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The Lawfare Podcast: Monaco and Yan on Coronavirus

Jen Patja, Benjamin Wittes, Lisa Monaco, Sophia Yan
Saturday, February 22, 2020, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Lisa Monaco was Barack Obama's counterterrorism and Homeland Security advisor in the White House, and headed the Justice Department's national security division. Sophia Yan is a Beijing-based correspondent for the British newspaper The Telegraph. Lisa and Sophia may not seem to have a lot in common, but these days, they are both spending a lot of time thinking about coronavirus. Monaco managed epidemic and pandemic disease events for the Obama administration, and Yan is in the middle of covering the ongoing epidemic in China. Benjamin Wittes joined Lisa (in the Jungle Studio) and Sophia (remotely from Beijing) on Thursday to talk about how the Chinese government has responded, how the Trump administration has responded, and how much worse this is likely to get before it ebbs.



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Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
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.
Lisa Monaco served as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism from 2013 to 2017. A career federal prosecutor, she previously spent 15 years in the United States Department of Justice, where she served in senior leadership roles including as Assistant Attorney General for National Security from 2011 to 2013 and as Special Counsel and then Chief of Staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller from 2006 to 2009. She is currently Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School and Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Sophia Yan is a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph, and has covered East Asia for more than a decade. She reports extensively on human rights, investigating China’s crackdown against ethnic minority groups, and unveiling human trafficking networks between China and the US.

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