Talking Feds

The National Task Force on Election Crises formed last year to try in a bipartisan effort to anticipate and stave off a series of possible catastrophes for the November 2020 election.  Now they are leading the charge to put in place measures to keep the virus from swamping the election or undermining its legitimacy.  Three of the most prominent members of the Task Force—Michael Chertoff, Vanita Gu...

Three of the most prominent Feds – David Frum, Matt Miller, and Ashley Parker – join Harry to dissect the domestic, political, and international consequences of the President’s erratic management of the coronavirus. Does Trump own his early bungling, or will at least his base once again give him a pass?  Are his daily conferences and Biden’s isolation working strongly in his favor?  And will there...

A special episode bringing together the Presidents of the University of California, Princeton, and Notre Dame. The Presidents first explain how they are responding to the fears and threats in their institutions posed by COV-19. They then discuss at length their ardent support for the DACA Dreamers program and their opposition to the Trump Administration’s attempts to rescind the program, which the...

The long-predicted grim effects of COVID-19 began to hit home in earnest, with numbers of cases in the U.S. doubling every 2-3 days, the economy in free fall, supermarket shelves emptied, and whole states and communities ordered to stay at home.  Chris Lu, Barb McQuade, Anne Milgram, and Asha Rangappa –former feds with rich and varied experience in governmental responses to emergencies – join Harr...

Juliette Kayyem, Matt Miller, and Natasha Bertrand join Harry and bring to bear extensive expertise on the emergency management, policy, and political aspects of the Covid-19. We run through testing, turf battles, failures of presidential leadership and more before looking ahead to capacity problems and specific needed measures, closing with an analysis of the likely effects on the presidential ra...

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) exploded into public consciousness this week, and nobody seems to know how widespread, long-lasting, and serious its impact will be. The Administration was caught flat-footed, having squandered several weeks of preparation time. Dramatic measures such as quarantines and school closings were suddenly in play. National security experts Frank Figliuzzi and Juliette Kayeem a...

The Trump-ordered drone killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s second ranking political official, raises profound and exquisitely difficult questions of legality under international law and the federal constitution’s war power clauses.  A spectacular panel of war powers experts-- Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith, New York Times Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage, and University of Texas Pr...

In the wake of the impeachment trial, the President has gone into overdrive seeking to root out from government anyone seen as personally disloyal, including those who provide truthful information pursuant to legal duty.  At the same time, he seems obsessed with trying to scrub away any facts that might reflect poorly on him. Feds Frank Figliuzzi, Matt Miller, and Sam Vinograd analyze the Presiden...

The Feds convene inside the LA office of Congressman Ted Lieu, a critical figure in the impeachment effort from his post on the House Judiciary Committee, at the end of a week of scandal and tumult at the DOJ. Congressman Lieu, former AUSA Prof. Laurie Levenson, and Atlantic writer Todd Purdum join Harry to discuss the cross currents of DOJ conduct, which ended the week with a Barr interview pushi...

Notwithstanding serious misconduct by President Trump of the sort that impeachment and removal seemed designed to address, there never was a serious prospect that the Senate would convict him.  What went wrong?  Scholars and former government officials Bob Bauer, Rick Pildes, and Kate Shaw join Harry to discuss how Supreme Court decisions, executive branch aggrandizement, congressional acquiescenc...

In this special Talking Feds Now! episode, taped hours after the Senate voted to acquit President Trump, Frank Figliuzzi, Glenn Kirshner, and Barb McQuade join Harry with initial reactions and analysis.  Is the verdict an unalloyed triumph, as Trump’s ardent defenders proclaim, or inconclusive given the failure to even present evidence? To what extent did the defection of Senator Romney take the l...

Republican strategist Rick Wilson joins Matt Miller, Jen Rodgers, and Harry for a post-mortem on the Senate vote to deny witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial and an assessment on the political ramifications of the decision.  They consider whether and how the Senate can rationalize the vote, and the possibility that McConnell’s political calculation was errant.  Looking past the coming...

Adam Schiff and the impeachment managers wrapped up three days of tightly focused and at times stirring argument that with few exceptions seemed to full on deaf ears of Republican senators. Paul Fishman, Anne Milgram, Asha Rangappa, and Todd S. Purdum (calling in from the hearings) join Harry to discuss the legal strategies of both sides, Adam Schiff's momentous performance, the comportment of the...

In a week in which the impeachment trial of President Trump commenced, there were ½ dozen other blockbuster stories, including the Parnas documents and interviews.  Natasha Bertrand, Matt Miller, and Joyce Vance join Harry to analyze a series of the biggest developments, including the Parnas materials, the ongoing battle over witnesses, the appointment of Starr and Dershowitz as Trump’s lawyers, a...

Three of the country’s premier experts in national security -- Frank Figliuzzi, Malcolm Nance, and Juliette Kayyem—in frank, unmediated discussion about the new threats to the nation heading into the 2020 election.  The Russian intervention in 2016 presents a sinister, existential hazard that calls for the same kind of paradigm shift in homeland security that the 2001 attacks required in intellige...

The Feds cast a close focus on the scourge of Russian Organized Crime, which stepped into the gap left by the fall of the Soviet Union to play an illicit and controlling role in virtually every important in the country.  At the same time, it maintains remarkable ties with Putin’s government, which ultimately controls its actions, including ordering targeted killings of people all over the world wh...

In an episode taped live in Washington DC and co-sponsored by the American Constitution Society and George Washington law School, Vanita Gupta, Leon Rodriguez, Lindsay Harris, and Andrea Senteno join Harry to describe and analyze the Trump Administration’s treatment of migrant families at the Southern border. The group traces the historical development of the issue and explains that, contrary to A...

Mary Gay Scanlon, Vice-Chair of the Judiciary Committee, joins Joyce Vance, Maya Wiley, and Harry Litman on the week in which the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump, making him only the 3rd president impeached in U.S. history.  The congresswoman adds to the group’s analysis the account of how it felt on the floor of the House as the Articles moved...

The House Judiciary Committee voted out articles of impeachment against a President for the first time in a generation and only the fourth time in history, and sent to the floor a two-count case for impeachment that seems overwhelming in both the facts and the law.  But the vote was along strict partisan lines and all indications are that the Republicans in both Houses of Congress will hold near t...

Congressional and political experts Norm Ornstein, David Frum, and Elliot Williams join Harry to analyze the probable workings – from the broad strokes to the nitty gritty – of the expected upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate.  Will Mitch McConnell control all aspects with an iron fist, and what if anything will make him part company from President Trump?  Will it all be a strictly political...

The impeachment process moves to the Judiciary Committee, beginning with a panel of scholars addressing constitutional standards for impeachment and applying those standards to the set of facts that the testimony in the Intelligence Committee established beyond reasonable doubt.  We engage the historic moment with a two-part episode featuring a remarkably high-powered group of commentators explori...

It was one of the most dramatic and consequential weeks in the history of the Presidency, as the testimony of a series of witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee appeared to establish conclusively that President Trump had engaged in a corrupt and illegal course of conduct in his dealings with President Vlodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.  Yet at the end of this series of seismic hearings, it a...

Feds Jill Wine-Banks, Elie Honig, and Barb McQuade huddle for a deep dive on today’s blockbuster testimony from Gordon Sondland acknowledging that Pres Trump conditioned the White House meeting and the release of military aid on the announcement of investigations of Burisma/the Bidens and the 2016 Election. Is there room for Republicans to continue to argue there was no quid pro quo? And will ther...

 In this Special Talking Feds Now! Episode on the first day of impeachment hearings, Harry, Barb McQuade, and Glenn Kirschner assess the performances of the Members of Congress, starting with Adam Schiff and Devin Nunes; the staff counsel; and the two opening witness, William Taylor and George Kent.  Schiff plainly approached the hearings as the accomplished prosecutor he used to be, and the Feds...

With Congress poised to begin public impeachment hearings, the Feds consider the coming historic juncture through the prism of the impeachment investigations of Presidents Nixon and Clinton.  Eyewitness participants in those dramas spell out key distinctions that shed light on the Trump impeachment and bring into relief some of the high hurdles facing the House Judiciary committee right now.  The...