To some extent, most government policymaking has a sausage element to it. Together, we were helping produce documents that would go to the national security adviser (Jake Sullivan) to inform his policy advice to the president, or they might go to the White House counsel (at the time, Dana Remus) to inform the legal advice she was providing to the president.ĭoes that end up creating a clean slice of meat or a piece of sausage? That process, as I understand it, had fallen by the wayside under the prior administration. We were very focused on reinstituting this interagency legal process when we got there in January 2021. So you’re doing a lot of coordinating, a lot of consulting, bringing people together for meetings. You are less often developing the legal analysis yourself instead, you are trying to get the wisdom of all the interagency general counsels on how to approach a particular problem or what courses of action are legally available. So you’re trying to produce the best advice you can provide to senior members of the NSC and to the White House more broadly. The National Security Council is an interagency coordinating body, first and foremost. What was the meat of your role at the National Security Council? She sat down to talk about experience she gathered on her most recent detour to Washington working on sensitive national security issues, but let’s be honest: She couldn’t really say much about it.

State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, including as assistant legal adviser for political-military affairs, working on issues related to the law of armed conflict, the use of force, conventional weapons and the legal framework for the conflict with al-Qaida.

Before joining academia, she spent 10 years working in various capacities at the U.S. Professor Ashley Deeks has returned to her home at the University of Virginia School of Law after taking a 17-month hiatus to serve as White House associate counsel and deputy legal adviser for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.Īt UVA, her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of international law, national security, intelligence and the laws of war.

A real jesus piece