The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Jimmy Rushton, a Kyiv-based journalist and security analyst who recently published, “How Ukraine gained the upper hand in the drone war against Russia,” in the Kyiv Independent. They talk about how the balance of power in the drone war seems to have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, Russia's latest missile strike on Kyiv, and what it all means for R...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower and Eric Columbus, and his Brookings colleague Molly Reynolds, to talk through a couple of the week’s big news stories in domestic politics, including:“The Grift That Keeps On Giving.” Last week, the Justice Department announced the creation of a so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund of nearly 1.8 billion taxpayer dollars, from which pur...

Sean Wiswesser, author of the new book, “Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War,” and a former senior operations officer with the CIA, joins Lawfare’s Justin Sherman to discuss the major Russian security organs and their training, characteristics of Russian “sticks-and-bricks” surveillance and counter-surveillance tradecraft, and the Russians’ use of coe...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Sophia Yan, a senior foreign correspondent with The Telegraph, to discuss her time reporting on the Chinese government, and how it leveraged its security services to investigate her in turn. Sophia recently wrote in-depth about this experience in “The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me,” in The Telegraph. Hosted on Acast. See...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Eve Fairbanks, a writer and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, a magazine of international writing, to discuss The Dial’s forthcoming book, “How We See it: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump” (out June 9 from The New...

On this month’s minipod, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talked with Lawfare Contributing Editor and a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law Bob Bauer about proposals for jurisdiction-stripping and other reforms for the Supreme Court. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff discussed the Department of Justice’s newly-announced “Anti-Weaponization Fund” which purports to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare,” oral argument in Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War before the Court...

From April 2, 2025: Atul Gawande is a surgeon and a public health expert. He's also the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that the Trump administration has prioritized for dismantling since its first day in office. On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gawande to discuss what USAID does, the consequences of...

From January 23, 2025: Alexis Loeb, the former Deputy Chief of the Capitol Siege Section of the Department of Justice, sits down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about President Trump's blanket pardons and commutations for everyone her unit prosecuted. She discusses how she became involved with the cases; how they were handled by prosecutors, judges, and juries;...

This week, the Department of Justice announced that Trump and his sons dropped their lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury in exchange for a $1.776 billion fund for Trump’s allies and blanket immunity from government suits for the Trump family.Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Senior Editor Eric Columbus about what the settlement means, where it came from, and what can be done abou...

This week, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Brookings Senior Fellow Kari Heerman to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:“With Friends Like Xi.” This past week, top U.S. officials and business CEOs traveled with President Trump to Beijing for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit had a warm air to it, with Trump going so far as...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Daniel Bell, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, who recently wrote, “Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future.” They discuss the ongoing influence of ancient Chinese political theory on the contemporary policies of the PRC and its domestic debates. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

On May 20 at 12 pm ET, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien answered Lawfare material supporter questions on immigration policy, litigation surrounding the mandatory detention policy from the administration, and more. Listen to the webinar, available exclusively for paid supporters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pri...

Loren Voss, Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Jeffrey Stern to discuss his new book "The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare."They talk about the development of the Paveway bomb and the importance of precision weapons to modern warfare. Stern grapples with their complicated effects on warfare, both adding precision to warfare that can reduce civi...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Antonia Senior, whose new book on the history of the Cambridge spy ring, “Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire,” comes out in the United States at end of this month. They talk about the history of the spy ring, how they were recruited, how they were unmasked, and their lasting effect on the culture of espionage. Hos...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Boulee denying Fulton County’s motion for the return of the 2020 election ballots seized by the FBI, a judge ordering the National Endowment for Humanities to rescind DOGE-backed cancellation of grants, oral argument in Mark K...

From May 15, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman talked with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, both Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss their recent Lawfare article, "Beijing's Changing Invasion Calculus: How China Might Put Taiwan in its Crosshairs." Together they discuss how China mi...

From January 10, 2023: District Attorney of Fulton County Fani Willis has completed her special grand jury investigation of election tampering in 2020. The special purpose grand jury has completed its report and has been dissolved, and the supervising judge yesterday scheduled a hearing for January 24 to decide whether to make the report public. What will happen next? Will there be indictments? Ar...

Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Danylo Mokryk, a war crimes investigator at the Kyiv Independent and the author of a YouTube blog about domestic Ukrainian Politics, to talk about the latest corruption saga engulfing the Ukrainian government—and why, despite so many arrows pointing toward Zelensky personally, no one is calling for his removal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privac...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Foreign Policy Editor Dana Stuster for a little chat with the guys about the week’s big national security news stories, including:“Minding Your Bs and Ts.” President Trump arrived in China this week alongside top U.S. officials and business executives for a much-anticipated summit with President Xi Jinping. U....

On today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Rep. Sara Jacobs, who represents California’s 51st congressional district. As a member of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, Rep. Jacobs has taken a lead role on an array of foreign affairs-related legislation. Before being elected to Congress, she worked for the U.S. Department of State and the United...

For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Holly Berkley Fletcher, former CIA Africa analyst, and Alexander Palmer, fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss the growth of terrorism and instability in East and West Africa, the fragility of regional governments, and how the United States and other outsi...

Candace Rondeaux, the founder and principal of Frontline Atlas, an independent geopolitical risk intelligence hub; a professor with the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University; and a senior fellow in global security at New America joins Lawfare’s Justin Sherman to discuss the latest geopolitics, operations, and state of Russian private military companies (PMCs). They discuss the cur...

In February, the Trump administration launched Operation Epic Fury in Iran—without congressional approval. The War Powers Resolution is supposed to constrain the president's ability to wage war. But is it? On today's podcast, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson about what that law says, whether it's affecting the administration's conduct, and how...

From July 17, 2023: The only thing more impressive than the performance of generative AI systems like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion is the sheer volume of training data that went into these systems. GPT was reportedly trained on, essentially, the entire Internet, while Stable Diffusion and other image-generation models rely on hundred of millions if not billions of existing pieces of artwork. Of cour...