Jack Goldsmith

President Trump on Friday fired the inspector general of the State Department. It was the fourth time he had fired or removed an inspector general in just the last six weeks. As he explained in a letter to Capitol Hill leadership, he had lost confidence in the inspector general, though Democrats were quick to point out that he appeared to be investigating Mike Pompeo on a number of matters, and Mike Pompeo, in turn, had requested his removal. To discuss the Trump administration's removals of inspectors general, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Mike Bromwich, who was the inspector general of the Justice Department during the Clinton administration; Jack Goldsmith, professor at Harvard, who wrote a piece on Lawfare about the legality of removals of inspectors general; and congressional guru Margaret Taylor, who examines the congressional reaction to the moves. They talked about many aspects of the controversy: Is this unprecedented? When have prior presidents removed inspectors general? And what, if anything is Congress going to do about it?

In a pair of recent podcasts, Rid joined members of the Brookings community to discuss his new book, "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare." First up, Rid chats with Harvard Law School Professor Jack L. Goldsmith about the early history of disinformation through the 1980s.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods: Neither of us has ever written anything that has been as misinterpreted as this piece in the Atlantic. People construed the essay to call for “an end to freedom of speech in America”; to endorse “China’s enlightened authoritarian approach to information” and “lament the US’ provincial fealty to the First Amendment”; as an attempt to surrender a “model of social organization predicated on individual liberty”; to argue that “the United States’ response to coronavirus would have been better had Big Tech and the U.S. government, like the Chinese communist regime, been able to control speech more effectively on the internet”; and to overlook that the “US & China are not equivalent” because “Americans are not at risk of being sent to a goulag [sic] if they breach YouTube’s terms of service [but in China] the risk is real.” And those were the nice comments. We did not say or imply any of these things. If you read the article, you will see that we do not remotely endorse China-style surveillance and censorship, or claim that the United States should adopt China’s practices. The piece was meant as a wake-up call about how coronavirus surveillance and speech-control efforts were part of a pattern rather than a break in one, and why, and what the stakes were. Let us try again.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods: Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.” Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs. We need “to make sure that, when we’ve made it past this crisis, our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live,” warns the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley. “Any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life,” declares the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency.”

President Trump’s claim that he wielded “total” authority in the pandemic crisis prompted rebellion not just from governors. Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum on Tuesday rejected his declaration that ultimately he, not state leaders, will decide when to risk lifting social distancing limits in order to reopen businesses. “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Mr. Trump asserted at a raucous press briefing on Monday evening. “And that’s the way it’s got to be.” But neither the Constitution nor any federal law bestows that power upon Mr. Trump, a range of legal scholars and government officials said...For Mr. Trump, the legal emptiness of his assertion fits with a larger pattern in his handling of the pandemic and more. Where President Theodore Roosevelt liked to invoke an African proverb to describe his approach to wielding executive power — “speak softly and carry a big stick” — Mr. Trump sometimes talks as if he has a big stick but with little to back it up. Despite his “extreme, proud rhetoric about how he can do whatever he wants,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, the story of the Trump presidency has been, with few exceptions, “talking a big game, but not in fact exercising executive power successfully.”

Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign policy. Do morals matter? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Nye to discuss his new book, 'Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.' They discussed the ethical and theoretical factors by which Nye judged each president before going through many of the cases he focuses on in the book.

If Michael R. Bloomberg is elected president, he says he would be “extremely reluctant” to order the military to attack another country without congressional authorization or an imminent threat to the United States. But he left himself wiggle room, stopping short of saying it would be unconstitutional for him to use force without lawmakers’ approval in other situations...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official in George W. Bush’s administration, said that while many of Mr. Bloomberg’s responses were fairly conventional, his stated inclinations about when he would unilaterally use force abroad seemed narrower than recent presidents of both parties. “While preserving wiggle room, the thrust is that the president should not use force except in cases of self-defense, pretty narrowly conceived,” he said. “That position would rule out Trump’s use of force in Syria in response to chemical weapons attacks, Obama’s use of force in Libya and in some strikes in Iraq, and some of the broader statements of self-defense power made during the George W. Bush administration.”

NPR's Noel King talks to former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith about Attorney General William Barr's public rebuke of President Trump for his Twitter attacks on the Justice Department.

For decades after Watergate, the White House treated the Justice Department with the softest of gloves, fearful that any appearance of political interference would resurrect the specter of Attorney General John Mitchell helping President Richard M. Nixon carry out a criminal conspiracy for political ends...For the most part, modern presidents have stayed away from cases involving their friends or associates, at least publicly...One notable exception was President Barack Obama, who during the 2016 presidential campaign said that he did not believe that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a private email server but was guilty only of carelessness — remarks that Republicans immediately criticized as interference with an open F.B.I. investigation...But while Mr. Obama was guilty of a single lapse, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, Mr. Trump has continually injected himself into federal investigations and prosecutions involving his political friends and enemies. “Even assuming that Bill Barr is acting with integrity, it is impossible for people to believe that because the president is making him look like his political lap dog,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “Trump makes it impossible to have confidence in the department’s judgment.”

For both better and worse, Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa was one of the most consequential union leaders of the 20th century. Unlike his very few peers (the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther and the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis could both claim comparable historic impact), he also has become the subject of three Hollywood pictures—1978’s F.I.S.T., with Sylvester Stallone ineptly playing a character modeled on Hoffa; 1992’s Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson in the title role; and now Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, with Al Pacino as the Teamster president. ... In his new book In Hoffa’s Shadow, Jack Goldsmith writes that the FBI now believes Hoffa’s killer was a Detroit-based young mobster who died just last year. But whatever Sheeran’s tenuous claims to veracity, his is a tale that Scorsese couldn’t easily resist.

Last October, Attorney General William Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, warned that Barr’s and Trump’s efforts could permanently alter the balance of power among the branches of American government. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a Chief Executive who is more powerful than the king,” Tribe said. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.” ... But his ideology has not changed much, according to friends and former colleagues. “I don’t know why anyone is surprised by his views,” Jack Goldsmith, a law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush Administration, told me. “He has always had a broad view of executive power.”

Let’s start this piece with two provocative claims. The first, which is hotly contested by legal experts, is that President Donald Trump broke the law when he ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian paramilitary leader. The second claim is that it doesn’t matter...There’s a great deal of disagreement among legal experts regarding when a president may lawfully target another nation. Some believe that, with rare exceptions, Congress must vote to permit such a strike. Others take a more permissive approach, arguing the president should be able to act to prevent sudden attacks on US personnel... One consequence of judicial deference is that there is fairly little case law explaining when the executive branch can and cannot take military action. Instead, most of the legal opinions in this space were drafted by executive branch officials. According to Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, “Practically all of the law in this area has been developed by executive branch lawyers justifying unilateral presidential uses of force.” These lawyers, Goldsmith warned, “view unilateral presidential power very broadly.”

President Donald Trump's confrontation with Iran is posing a gut check for Congress, brazenly testing whether the House and Senate will exert their own authority over U.S. military strategy or cede more war powers to the White House. As tensions rise at home and abroad, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold House votes this week to limit Trump’s ability to engage Iran militarily after the surprise U.S. airstrike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani...Yet Congress has shown time and again it is unable to exert its ability to authorize — or halt — the use of military force. With their inaction, lawmakers have begrudgingly allowed the commander in chief to all but disregard Congress...Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, said both parties in Congress have for years gone along with an expansion of presidential war powers, especially with regard to the conflicts in the Middle East. "In short, our country has — through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence — given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war," Goldsmith said in an essay in Lawfare, an online newsletter he co-founded. “That is our system: One person decides.”

“Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: one person decides,” Jack Goldmith, a Harvard Law professor and Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, writing on Twitter.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Depersonalization is a dissociative disorder characterized by a sense of observing one’s self from outside one’s body. Those with the condition often report an experience akin to watching yourself in a movie. My 86-year-old stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien, does not suffer from depersonalization. But for more than half his life, 44 years, he has watched himself portrayed in news articles, books and motion pictures — most recently, in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — as someone he is not. The effect on his life has been devastating.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about what actually happened to former criminal and labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa following the release of “The Irishman.” Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, former senior U. S. Department of Justice official and author of “In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” joins host Ryan Wrecker to tell us what he knows about his family ties to the case. Next, we transition back to impeachment coverage featuring opinions from the listeners.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer:  Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report last week told a complex story about extraordinary events related to the investigation of officials in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Its publication predictably ignited a contest between Democrats and Republicans to extract from the 429-page opus what was most serviceable in the construction of competing political “narratives.” But there is something much more important in the Horowitz report than evidence for political vindication. The report shows that serious reforms are vitally needed in how the FBI and the Department of Justice, of which it is a component, open and conduct investigations—especially those related to politicians and political campaigns. The report prompted concerns from both sides of the aisle, suggesting that there’s an opportunity for serious reflection and reform—if Congress and the executive branch can seize it.

Robert De Niro says he welcomes disagreement about whether The Irishman is accurate, but wasn’t “conned” into believing the firsthand accounts of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, the mob enforcer he plays in the film. ... But his account has been disputed by some Hoffa insiders. Harvard Law School professor Jack L. Goldsmith, the stepson of Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien (played by Jesse Plemons in The Irishman) told Vanity Fair that “there’s absolutely no basis for Sheeran’s claim and a lot of reasons to think it’s preposterous.” His new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow, offers a different account of the Jimmy Hoffa story than you’ll get from I Heard You Paint Houses or The Irishman.