Never Forget. Never Forgive.

Three years of genocide in Ukraine

Good Evening:

It was a weekend of protests and events, marking three years of warfare waged against the people of Ukraine. I will post three images each day this week to commemorate the occasion, both from this evening’s protests at the Russian embassy and from yesterday’s gathering at the Lincoln Memorial.

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Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher and I welcomed Holly’s former schoolmate, the estimable Dr. Beth Stuebing, who joined us from Malawi to talk about what the sudden loss of USAID funding looks like from the perspective of one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries. We also talked about the global politics of humanitarian aid:

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The Cause Of The Day

Today’s organization, suggested by Friday’s guest, Dr. Stuebing, is African Mission Healthcare, an organization dedicated to funding critical health care at mission hospitals across Africa and providing training for African medical and nursing students:

African Mission Healthcare works to strengthen mission hospitals across sub-Saharan Africa through multiple channels. About half of its funding goes directly to clinical care, with a focus on maternal and child health and combating HIV and tuberculosis. It also works to increase infrastructure capacity at the hospitals it serves, including building surgical facilities and ensuring access to vital necessities like oxygen tanks. Finally, the group funds educational programs, ensuring that the hospitals it serves can function as teaching hospitals, educating the next generation of African healthcare providers to meet growing needs.

Previously on The Cause of the Day:

We’ve raised $3,400 for Girl Security:

We’ve raised more than $3,000 for Rebirth Ukraine:

We’re still fundraising for the Trans Doe Task Force, for which we haven’t been as effective—yet:

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Today, in my “The Situation” column, I made a list—to wit, a list of “19 statements of facts pertaining to the week that has passed, to which I will attach minimal commentary but which a reasonable person might deem related to that whole rule-of-law thing.” Item number one? “Kash Patel is now the director of the FBI.” Item number 18?

Lawfare’s traffic, whether measured by visits, active users, or new users, is up more than 100 percent in the past 30 days over the 30 days before that—and more than that over this same period last year. One of those hundreds of thousands of new or returning readers, Ezra Klein, said recently, “I will say, I feel like it’s always a bad sign when I’m reading Lawfare a lot.”

I tried at one point to write the entire in verse. It didn’t work, so I reverted to prose. One line, however, pleased me. What is now item number four on the list read in the verse version:

Emil Bove argued to a judge that letting go
A corrupt official in a quid pro quo
For a policy concessions is no problemo

Friday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett

A Self-Imposed AI Brain Drain

Kevin Frazier outlines the negative effects that the Trump administration’s plan for a mass layoff of probationary employees at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will have on domestic artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, AI governance, and American dominance in AI:

This self-imposed, likely long-term brain drain cuts against Trump’s AI aims. In his executive order on AI, he made clear that his administration sought “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on that policy in a recent speech at the Paris AI Action Summit. Vance announced that “this administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide.” But staying at the front of the global AI race requires an expansion not a reduction. In December, Walter Copan, who served as NIST director in the first Trump administration, called on Congress to substantially invest in NIST given its key role in making sure the United States outpaces China in AI R&D.

A Lone Bove in Federal Court

Anna Bower reports from a hearing in the Southern District of New York on the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss a federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in which Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove—whose directive to dismiss the charges prompted at least seven federal prosecutors to resign—was the sole representative for the government.

Last week, Bove personally signed the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss Adams’ charges, which requires “leave of court” under Rule 48 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Though Adams consented to the motion, two groups of litigants moved to file “friend of the court” briefs, arguing that the judge should deny the motion to dismiss or, at a minimum, conduct further factual inquiry into the basis for dismissal. Judge Ho, for his part, scheduled today’s hearing to determine how to proceed.

Mosaics of Insight: Auditing TikTok Through Independent Data Access

Zeve Sanderson, Sol Messing, and J. Scott Babwah Brennen explain how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm allows foreign actors to influence the platform’s users. Sanderson, Messing, and Brennen argue that TikTok should improve transparency by providing data access for independent researchers and committing to robust data-sharing:

In both the U.S. court cases and the EU investigation of the Romanian election, there is a core concern: How do lawmakers or the platform’s users know if TikTok’s algorithm has been influenced, either directly by China or indirectly by another adversarial actor? Based on a large academic literature studying foreign influence campaigns on other platforms, it’s clear that the current transparency regime—algorithmic audits through Oracle and a limited application programming interface (API) for external researchers—is insufficient for identifying various direct and indirect mechanisms for influence. This risks leaving both policymakers and the public in the dark about the actual harms of the platform. Regardless of what happens in the first 75 days of Trump’s new term, independent data access for researchers will be required to fully understand the platform’s democratic effects in the U.S. and abroad.

The Loss of Afghanistan

Robert Rakove examines Amin Saikal’s account of the United States’s failed state-building efforts in Afghanistan in “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan.” Rakove highlights Saikal’s discussion of the U.S. campaign in the context of Afghan history and early strategic mistakes as particular strengths of the book:

“How to Lose a War” is a notably short book, and Saikal focuses his analysis on the flawed and rushed process by which the United States established an allied regime in Kabul, followed by sharply critical chapters on the presidencies of Hamid Karzai and Ghani. Two subsequent chapters deal concisely with efforts at civil reconstruction and the flagging U.S. military effort. These complement, but do not displace, the author’s overriding emphasis on failed state creation.

Why America Needs Its Own Salt Typhoon

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business newsletter, Tom Uren discusses retaliation strategies for Salt Typhoon’s compromise of U.S. telecommunications networks, the Samoan government’s cyber threat advisory for Chinese hacker group APT40, an Australian intelligence operation targeting bulletproof hosting service Zservers, and Russian threat actors’ use of "device code phishing" to hack Microsoft 365 accounts:

We think, however, that in a world where China and the U.S. run amok in each other's telcos, NSA would actually be better off than its Chinese counterparts.

Indeed the U.S. government has already mitigated some of Salt Typhoon's impact by publishing good advice, encouraging Americans to use encrypted apps to protect themselves, including Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Threema, Wickr, and Facebook Messenger.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Quinta Jurecic sits down with Wendy Edelberg and Jacob Leibenluft to discuss the implications of political appointees and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gaining access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems, and what it reveals about the administration’s political goals:

Videos

On Feb. 21 at 4 p.m. ET, I spoke to Scott R. Anderson, Bower, and Roger Parloff about the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and the firing of probationary employees:

Documents

Olivia Manes shares an executive order that directs agencies to work with DOGE to deconstruct “the overbearing and burdensome administrative state” by rescinding “unconstitutional” regulations and “de-prioritizing” their enforcement.

Katherine Pompilio shares a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court in Republic of Hungary et al. v. Simon et al., which held that commingling funds “without more, cannot satisfy the commercial nexus requirement” of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act’s “expropriation exception.”

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is an elk enjoying a mud puddle:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, honor your inner child. Get dirty and scream about it.