When Federal Agents Ignore Court Orders: What Happens to Democracy? | Secure Talk with Claire Finkelstein

Hello everyone and welcome to SecureTalk. I'm your host, Justin Beals.

Federal agents have killed two Americans on video in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They've denied state investigators access to crime scenes despite court-issued warrants. Right now, ICE agents and Minnesota National Guard forces are facing each other in a situation that security experts have warned could escalate to what the military calls green-on-green violence.

Security has always been built on trust. The trust that laws apply equally, that courts have authority, that those with weapons will use them lawfully. When federal agents ignore court orders and the Justice Department shields them from accountability, that foundation cracks. And when it cracks, communities have to decide what security even means anymore.

Our guest today saw this coming. In October 2024, Dr. Claire Finkelstein ran a tabletop exercise at the University of Pennsylvania with over 30 retired military leaders, national security experts, and state officials. They simulated a scenario where federal forces confronted state National Guard during civil unrest. What stunned everyone was how quickly participants escalated to violence and how few off-ramps existed once momentum built. Opportunities for dialogue were missed. Decisions were made for political announcements rather than problem-solving. The simulation reached green-on-green violence faster than anyone expected.

That exercise now reads like a preview of Minneapolis.

Dr. Finkelstein has been working on the legal front lines. She represented 155 members of Congress in an amicus brief before the Supreme Court challenging how the administration deployed the National Guard. The Court sided with her arguments. But when the administration lost authority to use the Guard, they surged ICE agents instead, creating the confrontation we're watching unfold.

The legal questions are urgent. Can states prosecute federal agents who commit crimes in their jurisdiction? What happens when federal authorities claim immunity for actions that look like murder on video? How do soldiers follow the chain of command when they can't trust that orders are lawful? The Supreme Court's immunity decision has made these questions harder, not easier. A soldier who refuses an unlawful order risks court martial. A soldier who follows one risks prosecution. The clarity that held the military together is eroding.

Dr. Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and the Founder and Faculty Director of Penn's Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. Her research addresses national security law, democratic governance, presidential authority, and the law of armed conflict. She is a frequent commentator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

Join me for this conversation about what happens when the rule of law meets political will, and what remains when the institutions designed to protect democracy are tested to their limits.

Justin Beals: Dr. Finkelstein, thanks for joining us today on SecureTalk.

Claire Finkelstein: Thanks so much for having me.

Justin Beals: Excellent. I got very interested in your work very recently from a Guardian article that I was reading online. And the article talked about some tabletop exercises that you had done for the Center of Law and Ethics at Pennsylvania University. Is that correct, Dr. Finkelstein?

Claire Finkelstein: University of Pennsylvania.

Justin Beals: University of Pennsylvania, thank you. Claire.

In the article, you talked about some tabletop exercises from October of 2024, and they've been a little bit of a Rosetta Stone for what's happening right now in Minnesota and California. I'm curious, as you're watching this unfold, having done all this work, where your emotions are at and how you're feeling a little bit.

Claire Finkelstein: Well, I have to say that though I study these things professionally, and I've seen a lot of footage of police brutality, I've seen a lot of footage of war, I study war professionally and use of force, the videos of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and their killings have been emotionally absolutely wrenching. I think the country is reacting to that, the pain of that. They're so well documented, and the use of force in those cases seems so impossible to justify. And then when we hear the federal government, Kristi Noem and others vilifying the victims, it's extremely painful. And really, for someone who has now run a rule of law center for the past 14 years, it's very discouraging to see this happening in our country right now.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I certainly share your interpretation of the events, myself having watched the multiple videos that seem to be available and a lot of the discussion. And I certainly share the kind of reaction, I think that I hear from you Claire. It is, I think the rule of law issue is very challenging. Now, you know, I learned about you from the tabletop exercises in the article in the Guardian, but as you pointed out to me, you've been doing a lot of work in the space, literally on the front lines of the legal work, filing briefs. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the types of work that you're doing to help ensure rule of law continues in the United States.

Claire Finkelstein: Sure, well, to back up a little bit in time, we filed a brief in the immunity case in 2024. And one of the things that we specialize in is the military. I've done a fair bit of work with the military, especially Army JAG. I teach national security law at University of Pennsylvania, Kerry Law. And I always bring my students down to the Pentagon and teach them about the law of armed conflict and really try to teach them about how we think about international and domestic rules for the use of force from the standpoint of the rule of law.

And so when the immunity case was making its way to the Supreme Court, I was very concerned because I was concerned that presidential immunity would have a very deleterious impact on the chain of command. And so we filed a brief in that case, which unfortunately the Supreme Court did not listen to, though I think their opinion makes implicit reference to our brief.

And then with regard to the National Guard issues, we filed a brief in the Northern District of California to support the Attorney General's position in California to say that the deployment of federal troops, in particular the federalization of the California National Guard was unlawful under the authority that they were using for that purpose.

We were very glad that Judge Breyer sided with California and implicitly therefore with our brief as well. And as a lot of the courts have that have considered that issue. And then we represented 155 members of Congress in a brief that we filed in the Supreme Court in the case of Trump v. Illinois, in which we argued that it was absolutely critical that courts weighed in to interpret Congress's intention in passing statutes that delegate authority to the president to use military force. And that statute that was under debate in that case was 10 USC 12406 to get a little bit technical. And that was the statute that the Trump administration was trying to use to justify the federalization of the National Guard.

And we argued on behalf of members of Congress that the Trump administration's claim to be able to use that statute for this purpose was incorrect and unlawful. Amazingly, the Supreme Court sided with us and with the state of Illinois to say that in fact, Trump could not use the National Guard under that statute in the way that he was using it.

Now, I think that is why, just to connect the dots with the current situation in Minnesota, we are seeing this surge of ICE because they can no longer use the National Guard in the way that they were using it. And so they, instead of being able to use the National Guard, they surged ICE agents, almost like, as I said in the Guardian article, a kind of paramilitary troop to serve the same function and to sort of take over Minnesota, in this case Minneapolis. But if you look at the pattern of guard deployments, right, there was a targeting of US cities prior to that. So this is the next wave.

Justin Beals: Yeah, intriguing both to think that there's continuity for what's going on here. They've been, you there's been an effort to try and lever military force as a political tool. I think one of the things that you have worked with a lot of folks in the military, very high ranking, high ranking jobs carry a lot of responsibility.

I'm stumbling over my words here a little bit, Clare, because I tend to get them lined up the best. As well as certainly I think myself and all of our listeners have family members that have served, friends that have served. The military is in a difficult place because they are more formed around the Constitution instead of any one political party, although that whoever is in power certainly has some influence over the actions and activities according to the Constitution. But fundamentally, it's the rule of law that is supposed to guide that, right?

Claire Finkelstein: Yeah, and the military, let's remember, is not supposed to be political. It is supposed to be apolitical. That's a very fundamental principle of military organization. It's part of the military ethos. Members of the military are not supposed to take political positions on things. You'll notice that the Joint Chiefs at the State of the Union Address famously sit there and not clap, right?

Justin Beals: Mm-hmm.

Claire Finkelstein: And President Trump complained about that in the last State of the Union address because he doesn't like it. He wants them to adore him and to fawn over him, which they're not going to do. They're supposed to be politically completely neutral. And that's the way the military should be. The military should never be a tool for satisfying a politician's or a party's agenda. That's true of a number of parts of our democracy. The Justice Department should not be a tool. Prosecutions should not be politicized.

But you can see how critically important it is with the military because you don't want military force used against political enemies or to carry out a political vendetta. It's really important that the concept of American security and the priorities that the administration has to secure the country are the same regardless of what party any American belongs to, especially when we're talking about domestic deployments, which can be so sensitive politically.

Justin Beals: Yeah. Okay. Let's dive into a little bit of the work, especially I think some of your tabletop exercises or simulation work, because I think that it highlights a danger we're seeing play out directly in front of us. And so there's a lot of validity to how sensitive we should be to the current state of affairs, especially in Minnesota.

First off, think one of the things that I wanted to talk about a little bit is the Center of Ethics and the Rule of Law at University of Pennsylvania, CERL, I think, is that okay to say it, or do you say CERL?

Claire Finkelstein: Yes, that's right.

Justin Beals: One of the things I noted in the white papers and research papers is that you brought together over 30 retired military leaders, national security experts and state officials.

This particular group of people, how did they make sure that the tabletop exercise felt authentic in its simulation?

Claire Finkelstein: That's a great question. So one of the things that we did was we tried to assign people to roles that were as close as possible to the roles that they had occupied in their professions if they were retired, or roles that they actually were currently occupying. And we did this under the Chatham House rule, so I'm not going to tell you who occupied what role. But we had people in the military having military roles and people in state and local government having roles in that sector.

And we even had a table for community leaders, church representatives, educational leaders, the Department of Justice, and so forth. And there was a lot of expertise assembled there. In fact, I was quite blown away by the cross-section of experience and knowledge that we were able to put together and the willingness of people to spend all day with us and to act out this scenario. And what we did was to give them some background on the scenario and then to bring them in as though it was a real evolving situation that they had to respond to in their roles.

And to make it authentic, we did not give them the details of the scenario in advance, except we gave them background information for them to digest. And we gave them one piece of information at a time so that they would get an initial piece of information, and then 30 minutes later, they might get an update, and then another update. So it was an evolving situation that, of course, got escalatory and got worse and worse. And they had to figure out how they were going to react and consult with their team members. And then we engaged a number of student interns who were note takers at each table. And we didn't want to record anything, so we stationed two interns at each table who took notes on the conversation so we could see what sorts of things that they were deliberating about as we reach certain crisis points.

So it's interesting how quickly the situation escalated. That's one thing that was quite striking to us. And before we knew it, we did have a situation in which we had the National Guard, which was deployed by the governor in a situation of conflict with federal troops. And that produced a situation of what we call green-on-green violence.

Justin Beals: A couple of notes for all our CISOs that listen to this podcast. This is a great way to run a tabletop exercise. I know many of you do, but what I love, Claire, is that you've held out information where information shouldn't be shared. you're putting people in roles that would make those types of decisions. So you're hopefully getting valid responses to them and how they would respond. And you're allowing the scenario to evolve, evolve to a place, did it really surprise you when you got there as quickly as you did? Were you a little stunned at the momentum of it?

Claire Finkelstein: I was stunned. I was stunned how quickly it evolved and how few off-ramps there were and how quickly people were prepared to up the ante. That did surprise me. I was also surprised by the opportunities that were missed for dialogue or opportunities that were missed to deescalate and we gave participants the opportunity to hold meetings with other sectors. state and local authorities could meet with the Department of Justice, could meet with the Department of Defense and so on. And it was interesting that participants did not avail themselves more of those opportunities, but tended to stay a little bit in their groups consulting about what to do.

Another interesting feature was that people tended to take action partly for the sake of the announcement. So we served the function sort of as a press. And when somebody took an action, say the Department of Justice made a decision or the Department of Defense or the governor's office made a decision, they would pass it to us in a note and then we would announce it. And it was interesting that there was a certain amount of grandstanding, which is exactly what happens in the real world. And you see the impact on other sectors of society from the decisions that the group makes, but not as much real problem-solving as you would like to see in escalatory situations.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it's funny because I in reading your after action report, there were two areas that I thought were really interesting. I think that your findings here talk to that siloed information a little bit as well as the The speed at which things happen one was that authorities were inadequately prepared for mass civil unrest. You know, perhaps we just haven't seen that much of it in the United States for a long time and that the courts would struggle to resolve the legal ambiguities in real time. It seems like those two challenges might play off of each other in the scenario, to allow the worst possible outcome.

Claire Finkelstein: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And one of our aims as a law-based center was to identify legal questions that could trip courts up and make it difficult for them to resolve these matters. And also to identify unresolved legal questions that would allow too much play for participants, so that if everything looks legally ambiguous, that itself can create escalation. So we wanted to identify what are the legal questions about the relationship of state local authorities to federal authorities around this kind of scenario that are still outstanding that need to be resolved.

Now, since then, of course, there's been a fair bit of evolution, but unfortunately, a lot of those questions remain unresolved. One positive factor that I see is that courts have been willing to jump in and reach decisions in situations that I thought they might be unwilling to. So I thought that courts might invoke what's called the political questions. Doctrine and say, know what, we're not going to get involved because this is a political question, or we're not going to get involved because we have to be highly deferential to the executive branch. But we've seen federal district court after federal district court render decisions in these matters, including right now in Minnesota, where a federal district court has been making decisions. that are very, very important decisions, which, unfortunately, the administration is ignoring a number of them. But courts are not quite as unwilling to step in as we fear that they might be. I think one of the major limiting factors is that it's hard for courts to react quickly enough to really be a kind of moment-by-moment arbiter in an evolving escalatory situation like this.

Justin Beals: It's interesting it certainly comes full circle with your group and the work you're Concept that we live in a country of laws and that we all live by them at the end of the day But it does feel like we have a current administration that appears to be ready to pressure test any of those assumptions In whatever way they can that's that's very different. I sometimes I feel like our government is not prepared or the type of chaos that they're interacting with.

Claire Finkelstein: Well, I think in the current situation, I would say that the federal government is trying to provoke that chaos and is trying very, very hard to create the image of an out of control population, out of control protesters, and either an ineffectual or unwilling state authorities who are part and parcel of the problem. That's the image they're trying to project. I think it's very far from the reality of what's going on. When you see peaceful protesters who are getting beaten up, pepper sprayed, having chemical agents shot in their faces, and in the worst case scenarios actually killed at point blank range.

And you see the videos, the lack of provocation, the exercise of First Amendment rights to protest. So clearly being invoked constitutionally and lawfully, being met with lethal force, it's very, very disturbing and really makes you wonder, sort of where this is, where is this heading? I hope not in the direction of our tabletop exercise.

Justin Beals: Yeah, to your point, let's maybe think a little bit about what the present situation was in the tabletop exercise. And today what we're challenged with, which is you have, you know, in your tabletop exercise, I think it was set in Pennsylvania. Yep.

Protesters and then a National Guard kind of situation and then army or military and then violence escalating from there. Here we have a situation of ICE in doing immigration work a lot of protesters are protesting the work that ice is trying to do in this city. Now the National Guard has been deployed in Minneapolis now we have ice federal forces Minneapolis or Minnesota National Guard forces. It is a powder keg situation and one that was mirrored in your tabletop exercise. Yeah.

Claire Finkelstein: Yeah, and the worry, let me just explain if I may, the worry and how this can escalate in the present situation. Because Minneapolis police really have an obligation to step in and stop crime wherever it is occurring. And that means that if ICE agents are engaging in an unlawful use of force which it appears that they are, then it's incumbent on the Minneapolis police to do their best to put a stop to that. And that could mean arresting ICE agents, right? That could mean physically intervening to protect protesters. Now there are only about 600 members of the Minneapolis police force.

And there are thousands of ICE agents. So the Minneapolis police are badly outnumbered. They're gonna need the National Guard if they're going to engage in law enforcement in any serious way to back them up. They're gonna need that. If the federal government then brings in the 11th Airborne to back up ICE agents,

That is the powder keg situation that you referred to because we've got implicitly Minneapolis police squaring off against ICE agents, both of them with military forces to back up their actions. That's the concern. And the question is how do we get an off ramp from that situation?

Justin Beals: I just can't help you know, but as we talk through these things I feel a sense of the danger That you know exists in the in the present space I'm You know, I'm I'm hopeful Claire that both we get the chance to see things de-escalate.

What and maybe I want to lean in there for a second. What were some of the off ramps?

in your report, you specifically warned that the Supreme Court's immunity decision could really wreak havoc on good order and discipline.

Maybe you can help explain how presidential immunity affects the soldiers calculus when they're interpreting what is potentially a lawful or unlawful order.

Claire Finkelstein: Yeah, that's a great question because we're used to being able to rely on the basic lawfulness of orders. And a lot in our system and in the reliability of the chain of command depends on that assumption. Depends on the assumption that when the president or the secretary of defense gives an order, it's very likely that that order is lawful. And why do we expect it to be lawful? Well, at the end of the day, in a normal set of circumstances, the buck stops with the president. And there ought to be, and we've always expected that there would be a certain amount of accountability for presidents who engage in unlawful actions, internationally, domestically.

Now it's never been easy to hold presidents to account. I mean, we can go back to the Nixon days to look at that and remember, of course, the famous comment that Nixon made, you know, “if the president does it, it's not illegal”. So there always was that attitude, but the reason that was so famous is because we all thought it was wrong.

And that it really told us more about Nixon than it did about the state of our law. So when the Supreme Court came along and said, yeah, there is suddenly out of nowhere, right, this decision that seemed to fly in the face of a number of other Supreme Court cases, most notably the Trump v. Vance case, which was decided just four years earlier, in which the same John Roberts affirmed that presidents are not above the law. And then they come along with this decision and say, well, if the president was acting in his official capacity, then there is no such thing as presidential crime. You can't be held liable for a crime. It was a shock because, among other things, now if you get an order that comes down from the president, you don't have the same expectation, and you can't rely as heavily on the assumption that that order is legal. Because there's not going to be the same risk of accountability for the president for issuing an illegal order, down the chain of command. We don't really know from the Supreme Court opinion what the Supreme Court would make of a Secretary of Defense or a combatant commander trying to plead presidential immunity as the basis for his action, right? And how far down the chain does it go? The opinion doesn't tell us.

But if you're given an order, say, to shoot protesters in the legs, because you're a federalized national guard troop and you're under Title 10 command, say, or you're part of the 11th Airborne or a Navy SEAL team or what have you, and you receive what on the face of it looks to you like an unlawful order, well, you better watch out because you're probably not gonna have immunity, right? So you may be between a rock and a hard place of getting an order that you have to follow because it's unlawful not to follow orders, but yet you strongly suspect it's an unlawful order and fear you could get convicted of a crime for following the order and get convicted of, courts marshaled of disobedience to orders if you don't follow the order. So it could put troops in a very bad position.

Justin Beals: Huge chaotic mess, isn't it? Feels like a, you know, I think we think about, certainly, I think there's this characterization of the Supreme Court as being a very thoughtful body, and probably 99 % of the time they do that. Although I'm sure in history, you would know better than me in the history of law, there's been challenging decisions, but this one feels like it's really opened Pandora's box.

Because I do think that the military had this idea that they could refuse an order that was unlawful and would be protected in that decision. Yeah, yeah.

Claire Finkelstein: That's black letter law. I want to be clear about that and in defense of Senator Kelly and the others who made that video, that is textbook law, right? Not just you may refuse an order, you must refuse that order if it is unlawful, if it is clear to you that the order is unlawful. The problem comes when you're not sure.

What happens if you get an order and you are not sure? You think this may very well be unlawful, but I don't know. Now, the further complication comes from the fact that to cover their tracks, as happened in the Venezuela strikes and with the boat strikes, they go to the office of legal counsel in the justice department, and they get a memo. And the memo says these strikes are lawful.

Now you're an ordinary enlisted soldier. You're not a lawyer. You don't know how to assess this for yourself. And you go to your commander and you say, hey, you know, is this lawful? I've been told to fire on some boats in the Caribbean, and they sure look like civilians to me. Could this be lawful? And he says to you, yeah, there's an opinion from the office of legal counsel saying it's lawful.

What should you do? How much credit should you give that memo? And unfortunately for our country, and a number of examples that we've had over time, the answer to that question should have been, don't give it any credit at all, because that body, that office, has become entirely politicized.

And the Department of Justice is no longer giving objective advice about what's lawful and unlawful. What they are doing is manufacturing immunity for their bosses in the White House and in the Department of Defense so that the president can get maximum compliance. And that's heartbreaking, right? And it's a terrible position to put troops in.

Justin Beals: Yeah, really. I think that part of the most frustrating bit is those people that we all really look up to for the contribution they make in their service are being put in a terrifying position.

Yeah, and the co-opting of the Justice Department as a public relations firm is the best way I can describe it, has even further eroded trust in some of those institutions that I think we relied on to help us dictate the ethics of what we should be doing in certain situations.

Claire Finkelstein: Exactly, exactly.

Justin Beals: Now, one of the things I wanted to highlight, I do think this is playing out in Minnesota, is that you noted the lines between state and federal authorities regarding civil unrest are not sufficiently clear. What specific legal clarifications would help governors and federal officials avoid the types of confrontations that we're dealing with?

Claire Finkelstein: Okay, so one of the issues that they're facing right now is access to the crime scene in the case of Alex Pretti. So state and local officials have got to be able to investigate there. It's really critical that there be number one, traditionally that partnership between federal, state and local investigators. But number two, let's remember that the state has the right to prosecute crime that occurs in its jurisdiction.

So they have the right to prosecute ICE officers who commit crimes. Now this is going to be much discussed and much debated because the Justice Department will back up, and they've already indicated that they are backing up those officers and that they regard them as immune. They're going to assert federal authority of using the supremacy clause, and they're gonna say they can't be prosecuted while they're on federal duty. But there are a lot of arguments against that. And federalism is a concept that, first and foremost, would argue that states need to have the right to conduct their own prosecutions. We face this in the prosecution of Donald Trump and his associates in the Georgia case, for example, where you'll remember Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump's chief of staff, saying, you can't prosecute me here in state court. I'm going to remove this case to federal court. And then once removed, you can bet that he would have argued for immunity, especially after the immunity decision of 2024.

So those issues will come up here if the state of Minnesota decides to try to prosecute any of these ICE officers who are committing crimes. But meanwhile, what we have is a battle over access to the crime scene. So state investigators went to the crime scene and tried to get access and federal agents did not allow them in. So they went to a judge and they said, can you give me a warrant? so I can go and investigate that terrain? And the judge gave them a warrant and they went back with this warrant and federal agents still didn't let them in, even with a warrant. Okay. So that's a situation where we have the federal government refusing to allow state officials to do what they have a legal right to do and ignoring court orders.

And that's when I start to get really worried about rule of law in this country and the guardrails on our democracy. Because if we're not listening to court decisions, if we're not letting judges make decisions and then obeying those decisions, we've got a very serious problem.

Justin Beals: It really does feel like the ability to say anything into the media sphere has kind of taken away our ability for a thoughtful review of what the law says, what we need to do. And it's strangely fought out in public opinion.

The court of public opinion, instead of what are our laws and ethics that our country has been fabriced together with, so that we can function as a society I wonder if they understand the stakes some days.

Claire Finkelstein: Well, on the public opinion issue, it's really interesting because we have this debate that has emerged about the Second Amendment now, because Alex Pretti had a lawful gun on his person when he ended up in this altercation with ICE agents, or altercation is a generous word, I think, when they set on him. Now, he did not brandish that weapon. He did not take it out at all. He did not threaten ICE agents with it from the video that we see. And they did disarm him before he was shot and he owned it legally. He was carrying that gun lawfully.

Department of Homeland Security is saying he was there to murder ICE agents. He was there to make war on them, and that he was a dangerous criminal, you know, not just a peaceful protester, but there's no evidence of that. We need to think about how we, the way that we use rhetoric around assertion of our rights. We have, we now see a number of gun rights organizations, including the NRA, at least in part, stand up for him and say, hey, lawful gun owners can't be assumed to have intentions towards federal officers just because they're carrying a gun if they're carrying them lawfully, right? Because they want to make it safe to own guns. So it's a very, very interesting debate. And here's where I think public opinion can kind of work for democracy, which is, you know, what goes around comes around, writes for one side or writes for another when the situation flips. And it's okay to have, it's a good thing to have these robust debates, but in the end, they're gonna need to be settled by judges in courts and by Congress, which also has something to say about the situation and by other sources of law, rather than by battles in the street.

Justin Beals: Please, and hopefully so, right Claire? I have one last question before I ask. I want to extend my gratitude again for joining me today to have this discussion for the work that you've already published. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. was really just, I love great research and certainly put a lot of thought and precision and care into the work that you do at CERL which leads me to my question. What is next for CERL? Where's your team at? What are you working on? Yeah.

Claire Finkelstein (42:57.684)

Thank you so much for asking that. So we are building CERL out in a number of respects. One of the most important initiatives that we have is that we're working with an organization called the National Institute for Military Justice, NIMJ, to together build a litigation initiative, because we really believe that work in the courts right now is one of the most important places where the rule of law is being defended, and that we need to be a country of laws and not coercion. And so we are about to list a position for a senior litigation director. And in this new initiative, we'll be not only engaging in litigation, but also policy advice.

I was very proud to represent a large number of members of Congress in the Trump v. Illinois case, but also to be able to serve as an advisor to those members in the run-up to that case and in other cases and other contexts involving the National Guard. So more and more, we're hoping that we can be a trusted source for advice on the rule of law, especially on military matters. And a lot of these military questions are often very technical and very detailed. We have an amazing collection of experts that are completely dedicated to the nonpartisan value of resolving contentious issues in the courts and in other rule of law oriented ways.

And that's what we're really going to be trying to lean into in weeks and months and hopefully years ahead.

Justin Beals: Useful work. Dr. Claire Finkelstein, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And to our listeners this week and when this episode airs, certainly wish you safety and security inside your community.

Claire Finkelstein: Thanks for having me.