Thread by @benjaminwittes

I tweeted this thread about Merrick Garland earlier today, not knowing that Lisa Monaco would—in fact—be named his deputy attorney general.

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1346870322096705537?s=20

I recommended this course specifically in one of the tweets in the thread and am delighted that the Biden transition was apparently thinking along similar lines. Today's events at the Capitol offer a good illustration of why this is a good idea. So here's a thread about Lisa.

As I said in my original thread, Garland seems to be the perfect attorney general nominee for a variety of reasons which I won't repeat here. He lacks one thing: *recent* executive branch national security experience. The Justice Department has changed a lot since his service.

His experience is actually deep, but on the executive branch side, it's a bit stale. He worked the most important counterterrorism investigation in U.S. history prior to 9/11, but the rules got rewritten in the wake 9/11. And the national security apparatus was profoundly...

...changed. It changed so much that Eric Holder, whose service was more recent than Merrick's, reported being shocked by it when he returned to government in 2009. Garland has watched a lot of this from the bench. The D.C. Circuit has a lot of visibility into these...

changes from the many national security cases that come before it. But an appellate judge sees a very scrubbed record. It's not the same as being in the game.

This is where Lisa's experience dramatically complement's Garland's. A lot of the press stories mention that she was Obama's counterterrorism advisor, but her experience is much deeper than that. She ran the National Security Division, for example. She was in the DAG's office ...

earlier in the Obama administration. And she has 15 years of service in the department.

So think about today in light of that. You would have an attorney general of unrivaled reputation for integrity and judgment, and a deputy attorney general who spent four years...

...running point for the president on national security emergencies, which means interfacing with all of the relevant agencies, and also ran NSD and thus knows the ins and outs of a lot of recent changes in authorities and intelligence relationships.

There's another thing about Lisa: She's a power player. A good DAG has to be one. It's an exceptionally hard job.

Today would have been very different had this team been in power.

UPDATE: I actually left out something important from this thread. Lisa was also for a spell Bob Mueller's chief of staff at FBI. So not only does she have recent national security coordinating experience (at WH) and deep prosecutorial experience at DOJ (as does Merrick)...

And not only has she run NSD and worked in the DAG's office on national security matters, she's also worked for the director of the principle federal law enforcement component.