We were thrilled to host a conversation with Brennan Center for Justice Senior Advisor Barton Gellman and national security expert Rosa Brooks, moderated by journalist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. They discussed the tabletop “what if” exercises conducted this summer, highlighting the need for defenders of democracy to prepare more robustly to mitigate potential threats of a second Trump Presidency to our constitutional government. While not all abuses can be entirely prevented, there are important steps we must take to combat these threats.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
Barton Gellman is Senior Advisor to the president and executive director of the Brennan Center. His focus is on building safeguards against threats to democracy in the 2024 election and in the presidential administration to come in 2025. Gellman joined the Brennan Center from The Atlantic, where he was an award-winning staff writer. He is the author most recently of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Gellman has received multiple professional honors including; the 2008 and 2014 Pulitzer Prizes, two George Polk Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, two Emmy awards for a PBS Frontline documentary, Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Rosa Brooks holds the Scott K. Ginsburg Chair in Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has served as a tenured professor since 2006. She also serves as Georgetown Law’s Associate Dean for Centers and Institutes and as co-director of Georgetown’s Center on Innovations in Public Safety. She is also an Adjunct Senior Scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, an ASU Future of War Senior Fellow at New America and a founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS). From April 2016 to November 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a senior opinion writer and columnist at The Boston Globe. She is also an MSNBC contributor, a frequent panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and co-host of the weekly Politicon legal news podcast #SistersInLaw. Previously, Kim was the inaugural columnist for The Emancipator, a collaboration between The Boston Globe and Boston University’s Center for Anti Racist Research that reframes the conversation about racial justice and equality.
