Today’s Headlines and Commentary

A 15-year-old sophomore opened fire at his Michigan high school Tuesday, leaving three students dead and eight others injured, reports the Washington Post. It is unclear how he obtained the gun and what the gunman’s motive was. This appears to be the deadliest school shooting in more than 18 months.

Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff under President Trump, is now cooperating with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and has agreed to provide documents and sit for a deposition, says the New York Times. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the select committee, indicated that it was still unclear to what extent Meadows is willing to cooperate, saying “[t]he committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.” Meadows’s sudden cooperation may send a strong signal to lower-ranking former White House staff members under Trump that they should cooperate as well.

The European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, proposed on Wednesday that member states bordering Belarus should be allowed to suspend some protections for asylum seekers, reports the New York Times. The proposals, if adopted, would give government authorities in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland more time to process asylum claims, which some aid groups have criticized for potentially leaving asylum applicants in a state of limbo and in increasingly unsafe conditions.

The Center for Disease Control issued a directive Tuesday ordering airlines to turn over the names of passengers who have recently been in any of the eight southern African countries where the Omicron variant of coronavirus is known to be spreading, according to Reuters. 

A German court sentenced a former Islamic State member of genocide, war crimes and human traffiking on Tuesday for the death of a 5-year-old girl he had purchased as a slave in 2015, says BBC. Nora, who was tied to a window in the scorching heat before dying of thirst, was part of the persecuted Kurdish-speaking minority, the Yazidis. Prosecutors said that Al-Jumailly killed the girl because she was a Yazidi minority and he intended to wipe them out.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger spoke with the Jan. 6 select committee for more than four hours Tuesday, writes the Hill. Raffensperger gave details of the now-infamous phone call in January when former President Trump pressed him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn results showing Joe Biden had won the state. “We talked about that and everything else leading into the election. That was their focus, because that was where the greatest disinformation was foisted upon our nation,” Raffensberg said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ICYMI: Yesterday on Lawfare

Jen Patja Howell shared an episode of the Lawfare Podcast in which Alvaro Marañon sat down with Mark Grzegorzewski and Margaret Smith to talk about a new model for cyber civic engagement, the role for Civil Air Patrol and the impact a local civil cyber organization could play in the community.

Steward Baker shared an episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, featuring: Paul Rosenzweig and Jordan Schneider to examine Beijing’s pressure on Didi to delist from a U.S. stock exchange, David Kris to cover a proposal from Lloyds of London; Rosenzweig and Baker to talk through Apple’s computer fraud and abuse lawsuit against NSO Group; Schneider to evaluate a Chinese province’s plan to construct a surveillance system for foreigners; along with a series of shorter updates.

Emily Dai shared the livestream of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit proceedings for the case Trump v. Thompson.

Rohini Kurup and Natalie K. Orpett introduced Lawfare’s January 6 Project, which compiles Lawfare’s coverage, analysis and resources related to the legal and policy issues arising out of the Jan. 6 attack and the government response.

Jack Goldsmith analyzed where the Biden administration is on presidential reform.

Klon Kitchen writes about how U.S. government access to at least some of the private data market, and the limiting of foreign access to this same information, is essential for national security.

Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Jonathan Shaub and Benjamin Wittes provided a summary of the Thompson hearing on whether former President Trump can block the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

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