just tell

them that it is survivable to exercise your first amendment rights of its critical against the

administration and that's hopefully what we're doing through this program and again I've been really grateful for it and I hope other people will get the chance to in the future. As Nietzsche put it what does not kill me makes me stronger we're going to leave it there Julia Curley Mike Feinberg thank you for joining us today Julia's peace on the censorship incentive structure is live on Laugh air today.

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