It’s December 2020. Donald Trump continues to deny that he has lost the election. He and his inner circle are working feverishly to try to overturn it while Trump is getting more and more irate. Then, on Dec. 21, he meets a man named Jeffrey Clark. Suddenly, the full might of the Justice Department is within reach. And he plans to use it.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Social media was key to Jan. 6. End to end. It was key to gathering the crowd that stormed the Capitol. It was key to generating the sentiment that led people to drop their lives to come to Washington willing to commit crimes. It was key to sending them home when the deed was done. Of course, we’re all on social media. But how does social media propel people to action, even inspire them to move from online to on the ground—and to the grounds of the Capitol? It’s impossible to track. But we...

In December 2020, The President and his advisors are still fighting to overturn the results of November’s presidential election. Then, in the middle of the month, a lawyer in Wisconsin sends a memo to the president’s legal team. This memo marks the beginning of a scheme that works its way through state legislatures and the halls of Congress, then to Trump himself. It is a scheme that ends with the Vice President of the United States in mortal danger. The main architect and proponent of this...

It’s been three years since the insurrection of January 6th. There have been congressional investigations, prosecutions, and legal reforms, and it’s looking like 2024 will be the year that Donald Trump and his inner circle finally confront the criminal justice system. But is that enough to respond to an existential threat to our democracy? It all started with a lie: that Trump had won the 2020 election. So we begin there, with a look at the man who—other than Trump—mattered more to the Big...

The season finale delves into what was going on behind the scenes in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation in the months between its first public hearing to its second, almost a year later. To many, the Jan. 6 committee’s public silence seemed to indicate that it simply wasn’t doing anything. The records trickling out of the court system, however, told a much different story. Episode 6 details the committee’s legal battles over subpoena compliance, executive privilege, contempt, investigating...

In this fifth episode of The Aftermath, we explore another aspect of Congress’s response to Jan. 6: efforts to create an investigative body to find out what had happened. Proposals for a national commission began the day after the attack and continued to gain traction with support from both Democrats and Republicans. After a months-long negotiation, the House passed a bill establishing a bipartisan national commission on the model of the 9/11 Commission, which had conducted a widely-respected...

This episode of The Aftermath recalls the brief period where Democrats and Republicans worked together to respond to Jan. 6—and actually made a lot of progress. How? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the days after the January 6th insurrection, for Raskin and his colleagues, it wasn’t entirely clear that the insurrection was over. And for at least a brief moment, there seemed to be some kind of consensus.  The moment turned out to be brief indeed, at least with respect to accountability for Trump himself. Within a week, the consensus had devolved into a sharp partisan divide. The House had passed an article of impeachment charging Trump with incitement to insurrection—but only a small...

In the wake of January 6, there were immediate calls for en masse arrests of all individuals on the Capitol compound, and demands that every one of them be hauled into court to stand trial.  But our justice system does not work that way. The bedrock of our legal system is the due process of law. You can’t be tried for being part of an insurrectionist mob, only for the specific things that you did–or, more precisely, what prosecutors can prove you did.   January 6, is not one case, but...

The Aftermath is not a podcast about the insurrection itself, or about how we got there. It’s a podcast about what happened next – how our democracy is attempting to right itself in the face of an existential threat. Who is being criminally prosecuted, and who isn’t. How is Congress taking action—and what is it ignoring. And how are our institutions telling the story—and who gets to tell it.  To set the scene for this project we are going to spend one episode—this one—on the events of the day...

Mahnaz was a member of a Female Tactical Platoon in the Afghan Military. She was one of tens of thousands of Afghans who came to the United States during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. In our final episode, you’ll learn about the bureaucratic mess they’re still going through to get resettled. And how Congress could pass legislation to help, but it might not even come up for a vote. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

20 years of war and broken bureaucracy culminate during the US withdrawal at the Kabul airport. Thousands of Afghans rush to the tarmac where American forces sort through the crowds. Veterans, advocates and politicians try to get their allies out while the Taliban rapidly takes control of Afghanistan.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We return to Fred—an Afghan combat interpreter who served with American soldiers for more than 13 years. After years of denials, an ad hoc team of lawyers and veterans tried to push his Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) application through federal bureaucracy. Then, we describe how a new president aimed to bring the SIV program to a screeching halt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matt Zeller deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, where an Afghan interpreter saved his life. Matt spent years trying to get him resettled in the United States and saw the problems with the SIV program firsthand. Together, they started lobbying to fix it in Washington, DC. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fred took a job as an Afghan interpreter in 2004. He ended up serving side-by-side with American soldiers for more than 13 years. But when the Taliban started targeting him after a mission, Fred started looking for a way out. The SIV program was supposed to help. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2003 the US started another war with the military invasion of Iraq. There, soldiers, aid workers, diplomats and politicians saw the threat that local interpreters, translators and partners faced for their work. That’s when Congress created the SIV program for Iraqi interpreters and then recreated it for Afghanistan. But it quickly became clear that this program wasn’t working as intended. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In order to tell you this story, we need to start at the beginning. After 9/11, the CIA set their sights on al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan. When the military invaded that fall, people up and down the chain of command learned that, in order to fight this war, the US needed local partners to help. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From Lawfare and Goat Rodeo, this is ALLIES: A podcast about America’s eyes and ears during 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Their goal was to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and they intended to do it by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes.  President-elect Joe Biden's victory would not be official until that count was complete.  The Capitol was breached and lawmakers and staff were evacuated, while rioters assaulted law enforcement...

A brand new podcast from Lawfare. Weekly long-form conversations with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security. Unscripted. Informal. Always fresh. Chatter guests roll with the punches to describe artistic endeavors related to national security and jump into cutting-edge thinking at the frontiers where defense and foreign policy overlap with technology, intelligence, climate change, history, sports, culture, and beyond. Each week, listeners get a no-holds-barred dialogue...

From Goat Rodeo, Long Lead, & Garrett Graff: Many Americans watched the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 unfold right before our eyes. What happened on 9/11 and how it changed our world is the most important story of the modern age. It’s the hinge on which so much changed. But in the years since the history we've come to tell of that day is incomplete—and sometimes wrong. Hosted by journalist Garrett Graff, author of the bestselling book THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: AN ORAL HISTORY...

The pardon power was designed to be a tool for correcting wrongs. Any system of justice applied to a whole nation is going to have failures. A pardon is there to correct miscarriages of justice—and injustice. It was always believed that if a president abused his pardon authority, it would be so appalling to so many, at such a gut level, that the checks on the President would instantly kick in: He’s be impeached, forced to resign, voted out. Trump pushed this theory. And the results were...

In this episode, we consider the problem of foreign interventions in American political campaigns—and what to do about it. And we’re also going to look at how Trump blocked and tackled the free press, especially when it reported on Trump’s foreign ties. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In our first episode, we explore some of President Trump’s most brazen transgressions—the conflicts of interest, the self-dealing and those elusive tax returns.  In the run up to his inauguration, Trump created a sort of original sin when it came to his conflicts of interest, proclaiming that he is above any conflict of interest norms and regulation. Throughout his presidency, Trump continued to challenge any transparency when it came to his personal dealings and conflicts while in...