CNS Fellows

John O. Brennan served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. Before becoming Director, Mr. Brennan served at the White House for four years as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. He is the author of Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies, At Home and Abroad (2020).

Director Brennan is currently the Senior National Security and Intelligence Analyst and Contributor for NBC and MSNBC News programs. He is a Distinguished Fellow at CNS and a Senior Advisor and Distinguished Scholar for the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Principal of WestExec Advisors and a member of FAMIL’s Board of Advisors. He is also a member of the board of trustees of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Director Brennan graduated from Fordham University in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in political science​. He then ​​​​earned a master’s degree in government with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

Jacqueline L. Barkett is a Trial Attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division, Counterterrorism Section. Ms. Barkett joined the section through the U.S. Department of Justice Honor’s Program. As a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., Ms. Barkett prosecuted and/or investigated national security cases, firearm and drug offenses. During her time at the D.C. USAO, Ms. Barkett prosecuted a Hezbollah financier for a money laundering scheme involving the evasion of U.S. sanctions. Following her time with the D.C. USAO, Ms. Barkett was a Counselor to the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security where she provided confidential, high-level legal and policy support for the National Security Division’s Assistant Attorney General on complex and highly sensitive national security programs. Most recently, as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the National Security and Cybercrime section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Barkett has investigated federal crimes ranging from material support to terrorism, terrorism transcending national boundaries and cyber matters. Prior to her DOJ service, Ms. Barkett worked at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, Italy and for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Beirut, Lebanon.

John Berger joins the Center on National Security as a Senior Fellow and Managing Editor and Moderator of Vital Interests: U.S. Foreign Policy and the 2020 Election. He has been involved in international publishing for three decades – first with Wolters Kluwer and then with Cambridge University Press. He has worked with authors from around the world publishing books on issues related to rule of law, human rights, humanitarian law, war and peace, transitional justice, international criminal law, global governance, national security, and counterterrorism. He is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

June 11, 2020: BAMLS Event - Security vs. Liberty? COVID-19 and Challenges to National Security Law

Joshua L. Dratel is a New York-based lawyer. Mr. Dratel has been involved in some of the past three decades' most important cases involving national security, terrorism, international law, and civil liberties. Mr. Dratel is co-editor with Karen J. Greenberg of the prize-winning The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (2005), and The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (2008). He is a past President of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2005), as well as Co-Chair of the Amicus Curiae Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Sheila Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy (joint appointment with the McCourt School). Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a University Professor and the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law at Fordham University. She also co-directed the Fordham Urban Law Center and was a founder of the Fordham University Urban Consortium. She served as Associate Dean and then Vice Dean at Fordham Law School from 2008-2014. Prior to joining Fordham, she was a Professor of Law at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

Professor Foster writes in the areas of environmental law and justice, urban land use law and policy, and state and local government. Her most recent work explores questions of urban law and governance through the lens of the “commons” exemplified by her article The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review (2016) and forthcoming MIT Press Book, The Co-City.

Professor Foster has been involved on many levels with urban policy. She currently is the chair of the advisory committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovation Working Group, an advisory board member of the Marron Institute for Urban Management at NYU, and sits on the New York City Panel on Climate Change.As co-director with Christian Iaione of the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov), she is currently engaged in the “Co-Cities Project,” an applied research project on public policies and local projects from over 100 cities around the world.

Donald Glascoff is a documentary film maker and retired attorney. He has produced three full-length documentaries, including the 2007 Academy Award winning "Taxi To The Dark Side," on which he was the Executive Producer. The major theme of his work is the preservation of human rights and individual liberties. Prior to his film career, Don was a partner and co-chairman of the oldest Wall Street law firm, Cadwalader. He also served as Chairman of the Park Avenue Bank and on the Boards of Renco Metals and Magnesium Corporation of America. Don is the Founder and was Chairman of Oxford University's Programme in Public Interest Law and Policy. In addition to his film career, Don continues to be an active real estate investor. He served the United States Government as a Captain in the Army and Deputy General Council of The Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is a graduate of Yale College and Cornell Law School.

Assaf Moghadam currently serves as Dean of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya), Israel’s first and only private university. He holds fellowships at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School (CNS); the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC); and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). Prof. Moghadam has previously taught at the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and at the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he also served as Director of Terrorism Studies. Prof. Moghadam held pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, both at Harvard University.

Michel Paradis is a leading human rights lawyer and national security law scholar. He has won high-profile cases around the globe, including some of the landmark cases to arise out of Guantanamo Bay for the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commission Defense Organization. He is a Lecturer at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on national security law, international law, and the constitution and a fellow at the Center on National Security. He has appeared on or written for CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Lawfare, Just Security, among other publications. Most recently, he is the author of the best-selling book Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice (Simon & Schuster 2020), about war crimes trials in the Pacific after World War II. He was awarded his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Campion Scholar, and received his law degree from Fordham Law School in New York. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

David Rohde is the executive editor for news of NewYorker.com. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, he covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Bosnia and is a former reporter for Reuters, the New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. His most recent book, “In Deep,” investigated growing fears on the left and right of an American "Deep State” and the effectiveness of government oversight of the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

Lawrence Wright has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. He is also an author, a screenwriter, and a playwright. His work has won numerous awards including: the National Magazine Award (1993, 2011) and the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism (1993), and three Emmys. His HBO series, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (2006), was translated into twenty-four languages and won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.His most recent book is “God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State,” parts of which were published in the magazine. The book has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. His works have been featured in The New Yorker Festival, Off Broadway in various cities around the country, and various theaters around the world.

Sean Steinberg is a Research Fellow at the Center on National Security, where he is tasked with overseeing research projects into reforming the Department of Justice and securing the 2024 U.S. elections. Sean’s geopolitical analysis has been featured in international news broadcasts and newspapers in English, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian; his written work on democracy and technology has appeared in Slate and other digital publications; and he has produced several documentaries on landmark cybersecurity events with an Emmy award-winning filmmaker. He brings 8 years of professional experience to this role from journalism, media, think tanks, politics, and NGOs.

Prior to joining CNS, Sean worked at the Soufan Center, where he distilled geopolitical analysis into over 100 articles and co-authored a comprehensive report on the Russian private military company known as the Wagner Group. He also oversaw the center’s Securing the Future Initiative, which analyzed two decades of counterterrorism policy and missteps at the UN Security Council. Before that, he held fellowships with the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and the Eurasia Group Foundation; served on disaster operations with the the American Red Cross; staffed a Congressional election campaign; and led a research team delivering policy recommendations to the U.S. State Department, which aimed to steer NATO’s response to Russian pressure in and around the Black Sea.

Peter Bergen is an author, documentary producer, podcast host, professor of practice at Arizona State University, vice president at New America, and CNN's national security analyst. He has written or edited ten books about national security issues, three of which were New York Times best sellers. They have been translated into 24 languages. He has testified before US Congressional committees 18 times about national security issues and has held positions teaching graduate students about those issues at Harvard and John Hopkins University. Bergen has produced multiple documentaries for CNN, HBO, Discovery, National Geographic, and Showtime. He has been nominated for four Emmys, and an HBO film based on one of his books won the Emmy for best documentary. He hosts the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen. He is the board chair of the Global Special Operations Foundation, a Homeland Security Experts Group member, and a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security. He has a degree in Modern History from Oxford.