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This much Advil is fine.
Thiiiis much Advil is too much.
This much coffee is fine.
Thiiiis much coffee is too much.
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Yes. First, take a very sharp knife…
If you have to ask, you’re not doing it.
Today on #DogShirtTV: It sucks out there, folks. It really sucks.
But while everything goes on sucking, I welcomed the estimable Stephanie Carvin, a Canadian political scientist, to discuss Trump's newly imposed tariffs and their impact on, you know, everything else that sucks. The estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher and the estimable Eve Gaumond were there too:
The Situation
I wrote my The Situation column today on one thing that doesn’t suck: the pushback inside the FBI to the efforts to turn over information on FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases:
How widespread is the internal resistance? I don’t know. But we are going to find out soon.
The results of the questionnaire, over the next day or so, will be sent to the deputy attorney general’s office which—as Driscoll quotes a memo sent to him, “will commence a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Will the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, receive a pile of actionable material or will he receive what amounts to a large pile of spoiled questionnaires? And either way, what will he—and the White House—do with whatever it receives? In one situation, it will have to take on the reality that a shockingly large number of bureau personnel played a role, quite unsurprisingly, in the largest federal investigation in American history. They executed search warrants, ran down leads, interviewed people, made arrests and testified in one or more of the 1,500 plus federal prosecutions that resulted.
Does Bove imagine that he will fire all of these people? Does he imagine administering loyalty tests to them somehow? What do you do when you want to punish FBI agents for enforcing the law—and thousands of them did it faithfully?
Today On Lawfare
Evenhanded Injustice: Jan. 6 Pardons, Commutations & Dismissals
Roger Parloff explains how President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons for convicted Jan. 6 rioters and the Justice Department’s dismissal of ongoing Jan. 6 cases is an attempt to erase history:
So a blanket pardon for all misdemeanor defendants would have been controversial. But what Trump did here—a blanket pardon for those who assaulted police officers with dangerous or deadly weapons; for those who assaulted members of the media; for those who smashed the windows and doors of the most recognized symbol of our democracy; and for those who, as the relevant clause of the seditious conspiracy statute reads, conspired to oppose by force the authority of the government of the United States—was beyond beyond.
It was indefensible, unconscionable, and—for those Americans who understand the meaning of the word—unpatriotic.
The Sudan War and the Limits of American Power
The estimable
argues that while the United States should continue to support humanitarian relief and peacebuilding efforts, the U.S. is unable to end the war in Sudan due to the complexity of the political environment and the dangers of heavy-handed intervention:Critics of American policy in Africa seem to want it both ways. They want the U.S. to take a strong but noncolonial hand. They want it to rescue the continent without acting like a superhero. They want U.S. aid devoid of moral dictates, but not when it empowers the abusive. The Sudan war will end when the belligerents see a self-interest in stopping it. The U.S. can work to get them to see that, to incentivize it, but ultimately it’s going to be their call. Sudan will have to save itself.
The Cislunar Competition
In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Clayton Swope discusses how U.S. success in the great power competition in cislunar space—the region between the Earth and the moon—will depend on closing gaps in international governance, investing in infrastructure, and more:
Over at least the next decade, the United States seems poised to expand its cislunar equities through Artemis and other initiatives, investing in lunar infrastructure and creating an ecosystem of commercial cislunar services for things like transportation and communications. To a large degree, the success of these endeavors hinges on the ability of the United States to address cislunar governance, infrastructure, and coordination challenges. Over the long term, success also depends on eventually finding a commercial business reason for doing things in cislunar space and on the Moon.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien sits down with Nema Milaninia, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to discuss recent efforts by the U.S. government to sanction the International Criminal Court. They talk through the motivations behind the campaign, criticisms of the Court, and why sanctions would benefit no one.
On Lawfare No Bull, Caroline Cornett shares the audio from the confirmation hearing of FBI director nominee Kash Patel in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 30.
Videos
On Lawfare Live, Scott Anderson speaks to George Ingram, Tony Pipa, and Jonathan Katz about the changes occuring at the United States Agency for International Development as Trump and Elon Musk consider shutting down the agency.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the gopher tortoise:
AI Absurdities
A few days ago, Aleksandra Urman decided to test the political neutrality of Deepseek, the newest Chinese AI, by asking it about the status of Crimea:
I (EJ Wittes) tried the same question on DeepSeek and got an almost identical answer. So, since Deepseek is apparently claiming Crimea for China, I decided to see what else it had to say about Chinese sovereignty.
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