Lawfare’s Publishing a Book: Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith’s “After Trump”

Lawfare Blurb ……

We are thrilled to announce Lawfare’s newest endeavor to bring you information, analysis, and deep insight at the nexus of national security, law, and policy: Lawfare Press, our new book publishing imprint, is publishing its first book.

David Priess is the Chief Operating Officer of the Lawfare Institute. He is a writer and speaker on the presidency, national security, and intelligence who served during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as a CIA officer. His most recent book, “How To Get Rid of a President,” conveys the stories of the many ways American presidents have left office. He is also the author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” the first book about the top-secret President’s Daily Brief and its recipients.

• davidpriess

Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.

• @benjaminwittes

And, if we do say so ourselves, we’ve found a spectacular way to come out of the gate: “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, will be released on Sept. 15, in paperback and electronic formats.

Bauer and Goldsmith provide a comprehensive roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era—whether that comes in four months or four years. In 14 chapters they offer more than fifty concrete proposals concerning presidential conflicts of interest, foreign influence on elections, pardon power abuse, assaults on the press, law enforcement independence, special counsel procedures, FBI investigations of presidents and presidential campaigns, the role of the White House counsel, war powers, control of nuclear weapons, executive branch vacancies, domestic emergency powers, how one administration should examine possible crimes by the president of a prior administration, and more. Each set of reform proposals is preceded by rich descriptions of relevant presidential history, and relevant background law and norms, that place the proposed reforms in context. All of the proposals are prefaced by a chapter that explains how Trump (and, in some cases, his predecessors) conducted the presidency in ways that justify these reforms.

“After Trump” will be essential reading for the coming debate on how to reconstruct the laws and norms that constitute and govern the world’s most powerful office. It’s hard to imagine two better co-authors for the task. Both served in senior executive branch positions—in the administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively—and have written widely on the presidency here on Lawfare and elsewhere.

About the authors:

Bob Bauer served from 2010-2011 as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, who in 2013 named Bauer to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law, as well as the co-director of its Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic.

Jack Goldsmith served as assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and special counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003. He is the Learned Hand professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The book is available for pre-order here.