Josh mentions to Sam that Lincoln signed a pardon on April 14, 1865, the same day he was shot. Until over a decade after this episode was filmed, historians thought this was true. However, in January 2011, Lincoln researcher Thomas Lowry admitted that he had altered the date of the pardon (which he had "discovered" in the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives) from 1864 to 1865 so that it would seem more historically significant.
During an episode of the "West Wing Weekly" podcast hosted by Joshua Malina and Hrishikesh Hirway, Aaron Sorkin told the story of how he came to use some lyrics from the Don Henley song "New York Minute" as the episode title and prominently include the song throughout: "That's an example of the half dozen or so times I've worked backwards. You need to write next week's script and you don't have any ideas because if you did they'd've been last week's script. You go out driving in your car and turn on music because that's sometimes worked for you in the past, you hear the Don Henley song which you've heard a hundred times before, but this time it puts you in a certain mood and you want to write something that has that mood. More specifically, you want to write something that earns that lyric as the title, you actually have a title before you have a story, but at least you have a title and that's something. And something, when you're writing, is always better than nothing."
The map in the situation room appears to be a Peters Projection.
In the meeting with the WTO protesters, Toby calls the leader Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and its totalitarianism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was eventually sent to a labor camp and exiled from Russia in 1974 before having his citizenship restored in 1990.
The plot point involving Sam Seaborn's father having had an affair for 28 years is a mirror to the first-season episode of Sports Night (1998) titled The Sword of Orion (1999), in which Jeremy discovers that his father has had an affair for 27 years. In both episodes, the character embarks upon an investigation to discover the truth behind an incident in the past. The investigation is eventually revealed to be a metaphor for the character's lack of understanding about his father's actions and how the infidelity has affected his outlook on life. Both shows were created by Aaron Sorkin.