Without a way to make regular, positive deposits in social relationships that bridge political lines, every civic debate is a withdrawal without social reserves, leaving people perpetually overdrawn.
The idea of interviewing someone is that you are getting their first off-the-cuff impression or response. You don’t want them to have the chance to really prepare.
As an FBI agent, you don’t want to go in there gangbusters and confrontational. You are going to get a lot more information if you put the subject at ease and allow them to talk.
When I did counterintelligence investigations, they rarely saw the inside of a courtroom. That wasn’t the goal of them.
But history shows that when courts intervene because a president is trying to shield his own conduct, the deck is stacked against him.
In practice, presidents have typically tended to think of themselves not just as stewards for their party, but also of the presidency itself - preserving the full scope of its constitutional power for their successors is part of their job.
When presidents decide to litigate an issue to protect their policy decisions, they are more likely to act judiciously, and with an eye toward compromise, because they can see the larger implications for the legacy of their office.
White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative.
But I have to say, in my 12 years as the dean of admissions at Yale Law School, there was a lot of legal behaviour that I saw that worried me and that clearly was allowing wealthier and privileged students to tilt the balance in their favour.
For wealthy or privileged students, applying to Ivy League schools or elite schools is sort of expected of them. If you go to a prep school, for example, that's just what your guidance counsellor tells you.
Presidents have, of course, acted inappropriately in the past, and our constitutional system has a framework in place for addressing misconduct by the chief executive. But it’s designed to deal with straightforward criminal activity, not national security threats.
In a typical whistleblower scenario where the inspector general determines a complaint to be credible and urgent, there would be no colorable legal basis for the complaint to not reach Congress.
The president, by virtue of his office, can easily 'go dark' when it comes to conversations with foreign leaders, even if he makes promises or assurances that run contrary to the interests of the United States or even place the country in danger.
Unfortunately, once a person who is willing to act against the interests of the United States assumes the awesome powers of the presidency, the laws and investigative techniques we use in ordinary national security situations are woefully inadequate.
The FBI is not in the habit of leaving loose ends. That's not what they do.
Reflexive control is a 'uniquely Russian' technique of psychological manipulation through disinformation. The idea is to feed your adversary a set of assumptions that will produce a predictable response: That response, in turn, furthers a goal that advances your interests.
As a former F.B.I. special agent who conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that foreign intelligence services do not operate on the basis of explicit agreements or even actions that, standing alone, constitute criminal activity.
Foreign intelligence services rely on manipulating vulnerabilities over time - like greed, or fear of exposure of a secret - to puppeteer those under their influence into acting in their interests without saying a word.
Though my parents were professionals and expected me to go to college, they were immigrants from India with no idea about how the admissions process worked in the United States or the importance of standardized tests.
I was a pretty unsavvy applicant, and I am grateful that the dean of admissions at Princeton chose to take a chance on a girl from an average public high school in southern Virginia.
