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The National Security Law Podcast

Episode 63: Mueller Is the Only Vulcan in the Room

The National Security Law Podcast

Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladeck

Courses, Politics, News, Education, Government

4.8646 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Out on spring break but still listening to the podcast?  We love it!  Actually, your hosts Professors Chesney and Vladeck are out on spring break too, but before they left town they sat down to record episode 63 on Friday March 9th.  If things have gone crazy over the weekend and you are surprised they aren't discussing them here, well, that's why! This week's show, at any rate, catches up on a number of ongoing sagas: The latest twists in the Mueller investigation: Yes, we feel duty bound to talk about the obligation to comply with grand jury subpoenas (looking at you, Sam Nunberg), but we also dig into the surprise emergence of issues involving Erik Prince (of Blackwater fame). The military commissions "seven-layer dip" issues in the Nashiri case: We've been closely tracking the concatenating issues bedeviling the Nashiri prosecution, originating with a defense team claim about monitored attorney-client communications.  This week, a key new detail emerged: the spat began when the attorneys found a microphone in the relevant room (one that the prosecution says was merely an unplugged legacy piece of equipment from prior use of the same room as an interrogation room), but then were directed not to talk to their client about it.  We discuss the implications both substantively and procedureally. Doe v. Mattis, the American citizen enemy combatant case: Two storylines are in play here.  First, we now know which judges will comprise the D.C. Circuit panel that will hear argument on the detainee-transfer issue in early April.  Second, the briefing on the underlying legal dispute has developed to the point that we can provide a deeper-dive into the relevant questions. The Doe v. Mattis deep-dive on the legal dispute quickly leads to a discussion of judicial deference and the good ol' Political Question Doctrine.  Buckle-up for an extended talk about how these doctrinal threads do or should work together not just in Doe but in other contexts. Someone on this show still hasn't seen Black Panther, so we are not yet ready to do our review of it.  Instead, those who hang in till the end will be treated to NCAA Tournament Final Four projections made without the benefit of knowing anything about what the brackets will look like.  One doubts this will make their predictions any worse than they would have been anyway.... Happy spring break to all!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello from Austin and welcome to episode 63 of the National Security Law podcast brought to you by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas.

0:18.8

I'm Bobby Chesney. I'm Steve Vladodick. It's spring break. Spring break. What

0:22.3

are we doing here? Well, for us, it's not really spring break because we're trying that stupid thing

0:25.9

again where we record on Friday and release on Monday. Is this another time capsule episode?

0:30.1

So, you know, I was pretty close last week. Yeah, that was actually, that was pretty good.

0:34.0

I mean, you know, Gary, Gary Cohen did not resign as the head of the National Economic Council until Tuesday.

0:40.5

You were off by a day?

0:41.3

I was off by a day.

0:42.2

That's not bad.

0:43.4

So, so I'm trying to think, what kind of, so you know what's going to be out by Monday?

0:46.8

The NCAA tournament bracket.

0:48.8

Oh, okay.

0:49.4

That'll offer us some predictive opportunities. So by the time folks are hearing the dulcet dulcet tones of our voices,

0:56.1

we'll know who's in and who's out and whether the longhorns somehow backed their way into one

1:00.4

of those 11 seeds. We ought to auto tune our voices on this show. So today is, let's see,

1:06.7

it's Friday, March 9th when we're recording this. Yes, it's the morning 9.30 central time.

1:12.6

And I have a bad feeling that unlike last week, we're not going to get away with it this week.

1:16.2

But there's going to be just all kinds of stuff.

1:17.9

It feels like one of those Fridays to me. that surely everybody else is like, you know, packing up the car and getting ready to drive their family somewhere, that is probably not actually how the news cycle is going to treat it.

1:31.3

Well, you know, is Sam Nunberg packing up his car and driving it over the, I mean, by all accounts, as we're recording this, he is actually in the federal courthouse in D.C.

1:40.6

Boy, that didn't take long.

1:41.6

That did not take long. All right. So we're going to talk a little bit today about some developments in the Mueller investigation,

...

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