 Thanks all for coming. Today we have Johnny Beier to talk about his new book, The Districts, which is a look at eastern and southern district of New York courts and who staff some. It may seem sort of a small topic, but as I think you'll rapidly see these two district courts are at the center of numerous things we're currently talking about. So I'll throw it over to you to talk a bit about the book. We'll then go briefly and then take questions. Sure. Thank you for having me. I'm a bit wary of being a New Yorker coming down to DC and demanding your attention. I feel like that's happening a bit lately. But I did want to talk about our local courts, which I think are actually a sort of national and international significance. That's the subject of this book, The Districts. I mean, even just this morning as I was coming down, I got a news alert that there was a significant decision in the southern district involving the president. The U.S. Attorney's Office had filed suit to block the Manhattan DA from obtaining the president's tax returns or eight years of his tax returns. This is sort of a typical jurisdictional squabble in New York, but it's also a national issue. And I think over the course of our history, we've seen these overlaps of things going on in New York that have significant impact, whether it's something like the Ulysses case, which I'm very cognizant of, because it's my publisher. It's also my favorite books. Or the Alger Hiss case, if we want to go back further in history, the Rosenbergs. More recently, Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Cohen, these are just some of the cases going on in the southern district. A lot of the focus of this book, especially as it relates to counterterrorism, is the Eastern District. That's directly across the Brooklyn Ridge in downtown Brooklyn. And this is where the national security team sort of waged this very intense fight against local ISIS plots, starting in late 2013 into, well, into present day. The counterterrorism practice also focused on sort of historical al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, and I think I'm going to read a selection concerning al-Shabaab. Before I jump into that, I want to give a little bit of background how I came to write a book about the courts. I'm not an attorney, something I have to constantly apologize for. And it's constantly being pointed out when I try to stop a judge from closing a courtroom. The seeds of this book are actually in Liberia, which is where I wrote my first book, which was about the American son of Charles Taylor. This is sort of ancient history at this point, but from 1909 until 2003, Liberia was engaged in this sort of grinding civil war at the center of the civil war. It was a guy named Charles Taylor who had a son from Orlando, Florida named Chucky. And I reported on Chucky's rise in Liberia as an American teenager who came to ruin his father's death squad. But that was my introduction to the federal courts because Chucky was eventually prosecuted under the federal anti-torture statute. It was the first case, the first application of that law, and the first time I was able to actually sit down in a federal courtroom and see the work of an assistant United States attorney. And these attorneys are sort of at the center of the districts. They're the lowest-rung federal prosecutors, but they're actually some of the most powerful people in government. They've got broad powers to recommend prosecutions and in doing so upend the lives of some of the most powerful people on earth, like Jeffrey Epstein. And that sort of planted the seed for me doing this second book. In part out of self-interest, I live in New York. I didn't want to be commuting back and forth to Liberia so much. So I pitched a book about the local court system, but I also wanted to report on things that had an international reach. And initially my focus on the districts involved these extraterritorial, what are called narco-terrorist things, where the DEA would invariably record a conversation in the hotel bar in West Africa and get someone on tape saying they'll engage in a drug transaction that will help FARC or help El Qaeda in the Maghreb or some group. And that would trigger the use of a statute that would allow that person to be extradited or rendered to the southern district. That seemed a really profound power for local law enforcement officials to have. It was most clearly articulated in the Victor Boot case, also known as the Lord of War. And it's something that drew a lot of protest from foreign governments like Russia in particular. The other significant element of these districts is that they're really sort of a proving ground for people who ultimately become very powerful. I wanted to write about people before they became powerful, but the list of people who sort of have used a job in either district to build a national platform just is almost endless. I mean, I think you can look to Mary Jo White, who was the southern district U.S. attorney, ended up running the SEC. Now she's sort of a legendary ex-prosecutor in private practice, represents the Sackler family now. I think Rudolph Giuliani is probably the most notable figure of someone who actually took this job as a line assistant and translated into political office. And now into whatever he's doing on official and official capacities. But I think there is a sort of continuity with what Mayor Giuliani has been accused and also sort of admitted to with respect to Ukraine. He has always used anti-corruption fights as a sort of tool of electoral politics. This is sort of how he ended his career as a federal prosecutor. He went after the heads of the Queens and Bronx Democratic parties who were involved in a racket with the New York City Parking Bureau. In prosecutorial terms, this was a clean hit. There was clear corruption. But it was also an opportunity for him to sort of clear the decks and pave the way for his mayoral run. So when you hear, I'm talking about anti-corruption fights now, I always think about the Queens, this guy named Donald Mainz who found himself at the end of Giuliani's sort of political ambitions. He decided to not go to trial. He ended up plunging a knife into his heart and taking his own life. The other, the Bronx Democratic leader, did go to trial and was convicted. But I think that sort of the visceral effect of those politics is still felt in our national politics. I guess moving to counterterrorism, which I think we should focus on a little bit. I wanted to actually read a selection, which the book is narrative nonfiction. So it's sort of, it's character driven. And some of the characters I focus on include a young terrorism, well, I mean, a convicted terrorist, a guy named Marty Hashi, who was a UK citizen who joined Al Shabaab and had his citizenship revoked while he was in Somalia. He was detained by officials in Djibouti as he fled Al Shabaab. He fled Al Shabaab basically under fear of being assassinated. They sort of had a policy or practice of killing their own, in part because of the paranoia surrounding the US drone campaign and who was providing information. He was rendered from Djibouti to the Eastern District of New York to face prosecution with two other members of Al Shabaab, two Swedish men. And as one of the senior prosecutors put it to me, when this case came across their desk, which they called DJ3 for Djibouti 3, there were a few options. One, they could leave these guys in Djibouti and custody indefinitely, see what happens. They could let them go and see how they fared in Yemen, which was where they're transiting to, whether they tried to link up with El Qaeda there, or whether they actually tried to make it home to Sweden or to the UK. They could let the military take care of it as they had been doing in Yemen with El Qaeda operatives, or they could bring in the FBI and interrogate them and see if they could build a case. So they chose that option. They brought these guys who had never set foot in the United States, never targeted an American directly. And after several years, these young men decided what most defendants in federal courts decide the most rational thing to do is to plead guilty. So this is Hashi's sentencing. His two compatriots had already been sentenced a week earlier. That sentencing went off the rails. The judge was not happy with the government in terms of their representations about negotiating a plea, a bargain that had a sentence baked in. So here is the line assistant sort of apologizing, yet trying to convince the judge to sentence Mahdi Hashi to what he thought would be a fair and just sentence. I should say the backdrop of the story is one member in custody in Djibouti. Two of them alleged that they were tortured. Hashi did not, but he witnessed torture and the torturers were present in the room when he was being interrogated by the FBI. And that sort of became a point that was litigated. So this is Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Desharm speaking. We asked ourselves, what more could we have said that would be helpful to the court? And I think the answer to that question is not much, but a little. Desharm pointed to the last hearing, something that really struck me, Judge, that you said in reference to the sweet sentence. I thought to myself, if Judge Gleason views some of this conduct as part freedom fighter, I fail. I'm not doing my job. I'm not communicating effectively what the ideology is and what Al-Shabaab is really trying to do. Desharm then laid out a passionate and forceful repudiation of Al-Shabaab. And in doing so, he offered an implicit defense of the expansive legal powers underpinning the Justice Department's counterterrorism strategies. He rejected that Hashih was ignorant of the group's barbaric tactics when he joined. He raised the specter that Hashih had been stopped before he could link up with another terrorist group in Yemen, where Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula operated and had demonstrated the capability to strike American targets. But in the end, Desharm acknowledged the evidence, or lack thereof, that had made Hashih distinct from his co-defendants. I can't put a gun in his hand. He said, he got no evidence that he personally engaged in acts of violence. Desharm explained the government's position. I think I've not conveyed adequately what I think is the critical consideration. And that is the difference between someone with no anti-American animus going to Al-Shabaab to participate in an international civil war, as opposed to someone who joins Al-Shabaab to participate in what would have been demonstrated the kind of atrocious conduct you have described with anti-American animus. Desharm concluded that if he didn't succeed, then shame on me. Judge Gleason watched him passively as the prosecutor finished. You have empowered me to do a little judging myself, Gleason said, after noting the quality of work on both sides. This is not a black and white situation. I see your side of it, he said, speaking to Hashih. I do think that you are slightly less culpable than your co-defendants. The legal approach to uncomfortable facts was to confront them as problems of language. The word freedom fighter and terrorist, as Judge Gleason rightly pointed out, are not binary propositions. Yet to engage the nuance of these ideas was to willingly enter into multering neither the government nor the defense could navigate without endangering its own position. The government's formulation that Hashih, Yusef, and Ahmad had been subjected to rough or even inhumane treatment only called attention to the absence of the word that the men and their attorneys used to describe their experience, torture. It was a word with clear statutory meaning, one that implicated U.S. treaty obligations, if not our basic sense of decency. The law seemed weakest in these moments, something that approached suspicion or belief in magic when language was thrown back at difficult facts in an attempt to change their essence. My mind drifted to a moment a decade earlier when I stood in the ER of a combat hospital in central Iraq on a November evening. Some 40 miles away, a battle for control of Fallujah raged, providing a steady stream of casualties throughout the night and day. That day, the doctors had treated a tattooed and doped up Marines with gunshot and blast injuries as well as filthy bearded jihadis with festering wounds. At some point, two helicopters descended to the concrete landing pad next to the hospital and nurses wheeled in the newest patient. A little girl wrapped in a foil blanket, twisting with agitation. The flight crew relayed that she had been discovered alone in a field, apparently laid out there for a passing American patrol to pick up. My son was one and a half at the time and I estimated her to be at least twice his age, but it was difficult to guess. Her face had been blasted open and blackened by a fragment from an explosive. I'd seen dozens of injured men over the course of the prior days, some with imperceptible injuries, others with horrific wounds. I'd watched in awe and admiration as the nurses and doctors, a confident group of American Australians confronted each case dispassionately, often under the harassment of intermittent rocket and mortar fire. But the sight of this nameless girl left each of us shaken. There was the horror of her injury, but the real horror each of us confronted was the fact that she had been left alone. The head and neck surgeon, a circumspect Irish Catholic Air Force Lieutenant Colonel from Newark, tried to make sense of this. He pieced together the events that abroderated the yarn. The fragment that struck her face was traveling at low enough velocity that it did not kill her, but it had retained enough energy to destroy her face. He couldn't fear that there was some distance from where the ammunition exploded, but close enough to be within the blast release. Each of us knew that the Marines and the Army had been bombarding Fallujah for days. The insurgents, as the residents and the Jihadis drawn to the fight came to be called, fought back with small arms, RPGs, mortars, and IEDs. Who was responsible for this little girl's condition? Was it an air and fragment from a U.S. artillery strike? Or had the shrapnel been thrown off by an IED? The truth was that each side treated Fallujah as an open battlefield. Any military-age male was seen as a combatant. Any civilian, even a little girl in a determined age, should have long evacuated. The girl's crime was circumstance, but the punishment didn't acknowledge this. The Lieutenant Colonel, a man who owed much of his gifts and talents to the U.S. military, confronted the bitter irony that he now used them to repair what military planners would describe as collateral damage. A decade later, the task before Judge Gleason didn't seem all that different. The frustrating work of upholding American values in the midst of a war. The sentencing and Hashih's experience sat on the continuum of other extra-legal tactics of the war on terror. Human and electronic surveillance, the coercive pressure of intelligence services, the drone assassinations, the torture by client states, the unseemly alliances with former enemies, all of which had been memorialized in the court record. These facts lent an ugliness to the outcome. None of these things belonged anywhere near an American courtroom. One could imagine under a different political order, many of these acts could be charged as crimes within their own right. These ugly measures taken in this war were unworthy of the men prosecuting the case and of the judge considering punishment. The only point left to argue is whether the steps were unnecessary. Hashih, I believe he was sentenced to nine years after that. That was an emotionally loaded moment in the courtroom, and I think that's one thing you wouldn't really expect to come across in a federal courtroom is emotion. The two prosecutors in that case sort of demonstrated the central thesis of the book, which is that this is a proving ground for the powerful. Seth, who argued before Judge Gleason soon became the chief of the criminal division in the office, which is a very big job. It's sort of second to the U.S. attorney. And then like many of his colleagues, he got the tap and was asked to come to Washington. He's now the deputy to A.J. Barr. This is a personal attorney. Shreve, who I don't discuss, was the other prosecutor on the case. He had sort of received tongue lashing at the prior sentencing. He also went to Washington. Now he's deputy counsel of the CIA. And I think this demonstrates the sort of the unique nature of pretty of the Eastern District's national security practice. One of their more successful attorneys immediately went to Mueller's team as a prosecutor. And now they're still continuing this fight of prosecuting ISIS cases. The book discusses a full range of crimes because you don't just enter the office and begin prosecuting national security cases. A lot of times you start out with what's called a career case, which is someone arriving at JFK with cocaine either strapped to their body or in their luggage. You can then go prosecute organized crime, which is almost a sort of nostalgic act. And the book spends a bit of time talking about organized crime. And then the sort of the intellectual crimes, prosecutor white collar crime and public corruption, this is sort of where, aside from the national security teams, the sort of most ambitious attorneys go, particularly in the Southern District, which has a long track record of fighting Wall Street. And I think the one thing I would say before we move on to the discussion, the traditional path has been from a local US Attorney's Office to main justice into private practice or perhaps into government. And in recent years, there's been a new path. And I think if you flip on cable news, you've seen this, the former federal prosecutor from the Southern District is almost a stock character on every panel. As a reporter, it's interesting to watch this. Oh, I'm well pre-Pirara, Elie Honig, Mimi, I think Roka. And there's quite a few. For me as a reporter, I see it as a form of almost regulatory capture. And I feel a lot of the sort of laudatory and uncritical reporting surrounding federal prosecutions, particularly the Mueller investigation, didn't do the public a service that journalists really strive to do when we rely on Department of Justice sources too closely. I mean, there's you know, plenty of former prosecutors who have jumped over into journalism, like Jeffrey Tubin, I think is a great example of it. But there is a danger when this line between the media and government gets blurred. So, so clearly, as we've seen cable news. But yeah, so I mean, I guess we can discuss whatever portions of the book may be relevant here. That was great. I have a few things to pull out. And then we have a pretty small group so we can have a wide ranging discussion. But one of the things you mentioned is, and it's really the structure of your book is that it begins with, it has, let's see, four parts, I think, five parts, each of which is a different type of crime. And then within each, there's a different story about who's being charged or convicted, or in some cases a couple stories. But we find that various figures keep reappearing across these, because as you noted, you don't just come to the District Court to prosecute terrorism cases. So can you talk a bit about that overlap and how different crimes and decisions made in, say, organized crime or the drug cases and the personnel are relevant to the terrorism cases or the corruption? So I mean, I think one of the points that this book makes that would also apply to the D.C. District and the Eastern District of Virginia as well. We don't really have a federal criminal justice system. I feel like we've adopted this language of it being a system. And I really see it as a society. It's like a small exclusive society where people, they've known each other and worked together sometimes for five years, sometimes for 30 years. And there is an overlap in enforcement areas. Case in point, Judge Gleason, who was the judge in Hashi's case and actually came to be the judge in a lot of the national security cases in the Eastern District during that era. He was a former Eastern District prosecutor who was most well known for flipping Sammy the Bull in the gaudy prosecution. And this is legendary in that courthouse. You even have defendants say that I want the deal that Sammy the Bull got because he had quite a few murders under his belt. He only got five years in prison. But Gleason sort of illustrated the sweep of that. I mean, even the decision to pursue the gaudy case, the official that decided whether it should go to the Southern District or it should go to the Eastern District was Robert Mueller. And this was when he was at the Department of Justice. Whenever you enter, you know, a courtroom, and I found this just from showing up for any number of hearings where there are no other reporters, you find that it's not, it's not an imposing place. I mean, these are, everyone knows each other and they've dealt with each other. You know, I had one instance where I was sitting in a suppression hearing, which is where they decide whether they're going to allow evidence in involving the murder of a U.S. diplomat, Molly. This was a case. It was an amazing case. It would never go to trial. But I had a prosecutor just come in and tap me on the shoulder and say the judge wants you in the courtroom next door because I was fighting to open that case, which involved a 17-year-old ISIS suspect from Queens. And that's the sort of close familiarity within the courthouse. In terms of the overlap of personnel, it happens on the defense side. And there is quite literally a terror bar in New York. And I think one of the attorneys involved pointed out to me that it's heavily dominated by reform Jews, which create a situation where you'd have a lot of al-Qaeda and ISIS suspects sitting down with attorneys who really represented what they not only hated. And there was one attorney who sort of brought this up to his counsel or his client, and he mentioned, you know, I did go to a Quaker school growing up trying to find common ground. And this client who had been accused of participating in one of the embassy bombings said, Quaker, like the movie Witness. I don't know if you guys have seen it. I mean, date me a little bit. But the fact that an al-Qaeda operative knew this sort of obscure 80s film about the Quaker community starring Harrison Ford, it was common ground that he could find with his attorney. But part of the reason I divided the book into these enforcement areas wasn't just to look at the overlap of personnel, but quite literally it's a geography of New York. So for example, writing about organized crime, I was able to go to these communities that were really disproportionately impacted by organized crime, particularly there's one neighborhood called The Hole, which is a sort of legendary stretch of Brooklyn right near Queens. Writing on white collar crime, surprise surprise, I found myself in a lot of hedge funds or meeting in fancy hotel lobbies, you know, public corruption, you know, a lot of this was downtown New York. So I sort of charted a map of the city with the different enforcement areas. You talked about who gets the airport and what that matters. Yeah, so the Eastern District is what they call border jurisdiction. It does have an international border and that is the airport. I mean, it allows the prosecutors there to establish jurisdiction once someone's brought into JFK. It's also a big transit point for narcotics. And this has been going on, you know, since the 80s when Columbians decided that one way to transit narcotics was to get people to swallow them and send them on a flight into JFK. So as a young federal prosecutor, a lot of times this is your first case, dealing with a courier who by and large these people are casualties, not sort of conspirators in the drug trade. They're largely people who are doing something out of desperation. So in the book, I write about how a judge copes with the sort of fundamental injustice of this, focusing on what are called collateral consequences, which is a big issue in the criminal justice reform community. Can you tell us a bit about Imran Rabani's case and the related ones, which centers a lot of the chapter on terrorism in addition to the segment on Hashi and the Djibouti 3. And in particular seems to connect with what you were saying earlier about there's a particular piece that I hope you'll try out about how just looking from outside the court, it's easy to get the prosecutor's message, but the prosecutor's sort of fact pattern isn't always sure what it's made out to be. Yeah. So Imran was, I think he was one of five children who lived in a one bedroom apartment in Flushing, Queens. I don't know how many of you are familiar with New York, but Flushing, Queens is it's one of the big Chinatowns in New York City. It's also the site for the Met Stadium and for the US Open, the Arthur Ashe Tennis Center, but it's probably the most diverse neighborhood in the city. His family was from Pakistan. A lot of his friends were also first generation kids. He was sort of a middling student, but a widely respected kid at his high school and at his mosque, who found himself at the center of an ISIS investigation. And this culminated on a bridge in the middle of night. He was with two friends going to a mosque to open it up for morning prayers. And they noticed a car trailing them and they had been surveilled for weeks on end. And to the point where Imran went to the NYPD with the license plate of the car that was following them to try to get something done. And the NYPD either wouldn't or couldn't do anything. They told them they couldn't. So 17 year old Imran, his body who was 19, decided, you know what? We're going to confront whoever this is. They confronted the vehicle, which immediately reversed away from them. They got back in their car, drove off, and then the car fell in behind them. They confronted the car again. And this time, they had knives. Imran didn't produce his knife, but his friend did, if only for a moment. And within seconds, there were FBI agents with weapons drawn and they were detained. The people that Imran had been involved with were part of a real ISIS plot. One of them was arrested the following day and he had shoved a knife into the chest of an FBI agent. And he was wearing protective vest and wasn't injured. But the other young man in the car had both scouted and plotted a sort of Boston style attack. Didn't get that far, but had done enough to give the investigators pause. Imran, to his part, it wasn't really clear how far along the radicalization spectrum he was. But when he was charged, he was charged on the material support statute. He became the only minor in New York City to be charged under the statute. And he immediately told the FBI everything, at least according to his attorney, he did. And he was thrown into a juvenile facility but put in solitary. He was denied bail, couldn't get out, missed high school graduation. And the government raised, perhaps the most serious allegation, which was that he was looking at pressure cookers. They found evidence of this in his computer, which they had seized. Which of course was the structure of the Boston bombs. Yeah, exactly. This, I mean, anything involving pressure cookers raised the specter of a similar sort of Boston marathon style attack. Federal prosecutions involving the material support statute usually invoke what's called SIPA, which involves classified evidence. So this is a unique situation where the government can really keep a lot of the evidence, even from the defense. And, you know, they, a prosecutor would argue that the real danger of bringing a terrorism case is that they're going to reveal their methods, their sources, and give terrorists a sort of roadmap for how to avoid law enforcement. Defense counsel will say this is just used to win cases and to sort of deprive their clients of their rights. After many months when Imran's attorneys finally got access to his raw data from his laptop, which included this purported pressure cooker information, it was an Instapot ad on email, which it's not clear he even opened it. It didn't get to the point where this was raised as a point in litigation. Imran's attorneys simply went to the government and asked them to drop the terrorism charges, which they did. This doesn't happen very often. The government does not want to bring charges on terrorism and then drop them. I think in Imran's case, as I understand it, they didn't want to bring these charges at all, but their hand was forced by the incident on the bridge. Eventually he was, pled guilty and was convicted of interfering with a federal officer. And he had done, I think, a little over a year and a half. And now he's a convicted felon. It's one of these cases where, and I think this is sort of the nature of justice that I saw in both districts, is when you see justice in action, nobody's satisfied. It's a really sort of imperfect, at times, an ugly outcome. I think his case sort of demonstrated the dual nature of counterterrorism efforts. At some level, they can interrupt plots. And at some level, they can engender radicalism. And I think Imran's fellow defendants would argue that that was what pushed them down the path. But I think that's sort of the double-edged sword. Let's get some questions. I have a question. Sure. Yeah. Speaking like to the criminal justice, how is like writing this book and like exploring these two districts change for the criminal justice or has it changed your view? Well, yeah. I mean, I think I alluded to the bigger point. I always saw the justice system as systemic or systematic, rather, just because that's the language we use around it. And then I realized it's really not. And I think a lot of journalistic work is centered on this theme. I mean, it's human beings really trying to create something, trying to create justice. And that's a very, I mean, I live in New York and, you know, again, I think about the city geographically. If I go to like Chelsea or, you know, Lower East Side, where people are involved in art, people are trying to create beauty, you know, in, you know, on Sixth Avenue, where all the media companies are, you would think they're trying to create truth in these courts, the value they're trying to create is justice. And I think everywhere in the city, everyone's doing as best job as they can. And it's not really the greatest results. But I think one thing I would take away from is the power of federal prosecution to tilt the narrative surrounding anything. And I think this presidency in particular, just leaving aside any of the facts surrounding what led to the investigation into Russian inclusion, the existence of a prosecutor who is dedicated to the task of investigating a target shifts our consciousness surrounding that person. And I feel like it's a very hard prejudice to overcome. It's very hard to see the facts when there is this aura of guilt around people. And this is really true in terrorism cases. In fact, there's only been one acquittal involving materials for charge. I don't know if you guys know this case. It was the wife of the Pulse nightclub shooter. But when you have a system that's operating at 100%, and it's intended to create justice, I think that means there's a bug in the system somewhere. Yeah, can you talk a bit about the question of corruption cases as a particular area where we're dealing, of course, with the Mueller related dynamics in our society. And we're saying, I think a much, at least now, much clearer example of the dangers of us in Brazil with the Lava Chateau, the scenario sort of emergence of that, how it's become not what was seen initially, perhaps as a not political has become foundational to society. You see aspects of that. This is what we learn from sort of corruption isn't just like legal. Yeah, I mean, I think this is what's really dangerous when prosecutors are seen through a political lens are seen as political, which has happened in the Brazil case referring to. If you look at the current situation with the Attorney General, I think a lot of people feel he's not an honest broker in deciding what merits the department's resources in terms of making a determination as to what's prosecutable as corruption. I think in the case, I write about the Silver case, which is a Sheldon Silver. He was a very powerful figure in New York, who was targeted by Preep Barara. And again, it was seen through the lens at the moment of you have the US Attorney for Manhattan going after the most powerful figure in the state. Namely, he's doing his job going after corruption, but everyone sees it through a political lens and they're like, well, maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe the next step for Preep was something bigger. I think Preep tried to soften that perception by also going after the Democratic counterpart. But I think it just raises the question of credibility. And I feel like in terms of our society, we're moving into territory that you see in places like the Ukraine or Brazil or Liberia, where prosecutors are really just seen as a political figure. I think what did the guy refer to himself as a political animal? This isn't the A1 story in the times yesterday. That's really dangerous. And when you see the line assistance, the lowest level prosecutors, the ones that I spoke with took a lot of pride in the fact that they didn't know the politics of their colleagues and that when they were speaking, they were speaking as the government. You don't see that pride shared at the higher levels, which is a shame. It's a sort of situation where you would hope that the leadership is actually looking at the prosecutors on the front line and emulating what they're doing on a daily basis. That's our question. Mine's not so much a question, but some comments I'm hoping that you can respond to. Sure. So when you talked about Seth Dushar, I had met him a few years ago when I was in grad school in New York. And I was asking him about the then counting violent extremism pilot programs that had been set up during the Obama administration. And so part of my thesis research was on that. So when I spoke to him, he was saying, well, my job is not to help figure out where people are supposed to go to fix whatever they're being charged on. My job is to just prosecute. And the context for that was that in Minneapolis, the judge there was trying to figure out, you know, do I need to send all of these young kids who were trying to go to ISIS or to be recruited for ISIS? Do I send them to prison or do we create some sort of setup? Because I think most of them were between the ages of like 18 and 21. So they were quite young. And so that judge, whose name is escaping me right now, was trying to come up with maybe like a de-radicalization option. So he sought some suggestions from people who were in Germany, who had come up with things locally and then see if they could put with the US context something together, but there was no infrastructure for it in the US. So looking at that context in Minneapolis and then bringing that to New York and hearing that, you know, it was just like, you're pushing things through all the time. And it's only about prosecuting, prosecuting, prosecuting. And then you have cases like Imran or other people who may have a similar setup or they haven't necessarily done something concrete. It was caught ahead of time or maybe it was like guilty by association almost. And they were able to be looped into that piece. You know, what are your thoughts on how that structure just keeps building in the United States and we're creating this culture of, you know, we just keep prosecuting. And then that's our only option for just terrorism for that one example. Well, so a broad sort of overarching comment I found that when criticizing law enforcement as a reporter, it's never really effective to criticize the sort of ethics surrounding it. But you can go to effectiveness and I feel like that's where a real dialogue can happen. I feel like in the case of materials for cases where you have a lot of these young men who are literally following the same path that the Department of Justice came around to this idea that it's not effective to spend four years prosecuting. I mean, it's a huge strain on resources. And we don't know what will happen at the end of that, you know, so they get 13 years on a material support charge, what happens at the end of that. So Seth actually had, he, I think he had several experiences with young cooperators, including this one guy named Moe, who had dropped out of Columbia University, joined ISIS, essentially joined the help desk of ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, saw what it was all about, and then called the FBI for help. And he became a big cooperator in the Eastern District. And there were other cooperators, a lot of like Brian Neal-Vineas who joined Al Qaeda. But Seth and another AUSA, a woman named Melody Wells, helped launch this program called Deep. And I don't know the status of the program other than the intention of the program was to intervene, sort of get people before they cross that statutory threshold. Whereas a prosecutor, you're operating at your own peril if you choose not to charge. And I think that represents the sort of like, you know, you kind of see this learning curve in DOJ right now with domestic terrorism. But you know, they're adapting to threats and they're also adapting to understand their own effectiveness. Yet there's still ISIS cases coming through. And I will say that, you know, as someone who is in New York on September 11th, comparing it to this moment in 2015, 2016, when we had the pulse attack, when we had Santa Bernardino, when we had Charlie Hebdo, it was tense. It was tense as someone who was on the subway. It was tense. Going to these hearings, you could feel the tension. And I know the investigators with the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the prosecutors felt a real burden to not screw this up. So, you know, the human rights community on the sideline could point out what they were doing wrong, which I feel is a reporter that's part of my job. But I also feel it is important to highlight the fact that the stakes were extremely high, and it wasn't an intellectual exercise by any stretch. Any other questions? Yep. Are there any cultural differences between the two offices? I know there were when a long time ago, when I practiced in New York, I was curious. Yeah, if it's the same types of people in the two offices, or are there differences by the two numbers? Yeah. I mean, I am, as a reporter, there's a lot of differences. I mean, to not be too colloquial, but the prosecutors in the Eastern District are more chill. They're just laid back. You know, the Southern District is wanted for this tradition of independence from main justice, as being the absolute cream of the crop in terms of the young prosecutors. I think that's still true. I think a lot of them wear it on their sleeve when they're in hearings. They won't touch me as a reporter. They're not allowed to. That's not true in the Eastern District. They are allowed to. They just have to clear it up the chain. So that's why I say they're more chill. And I'm always reminded of it was actually in this case involving this murdered diplomat, the prosecutors walked into the courtroom. And for whatever reason, as opposed to the usual three, I think there were five there, as well as the FBI agents and courtroom manager said, oh, there's a lot of you here today. And she just said, yeah, we rolled deep, which I think like sort of, you know, that for me was the Eastern District personality. Whereas the Southern District was so buttoned up, also impeccable by and large. I mean, the lawyering I saw there was it was actually really exciting to watch. You know, I think the most exciting hearing was involving Michael Cohen. And the issue was whether the government could access the materials that they had seized, whether this was protected our attorney client privilege. And, you know, Stormy Daniels was sitting three seats away. Michael Avenatti was there. The middle of the hearing was disrupted with this press access issue, where we wanted to know the contents of a piece of paper which listed Michael Cohen's only other client as an attorney practicing in New York. And an attorney from the New York Times stood up, made a sort of off the cuff argument. I'd never seen this in federal court. The judge ruled right then and there. Yes, you know, you get you have access to that information. And Cohen's attorney said, well, you mean like we have to go to him now. And she said, yeah, read the name. And she read the name. And it was Sean Hannity. And the entire entire courtroom just busted out laughing. But at that hearing, President Trump was represented by private counsel because he had an interest in making sure that Cohen's materials were protected. And when I saw the attorney stand up, I knew who she was. She was a former AUSA in the Southern District who is now a criminal defense attorney. And I had seen her argue at the sentencing for a Bronx gang leader two weeks ago. And she was an amazing litigator. And for me, that was the really profound thing about sort of reporting in the courts to see the sweep of that, that this woman could be representing a basically an indigent young woman who was convicted under a RICO charge one week. And then two weeks later, she was representing the president of the United States. So yeah, I mean, there is a cultural difference. But I think by and large, it's just the rivalry that really distinguishes them. I mean, they're all of excellent credentials. I think the Brooklyn prosecutors just feel they have a bit more edge to them. Maybe in a similar vein with EDNY, some of the practices you talked about, their extensive national security terrorism practice now broadening out maybe into cyber. And they've all started doing a lot more business and securities fraud big cases there. Do you see that continuing? I mean, EDNY does not have the historical prestige that SDNY does, although a lot of people now think they're sort of very similar or very equivalent rivals. Where do you see EDNY or SDNY sort of going and building strengths in certain areas? I think the most significant case in the country right now is going forward in EDNY. And it's the US versus Huawei. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this case. I mean, there's a range of charges from money laundering to fraud. And I believe the subject of the case is still in Canada awaiting extradition. There's a lot of litigation going on. But I think that's the sort of prototypical EDNY case where it's substantive. It's not grabbing a lot of headlines, but it is pulling out like significant powers. They did a lot of really interesting FCPA cases involving AUXIF, which was a hedge fund, which was involved in bribing officials throughout Africa and Libya and South Africa. And I feel like they did the El Chapo case as well, but they're not as predisposed to headlines as Southern District. But when I'm really watching to see where the department is headed, I watch the Eastern District. I find that the Southern District, there are a lot of flashy cases, but they're resolved in sort of weird ways, like the main defendant hanging himself in jail. Or this case today was decided by the judge, now it goes to the Second Circuit. And I'm going to be proven wrong almost immediately. I guarantee that there's going to be a significant case in the Southern District, but that's just the nature of it. But I think the Eastern District people sleep on it and they really shouldn't. Any concluding? Want to see the light tonight? No, thank you. I mean, this is a nice intimate room. I found that when I covered Trump rallies last fall, the president likes to do small rooms so he can feel the crowd. This is really great. But yeah, thank you. Thanks. Well, I very much recommend the book, which has many more stories like this that we've heard. Yeah, thank you.