Jack Goldsmith

So somebody who's very much been in the room on exactly these kinds of discussions.

And he's the author with Jack Goldsmith of After Trump, Reconstructing the Presidency.

It's a popular word in the air these days, it seems.

But that's one of the most detailed reform plans about concrete, actionable specifics.

In it, Assistant Attorney General Bybee dismissed numerous U.S. federal laws, treaties, and international laws that prohibited the use of torture, essentially defining the term torture out of existence.

In his book, The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, who later took over the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and rescinded the infamous 2002 Bybee torture memo, he summed up the legal conclusions in that memo this way.

He said, "...violent acts aren't necessarily torture.

If you do torture, you probably have a defense.

Uh, I'm here to discuss yesterday evening's, uh, court ruling in the Postal Service case involving election mail.

I'm not here, as I normally am, with my colleague Jack Goldsmith.

This time I'm solo, and I'm just gonna make a few brief observations about the case.

The first is that we are conjecturing about the future to some extent when we try to draw out the implications of the case, because not much other than by the dissent and briefly by Justice Kavanaugh was said.

And later, uh, John Yoo, who was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, uh, in the White House, wrote a memo about this, um, saying, um, these techniques were not torture because torture is only organ failure or imminent death.

And someone else in that office, a guy named Jack Goldsmith, whom I am v- very much still in touch with, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said that memo was, uh, um, really poor scholarship, and Goldsmith ended up getting fired.

And I think I've got this right.

I mean, some of you were there, so, you know, this is just my memory from decades ago.

So in this episode of Interesting Times, Christopher Caldwell sits down with Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith to discuss something pretty troubling, whether the presidency itself is becoming a profit center under Donald Trump.

And Goldsmith doesn't pull punches here.

He points out that what's normal for presidents is strict separation from personal finances, usually through a blind trust.

And later, uh, John Yoo, who was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, uh, in the White House, wrote a memo about this, um, saying, um, these techniques were not torture because torture is only organ failure or imminent death.

And someone else in that office, a guy named Jack Goldsmith, whom I am very much still in touch with, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said that memo was, uh, uh, really poor scholarship, and Goldsmith ended up getting fired.

And I think I've got this right.

I mean, some of you were there, so, you know, this is just my memory from decades ago.

That, why...

The, I have a book for you, is that there's a guy who I knew in the political world named Jack Goldsmith.

He worked for Obama.

He worked for Bush.

But he had this other side.

Yeah.

But, uh, Jack Goldsmith's book is very good.

Very, very good.

Can you give us a sense of how one would be thinking about bio threats before November of 2022 when OpenAI announced and released ChatGPT? What was the bio threat environment like? What was the kind of infrastructure and technology for bio threats around then?

Well, in the last decade, we've seen a dramatic change, Jack.

So I would say they're the traditional bio threats that we dealt with during the Cold War and following the Cold War, largely focused on Russian programs, Soviet programs before Russian.

And that has been transformed by initially the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that emerged around 2014, 2015 as a genuinely powerful capability.

You could have an adversary who is planning to launch a major military campaign and decides to do what the Pentagon would call preparing the battlefield by releasing an illness-causing disease vector into the homeland while they secretly inoculate their own population against it.

And the objective of that would be to disable the deployment of the American military and cause societal panic just when unity of effort is required.

So I'll note to you on this list, Jack, that one of the things I've seen in my study of this challenge is that 25 years ago, next month, we experienced 9-11 and the after action analysis of how we had failed to prevent it included as the first of four reasons, a failure of imagination.

And what we need to do here is imagine based on the science and technology as it's evolving, what the potential use cases could be by a malicious actor, and then take the steps necessary to ensure that we're ready to prevent them if we can, and to respond to them effectively if we cannot.

I have a book for you.

There's a guy who I knew in the political world named Jack Goldsmith.

He worked for Obama.

He worked for Bush.

And he writes this book.

It's a kind of thin, quick read that is an investigation of Hoffa's death, but also about the personal relationship he had with him as a stepfather, which is much more complicated than the stuff that you usually get about Hoffa being a gangster, which he was, but he had this other side.

But Jack Goldsmith's book is very good.

Very, very good.