Courts & Litigation Criminal Justice & the Rule of Law

The Lawfare Podcast: Brian Greer on Silent Witnesses

Benjamin Wittes, Brian Greer
Monday, June 12, 2023, 5:00 AM
How do you prove that the former president mishandled classified information without presenting a lot of classified information in open court? 
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The indictment filed last week against former President Donald Trump involves hundreds of classified documents, and the first 31 charges involve mishandling individual classified documents. This raises the specter of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, which is the major instrument through which we handle classified material in criminal cases. How do you prove that the former president mishandled classified information without presenting a lot of classified information in open court? 

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Brian Greer, former CIA lawyer and the man behind the @secretsandlaws Twitter account, to talk about the Justice Department's options for presenting these 31 documents in court, about whether they can be declassified, and about whether the department can use something called the “silent witness rule.”

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Courts & Litigation Criminal Justice & the Rule of Law
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Benjamin Wittes

Benjamin Wittes

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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.

Brian Greer

secretsandlaws
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Brian D. Greer was an attorney at the CIA’s Office of General Counsel from 2010 to 2018. He served as the chief of staff to General Counsel Caroline Krass and was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service. Earlier in his career, he served as deputy chief of the Office of General Counsel’s Litigation Division and as an operations attorney in the Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center and the East Asia Division.

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