Mary McCord and Jason Blazakis on Criminalizing Domestic Terrorism
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2019
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events have drawn into the public discourse the fact that domestic terrorism is not a 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, 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; and Jason Blazakis, 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, joined Ben to talk about their 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 1st Amendment consequences of their competing proposals.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | The actual threat that terrorism poses to people in the United States |
| 0:39.0 | is actually greater in terms of loss of life and limb. |
| 0:45.0 | Post 9-11 greater that a person will be injured by an act of domestic terrorism |
| 0:51.0 | than by an act of international terrorism. |
| 0:53.0 | And by that, I mean an act motivated by domestic extremist causes, |
| 0:57.0 | rather than international Islamist extremist causes. |
| 1:01.0 | And so too much of the data and the writing and the reporting and the discussion, |
| 1:05.0 | too much has focused on the international terrorist threat. |
| 1:09.0 | I think to the detriment of people understanding the significance of the domestic extremist threat. |
| 1:15.0 | I'm Matthew Khan and this is the LawFair podcast, January 5th, 2019. |
| 1:21.0 | The murder of Heather Hire in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events |
| 1:27.0 | have drawn into the public discourse the fact that domestic terrorism is not a crime in and of itself. |
| 1:33.0 | Earlier this week, Benjamin Wittis sat down with two experts on domestic terrorism |
| 1:39.0 | to talk about ways that it might be incorporated into our criminal statutes. |
| 1:43.0 | Mary McCord, a professor of practice at Georgetown Law School, |
| 1:48.0 | a senior litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Accountability at Protection at Georgetown Law School, |
... |
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