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

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More from @benjaminwittes

6 Jan
A thread with some thoughts on Merrick Garland, whom Politico is reporting has been selected as attorney general by President-elect Joe Biden... /1/
politico.com/news/2021/01/0…
Garland is principally famous outside the D.C. legal world for having been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama in 2016 and having been shamefully blocked by Senate Republicans for nearly the entire year. This is a shame. And his treatment ithen is not the reason /2/
why he is the perfect choice for Biden for attorney general. Indeed, his martyrdom on this point actually complicates the picture a little bit; while Republicans generally refrained from attacking him, the very fact of the nomination and their stonewalling of it makes ... /3/
Read 22 tweets
4 Jan
#YourMusicOfTheDay is the Brahms Horn Trio in E-Flat Major, Op. 40, the greatest performance of which I know is this one from the Marlboro Festival with Rudolf Serkin, Myron Bloom, and Michael Tree:
Movement II:
Movement III:
Read 4 tweets
1 Jan
.@scottjshapiro, who has only fewer than eight as many Twitter followers as I have, just gave an important Powerpoint presentation of his New Year's resolutions.
@Klonick is above having New Year's resolutions.
I have three:
(1) Always to mention how many more ...
...Twitter followers people (particularly repulsive people) have than @scottjshapiro.
(2) Never to mention @HawleyMO's name without reminding people that he sought to overturn a clear presidential election result.
And (3) To stop pretending that all Covid victim deaths...
...are equally tragic. There are innocent victims of Covid are very non-innocent victims. I mean to start distinguishing very actively between the two. Don't @ me. Or do. I don't care.
Read 4 tweets
19 Dec 20
Just received a clever phishing attack I have never seen before: a text message purporting to be from DHL with a tracking number for a package allegedly on its way to me. When you click on the link to track the package, it takes you to what purports to be an @Amazon promotion.
This, in turn, asks you to answer four poll questions to be eligible for a drawing. I did not respond to any of the questions, so I don’t know what info it’s ultimately phishing for.
But the actual @DHL site has no record of the package number in question, so I’m confident that it’s a fraud of some kind. If you get routed to a URL that purports to be from @amazon, be sure that it actually is. And specifically, be careful of this URL: amazonreward.club.
Read 6 tweets
16 Dec 20
Because Joe Biden hasn’t fired the FBI director over the investigation and boasted to a adversary foreign minister that he relieved pressure on himself by doing so?
Because there’s no reason to think the Justice Department under Barr and Trump will go easy on Hunter Biden?
Because Joe Biden’s government and campaign are not littered with people with untoward relationships with hostile foreign powers who lie about it when questioned?
Read 4 tweets
14 Dec 20
Trump's winning!

(For those who are total morons, this is a joke)
nytimes.com/interactive/20… Image
Trump’s lead grows in absolute terms but shrinks in relative terms. How can that be, @JSEllenberg? How can you get further ahead and have a smaller percentage? Fraud!!! Image
And Biden has taken the lead!
A huge dump just came in from Georgia and elsewhere. I mean, Trump had it won! People, and they just found these votes...in Georgia! Image
Read 5 tweets

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