The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

John Gotti was the boss of the Gambino Crime Family in New York City and one of America's most notorious mobsters. Nicknamed “The Teflon Don” for his ability to beat criminal charges, Gotti became a celebrity mob boss and was no stranger to law enforcement. Gotti's reign was put to an end by convictions obtained by John Gleeson, a former federal prosecutor, and Gotti's conviction and others that followed eventually led to the takedown of La Cosa Nostra in New York City.

Decades later, now-Judge Gleeson memorialized how he obtained Gotti's conviction in his new book entitled, “The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America's Most Notorious Mobster.” Former Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm sat down with Judge Gleeson. They discussed how Gleeson became involved in one of the biggest mafia cases in the history of United States jurisprudence, conflicts between the prosecution and the FBI, and how underboss “Sammy The Bull” Gravano became an informant to take down the rest of the mob.

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You’ve likely heard that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter… and that he is now trying to get out of buying Twitter… and that at first he wanted to defeat the bots on Twitter… but now he’s apparently surprised that there are lots of bots on Twitter. It's a spectacle made for the headlines, but it's also, at its core, a regular old corporate law dispute. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke with Adriana Robertson, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law at the University of Chicago Law School, to talk about the legal issues behind the headlines. What is the Delaware Court of Chancery in which Musk and Twitter are going to face off? Will it care at all about the bots? And how do corporate lawyers think and talk about this differently from how it gets talked about in most of the public conversation about it?

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The United States Secret Service is in the spotlight once again—this time because of deleted texts for the time surrounding January 6, 2021—and the organization is reeling. To discuss it, Lawfare publisher David Priess sat down with Juliette Kayyem, formerly assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, who has served on the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Committee and has written the book, “The Devil Never Sleeps,” and also with Jonathan Wackrow, chief operating officer of Teneo Risk, who was a long-serving special agent in the Secret Service, including in the presidential protection division.

They talked about the use of phones on that job, the loss of trust and confidence in the Secret Service, and its mismanagement of the crisis. They also talked about the performance of the vice president's protection detail on Jan. 6, the Secret Service’s status within DHS, and the prospect for a Department of Justice investigation of the Service.

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At the end of its past term, the Supreme Court took up the case of Moore v. Harper, a challenge to North Carolina State Supreme Court rulings on elections that promises to confront the controversial independent state legislature doctrine, which argues that the Constitution empowers state legislatures over other state institutions when it comes to deciding certain election matters. Court watchers have posited that the decision could be a major one, as upholding the independent state legislature doctrine could not only hinder the state judicial enforcement of various election-related rights, but potentially strengthen arguments that state legislatures can decide how to allocate their state's electors in presidential elections, a contention that played a central role in some of the legal machinations that former President Donald Trump supporters attempted to pursue following the 2020 election in order to turn the results in his favor. 

To better understand what exactly is at stake in Moore v. Harper, Scott R. Anderson spoke to Derek Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and a leading election law expert. They discussed what the independent state legislature doctrine may look like in practice, how it intersects with congressional and presidential elections, and what Moore v. Harper does and doesn't mean for the security of U.S. elections moving forward. 

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The Cyber Safety Review Board issued its first major report this month, which focused on the Log4j disaster. So, what is the Cyber Safety Review Board, and what is Log4j?

To answer these questions and others, Benjamin Wittes sat down with the deputy chair of the Cyber Safety Review Board, Heather Adkins, and board member Dmitri Alperovitch. They talked about what the board is, where it comes from, how it is composed, and what it does. And they talked about Log4j, why the board started with this particular cybersecurity incident, how the board went about doing its investigation, what it found, and what it recommended. 

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The false claims of election fraud and other controversies that followed the 2020 election brought to light a number of frailties in the United States system for selecting presidents. Several have their origins in the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law whose vagaries played a central role in efforts by John Eastman and other supporters of former President Trump to keep him in the White House, despite the election results.

This past Wednesday, after months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators finally put forward a set of legislative reforms aimed at resolving these and other issues well in advance of the next presidential election in 2024. To determine what this reform package will do and how it may impact future elections, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Ned Foley, a leading election law expert and professor at The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, and Genevieve Nadeau, a counsel at Protect Democracy who has been actively engaged in reform efforts. They talked about what the reform package intends to change, what will stay the same, and how likely it is to eventually become law.

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When the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the impact of the decision on the internet may not have been front of mind for most people thinking through the implications. But in the weeks after the Court’s decision, it’s become clear that the post-Dobbs legal landscape around abortion implicates many questions around not only data and digital privacy, but also online speech. One piece of model state legislation, for example, would criminalize “hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.” 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights organization Fight for the Future. She recently wrote an article in Wired with Lia Holland arguing that “Section 230 is a Last Line of Defense for Abortion Speech Online.” They talked about what role Section 230’s protections have to play when it comes to liability for speech about abortion and what content moderation looks like in a post-Dobbs world. 

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