This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 8th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Obama administration's internal and public fights over surveillance, targeted killings overseas,

and other assertions of executive power will, at best, leave a mixed legacy for the next occupant of the White House.

Charlie Savage is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times.

His new book is Power Wars, Inside Obama's

post-9-11 presidency. We spoke this week. When President Obama learned of

the authorities that he was inheriting with respect to surveillance under the Patriot Act, how did he respond?

And was he being like Bush in that regard?

So this is one of the big questions this book grapples with.

So let me explain a little bit about what this book is.

And then that'll lead into the answer to your question. So this book is and then that will lead into the answer to your question.

So this book is an investigative history of the first seven years of the Obama administration's

national security policymaking, especially its legal policymaking.

And with that one chapter that's sort of a deeper history of surveillance now that we can see it.

And I interviewed over 150 current former officials,

many of them I circled back to over and over and over again.

I tried to reconstruct sort of the behind the scenes deliberations

over this unending series of dilemmas about things like detention,

surveillance, interrogation, secrecy, leak investigations, where it all came from, why did they

make the decisions they made, what were the trade-offs they were encountering.

And so a lot of it is case studies where you're kind of on a fly on the wall in the room is

...