Project Batteries: The Latest Figures
Guess what, folk? We’ve raised and spent a veritable shitload of money!
Good Morning:
A Project Batteries update. We had a big infusion of cash following my appearance on the Bulwark Podcast last week, as well as discussion on the Secrets and Spies podcast::
The most estimable Anastasiia Lapatina has also been busy spending money. She and I have gotten into a pattern wherein I wire her $5,000 every morning, along with the word “hello.” Yesterday, we had the following exchange:
Here are the updated numbers:
Total contributions so far: $127,283.63 (The actual number is higher than this. This is the figure minus PayPal and Venmo transactions fees. I have not tried to calculate the total figure.)
Number of individual contributions so far: 726
Median contribution: $97.62
Average contribution: $175.43
Largest individual contribution: $6,000
Total tax deduction achieved by any of 726 people in exchange for their generosity: $0
Batteries purchased: 35
Generators purchased: 2
Heated blankets purchased: 25
Batteries delivered to families: 31
Batteries delivered to institutions: 1
Batteries delivered to soldiers: 3
Generators delivered to families: 1
Generators delivered to soldiers: 1
Heated blankets delivered to families: 19
Cash on hand to spend: Roughly $14,500
Total expended so far: $100,143.52
Amount on its way to the estimable Anastasiia Lapatina but currently in various stages of wire-transfer purgatory: $10,000.
Current temperature in Kyiv: 36 degrees Fahrenheit/2 degrees Celsius
I am completely overwhelmed by the response to this fundraiser—which began as a simple effort to make sure Nastya and her family could keep working and stay warm during power outages.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed and continues to contribute. If you want to help Nastya and me keep this going, you can Venmo me at @benjaminwittes. This is the preferred way to do it as PayPal is taking a larger cut than Venmo. You can also PayPal or Zelle me at benjamin.wittes@gmail.com. As long as money keeps coming in, Nastya and I will keep spending it.
Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher and I welcomed the estimable Windsor Mann to discuss his recent article on leaving the US in response to Trump.
Friday on #DogShirtDaily, the estimable Mike Feinberg and I took questions on Iran policy from the estimable John Hawkinson, planned new MARA shorts with the estimable Andrew Steele, and generally chatted:
The Situation
The Situation on Wednesday translated Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference into plain, simple English.
Today, I am just asking questions—again.
Specifically, I have a list of ten questions on my mind—both as a citizen and as the editor of the publication that covers The Situation—as I contemplate the next few months of American politics and law:
Imagine you are a malevolent despot who wants to rig the midterm elections. How would you do it? What specific steps would you actually take? It’s not enough to make some noises on a podcast about nationalizing elections, though that’s enough to send lots of commentators into a panic. You have to actually do things. What would you do?
A variety of investigations of a variety of conspiracy theories have materialized in a variety of locations around the country. There is a Fulton County investigation, for example, and a Grand Conspiracy investigation. There are a bunch of others too. How does the administration leverage these for maximum negative impact on its political enemies given that the facts simply will not support sustainable criminal charges? Is the goal mere harassment? Is the Justice Department high on its own supply? Or is there some other objective at work?
ICE violence against protestors turns out—unsurprisingly, really—to be unpopular politically, as does massive ICE presence in urban areas and house-to-house sweeps that infringe on the rights of lots of people, aliens and U.S. citizens alike. So what is the next act for The Situation’s cadre of third-rate Janissaries? The administration hasn’t built this corps not to use it aggressively. But Minneapolis led to a humiliating climb-down for the administration, as did Chicago. And the administration is also losing a lot of litigation and suffering in the polls as a result of ICE activity. So what comes next? How does the administration continue to deploy this tool without damaging itself politically?
Speaking of humiliating climb-downs, the United States still does not seem to have acquired Greenland or Canada. What is the next step in The Situation’s adventures in neo-imperialism? The administration is presumably not finished menacing America’s allies and neighbors. On the other hand, the stock market did not react well to the idea of a forcible takeover of a large block of ice—and that actually does have some inhibiting effect of behavior. Nor has Canada proven eager to be acquired and have its ten provinces condensed into one gigantic state. So what’s the next play if we assume that the neo-imperial project is not done and that the appetite increases with the unrequited attempts at eating?
Are we about to attack Iran—and why? In pursuit of what objectives?
The clock is still ticking on the longest 24-hours in world history: that one day the president promised it would take him to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Peace talks convened under American auspices have mysteriously not yielded a cease-fire yet. And the president himself has vacillated wildly on the subject of the Russia-Ukraine war: between rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, dressing down Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, adopting Russian negotiating positions, and extorting mineral rights from Ukraine—on the one hand—and imposing new sanctions on Russia and freeing up Ukraine to engage in long-range strikes into Russian territory, on the other. What is the administration’s play as the peace talks continue to not result in a peace? Does it abandon Ukraine once and for all? Does it finally give up the president’s decade-long flirtation with the Russian dictator? Or does it continue the incoherent muddling through?
How much further do the president’s polls erode? So many of the conditions that make up The Situation actually depend—directly or indirectly—on public opinion. The Full-Scale Situation requires a certain degree of presidential popularity to drive it, after all. And a president who is terribly unpopular won’t be able to hold his congressional majority together to do things—or prevent Congress from taking steps to rein in the president. Similarly, the widespread expectation that the president is heading for a shellacking in the midterms involves a set of predictions and expectations about public opinion. It is a perception based on a rather minor, though clearly real, decline in the president’s public approval rating over time. Trump’s approval rating has drifted slowly downward, but it has also shown remarkable resilience. The president is, for example, still far more popular than President George W. Bush was at the end of his tenure. One imagines rather different scenarios if one thinks the southward drift will continue than if one hypothesizes that the president has hit bottom, and one imagines different scenarios still if one hypothesizes that his numbers might recover. How does public opinion over the next few months influence opposition protest strength, presidential flexibility in dealing with Congress and state governments, his own eccentricity, and other actors’ electoral considerations?
What is the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision today striking down tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act? Does the president attempt to reconstruct his signature economic initiative under other tariff regimes, none of which permits quite the freewheeling tariff-by-whim powers he claimed under IEEPA? Does the refunding of $200 billion in now-illegal tariffs blow a hole in the budget that cause either economic or political problems? Does the president begin to treat the Supreme Court with hostility similar to that with which he and his administration have treated lower courts?
The president is likely to lose a whole string of other high-profile litigations over the coming months—everything from his effort to overturn birthright citizenship by executive order to appeals in the criminal cases of high-profile political enemies. Does this coming—ongoing, really—string of court losses sharpen the sense of the courts as the enemy for the president? And if so, how does he react? What happens as the legal constraints increasingly restrain what he wants to do and as judges lose patience with his lawlessness?
How do you litigate thousands of cases challenging the legality of government action without anyone actually working at U.S. attorneys offices or at the Justice Department?
I pose these questions because they—along with a great many others I’m not thinking of right now—will condition The Situation over the next several months. Imagine the answers to these questions six months to a year from now, and you can imagine something about what America will look like then.
They are among the questions that will determine how The Situation continues tomorrow.
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang
Allies Notice When America Deploys at Home
Miro Sedlák examines how prolonged legal disputes over domestic U.S. military deployments impact ally relationships, including with other NATO members, and erodes allies’ long-standing trust in the U.S.’s predictability.
Disputes over U.S. deployment authorities—even domestic ones—complicate adversary calculations about allied response coherence. Allies don’t need to conclude illegality to adjust planning; they only need to model uncertainty about how quickly Washington can make and sustain decisions under constraint. In other words, the relevant question for a Baltic defense ministry isn’t whether the Ninth Circuit got the Posse Comitatus analysis right—it’s whether the extended dispute reveals something about how quickly Washington can make and sustain military decisions under domestic constraint.
The Strategic Cost of Collective Punishment
Camille J. Mackler argues that the increase in immigration enforcement actions targeting refugees from Afghanistan reflects a critical misunderstanding by the U.S. government of effective vetting and threat mitigation.
When violence occurs despite extensive vetting, the appropriate security response is not to cast a wider net, but to identify what specific failure occurred and how to detect it next time. Calls for “better vetting” that do not specify what information was missed, how it could have been obtained, or how future screening should differ do not craft a security strategy. They detract from the goal of identifying real, workable solutions.
Congress—Not the Pentagon or Anthropic—Should Set Military AI Rules
Alan Z. Rozenshtein argues that, rather than private artificial intelligence (AI) companies or the Department of Defense, Congress should set regulatory limits and requirements for AI use in the military to uphold democratic governance.
Both sides have real claims here—though the way the government is pressing its position is, to put it mildly, disproportionate. But the deeper problem isn’t who’s right in this negotiation; it’s that the negotiation is happening at all. The terms governing how the military uses the most transformative technology of the century are being set through bilateral haggling between a defense secretary and a startup CEO, with no democratic input and no durable constraints. Congress should be setting these rules. And it should do so in a hurry.
The National Security Case for Judicial Review
Suzanne Spaulding, John Bellinger, Mary DeRosa, Stuart Gerson, Glenn Gerstell, Peter Keisler, Robert Kugler, Paul Michel, Nuala O’Connor, Liam O’Grady, Philip Pro, Paul Rosenzweig, Nicholas Rostow, Jeffrey Smith, Bruce Swartz, and Kenneth Wainstein assess the importance of meaningful judicial review in preserving the rule of law and democratic legitimacy, especially when facing unchecked assertions of executive authority on issues of national security.
The executive branch is increasingly asserting broad authority based on national security to justify a wide range of actions. As a result, federal courts are more frequently required, in the face of complex and conflicting precedents, to determine the degree of deference due to those claims. As these claims are assessed, we, former officials with national security experience in Republican and Democratic administrations and in the judiciary, thought it important to emphasize that, while there often are valid constitutional considerations in these cases, judges have demonstrated competence to consider sensitive and complex issues of national security. Appropriate judicial review strengthens national security, and there are risks inherent in undue deference.
Europe’s Cyber Bullets Can’t Replace Political Will
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business Cybersecurity Newsletter, Tom Uren explains why European countries should consider launching cyber campaigns against Russia, how U.S. policymakers should help protect domestic AI companies from proprietary information attacks by competitors, and more.
If countries are not willing to levy the easy, straightforward punishments they already have at their disposal, there’s every chance they’ll be just as trigger-shy on launching powerful destructive cyberattacks when, or if, the capability finally arrives.
Rather than sitting back and waiting for a magic cyber bullet, European countries should take the shots they have in their arsenal now.
Documents
Anna Hickey shares the Supreme Court’s opinion in Learning Resources et al v. Trump, in which the Court found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize President Trump to impose tariffs due to proclaimed drug trafficking and trade deficit national emergencies.
Podcasts
On Thursday’s Lawfare Daily, John Albanese joins Natalie K. Orpett to discuss the flood of habeas corpus cases in Minnesota sparked by a surge of immigration enforcement actions.
On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson sits down with Daniel Byman, Michael Feinberg, and Ariane Tabatabai to unpack some of the recent happenings in security around the world, including the Munich Security Conference, negotiations on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and the Trump administration’s approach to China.
Videos
Friday on Lawfare Live, I sat down with Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, Peter Harrell, and Troy Edwards to discuss the amended complaint in Fulton County’s suit against the FBI seizure of 2020 presidential election ballots, a judge in Minnesota holding a U.S. attorney in civil contempt, the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, and more.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the horse, seen by me, EJ Wittes, hanging out outside a coffee shop Thursday morning.
I cannot emphasize to you the extent to which there should not have been a horse outside this coffee shop. This was just outside DC. This is an urban area. This was during rush hour. The woman accompanying the horse was not seemingly equipped for horse riding.
Today’s Beast earns its title for causing me to do a cartoonish double-take in the middle of the sidewalk. In honor of today’s Beast, please enjoy this continually applicable John Mulaney monologue:
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