There’s a line from Shakespeare that Mark Zaid keeps coming back to. It’s not a pious invocation. It’s a warning dressed as a compliment.
“The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers,” he says. “That’s not a derogatory term. It was because lawyers would uphold the rule of law and get in the way of any despots who were trying to overthrow the king.”
Henry VI. Dick the Butcher. A line from 1591 that reads, in April 2026, like a field intelligence report.
Zaid would know. He’s been on the list.
The Washington, D.C.-based national security attorney has spent three decades at the intersection of classified government and public accountability — representing intelligence community whistleblowers, Secret Service agents, Capitol Police officers, FBI analysts, and figures on every side of the post-9/11 security state. He co-founded Whistleblower Aid. He’s litigated against a sitting president. He’s walked into classified meetings about anomalous health incidents and walked out unable to say what he heard.
And for the past year-plus, he’s had his security clearance revoked — the stated reason, in his telling, being his representation of the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the first Trump impeachment.
I sat down with Zaid to pull together the threads: the Tulsi Gabbard rewrite of 2019 history, the pardoning of people who tried to kill police officers, the Kash Patel lawsuit against the press, military members consulting lawyers about potentially illegal orders regarding Iran, and a whistleblower complaint about anomalous health incidents that the Department of Defense inspector general closed without even asking a follow-up question.
It is a connected picture. Zaid connects the dots with the precision of someone who has lived inside each of them.
The press release Tulsi Gabbard issued in early 2026, purporting to declassify documents about the 2019 Ukraine whistleblower case, landed with a sharp noise in MAGA circles and nearly none elsewhere. I asked Zaid about it. He was blunt.
“The only reason that I have been given about why I lost my security clearance the first time last year was because of my representation of the intelligence community whistleblower back in 2019-2020. There were a lot of reasons why I crossed paths with Trump and his administration, numerous cases, but that was the one that was highlighted by folks as to why I was a threat.”
The Gabbard release, he argues, was structured retribution dressed as transparency.
“The release of this information is entirely to make anyone who was associated look bad and to try and refabricate the history of what we know happened the first time around.”
The historical record, Zaid points out, requires no declassification to read. The whistleblower complaint was released. The summary transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky was released. The substance of Gabbard’s so-called revelations was already public — and the documents she released weren’t classified in the first place.
“Those were inspector general protected documents, not classified. Remember, Trump declassified the whistleblower complaint. Trump declassified the summary transcript of his conversation with Zelensky. The interviews then would be collateral. They’d be derivative of the same information. So classification wasn’t the issue. It was protecting the integrity and the structure of the inspector general system.”
The inspector general system, Zaid notes with particular force, is supposed to be independent. The DNI does not control the intelligence community inspector general. The attorney general does not control the DOJ inspector general. The secretary of defense does not control the Pentagon’s inspector general.
“They are supposed to be independent individuals. And this shows they’re not, not at all.”
The most recent escalation: Gabbard has referred the whistleblower — who Zaid no longer represents — and former Inspector General Michael Atkinson for criminal prosecution. Whether Zaid and his co-counsel have themselves been referred, he says, remains unknown.
“Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
I told him I’d gone back through the Gabbard press release after writing about it myself. The items she highlighted as smoking guns appeared, on examination, in documents that had been publicly available for years. Nothing in the release was new. Nothing was secret. One of the MAGA talking points resurrected in the coverage — that the whistleblower lacked firsthand information — Zaid dispatched with barely controlled impatience.
“Nobody said the whistleblower had firsthand information. Wasn’t required. No whistleblower complaints require firsthand information. That’s a very basic function of whistleblowing. You have to have a reasonable good faith belief. And the whistleblower had been briefed as part of their official government responsibilities of the phone call.”
He walked through the mechanics of how this works — that when the president speaks with a foreign head of state, the relevant agencies are briefed afterward. Agriculture gets told about banana tariffs. Defense gets told about security agreements. It’s the process. That’s how the whistleblower learned what they learned. It wasn’t a leak. It was a briefing.
“That happens every time a president of the United States has a conversation with a foreign diplomat.”
The other claim being recycled — that Zaid conspired with then-House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff to write the complaint — he dispenses with a single fact.
“I didn’t even come into the case for five weeks. After the complaint had been filed.”
His co-counsel hadn’t seen the complaint until it was publicly released. The conspiracy theory requires him to have retroactively written a document that already existed. The math does not work. The MAGA media does not care.
And that, Zaid says, is the larger signal — the mainstream press, for the most part, gave the Gabbard release almost no scrutiny.
“Nobody in mainstream media has really focused on this. It has only been right-wing MAGA who are pushing the narrative.”
He pauses. Then adds: “Nobody contacted me from the media on either side.”
I asked Zaid to talk about January 6th. He has standing to. Within days of the attack, he began representing one of the senior intelligence officers at the Capitol Police Department. He then took on Harry Dunn — the first Capitol Police officer to speak publicly about what happened that day. He represents Sergeant Aquilino Ganel, who suffered injuries severe enough to require medical retirement. He represents the estate of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the aftermath.
“I watched what happened on January 6th live, as so many people did.”
He built the legal framework to let Dunn and Ganel speak to the media and to Congress without fear of retribution. He made sure everything they wrote was reviewed and cleared. “No one was going around or circumventing rules and regulations.”
Then Trump came back.
“President Trump, of course, ran on that he was going to pardon everybody. I think most people, including the Republicans, thought, well, he’s only going to talk about the people who were just trespassing, who just got caught up in the moment.”
If it had been limited to those cases, Zaid says, the response — even from people like him — might have been muted.
“If that had been the pardons, I think most people would have just gone, eh, okay, because they served their time. It’s not like you can take back that they were in jail.”
But it wasn’t limited.
“He pardoned everybody other than the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, including the people who literally tried to kill police officers.”
He stops himself, notes the additional fact almost as an aside: “They had a gallows to hang Mike Pence. And I wouldn’t have doubted had they found him or Nancy Pelosi that there would have been political legislative bloodshed.”
As for the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — who received commutations rather than pardons, meaning their convictions technically stand — the Justice Department has since moved to send those cases back to district court, which would erase the convictions entirely.
“Why in the world would that be done? You know, it’s dumbfounding.”
Zaid’s voice shifts here into something close to controlled disgust — the register of a man who has spent his career understanding that institutions hold because people inside them believe they must hold, and who is now watching the belief collapse.
“I don’t think there is a way to understand anyone who is a conservative Republican who in my lifetime was the party that supported the blue, that backed the blue, supported law enforcement — to think that these individuals who conspired to overthrow the U.S. government, who are part of militias who don’t even acknowledge the existence of actual government, and advocated for the harming of police officers — and yet this administration is just willing to...”
He trails off.
“I lose words every time I try and discuss this because I’m so disgusted by it.”
The Oath Keepers leadership, he notes, included people who weren’t even physically at the Capitol on January 6th — but who had organized the participants, secured weaponry, and staged an armed quick-reaction force at a Comfort Inn across the Virginia state line.
“They had at a separate site in Virginia literal actual guns and other weapons ready to go. They wanted to obey the gun laws. Because in Virginia, you can have weapons a lot easier. But in D.C., it’s very strict. But it’s well in the evidence that they did all of these things. No debate.”
He’s right about that last part. I’ve been through the evidence myself. Every frame of the documentary record sat on my desktop for months. There is no debate about what they planned.
As for some of the people who received pardons: “A lot of guys that did that, they went out and committed even more crimes after they got released and pardoned.” One attempted to argue that his pardon covered weapons charges related to threatening to kill FBI agents. He reportedly failed on that argument — but the fact that he tried tells you something about the ecosystem these pardons have created.
Kash Patel, now director of the FBI, sued The Atlantic and the reporter behind a story detailing concerns — sourced to between nine and two dozen individuals, depending on the allegation — that his drinking has interfered with his performance in office.
Zaid is not a neutral observer here. He represents a cohort of fired and targeted FBI analysts and agents, including, in one lawsuit, the former acting director of the Bureau who preceded Patel, the former special agent in charge of the Washington field office, and the former special agent in charge of Las Vegas.
“In that, there is an allegation we put that Patel had told one of them that the FBI official should file a defamation lawsuit against anyone, because that will, you know, muck up the works.”
It’s a tell. The lawsuit against The Atlantic is, in Zaid’s reading, not a serious legal proceeding. It is an instrument.
“It is nothing less than an intimidation tool. It stresses out people. It’s not fun. It costs a lot of money. It’s a resource consumption and it’s a bandwidth consumption.”
He noted an immediate effect: The Atlantic reporter was scheduled to appear on Dan Abrams’ Sirius XM show the day after the story ran. She had to cancel because of the lawsuit. That’s a chilling effect, even before a single motion is filed.
“Even though the Atlantic is standing steadfast behind her, this case will be litigated.” He noted that The Atlantic keeps re-promoting the same story, same article, multiple times since the suit was filed. “You wouldn’t see that if you didn’t believe in your sourcing.”
Patel’s odds in the litigation are, in Zaid’s assessment, essentially nonexistent.
“He’s a public figure. He’s a public official. He’s got to prove malice. There’s no way he’s going to be able to do that. The standard is just too high. There’s a reason why individuals at his stature by way of title do not bring these types of cases.”
And truth is the best defense. Zaid was characteristically direct about that.
Patel’s lawsuit uses the same law firm that handles a broader ecosystem of MAGA-sphere defamation suits — Rick Grinnell, Michael Flynn, cases formerly brought by Devin Nunes. Zaid has faced them repeatedly.
“They had organized people to go. — wait, no, that’s another quote.” He refocused. “The vast majority of cases that that firm has brought for in the MAGAsphere, they have either abandoned, lost. Every once in a while there might be a settlement, usually because there’s an insurance company that might be involved and they’re just rolling numbers and doing statistics — has nothing to do with the merits.”
The pattern: file, intimidate, drain resources, withdraw. In the Rick Grinnell case against Olivia Troy, they were on the eve of trial when the firm dismissed. A year later, they refiled. Zaid’s side defeated the case twice.
“We were on the eve of trial, and they dismissed the case. They just walk away.”
Could you imagine, I asked, James Comey suing Fox News during a previous administration?
“They would have laughed.”
That is the measure of how far the norm has moved. Senior government officials do not sue the press. They accept scrutiny as the price of public power. This administration has inverted that. The press is the target. The lawsuit is the message.
The courts, Zaid says, have been the one functioning check.
“The one shining light that exists so far is that the judiciary has continued to uphold the rule of law. That doesn’t mean every decision has gone every way that we want, because clearly they haven’t. And that’s fine. There is still a system in place.”
Roughly 70 percent of challenges to administration actions, he estimates, have been ruled against the administration — including by Trump-appointed judges. Including, occasionally, by the Supreme Court’s Trump-aligned majority.
“We’ve seen it even on the Supreme Court, which is why he lashes out at the justices who rule against him, who include his own.”
The legislative branch he dismisses in two words.
“They checked out. They’re useless right now.”
He draws a comparison that frames just how different this administration is from any in his professional memory — and he was a young lawyer during Watergate.
“Even if you look back to the Nixon administration — there were career politicians who, while one could certainly question their moral integrity on certain issues, and that they wouldn’t necessarily follow the law if it didn’t suit them — they followed norms. And that’s the difference, in my view, between this administration and past ones. This administration throws every norm out the window. There is nothing that they think they cannot do. There is nothing that they do not think they are entitled to.”
Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford pardoned him not to help his friend, Zaid argues, but because he believed it was better for the country. The instinct that held even through Watergate — the sense that there is a country beyond the immediate political contest — is what he sees as absent now.
“Whereas Nixon, the mere fact that he resigned was demonstrative of he knew what was not only better for him but better for the United States.”
I mentioned the Bush and Cheney era — how what was done to journalists and lawyers then, including to people like Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, felt like a serious violation of norms at the time. Zaid didn’t dispute it. He calibrated it.
“This is such an order of magnitude different that it’s a shit show on a shit show on top of a gaslight.”
I raised Iran. The nonstop drumbeat of potential military action. Whether any of it was showing up in the cases reaching Zaid’s desk.
“Yes, absolutely.”
He said his firm has been contacted by military members with concerns about illegal orders. Specifically, concerns about operations related to Iran that could lead to boots on the ground, or — he said this with care — “concerns of use of potentially nuclear weapons.”
Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid, which provides free legal representation to national security whistleblowers. He’s a fellow at the National Institute of Military Justice, which runs what’s called the Orders Project — legal guidance for service members trying to understand how to properly respond to an order they believe is unlawful.
Earlier in this administration’s term, he said, the inquiries were heavier around Greenland — military members saying they would resign and speak out if the U.S. moved against a NATO ally. That pressure dissipated as the administration moved on.
“Something distracted Trump and he’s moved on to, you know, the next item, which at the moment is Iran.”
He noted the Venezuela episode — the reported removal of Maduro, the apparent intent to run the country — as another example of an initiative that generated enormous noise and then simply vanished from the news cycle. No accounting. No follow-up. The attention span of the crisis doesn’t match the gravity of the action.
The anomalous health incidents — still widely called Havana Syndrome, though the term is insufficient, since cases have been reported far beyond Cuba — have been Zaid’s most operationally active classified legal work. He attends classified meetings on the topic regularly. He does not say what is discussed.
What he will say is this: his firm represents a whistleblower at the Department of Defense who filed a detailed ten-page complaint about waste, fraud, abuse, and national security threats related to AHI. The complaint went to the Department of Defense inspector general’s office last month. Last week, they received an email informing them the case had been closed.
“No action, no warning, no interview. They didn’t even ask for additional information. They just shut the case completely down.”
The bureaucratic burial of a whistleblower complaint — without a meeting, without a request for more information, without any apparent inquiry at all — is exactly the behavior Zaid identified at the top of our conversation as the consequence of an inspector general system that has ceased to function as independent.
On the underlying substance of what these incidents are and where they come from, Zaid was as direct as he could be.
“I think we are moving closer and closer towards identifying who the culprit is. The unit you mentioned, it’s Russia.”
He used the iceberg image deliberately. The classified picture, he said, is vastly larger than what is publicly known. The real damage runs beneath the surface. “That’s what sank the Titanic. It hit the iceberg beneath the waterline.”
The classification layer protecting that information sits primarily within the CIA. Zaid said he believes it is the CIA that has been “keeping the cover-up going.”
His security clearance — the one revoked as apparent retribution for his 2019 whistleblower work — he uses most heavily on AHI cases. The revocation, which he has since recovered pending an appeal with arguments scheduled next month, was targeted precisely at the cases where his access matters most.
“The case that I use my security clearance the most is about AHIs. I go through, I participate in classified meetings all the time about AHIs.”
He stopped just short of saying what those meetings contain. But the implication was explicit: “I will tell you that were that information to be known, people would have different opinions about the topic.”
Near the end of our conversation, Zaid said something about the press that felt worth holding onto — not because it was sentimental, but because it was precise.
He contrasted outlets that have capitulated — CBS, ABC, law firms that settled rather than fight — with outlets that have held.
“Unlike CBS, unlike ABC, unlike the law firms who settled and capitulated, because all of those decisions are, frankly, not substantive. They’re not concerned about the facts. They were concerned about money. They were concerned about mergers. They were concerned about FCC issues.”
The Atlantic, he said, has become one of the leading outlets holding this administration’s feet to the fire. He added, with some surprise in his voice, the Wall Street Journal.
“Which is fantastic to see, because it’s not about being part of it.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is now facing a DOJ investigation over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups — the same basic investigative methodology that law enforcement has used for decades. I asked Zaid what he made of the juxtaposition: an organization that once partnered with the FBI to track domestic extremists now being criminally investigated by an administration that has freed those extremists.
“If I were O’Keefe and Project Veritas, I would be really concerned because I’m not sure they can make a distinction other than partisan favor. And that’s not a lawful distinction.”
He sat with that for a moment. The law, applied selectively. The distinction not legal but political.
That’s the condition Zaid operates in. Not the collapse of the system — at least not yet. The judiciary still functions. Cases are still being won. The rule of law has not been extinguished. But the inspector generals are compromised. The legislature has abdicated. The executive branch is pursuing its critics through litigation, through clearance revocation, through criminal referrals of whistleblowers and their lawyers.
“There is nothing that they think they cannot do. There is nothing that they do not think they are entitled to.”
We’ll be covering more between now and whenever this ends. Zaid said as much at the close.
What he didn’t say — what he didn’t need to say — is whether it ends.
