Lawfare Archive: Mary McCord and Jason Blazakis on Criminalizing Domestic Terrorism
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
From January 5, 2019: The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events have drawn in the public discourse to the fact that domestic terrorism is not a federal crime in and of itself. Earlier this week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with two experts on domestic terrorism to talk about ways that it might be incorporated into our criminal statutes.
Mary McCord is a professor of practice at Georgetown Law School, a senior litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, and the former acting assistant attorney general for national security at the U.S. Department of Justice. Jason Blazakis is a former State Department official in charge of the office that designates foreign terrorist organizations and a professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Both have proposed ideas in recent months to recognize domestic terrorism in U.S. law. They joined Ben to talk about their very different proposals for how domestic terrorism might become a crime. They talked about why domestic terrorism is currently left out of the criminal code, their two proposals for how it might be incorporated and how those proposals differ, and the First Amendment consequences of their competing proposals.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:39.8 | This is the LawFair Archive. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm Emily Day and this is an episode from the LawFair Archives for October 30th, 2021. |
| 0:49.9 | Four years after the deadly Unite the Right March and Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in |
| 0:53.9 | 2017. |
| 0:54.9 | The civil trial determining whether the organizers conspired to engage in racially motivated |
| 0:59.4 | violence began this past Monday. |
| 1:02.0 | This white nationalist rally, along with the ongoing investigations into the January 6th |
| 1:06.2 | attack on the Capitol, has sparked discussion on what is and isn't domestic terrorism. |
| 1:11.5 | For this week, I chose an episode from January 5th, 2019, in which Benjamin Wittes talked |
| 1:16.6 | with two domestic terrorism experts, Mary McCord and Jason Blasakis, about how domestic |
| 1:21.4 | terrorism could be incorporated into criminal statutes. |
| 1:26.9 | I'm Matthew Khan and this is the LawFair podcast January 5th, 2019. |
| 1:33.0 | The murder of Heather Hire in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events have drawn |
| 1:39.1 | into the public discourse the fact that domestic terrorism is not a crime in and of itself. |
| 1:45.4 | Earlier this week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with two experts on domestic terrorism. |
| 1:50.7 | To talk about ways that it might be incorporated into our criminal statutes, Mary McCord, a |
| 1:56.8 | professor of practice at Georgetown Law School, a senior litigator at the Institute for |
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