Lawfare Daily: Lies, Laws, and Campaigns

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If you are called to testify before Congress and you lie,

that is criminalized. Rogers Town was convicted of that, charged, had a trial, had you process convicted. But if Congress lies to us, there are no legal ramifications. And you know, there may be political ramifications,

but there's certainly no legal ramifications for that. It's a law fair podcast. I'm Michael Fimberg, senior editor at law fair. Here today with Andrew Weissman, a professor of law at New York University, an individual who held the number of positions at the Department of Justice, both within its headquarters and in the eastern district of New York.

The idea is that if you keep your head down and don't do anything, or don't do anything controversial, that's the way to have a long career.

“I think that, to me, is the challenge for institutions that rely on and need”

and just be clear, the public needs long-term expertise. Today we're talking about the current state of political discourse in the United States, how our legal ecosystem may inadvertently be promoting falsehoods, and what changes we can make for remedy the problem. We are here today with Andrew Weissman, who is an accomplished professor of law at New York University,

and a well-known commentator on MSNow for legal and prosecutorial matters. But more important for the purposes this podcast has also occupied a wide slate of positions at both the main justice department and the FBI. He worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the eastern district of New York. He worked at main justice in the fraud section, and he was also the general counsel of the FBI.

So he brings a wide variety of experience to the topics we are going to discuss today. I want to open our conversation with sort of inquiry about why this book is coming out now,

and the answer is a little bit self-evident from the title,

but the problem of politicians lying to the public is really quite evergreen.

“I think if we go back to Homer, we would find examples of it there,”

and it's certainly something that any historian of the latter day United States would be familiar with. So why is this moment of deceit and politics different from those that have occurred in the past? Well, one, thank you for having me, you know, when I was at the Bureau, and was the general counsel I used to religiously read law fair just like every single day, because they just had such a great compilation of people and issues,

and it was really smart, and I think it's an great job of speaking to multiple audiences. But people sort of in the field, and then also lay people, and if anything, it's gotten better and wider in terms of what it does. So that's a long way of saying thank you so much for having me, and it's great having this conversation with you,

given our FBI overlap in terms of our work experience. So the book is Liars Kingdom, and so as you're correct, and I point out in the book that this is not a unique time, it's not like we don't have substantial historical examples that we can point to, and there's obviously Mark Twain, who commented very famously,

about political lies. And so, in the one hand, I do think it is a perennial problem,

and civilizations have had to deal with. Having said that,

“I don't think, in my lifetime, that we've had such brazenness about lies,”

and ones that are so readily accepted by an inordinate number of people. So let me just explain really quickly what I mean by that, which is, so one example of a lie that I sort of take throughout the book is the big lie about the 2020 election that there was material fraud. I obviously can't cover every lie told by Donald Trump or every politician,

the Washington Post catalogue just in the first term

that there were 30,000 false or misleading statements. So I didn't want to write a encyclopedia. I wanted to write something that people could read. So I took that as the core lie. Pulling on that, which has been incredibly consistent,

are that two-thirds of Republicans believe that, and a third of the electorate believes that lie.

“And I think part of that is because we are in a substantially different media environment”

than we have been certainly since Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about sort of the marketplace of ideas. And he didn't actually use that exact phrase, but that was sort of his concept. And because of this Balkanization of the media, I think that lies can be much more pernicious and prevalent because the whole concept that they would rub up against the truth

and be combated by the truth and justice is saying, you know, the remedy for false speech is true speech. That presupposes that they're going to be heard and with our current media environment, which I don't see getting any better,

that precondition for a marketplace of ideas is no longer there in the way that it used to be. Okay, so you mentioned Wendell Holmes's famous, well, his statements, which later got turned into the ways the marketplace of ideas.

And that was in the context of First Amendment jurisprudence.

And your book is very much a dialogue, at least I felt, with traditional conceptions by which I mean ones that have gained currency in modern court decisions of the First Amendment. And you lay out a proposal that by your own admission is going to get some pushback from people

who are really wedded to the marketplace of ideas theory. Can you sort of just give us a brief overview of what your proposed solutions to this problem are?

“I think by the end of the book, you lay out sort of three variations on a similar theme.”

Yeah, so maybe just turning to sort of the possible solutions at either the federal or state or both level because this could all happen in either one. And to be candid, it's much more likely if it's going to happen

at a state level first, certainly right now,

where we have a congress that doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything. So I think you can buy for Kate sort of the proposals into two camps. One is simply criminalizing an intentionally false statement. You know, I can talk about that at Nazium. And the other is a disqualification model.

And for both of those, I go through sort of what the pros and cons are, what the various precedents that you might have. But those are sort of the two ideas that one is if you tell an intentional lie of some material way, you could be prosecuted or you could be disqualified as a candidate.

So an example of the latter would be England. England has a law that if you lie about a political opponent, you could be disqualified. To be fair, they don't enforce it all that often. And it may be that they don't have to do it that much. And they're much more judicious about when they do it.

And then you have the other, which is just criminalize an intentionally false speech. And one easy way to think about that in terms of the sort of why it would make sense is right now in this country. If you are called to testify before Congress and you lie,

Roger Stone was convicted of that. Charge had a trial, had due process convicted. But if Congress lies to us, there are no legal ramifications. And you know, there may be political ramifications, but there certainly no legal ramifications for that.

“And that sort of the main theme of the book, which is why is that?”

And looking at that particular issue. So there's a lot to unpack here, because this has a lot of both immediate consequences,

but also those of the third and second order category.

And we can do it through a largely theoretical model, or through sort of pragmatic questions that naturally follow. I'd like to do both, but let's start with the practical ones. You are no stranger by any means to going after politicians and their immediate circle for a wide variety of criminal acts.

And your background is primarily as a prosecutor, mind's primarily as an investigator. But we both know, I think, that lies rarely occur by themselves. They are often attempts to obfuscate other crimes. Or even when they're not, they're usually occurring from the same sort of nexus of facts

that lead to other criminal behavior. So I suspect the answer to this is going to be pretty obvious,

but I want to hear it from you since you have the first hand experience.

Why is our existing prosecutorial and judicial system not enough to cover the waterfront on these issues? Because if we go after somebody primarily for fraud, primarily for white collar crimes, primarily for process or substantive crimes, we don't have to implicate first amendment concerns

in a way that your proposals might. So, and I realize this is just sort of me rephrasing our first question, but why do we need to change now?

“So, you know, I think that when it comes to politicians that lie,”

I'm not sure I agree that that the lie is one that goes with other prosecutable crimes.

I also feel like the reason that we have both civil and criminal laws

with respect to false, intentionally false statements, whether it's defamation law, whether it's lying to Congress, whether it's lying to banks, whether it's lying to shareholders, whether it's lying to an FBI agent or a prosecutor, is to have an effect on people's conduct.

So, they think long and hard, as you know, before an interview, if you and I were doing an interview together, I would start by saying to the person who is being interviewed, usually their lawyer would be there, and I'd introduce all of us and I'd say before we begin,

I want to make sure you understand both your rights and your obligations. And when it got to obligations, I would go through, I used to say exactly the same thing to everyone about what is required about telling the truth, and what the consequences could be if you do not tell the truth.

Now, it could be a little scary for people to hear that, but that wasn't really the point. It was to make sure they understood what they were getting into. And ideally, there's like a bell curve of people. There are those people who were going to tell the truth no matter what.

And probably are those people who were going to lie no matter what. But they'll point of having some either criminal or civil strictures is to produce people who will change their behavior based on knowing what the lie is. Think of speeding in a car and seeing a police car as you're driving by,

you slow down.

“And so I think there's an important effect of having a lot”

where people think twice before they say something to make sure that it is accurate. This is something that you and I are sort of still relatively new to the public speaking quasi-journalist role that we take and that you and I both now comment and give our analysis on things

and are very much exposed to people who are real journalists on a day and day out basis. And as you know, there's standards departments for any reputable journalism organization to make sure

but also they're concerned about making sure there isn't

a defamation lawsuit. And to me, if you do not have that,

“for the bad actor and the people who could be persuaded,”

you are saying, well, you know what? There really isn't. There may be a political deterrent and that may be less and less. And by the way, it may come after you've already won the election. And so, you know, you may get the benefits of your lie.

But you want to have that deterrent at the time so that they are that squashed because we're owed that as the people who these people are going to represent. Yeah, what you're actually talking about is very similar to the change in footing the FBI took while we were both there,

where it went from investigating things almost entirely after the fact to where it really became an organization that was based on

preventing harm in the first place.

“And I think what you're getting at is that in today's sort of what”

you described as a skewed market place because of the Balkanization of media and the media voices proliferating. Our legal regime has to be more focused on preventing the lies from circulating in the first place because once they're in the ether, they're on a control versus going

after somebody after the fact. Much better said than much better and much faster. So, well, it's something we've both been thinking about since roughly 2016, I suspect. So, all right, so there's, I'm curious about this though,

because what you are talking about is it's an imposition, I think it's a pretty modest one, but it does

require a reconceptualization over the first amendment.

And we live in a world in this speaks to your comments about Balkanization. We live in a world where in airhead, who happens to have a read the people tattoo, is given as much credibility as John Hart Eli or Irwin Chemerinsky when it comes to

expounding on the constitution. So, I'm going to give you a softball and just ask you to defend, why is this imposition, which some people will note out view is very extreme, actually not that out of the main discourse of American history?

So, I don't think that it's a reconceptualization of the first amendment. So, the marketplace of ideas, the entire way it sort of came into being and was used, came up in the context of opinion and not something that was a hard fact.

So, there is no such thing as a false opinion.

“In other words, I think that there should be more focus on”

immigration. I think there should be less focus on immigration. I think there should be more focus on fentanyl. I think there should be less focus on fentanyl. Those are all opinions or I think that the constitution

validly can be viewed as including a woman's right to choose. I disagree, I think that it doesn't include that. All of those are opinions and those are ones where you can completely imagine and I think correctly that there is a marketplace of ideas and people have that discussion and we have a

problem in terms of how that marketplace is functioning, but nothing about what I am saying is restricting that in any way shape or form. I'm talking about something that's a cold, hard fact. So, one of the examples I give is if there is gravity in the

world, that is not something that is subject to a marketplace of ideas or my father was a scientist and there are certain things that are cures. There's objective data for that. And you're not going to subject to a marketplace of ideas,

something that is actually objectively fairer-file. And the Supreme Court has said that. The Supreme Court has said that false statements in and of themselves are not protected. Now, there's there's various justices who have various

themselves are protected is something that is now a truth.

“That's why Michael, that you can have false statements to”

Congress or criminalized, false statements about false statements in Georgia are subject to civil laws. If you defame Eugene Carroll, you can be suit successfully and be required to pay tens of millions of dollars. If you lie to Congress, and if you lie to banks, et cetera, et cetera.

All of that, no one says, wait a second, the first

amendment protects it. And so, my extension is about the question, why are we exempting politicians from that? As opposed to saying, wait a second, isn't that a total we conceptualizing of the first amendment?

I would argue, it's not. It's a question of what are the upsides and downsides of applying it in this other context? Okay, so let me ask for the record. I agree with everything you're saying, but I wouldn't be doing

my job if I didn't throw some provocations out there. So, wait, totally love it. By the way, I should tell you, I went to, I did a bit of a book tour in London, and some of the best smartest, most provocative questions I got were from various

British intellectuals. And it's, you know, as you, as I don't, you appreciate. It makes it more fun and more interesting.

100% all right, so my first question is, are we an

appointment where we as a society agree enough on what a fact is full stop for this to be workable? And I'm going to be a little bit unfair and pull a somewhat obscure example. You mentioned gravity as being a fact.

But we live in a world where less than a few decades ago, a professor was able to write an article in a journal called Social Text, where he argued that gravity was a social construct. This was widely known as the Soko affair after the

author Alan Soko, and his point was that even in a peer reviewed system, there were ways to get through the gate keepers and make something patently insane, sound truly. So, you know, the answer to that, this is where I would say

the practical side of me comes in having, you know, just practiced a lot for so long.

“I think the answer to that is if the government”

couldn't prove that what the statement is both false and intentionally so, this doesn't apply. And what you're saying is there may be issues, factual issues where the person can say, that's not even a false statement.

So opinions, of course, are never going to be covered because

they're not a false statement. And even if you could show that it's false, you'd have to shed intentionally false. So in your example, you may be able to show and convince a jury, let's say, beyond a reasonable doubt

that it's false because there is gravity. They then would have to assess whether it was intentionally so. And by the way, that's what we do now, that just think about defamation law, where if you defame a public figure,

it's not enough for the plaintiff to say that what they said about me is wrong.

“You have to share that it was said with actual malice,”

which is a mental state that's required. And so, that's all that would happen here. So the more that the fact is not actually, universally agreed on and the easier it would be having been a defense lawyer, I would know this.

But you know that's two, just as having been an FBI agent, because you think about what the defense is going to be. And so, I think that's the answer to that issue. Now, I'm guessing you started writing this book some time ago. If not an incredibly long time,

like books suggest the ideas come, you mention a conversation with your parents that sort of forms the seed for this one. And in the interim, between what I assume was the beginning of this project

and now it's publication, we've seen a real optic, at least in the federal level of what I think most people would not have a problem saying our selective and vindictive prosecutions.

Do you have any concerns that promulgating this sort of regime now

to those who do want to weaponize federal prosecutions?

“So I addressed that towards the end as sort of one of the key”

downsides is, is this going to lie around like a check off gun that somebody can use? Which just for those in the audience who do not love Russia literature apparently what we do,

check off's law is, if you show a gun in act one, it has to go off an act three. And it creates tension, because it's like there,

you know, you're sort of, you know, as an audience member, you're like, you're sort of waiting for it. So I'm not going to get, I actually addressed that in detail,

but let me just give you sort of the high level of where I am on that.

There's so many weapons that are exist right now. It is true that this could be a potential new one, but I think that, that when I'm assessing the pluses and minuses,

“I think it depends on where you think we are in this country,”

and how much of a crisis you think we're in. And even for people who are not sold on this, on my idea, or I just read something for the times about this,

a way to quell vindictive prosecutions, which by the way, I think you would like because it's, it's big of a, it should actually appeal to everyone,

but in any event, I think that if you think that we're in a sort of fundamental crisis, as opposed to just a pendulum swing and don't worry people will learn,

and we won't get back here anytime soon, I think that that will dictate how you view this, but I do think no matter where you are in my idea, I think it's really important that we think about structures,

you will like this phrase, because I think it sort of goes to our, bringing at the FBI, which is how do you harden the target? That's a phrase that is used in the intelligence community,

very much to say, how do you make a target you want to protect, hard or titaniful trait, whether you're talking about cyber attacks, whether you're talking about spying,

by foreign adversaries, whether you're talking about terrorism, how do you harden the target, here that being our democracy, against authoritarian tactics,

and tendencies, and people? Yeah, I think that makes sense, and I don't want to belabor the point, because I think you and I are on the same page about where we are, and that spectrum now and what level of alarm,

people if not emoting about should at least be considering in their own mind.

“But it's important to know what I think,”

while the problem may have reached an inflection point in the United States, this is, as we've said before, not a new concern,

and you are not the first thinker to write about it.

What you're talking about is, the first argument I'm aware of, to justify politicians or rulers, lying to their people, is the allegory of the cave and Plato,

which for those who don't know, essentially imagine, the polity is living in a cave with limited light, and all they can see, on the wall of the cave,

our shadows of the real world. It is the job of the ruler to be an intermediary and interpret those signs for the citizenry. They should not be allowed to have first hand access

to the actual truth outside of that sort of moderating force. To really reach for an analogy, it's sort of the difference between the early church and the justification by faith alone of Protestantism. Should you be allowed to know the divine truth

without intercession from an appointed body? You know, this is great. This is really a ice-studied in a college on a fellowship after college, 17th century theology,

and very focused on sort of Puritanism, Catholicism, a version of Protestantism that was aligned with Cartesianism, and people are probably going on. But I think just to bring it back to

this issue of the role of political leaders

before we started, which is, there is the Plato model,

“and one of the thinkers that I reference”

in my introduction, which is-- And this is what I want to get to. Yeah. My introduction, by the way, is extremely personal. Like it is for people who don't like me,

don't read the introduction, but it's a very personal story, which it's funny when I was on with Nicole Wallace. I knew she would go right to those issues

because I'd never talk about that stuff on air,

and so I knew she would be really fascinated by it. But I'd talk about Carl Popper, who was not a fan of Plato, or at least in the area where you have raised, and in terms of the role of the citizen

“and the individual and what's owed to them,”

and the role that they should play. These are the sort of political leaders. Yeah, and I mean, that's sort of what I want to get to, because I don't think it's a coincidence that Popper came of intellectual age

during the 30s and 40s,

and was part of that intelligentsia generation

that really grew up. If I'm not misremembering things, like, he was somebody who is very much part of the intellectual ferment that begins with the decline in fall of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsperms,

and leads to this just absolute flowering of social sciences and humanities and literature and art that comes to a crashing halt with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 30s. And that's the background against which he's writing.

And I'm wondering if in a looting to him in your book, you are making an implicit comparison to a precipice we may be standing on now. Absolutely. That is 100% of what I was thinking about,

“and I think I make that fairly clear when I talk about my father's history,”

he was born in 1930 in Vienna, and my grandparents, his parents, were part of that intelligentsia. My grandfather, his father, was a doctor at the university there and was very much in denial about what was going on

and thinking, it's a little bit like the way I think about New York now, which could not happen here because you know, look how sophisticated people are and cultured and also relatively tolerant as a community at the time. And as a result of that, my grandparents did not leave Austria

when they should have and instead they managed to leave in 1938, which for some people listening to this are going to go, that's late because it was after the borders closed. And so, you know, I start the book with a conversation with my parents where my father directly eludes to that period in history

when we are having this conversation about McCarthyism, about Trump's first term, and he is relating what his experience. So, I just want to interject with one thing, which is,

there are never going to be people who hear this,

having not been familiar with Karl Popper beforehand. They're going to jump to the assumption he's some sort of creature of the left. So, I'm going to point out that Karl Popper has three targets in his work, the open society, in his enemies, and its enemies, and the latter to our haggle and marks.

This is not somebody who is an ideal dog for any side, but rather genuinely interested in freedom of thought and what allows for a flourishing society. I kind of want to pursue this Karl Popper thought by bringing in another thinker,

who you don't extensively talk about, but you do quote, "And that's Hannah Arendt." And Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper both come out of the same sort of intellectual environment, but after the war, Hannah Arendt has a very different approach

She writes extensively on it, her book,

the origins of totalitarianism is sort of a gold standard of sociology for authoritarianism and its creation and ascension.

“I think a lot of people disagree with some of its assumptions and conclusions.”

Now, but it's not a polemic. It's an actual academic work that attempts to figure out how to these things happen. But at the same time, she's remarkably forgiving of many of the people who enable it.

I'm thinking in particular, she hadn't on again, off again, love affair with Martin Heidiger.

It was going to make some point about wearing his fascism on as sleeve,

except he very much actually does. I mean, he's a member of the Nazi party who helps jettison Jewish intellectuals from the various universities. I think Heidelberg or Gertgen, where he's working throughout the war. And I want to ask you as a veteran of the FBI and a veteran of the DOJ,

there are certainly explicit bad actors who are enabling the weaponization of the legal system. There are the opposite. There are people who left or got fired out of a refusal to do so. But there's also a wide swath in between of careerists who

maybe are trying to keep their heads down, maybe are working on things that in and of themselves are unobjectionable, or maybe just think that their work is apolitical and not connected. And I just want to get your point of view, because it's something I've been puzzling over a lot

with many of my friends and former colleagues about if you believe that the Justice Department has been corrupted. What do we do once this is done? The explicitly bad actors are an easy question. Right.

What do we do?

“Or how do we approach careerists who allowed the machine to continue running?”

But they themselves were not malpractors. So let me give you my take. And obviously, again, there's different categories. The people who are being actually being asked to do things that are illegal or unethical. We've seen so many, the illegal is an easy category.

Unethical is the category of not obeying your duty to the court in terms of candor. And, you know, we've seen examples of that, that judges of all stripes have called out. And so that group fall into this sort of complicity group. And I maybe unlike kind of a rent.

I view those people as particularly problematic,

because there are always going to be truly bad actors.

You will have political leaders who are corrupt. Donald Trump, in my view, is not the first, any is not the last. I've worked on the Enron case that leaders of Enron were convicted, but the story of Enron is not about them. If you want the lesson of Enron is the complicity of those people who knew what was going on,

or close their eyes to what was going on. And so with IndiaJ, those people may not have criminal liability,

“but I think that they do need to be removed.”

And obviously, I think there should be due process, and I think they should have a chance to be heard. And if you can't show they did anything wrong, then that's so be it. But I think for people who, let's just take my office in the Eastern District of New York where I grew up. You know, let's say you're dealing with somebody who's been there for a year or two.

They're doing their narcotics cases, which is sort of a typical sort of training ground. And it's all business as usual in terms of what is in front of them. And those people are thinking, "Well, I wanted to be a prosecutor. I'm not in any way doing anything it wrong. I'm not at being asked to do anything wrong.

I wouldn't if asked do something wrong." And these people are, I think, who I'm prosecuting, or these are righteous cases. And I am modeling good behavior. So I don't have a view that those people should leave now,

I think it's better for them to be there for a whole variety of reasons.

And I don't think anything should happen to them later. And also, in many ways, there are victims having to even think about this. It's not sort of part of the job. In the same way, I want the same thing to be true with FBI agents and analysts and staff. And there may be even more so, because of the national security mission.

I want to make sure that we have the very, very best people there now to keep people safe.

That's sort of a paramount importance.

It's funny. I don't think the issue of like rebuilding DOJ, rebuilding the FBI. I don't see that as being the hardest issue.

“I think the FBI is going to be harder than DOJ.”

And I'd be really interested in your view on this. And I think DOJ is going to be relatively easy to build its reputation back and to model it. And I think there's various things they can do. The FBI think is harder because people go there for their career. And if you now have to think every four years, we could have another Donald Trump.

We could have no protection. The old saying of, which is I think not just unique to the FBI, which is big cases, big problems, little cases, little problems, no cases, no problems. The idea is that if you keep your head down and don't do anything or don't do anything controversial, that's the way to have a long career.

“I think that to me is the challenge for institutions that rely on and need and just be clear.”

The public needs long-term expertise. Yeah, I think I've got two things in response to that. I remember after the 2016 election, right around the time of the Muslim man.

I've always considered myself somebody on the center of rise if not explicitly right.

And a number of my friends very much on the left asked me how I could stay in a government that was promulgating a policy like that. And my response was pretty simple, which is just because we have domestic disagreements right now. Does not mean that the Ministry of State security from China or the Russian SVR are not doing everything they can to undermine US national security. And that's ultimately going to bounce back on the citizens, including the ones who voted against Trump. And I have a moral obligation to stay and try and stop them.

But I think you hit on another point, which a lot of people on the outside don't understand, which is one can very easily and very frequently, as I believe you yourself have done. Leave and come back and leave and come back to the Department of Justice. It's not only easy, it's something that's almost expected. There are very few people who start as a line a USA and spend their entire career at DOJ steadily rising the ranks. What is far more common? You do a couple years as an AUSA. Maybe you become chief or deputy chief of a section within your US attorney's office. You go to the white shoe firm world for a couple years.

Maybe you come back as a higher position at the US attorney's office or main justice. Maybe you leave again and then maybe you come back as a political point when I was in law school. In fact, it was the same as when you were a law school. That was actually sort of the dream progression of 75% if not more of the people who wanted to go into some sort of public service. FBI is emphatically not like that. By design, people do not leave get other experiences and come back. And, you know, I've been asked if there's a change of an administration would you go back to the FBI.

And my answer is maybe maybe not, but I can't because the fact is under FBI policy if you leave for more than two years and you want to come back.

“You have to go through the FBI Academy again in its entirety and you have to start again as a line level investigator.”

I'm quite sure my wife and child would not allow me to disappear for 21 weeks.

And my biggest worry is that we are going to have a core of agents who came in starting in January of 2025 up to, you know, four years from now.

“And they're going to be a cultured to an FBI that they have never known as a political. And extirpating that kind of thought, I think is going to be infinitely harder than people realize.”

Yeah, and I think that's true. I think what I said is true in terms of recruiting. I just think, you know, that's where going back to my theme of thinking about systemic issues.

Civil service rules are, you know, gravely gravely under attack. They don't even apply to the Bureau. And the need for us to think our way out of this problem and for people to understand.

I know it doesn't sound very sexy to be like your politicians need to run on the civil service, but it's true. There's a reason for the civil service is that we lived in a system of the spoil system for an incredibly long time. And that is not healthy. This is one where it presupposes an engaged electorate, and an engaged Congress to deal with this, but that to me is the only real way to solve the sort of FBI issue, which by the way, we're dealing with the FBI because we're both there, but the same issue in many, many other agencies,

where these are, this is where people spend their career. And they had previously been trained to be completely a political.

“I mean, I remember Michael when I went from, I'd worked for, in the department for years and years and years, and the first time I worked for director Mueller was as his special counsel for six months, and then I came back as the general counsel.”

And it was so palpable how independent and fact-based the FBI was and how proud it was of that, that it was in Washington, but it just kept its head down on all of those issues. I mean, director Mueller would be asked to weigh in on various policy issues, or like a new law was being proposed, or to testify in support of some new administration law enforcement position. And he was like, that not doing it. I mean, his view was that it was so important for the FBI to have integrity for everybody, Republican, Democrat, independent, so that they kept itself out of those debates.

Yeah, I remember midway through my career when I wasn't quite a senior executive, I also wasn't a field agent, I was what the FBI and it's overly complicated vocabulary would call a senior leader. dealing with particularly thorny counterintelligence problem that had a very easy legislative fix. We weren't going to propose it, and it just, it wasn't viewed as our place. There is a political pointy of the Department of Justice Department of Justice has an office of legislative affairs, and if the administration wants to speak, it will be through people who do not carry guns. There is just, there is something deeply ingrained in the American spirit that if you had the power to use force against the public and certain circumstances.

“You had an obligation to be a sort of grey man, don't wear your feelings or your ideologies on your sleeve, you have to be the epitome of a political.”

So that when you do have to do something extreme to protect other people, nobody is going to second guess your judgments.

And the loss of that trust is something that does still keep the up and night. To me, that is when you said that you and I have exactly the same view, but where we are on the spectrum of, you know, caron fire versus pendulum swinging, you know, the story after story of what is happening in the judicial system.

You also, you don't see mass firings or even people quitting over being asked to do things that are improper in any administration other than now.

Yeah, this is the Saturdayly massacre, except it's lasting 18 months with no signs of slowing down. I think I'm had slightly pessimistic note being respectful of your time, we will leave things, but I would unhesitatingly recommend your book for anybody who wants to try and understand what solutions to the problem of fraud and politics by which I mean,

“globally speaking, lying in politics might be out there that haven't previously been on the table in this country, and I think the set of circumstances were in right now is sort of exactly the right moment to start examining those options.”

Well, thank you so much for having me great discussion.

Thanks for coming here.

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