Mm-hmm

... and I think Ben correctly said, you know, we have a president who has, uh, said he thinks elections are unreliable.

He's gone, you know, just to push the point even a little bit further, on national television to say that the election system is completely corrupt and vulnerable and a disgrace to the country.

And furthermore, has attempted to assert or exercise presidential authority that exceeds anything we've seen presidents attempt to do before under a constitutional arrangement that we have in which the president does not have any election rulemaking authority.

That's, that's confined to the states unless Congress chooses to make rules of its own choosing for federal elections.

So this is a super charged situation.

It raises really profound constitutional questions, and it has added very much to the docket of cases that the court has to decide.

Yeah.

What was it like shifting your capacity as a lawyer in these very different contexts, sometimes with the same individual, right?

Yes.

Well, that was excellent advice that you received and I teach a professional responsibility course about lawyering and public life at NYU, and we spend a lot of time discussing the fundamental question of who is your client and to whom do your ethical obligations, to whom are they devoted? Because as you say, the ethical obligations flow from the identification of the client.

I think it is fair to say that in one sense, that's a very simple question and in another sense, it's very complicated.

So I'm just going to flip quickly to the White House piece, although I can talk a little bit about how this particular issue plays out in private practice.

In the White House, the White House counsel, this has been a topic of some significant conversation.

controversy over many years involving the role of the White House counsel.

If you transferred so much of this work to the Justice Department, wouldn't it make it even more complicated than what it is now in the White House?