The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Wittes: Talk About America in Decline

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Trump had to take two Air Force ones to the NATO summit in Turkey: his new bling Qatari hand-me-down that he wanted to show off and the old baby blue one which he had to use to fly safely home—given the war in neighboring Iran. And at the FBI, Kash Patel’s thievery of taxpayer resources has gotten so out of hand, even Chuck Grassley wants answers. Plus: Ukraine has created panic in Russia (which has Trump rethinking which side he wants to root for), Dems should be highlighting the massive military waste in Iran, and Ben invites the public to test-run his new giant database of government records. Oh, and baby elephants are the best.Ben Wittes joins Tim Miller. Show notes: Lawfare on the military's potential deployment at the polls  Ben’s email: [e-mail] Ben's Substack, "Dog Shirt Daily"  Get 20% off when you go to trustandwill.com/BULWARK

Welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare, senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. That's very serious work. His substack is dog shirt daily. It's a little less serious. He is in a what? What shirt are you in? Ben Wittes. Is that a dog? It is. It's a kind of cubist dog shirt. A cubist dog shirt. Where does one acquire a Picasso?

Okay. Where does want to acquire a shirt like that? Well, the thing is, if you buy enough dog shirts, then you get advertised to on Instagram whenever somebody releases a dog shirt in the world. The speed with which I get notified is really impressive. There is a single lady in Bangladesh who just has your number. That's right. If I just print a new dog shirts, this one gentleman in America is sure to buy it, you know? That's correct.

And she's right. I'm happy about that for you. And for her. We have a lot of this, Gus. I'm going to start with this, because this is a real news story that I think very much encapsulates where we are at. And I think that many people wouldn't have believed would have said I had TDS if I told you this was happening a couple of years ago.

The president of the United States had to take two Air Force ones to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. That is because the nation of Qatar gifted him, his preferred Air Force One, and he wanted to ride on that fancy one. And simultaneous to that, he started a stupid war in Iran that has created some lack of safety in the region. And so he defy the old Air Force One there to get him out of Ankara Turkey safely. and the new Air Force One, and the new Air Force One, I guess, does not have the anti-aircraft safety tools that the president would want. But it's fancy. It's got, as the president said, it's got luxury like no one has ever seen before.

Really? That's what he said. It was a hand-me-down from the nation of Qatar, which is kind of like a minor, Sharia law of Petro State. That's right. But it's good on the, you know, bling. And I always thought, I think I wrote a column about this at the time that the plane was accepted that, you know, I objected to this deal because the president was getting a used

secondhand plane. And I thought there was something genuinely weird about that. Look at the hand-me-down plane I got from the Emir of Qatar. Yeah. I mean, talk about American decline and decline being a choice. And this is what kind of broke deck country we are now. We're taking hand-me-down planes. And then even still, you and me, the taxpayer, had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit the hand-me-down plane. To make it not usable to get the president to and from Ankara. Correct. And then you and I then also had to pay for both planes to fly to Turkey. It's a truly preposterousity. It's a truly preposterous.

situation. The administration wouldn't admit this is what happened. They said that they brought the two planes because they wanted to show off the new one to our troops stationed in Europe for now. Trump's also threatening to take them out of Europe. That is an obvious lie based on the fact that the president didn't fly on his preferred plane. Look, I think, you know, this is one of those things. Trump lies about everything all the time, except his emotional state about which he is incapable of being dishonest because he just kind of wears it on his sleeve. And he has been nothing but honest about this plane, which is, they gave me a really cool plane and I want to use it and I'm going to keep it. And there's been nothing but transparency about that. And as a result, everybody kind of looks

and says, well, there's not that much to see here. And the point that you just made, which is that Air Force One is not usable to get the president to and from safely a NATO summit, somehow gets lost in it. But, you know, that is the reality of modern America. And by the way, a kind of metaphor for Trump's larger presence at the NATO summit, which, you know, the New York Times ran a long story about, which I think is basically pretty accurate about there being two summits. One is, you know, Trump, as you would say, bleeding, only their bleats are in speeches, right? And just this kind of Trump show and attacking our allies. And the other is the actual NATO summit where, you know, European NATO allies are kind of getting down to business, doing a lot of work, planning for a post-America.

security environment. And, you know, what is a better symbol of this than the president flying in on a cuttery bling jet that he can't safely fly out on? Right. I mean, he's, and talking about Greenland, like acquiring Greenland on the way. Liberty 24 is changing call sign. Liberty 24 is now Air Force One. Get off my, I'm just going to quote Harrison Ford. Get off my plane. Anyway, I love Air Force one. Great movie. Anyway, to your point about what was happening in the actual meeting, I want to talk to you about Ukraine stuff, which we like to chat about. Russia's attacks on civilians continue earlier this week, as we discussed, they were firing missiles at residential districts in Kiev. 27 people died for last night in Odessa. Trump and Zelensky met, and, you know,

it's just classic Trump stuff. That's kind of the weird exchange about whether he'd go to Moscow, Trump wanted to get him to Moscow, and then Zelensky kind of made a joke about how, well, it's, you might not be safe in Moscow because of Ukrainian drones. A lot of Ukrainian drones there. And I guess the positive item that came out of this is that Trump said the U.S. will give Ukraine a license to produce Patriot Interceptor missiles. This is a little bit of a, you know, Johnny come lately situation. It's going to take a long time to produce these missiles. We're running out of Patriots because of our stupid war in Iran. But at least any sign that Trump is not going to actively be helping Russia, I guess is a plus.

Yeah. So there's three things going on here and they're related. And it is largely a good news picture, but it is a good news picture that produces a lot of collateral bad news. So the underlying good news is that the Ukrainians are making significant progress at the military front. and that is not currently being seen in the lines moving, but it is being seen in the degree of degradation of the Russian economy and the degree of degradation of the Russian military presence, particularly in Crimea.

And so, you know, you can't get 1,100 people killed or wounded a month as the Russians are doing at the front and not be able to replace them and continue military progress. And so the Ukrainians have really done a good job in arresting and to some degree reversing the Russian military gains. This has produced panic in Russian society, where it's hard to get a gallon of gasoline in a lot of areas now, and where, you know, the capacity to continue the military campaign

has really been eroded, and that's an incredible accomplishment. And the Russian response to it is to bombard cities, because that is something that is easy to do, and it kills a lot of people, and it demoralizes people, or at least they hope it does. And so this is concurrent with a third development, which you just alluded to, which is that the Ukrainians have run out of Patriot Interceptors, and they're super low on other interceptors. And so their air defenses against particularly ballistic missiles, but also some drones are less good than they were a few months ago. And the result of that is that you have ballistic slamming into apartment buildings

and killing a lot of people. And the last week in Kiev has been awful. And it's a direct result of the progress that the Ukrainian have had both at the front and in their medium and long-range missile strikes into Russia. So this has put a real premium on the question of whether they can get or make new interceptors, and that has happened at exactly the moment where, as you also pointed out, Trump has largely depleted our supply of patriots and put us actually in a really unfortunate military preparedness situation vis-a-vis our own missile defense. And so the solution that the Ukrainians

proposed, and to Trump's credit, he seems to have accepted, is that they want to make their own. And Zelensky asked Trump for basically a license to produce patriots in Ukraine. And Trump has, at least in principle, agreed to that. It's a long-term solution. You can't produce a patriot overnight, and you can't build the capacity to produce patriots overnight. It is a good solution. The Ukrainians have an increasingly robust military industrial complex that's capable of acting very quickly in a way that the Western and Eastern European and American defense bases are not for a variety of reasons.

And so it's a good outcome. Would that it had happened a long time ago? and would that it could be done even faster than it's going to be done. But I think it is a good outcome of this meeting between Zelensky and Trump. I do think there's a relationship also, as you're saying, kind of in Trump's brain between all of what's happening in the actual battle and his willingness to go along. I mean, Trump has a baby brain. He likes to see things go boom.

As Haverman and Swan Road, he was very impressed by the pager attacks. It seems like they've been able to impress Trump. It's like, oh, look at the Ukrainian technology. Look at how successful they are. Look at how bad the Russia economy is. Russia economy is getting very sad. And like that has an impact on the way he sees things. I think that's right.

And I think he also does not ever want to be on the side of the losers. And when it looked like Ukraine was going to get run over in three days. He was loath to criticize the invasion. And when it looked like it was a grinding stalemate, he would just say he wanted the war to stop. He wouldn't say who he wanted to prevail. And when it looked like Russia was grinding away and eroding the Ukrainian lines over time, you know, he would say you have no cards, right? And eventually Ukraine is going to lose. And now that it looks different from that and whether it looks like eventually Ukraine is going to win or whether it looks like Russia is collapsing or whether it looks like it's going to be a stalemate

on terms more favorable to Ukraine, I leave it to military analysts to make that prediction. I try not to do predictions. But it doesn't look like we're heading toward an inevitable grinding Ukrainian loss. And I think his interest in being on the side of the plucky, underdog that's now a little bit on top is much higher. And you see that in others. Laura Lumer has conspicuously switched sides and now declares herself pro-Ukraine. She might just be on the take, but, you know, whatever it takes. Like, I think there are a lot of people who thought Putin was going to win because they believe evil is cool. But evil when it's losing, like nobody's pro-Victor Orban now. Well, Chris Rufo, drowned to sanctimonious, a couple people, but not too many. I do have some bad

news for Trump. Things seem to be looking worse and worse for the Nobel Peace Prize that he wanted. I need to get the FIFA Peace Prize. But just this week, maybe there's other bombings happening that I'm not monitoring, but Ukraine has been bombed, Russia has been bombed, Lebanon's been bombed, Gaza's been bombed, Bahrain and Kuwait have been bombed, and did I mention Iran yet, Iran has been bombed. It's always darkest before the dawn. The solving of all the wars. Yeah. You've got to have wars in order to solve them. The situation in Iran, we launched strikes for a second day, we being the U.S. I don't know who

everybody's written for, he's listening. At 90 Iranian military targets, Iran said it carried out coordinated missile and drone strikes in response, as mentioned, hitting Kuwait and Bahrain bases. They threatened other bases. Shipping traffic has once more come to a halt in the straight. Cutter is pausing efforts to rapidly revive production at the world's largest lookout national gas facility because they're worried that that's going to get hit again

too soon. So, I mean, we've really kind of groundhog dayed the situation in Iran, and we're back to where we were six weeks ago. Which is exactly what you would have predicted six weeks ago. And I think on this show, repeatedly, you did predict. I'm about three weeks behind in my podcast listening chronically. But did you ever doubt that's kind of fun for you on this show, you know? I'm always about two, three weeks behind. All right. If I ever have a really bad miss, make sure to text me. You know, they're like,

Ooh, this didn't look that good, actually. Three weeks on. The thing is, these calls have been so easy. Like, listening to JVL Crow about how he got the memorandum of understanding exactly right, who didn't get that right? You know, like, but I do think that the fact that this was not going to be a stable climb down was deeply knowable and known by, like, nobody. he was fooled and thought, ah, peace in our time. There's no, there was no Neville Chamberlain here.

Maybe there was a Neville Chamberlain here, but anyway, that's funny, neither here nor there. Well, he tried to be a Neville Chamberlain, but he didn't declare, Neville Chamberlain got six months out of it before Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Trump got six weeks, right? There was never any doubt in any reasonable person's mind that this wasn't going to lead to a stable de-escalation. And we're facing now a long-term standoff over the navigation rights in the Straits of Hormuz and Lebanon and what the hell Israel's obligations with respect to Hezbollah are, if any, and whether we are going to continue bribing the Iranians with their own frozen assets or not. And I think that's going to take months or years to resolve in a stable direction. And I don't care what pieces of paper people sign in Switzerland in the meantime. We're dealing with the downsides of homeownership over here right now. We did some work in the backyard, had to get an inspection done.

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steal one thing from the way that Platner talked about the war. And that is, I think this is a good moment for a populist railing against the waste of our resources overseas and at home. And, you know, sometimes this is kind of a hackneyed bumper sticker, you know, where, you know, our money is being spent on bombs that should be spent on hospitals. And there's like varying degrees of truth to that. And, you know, sometimes that argument is used in bad faith, but like, it's really apt right now. Like, I was just watching the, you know, the U.S. put out some propaganda videos of all the things that we blew up yesterday. And all I could see when I was looking at it is like, what?

What? Like, why are we spending this money? And so much money is being wasted right now on bombs, on material in Iran and in the Middle East. Of the reporting from people who are experts on this indicate that we're also running low, on the types of things that we'd need if a real war did sprout up in the next year. And like all of this waste is happening at a moment when people at home are concerned about prices and costs. And it just, it feels extremely frivolous. And they are totally unable to enunciate anything even bordering on a rationale for like this type of commitment of resources from our country.

So I agree with that, and I think you're circling around a important test. I don't mean a legal test, but I mean like, you know, when you're trying to justify an overseas military action, if you have to answer the question, what did you accomplish with reference to things you blew up, rather than strategic objectives, you've wasted money, right? What did you accomplish? Well, we obliterated the Iranian Navy, and the Straits of Hormuz are closed because of oil traffic, right? If you can't answer the question without reference to the things you destroyed, then you actually haven't accomplished anything because the goal, unless you're a child like Pete Hegseth, the goal is never to make things go boom, right? Klausovitz didn't say politics is the continuation of war by other means. He said the opposite,

right? The goal is to achieve a political objective, and you're using violence to achieve a political objective. Now, you can measure the value of the political objective in terms of dollars. We prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, if we did. Right. How do you compare that to the value of 300 hospitals. But you can't compare, we blew up this stuff. We obliterated this stuff. The dollar value of that is always negative. And like the amazing thing about this war is that they've never even tried to articulate what the non-obliteration value of it is. What are we trying to do? And now the irony is that what we're trying to do is to get back to something like the steady state that we had before the war. That's called strategic failure.

Something worse than that. It's so great. So we just blew up tens of millions more of my money in the hopes that we can get back to where we were before the war started. But plus Iran gets an environmental fee and the straight isn't quite as open as it was. It's like, okay, and our allies are more upset with us. Just across the board, it's just been an utter strategic failure. Sometimes I just, I do feel like a fair critique of the establishment Democrats is like when they're talking about this. It's very, it's sort of in the language of diplomacy and Washington and military terms and academic terms.

And a lot of times the right message to this is stop spending our fucking money on these bombs. Right. Or if you can't answer Bernie Sanders or Graham Platner with the, it was worth it because we accomplished this. It was worth it because we kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Right. Right. It was worth it because we stopped a genocide in Kosovo.

It was worth it because we did something, right? We accomplished something. And that was worth the expenditure of money. If you can't say that, they're right. Right. They're very right in this case. And maybe you should talk like them. Right.

Like, it is true that they're cutting funding for rural hospitals. And we're just like recklessly bombing random shit in Iran and killing people. Right. And it's not just rural hospitals that they're cutting funding for. They're cutting Patriot Interceptors available to defend Kiev. They're cutting all kinds of weapons we would need to defend Taiwan. It's military objectives that we are undermining as well as rural hospitals. I will give the Graham Platner's and Bernie Sanders' of the world the comparison to domestic priorities.

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I want to talk about our friend Cash Patel. Who's still in there? He's still the director. He's a survivor, man. It's like, make a wish FBI director. New story from Kendallanian over at MS now. FBI director Cash Patel. We've covered some of this, but it's kind of, he's capturing even more.

And now even, it seems like even Senator Grassley is kind of wanting to learn a little bit more about what has been uncovered. You're a Republican FBI director and you're losing Chuck Grassley, you know you've got a problem. Yeah. Among the perks, helicopter tours, jet ski excursions, et cetera. Will Summers has been covering the many plane trips to go pick up his D-List country music singing girlfriend from her concerts opening up at amateur wrestling matches, etc. I don't know. You've got relationships in the bureau. I feel. he's catch has been a little bit out of the news like what's what's the state of play over there the state of play is that he seems to be completely unashamed by petty you could say it's corruption but what it really is is you know like stealing the dinner silverware at the restaurants you go to right it's you know it's stuff that you simply can't imagine chris Ray or Jim Comey or Bob Mueller doing. And it's unabashed, except that they then sort of deny it.

And I have no explanation other than like petty fevery why they think this is a good idea for the FBI director to do. But it does seem like even Chuck Grassley is a little irritated with it. And, you know, you would think that after the guzzling the beer video incident got under Trump's skin, that Cash might be a little bit more careful. But he doesn't seem to be. I'm not sure what else you say about it. Yeah. The other thing came across my radar about the cash just made me chuckle about all this was the Tyler Robinson preliminary hearings is underway for his trial and his murder of Charlie Kirk. allegedly.

And maybe this was known already, but I've been kind of trying to monitor the case. I've been mostly monitoring the conspiracy theories about the case that you're saying on the right. But I don't know if I realized this until the hearing where they showed the video of it. Like Tyler Robinson himself literally turned himself in. I thought that the dad had done it.

And he walked in. And like they have the video of him like kind of walking into the building to turn himself in and then kind of pacing around a room there. of kind of the law and order camera that you can see in the TV shows of the suspect alone in the room. I'm like, Cash didn't even do that.

It's just, it's a kind of funny embarrassment for cash. It's like, all of the news about him is about his jet ski trips and his corruption and his incompetence and the challenge coins that he hands out. And in like the one case you think he'd care the most about,

like he totally botched it on the front end. And like the suspect ends up just turning himself. There is no way to run the FBI in the fashion that he has run it, which is involved decimating the senior and even middle management of people who have served honorably. I mean, the purge has been dramatic, and there's no way to do that without having significant operational consequences. Most of those operational consequences are and will remain invisible because they just take the form of crimes that go unsolved or take much longer to solve. And how do you know that a crime that goes unsolved would have been solved under the previous iterations of FBI leadership?

Or how do you know that one that took six months may have taken three and a half months, right? And so most of it is completely invisible. But there are these things that are not invisible. And one of them is the behavior of the director who, you know, be clowns himself in all kinds of really assinine ways and also behaves in ways in private that become public because they so disgust the people in the bureau that, you know, people talk about it. And there's a lot of that. The second thing that are visible is FBI agents participating in stuff that they absolutely should not be participating in, right? A search warrant at the Fulton County Elections Board requires about 100 agents, you know, and that means that 100 people had to agree to go execute that warrant. So there are these things that are super visible, but the larger impact is invisible and just is, you know, the justice system at the investigative level working less well than it should. Well, and that's why the visible thing about the Robinson

thing is so embarrassing. And it's like you have cash putting on his costume and not getting on the plane tickets off his costume and him tweeting the wrong suspect out. You know, this is just stuff that never would have happened. And you saw the same thing with John Bolton, the raid on John Bolton's house that that was announced in the New York Post the moment it was happening. And then Cash Patel tweets FBI agents on mission. No one's above the law. I have known FBI directors personally during their times as FBI directors. This isn't the way the institution is supposed to function. And it isn't the public role of the FBI director to be an influencer, much less a, you know, an influencer with merch.

I want to go through some of the other lawfare stuff. And I guess we'll start with that, maybe, an FBI director you may have known when he is in office. I think I want to get any updates you have on the revenge tour stuff, what the latest is with Comey. I saw you guys recovering. Brennan has a civil suit against the DOJ. I haven't talked about that at all at the pod.

They just give us a little rundown of the latest on the revenge tour. Let's start with Brennan because there's real news in it, which is. that Brennan and his lawyers have, you know, gotten fed up with this deranged effort to prosecute him for what exactly? So they filed a lawsuit that is basically a demand for document preservation on the theory that any indictment that would proceed against Brennan would be a vindictive prosecution. And the evidence of that has to exist and will be destroyed or may be destroyed absent some requirement that the material be preserved. And so I think this serves two functions. One is maybe a bit of a Hail Mary that you could get a judicial order to preserve all kinds of material pre-indictment. But the second is just a warning, a shot across the bow of the prosecutors who were thinking

about this case that, you know, we're going to take your pants down if you bring it. And this is what we can do without seeing any other records. I think there's also an effort to, you know, get this thing in court in the District of Columbia where there's a reasonable bench and the effort to engineer on the part of the Justice Department to engineer grand jury investigations of this stuff in other jurisdictions anywhere but Washington, right? Anywhere but Northern Virginia where there's, you know, a good bench and a sane jury pool. You know, this is an effort to force the D.C. bench to take a look at this stuff. And, Comey? First of all, just for the record, I am not in touch with Jim Comey these days for reasons. She's in a remote location somewhere and undisclosed location. It actually has to do with the very, very, very

marginal chance that I could be called as a witness in one of these cases. And so just as a precaution, I have been making a point of not being in touch with Jim. The state of the cases are the following. The first one is on appeal. This was the one for allegedly lying to Congress that was brought by Lindsay Halligan, who was ruled to be illegally appointed, and both the case against Comey and the case against Letitia James were thrown out on that basis. That is on appeal by the government to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. I believe they are currently working on scheduling oral argument, which will be sometime in September or October. The other case, which is the, you know, very serious, not ginned up by, of course, Seychelles case in North Carolina now has a

briefing schedule. The motions to dismiss are due, I believe, in August, and the briefing will finish in September. There's an arraignment. And then presumably one of those motions will be the, are you fucking kidding me motion? And another one will be the vindictive prosecution motion that would have prevailed in Virginia had the prosecutor is illegally appointed motion not prevailed. And so I'm, there basically hasn't been a lot of movement in this case, these cases since the time of the Seychelles indictment. I like the AYFKMM, you know, that's nice. You know, this is a new kind of motion. And it includes, you know, the you maliciously tore up paint from the reflecting pool. It includes the you 85-year-old woman assaulted or the sandwich guy assaulted an ice agent, right?

Or a CBP agent. And I think it's the motion to dismiss because are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, with a poop emoji. Yeah, exactly. A lot of these motions are prevailing. I want to also some of the other lawfare stuff. You guys have a series on military at the ballot box. This was kind of a big story.

A couple months ago, because like Bannon was calling for this and Trump was doing the Trump thing where he's like, well, maybe we'll do it if we need to. You know, at some level, like from a political standpoint, I have been kind of on the side of, I'd like to see you try it a little bit because I do think that there's a backlash a lot of times. in these cases, not all the time.

Sometimes voter suppression works, and it should be taken very seriously. I think it's important that there are legal folks and Mark Elias and those folks that are out there challenging it. It's like a political standpoint, it can be an effective actual political tool to fuck over the people that are doing it ham-handedly

because it motivates people to vote in elections. They might not have been motivated to vote in. That said, just as a rule of law matter, it's serious. And you guys like took it seriously. And so I just kind of wondering how that shook out. So this is a series by my, colleagues, Natalie Orpitt and Lauren Voss and Molly Roberts. And you have the psychology of the series exactly right, which is, hey, it's a political people's job to use this as a motivating factor

to get people to vote and to get people serious about the idea of protecting their right to vote and getting people energized. It is our job to take it seriously as a rule of law matter. And so we did, or my colleagues did, and they did a two-part series, the first part of which is about the actual legal impediments to deploying the military in connection with elections, which are extensive and turn out to involve Abe Lincoln-era statutes that actually make it a criminal violation to put troops, use troops to control access to the polls. and a variety of other factors that reinforce the idea that military forces should not be playing a role in our elections. So that's sort of part one is laying out the protective umbrella that exists.

But part two is laying out the holes in the fabric and the fact that, you know, you can get around a lot of things with the National Guard and you can declare national emergencies. And there are a variety of ways that the president, if he's reasonably creative or has people around him who are reasonably creative and really push on the court's deference to the president on emergency declarations can kind of get a lot of things done anyway. And so I think there is, you know, reason to be concerned. And I agree with you that the reasons to be concerned may also be. be reasons to be excited, which is to say, like, go ahead and freaking try. It is not our job to point out the go ahead and freak and try thing.

That's, you know, the Sarah Longwell, Tim Miller job. And I think both are important. I've kind of a little running series. I was on Mark Elias's show a little bit ago and we're on Nicole together often. And I need to get him back on. But there is that push and pull a lot in trying to navigate the stuff. because, like, also, it's hard to predict what will actually work and what won't work, and it's important to challenge things, and, like, we all don't have a crystal ball.

And also, if you do intense voter suppression in one area and it works, and it motivates people to vote, and they're in other areas, is that a success and for whom, right? And so, like, you know, I think it is a really interesting question. whether voter suppression essentially always backfires. But that's a political science and political motivation question. And obviously it didn't backfire in the Jim Crow South, for example. I'm like, you know, like they're extreme. Exactly.

There's a level at which you can do it that doesn't backfire. And, you know, our job is to say, hey, we want people to vote and we don't want people engaged in election interference using the military for malicious partisan reasons. I wanted to pick your brain on the Supreme Court rulings that are happening on your vacation. We're going to close with your vacation because I want to hear about that too. But particularly the one about the president's ability to fire people at these independent agencies with the one weird exception of the Fed because of something, something, reasons, and it was around for a while and reasons, reasons.

What I've been interested in particularly is the implications, you know, as important as the FTC is, like for some of these other functions within the federal government that are used for accountability, particularly independent councils, particularly inspectors general. Obviously, Trump's already fired a bunch of inspectors general. So anyway, I'm curious that your macro view on the ruling and also in particular, those offices that weren't addressed as directly. Long before the FTC and the independent agencies were toast. with respect to the president's ability to fire people who allegedly had some job security.

The inspectors general were toast before that, and the special counsel was toast from 2000 and from 2000 when the independent counsel law expired. And, you know, the president could have fired Bob Mueller for any reason he wanted or no reason at all, and he chose not to. and would have had to direct the attorney general or the deputy attorney general to do it. But it was always an option, right? And it was something that he was contemplated and didn't do only for political reasons. So the real question that these cases raise is not about inspectors general or the senior level people. The real question is about junior level people.

The traditional way of understanding the president's appointment power and therefore his firing power is that every principal officer, if you run an agency, if you're political appointee, if you have Senate confirmation, right, you have to be fireable by the president. But below a certain level, what are called inferior officers, Congress has a lot of authority to create other appointment mechanisms for them. So, for example, a U.S. attorney can be appointed by the court in the local jurisdiction under certain circumstances. The civil service can have protection against firing without cause that you could never give to an agency head. And this opinion is careful not to prejudge the question of whether all these civil service protections are actually vapor. And I think that's the risk. And so to go back to a different Comey, Maureen Comey was fired as a, as, you know, Jelaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's prosecutor. Epstein was already dead. But she was fired because literally, the paperwork said, because Article 2, right, which is the dog pissing and licking his balls because I can. So the question this case raises is, is that legit? If Congress can't make a for-cause protection or commissioner slaughter, can it still make one for Marine Comey?

Now, there is a philosophical and constitutional answer to that question, which lives in the nature of the appointments clause and the inferior versus principal officer distinction. But the fact that the court didn't say that worries me. So I think we are going to see the question of how far down the civil service chain. Have there been any interesting rulings on that front from like the original doge firings and, you know, kind of what that's good? So all of that stuff is in litigation and the question of do they have to go to the merit systems protection board first and can the merits, you know, like there's a lot of procedure. nonsense that we're going to have to work through. So it's just like one of those things like, we'll find out in 2029. Correct.

Like, actually, they did have protections. It's fine, probably. And then in 2032, when Baron Trump is the president, we'll find out again that, well, no, actually. We're not quite as, not quite as sure. It turns out they can be fired. We looked at a subclause of the appointments. So I think we're going to find out eventually that a huge amount of this firing was illegal. That's what I think we're going to find out eventually.

But I believe that for only one reason, which is that I think I know how the Chief Justice and Amy Coney-Barrant will think about that case. And maybe Brett Kavanaugh, too. But I don't know that I'm right, right? And, you know, I have long since developed the humility to know that my instincts about where conservative justices are going to end up is not perfect. Are you more worried about that now than you would have been before this ruling with the independent agencies? Oh, yes.

Yes. Because I think it would have been so easy for John Roberts in that opinion to include the sentence. And of course, the terms of service of inferior officers is regulable by Congress, right? that sentence would have cost him nothing to include. And instead, he just said, we're not commenting on that in this case. We leave for another day, right? And that could be simply a desire to keep more justices in the opinion because they don't all agree about that, or it could be reflecting his own desire to see that case come up so

that he can rule in a different direction. As far as lawfare business is concerned, I was multitasking and listening. to a lawfare live stream. And, you know, sometimes you guys get down into the weeds in areas that, you know, those of us that had a 3.3 GPA in undergrad and never went on to law school, you know, starts to get a little, so to get a little peanuts perency for me. But there are always interesting nuggets that I gather from it. Though one phrase really parked my ears up recently, and it was during an ad read that you

were doing. Uh-oh. And you said, quote, I've spent a lot of time vibe coding lately. Ben Wittes. And I don't know if that's the kind of thing that you say in an ad read, just to kind of say to feel cool

or if it's true that you spent a lot of time vibe coding lately. And I want to talk about AI legal policy and the very big matters of states around that, but I want to build into that through the question of whether Ben Wittis is vibe coding. I am vibe coding. I don't lie in my ad reads.

I sometimes, you know, exaggerate or declare my love for products that I merely appreciate. But I don't lie. I know I have spent a lot of time over the last a few months. It started as a project trying to develop datasets for one of my reporters, Catherine Pompilio, who was on this show, to help her identify J6 perps who had reoffended and to help her help her. identify cases in which the government had violated court orders. And over the course of doing that, I realized that I had developed what has turned into a weirdly powerful surveillance tool directed at U.S. government activity in a whole bunch of domains, litigation, regulatory

areas and all kinds of legal and administrative actions. And so we now have built this database that includes every piece of federal litigation in the United States since the beginning of the Trump administration, all OLC opinions that are public. This is from your vibe coding? You got something going and then you called in an expert. No, no, no. So I have done it all myself.

Well, myself being with Claude. It's me and Claude. I am now hiring a team to develop it further. And it also includes the entire diplomatic, published diplomatic history of the United States. It includes the entire electronic congressional record and 35,000 congressional hearings. It includes an incredible range of stuff. It includes every sanctions action. It includes every pardon that's ever been issued.

and you can use AI to do these incredible searches of the corpus of federal government activity. Are you falling in love with the computer right now? Is this a her moment? This does feel? No, it's really a, there are a lot of people who are using this stuff for ill and to undermine democracy. And I want to use it to build tools that give journalists, researchers, and just every day, citizens insight into democratically sensitive data. And I want to do it in a fashion that is free for the public to use and that is insanely powerful. It's wild. And so we call it ragtime.

It is in beta right now. If you're interested in the name. So rag time is a pun. Rag stands for retrieval augmented generation, which is a type of use of LLMs within limited data sets. It also stands for research across government. And so we built, for those who are technically minded, it's basically a giant rag of government records. And it gets bigger every day. It's kind of happening on its own. Like just give me a little example, because I don't, I'm not, I assume most of listeners don't vibe. So what like square one? So yeah.

So the other day I plugged into it in response to the arrest of the Olympian at the reflecting pool. I want to rip some paint up from the bottom of the reflecting pool. What regulations enforceable by what criminal laws might I violate if I did so? And it spat out the answer to that question. How long? Over how long? Oh, it took about a minute. But it ran through the entire code of federal regulations, and it ran through the

criminal code, figured out what they matched. And so then I said, okay, I will try a different one. What if I asked it the question that I got in trouble for last summer? I want to project pro-Ukrainian slogans on the Washington monument. What would that do? And it got that one right, too. And then I thought, okay, let's do the one that I just did and got away with because I couldn't find any law that it violated,

which was projecting on the Trump banner on the Justice Department. And it got that one right too. Okay, but so that's the Q&A part. Now, how do you get to the next step from, okay, You know, Mr. Claude, sir, please, you know, scrape the history of diplomatic statements, and now we want to turn it into a searchable database. Like, how do you get from one to the other? So you don't have to know how to code.

What you do have to do is not be afraid of diving into technical areas that you don't know anything about. I can't speak to Codex or any of the other models. Claude Code is astonishingly powerful. And, you know, I started with a concept, which was, I want to develop a data set of violated court orders in immigration habeas helped me build this. And it did. And we just, it started with that. And then we went to let's find J-6ers who've re-offended. and it built a bunch of tools for that.

And then I was just like, let's ingest every public piece of data we can get from the federal government and build a giant repository of the ability to ask questions. It's pretty cool. That is cool. And so we're in beta right now?

It's on the site. I saw it on the side. It's there. It's in beta. And anybody who's interested in playing with it or helping us kick the tires on it, feel free to email me, benjamin.wittis at lawfaremedia.org. You know, we're interested in having people play with it.

We're adding more data to it all the time. Come give us suggestions. And so kind of getting back to that big question, I am curious. I made this doesn't inform your position on it at all, but I'm just kind of wondering how you're thinking about all the discussions now about these super powerful AI models that now Trump administration is going on.

around Congress, like putting rules on, you know, forcing either Anthropic or Open AI to come to them before releasing new models. Like, do you have any, any thoughts on all the controversy around that? Yeah, I do. So, look, the administration's behavior toward Anthropic is absolutely lawless and generally should be understood roughly the way we understand their behavior toward Harvard University law firms that bother them, Letitia James, right? Like there is, there is nothing to be said in defense of them. That said, the mythos case is a, it's a scary situation, as Anthropic will be the first to say. And the idea that a private company can develop a product that can expose quickly, thousands and thousands of vulnerabilities in existing software packages, including in

very sensitive areas, is a, that is a non-trivial security problem. So, you know, part of the problem is that the administration's behavior is so awful that they don't get the benefit of the doubt when they panic over mythos. But the mythos, whether it was worth panic or not, it was certainly worth attention. And for those who have used the mythos model, which is called Fable in its commercialized form, in a complex project, it is awesome. And I mean that in the sense of inspiring awe in the degree of its power. And I have no doubt that it has significant security implications. So what you would want in this situation is a serious group of people in the administration to interface with the serious group of people at Anthropic to mitigate that risk.

Unfortunately, that is not the government that we have. It's an understatement of the year on this podcast. So I appreciate that. All right. You're back from Africa. You're in Kenya. Do you have a highlight? I was in Kenya with sometime bulwark contributor, Holly Berkeley Fletcher, was once a CIA Africa analyst and now takes groups of people to these unbelievable safaris in Kenya. And I spent two weeks with baby elephants and giraffes and leopards and Holly Fletcher. And it was lovely. Do you have a favorite megafauna now?

I got to say there is the baby elephants really stick with you. They're pretty wonderful. Seeing a leopard up a tree with its kill is a highlight, but it's not cute the way the baby elephant playing with a stick is cute. The baby elephant's kind of like the equine therapy, but for elephant. You just kind of want to go like hang with them. Nozzle. Yeah.

I love that. All right, Ben, what is any other, any other deep thoughts, wisdom, anecdotes? I mean, I went away. While I was going away, they hung the charp in front of the Kennedy Center. And I just want to say, you do that in Lord Laser's Town, and you're asking for it. That's a fair warning to the Trump administration from Benjamin Wittes. He's over at Lawfare. Go check out all the great work they're doing.

and drag time, which he vibe-coded, apparently, because, hey, why not? It's 2026. Appreciate you very much, brother. Come on back soon. We'll be back tomorrow with another old friend of the show. We'll see everybody then. Peace. Great to see you, man.

The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.