It seems very much that the department of justice are in the headlines about all whats going on in t the country, if its not the protests in portland or in kenosha, if its not issues about covid and restrictions and whether they should be followed or not, if its not about the election and concerns about the legality of the election at the procedures to the election, not to mention the number of cases that involve administrative officials and the dojs role as those cases go through the system. We have a lot to talk about today at of what to start with the big question, and the big question is, does this look different to you . Doesnt look like a different environment than would you,ik fr example, the two of you at department of justice, or are we just overreacting . Lets begin with you because you were there the longest time ago, josh larocco come seeking give us some recent history. And i have the gray hairs. Thanks, karen. Its good to be here. I thought i would start with come to question of sort of what has the Department Look like and would talk about National Security today in particular. Lag us up to the present moment. In getting ready for todays conversation, i decided to go and look at the recent press releases, recent announcements on cases, see what is being publicly announced. I went back to the beginning of august, end of july. Drowning this conversation in National Security, i saw any number of cases in the National Security realm that you could have taken the same snapshot from five years ago, 10 years ago. I saw a Material Support case, attempted Material Support case for isis, one about al qaeda, some very interesting cases involving the cyber threat, the takedown of cryptocurrency terroristelated to organizations, and so forth. In that snapshot, on the one hand, you can say the study stream of National Security prosecutions that have been in place in one form or the other since september 11 and picked up steam with the founding of the National Security division in 2006 remains consistent. I have thought for a long time that the general public, who doesnt follow these issues on a daytoday basis, would generally be surprised to find that these cases are happening with some regularity. Isisugust, there was an case, or what have you. On that level, there has been a remarkable degree of consistency. The second thing i would say is you place that in the context of cases,you place those what is happening on the daytoday line level with the larger context. To use a phrase from davids book, what is the difference between institutional government and the political class, or the political set of factors that weigh in on any administration . That is the interesting dividing line, if you will, that i think he will get into today. Do you think the National Security following up the National Security division in 2006, as you say, is sort of what is true for them is true for other departments in the department of justice, or not . If you extrapolate out, there is a steady stream of what i would call regular bread and butter cases being brought across the department. Of course, do you everyone is well aware, unlike a lot of other executive Branch Agencies that have this dichotomy between the institution of main justice and individually appointed u. S. Attorneys separately president ial appointees confirmed in the district around the country. Again, i think there is a tremendous amount of that work that goes on daytoday. You in ons bring this. Your experience is more recent, having worked for the Obama Administration. I am just wondering how you see this. Particularly talk about the department of justice in the whole, but also if you like the nsd. Casesount of terrorism that joshua is referring to are down in numbers, have been since the end of the Obama Administration emma largely because of the defeat of the caliphate, a number of other reasons. National Security Division doing these days . Are some of the politically charged issues like black lives matter protests, the threats to them, is that in the National Security interest or elsewhere . I want to thank everyone for setting this up. Its a pleasure to be doing this with david, josh, karen, tackling such an important issue. To maybe make a comparison and build on what josh said, when people ask is the Supreme Court divided or polarized . You sometimes hear people say there are cases that are nearly unanimous that the public does not notice. That feels like a comparison to what josh is rightly calling our attention to. Prosecutions and other matters done primarily by career officials that are roughly continuing a pace at least in the National Security space, maybe not in the Voting Rights section or the environmental book, but in the National Security state. What people say about the Supreme Court is there are some highprofile cases that are polarized. Those cases happen to matter a lot. Again the analogy holds up here. There are some highprofile cases that are being handled very unusually now, and they matter a lot. It me zoom in and give may not seem like a big moment, but it reveals just how disruptive that Political Leadership of the Justice Department is to norms and traditions. Folks may recall when the Inspector GeneralJustice Department, michael horowitz, issued his longawaited and just plain long report on the origins of the Russian Investigation, for lack of a better way to civil if i what he looked into. He found there was no political bias to the opening of the investigation, though, he did identify problems with the fisa process at a granular level. Within hours of it being issued, john durham, prosecutor in the Justice Department, issued a statement, saying he disagreed with horowitzs conclusions, and that his own investigation might yield something different. Again, that may seem like a few sentences, and it was. It was also completely wild. That a prosecutor would do two things, one, disagree with the work of his own departments Inspector General that had issued pages and pages after months of investigations wild. Second, that he would comment about what is going on with his own investigation while the investigation was still occurring. I would say not just wild but inappropriate. That is just a piece of what the Justice Department is doing right now, to go back to josh, and his efforts to situate us. At the same time, the things under that political magnifying glass seem to me to be handled friendly right now from how we used to see them handled, and frankly, how we would like to see them handled. Karen david, part of your recent book focuses on the longterm scope. You talk about changes from one administration to another. There were politicized issues within the department of justice, and then sort of a recalibration after. Do you want to put this in perspective in how you see it, given your knowledge of the history of the department . David i want to thank you as well for setting this up. Knowned both joshs who more than i do about the Justice Department. Thank you for the institutional government plug. [laughter] i still have more on that. And i am a nerd, so let me get that out there. Him that much about the Justice Department, i had worked more overseas as a journalist. The key thing for me is understanding the modern Justice Department, and you understand it through the example of john mitchell, Richard Nixons attorney general, who used his office to investigate the vietnam war protesters, black panthers, and other groups, as a way to reinforce president nixons messaging about chaos in the country, the need for law and order. Mitchell, he left his post as attorney general and then famously chaired president nixons Reelection Campaign and then ended up going to jail for his actions as his role in the campaign. You had these massive reforms in the 1970s. You had president ford appoint edward leavy as attorney general. You know him, i think many love him. President of the university of chicago. Many people watching may know this already but he created this idea that the attorney general should carry out justice programs, Law Enforcement priorities that the president asks to do. Barack obama wanted to crackdown on environmental, or Voting Rights, lets say, violations, and President Trump wants to crackdown on crime, that is his right. He is a democratically elected president. But the difference is if the president wants to crackdown on pharmaceutical companies, he can say that to the attorney general, but it should not be mr. Attorney general, go after this certain pharmaceutical ceo because he did not give me a campaign donation. All of this is old to you, but it helped me understand the modern Justice Department, the modern attorney general, edward leavy embodied it. We can talk about the ups and through billm all barr. To have people trust the politically neutral enforcement of the law. And i do think that is being questioned. I agree with josh, the institution is functioning. Dangerous people are being prosecuted across the country. People should not overreact to the headlines about what is happening, but i think the department is being used in a way to aid a president s Political Goals and reelection efforts in a way that it has not been used since watergate. Karen that is interesting. Are you all making a distinction between the doj on the one hand and the office of the attorney general on the other hand, that you can sort of separate them and assess them differently . I think this attorney general is making that more of a distinction that we are accustomed to seeing. We are having this conversation just hours after the attorney general gave yet another interview again, attorney generals sometimes give interviews, sometimes they speak, but to do so in the way that this is attorney general does the where he deliberately replicates words chosen by the president , whether that is how he described a rush investigation in 2016, how he talks about mailin ballots, despite telling congress under oath he had no evidence to support his characterization, and again saying it on national tv last night when he creates his mouthpiece as something as prominent as it is and as allied with the president as it is, i think it is the attorney general who makes that office and that person, in some ways, a distinction below from the department from a greater degree than we have been accustomed to in the past. Karen let me ask you to weigh in onhere. There have been attorney generals in the past that have been close to the president. John f. Kennedy had his brother as his attorney general. It is not the closeness in and of itself that matters but the office. Is there a distinction to be made . Maybe david can talk about this. In the past, there have been suggestions that the attorney general role and the department of justice role should be rolled out as a completely independent entity. Answer let me try to that in the lens of National Security. One of the challenges when you talk about National Security is, in some ways, is more a subjective area than other areas of the law. We can talk about certain types of violent crime, homicide of course prosecuted at the state level. There is not a lot of debate around homicide. There is certainly debate around punishment and that sort of thing, but not National Security. The National Security priorities of the country are always changing. There are a variety of components that go into that. When you talk about National Security, you talk about the nature of the threat, the Threat Landscape has changed dramatically as always changed cyber, the area that i working a lot, is the biggest headline in terms of the changing nature of the threat. When you say, what do prosecutions look like, what are the enforcement priorities of the Department Looking like at any given time . There are always prosecutorial choices being made. In the National Security arena, if you start with what are the priorities of the country, and how do you protect them, taking action and so forth . That will change over time. The example i would use in terms of saying what parts of the institution are consistent, what parts of the institution are dynamic across administrations, i think the sanctions regime is a good example. Enhanced sanctions, the increased use of sanctions is a well told story at this point since september 11, even though sanctions have been in place under different regimes before september 11. But the expanded use of sanctions has been moving in one direction under various administrations for quite some time now. So you have that line happening, but you have choices being made by different administrations at Different Levels about who will be sanctioned and for what purpose. The sanctions regime, as everyone knows, is incredibly complex, very dynamic, changes on a daytoday basis. For example, if you are on the backside trying to keep up with who to keep out of the u. S. Financial system. On the one hand, you see consistency. It is a tool that has been used by lots of different types of administrations. On the other hand, you are making strategic choices about who will be sanctioned when, and what purposes. Karen one of the questions that comes to us and it fits perfectly into this conversation is from johnny dwyer. Is the nature of National Security changing, the definition of National Security changing . We hear about the protests themselves being a National Security concern of major importance. That . O you think about do we need a rethink in terms of the National Security division . Its portfolio become broader, is it focusing domestically in ways it has not before, how do we think about it . Joshua it is a great question from johnny, who has written about these issues. The recognition that it is not that there is a set of cases that is obvious and objective, that any Justice Department simply needs to pick up and do. Instead, there are policy choices, leadership choices about where to find cases in the first place. Or as josh said, to use an established tool but how to direct it. NotJustice Department is just a place that turns out law but also makes policy choices. A National Security division was created in part to enhance the Justice Departments policy role, voice in the interagency process. It is incumbent on the National Security division amidst the broader Justice Department to keep up. When i had the pleasure of working there, folks like lisa monico, mary mccord made sure the division, while never taking its eye off of the terrorist right, realized cyber thing was getting bigger and more consequential. Josh is the real cyber expert in this crew. But that is an important pivot you seek,he expertise who you hire, what parts of partnerships you forged with the fbi, how you work with u. S. Attorneys offices. That evolution needs to happen. And johnny put his finger on what i think needs to be a big part of that evolution, dealing with this surging domestic terrorist threat, what i call the white supremacist terrorist threat. Increasingly it has transnational links. Unfortunately, it is global. We see a little bit of innovation on that front. We saw the fbi and the broader Justice Department disrupt a plot in colorado that the doj and fbi said was the first public manifestation of new cooperation between the counterterrorism investigators and hate crimes investigators. These are people that use different tools and tend to come at things differently. Domestic terrorism in some ways slices between them. So there was adaptation, a new collaboration in that which hate crimes investigators look to know for, and the tools that counterterrorism folks use, tools often focused on stopping a crime, or catching someone when they have committed a crime without people getting hurt, bringing that together in a useful way that may save lives. I think more is needed, and i think this Justice Department over all has not made that pivot toward addressing the rise of what supremacist threat as much as it could or should have, but you see some indications of that adaptation. Things if the you just sent to the normal educated reader of the media, what are the National Security concerns that the department of justice is involved in right now would mention the durham investigation. Intoct investigation igins of the Russian In