Maxwell School News

Discussions between public and private entities will ultimately come down to how profitable a deal is in light of the changes, says David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School. The requirement for master development plans will probably lead to better-managed projects, he adds.

"Going after these records will provide more details about relationship of any Russian financial interests and any Trump business ties," analyzes William C. Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs. 

"If the facts are read, the FBI was balanced in making its request to the FISA court, as they always have been," says Professor Emeritus William C. Banks.

William C. Banks, professor emeritus, of public administration and international affairs, spoke with several media outlets about the Nunes memo, how the FISA process works, and what the controversy means for the Trump presidency and the U.S. intelligence community.

William C. Banks, professor of practice of public administration and international affairs says, "Trump has already said certain things that support at least a serious inquiry into whether obstruction has been committed. Whether [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions tries to stonewall with the privilege claims or some other, the facts are going to be discovered by the Mueller team in the not-too-distant future."

William Banks, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs, discusses the House’s passage of an extension to the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Act.

"It is fair to wonder about the [Christopher] Steele dossier and how it came into the hands of our intelligence community," said William Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs. "The bottom line, however, is that whatever role this dossier has played, our intelligence community had other sources that would have led them to the information about the Russian interference in the election even if Steele had never tried to share his dossier with the United States."

"I think the fact that [George] Papadopoulos had a meeting early on or had connections early on with Russian government officials while he was employed by the Trump campaign is pretty damaging," says William C. Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

“This is a tremendously costly endeavor, and that’s why we haven’t done it already,” says Pete Wilcoxen, director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration, about revising the EPA's model for evaluating the broad economic costs and benefits of air pollution regulations.

"The Mueller investigation from the beginning has been about potential collusion, and this would be additional evidence of potential collusion involving the campaign, in particular of General Flynn," says Professor Emeritus William C. Banks.

"I think it's a very disturbing trend for the President to turn the relationship between the presidency and the justice department into an adversarial relationship based on political points of view. The justice department is charged with enforcing the law, it's that simple, and they shouldn't be influenced to do so in a certain way by the president or anyone else," says William C. Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

"The Justice Department could certainly apply pressure on Mueller's team to hasten the investigation, make it difficult to obtain the funds beyond certain periods to continue to investigate; more likely that those kinds of informal pressures would be applied rather than removal itself," said William Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs and director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

William C. Banks, professor of practice of public administration an international affairs, says it is up to individual states to reveal the extent to which their systems have been intruded upon. He adds that a federalized system with wide stratification of election officials bound to the county level makes the system resilient and harder to damage.