Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests

for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day.

I'm Harry Littman.

A few hours after we taped this week's conversation, the United States and Israel launched

military strikes on Iran.

Iran retaliated with hits on Israel and on U.S. targets across the Middle East.

The initial wave of attacks eliminated Iran's top leadership, including supreme leader

Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.

But by Sunday, Around's counterstrikes had already killed three U.S. service members and

at least nine in Israel. It's still too early to know the full-scale loss of life, how the conflict will play out,

or what the political impact might be.

But some things were clear even before the attacks began.

At the end of the episode, we talk about why Trump didn't even try to prepare the public or the Congress for the operation,

and why he is perfectly ill fit to lead the country into it.

Elsewhere this week, Trump slogged through the longest state of the Union in history.

Clocking in at 108 minutes, it felt

even longer. The president rattled off scores of lies about his record, punctuated with a dystopian

rant about crime, immigration, and of course, woke and unpatriotic Democrats. Less than a day later, the news cycle had moved back

onto the administration's least favorite topic, the Epstein scandal. Reporters pinpointed

dozens of pages involving allegations against Trump that the DOJ either took down or failed to produce.

At the same time, the department faced new anger for overdisclosure,

after it released documents that identified Epstein victims and even cooperating witnesses.

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