We have to recognize the Senior Member here, and treat to welcome current and former colleagues and i have worked with this panel in some form or another inside and outside of government. It is a treat to welcome everybody here on the nyu school of Law Community where i am a distinguished fellow. Welcome to the program and my colleagues. This is a treat for me to be joined together with you once again to talk about a really important and timely subject, the issue of National Security and how the executive branch and the legislative branch address some of the most Critical Issues of our time, and i will do some very brief introductions in a minute, but you will understand that the theme here is that every single one of the distinguished Public Servants served in the executive branch in the National Security community and the searching topic for today is how has that service informed your view as legislators and how can we be best poised from both branches perspective to confront some of the most thorny issues that we face and so thank you one and all for being here. Quickly, we have to my far left, no pun intended, will herd. Represents the 23rd district in texas, and elected to congress in 2014, and he of course serves on the House Appropriations committee and the Permanent Select Committee on intelligence, and most importantly for this panel before serving in congress, he served as an undercover officer in the cia and in middle east and south asia and near and dear to my heart he is a cochair of the Aspen Institute and one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable members of cyber technology, and emerging technologies, and so we are fortunate to have him here. And next to him is congresswoman slotkin who was represented in 2018, and she serves on the House Armed Services committee and the House Homeland Committee and before elected, she worked for the cia in the middle east and served as acting assistant secretary of defense for the interNational Security affairs where she and i spent many, many hours around the situation table. This is not going to be like that. And last but not least, congressman kim, andy kim representing the 3rd district of new jersey and elected to congress in 2018 and representative kim serves on the armed house Services Committee and the house Small Business committee, and before elected he worked on the house National Security staff again with yours truly as an expert on the middle east, south asia and afghanistan and he served as a strategic adviser in afghanistan alongside generals David Petraeus and john allen and so we are very lucky to have all of them here today and the citizens of texas, michigan and new jersey are fortunate indeed. I am the moderator for this. Im lisa monaco, and in addition to the service at nyu, i was president obamas Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism adviser, and so lets get started and rolling. I know that some of you to leave early to do the peoples business. So crossing the divide. That is the title of the program, going from the ek executive branch to congress and i so will lob a softball to try to get your answer to this because you have all served in the executive branch and the National Security and made the pivot to the legislative branch and how has that informed your service in being a productive and effective legislator in the time of tremendous National Security tumult. I will start with you, will. Sure, lisa. Thank you, and it is a pleasure to be here with my esteemed colleagues and we are lucky to have this kind of the experience here in congress at an important time. As a operator within the cia and you are the collectors of the last resort, and our job was to collect information to inform the policy makers and we were clear that our job is not to suggest or to project policy and so the transition was interesting for me, because for almost a decade is doing the things that we were not supposed to be doing. But having granular understanding of the positions, living in the india for two years and then living in pakistan for two years after that, and looking at the issues from the different perspective, and being in new york city, and doing a lot of intraagency work and understanding how the foreign issues impact the domestic agencies and spending a year and a half in afghanistan where i manage all of the undercover operation, you have a working knowledge of the topic that is important. And while isis was not a thing when i was in the cia, al qaeda was, so the same principles and theories in dealing withal a qua with al qaeda is something that you do use with isis. As my job as a coordinator is to help people understand, and the understanding of where they overlap is as close to the truth that you will get. So having that background experience, i have brought that to my job up here in washington. So you have to act as a case officer for any of the members of congress . Well, i have had more surveillance as a member of congress than i did in the cia. So at least in the cia, i knew who my enemies were [ laughter ] and so, you know, so, yeah, but the other thing they have found interesting is when i came in, i won in starting in 2015 of being a young junior member, right. The number of folks who had been around here for a while that come and seek you out for advice in perspective and that has happened more in my time in congress than i would have expected when i first got in. So while everybody may not understand and be able to give you an answer on how what we should do next in syria and what should we have done, they may understand and recognize it is a problem. Great. Hello, everyone. Thank you, lisa, for having me. I am thrilled to be up here with my colleagues. I think that the biggest thing for me that is a transition from the executive to the legislative branch is that the executive branch is a chain of command organization, and the legislative branch is 435 entrepreneurs, and nobody is each others boss, and the only people who can fire us are the people in our districts and not any member that we see and not anybody in leadership and not any committee chair, so i am still adjusting to that culture i would say, and because in the executive branch you can have vociferous debate on what to do on a pollicy issue and i worked in the bush and the Obama Administration and vociferous debate of what to do and if you cant work it out, it is working up the chain, and ultimately decisionmakers more senior than you that make a decision and you go on with your lives, and you say, i didnt win that battle or i did win that battle, but we have a path forward. And with 435 entrepreneurs, it is a huge game of consensus building and constantly using relationships to meet with people and say, do you want to work on something together and do you care about this issue. I am interested in doing something for parents with autistic children, and it is a consensusbased thing which is much harder and less clear, and the culture is one degree down from that, and you know in the executive branch, you know, you may meet some characters from time to time, but there is a real missionfocus, and everybody is coming to the table and says, okay, we are doing this for a specific reason, and now the mission and im trying to get that done. And i used to say to the people at the pentagon if i were leading a meeting with my ds and running the staff, and there was one person around the table who started to talk about how i should lead, because i am really good at this or i should have that portfolio and me, me, me, and that would be literally a reason for me to say, if it is about the you and the not about the mission, get on up out of here. And in Congress Somebody else says, what about me . And in congress that is every meeting, always somebody who says i am great at this and i should lead on that. And so culturally, it is difficult for some of us to real really transition and it is important to have the missionfocus and having training on the missionfocus, because we bring it for the jobs as legislators which is a good thing even if it is a cultural adjustment. Great. Thank you. Yes, a couple of things to build on. I think that one aspect of this that was incredibly important to me, and probably shared across the table is that the three of us all served in National Security in nonpart san ways. We were a career Public Servants in the differing institutions and something that i have been wondering about coming into this body, can i approach National Security with that same lenses, and for me, i feel like i have been able to more than i was necessarily expected to do so. The Armed Services committee for the most part if you were to print out a transcript of the Armed Services committee hearings, you could blot out the names, and you wont necessarily know who is a democrat or a republican based on the questions that they are asking. I think that there is a certain professionalism still that i am happy to be a part of and trying to find the ways to broaden that out. I think that coming from my background, you know, i had a specific expertise in, you know, iraq, afghanistan, the Counter Terrorism issues and while i have been working in the National Security space, i cant claim that i am an expert on the latin america issues or the things they come into contact here in congress, but what is helpful is that i have a deep Network Across the field of the experts that i have worked with whether at the white house or elsewhere who can help me to get up to speed on this issue perhaps faster than solve to colleagues, but the interest of building out this catalog and the network outside of capitol hill is something that i am trying to build on. And because of my previous experience, we have, and i am sure that the three of us can all say to this point, there is just certain fundamental tools of the National Security that i dont believe are utilized as well as they should be here on the hill, and for instance, we dont have the ability of the level Situational Awareness of the intel to utilize it in the way that we were briefed every single day and to have a certain amount of the Situational Awareness here, and here it is reactionary, and it is something that you rarely go to read the intel unless something horrible has happened in the world and what did we know two weeks ago, so that is not putting us in as strong as a position here in congress if everything that we are doing is much more reactionary, and how do we do the oversight efforts and it says for me, in some instances that as lisa introduced to work out in afghanistan eight years ago, and i was the guy that was in the room during the codels there to go back to the briefing and interesting to go back to afghanistan two weeks ago and get a briefing in my old office. How did those people do . Very well. More importantly, how did you do . Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, it is one of those things, where you, you will have a better sense of when you are given the talking points given to you and having written them, and gone through and, so it is going to help me to find ways to get a deeper truth and expose that. That is to the final point that is a part of the job that is different is that we have to speak more human about the National Security and Foreign Policy, and that is something that i wish that everybody across the National Security space does, but cut out the acronyms, and get straight to the point. And when i came back, how do i talk to the people in the Central Jersey and the jersey shore of why they should focus on what has happened after a 18year war, and we have to speak human about it in that way, and this is something that is going to hopefully make that discussion dialogue very true in our country. That is pivot to some Current Events and lets get into some of that. And the news of the day, syria, and you have all to varies degrees spoken out against or expressed concerns about the decision to remove troops from syria. So unique perspectives on that with your roles and that they are not moved from the theatre but to iraq. And does that change your view at im sorry, representative slotkin. Thats quite all right. So i will be honest, ive been surprised how much this issue has resonated even in midmichigan. The issue, i think, of the president having a conversation with the turks, with president erdogan, and then removing our forces, forcing the kurds to sort of flee the area where they had been working with us has resonated with people not because people have a ton of detail on who is involved with who and the history there but because i think theres a firm belief the american handshake has to mean something, and that loyalty has to mean something. And the pictures starting with or ending with today where we have American Military vehicles being pelted with fruits and vegetables as they cross into iraq, i just dont remember a time when ive seen that in my lifetime, and i have my husband was in the army for 30 years. My stepdaughter is in now. Those are wrenching pictures for us. But i think the thing that concerns me the most, we have a situation right now with the kurds that is devastating, but when weve shirked our responsibility it sends a message to every future partner and ally that they should think twice about shaking the hands with the americans. And i try to remind people why was it that we were working with this kurdish group. What are the origins of it . And the origins of it are the iraq war, which i did three tours over there and americans said very clearly i think both sides of the aisle they do not want American Forces on the front lines in long entrenched, expensive wars in the middle east. And so we shifted our strategy to work by, with, and through allies and that whole proposition is that we go to these other armies, we go to these different groups and say if you fight as the infantry we will provide overhead intelligence and support. And that is the bargain that we struck with these kurds, and that is the way we keep people like my stepdaughter out of fighting again in places like syria and iraq. But if that whole concept just has a big hole punched in it, our ability to make those deals and to have those conversations in the future goes down and the likelihood that when theres a real threat, it will be American Forces out there again goes up. And so i think it has been a seriously, seriously devastating week for American Foreign policy or a couple of weeks. We are all talking about sanctions packages. Theres a couple of different packages. I personally am in favor of humanitarian assistance for the kurds. In particular, for the kurds in northern iraq, who are receiving a lot of their, you know, cousins who are coming over the border. You know, im going to the middle east on the 31st to have these conversations with senior leaders. Unfortunately in our system, the president has a lot of power over Foreign Policy, and congress can sort of come in behind and deal with the money and with sanctions, but there isnt a ton we can do, and we end up watching scenes with Everything Else like we saw today. Congressman hurd, anything you want to add to that . Sure. Sometimes we forget, we got to go back to september 10th, 2001, right. I was in headquarters of the cia. I remember in august analysts being like, something is going to happen, something is going to happen. We dont know what. People were sleeping in their cars, sleeping in their offices. We know what happened on the 11th. A lot of people have forgotten that. The reason that weve had to be in afghanistan, the reason weve had to be in places like syria is to prevent another day like that from happening. And on september 12th, if you would have told me and i was the fourth, fifth, sixth employee in ctcso, the Counterterrorism Center special operations division, if you would have told me on september 12th there would not have been another attack on our homeland for 17 years, i would have said at that time you were crazy. The reason we havent seen that is because the men and women, our diplomatic corps, our intelligence services, our military and federal Law Enforcement has stopped that from happening. Thats why were there. Ive made it very clear, these terms of this peace deal i thought was more of a surrender than a peace deal. I think this is a terrible decision. Thats the deal between between us and erdogan, right. And again, we still havent seen all the details of that deal. And why is it bad . And elissa outlined most of them. We screwed our friends, and its not just does the u. S. Handshake count. This has impacted all western alliances. I was in paris in the ministry of defense 12 hours after the tweets were sent about this deal. I can tell you our partners in france had some opinions on this topic. Theyre part of the coalition against isis. They are. They have 1300 troops in that region. Theyve been intimately involved. So if your friends dont trust you and your enemies dont fear you, its a pretty bad situation to be. I can make an argument that this recent announcement by the japanese to not participate in the u. S. Led effort to protect ships in the middle east is probably a bad indication that either they