Angry Planet - So What Happens to SEAL Team 6 If They Do Assassinations for the President?

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/On July 1, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for “official acts” committed while in office. In the dissent opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised an interesting hypothetical.“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”It’s the kind of hypothetical situation that people would roll their eyes at during a dinner party. Now it’s on everyone’s minds and in an official Supreme Court ruling. The president can order it, but that doesn’t mean the operators would carry it out. It also doesn’t mean state and local authorities would look the other way. On this episode of Angry Planet, Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate Dan Maurer comes on the program to take the SEAL Team 6 hypothetical seriously. Maurer is an expert military legal scholar who was willing to answer our questions, no matter how absurd they might be.Want to know what happens if the President hires Pinkertons? Interested in a definition of an “official act” or want an explanation of what the long term consequences of this might be? Looking for a bit of hope that cuts through the hysteria. We can help with that. We also ask a very silly question about Delta Force.Maurer also wrote about the topic in Lawfare.Can the Military Disobey Orders in the SEAL Team 6 Hypothetical?Click here to join the Angry Planet Discord.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Dan, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet today and walking us through a very bizarre topic. Will you introduce yourself and give the relevant disclaimer to the conversation we're about to have? Sure. Thanks, Matt. My name is Dan Mauer. I am an active duty, Army. Lieutenant Colonel Judge Advocate Officer that is a military lawyer. Of course, I'm speaking and writing only in my personal capacity. So what I'm going to say about this case and its implication is really have nothing to do with any official position of the J.I Corps, the Army, Department of Defense, really any part of the government is just my own interpretation, my musings. So I'm on the tail end of my military career. I'm on the verge of retiring. I'm heading.

off this fall to become a civilian law professor of criminal law and various national security law subjects. I have been a prosecutor and appellate counsel, general counsel to commanders. I've advised on courts martial prosecutions. I've advised on law of war matters, international law. Two combat tours in Iraq. One, the first one was as a platoon leader before law school. second one was as a general counsel, essentially a brigade judge advocate for a brigade commander in Iraq, towards the end of that conflict. I spent three years teaching constitutional law, criminal law, military justice, law of war at West Point. And then the last two years I've been teaching at the Army JAG School, national security subjects like war crimes and presidential power here in Charlottesville, Virginia. So in other words, yeah, I was a man.

going to say, so you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. That remains to be seen. Well, we're here today to talk about the Supreme Court ruling on Trump's immunity, and one of the stranger kind of hypotheticals that's been brought up as a result of it, which is can the president order CLE Team 6 to assassinate people, basically, right? And you wrote about this at length in Lawfare. I read the piece at Lawfare. I'll link it in the show notes.

But that's why I wanted to have you on was kind of to talk about this ruling. So if you can, can you walk us through the very basics of it and kind of what your initial reaction was when you saw it? Sure. You're right. It's a bizarre topic. And I'm fuddled that we are here in 2024, even having to discuss it at all. But here we are. So the basics of the Trump fee United States opinion are kind of as follows. So, you know, this is one of, it deals with one of four prosecutions involving former President Trump, two of which are in federal court, two of which are state court. Obviously, one of those is now complete. The one at issue here is the one involving what I would call the gravamen of the bad acts, right? The January 6th related election fraud claims and the quote unquote insurrection, whatever you want to call it, it happened.

on January 6th prior to the certification of electoral votes. That case was in the process of being prosecuted at the U.S. District Court. The defense counsel for Trump motioned to dismiss the case on grounds that former President Trump had immunity for literally everything he did or failed to do during his time in office, everything. So that was decided, right, decision came before the judge, the trial judge. to weigh that argument. And the trial judge said, no, declined to dismiss the case, made a ruling, and said that at least at this stage, Trump is not immune from prosecution.

The Trump team appealed that case to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The Court of Appeals also held the same, did not agree with the Trump argument that he had blanket immunity and basically approved the lower court decision to keep the trial going. The Trump team appealed to the Supreme Court and kind of on an expedited timeline much faster than you would normally see something, well, there's nothing like this in history. That's part of the problem. But normally a case takes a little bit longer to weave its way through the federal district appellate and then Supreme Court dockets.

Suffice to say, at the end of this year's term, at the end of June, July 1st, the court issued its opinion in which it was weighing this fundamental decision, this fundamental question that had never, ever, ever before been before the court. And that is, to what extent, if any, does the president, a president have immunity from criminal prosecution for things he or she does while in office? Never before that's up in a question because never before has the president ever been charged with crimes. So the opinion, depending on your maybe partisan flavor or a particular ideological standpoint or view of the law was either a masterful piece of legal craftsmanship on the part of Chief Justice Roberts where he tried to split the baby

in half or whatever metaphor you want to use and try to make the smallest possible decision he could or a piece of legal gibberish. And if you buy the dissenting argument, they take him to task for sloppy legal reasoning. The gist of the opinion is that, and this is all, again, all novel, all of this is a case of first impression. But what the court did say was we're going to make a decision on some things or we're going to punt the case back down on most of everything else. So the end result is the case goes back down to the trial court, basically to have fact

finding hearings to determine whether or not certain things that he is charged with under this indictment fall within the category of official acts or unofficial acts. Because if it's an unofficial act, there is no immunity. If it's an official act, there is almost complete immunity. And here's where the case gets a little bit wonky and a little bit strange. And what the dissent criticizes a fair amount of is the fact that the court, and here I mean the majority opinion, Justice Roberts' opinion, where he says there's a difference between one kind of official act and another kind of official act. You have core official acts and then you have this outer perimeter of official acts, both of which come with immunity, but the degree of immunity

differs. So if you're in the central core of presidential power, that is being the commander and chief of the armed forces, nothing Congress can do, nothing the court can say, can ever take away that responsibility, that duty title from the president. The president by Article 2 of the Constitution is commander in chief of the armed forces. That is inviolable. Vito power. No one else but the president has that power. The power to appoint ministers and officials. That is with the president. The power to discuss issues of importance and relevance with heads of his executive branch departments for power within the president's article two authority. It cannot be touched by Congress and therefore has complete and utter immunity from any criminal prosecution.

That's the nub of it, right? Outside of that, you still have official acts, but they're within this quote unquote outer perimeter of official acts. If you're stretching your head as to what that might mean, we all are because between that and the next layer of unofficial acts, there is no definition. There is no line where that is. The court kind of talks about what kind of things might be in outer perimeter. It doesn't really give us an example of what might not be and is simply an unofficial act. The opinion basically says it's really hard to draw that line. And this is, well, either to their credit or to their shame, the court punched this question back down to the trial court. It says for each act alleged, the trial court has to make a determination about

whether it fits within either the outer perimeter, the core, or this umbrella unofficial act category, which is going to be probably pretty hard to do, again, because there's no precedent for this. The issue that the dissent raises here is, to your point about this crazy hypothetical about Siltim 6, is that in her reading of the opinion of the majority's logic, is that... This was Sotomayor, right? Correct. Yeah, Justice Sotomayor wrote one of the dissenting opinions, and the other two, quote-unquote, liberal justices sign on to that opinion. So six to three. And in that dissent, she raises towards the end of the opinion the implication that the failure of the court to draw a bright line between unofficial and official and failure to explain what the outer perimeter includes basically means anything the president does and claims it as an official act will be in essence an official act.

CEL Team 6 murders by order, you know, an assassination of a domestic political rival. In her words, that it would be immune under her interpretation of the majority opinion. And that's her example, too, right? That's her hypothetical, yes. Yeah, and it was actually raised at the lower court and during oral argument at the Supreme Court. I can't remember which justice raised it first, but it was discussed with the counsel during oral argument before the, the, the, the written opinion came out. So she also raises the issue of like a coup d'etat, if president or any president directed the military to conduct one, is he immune from that?

She would, she says yes. If you follow the logic and rationale and the opinion of the majority, then yes. Even that would be shockingly immune from prosecution. So there's the problem. The extent to which this immunity seems to go into crazy, crazy hypotheticals and what ifs. And the rational, reasonable concern that a president could do something like this and seemingly escape accountability. Now, my point in the article was that that's only half the problem or half the issue. It's not just the lead conspirator's immunity.

He has to rely on other people to execute those acts. And in this case, in this hypothetical, you know, we provided with what that factor might be, and that is Steel Team Six. So the question is, does that immunity from the president flow down into immunity for Steel Team Six? By virtue of him being immune, are they immune? Can they do it? And the answer to my point that I make in the short article is that no, of course not. What was illegal for Steel Team Six to do, that is murder somebody before the opinion came out on June 30th, is still illegal for them to do on July 1st after the opinion comes out. Just because he has immunity as president doesn't translate or transform that into somehow a lawful thing that the military must do.

In fact, they are because it is unlawful, because it remains unlawful for them to do, they have a duty, a legal duty, to disobey that order. And by disobeying that order, they are not prosecutable. So they are basically immune for prosecution for disobeying the order by the president that is unlawful. if that makes sense. So my my ultimate conclusion of, you know, hopeful optimism, I still, I think still stands. I don't think, I think there's no reasonable way to read the opinion otherwise. But what that means is that we're relying upon the military to act according to its own principles and its own law and to follow the law, not just the edict of a president. We swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. We don't swear an oath to support, to support, and defend the president. By name or by office, right? We follow the Constitution that includes subservience to the commander-in-chief, whoever that might be, and the Constitution and the law.

We followed the rule of law, right? So not the rule by command. So it is highly implausible, I think, and I hope, highly implausible for any commander-in-chief to include this one, to use his power, shielded buy immunity to order seal team sex or any military unit to do anything like this. And if they were to do that, and even if the president were somehow immune from that, and that's a separate question, but even if the president were immune, that doesn't mean the military would follow it

just because they're the military. Just because they salute and follow orders doesn't mean it's any order. It's any lawful order. And it remains an unlawful order. So this is one of the key points about this case that I want to make sure I emphasize is that the distinction between official and unofficial that the court makes has nothing at all to do with whether the underlying act is legal or illegal. And so official, just because it's official, you know, comes from the office of the president. You know, imagine a command on the red phone from the Oval Office or, you know, a secure telephone line from the Pentagon, you know, saying this is the president speaking, I'm commanding you to do X. Doesn't make it lawful.

It is potentially lawful, but doesn't become lawful just because he said it. But the problem is the court doesn't explain or draw the line about where that unofficial and official act is. That makes it harder to determine potentially if it's legal or illegal. But some things like murder are clearly illegal, clearly unlawful and would never be countenanced, at least by a good faith following of the law that we would hope. that all military members are abiding by, not just, you know, adherence to a command. Well, there's some interesting things that come up, for me, the war on terror. When you look at some of the incredible orders that were given, especially to the CIA,

and of course they have their own kettle of fish. But, I mean, they tortured people and then wrote the justification. And there are written justifications for doing so. that, you know, have been through courts and all that kind of fun stuff. I guess I'm just wondering, does the law get murky? I mean, when you have like John Eastman writing the law, does it get murky? Yes, it does. But I guess the genius of our system is that there's not just one lawyer writing the law. There's not just one level of court interpreting the law. There's not just one lawmaker. and there's not just one person who executes the law, right?

We have a system of checks and balances at every conceivable level. And in order to facilitate something as dastardly and unlawful, even if official, as the assassination of a domestic political rival by a military unit, would require so many things to happen, all of which are unlawful, that it just, you know, it makes a JFK conspiracy theory look, you know, like peanuts. I mean... It would be the culmination of years of failure. It would. Again, not to say that it couldn't possibly happen, but I still find it highly implausible. So does that answer your question? I want to go back to the point about the like the international law stuff. So yes, there were memos written by DOJ lawyers that said, you know, we can do certain things under the umbrella of enhanced interrogation. Those came to light. There was a public debate.

massive criticism from within the DoD and outside the DoD, internationally and domestically, and eventually the law was changed. And the law prohibits the very things that were initially said to be okay by the very people that were somewhat of a conflict of interest, right? Those were kind of sins of omission, though. I mean, the law may not have specifically said, don't pull out someone's toenails. But I think a reasonable person could have made the assumption, you know, probably the law meant I should and pull out this person's toenails. I mean, the spirit of the law seems to be something along

those lines. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the court in the opinion that talked about the torture case and that led to eventually the new torture policy and the new torture law basically said, look, international law applies whether you want to call it a, you know, a world war or counterterrorism or counterinsurgency, you know, you still have to follow Geneva conventions. We're signed on to those. And we've, we've, we were a charter member of the UN and, you know, we can't just ignore the things that we have agreed to, regardless of whether it's just the moral thing to do, we are by law required to follow it. And that included, you know, humane treatment for detainees, whether they're prisoners of war or not,

they're still detainees under our authority and control, and they deserve basic human protection, humane treatment, and that involves psychological well-treatment, or at least not inhumane, terrible treatment. You know, all the things that were blessed off, or most of the things that were blessed off on under the rubric of enhanced interrogation were found to be, you know, torture. Every person who looked at it objectively outside of the DOD or CIA, or executive branch, I should say, would probably agree that that falls within the rubric of torture. And eventually, Congress agreed and said, yeah, we probably, we probably, you know,

should put something in writing here and codify that. I guess I'm just saying that that's what I'm afraid of. I'm not saying, you know, like there's a habit of obedience. There's a, I mean, which I think is important for the military, right? I mean, that things have to happen sometimes very quickly. And you have creative people thinking about how to carry those orders out. I just worry that SEAL Team 6 could be off the leash first and prosecuted later. Yeah.

So, yeah. I don't know if there's a good practical solution to that other than retraining. Again, to the point where we're having a conversation like this in 2024 is evidence that we're in a theater of the absurd right now, in my opinion, in some respects. But, you know, I half-jokingly say perhaps this opinion should reinvigorate the training of where the president's powers for making a lawful order or actually lie. you know, what is a lawful order versus what's not a lawful order? We're very good at training soldiers who are about to deploy what a lawful order is and what an unlawful order is, you know, taking the detainee out behind the Humvee and shooting them so that they can't escape or because they, you know, blew up your friends the day before and you want to exact retribution.

We all know that's unlawful. That's a war crime. Can't do that. We train against that. And, you know, on moral grounds, on legal grounds, on practical grounds, on practical grounds, soldiers are ingrained to know that that is wrong. Do we now have to have the conversation that doing that domestically just because the president says it is okay?

Does that mean we now have to say it's not okay? The SEAL Team 6, specifically that being the hypothetical example, I think is picked purposely because it is the one that it's like the image of the operator that people conjured a mind despite there being a whole bunch of different other spec ops forces, right? but also not a great reputation as of late. Right. If we were going to pick a special operations force that might do some fucked up stuff domestically, you could do worse than CLE Team 6.

Well, I'm not going to have an opinion on that other than to say, I don't think there was that much thought by counsel or by the court when they came up with CLE Team 6. You know, I don't think there was an analytical distinction that they made between Delta Force and SEAL teams and Ranger units and anybody else. That's fair, but by point being that I think that for some people that follow this stuff, it is not too hard for them to buy a small group of soldiers loyal to an executive taking unlawful orders from that executive. Yeah. Well, I think if that is true, if there is a public perception, small or large, that there are elements of the military that are willing to push the boundaries of what is lawful on behalf of the greater good, so to speak, because the president says so as commander-in-chief, you have to understand that that reaction, again, my opinion, that reaction, I think,

flows out of 20-plus years of global war on terror. and the things that we have been allowed to do, so to speak, or the amount of congressional non-interference with presidential actions, the, you know, the so-called, whatever you want to call it, the ability to use targeted killings, you know, abroad if they meet certain criteria. All of that has either been blessed off directly by Congress or has been acquiesced to and has grown into a precedent of executive power. But all of that has been essentially against an enemy of the state in a wartime setting, a wartime context, not against a domestic political rival that you disagree with. Granted, the level of hyperpartisanhip is documentedly severe right now. It is beyond doubt that people are polarized. But to say that people would translate that into acquiescence, to or encouragement of or acceptance of using political violence of that extreme nature,

using the military to do it, no less, domestically in a political contest, I think is a bit much. I don't think we're there yet. I hope we're not there yet. I pray that we're not there yet. But again, I think the concern, if there is a concern that, you know, it's still Team 6. They cross lines. They are questionable. They use force when maybe other units wouldn't use force. All of that is in the context of essentially taking out terrorists, right, under this otherwise lawful authority from the president and from Congress. It's nothing at all like using it here against another candidate for office or a media person or anyone, right? It doesn't matter, domestic citizen. You know, it just boggles the mind that that would be equivalent.

I don't think they are. again, like we'd said earlier, there'd be several failures before that thing happened. One of them would be, you would probably publicly in some way see the creation of a Praetorian Guard before it was used to kill a domestic political rival, right? And that is not something that we have seen. Right. But, like, I'll use this to kind of piggyback and ask a reader question, as we've talked about it a little bit. Do you think, in the context of the global war on terror, in the context of the Supreme Court ruling, we have seen expansive new powers of the president of the president used to justify targeted killings of American citizens abroad, right? do you think that

do you think that we are maybe a couple failures already down the line and that the use of this the use of this ruling is a justification for more killing, maybe domestically maybe abroad is more likely now.

I think if you are a legal scholar like, let's say, John Yu, who wrote the original torture memos in the early 2000, who have this catastrophically large, expansive view of what the president can do

under inherent Article 2 power, maybe you'd be willing to argue that there's nothing stopping a president from using past precedent abroad in a war time setting as precedent that is reasonable to apply in a domestic setting. I still don't think that's going to be likely

I mean, at least for the very fact that that might make the lawyer an accessory to murder. And I don't see a lawyer advocating for that broad of expansion. They're going to be more risk averse and say, you know, this is not a war. Historically, courts and Congress have given great discretion to presidents when they make wartime decisions about the use of force, how to use it, where to use it, when to stop using it, against whom to use it. But that same allowance, the same permissive attitude, the same discretion. that the courts in Congress give to presidents in that context have never applied to more domestic

and inherently political actions like elections, right? That has just never been applied. So it would take an extremely, extremely on the edge kind of legal opinion, fringe opinion well beyond, I think, what John U was writing in the early 2000s to suggest that there was a legal justification that you could draw from this. So I hear your concern that we're a couple steps down the line maybe toward that Pretorian Guard kind of thing. But here's my, or a reason for kind of cautious optimism. The use of force, even though courts in Congress have given great deference to presidents over time about how, when, if, et cetera, is not within that core of presidential power that comes with absolute immunity.

according to the court now. It is not. In fact, when the opinion kind of glosses over quickly, what might be within that core of power like veto and appointing ministers and talking to cabinet heads, they don't mention any of the national security authorities because they don't have them. They're not within that core solely within the hands of the president. They are shared powers with Congress. If you look at Article 1 of the Constitution, there are more explicit powers for national security than national security and defense than the president has, right? The president has the absolute power to be the commander-in-chief. There's no one going to be appointed from the civilian world or the military by Congress to be the commander-in-chief. It'll always be the president.

But Congress funds operations. Congress writes rules for military discipline. It's the uniform code of military justice, the criminal code for service members. They write rules for how personnel are hired, selected, promoted, retained, fired, separated. All of that falls within the ambit of Congress. Congress shares that power to include how to actually wage war. If Congress wanted to be more explicit and more controlling about the methods by which presidents wage conflict abroad, they could.

They just haven't. It doesn't mean they can't. constitutional power to do it. They just have not, at least in the last 60 years, done so much, but they could. So my long round way of saying that one reason to be a little bit more secure here is that Congress can always write laws that would prohibit the creation of a Praetorian Guard, so to speak. The president can't create a cadre of loyalists, so to speak, you know, like Emperor Palpatine had with the red caped, red masked, I think they were actually called a Victorian guard. So he can't create one of those.

One, that's never happened before. Two, Congress could step in and prevent it from happening. The president would need funds to do it. Congress has those funds and they could deny those funds. So I'm a little bit optimistic in that regard that there are checks that can still prevent the enabling of the president to take those. drastic decisions. Well, except I would just, I would say, and I'm not, oh, do I really have to say out loud?

I'm not a legal scholar? No, I don't, because I'm so clearly not a legal scholar that, so let's just put that to the side. But it seems interesting that the president has, I mean, I totally understand why I might not want to get this order and I might not want to carry it out because it could end up with serious personal consequences. I could end up in jail rotting forever like, oh, I don't know, G. Gordon Liddy, who might have been given in a law, unlawful order. He got out. He didn't ride jail forever. He was selling calendars and gold and writing books. No, you're right. But what I mean is he did actually end up in jail. I mean, I just, you know, a couple of people did in Watergate.

But so I wouldn't want to be that person. But it does seem like the president is at least effectively immune to virtually everything at this point. I mean, and the reason why I say that is now we have an immunity ruling on top of the fact that we weren't able to carry out very many of the cases against him anyway. I mean, who's going to punish it? Many of the cases are still being litigated, right? Like much of that, much of this is open here. Not anymore, buddy.

We don't. This is the end of that. This is the end of that. Is it? And if he wins, well, no, I mean, we should ask. the actual scholar, whether, you know, he, I'm just saying that now we have, he does have immunity from prosecution for official acts, and he's got a court on his side that's clearly going to say, oh, no, that's an official act, sir. Well, possibly, possibly. I mean, like any political actor and

I think Supreme Court justices are political actors, whether they would say they are or not, they are. I mean, everybody essentially is, and all political actors care about their historical legacy. At some point, you want to be going down in history as the court that just created a monarch or an emperor. I mean, at some point, they have to draw the line. And that's kind of where Chief Justice Roberts was aiming, I think. He was trying to not have it both ways. That's not the right way to put it, but try to carve out something that seemed reasonable. and that is kind of core, core immunity, absolute immunity for core things that we know president shouldn't be prosecuted for.

Because it would hamper their decision making. It would hamper their ability to take care that the laws be executed. Like veto, talk to their branch heads, you know, those sorts of things. But outside of that, here's where the court hunted. And it's saying, look, you have to go back and look at every single allegation and ask yourself, is it an official act or an unofficial act? and the court kind of gives some guidance there because they basically say anything the president said to the Department of Justice leading up to January 6th is absolutely immune, even if it was based on a lot, even if he was blatantly lying. It's still immune because that is core communication.

I mean, the analogy would be, not perfect analogy, but analogy would be like attorney-client confidentiality. you know, it's free from observation. It's free from criticism. You can't touch it. Loose analogy. So that core nubbin, the court said, is, you know, off limits. You can't prosecute him for what he was saying to DOJ, even if it was, you know, inducement to commit fraud. That in and of itself is protected, right? Beyond that, all the other stuff that he did, the things that he was saying on Twitter, the things he was saying on TV, any other statements that he made, publicly, anything he did or failed to do outside of that might be unofficial. But it's for the lower court to decide. The court, the opinion here basically said there was a failure to ask this question, failure to make this determination at the lower court, failure to make a record of it, failure to discuss it. And to some extent, they're right. It was not an issue. It was not raised or discussed by the lower courts. And therefore, it's not illogical for the Supreme Court to kick it back down

and say develop the record more, make a determination. And if the government loses below, they can appeal. If Trump loses below, he can appeal. And eventually, it will get back to the Supreme Court and they will say, okay, the lower courts said, you know, activity X, Y, and Z were official acts, and therefore immune. They said A, B, and C were unofficial acts, and therefore not immune. We agree with A and C, but not B. And so now we have a court saying, a little bit more precision and nuance, what might be in those categories. And that's how the law works in a common law system, right? It's case by case. The court is not going to issue these grand statements by Fiat and say A through N are official and, you know, O through Z or not.

They just don't work that way. That's not how we do law for better for worse. So it's going to be, and it's going to be on the lower courts, case by case, back by fact, allegation by allegation, figure out what is official, what's unofficial. And as it gets appealed, as it inevitably will, the Supreme Court, whether it's this six to three contingent or not, will have to weigh in and say lower courts are correct, and therefore it is, or they're not correct, and therefore it's this other thing. So that's how the system's going to work. It's messy. It's not timely at all. It leaves open windows like this to discuss and complain and criticize and argue and debate, which is, I guess, a good thing in the long run, but it's also problematic.

It also leaves a lot of question marks. It also leaves a lot to be decided by courts and not Congress. Now, if you're on one ideological end of a spectrum, you want courts to make those determinations. If you're on another side, you don't want courts to make those kinds of determinations. It's possible. I don't know what it's probable, but it's possible. Congress could step in and enact. laws that lay out specifically what things are or are not official acts of the office of the

president. I don't think that they would do that, but they could. And that would have some bearing on a judicial termination. You know, the court could always say, well, that was wrong for the following reasons or was correct for the following reasons. So we're in this weird kind of frothy sea of ambiguity and dissension and confusion. And I'm right there with you. So you make it sound as if we're.

one of the major consequences of this decision is going to be kind of after the 60 years of, and maybe even longer than that, of growth of the executive branch, because of Trump, we are going to get into the nitty gritty of what is and is not enumerated that the pro, may that's the wrong word, what is and is not possible and legal for the president to do. And it's going to be done on a case-by-case basis laboriously over the course of years. Yeah, but to some extent, that's how it's worked for the last 200-plus years, right? Like, there have been very few cases, and the court actually acknowledges this. There's very few court cases that lay out the left and right limits of presidential power.

Far more cases about the judiciary, far more cases about Congress, relatively few about the president. And that's part of the problem is that there's lack of precedent for help us to understand. So the courts looking back at history, looking back at how the courts dealt with civil cases in the president, how the framers viewed it, what the text says or does not say. You know, what Alexander Hamilton wrote in the federal's papers was relevant for both the majority and the dissent in this case, as it has been for every presidential power case. So, yeah, it's going to be messy and iterative, long. And, you know, as you were asking the question, I kept thinking about my first year in law school a long time ago. That was during the, let me see, second George W administration taking a separation of powers course. It was mostly about presidential authority.

The issue of for what things the president might be criminally immune for never came up. That was never a thing that we read, right? It was what does Article 2 say the president can do? How have the courts interpreted that over time? What has Congress pushed back on like the war powers resolution? How has Congress tried to try to put guardrails like in a bowling lane up against the president's power? It has never been, you know, what is Article 2 say? What has Congress said? And then what are the things the president is criminally immune for?

Right. Now any separation of powers casebook or presidential power casebook is going to have to talk about authority, presidential authority in terms of what Article 2 says, what Congress says, and what we know or don't know the president is criminally immune for is falling within the power the president to actually do, right? That seems absurd to me and deeply problematic. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, angry planet listeners, welcome back. Well, I mean, it is, I'm going to say something that I'm sure I'll regret. But there is a case to be made, and someone has, that you can't go around suing your predecessors. Right? I mean, you can't have legal jeopardy for everything you do as president. What are we, Australia? Well, I mean, if you look at, now, okay, I'm going full asshole here.

Julius Caesar went into Rome partially because he was up for, he was going to be tried on various crimes, whether or not he was guilty or anything. But, you know, he said, I have an army. I'd rather not be tried. Let's go in that direction. So, I mean, you can tear a republic apart, I guess, is all I'm saying, you know, if you really can prosecute your predecessor for acts. But that's all I can say about that because it's. It just seems like it's so evil. We're in so much trouble. Yeah. So that point was actually raised by, I think, both the majority and the dissent.

You know, they say allowing a sitting president to be sued in civil court or a past president to be sued for things they did while president is a different question than whether or not you can bring charges against them and where they face, you know, punishment by prison sentence, right? That's two distinctly different kinds of cases, right? The degree of the burden of proof is different. The social stigma is different. You know, obviously the effect on the accused or the defendant is different. And the court says, and I don't necessarily disagree with this, is that the presidents are going to be less concerned about a civil case. I mean, surely it's concerning, but less concerned about that will have less of an impact

on their decision-making as president than the prospect of, criminal prosecution, right? So in the court's view, the majority view, criminal prosecution is so weighty, so important, so terrifying that having it hang over the head of a sitting president, because a future president might come back and prosecute them through the DOJ, is too much of a chilling effect, right? It would deter them from making bold action, which we need presidents to do in crisis, right? That's the majority's argument. The sense, says, well, okay, yeah, there is a difference between civil and criminal cases, definitely, but there are also different protections in place for the accused or the defendant in those kinds of

cases. It is much harder to bring a case criminally than it is to bring a case civilly. As the dissent says, it would be hard to get it out of the starting gate if it's just a zealous, overzealous prosecutor who was bent on bringing the previous president to heal because they didn't like what they did or didn't do while in office. It's not just like a snap of a finger and the president gets prosecuted and isn't potential jeopardy for going to jail. It doesn't happen that way. There are other constitutional due process protections that would prevent that kind of bad faith prostitution from ever happening. Those kinds of guardrails are not in place for a civil suit, right?

So the dissent uses that as an argument to say, look, are presidents really under duress? Are they really holding themselves back? Are they really handcuffing themselves in their decision-making day to day, especially in crisis, because they might get prosecuted later on for it? No. You know, that fear has always been there. Yet presidents, as the dissent says, have always taken, or not always, but have taken bold action before, even when it might be argued that what they did was criminal. They still do it, right?

So is that really? Are they really being handcuffed by the potential of prosecution? No, they're not. And I think the dissent makes a good fair point when they say, the other thing that Article 2 tells presidents to do is take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Well, you know, how do you do that? How do you square that responsibility, that duty, with, breaking the law and saying, well, it's an official act, I can do it. No court has ever said I can't do it.

So I'm going to do it. How do you square that attitude with the requirement in the Constitution that says, take care of the laws are faithfully executed, right? That's an argument for not granting a self-pardon, for example, or not granting pardons for clearly, you know, philonious reasons, right? Or bribing people, right? You can't do one and the other at the same time. But we have had presidents that have gone on TV and said, when the president does it, it's not illegal. Well, only one president, to my knowledge, has said that. And universally, well, not universally previled, but almost universally disagreed with on that point. Now, however, to your point, maybe there's some support by SCOTUS that, you know, maybe, you know, maybe he was not as articulated as the Supreme Court, but, one could argue that the recent opinion does basically reinforce Nixon's belief that if the president does it, he can do it. You know, full stop. But that's why we have to take really good care that the lower courts, and we hope that the lower courts come up with something to reasonably and fairly draw a line between that outer perimeter of official conduct and unofficial conduct.

right, and make some kind of sensible test or framework for thinking about it, right? Because right now there isn't one. There actually is a definition of official act, by the way, in the bribery statute. What is it? Oh, I couldn't tell you. Well, actually, I have it written down to me one second. No, I don't have it in front of me. But you can look it up.

Look up federal bribery statute, and there's a definition of official act in there. It wouldn't be quite on point. But the point is, Congress has defined official act for certain prosecutions. They could do it again, right? They could. So one would hope that either through scholarship or case law or statute, somewhere there becomes a line to be drawn or at least a good, reasonable way for thinking about where president's official conduct stops and starts again. The court says, it's really hard to draw that distinction. It's really hard to find that line.

But is it really like, yeah, in some cases, but ordering, you know, ordering your military to take over the government or to kill a rival, you know, or to violate Geneva Conventions, how can you possibly say with a straight face, any court, with a straight face, say that the history or tradition or court precedent or the text of the Constitution would say that that's an official act of the president. It defies reason, logic, good faith interpretation of the Constitution itself. I find it highly unlikely. So there is a way to do it. The court can at least say the following things are not official acts, right, and not make an exclusive club, but they can certainly say some things are not. Lying to the public or to state officials about the nature of a fraudulent election, whether it's, you know, saying it's a fraud when it's not. in order to induce them to do something. Ought to be, in my opinion, not considered an official act,

even though it comes from the office of the president through some kind of official channel. But let me just say this one other thing. There's a problem here because the court, in its opinion, does say, when you're drawing that line, lower court, when you're drawing that line and thinking about whether acts A, B, C, and D might be official or unofficial, you can't consider the president's motive and you can't consider the fact that it would violate a general criminal law. You can't use either of those two facts by themselves to say that was an official act or unofficial act. Now, my reading of that is that's sloppy reasoning and a sloppy

opinion because they don't say anything about whether those two things in conjunction could be considered. The president's motive and the fact that it violated a criminal law. law as a way to help draw the line between official and unofficial. Maybe I'll write an article about that someday. I don't know. But the court doesn't say that. The court, a fair reading of the opinion says, this can't be used and this can't be used. Motive can't be used and general criminality can't be used. But what about both? So I think there's a way to do it. And I think the cleanest way is for Congress to step in and say what an official act is for the purpose of granting immunity to the president. Then it becomes a whole other issue of whether the Congress has kind of

stepped into Article 2 land and violated separation of powers. That's a whole other decision, right? But it might help. But again, that's either the beauty, the genius, or the terrible, you know, implication of how our system works is that it's going to be decided piecemeal case by case iteratively over time. So if Congress is won by the Democrats and Trump wins the president, presidency. They would have a couple of weeks, I'm just thinking this through, to pass all of these clarifications. So that could happen. They could get their act together. I like that you just automatically think that it's like a Voltron coming together or something, the moment that he gets elected and he takes the oath of office, like the flags unfurl. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's exact. His dark wings will

unfurl from his back. But right. I don't think it'll be quite as disastrous as that. You are so wrong. But anyway. No, but that. Been living in D.C. too long.

Yeah, they know where I live. Sorry, Matthew. You just got the, no, you've got the, you've got the,

the, the wonk bubble all around you. Yeah. You're all sipping doom. We are sipping doom. Um, we got to get to some of these reader questions. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Some of these are, silly, but I want to ask a couple of them. One of them is when somebody asked me a long time ago that I've been trying to get an answer to. I'm going to ask it first. All right. When Oliver North testified, quote, this lieutenant colonel is not going to challenge

a commander in chief for whom I still work, end quote. Beyond the Uniform Code of Military Justice, that you don't follow legal orders. Was he correct in his implication that active duty officers working in policy roles act as if in a military chain of command, in a

way that is different from civilians acting in the same policy roles? Okay. So I think I understand the gist of that question. And I would say that two things. One, civilians who work for other civilians and policy roles are not subject to the UCMJ, right? Or any federal law that criminalizes their disobedience, right? If they disobey a command, an order, what's the worst that could happen?

They get fired. they get replaced and they're sidelined, right? That maybe their reputation is tanked. But the worst that could happen is a social stigma and an employment consequence. In the military, if you disobey a lawful order, you are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and therefore potentially going to jail for disobeying that lawful order or command, whether you agree with it or not, right? So there is an inherent difference between a military, um, employee disobeying something from a civilian employee disobeying something now now the question is if a military employee let's say a lieutenant colonel uh is working on assignment for the national security

council just hypothetically um and is you know answering to day to day to a civilian uh appointed official um appointed by a politically elected person and that civilian gives a command to the military subordinate, it is not unreasonable to think that you would impute that command coming from the commander-in-chief, because ultimately everyone in the Department of Defense, everyone working for the office of the president, everyone in the executive branch, is ultimately responsible to the president as commander-in-chief when it comes to military action. So, regardless of where on the food chain that lieutenant colonel and that civilian appointee are, it's not unreasonable. for that lieutenant colonel to assume for the purpose of taking action or not that the order is

tacitly or explicitly blessed off on by the commander-in-chief and would therefore follow it, assuming it's lawful, right? In fact, the law, the case law about disobeying orders requires a presumption of legality, right? It's presumed to be lawful unless you have evidence to suggest otherwise. So, you know, that, again, is there for a reason, right? It, encourages, incentivizes kind of immediate obedience because in wartime, in conflict, you have to have that kind of rapid decision-making, rapid action kind of sequence, right? You can't wait and delay and debate things. And that same obedience to order law doesn't change just because you're working domestically. So would a lieutenant colonel obey in the same fashion that a civilian would? I think a civilian would have a lot more

freedom to disobey and disregard. And the military member would, in effect, think of it as a chain of command. They would follow it as if it came from the colonel who's above the lieutenant colonel, as if it came from the general who's above the colonel, even if the only people between the lieutenant colonel and the president are civilians. They would still follow it as if it were coming from a normal chain of command. In essence, it is. He's been directed by the Department of Defense, which works for the president to work in this other office where he might be wearing a suit all day or his dress uniform all day, not camouflage, doing certain things that his expertise or experience allows him to do well better than civilians. And for that period of time, that assignment, he is doing that

because he's been directed to. It's just shifting offices. I mean, it's tantamount to being a reassigned unit to unit. The effect is you're still following the chain of command. You're still following orders. It doesn't matter what unit you're in. You're still following. the chain of command, whether they're wearing a civilian attire or not. Now, there is, I think, an open question about whether any lawful order from a civilian can be, if it's disobeyed, whether you could actually prosecute that soldier for doing it. I'm actually writing an article right now about that question. It's a little bit sketchy, to say the least, because it doesn't happen very often where a uniformed member would disobey a direct.

command or order from a senior civilian official, and it becomes public, and to the point where the question of, do we prosecute this person or not, gets raised. But it's an open question. It's a bit of a legal wonky issue, I think, at this point. But the bottom line is, in effect, day to day, I think that military member who's in a civilian office doing national security stuff is still going to follow a chain of command-like structure. They're still going to follow orders or commands, as if it were coming from anyone else in uniform. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely.

Is SEAL Team 6 the best choice? Surely Delta Force is on the table? So I'm going to assume that that question came from someone in an Army unit or Army experience and not the Navy. And while I think the Army is always perpetually poised to beat the Navy in the Army-Navy game, I'm not prepared to say whether or not, you know, a group from Fort Liberty or any other organization under a army chain of command of sorts is better suited to do something illegal than a Navy unit is to do something illegal. So I don't take that as a particularly serious question. But I hope they don't like try a contest or anything. No, no, I mean, maybe it goes back to your earlier point about, you know, the Seals high.

having a maybe a reputational crisis, a mark of a blemish upon them based on previous conduct. Now, again, there are thousands of seals, to my knowledge. They're not all bad, right? And clearly, most of them are not bad. And they're doing the right thing. They're following orders. They're following lawful orders. They're ethical.

They're moral. They're doing the right thing for the right reasons at the right time. And occasionally you have instances where they're not doing that. And because of the nature of their work, sometimes it becomes very, very public when they don't. And that's a problem, right? Because of the highly sensitive nature of what they do, the consequences of what they do when they go afoul, Congress is going to be concerned, the president's going to be concerned, sect deaf is going to be concerned, commander of J-Socke is going to be concerned, so-com commander's going to be concerned,

the seal commander is going to be concerned. And to my knowledge, there are lots of efforts been ongoing over the last several years. years about kind of rethinking and recalibrating the ethos within that part of the special operations community. What effect does it have? I don't know because I'm not in that community, but I know that they're doing it, and I know they're doing it in part because it's a response to public perception that they might be doing something wrong. And that's a good thing, right? They're taking criticism and they're trying to fix it. But I don't think that that is necessarily indicative of a widespread cultural phenomenon where they are like the tool of choice if the president wish to, you know, run a coup just because they have a public blemish upon their record of lit.

I think it's always going to be complex, right? I mean, when you're basically telling people, all right, you're hired to kill people, but don't do it that way. Kill them right. I think that's actually a, I've always thought that that actually could get tough under pressure. It does. I would also point out that the history of the last 100 years, when a civilian, not in America, but in the rest of the world, when a civilian leader tasks the military with killing its domestic political rivals,

that is usually the point in which the military separates from the civilian leader and things go very bad in a very different way. Right? Like that is typically what happens historically in democracies in the last 100 years when this kind of thing happens. I just want to, as I think that there's this idea, and we kind of touched on this at the beginning, that the military are these machines that are just going to do what their executive tells them to do, right? and there are people and there's training and there's other loyalties. And this thing is complicated.

And they're not just going to execute a command just because someone asked them to, right? So the other historical examples that you're alluding to of essentially twos, right? The president wants to use his or her military for a certain domestic nefarious reason. The military rejects that reason and instead replaces sex. said commander-in-chief political-appoint political elected official, right? Okay. True. That may, that may very well be a consequence, you know, instead of a devoutly loyal military cadre that carries out an official but unlawful act on behest of the president. They just reject it to the point where they try to replace said commander-in-chief domestically, right? That I don't think

is I don't think there's an international analogy that you can say and import into our situation and say that could happen here too. The most likely event, I think, again, worst case scenario, if a president were to give said order, what I think would happen is one, the senior military chain of command that received said order would push back first. Then they would say, disregarding my advice, you are in the verge of breaking a law. Whether you have immunity or not, you're still asking us to break a law.

We're not going to transmit that order down to those who actually executed, right? The Chief of Staff of the Army, the J-Soc forced our commander, they are not going to be the ones pulling the trigger, right? They are intermediaries between the decision maker and the agent. The agent being, say, SEAL Team 6 on the ground, right? Or whatever force you want to say. There were people, multiple people in that chain of command that the order has to transmit down through. They're just not going to transmit it, right? Okay, so let's say the president or the sect death at his behest calls up the unit directly and says, you're going to do this now.

We're cutting out all the middlemen. You're just going to do it. Here's the order directly from the office of the president. Okay. Well, then you're relying upon the military, that lower level commander at the unit level to say that is an unlawful order. I'm not going to follow it. Right. So not only you have the potential of directly pushing back and then slow rolling the decision. You have the threat of disobeying it, threat of going public, going to the media, going to Congress, and saying, hey, the president is asking us to do this or telling us to do this. Once it becomes public, you know, a president might back up, might back off and say, maybe not a good idea.

So those realistic intermediary steps where slow rolling can happen, pushback can happen, outright disobedience can happen, going sideways to the media and reporting it, going to Congress to report it, all those things could happen. I think what would happen is it just wouldn't occur. The thing that the president wants to happen just wouldn't happen. It doesn't mean that the military would then take that, bad thing that the president wanted to do and use it as justification to replace the president

themselves. So a couple of months, not a couple months ago, when was it? years ago now, after the election of 2020, before the inauguration, during the multiple lawsuits that were ongoing, there was an article that came out written by two retired lieutenant colonels. Both scholars in their own right, civil military relations scholars, one of whom was working at the Army War College, they had written together before, very well respected within the Army strategist community, their well-known authors. And I think it was on Defense One. I think it was published on Defense One. The article basically said, it was like an op-ed, and they basically said, hey, General Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs, if the president refuses

to vacate the Oval Office on January 20th, on inauguration day. You have a duty, General Millie, to force him out. What does that look like? That looks like what you were referring to historically across the pond is happening when the military disagrees, right? And that is dangerous. That I disagreed with. I publicly disagreed with it. Whether they heard that disagreement or not, they're wrong, right? That is not one. The chairman of joint chiefs has no command authority by law, could not order that to happen at all. So that point number one is, is operationally not going to happen.

But let's say it was to the, the Northcom commander, four-star member of combatant command, right below the SEC DEF in the operational chain of command. The order was to that person. That person wouldn't do it either. They just, we are professionally,

almost ingrained. That could not happen. It would be so absurd. again, one could argue that this opinion seems to less off on certain things like that. But I would hope... You did say we live in a theater of the absurd. I did. I did say that.

I'm hopeful there's a long intermission. That would be lovely. Yeah, yeah. So I think instead of a reverse coup, right? Like you want us to take over something or kill someone? No, we're going to take you out instead. That probably wouldn't be the scenario that plays out. What would happen in this worst case scenario is that,

Nothing would happen, right? The military just wouldn't take action. They just would stop. And maybe Congress gets informed, maybe the media gets informed, maybe the public gets wind of it. But the act wouldn't occur unless all those actors in the chain of command decided to follow an unlawful order, which again, I think is highly unlikely because it's clearly unlawful to do so. Now, the other interesting question, which we haven't gotten to yet is, well, what about, okay, if not the military, well, who else could be at, you know, be at the military? the behest and command of the president to do said action. Those actors, civilian actors, law enforcement actors, but are not military, don't have a comparable uniform code of military

justice that requires them to follow lawful orders and allows them a defense of following or not following unlawful orders. It's an entirely different context, entirely different circumstance, entirely different relationship. And there you are relying upon the good faith action of the law enforcement, whoever is given that, whoever a civilian is given that commander order to follow the law that they know is on the books, that is don't murder, right? Don't use force to replace the civilian elected government, you know, via coup, right? Those, these are laws on the books. And again, just because the president ordered it as an official act, even if you were considered an official act, doesn't make it lawful for them to do it. They would still be on

the hook. And then this reverse back to our original point of, well, thank God, immunity does not just transform itself all the way down and translate itself all the way down to the actual actor. They know that, or they should know that. They are on the hook regardless of whether the president get away with it or not. I think that's a really good point. If the president rapid fire answering some other listener questions, if the president hires Pinkertons, if the president gets local cops on his side, local law enforcement, they do not share that immunity. They don't get to walk away from this in the event that it doesn't play his way, right? And that's important.

Right. But maybe they're incentivized by the fact that they're promised to pardon. Right. So the other inviolable thing. That could never happen. That could never happen. Right. So the other thing the president can do, right?

Yeah. So if the president says, do this. this, you're going to get arrested for it, but I'm going to pardon you, or I'm giving you this letter. I'm basically immunizing you in advance and saying you have a pardon for doing this. Okay, so let's play that one out a little bit. They grant pardon, or he or she grants a pardon. They carry out the action, you know, the assassination of the political candidate, let's say, during a campaign stop in Wisconsin or, you know, pick a state. Okay. So, that's means, let's say they're caught, or they say, I did it. The president ordered me to do it. I did

my civic duty. And look at my get out of jail free card. I'm immune from this because the president pardon me, ha, ha, ha. Okay, that means the U.S. attorney, the federal prosecutor may be hamstrung and can't prosecute the case as a violation of federal murder statute. But the crime happens in Wisconsin, right? Murder is murder in every state, right? Unlawful kill. is an unlawful killing. And whether or not it violates or could be prosecuted under federal law, there's still a state law in the books. It says, don't kill people without a legal justification or excuse or defense in our state. And if they do, the state prosecutor is free to prosecute, regardless of whether the president can pardon them. The pardon by the Constitution's own terms

applies to offenses against the United States. That is a federal offense, not a state offense. Okay, so let's play that good news story out a little bit. Let's say the president offers a pardon or offers a bribe, excuse me, a bribe to the governor of Wisconsin and says, if you grant a pardon to the person who's about to do this thing or he did this thing, I will give you X, Y, Z. All right, I'll make you my running mate during the next election cycle. I'll, you know, I'll give you $100,000, whatever the bribe might be. And the governor does that. then now we're in gray land or maybe not gray land it's it's black and white land perhaps that person is now free to do what they did and the person you know maybe has a conscious and wouldn't do it or maybe is you know not you know they they are you know I'm binge watching blacklist right now so I'm immersed in like these nefarious actors that do criminal enterprises and have no seeming conscious about it and do it for money so maybe there's a

person or persons out there that will do this, knowing that they'll either going to get a pardon from the president or a pardon from the governor at the behest and bribe of the president, and therefore, it doesn't matter if they get arrested, they're not going to go to jail. And maybe that's why they'll do it, right? So that is like the worst case. It's not Steel Team Six, right? It's not using an elite special operations force to use their powers and capabilities to apply to a domestic political actor for the personal political benefit of the president, right?

That is not the likely worst case. The likely worst case is this incentivizing somehow the state to pardon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Could that happen? Yeah, again, I think there's nothing that prevents it from happening other than the good faith and, you know, historic situational awareness of the people who are being asked to do it. you know like you said earlier matthew the number of bad things that i'll have to kind of fall in place for this worst case scenario to happen is very large very long list got to have the bad actor willing to do it you got to have the bad president willing to order it you got to have the

bad governor willing to accept the bribe uh you got to have to find all these actors willing to do it irrespective of their conscience irrespective of political opinion or public opinion irrespective of anything else, they're still willing to do it. Then maybe you have this terrible thing that could happen where all these dominoes fall into place and the president and everybody else gets away with it. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. But I think that that chain of events is so improbable, not that we shouldn't be worried about it, but it's so improbable that I don't think we have to be realistically concerned about it. We have to be more realistically concerned, I think, about the fact that the court's lack of a definition, and Congress's, you know,

lack of a definition of what official and unofficial might mean, means so much can go into that outer perimeter of presidential power, right? Where does that stop? Where does it realistically stop? And without that kind of stopping point, presidents may be incentivized, keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing that line until we get to the point where it seems like presidents can and have done anything that they want and gotten away with it. And we seem to be okay with it. And that's not good.

You've brought us back around at the beginning. Jason, you don't seem calmed or mollified at all. You see, if anything more worried than when we began the conversation. I thought I just looked despairing. Yeah, no, I think that we don't know how far. the rot has gotten and we'll find out. It's going to be a fun six months. Dan, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through.

This was an incredible conversation. I really appreciate it. Now, Matt, Jason, thank you for having me. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. He was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to Angry Planetpod.com.

Subscribe for $9 a month. you get commercial free and early access to the mainline episodes, as well as bonus episodes, the most recent of which is an interview with Jason about his recent trip to Israel. Got some other great stuff coming up. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.