Lawfare Daily: Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S., and We May Not See It in Time

On Friday, March 6th, Laugh Fair and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars,

“practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day”

event on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public in person and online. Visit Laugh Fairmedia.org/AkpaEvent, that's Laugh Fairmedia.org/ECPAEvent for details and to register. New news from Mark Ovekling, the Kango Rohebellion, now at the bookbite and everywhere, where the public and the public are going.

And the fact that I can't answer the question, is that I can't answer it.

For all of this, I'm in Vax-Tomb. Across the country to lead US Attorney's Office as an help a USA's navigate this classified

“information space and this hyper-specialized foreign adversary space.”

It's the Laugh Fair podcast. I'm senior editor Michael Fimer, and today I'm speaking with Laugh Fair public service fellow Troy L.T. Edwards.

To lose all of that is to not only put us at risk now, when we face an heightened threat risk

from our conflict with Iran, but it's also put us at risk moving forward because it's now losing progress at developing that culture and adjusting with the ever-malable threat landscape that exists. It's been a long time to pick that pack up and start rebuilding. Today we're discussing his new article which talks about the past, present, and future of the conflict between the United States and Iran previously consigned to the shadows.

And now in the open. We are here today to discuss your recent article. Iran will retaliate in the US. We may not see it in time. The very title itself is a little ominous, but I suspect that was the intention.

And we're going to get to why you think that is the case that Iran may strike the US in some former fashion, and we may not be able to get ahead of it. But before we really delve into that argument, I was hoping you could give a sort of overview of what you understand is the history of Iran as a state sponsor of both terrorism and sort of malicious cyber activity.

Yeah, of course, so thank you for having me. The history of Iran is what actually prompted some of the concern here because of its unique focus on extending its reach and engaging in external operations around the world. So my last two years in the Department of Justice was focusing on Iran's weapon smuggling during the time of the military and terrorist attacks in the Red Sea in 2024 and 2025.

And so knowing that Iran has historically extended its reach by developing proxy relationships with militias and terrorist groups and the Middle East led me to be concerned that they're going to continue to do that, but at a time when close colleagues of mine and yours and people around the country and our national security apparatus were being fired or forced out.

“So that's what prompted the deep dive here.”

The history extends back to the founding of the revolution in 1979, 1980 timeframe. And then if you look at a really useful tool, Matthew Levitt has an interactive map available that allows you to see the history of Iranian external operations and filter by the countries they reached out to the countries impacted by it and the timeframe around the world. You see a pattern emerge in that data set, which is developed extensively by open source information.

1980 timeframe in the founding or after this revolution. And and that also had an impact on the United

“States, including one successful assassination in the Maryland area. And then another spike in the last”

five years during the most recent escalation in U.S. Iran tensions after the Trump administration engaged in a drone strike that successfully killed the general custom salamani who led the Islamic

Revolutionary Guard Corps Cuds Force, which is the military organization out of Iran that specializes

in these external operations. And so that that kind of lays out this history of of this spike in two different timeframes. It's that latter timeframe that gave me pause to kind of dive in and see what is a more recent reflection of what Iran's capabilities are if we and what we face from you know moving forward. All right, so given that history and given the animus that has existed between Iran and the United States in 79 and particularly among the other spike you mentioned as

well after the U.S. led targeting of a high-ranking IRGC member, what have been the major cases that

stand out to you that the Justice Department has prosecuted that really illustrate how dangerous

Iran's use of proxies for global reach is to the United States. Yeah, so before diving into the DOJ cases, I want to be clear about the narrower scope of what I focused on in this piece. Iran obviously has the capabilities to engage in a conventional response in the region. And we've seen that play out after the beginning of Operation Epic Fury. Iran has these ballistic missile and anti-ship cruise missile components that they're able to use

in the region and engage in their own military strikes. We also saw that after the strike of

Customs on the Monion January 2020 within days Iran attacked a military base in Erbil that I think

led to some casualties of military servicemen and women. And so there is that category of conventional response. Take that, set it to the side. What I focused on was this less conventional more asymmetric response that Iran is known for, coupled with its long-term memory. And it's willingness to engage in retaliation long after an incident that prompted this anger.

“And that's what we saw play out in the last six years since the strike on Soleimani.”

We saw a number of DOJ and FBI foiled plots that seemed tied to retaliating against this strike against Soleimani. And so a few that stick out in my mind. One is this case on Mariam Thompson who was the defendant. And the reason sticks out in my mind is it was within days of the Soleimani strike in January 2020 that this Lebanese individual that Mariam Thompson who was a contract linguist in the Department of Defense had been interacting with since 2017. And allegedly engaged in a romantic

relationship remotely with, was within days that this Lebanese individual contacted her soliciting information specifically on human assets that helped America target custom Soleimani, photographs, names, information. And that sticks out to me because of the speed with which Iran started acting. And it's reached to collect actual intelligence from United States individuals that may have

“access to it. And they were successful. Mariam Thompson successfully passed secret documents,”

national defense information that revealed certain human assets around the world that may or may not have helped the United States, but passing it nonetheless just shows the successful reach Iran head within days. Another one that sticks out in my mind is Naji Zendashdi, which was about a year later, January 2021. The reason it stands out is because it was a different flavor of proxy that Iran clearly has developed over time that isn't less the traditional militia

and terrorist groups in the Middle East region. Because Zendashdi a year later ends up recruiting and paying Canadian Hell's Angels members. And to be fair, maybe it's my ignorance. I wasn't aware that there was a Canadian element of the Hell's Angels. They are actually a criminal organization with global reach, believe it or not. And this is not the only case of which I'm aware in which Hell's Angels are other outlawed motorcycle gangs have been willing to work for fairly nefarious

foreign actors again for money or favors. Yeah, it shouldn't have surprised me. It did.

likely have less control over. And yet they did successfully and had two members of the Canadian

Hell's Angels travel into the United States with a goal of killing an Iranian dissident in

“that I believe the Maryland area and this dissidence spouse. And look more than when we went into”

in the peace, there is a gruesome side to this. I mean, the Iranian handler was communicating with these Canadian Hell's Angels in an effort to make the deaths gruesome and to make a point in the national public that this Iranian dissident had in some way violated an Iranian code, right? And by stepping out Iran needed to suppress that voice, it's reflective of two things that stood out to me one I've already mentioned, which is this expanded network of local and organized crime

that Iran is willing to tap into, which I think extends its reach considerably in the United

States. But two is Iran's willingness to engage in this transnational repression at a time when they are also attempting to retaliate against the United States, folks to them that they view are speaking

“out against the Iranian regime. They must silence. And I suspect that there is some argument”

to be had that Iran views that as a domestic problem, not an international problem to an American lens. This is an international problem. This is Iran's reach into the United States and particularly harm potential harm to American citizens. So the third one that sticks out to me are the more is a more recent one, which is this massive merchant case that just went to trial and had a defendant convicted for material support to terrorism in a couple other charges.

Merchant more recently in 2023, allegedly, was sent by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Again, this designated foreign terrorist organization and highly skilled subset of Iranian military. Yeah, and we should, we should actually pause to point out the IRGC is one of the more unique organizations that the US operates against in the national security sphere because it is the only organization that is in intelligence and security agency for a foreign country that is simultaneously listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. There is no other country

which has that very dubious honor. Right, and it makes it a complicated target for American American national security apparatus because it can be viewed through the lens of an intelligence

“apparatus that you should counter, but it's also a terrorist organization that you should counter.”

And both of those, as you know, require very different approaches and skill sets and we'll get to that a little bit about where that skill has gone from the Bureau. But when you approach the IRGC, you are approaching an agency that is highly skilled at doing what it does, which is inflicting terror around the world. And, you know, some counter to this may be that isn't at the point that these strikes on Iran have weakened the IRGC considerably. And I'm not going to

comment on that because I'd be speaking out of turn. But what I will say is the IRGC's networks that it's developed over the last 40 years are precisely for moments like this, where Iran wants to have this reach and these folks planted around the world. And that brings me to this merchant case, where in 2023, allegedly the IRGC, when the jury agreed with this, the IRGC had tasked merchant with traveling to the United States to collect a network of assets

that could work for the IRGC, but remain in the United States. And that should give us pause because now that's an entity, a state sponsor of terror that we're engaged with in a kinetic campaign. And so we shouldn't be worried that the Iran may use this or deploy this weapon that they've developed over the years. And in 2024, merchant was then tasked with coming back to the United States. And connecting with, again, this example of local and organized crime, he connected with

who he thought were New York mafia members. And those I did know existed. And fortunately for him, right, unfortunately for the United States, we had a national security apparatus and law enforcement in place that those folks were actually undercover law enforcement officers who were able to track intelligence that coming from Iran and sources from Iran, likely from the outside looking in at the descriptions from the DOJ. And know that they had to infiltrate this individual who was

here to what he claimed was attempt to kill political leaders, including President Trump.

collection, and potential harm, and the extended reach that Iran has around the world,

“including in the United States. All right, so you alluded to something that is going to”

touch upon our own personal situations tangentially as well, which is that the national security apparatus of which United were both apart until very recently might not have the same resources that it used to when the cases you mentioned were originally investigated and prosecuted. I mean, I remember when the Thompson case was going on, you were at DOJ, I was at the FBI's Washington field office, that was a five alarm fire. And our respective agencies, I know mine was technically

a part of yours, but you don't admit that. You have your own email addresses. Yeah, our respective agencies were able to surge resources to that case in a way that frankly, I don't know is possible right now. So I was wondering if you could sort of talk about the part of your piece where you elaborate what has happened to the agencies writ large that would normally be tasked with combating these sort of activities. And can we also sort of zoom in on a more granular level with

“what has happened to the specific personnel who would normally be tasked to deal with these matters?”

Yeah, yeah. So on a systematic front, well, first of all, so those threats that we've talked about

here in the beginning, those all capture the first half of the title of this piece that he ran will retaliate in the United States. And that was intentional because if we are to use, as we all do, write an intelligence collection and prosecution efforts, we use history as our guide. If we are to believe the data coming out of these five years after an escalation in the striking in Soleimani, then we are to think that Iran is both capable and willing to retaliate by reaching

in the United States. The second half of this title stating that we may not see it in time is supposed to do two things. One, it's supposed to qualify it because there's still our dedicated men and women who are serving our national security apparatus that we'll talk about how they're distracted and stretched thin. But it's also to the raise a point that we still may be unsuccessful, even though we're qualifying. And we may be unsuccessful because of exactly what you're saying here

that systematically and individually we have had our national security apparatus gutted by this administration. So from an institutional perspective, just on these cases alone, it involves FBI, it involves DOJ's national security division and CES and CTS to of the litigating components. Could you spell out what those acronyms refer to? Yeah sure. So the CTS acronym refers to the NSD's counterterrorism section, which is a litigating component out of that division that focuses on

terrorism matters around the world and runs those organizations or leads them by helping the U.S. Attorney's offices with their expertise. And then CES, the counterintelligence and export control section, which focuses on the counterpart to the national security threat, the espionage, the counterintelligence, which are two different things, as you well know, and foreign adversaries on U.S. soil. And so those two sections in the national security division have been gutted, the law and policy section

of the national security division, which is more focused on creating this interagency relationship between DOJ and the national security council. That has been gutted by almost two-thirds. Then there's the civil rights division, which I think fewer people think about when they think

“about the national security apparatus, but it's important to remember that their portfolio of hate”

crimes investigations is really important because they've developed critical sources around the

country and around the world in sensitive demographics, where they can sense whether or not something is going to happen to a particular group of people. And here, particularly relevant, Jewish individuals across America, as we've seen in one attack already on a synagogue after the operation epic fury began. And then there's the law enforcement apparatus. There's the FBI, the bureau, and you can speak to this much better than I can, is split across multiple divisions

at headquarters, but then in each field office, there's split across sections that focus on these parallel pieces to NSD, the counterintelligence, the counter espionage, the counter terrorism. Not only have they been gutted of leadership and experience across ranging hundreds of years collectively, but they've been stretched and re-deverted to immigration efforts and other efforts that kind of

obviously the US Attorney's Office is around the country, which are experiencing historical drops and numbers and inability to fill those ranks, so much so that we're now seeing avenues open up to become as you say, by tweeting some person's DMs, or by just picking out your favorite executive order, regardless of whether you have any legal experience. And so I worry about the health of the

institutions as they continue to drop standards to bring people in. And then you asked a second

question, the individual side. And I want to talk a lot, I want to kick it to you to see if you

“had a follow up on some of what I just said. Yeah, so I think what you're saying is absolutely true.”

You know, I'll talk first about main justice, particularly as it applies to the US Attorney's offices. That was traditionally a place of employment where if you went to be a line a USA, you couldn't get in off this street. Nobody graduated from law school and accepted very rare circumstances. Immediately became an assistant US Attorney. It was the sort of thing where you had

to sort of prove your metal and get some trial experience, either at the state and local level

as a prosecutor, or at one of the large white shoe law firms. And I would say generally most of the people with whom I worked, both at the US Attorney's Office and within the Counter-Espunization Export Control section, probably had three to six years at a minimum as practicing attorneys before they entered government service. So there was a reservoir of experience that I don't know you're still going to get if you lower the requirements as they did this week to only be one year

of work experience prior to joining. And it's less an issue of institutional culture and knowledge

“in the abstract than it is I think we're seeing for the first time since the department's”

founding they're losing cases and they're not getting indictments. I don't know if the general public knows this, but for DOJ did not secure an indictment when it went before a grand jury was almost unheard of. And for DOJ to lose a case at prosecution happened in something like less than three percent of its cases. But both of those things are occurring with some degree of regularity now. And that might be solely a reflection on the type of prosecutions that DOJ is trying to bring

in line with the new White House priorities that you've mentioned. But it can also be a reflection that with this huge loss of personnel and with the lack of experience they're just not able on a tactical level to win cases. And there's almost a death spiral in that whereas every time you lose a case you lose a little bit of credibility and the more credibility you lose the harder it

“is to win future cases. So I think DOJ as a prosecutorial machine is really in a bad place right”

now. And to speak for my own former agency, the FBI, there has been an unprecedented loss of expertise through firings, forced retirements and people just getting fed up and retiring years earlier than they expected to. And that's a problem because as you know from working with us, agents aren't

functional. A first year agent right out of Quantico is not going to work at the same level as somebody

with five to 15 years of experience. And that is particularly true in the national security realm simply because those more experienced agents based on their time on target have things like increased cultural knowledge that allows them to build rapport with sources and witnesses. They might have language skills. They might have dealt with the terrorist organizations or counterintelligence operations in the past. There's just a sort of inherent understanding of how these cases should

work that you don't get with anything other than time. And one thing that the public and I fear the leadership of the OJA and the FBI doesn't understand either is that investigations are also not functional. To build a national security prosecution is orders of magnitude more complex

problems. If 25 to 30 percent of your time is an investigator is you being farmed out to another

“agency to deal with immigration roundups. So you know what you said is a hundred percent true”

and we could have a friendly debate about which agency is worse off. But for the purposes of the American people being safe, you don't want any of these agencies firing on anything less than full cylinders. Yeah and what's so problematic and that I'm not sure it is easy to see from the outside is there is this too pronged element to what the administration has done to the National Security apparatus. On one hand it has removed the leadership and experience and on the other hand

it has put the folks who remain in the position of having to shoulder all of this responsibility without either the experience or the very least the bandwidth because there are so few people

“and the resources and something that's different about the National Security space which you touched”

on then say for example a standard narcotics operation or prosecution is the complicated nature of the front end before something goes boom or before national defense information is transmitted

unlawfully into foreign adversary hands all of these steps ahead of time that the public never sees

depends in part on this leadership and this experience and the muscle memory of knowing how to do it and having the interagency relationships in place such that if it becomes a reactive case or a surge moment like you mentioned then we have the people in place the relationships in place such that it's firing on full cylinders and when it does it can stop this threat and we saw that for five six years of a barrage of Iranian incidents and all those cases that I put in almost all of them

we stopped it before the target was harmed we stopped it before the assassination we were able to stem the tide of classified information flowing to Iran and other hands that only happens because we have just the bare bones resources but also that unspoken for quality of everyone who knows what they're doing knows the relationships in place

“and knows how to do this before it goes boom and I think that we've we've lost that's really hard to”

quantify that until something goes wrong have they actually often creativate parents? Yes so what's the reason? Let's talk about a specific example for the benefit of our audience not a specific case but a specific type of problems that they could affect these prosecutions

is the predication for a lot of these investigations classified or unclassified classified and can you sort of walk us through if you're a prosecutor handling one of these cases and it's opened based on classified material maybe it's a human source reporting from overseas maybe it's signals intelligence that another agency has collected what problems does that immediately create for you as a prosecutor how do you ameliorate them and what role does experience

play in that amelioration? Yeah man that's a that's a useful exercise so completely hypothetically this walks in the door which is likely not now in your office you've been asked to go into the skiff just for people who don't know is especially outfitted room within certain government buildings that allow you to receive retain and work on a classified material in a way you cannot in a less

secure space which is already the first hurdle because you need prosecutors who have the clearance

to be able to go in that facility and hear the information the agent needs to present to you and it's even more complicated than that the more you lose this experience in the national security space across the country the more you lose folks who may be able to be qualified to be what's called red in to certain compartmented information and so in these tiers of classified information you have secret top you know you've lower than secret secret top secret and then you

potentially gain access to this information for very short amounts of time and then when you gain

“access to it for short amounts of time you've now removed someone else who's on that billet or list”

I highlight this kind of hyper technical space because it is already a hurdle that the department may face if they have fewer people who can gain access to that compartmented information and that may exist in trying to combat foreign adversaries like Iran or the RGC and so if that exists then the agent needs to be able to talk with the A you would say about that then the agent A was saying needs to think through how to develop legal process with the agents as a team that can go before a

judge how do I work with the agent the way because it's two parts here the agent who is experience

to know how to discover information in an unclassified manner to maybe either replicate or at

least reveal some of the danger and then the A was say who knows how to work with the agent to guide

“this process to a product that can now go in an unclassified way to a judge to seek a search warrant”

or a 2703D order which is one step below a search warrant and to build an investigation to either stop a threat before it becomes materialized or in your mind do it in a way that then will eventually lead to a successful try where you can present this stuff to a jury and so those are the kinds of things you're doing at the step zero and step one with agents step negative number but before zero is the agents have to have already had the experience and relationships with

sources around the world and intelligent agencies around the world where they can collect that

information and know how to splice through it know how to filter it and see what's actionable and what's not before they can even predicate the case and bring it to the A was say yeah and I just want to sort of hammer home in earlier point that relates to what you just said to the extent there is a reservoir of this sort of knowledge and know how at the justice department it's in the counter espionage and export control section and in the counter terrorism section of the national security

division and as you mentioned the turnover there has been astronomical I prosecuted counter intelligence cases for close to 16 years in my career and I only know one person who still remains in that entire division that I worked with I worked with dozens the outflow of talent has been nothing short of astounding and you know you get more specific we're talking you know some cases that could not have a seat yes attorney that we're ongoing because the CES attorney would either be

fired by the administration or would resign and you'd cycle through CES attorney after CES attorney in one case and that is a danger both to that case but also to the wider national security goal which we used to talk about in a zero tolerance policy we had no tolerance for mistakes nothing could go boom class identified information could not leak or beyond authorized you know into other hands and CES is a perfect example it has lost over 50% of its personnel it has lost

almost every single supervisor that existed down the ranks from chief down the deputies at one point there was a three week span in 2025 where it had three different heads of CES and at some point that musical chairs experienced landed on someone from a U.S. attorney's office that didn't have the clearance enough to sit in the skiff and that's a leave had less than five years

“experience as a prosecutor that's unheard of and and puts us at risk and I think we ignored to”

this the progress that that section and other sections had made in the last few years think about an SD is relatively young right it started in 2006 and so these litigating components are developing their own identities over the last 20 years particularly in a post 9/11 threat landscape and the leadership there was doing a phenomenal job at developing a culture of both excitement and aggression leaning it forward and dispersing across the country to lead U.S. attorney's

office as an help a USA is navigate this classified information space and this hyper specialized foreign adversary space and to lose all of that is to not only put us at risk now when we face and it heightened threat risk from our conflict of Iran but it's also put us at risk moving forward because it's now losing progress at developing that culture and adjusting with the ever-malable threat landscape that exists it's been a long time to pick that pack up and start rebuilding

all right so with our last few minutes I want to bring this back to you in a rod specific topic

and how that affects us now that operation epic fury is ongoing but i'm going to spring a question on you that is completely unfair because your article does not touch up on it and you and

I have never discussed this before but i'm going to sort of bring our institutional rivalry to the

floor and make an argument that only in a FBI agent who spent his entire career in counterintelligence would make and can only really be argued against by a prosecutor who spent most of his career in the national security space and I'm going to do it by asking you a question every example we've talked about of trying to stop or run from conducting operations on US soil has been in the context of something that was ultimately prosecuted is that a good strategy prosecution makes sense

does it have a real deterrent effect on a nation state the same way it would on a domestic criminal organization or should we be focusing our efforts more on things like double agent operations recruitment in place signals collection and intelligence interdiction of technology before it gets to a rod like in an ideal world where we actually had all the prosecutorial resources we need how much should they be leveraged in actual prosecutions and criminal investigations versus

what somebody in our old organizations would call sort of the secrets swirl side of things yeah yeah it's funny i recently got my children a secrets squirrel t-shirt and so i'd rather resonate with me no it's a good question i'm going to answer it in the most lawyerly fashion and i'll resist the urge to snap like this is a shark's versus jets moment yeah uh the he both there is no reason that the american public should not expect its national security apparatus

to do both and in a normal world we do the question is why has the administration got it the apparatus so much that we are skeptical right now that we can do both that's the hardest

“question i think to be answered and so let me put some flesh on that from two lenses one”

lens as a prosecutor and then two kind of more programmatically as the prosecutor part of my goal when i started managing in the national security space was to radically change the way we think about a u_s_s_ in the national security space at least yes we are good and can be helpful at prosecuting the case afterward and bringing it into court and making sure that we seek justice for both both for both victims but also for the defendant right to face accountability when we

capture that person there is no world in which we can't also aid the national security mission well before a courtroom and even if it doesn't even reach into a courtroom because we have the ability to work with our interagency partners in the intelligence community and the law enforcement community to help with legal process that may supplement an investigation or may be able to think through how to navigate something and stop it but be involved early on just in case it gets to a

courtroom i think that we can do both and a wasa is ought to view their job in fact i would

“talk about it as kind of wearing two hats you should think about wearing it as two hats right”

it agents do all the time at the FBI whether they are an intelligence hat or law enforcement hat and we'd often talk about which hat are you wearing when we talk about this a wasa should do that too okay programmatically we should do both right we should we in the national security apparatus for those listening they will all vigorously not right now we do both right we should be stopping

Iran by focusing on what materials we should interject and stop from reaching Iran in the first place

right we should be focused on signals intelligence we should be focused on affirmative cyber operations from cyber command and from the NSA we should be focused on collecting that intelligence and making sure that we can't be caught flatfooted moving forward it's only when activity crosses a certain threshold right of materializing is certainly on the United States soil that we should then kick into guarantee okay well maybe how should we stop this and bring it into a

“courtroom but to focus only on bringing defendants into article three courtrooms i think is”

one layer to a lot of layers of how we operate in the national security space and SD was getting

quite good at doing this this the secret squirrel stuff that we talking about a second ago

prosecution that apparatus is significantly damaged when the administration fires all the

“folks who had had enough experience to think creatively how we should do this better that's another”

unmeasurable quality that we've lost right now yeah i want to hammer home that point by building on something you alluded to earlier which is the relative newness of this whole apparatus you would I give each other brief quite frequently in morning meetings about investigators versus prosecutors and who has the primary ticket on something or is the best at a certain task but we're able to do that because people like us over the past few years have worked together throughout the

entire life cycle of a case the public has an idea probably based on the 15,000 varieties of law

in order shows that are on that you know investigators carry things up to the 50 yard line and then they hand it off to the prosecutors who finish and that certainly was the case for much

“of FBI and DOJ history but I think really in the years maybe probably starting five years after 9/11”

when things really got up and running that wasn't how you and I were trained right when I had a case that I thought might go to prosecution I bring in attorney is early use humanly possible and we would have a frank conversation that hey we're looking at this guy he's working for bad people and we haven't decided yet whether we want to recruit and turn him or if we want to stop him and

prosecute him but we would talk about that from day one and make sure that if we went down the first

path we didn't do anything that would preclude the second if the first one did not work out and one of the really terrible things that has happened from the point of view of our nation safety is that those of us who have the muscle memory of working in that fashion and those of us who've done that extensively are exactly the generation that has been most pushed out. Yeah that's right and the folks who remain are still largely skilled dedicated public servants who

want to do this work in some ways maybe they can't because they've not had that experience and so they don't know how to develop those relationships or they do and it's just going to take time time we may not have in another way they're stretched thin that the byproduct of removing all of these folks from the FBI and DOJ and other institutions is that it reduces the capability of everyone who remains to shoulder the immense responsibility of preventing a terror attack on United States soil

or an espionage or intelligence failure in the United States and when they've been stretched thin and then it diverted an attention to immigration efforts or surges into DC for the safe and beautiful task force which a hundred agents are still being tasked to every day from Washington field office or hundreds of NSD attorneys over the holidays to redact Epstein documents. Our eye is no longer on the ball right and the administration seems to be hellbent on taking a mirror

and whatever eye is still on the ball and shining as much sunlight as they can in it and that gap and coverage that darkness worries me as we intensify our conflict with Iran because of Iran's history in retaliating and not only saying it but trying it on US soil and so that's not a knock on the folks who are still left it's a worry for them because they are still operating with the mission of zero tolerance but given fewer resources to do it. Well on that slightly less than Holy

Obtomistic than I think we will leave things and I will recommend your article to all of our listeners who want to fully understand what has happened in the past in this sort of shadow battle between Iran and the United States and who are concerned now that that warfare has broken out into the open. Thank you so much for having me Mike.

“The warfare podcast is produced by the Law Fair Institute. If you want to support the show and”

listen to add free, you can become a law fair material supporter at law fairmedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events in other bonus content we don't share anywhere else.

And be sure to check out our other shows including rational security, allies, the aftermath,

“and escalation. Our latest law fair presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine.”

You can also find all of our written work at law fairmedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen

Potcha with audio engineering by Kara Shillin of goat rodeo. Our theme song is from Al by

“Music. And as always, thanks for listening.”

Of course, I know. To be honest, I've been talking about a lot of good news about my site.

It's a video. But I just wanted to show you the whole marketing video with GF's new book in

“Schnaps Berlin. It's not a giveaway. If you want to know, you can do your word.”

New is from Mark Ovekling, the Kangaroo Rebellion. Now, on the bookbite and everywhere, where and I hope you have a great time.