transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Scott, you look tanned, rested and ready.

Speaker 2:
[00:03] I never looked tanned, day in my life, Eric. You're a damn liar and you know it. But that's fine. I may look rosy, sun-kissed by some accounts. There you go. Yeah. I got to spend the last week in a tropical locale, although traveling with two young kids is not, I would say, vacationing-like experience, a restful experience, to say the very least. But especially when my kids, if your kids are like my kids, I mean, they're incredibly fair-skinned. If not, outright gingers like my daughter, meaning like me, they have to slather on 100 SPF sun-tail lotion every 30 minutes to avoid getting a hospital-inducing sunburn. But despite that, we appeared to have all emerged from a week in Florida sun, relatively unscathed, which is all I can ask. Did you all get up to anything exciting for spring break? Any travel?

Speaker 3:
[00:48] I had a conference and my husband traveled with our three kids.

Speaker 2:
[00:52] Wow. That is ambitious.

Speaker 3:
[00:55] I am so proud of him, but at the same time, I got out of my meeting and I got a phone call that was like, we rented an Airbnb and there's a snake in the house. And he sends me a photo and it's not like a little garden snake. It's like a four foot long snake. And then he's like, I've taken the kids outside, I'm going to get it. And he goes after it. And it climbs into the air vents and he can't get it. And he's like, it just keeps peeking its head out and its little tongue out like every couple minutes. And he was like, I can't get it out. I'm just going to close all the vents in the house. So I felt so bad.

Speaker 2:
[01:28] Oh my goodness. People don't tell you this about snakes. Snakes like to get in houses. It's like a thing. I remember at my parents' house, which live in Northern Virginia. It's not far from where we live. I was helping them track down, which we thought was a rodent or something. Was they appearing something up there? And I went up over above a little ledge over an office in their basement. And there was just a snake skin lying there. And I'm like, guys, good news. You decidedly do not have a rodent problem. I think that rodent problem is taking care of itself for better or for worse. But you may have a different sort of problem.

Speaker 4:
[02:00] I accidentally brought back a lizard from Thailand once in my luggage, but it was in March 2020. So it was COVID era. And I was like, oh, God, what if it's going to spread something? What if I cause either a separate pandemic entirely or just amplify the current one? It's very, very upsetting.

Speaker 2:
[02:22] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security, the show where we invite you to join members of the Lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's biggest national security news stories. I am rested, refreshed, only slightly sunburned from my week off last week. Sorry to miss you in your pod catchers, but I'm thrilled to be back here with some members of the Lawfare squad to talk over a couple of the more eclectic, maybe perhaps overlooked stories that have been happening this past week in the national security space, at least two of them. One of them is a pretty big deal. I think you probably saw the newspaper. We'll talk a little bit about it and dig into it with a couple of my colleagues. Joining me this week is, of course, back on the podcast for the mth time at this point when you reach the official variable, that means you're a regular, is Molly Roberts, senior editor here at Lawfare. Molly, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thrilled to have you as always.

Speaker 4:
[03:08] Thank you for having me as always.

Speaker 2:
[03:10] Rounding out the senior editor from Lawfare Crew is Eric Columbus, another of our senior editors here at Lawfare. Thank you for coming back on the podcast, not in your nth time, but maybe your nth minus one time. You're getting to regular status, slowly but surely.

Speaker 1:
[03:22] Glad to be here, Scott.

Speaker 2:
[03:23] And back on for the first time in a while because she has kind of moved on from Lawfare, but is still with us both in spirit and in kind of masthead status, but our former public service fellow, now a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund, Loren Voss. Loren, thank you for joining us. Back on the podcast, thrilled to have you back on.

Speaker 3:
[03:38] Happy to be here. I heard you never fully get away, so.

Speaker 2:
[03:41] That is right. We get hooks in you and then you cannot get away from them. It's more of an intimidating message than you seem to have taken away. That's okay. We'll drive that point home soon enough. But regardless, I'm thrilled to have you guys on board as we talk through a couple of news stories, including our first topic, Meet Joe Flack. The Justice Department's ongoing investigation into the alleged grand conspiracy against President Trump relating to the 2016 election and its aftermath has entered a new phase this week with the appointment of Joseph Degenova, a former Reagan era US attorney and political commentator as counselor to the Attorney General now in charge of the investigation. Meanwhile, reports indicate that the Justice Department may be closing in on charges against former CIA director John Brennan, a vocal Trump critic, who Degenova has previously called a traitor in political commentary on Fox News. Even after a career attorney previously charged the investigation appears to have withdrawn. What should we make of Degenova's new role in this investigation and how seriously should we take these attempts to prosecute Brennan and others allegedly involved in the grand conspiracy? Topic two, no occupation without representation. A district court has officially closed out Trump v. Illinois this week, the case that led the Supreme Court to invalidate the grounds on which the Trump administration had federalized and deploys National Guard troops to several states last year over the objections of their state governors. While those deployments have ended, other deployments remain ongoing, including here in Washington, DC., where 2,500 soldiers, a little more than 2,500 soldiers, are still on the streets, deployments that are now projected to last perhaps all the way to the end of President Trump's term in 2029. What are these other forms of domestic deployments that are still with us? How do they differ from the deployments that have ended and were invalidated by the Supreme Court? And what space does Trump v. Illinois leave for the Trump administration to pursue other, more aggressive domestic deployments if it chooses to do so? And topic three, Hungary for Change. This was not original. I'm sure many people have done this, but it's still a great subject title and I won't apologize for it. Last week, Hungary voted to end the 16-year reign of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party, which have been frequently cited as models for President Trump and his mega-movement, among others in the global nationalist, somewhat quesadilla liberal movement. This was in spite of a last-minute visit by US. Vice President JD. Vance, wherein he unsuccessfully sought to shore up support for Orban in the last days of the campaign. How do we see Orban's defeat playing out in the United States at the conservative movement begin to think about what comes next after the Trump presidency? For our first topic, let us dig in to this grand conspiracy. This idea of a grand conspiracy has been with us for years now. I think maybe the term grand conspiracy is only fully coalesced as the accepted way to describe it in all sorts of channels here in Washington, DC and beyond in the last year or so. But we've seen lots of these different threads of this investigation that are reopening these old wounds from the 2016 election. And not for the first time. This is the subject, more or less, that we saw a similar scope of the Durham investigation and the very first Trump administration, which didn't ultimately result really in any meaningful criminal charges related to this conduct. There were some collateral matters investigations. Now we're seeing it renewed again, primarily in the state of Florida involving a couple of familiar characters regarding prior Trump-related legal sagas. Molly, before we get into some of the substance of it, let me bring it to you to talk through the listeners with a bunch of these different threads and how this most recent appointment of Joe DiGenova fits in to the kind of broader picture and trajectory we've seen over the last few months around this investigation.

Speaker 4:
[07:07] Yeah, I'll preface this with saying it's extremely confusing, it's extremely convoluted. Please don't blame me. The problem is that the grand conspiracy is a grand conspiracy theory and it doesn't actually make that much sense in large part because the facts don't back it up, but the most kind of general sketch of it is that every bad thing that has happened to Donald Trump since 2016, so that involves the Russia investigations, both into the idea that Russia interfered to help him in the first place and into the idea that his campaign might have colluded with Russia, to the impeachment over the Ukraine phone call, to the prosecutions related to the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and to January 6th, those were all efforts by a deep state cabal to violate Trump's civil rights. So that's the general idea. And then the legal theory, connected to the conspiracy theory, is that you can charge all this stuff together as a conspiracy against rights. And it turns out actually that conspiracy against rights was one of the charges that Jack Smith was planning to bring against President Trump. So, you know, it's one of his sort of tit for tat things that he likes to do or that prosecutors working for him like to do. So, that's what it is. The reason it is in southern Florida, which is what you'll hear about, you'll hear about this is happening in Miami and in Fort Pierce, where Eileen Cannon, who's a notoriously Trump-friendly judge, presides. The reason it's happening in Florida is they're thinking, okay, a lot of these acts took place in DC. They took place in Virginia. They took place wherever in the country, but the classified documents search took place at Mar-a-Lago, which is in the southern district of Florida. It's not actually in the Fort Pierce division, but you can get around that because there are a lot of intricacies with the rotating system for the duty judges. But anyway, that's how you get to Florida. What we've been hearing for months and months and months was, well, this investigation, which is broad and will likely in the end involve lots of perceived enemies of President Trump, is specifically focusing on former CIA Director John Brennan. They tried to prosecute him in Pennsylvania. The prosecutors there weren't interested because there wasn't much there there. It got shipped down to Florida where US Attorney Jason Redding Quinones was willing to oversee the case. And they were kind of using that as a jumping off point look at this broader grand conspiracy. Issued a bunch of subpoenas mostly related to the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, looking at the grand conspiracy down there. Got a grand jury and paneled in Fort Pierce. Now, there are kind of two major developments that have happened this week. One has to do with that, well, they both have to do with the John Brennan inquiry. It turns out that a relatively respected career prosecutor down there, Maria Meditas Long, I believe her name is, has withdrawn from the case because she believed there wasn't reason to bring charges against John Brennan for lying to Congress. The probe had sort of narrowed in on that issue. Even as the broader one went on, the most developed portion was this lying to Congress charge. She decided, again, there wasn't enough there. There, a pattern that we've seen in the Comey case, in the LaTisha James case, we've seen career prosecutors think, I can't do that, and then they bring in someone else to do it instead. So that's what they did. They brought in two people for the Brennan thing. They brought in one guy named Chris DeLorens, who's a former canon clerk, and then they brought in Joe DeGenova. And you mentioned who he is. He was the US. Attorney for the District of Columbia in the Ronald Reagan era. And he's become-

Speaker 2:
[11:09] Through the first term, if I recall correctly.

Speaker 4:
[11:11] Yeah, and he's become kind of a MAGA media fixture ever since then. And he himself is a conspiracy theorist. So it looks like he's doing two things. One of them is taking the Brennan line to Congress charge to DC. That makes sense because unless you're doing the big conspiracy, there's no jurisdictional hook down in Florida. And then two is continuing to work on this broader case in Florida and specifically in Fort Pierce.

Speaker 2:
[11:38] So I am so confused isn't quite right. I am like so dubious of this decision to try and tie all this conspiracy to Florida via of all things, the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Because if you wanted to make a conspiracy charge stick, I think one thing you would need to do or something to be very helpful to do, I don't know if it's actually strictly necessary, is that you would want to show that the action to initiate the investigation at Mar-a-Lago was motivated by the conspiracy, that it was an act in furtherance of the conspiracy. And part of that will be showing that it's not predicated on a factual basis. But there's very strong factual basis for the Mar-a-Lago investigation, like really, really strong. And it's trying to be particularly as one that's not particularly useful to reopen, that the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, could move past it. But instead, this is a vehicle by which you're going to have judges and courts scrutinize, potentially, the basis for that investigation, which boils down to, is there a credible basis for believing that President Trump and those other people at Mar-a-Lago around him, his staff are involved, Walter Nauta, some of the other people who were at one point as co-defendants, engaged in illegal activity? Eric, let me turn to you on this. Am I wrong on this? Is there a reason to think that they could tie this to Florida without having to reopen some of these old, weird wounds about the Mar-a-Lago investigation? Or is there, am I missing something about other ways they might get it here? And if so, why is Florida so important? Is it just because this is where you have a US attorney willing to sustain this investigation, even though apparently his career prosecutors aren't?

Speaker 1:
[13:15] I can't think of anything else that would connect it to Florida other than the raid in Mar-a-Lago. And I don't, as you say, they would bring up old, festering issues that you might think that they would prefer to have not reawakened. But Trump believes that he's done nothing wrong in Florida or elsewhere, and is delighted to do anything that will help inflict pain on John Brennan and on other perceived enemies. And in Florida, you have a somewhat eager prosecutor who is willing to go to bat for him. And also you have, I think, very importantly, and Molly mentioned this in her piece on the grand conspiracy, which I encourage everyone to read, bringing in the Mar-a-Lago raid helps take care of what otherwise would be a very substantial statute of limitations issue. The Mar-a-Lago raid, I believe, was in 2022 and that would kick the general, that the general federal statute of limitations is five years. So if you can allege a continuing conspiracy that covers everything from 2016 through 2022, then you can arguably have a statute of limitations that does not expire until 2027. Now, the fact that you can do that, of course, doesn't mean that you're going to prevail at all. But for Trump, he doesn't necessarily think things through and is always able. Besides that, is happy to bring as much punishment against his enemies as he can, even if it does not lead to an ultimate conviction.

Speaker 4:
[15:05] I can also add to that a little, and it kind of stinks because to a certain extent, I have to spread disinformation to describe what's happening here. But part of the grand conspiracy theory is that the Mar-a-Lago search was a frame up, and that it was part of covering up actually the bad things that the Obama era officials had done, and that Trump had, some of the documents that he had were documents related to how actually the Mueller probe and the ICA and kind of all the Russia investigations were a plot to bring him down when he didn't do anything wrong. So that's how you would connect it. That's why they claim that the motivation was part of the conspiracy. The idea is they went in to make it so that Trump didn't have access to these documents that would have exposed this whole thing and then also there's the Eileen Cannon angle. She didn't want released, I think the report that Jett didn't want is not the way to say it. But I believe that she had barred the Justice Department from releasing Jack Smith's final report describing the classified documents stockpiled at Mar-a-Lago. And so I think they're thinking that there's a lot they can get away with with Eileen Cannon. But what would actually happen even with Eileen Cannon, I don't think would work out great for them. Whether they even get to that point, we'll see. A lot of it, I think, is sort of posturing. A lot of it is saying to President Trump, hey, we're doing this, because he keeps demanding that it get done. And actually, Joe DeGeneres himself said, and whether this is true, we don't know. But he said it, that part of the reason Pam Bondi was fired was because she wasn't moving fast enough on exactly this investigation.

Speaker 2:
[16:50] Oh, interesting. I had not actually seen that. So, I mean, it's not surprising to hear that this is a White House-pushed sort of mission. This is an investigation that they wanted. And that helps explain to some extent some of the incoherence, I think. I think it must because I don't know what else would drive people to pursue this particular avenue for this route. That raises this other question, which is this idea of malicious prosecution that we've seen raised in the Comey context, in an other context, in other investigations. And it's a notable case here. We've seen John Brennan and other folks become stocking horses for a lot of the right-wing commentariat, including Joe DiGinova and other folks in the media sphere that are now involved in this investigation. Do we have a sense about how big a barrier that's likely to be or how big a concern that's likely to be?

Speaker 4:
[17:46] Eric can probably speak to this too, but I mean, it should be a big barrier. It should be a big concern. It's really tough to prevail on a selective or vindictive prosecution motion, but Kilmer Abrego-Garcia recently got discovery there and that's one of the big barriers that you have to surmount. And Comey and James had really strong motions too. We never found out the outcome because the cases were dismissed because of Lindsay Halligan's improper appointment, but again, they looked strong because you had what Abbey Lowell, who was Legislature James' attorney, described at the time as animus threw a megaphone from the president. I mean, you had him on social media saying, Pam, prosecute these people. So it should be a big barrier. And I think that the difficulty of prevailing on these motions is partly a result of the presumption of regularity that the courts afford to the administration. You know, the idea is they should be able to prosecute people and have discretion there. But just as the presumption of regularity is eroding across lots of contexts, I think it may start to erode here, too, if you continue to see cases like Kilmar, Brega Garcia's, like Comey's, like James's, like this would be even the woman who was charged with smuggling frog embryos into the United States and she was working at Harvard and she was a Russian born scientist. And this was around the time that the administration was going hard against Harvard universities. She won on her habeas case for selective vindictive prosecution. So, I mean, it's rare, but it's happening more now than before. And you would think this would be a similar situation.

Speaker 2:
[19:35] Yeah, Eric, anything to add to that? I mean, like, I look at this from the perspective of, you know, a government lawyer and like a small, all government lawyers are at least used to be, I think by the nature of small c conservative. I feel like that is not really the case for the current executive branch in all the case, at least not the people making decisions around cases like this. But I would be incredibly nervous about even opening up to discovery around something like this because of what's clearly seen to be a lot of what could be, I guess, depending on your audience, politically kind of embarrassing communications about how this would go. I mean, perhaps the Trump administration is going to push back on the ability of the courts to inquire into that, although I don't know how the courts are going to receive that. I mean, what are the avenues that seem like they could pursue to avoid that, or is that just a cost that seems baked in here?

Speaker 1:
[20:23] I think it's a cost that seems baked in. I mean, the way, Scott, you or I consider the role of government lawyer is very different from the way the president and therefore the people who want to work for him and want to not get fired while working for him operate. The president's goal in this area is to inflict maximum pain upon his enemies. And if it is revealed that he is as vindictive, everybody is vindictive as we think he is, that does not strike him as really much of a cost because his goal is not just to, in addition to inflicting maximum pain on his enemies, his goal is to make other people think twice before crossing him. And he has succeeded in silencing a significant percentage of people who are not his fans but who either need things from him or fear being retaliated against in some respect. And so that, things that would be a detriment to normal people, relatively normal people like us, are things that he does not see the same way at all.

Speaker 2:
[21:41] So this suggestion by DeGenova that Pam Bonnie's removal as Attorney General just the other week opens up another big area that's worth talking about, because obviously it touches on this, it also touches on the Epstein files, other sort of retribution and prosecution, that is this question of the new Attorney General. You know, they're kind of perceived to be in the reporting kind of three candidates, the current Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanch, US. Attorney for DC., Jim Imperial, and the head of Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon. I don't know if anybody really knows those are the three people, if those are just the names I get kind of floating around, I guess I think it's probably the latter. I don't know if it's actually that limited a list, but there's certainly a perception they're in competition. Eric, talk to us about what we have a sense of those folks and how these questions, these questions of these kind of extraordinary investigations, the targeted retributive prosecutions, how that looks to be fitting into this competition for being the Attorney General, what it means not just for being selected, but also for being confirmed for the Attorney General, which of course any of these candidates will have to be.

Speaker 1:
[22:46] One job requirement, if you will, is to be willing to do outlandish things for Donald Trump. And all three of these people have a decent track record in that regard. Todd Blanche is the Deputy Attorney General since the beginning of the administration. He was nominated and confirmed roughly the same time as Bondi. And he remains in that position while he is acting Attorney General. Harmeet Dhillon is the head of the Civil Rights Division. He has done a lot of unusual things in that regard, including basically presiding over the dismantling of much of the division. I think apparently 70% of the staff have left, which is just astounding. Janine Pirro is the US. Attorney for DC and she was in a past life a Fox commentator. And before that was the district attorney in Westchester and ran for a statewide office a couple of times and lost. She is currently trying to investigate Jerome Powell. She must do the delight of President Trump, although she has yet to succeed in doing anything there. And she has some of her grand jury subpoenas were quashed, a rather unusual move by the district, by Judge Boasberg, who is the chief judge of the district court, federal district court in District of Columbia. I would say that Blanche has the inside lane because he is currently the acting attorney general. One thing you've seen in recent weeks is that he's done a lot of public appearances. He has given a lengthy interviews to outlets such as NBC News, which is not the type of place that Pam Bondi would talk to. She, I think, tended to confine herself to more right-wing media. Yesterday Blanche did a press conference with Cash Patel to announce the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Blanche is very comfortable in front of a camera. He's a former prosecutor also, and he comes across as a fairly normal human being, for better or worse. He may have more of the central casting look that Trump prizes, and he is, at the same time, needs to show that he is getting the things done that Trump wants him to get done. And so this prosecution is one that has not been really getting off the ground, and Trump very much wants it to. And I think putting a guy like Joe DeGenova in charge of it is a very interesting move. DeGenova is not really what the guy you would put in if you were dead set on getting a conviction. He's 81 years old, doesn't look a day over 80. He is, on record, as despising John Brennan, and has been saying things about him for years, that are very stride and critical things that play well on Fox News and on Newsmax, but that might also show up in a vindictive prosecution motion. But for Trump, the process is the punishment. And if your goal is to indict someone and not necessarily worry about what happens after that, who better to pursue an indictment than a demonstrated hater like Joe DeGenova? Now, you're not supposed to do that as a prosecutor. You're supposed to bring a case only if you believe you're likely to get a conviction. But Blanche is probably saying, look, knock yourself out. Mr. President, this is important to you, and therefore it's important to me because I want to be Attorney General. I'm going to put Joe DeGenova out there, and maybe you'll get a headline out of it.

Speaker 2:
[27:05] But I do feel like there's like a, I agree with that assessment, but I also feel like there's like a qualitative difference in the way Blanche has approached his advocacy around this. That's interesting, that frankly being the Deputy Attorney General allows him to do in a weird way, which is that Harmeet Dhillon basically is just full on in. She's like in the culture war, she's on social media, she's trying to boost her portfolio. She's saying like a lot of the controversial things that align with what the president is trying to do. Jeanine Perriere is at the frontier of actually doing it. Unlike Dhillon who is presuming a variety of things, but isn't at the center of the core matter, she is doing a couple of controversial legal maneuvers. But some of them have big problems, potentially dissent at confirmation. I think the Federal Reserve investigation is the one. We know Tom Tillis is already holding up Federal Reserve Board nominee over this investigation. I don't think it's impossible to imagine that he might do the same thing if it were to come to that for the Attorney General as well, or at least might raise big questions about it. Blanche, interestingly, tell me if you think I'm wrong about this, but my sense is that he has been very strategic about letting other people get their hands dirty. He has to say the right things, he has to be involved because he supervises it, but mostly, and in part this is because, again, there's a privilege of being a supervisory role, he's been able to let other folks say, hey, these are the taking the lead, I'm investing this person, this role. Sometimes it'll be someone he chooses or somebody who doesn't. But he seems like he's got that distance that might give him a little bit of an inside track insofar as there is any sort of pushback from anyone in the Senate, particularly Republicans, around any of this stuff, which I don't think is impossible. I'm not sure it's likely, but I don't think it's impossible. We already saw at least one, I think, Lisa Murkowski voted against Armory Dillon's confirmation. So she's only got two senators to lose, three senators, I guess, if JD. Vance come in to throw a vote. I don't know, am I being too optimistic about this, Molly, Eric, like, is this a destined, that like any whoever gets this is going to get confirmed? Or is this an issue set where we might actually see at least a little bit of pushback, especially because we're coming into an election season where at least a number of Republican senators are facing competitive races, not a ton, and others are about to yolo out of here. And you have Tom Tillis and to some extent Mitch McConnell, who've been willing to buck the administration in other circumstances. So I'm just kind of wondering how confident the administration has to be that they can go in and get their wild card choice for this role.

Speaker 4:
[29:36] Yeah, I mean, I do think that Todd Blanch is more confirmable than the other two. I think that he is kind of exactly what the president wants. He's the president's lawyer. He's been the president's lawyer. And partly because he's been the president's lawyer, he didn't have to do a sort of notice me, notice me thing in the way that Harmeet Dhillon did, the way that Jeanine Pirro did. And Trump knew who he was, he was his lawyer. So I think that has benefited him, although now he appears to be auditioning a little more for the role because that's the opportunity. He's been presented with, I could not tell you whether he'll be confirmed or not. You know, part of me is like, if I were Trump, I wouldn't have fired Pam Bondi because I think it will be hard to get anyone confirmed who is willing to do what clearly anyone he would ever nominate needs to be willing to do, which is to treat the Justice Department as a vehicle for prosecuting Trump's personal and political vendettas. So I mean, you think there would be some Republican senators who are skeptical of that. You can see that there are some who are on the other hand, you know, the meme about how concerned Susan Collins is, etc, etc. When it comes down to it, a lot of times, these people still vote for the nominee.

Speaker 2:
[30:52] So yeah, it's an interesting question. Like, you know, the president clearly has more sway earlier in his first term as it gets further along. And this president, particularly with his popularity having dropped precipitously, like, you know, it does seem like the general logic would be, oh, it's going to be a harder uphill push for doing things that are a little unorthodox, uncomfortable for senators, which we know that some of the stuff really is, even if they don't ultimately, if they do ultimately go along with the administration. But you know, what takes the line? How much does that break party discipline around confirmation of a position as pivotal as attorney general, and that you actually need to have a confirmed official in as attorney general? We learned that in the first Trump administration. That's a really big question. But something we will have to keep an eye on as we move forward. We've got a couple other topics we should shift our attention to for today's conversation. To let us shift our focus from the state of Florida, I guess primarily was the focus of the last investigation, although there may be a prosecution happening up in DC too. But let's focus our attention on DC where I can look out my window right now and there's about a 50% chance here in Massachusetts Avenue that I am going to see some young, uniformed men and women patrolling back and forth, mostly looking pretty bored, if I'm being completely honest, sometimes eating catered lunches or box lunches out on some of the picnic tables scattered around the neighborhood here. It's interesting because we have, I feel like domestic deployment, the domestic deployment of the military was kind of the story of the last half of 2025. I know that I spent a lot of time writing and talking about it both here and in other places. And now in parks, we had a Supreme Court decision, around the holidays that put an end to that form of domestic deployment that was the most controversial. We don't hear talked about that much. But here in DC, people who live here, it's still very much a day to day reality, both for the soldiers serving and for the Americans living here. And that's true in places like Memphis and New Orleans, we still see extraordinary deployments in other places. So, Loren, I want to come to you on this. You are have been both for Lawfare and in your new capacity at your Marshall Fund, working on this topic, looking at this topic, and have a better inside view of what the picture of domestic deployment that are still happening is in a lot of people. So bring us up to speed on this. Talk to us about what the different types of domestic deployments that are still in place are that we're still seeing, even though they're not getting the same media attention and intense focus that those in Portland, Chicago, and LA did at the end of last year.

Speaker 3:
[33:17] Yeah. So as you said, we still have the troops in DC, about 2,600, and that's supposed to go on now till 2029. We also have small numbers of troops in Tennessee and Louisiana in Title 32 status. Those are also supposed to be crime missions.

Speaker 2:
[33:42] Title 32 meaning they're in a hybrid status. Can you explain what Title 32 is for people who might not follow this stuff? Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[33:50] So that means both for Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, they are in a Title 32, which means that they are doing a federal mission, but they are still under the command and control of their governor. So that is with the approval of the governor, still overseeing the operational control day-to-day. So you saw those two missions start up last year and continuing on, but small numbers like 100 troops type things. We've also had ongoing, and this is falling off the radar, ICE support missions in various states. It seems like very small numbers. It seems like it really depends by state on what they're really doing. I think those are probably all Title 32. There was never a very public statement of what the different authorities were for that. But don't forget everything that's happening at the border still. We have patrols along these enormous swaths of land now known as national defense areas. That is supposed to be something like 845 miles worth now of national defense areas, where we presumably have troops patrolling and arresting migrants as they cross into these areas. And then we still have the border missions that we've seen from the last decade continuing on. Maybe about a total of 10,000 troops. I don't think there's a very public number out there to know exactly how many are there right now. So it's kind of a mishmash of things right now. But all the things that were exciting in the news last year, California, the attempts in Oregon and Illinois have all wrapped up, although the cases are slowly petering out but not completely gone.

Speaker 2:
[35:44] So let's start a little bit, because I want to dig into a couple of these missions to get a sense of it and where the legal fight over them is. Let's start with the border mission a little bit, because I think there's an interesting one. Talked about what the National Defense Area designation is, because troops on the border is not a new thing. We saw the first Trump administration do it. We saw the Biden administration continue it. The George W. Bush administration did it. I can't remember what the Obama administration did. Well, might have, at various points. I suspect that you're nodding at this aspect they did, it seems like. Is there, and of course, we should note, there are statutory authorities that are specifically allocated to allow the military to do a variety of things in relation to the border. But it usually is understood, or traditionally understood, to stop short of allowing the sort of confrontation between soldiers and civilians that is usually entailed by, you know, core law enforcement activities like arresting authority, right?

Speaker 3:
[36:35] Usually, I mean, you have seen some instances where they've changed from like a federal Title 10 authority to a Title 32 authority because they felt like they were interacting too much with immigrants. And so they were changing statuses so that they wouldn't run into posse comitatus. But generally, it's supportive. It's logistics, it's administrative, those types of things. Sometimes it's, you know, intelligent support.

Speaker 2:
[36:57] So that's exactly what I was going to ask. Are these mostly Title 32 kind of hybrid missions where they're under state mission of do we like what is the authority structure that they're doing? Is the National Defense Area designation indicative of a kind of new legal theory that's allowing them to do certain things on the border?

Speaker 3:
[37:14] Yes, National Defense Areas are a new authority. You actually had the Northcom Commander at a conference a while ago, you know, talk about them and say that they're likely going to be permanent. And one of the reasons behind them was the idea of a National Defense Area. Basically, they're taking large swaths of federal land and attaching it to nearby military bases, right? And so that territory becomes a military base in legal parlance in such a way then that the military can do law enforcement in that land just like they would on a military base under a commander to do, you know, control of the base. So they're basically using it as a way to do law enforcement and get around Posse Comitatus.

Speaker 2:
[38:05] So it's kind of like a rough parallel is kind of like what we saw during like the end of the first Trump administration around like park lands and federal buildings with federal law enforcement or in Portland and here in Washington, DC where we saw protective missions of federal property being interpreted very broadly. This is kind of extending that to the military. Is that like a fair parallel?

Speaker 3:
[38:25] Yeah, I mean, in practice, it's it's parallel on what they're doing, but like the legal authorities are different, right, so this isn't like an inherent protective power type argument. It's it's a more narrow military necessity commander must control their military base type argument.

Speaker 2:
[38:43] And there are statutory authorities that relate to like the ability to patrol, provide security, I think even arrest authority on military bases, as I recall. So presumably they're leaning on those a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[38:53] Yeah, I mean, we haven't seen much come out, so it's guesswork at this point.

Speaker 2:
[38:58] Yeah. Well, so let's talk then about the city, like law enforcement deployments, the Memphis, New Orleans, and DC. DC is always like a little bit of an outlier. Talk to us about what those look like and where they are legally, because there are legal challenges of all these in federal court in the DC case. I know in state court in Tennessee, maybe in Louisiana, so I'm actually not sure. But talk to us about where those are right now.

Speaker 3:
[39:20] Yeah, I haven't seen a legal challenge in Louisiana. In Memphis, Tennessee, there was a state court challenge there. At the Court of First Instance, I think it's called the Chancery Court. I don't know my Tennessee state courts very well. The Chancery Court did a temporary injunction against the deployment and found that the governor exceeded authority under state law, but then did what we saw in some of the federal cases, state that injunction while the appeal was going on. The Tennessee Court of Appeals did hear oral arguments last month in March, and we're just awaiting that decision right now. Any day now on that front. We haven't seen anything out of Louisiana. The other state court case we did see was West Virginia challenging the deployment of West Virginia National Guard to DC., but that was found to be within the governor's authority.

Speaker 2:
[40:23] Interesting. And what about here in DC.? There's a federal district case that's still kind of proceeding, but talk to us about what that is and what makes how the legal authorities behind the DC case is a little different from the Memphis and New Orleans cases.

Speaker 3:
[40:35] Yeah. So, you know, DC., completely different. One of the reasons it's still going on is because, you know, the Supreme Court decision, Trump v. Illinois, like just completely different authorities. So, here in DC., there's two main questions. One is around the DC code and what the authority the president has to call up the DC. National Guard, and the second question is around using Title 32, that hybrid status, and specifically 502F, which allows you to do training and other duty, and for all of the other states that have been activated to come into DC under that authority to do this safe and beautiful mission. And so those are the two pieces. Back in November, the DC court did rule on the side of DC., but that was stayed by the district court in DC., and they are really, they're taking their time deciding what happens next, right? So they, this day was back in December, and there was just the first appellant brief this month. The appellee brief is due the next month. The reply brief is due in early June. There's no, you know, schedule yet for oral arguments. They're, they're taking their time. But I would say it is really worth reading the arguments in that case and how they've morphed over time. So to the 502F point, you know, it started, well, right now they're at the point where they're saying Title 32, 502F, it says you can do training or other duty. And other duty is not defined except for to say the mission must come from the president or secretary of defense. And because it's not defined, that means we can do whatever we want. There is no limitation on that mission authority. And remember when you're in this hybrid status, Posse Comitatus arguably doesn't apply. That's been the federal government's opinion on this, although there's no case law on it.

Speaker 2:
[42:46] And we should know for people, 502F is a statutory authority they use to justify deploying people in that hybrid status for certain different types of missions.

Speaker 3:
[42:55] Yeah. And so, and what I will say is exactly that, that this has traditionally been understood as a mobilization authority to call up the National Guard. It has not been understood as a mission authority. And they weren't explicitly arguing that in the early days. But originally, they were kind of, it seemed like relying on that protective power that we were talking about, that inherent presidential power to protect federal persons, property and missions. But it seems like, you know, their original deployment, you can see it in the case where they talk about, you know, the commanding general says, that's what we want you to do, protect federal property and federal law enforcement. And they add in local law enforcement. But remember, in the early days of the DC mission, local law enforcement, the president had declared a national emergency and taken over local law enforcement, right? And so in the initial days, you can kind of see how this would fit in that protective power argument. Obviously, local law enforcement is no longer underneath the federal government. And so it's unclear here, you know, so they had to kind of move to know we can do whatever we want. This is a mission authority. But, you know, there's other mission authorities and you find them elsewhere. That's why we have 904 Homeland Defense or 112 Counterdrug, right? Like this mobilizes, then you have to figure out what you can do through other means. Because I mean, otherwise, you know, Posse Comitatus doesn't matter. The Procedure of Insurrection Act doesn't matter. Like you could have them out there doing local police roles. You could have them actually doing the immigration and asking people for papers, right? And that just doesn't seem, you know, quite right. So I'd say, you know, that is a very unique situation that's developing here. As they argue that very explicitly, they're also arguing that the DC Code basically should allow them to do this. There is a provision 49-103 that is specifically about using the National Guard for rebellions, which they didn't use because one of three people has to ask the president to do it. Two of those people are appointed by the president. The government's argument is, well, we shouldn't have to do that because he's in charge anyway, but which is an interesting argument of we don't have to follow process, which is not usually how this works. I mean, think about trying to argue, oh, we're going to invoke the Insurrection Act, but we don't actually have to issue a proclamation first. They're basically saying, he has this power anyway. There's an interesting line in the brief that they just filed where they're making an argument that they actually don't even need statutory authority. They actually say, we don't need to express statutory authority. The president can deploy the DC National Guard to DC because it's a federal enclave for federal purposes, which is an expansive claim that I haven't really seen them make before. So as this case goes along, you see them really making larger and larger claims. One that hasn't risen to the top, that I just want to flag for people is this Posse Comitatus bit, which is there's been this understanding by the federal government that it doesn't apply to these hybrid mission statuses of Title 32, because you're still under the command and control of the state. But in DC, that's a very weird claim to make because the DC National Guard has a federal chain of command. You have all these other states coming in and there's this argument about, okay, well, they're still responsive to their states, but they're getting operational orders from the federal government. It just seems like a way around that. Then they argue, well, we're not doing law enforcement anyway. But then we get back to the, well, what really is law enforcement? What is the Posse Comitantes Act actually prohibit because they say, well, we're not arresting people, we're not doing investigations. But we are detaining people. We are being told to look out for certain suspects. We are taking over patrols from park police. In other ways of assistance to law enforcement. It makes you go, okay, well, then where do you actually see that line here? I would like to see it come out of, okay, well, does Posse Comitantes truly not apply in this situation? Because it seems like just a factually weird situation to say, because they're in their malicious status, Posse Comitantes doesn't apply even though all of their command and control is federal.

Speaker 2:
[47:26] There's a really dense network of legal authorities around these sorts of questions. I think you've done a really good job hashing and walk us through a little bit, Loren. But it's also a political dynamic around this, and I want to turn to you, Eric and Molly on this real quick before you begin to think about the future of some of this stuff. I mean, there's always been a possibility of the president being able to deploy troops domestically under the Insurrection Act, under some of these other legal theories that has never been maximized to its furthest extent because it was always expected to be unpopular because a lot of people doubt it was actually the right solution for the problem people face domestically and because it's burdensome. It's burdensome on state governments that are often providing National Guard troops where that's the case. It's burdensome on the individual service members who are being inconvenienced by this. It's burdensome on the local communities where they're deployed, often unpopular. But we haven't seen these different elements really coalesce into a sense of outrage or discontent or disapproval. I think maybe people here in DC dislike a lot of the National Guard deployments, but it hasn't communicated to a broader level in a way that has political salience. I'm not even sure really among Democrats, really at a national level at least. So Molly, I'm curious about your thoughts. Eric, I want to come to you and Loren if you have thoughts too. Why is that? Why is it that we haven't really seen a strong pushback against these other domestic deployments the way we did around Portland, around LA, around Chicago? Is it simply that DC is a weird case and people are unsympathetic to it and maybe we're all a little acculturated to have the military around because frankly, we have always had a lot of uniformed military around DC and always will? What is it that makes this a little bit of a different case? Or is it just a matter of things not having percolated up enough?

Speaker 4:
[49:13] Yeah, I think it's a mix of things. And Eric may have kind of a different explanation of it. I think one thing is that they're not really doing anything. You know, I think that they're cleaning up the trash in the parks and they did some snow removal. And I'm not saying that like, oh, I'm so grateful to them for that, although the snow was really annoying. So maybe I am grateful to them for that. But I think it's that they're not doing anything that seems more menacing than it is just to have people in uniform and guns walking around, period. And as you said, you know, there is some military presence otherwise. So, and I think that they've helped enforce the juvenile curfew. But I mean, really, we're not seeing them do much that would chafe at anyone here, or I haven't seen that. So I think that's one thing. And then I think another thing is that to the extent it is bothering people here, I think it kind of bothers them as part of the broader feeling of we don't have home rule. And that's a longer standing thing that isn't really even just specific to this administration and also something that we're kind of accustomed to even if we're grumpy about it. You named the title of this section, No Occupation Without Representation. So that's part of the parcel of all… These days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then yes, and the No Ex Without Representation is kind of a long standing vibe and a long standing gripe. So yeah, that's what comes to mind for me. I mean, it feels, I don't like it and you know, it feels silly. I go to DuPont Circle to eat a sandwich for lunch and there are these people there and they're just standing there and they walk around the circle and then they walk away. But I mean, it's not exactly offensive. It's not offensive. It's offensive on principle, but the practice of it isn't really offending me all that much.

Speaker 2:
[51:09] Eric, let me turn to you on this, but let me add a little wrinkle to this. Like, why are we seeing outrage among the people who are being inconvenienced about this? I mean, there are the DC National Guard has been mobilized for a long time, is still forming a big core of this mission. They are being inconvenienced. There are reports in the media about like senior Justice Department officials who've been stuck on National Guard duty. And so, because they're in the DC National Guard and have left units, you know, without big gaps in their leadership while they're stuck on this duty. You have other states sending personnel here that are, you know, it's a burden on those families who are constituencies that, you know, I think most state governments probably have to be a little sensitive to because they're service members and because they are doing, you know, state service, maybe not national service, but state service at least in doing this. And the governor is supposed to have some responsibility for them. And if they're being pulled away from their families for a mission that doesn't seem very worthwhile, it seems like that would have backlash. And this is just expensive, you know, estimates of a million dollars a day or whatever it is for this DC deployment alone. That's a really, really steep tab that the federal government is paying to do this. Then some ways as a DC resident, maybe, maybe you're welcome even. You would say, okay, well, yeah, if they're going to sink $365 million every year into DC crime reduction, maybe that's a good thing, especially in an era where DC Police Department was running low on funds and having trouble getting police officers to do enough overtime to match what they needed them to do. That was a reality early in 2025. But why isn't the rest of the country kind of up in arms about DC security getting subsidized to that level by this administration?

Speaker 1:
[52:44] That's an interesting perspective. I hadn't really considered that. I don't know. I don't know whether it is a large enough number in any given state to have political salience. Now, obviously, if there was a massive deployment overseas, at a certain point, it becomes a national issue because you have a broad array of communities taking a hit and people risking their lives and unfortunately, one national guardsman was in fact shot and killed here in DC, so that's not entirely different. But I don't know whether in any given state it is large enough. What are the numbers in DC?

Speaker 3:
[53:27] It's about 2,600.

Speaker 1:
[53:29] Yes. Well, that's relatively small. They're spread out among several states. And I believe that they're coming from only from states with Republican governors. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:
[53:41] I believe so. Right, Loren?

Speaker 3:
[53:42] Yeah. Well, I mean, the governor has to approve it, right? Because it's Title 32 hybrid. So, I mean, you've had some that had governors swap out, you know, new governors come in and then they pull their troops back or missions would end. But yes.

Speaker 1:
[53:59] So it's already in areas that are less inclined to be critical of the president. And I mean, Republicans have been running against crime and disorder in DC for forever. And if the mission is cleaning up DC, that's something that I think that there is probably some enthusiasm for at some level in Republican areas, even if those of us who live in DC know that they are really not doing much in that regard.

Speaker 2:
[54:32] So I want to come back to you, Loren, to close on this topic, so we should move on. I want to leave a few minutes for our third topic. Before we part, what are you looking at to get a sense of your sense about what the future of these deployments may be? I mean, Trump v. Illinois left the door open to the president turning to the Interaction Act, particularly if you use active duty troops. I think there's still a question as to what exactly the implications are for state national cards and like the circumstance where they can be called up, but it didn't really bear on the president's authority to use the Interaction Act for, you know, federal first troops already in federal service to deploy them domestically if they felt the circumstances were right. It didn't say thoroughly, firmly could. And not only that, we heard justices and oral arguments and I don't possibly even the opinion itself, I have to go back and look, mention that the Interaction Act is there as an alternative, you know, that the president could have available. So they're not removing this ability. The president hasn't done it yet. He didn't do it to renew these other deployments. He hasn't actually never done it, although he's talked about it. We know people have been worried he was going to do it. Is it these other political checks that are the things really holding this back? Are there outstanding legal questions? And how strong are they if we look forward about the ways the president may use domestic deployments in the coming three years of his administration?

Speaker 3:
[55:44] Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me that people talk about the SCOTUS decision is like closing this door. And it really didn't, right? Like it is very narrow. It is about one of three prongs of one statute, right? And you would have lost one of the six votes, you would have lost Kavanaugh if the president had just made the determination that he couldn't use the military, right? And he just said like, oh, it's just because he didn't do the procedural thing, not, you know.

Speaker 2:
[56:16] The regular military, right?

Speaker 3:
[56:17] Yeah, right. And if he had made that procedural, you know, action, then he would have had great discretion, right? And so, but I mean, this is just, they didn't even get, so we're all talking, this is all about 12406, right? And this is three, which is about, you know, enforcing the laws. But there was also an argument around two, which was rebellion or threat of rebellion. And that never, the Supreme Court ignored that argument entirely, right?

Speaker 2:
[56:41] So I would say implicitly rejected it because they didn't find it a basis to uphold on. But yes, they didn't really engage on it. I actually think the government may have abandoned it by the top stage, I think, in the briefing.

Speaker 3:
[56:51] It was, well, regardless, it was in at least one of their written briefings to SCOTUS. And yeah, it was implicitly overruled, perhaps.

Speaker 2:
[57:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[57:03] So, but I mean, all of that to say, right, like, I think the Interaction Act is still on the table. And a lot of people speculate, you know, why hasn't that been used yet? And I think it's just because of the public perception of the types of situations in which you should invoke that and how serious they should be, and that they should generally be situations in which local law enforcement is unable to deal with the crisis, right? And we just really haven't seen that. We haven't, I think, seen a situation where the general public would be supportive of invoking the Interaction Act. So I guess that's why we haven't seen it. But I mean, we've closed the door temporarily on one prong of one statute, right? And so there's plenty of other ways, whether it be the Insurrection Act or, you know, there's a lot of other provisions. It is kind of a mess of various statutes over the years of how you can use federal military. I mean, there's ones about like, you can use them to enforce laws to protect federal timber in Florida, right? There's all kinds of like various things out there. I mean, what I would say, you know, people may want to look at is, you know, we had that executive order in December making fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. And there was this, you know, strange reference to what the Defense Department may do to support that. And in a reference to, it was 10 USC 282, you know, about how you may use the military to support dealing with WMD, right? And so there's that potential door opening there. I think there's a lot of other like random statutes out there. We just talked about Title 32, which is completely open. And then as you mentioned, we also have state active duty. And so you could see governors deploying their National Guard in various ways that, you know, the president encourages or that they do because they think it's supported, you know, by the executive. So there are, there is, this is like a huge decision tree that could go in so many different ways.

Speaker 2:
[59:13] Yeah. Well, and needless to say, this issue will come back to haunt us again one day soon, if perhaps not quite at the volume, hopefully not at the volume that it did in late 2025. But for now, let us move to our third topic before we are out of time. Because we had some pretty big developments in Europe in the last two weeks, a historical development specifically in Hungary, where we saw the end of Viktor Orban's term as Prime Minister, the end of his Fidesz Party domination for almost two decades. That had a lot of regional implications for Hungarian politics, for European politics. I don't really want to get into those, but I do in part because I think we have reason to get into them in some other topics I want to cover in episodes in the next few weeks. But I want to talk a little bit about what it means domestically, because the Orban government has always played this really weird role in the intellectual foundation or firmament of a lot of the strands that compose megaism. It's often been a frequent touch point, a frequent model. Molly, I want to come to you and start with you on this, if that's all right. This idea that when you see a serious model that was held up as an example of how to consolidate power, how to a movement in the United States could and should restore conservative values within a democracy, including by trimming back on a lot of the traditional incidents of liberal democracy. And I'm not, I don't think I'm exaggerating here. I mean, this is the way Vice President Vance has actually described Orban as a model, fairly publicly and publicly remarks. Like, what does it mean when that model gets defeated and rejected fairly handily, politically, even after the intervention of the Trump administration? Although I don't know how many actual fans Trump administration has even among Orban supporters in Hungary. Talks about like, how does this echo to you? What is that? What do you think this matters in kind of the American political environment?

Speaker 4:
[61:11] Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a bullish indicator for the MAGA folks and, you know, for JD. Vance, who went over there ahead of the election, almost as if he were campaigning alongside Orban. And I think it's certainly true. I mean, not only that people who are kind of involved with the Trump project or who are Trump allies have gone to Hungary specifically to learn from Hungary, to learn from Orban. All that has happened, and it seems like concretely they've implemented parts of the playbook, taking over the bureaucracy, replacing career employees at the Justice Department and elsewhere with less neutral people. So they've done that. They've done the same playbook on the media for sure, too. Trying to either intimidate the media into being friendly to them or basically buying it up, certainly getting allies installed, you know, CBS, CNN, that kind of thing. So they've done all that. The big question for me is if it had been less of a complete blowout in Hungary, which it was, right? I don't know what the final count was, but something like two thirds of the seats in parliament went to the opposition. If it had been less of a blowout, I wonder whether he would have been as quick to concede because they were sending messages ahead of time that suggested that it wasn't gonna go quite this way. They were talking about the possibility that the election would be stolen. They were talking about how there was gonna be violence from the opposition. If things didn't go their way, they were sending the signal, the same sort of, the signal that made things look like this was gonna look like 2020. So, I don't know exactly how ready I am to say, okay, good, this suggests that if Trump loses, things are gonna play out similarly smoothly. I also don't know whether I'm ready to say, this suggests that Trump is going to lose. I think that the way that Magar ran his campaign and what he campaigned on doesn't seem terribly similar to what I imagine any Democratic candidate running on. I mean, he really avoided all the culture war issues. He also was pretty similar in a lot of ways to Orban on immigration. I mean, I just don't, there's such a party duopoly here that it's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate who says no to the corruption, no to the economic implications of what's happening under this regime, which again have to be, I think, really bad to get to the blowout, to the degree that there was a blowout, but who's going to not say any of the things that are going to alienate voters who could otherwise go for the opposition. So I don't know, it makes me a little more optimistic. Certainly, going the other way would make me feel worse, but it doesn't make me feel terribly optimistic that this means that the national and international right wing is totally wrong about what playbook to follow.

Speaker 2:
[64:33] So Eric, let me follow up on that last point from Molly about the playbook lesson, because this is something we've seen a lot in the media commentary since the election, frankly, even before the election when the outcome was seen pretty determined and easily to predict. A lot of people were talking about the success of the Magyar who replaced Orban, defeated him. The fact that he's a center-right candidate, was part of the Orban coalition, broke off. You've heard people argue, well, that means we need a centrist candidate in the United States to beat Orban. Other people have said, he led a new party, he formed this new party. Other people say, well, that's a sign that whoever is going to be able to defeat Mega needs to abandon the two-party system and recreate something new or or similarly remake the Democratic Party, Trump has made remade Republican Party. These strike me as fairly facile parallels, if I'm being honest, and not least because the idea that a new party in a parliamentary system, A, is that not newer novel, and B, means that it could somehow translate here, is itself a little absurd. Although, notably, a lot of people have acknowledged that maybe you don't mean a new party but maybe you do need a major restructuring of the Democratic Party. But I feel like a lot of these are people reading their own preferences, if you will, into the lessons that they want people to take away from this. So I invite you to do the same. Tell me, what are the big takeaways that you would have if we can take any away for what this really means in terms of like playbooks for defeating this sort of nationalist, populist and liberal political movement, which does have parallels to what we're facing today. I think it's overly simplistic to say that that is the entirety of what we're facing, but it's certainly a core element, self-identified, consciously associated of certain people around President Trump. If that is a big part of their poll, are there lessons to pull away about how to counteract and oppose that sort of political movement?

Speaker 1:
[66:22] Sure. In imposing someone like Trump, there's always the question of to what extent you run against Trump as the crazy man, or do you run against Trump as the person who happens to be the president while bad things are happening? I think that one reason why Orban lost is that the economy was not doing well, apparent by all accounts in Hungary, and especially compared to most of its neighbors. At the end of the day, material conditions really matter to people, especially to people.

Speaker 2:
[67:00] We're all Marxists now. This is it.

Speaker 1:
[67:02] Well, basically, yes. That's something that I think Joe Biden learned to his detriment, and that Donald Trump is now learning to his detriment. We can argue about the extent to which the economy is actually in the dumps here in the United States, but people certainly seem to think that it is, and that obviously is what matters electorally. That points to being able to emphasize that, and be able to offer at least something that appears to be a better alternative. I don't really have a dog in the fight of whether it means you need to kind of like hue more closely to the center or even go past that in order to win. I think that it's a little bit harder to do in a primary system, where you need to first attract the support of the folks on your team. I think it's also interesting that people taking to the streets in Hungary over time in demonstrations seemed to matter. There was, I think, and I'm getting maybe a little bit out of my skis in terms of my knowledge of these things. But I recall reading that Orban tried to restrict, limit, maybe ban a march in support of LGBT rights in Hungary in 2025, and the march took place anyway. It was apparently viewed to be a big success. It was a physical demonstration of people seeing themselves, seeing the size of their movement and feeling more in confidence that they would ultimately prevail.

Speaker 2:
[68:53] Well, Loren, what about you? I mean, I want to come to you a little bit. What are your takeaways from this? What kind of lessons do you take away? Or is it too dangerous to take away lessons from a situation so removed from our own?

Speaker 3:
[69:03] So I think that the economy argument is one that we always know in the United States, right? Like we care about that. We care about gas prices. We care about those types of things. There's also an argument that one of the big factors here is around corruption and that people were tired of blatant corruption. I think that if you do some comparative analysis, you have seen that in other countries too, that sometimes that seems to be a reason that people look for change. But usually, that's partnered with the economy being bad, right? Then you look up and see these bright, shiny people with all their fancy things, and that results in them wanting something different. But I guess I want to caution being too optimistic here because everyone's favorite right-winger, Steve Bannon, came out with his own lessons learned, which were the opposite here, which is that what actually happened was that Orban moderated too much, and he lost his base, and what you actually need to do is double down. And I think there is something to be said that, one, some people could take away from this, what you need to do is break down institutions faster, take control faster, be more extreme. And so that there is no ability to then be voted out of office later, right? Like in those types of things. And so I could see there being a strain of like negative lessons coming out of this as well.

Speaker 2:
[70:47] Like I said, everybody is just trying to project their own preferences onto whatever this outcome is on both sides of the political aisle. Well, regardless, you know, we're going to see exactly what lessons we can take away from this because we are going to be living through our own little political moment over the next year and then two years beyond that. But until then, we are out of time on rational security today. But this would not be rational security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Eric, what did you bring for us this week in terms of object lessons?

Speaker 1:
[71:16] I make my object lessons very literal. I have something called a brick. If you're like me, you are extremely distracted by your phone. And this is a device, an actual device that you can pair with your phone and stick your phone up next to it and have it block for indefinitely or for the amount of time you choose any number of apps that you wish. So when I'm trying to get my Lawfare work done, I go like this and it blocks all social media and a bunch of other stuff. And which makes a dent in my distractions. I still have it unfortunately on my browser, on my desktop, so I haven't found a way to completely eliminate distraction. But in the fact that it's a physical object and it lives on my refrigerator. So if I need to get access to the stuff on my phone, I need to physically get up, stand up, walk over there and tap it again. But I can still, obviously you might ask, why don't you just turn off your phone? And the answer is that, well, I want to family members, text, call, etc. I still sadly need to use it. So that is my object lesson for today. It costs like 60 bucks. It's a little bit silly for something this small, but it seems better than not having it for me.

Speaker 2:
[72:46] I love it. I had a friend recently who got a phone in an effort to downgrade there, get away from social media. That's kind of like, it's not quite a dumb phone, but it's a phone that doesn't have a screen instead. It has a Kindle type of ink interface that's mostly text-based. I definitely caught, I believe, them scrolling, nonetheless, Blue Sky or Twitter.

Speaker 4:
[73:05] Is that the light phone? There's a very popular phone that's what you're describing that I think is a luxury dumb phone, right?

Speaker 2:
[73:13] Yeah, that may be the right way to describe it.

Speaker 4:
[73:14] People liked using it. I think Silicon Valley types, ironically, were using it. I think, and also some kind of more Hollywood types were using it. It was just a funny set that was into this phone.

Speaker 2:
[73:26] There you go. I love it. I love it. Well, Molly, what did you bring with us? Do you have a smart dumb phone or a dumb smartphone to share with us or a different sort of object lesson?

Speaker 4:
[73:34] I could go grab my dumb phone. I did a month with a dumb phone.

Speaker 2:
[73:37] Oh, really? Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:
[73:38] Yeah, and it was like a truly dumb phone. It had the game Snake on it and that was about all the entertainment I could get out of.

Speaker 2:
[73:45] I found my old Nokia brick phone from high school recently at my parents' house while helping them clean out the drawer and I was like, yeah, throwback. I wonder if it's still works.

Speaker 4:
[73:52] I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my Motorola razor. That was like the hot phone when I was in middle school. But no, I thought we were going to talk more in the hungry context about Russian stuff. But so I brought my Soviet nesting dolls.

Speaker 2:
[74:05] Oh, beautiful.

Speaker 4:
[74:07] I'll go through them a little bit. But anyway, there's the only lesson was going to be about authoritarian or authoritarian ish regimes and persisting and whatever. And I thought we were going to talk. I'm sorry, I'm keeping going because I want to get to Putin. Because that's the best part. There's only, oh no, there's another. There's Gorbachev, here's his birthmark.

Speaker 2:
[74:28] Oh, I love it. This is really goes deep. These are tiny. That's amazing.

Speaker 4:
[74:32] They skip a few, but I mean, I think we have like and drop of in there. There are a lot of them. Oh wait, this isn't even, okay.

Speaker 2:
[74:39] Shouldn't be the more recent ones be eating their predecessors. Shouldn't it really start with like Lennon and then go up? They each kind of devour them. I like that imagery better.

Speaker 4:
[74:47] My parents have a set that does it the other way around.

Speaker 2:
[74:49] Oh, I like it. Okay. I feel like that's more symbolic.

Speaker 4:
[74:51] But then you have a giant Putin and it's kind of, but I think Putin has been misplaced. I think he fell out. He's even smaller than this. I don't know where he went. He's so small. I've lost him.

Speaker 2:
[75:00] Hopefully the dog did not eat him. He's downstairs somewhere.

Speaker 4:
[75:04] There's a lesson for it.

Speaker 2:
[75:04] If only we were all so fortunate. Well, this actually dovetails quite well with my Russia-related object lesson. Because I was on vacation last week, I got to do something that I don't very really get to do, which was to watch television. My wife and I usually pick some long-form drama that we want to watch over our week on vacation. We try and watch an episode a night or sometimes two so we can actually finish it, which we otherwise don't really get to do. We picked Ponies. Have you all seen Ponies, this new spy drama with Milly Clark? It's worth checking out. It is my object lesson. I'm going to do it with some caveats. It is sensationalistic TV. It's got Emilia Clarke, who I find quite charming. Her co-star, whose name I just gave me right now, interesting and charming too. A couple other good acting jobs I like in it. It's interesting. It's entertaining. It is a terrible show about spies in that it is so unrealistic and has such bad opsec, it is infuriating. Have you ever actually thought about these things for a hot minute? But it does an interesting job pulling in little interesting chapters from actual U.S.-Soviet relations. It's about spies in Moscow in the 1970s, and specifically the wives of two spies who then become spies themselves in an extremely unrealistic context, not because it's basically premised on the idea as like, no one's ever tried to use a woman as a spy before, so this will definitely fool them, which is absolutely ludicrous, even in 1977, certainly today. But the one thing I will say, that's an endorsement for the show, which is fun to watch, even if like, you know, I didn't, may not have been my choice of show. It is visually so cool, because they do an amazing job recreating Moscow in 1977, and they're like, not shy. They're all over the city. Evidently, it was recorded in Budapest, so it ties in well with our third topic. And they've got like car races with 1970 cars. Everyone's ducked out in 1970s clothes. The fashion is amazing. The architecture even has kind of like a 1970s Soviet vibe. I think, I don't really know, but it certainly looks that way to me. The people who designed these sets were so good and it's so interesting and fun to watch, to the point that they're even capturing kind of like different cultural contexts where like Amelia Clarke's character is like an Ivy leaguer from New England and the other one's kind of like a little bit more boho and kind of traveling around. It's really, really, for a visual kind of like experience, it's kind of amazing. And for me, especially, your nesting dolls made me think of this, Molly. Like I always really wanted to go to Russia and now I'm sanctioned by Russia twice, so I can't probably ever in the rest of my natural life. So it's not going to happen. But now I feel like I get a little taste of like, you know, throwback Russia back when Moscow was cool in the 70s. So it's worth checking out for that perspective alone, although the rest of the show, you know, take with a grain of salt. With that, Loren, bring us home. What do you have for your object lesson this week?

Speaker 3:
[77:42] Yeah, I don't have an actual object. But so if anyone knows me, I don't I don't drink coffee. I drink energy drink and I drink chai and that is very military.

Speaker 2:
[77:53] That's very military of you. I expected that to be a rip it.

Speaker 3:
[77:56] So I actually started drinking them 22 years ago before I joined the military. So I was an early adopter.

Speaker 2:
[78:04] But it was destiny.

Speaker 3:
[78:07] But my recommendation is actually a place I found here in DuPont Circle. There's a little coffee chai booth called Afghan Chai. And if anyone likes chai, I am tired of going to the main coffee chains, where if you actually look at what it breaks down, you get 90 percent of your daily sugar when you will get one of their chais. And so there is this little coffee stand in DuPont Circle here in DC, that is Afghan Chai, started by a family who immigrated here in the 1980s. After the Soviet-Afghan War, started this company as a family company. But just like good chai, nice people, and you don't get all of your sugar for the entire day in one drink. So just a recommendation for those who make it. I unfortunately was running late this morning and did not grab it on my way in, but next time.

Speaker 2:
[79:06] Wonderful. Great to have to check that out. I have been, I'm a chai. That's my like indulgence drink occasionally is a chai or a matcha latte or something like that. So I will have to have to check that out. Well, until then, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Special Security is, of course, a production of Lawfare. Be sure to visit lawfairmedia.org for our show page for links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media, wherever you socialize your media. Be sure to leave a rating or review, five stars, please, wherever you might be listening, and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad-free version of this podcast, among other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfairmedia.org/support. Our audio engineer and producer this week was me, of me, and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan. We are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests, Molly, Loren, and Eric, I am Scott R. Anderson. We will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.