Welcome to Talking Feds. A round table 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 Lentman. The week began with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin,

drawing a line in the sand making clear he would support neither the Democrats, voting rights bill,

nor any sort of reform to the filibuster, which the Dems would need to advance any of their

key legislative priorities. It ended with a major Washington dust up prompted by the revelation

that the Department of Justice under former President Trump had sought information on prominent

political adversaries of the President in its investigations of leaks of classified information.

The fear caused the Department of Justice to order up an investigation by its inspector general,

which Democratic members welcomed but said had to be supplemented with a full-on congressional

investigation. Of course, the prospects for congressional action run immediately into the wall

that is the entrenched political standoff between the parties and the widespread embrace of the

big lie by a large cohort of Republicans. The episode, combined with recent decisions by the Biden

administration DOJ, put increasing pressure on Merrick Garland to change his institutional stay-in-the-line

approach and adopt some proactive measures toward greater transparency and accountability for the

Trump years. Garland has now ordered up some changes in Department policy, which would make it

harder to subpoena reporters and would bulk up the Department's voting rights enforcement section

with mansions tofection that may be the most the country can hope for in the short term as far as

voting rights reform go. Meanwhile, Republicans and ever-greater numbers are pursuing restrictive

state legislation and bogus audits of the November election. The delve into these topics and their

broad and largely unhappy implications, we have a fantastic group of returning feds. They are.

George Conway, a prominent American attorney, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post,

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