The Lawfare Podcast

We normally think of international law as constraining leaders' actions, especially aggression toward other countries. But what if one effect of an established international principle actually spurs more covert action against other countries? Michael Poznansky is an assistant professor of International Affairs and Intelligence Studies in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, wit...

In this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ryan Merkley, the chief of staff to the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. We’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast discussing how social media platforms have handled issues of disinformation and misinformation. But what about Wikipedia? It’s a massive online encyclopedia wri...

Dr. Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He's also an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR). He is a scholar of, among other things, police-civilian relations and has done a lot of work on police-involved killings. He joined Benjami...

The president is threatening to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. This evening, he appears to have ordered a tear gas attack on peaceful protesters near the White House in order to stage a photo op in front of a local church. And he has called out troops in Washington, DC, and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. To talk through the legal ins and outs of what the president has do...

Journalist Bart Gellman is the author of the new book, "Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State." Jack Goldsmith sat down with Gellman to discuss the book. They spoke about Gellman's reporting on the Snowden affair, the scope of the National Security Agency's surveillance capabilities and press freedom as it relates to national security reporting. Support this show http://s...

Eli Lake is a columnist for Bloomberg and the author of a recent article in Commentary magazine on the case of Michael Flynn. In that article, he argues a number of things that many at Lawfare have argued against—that Michael Flynn was railroaded, that he was set up, that the FBI behaved inappropriately, and that the Justice Department pursued Michael Flynn unfairly and was thus correct under Atto...

In this episode of Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Gabrielle Lim, a researcher with the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and a fellow with Citizen Lab. Lim just released a new report with Data and Society on the fascinating story of a Malaysian law ostensibly aimed at stamp...

Hong Kong protesters are out in the streets once again, as the Beijing legislature contemplates a new national security law for the city, and the Hong Kong legislature considers a bill to make it a crime to disrespect the Chinese national anthem. It's all going relatively unnoticed amidst the international focus on the coronavirus, but Hong Kong is increasingly under the thumb of the Chinese Commu...

On Wednesday, NASA and the SpaceX Corporation are scheduled to send astronauts back into outer space from U.S. soil for the first time since the U.S. space shuttle program ended in 2011. The launch promises to kick off a new era in space exploration, one that will see the increased use of outer space for both public and private purposes, as well as greater involvement by private corporations and o...

Steven Teles is the author of a new book with Robert P. Saldin, "Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites." Benjamin Wittes spoke with Teles about the book, how the national security and legal communities approach Donald Trump and how these two schools of thought have informed the Never Trump movement. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...

This week on Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Deen’s work focuses on data science and political expression on social media, and they discussed research he conducted on tweets from the Internet Research Agency troll farm an...

There may not be many laws governing how former presidents should interact with the current commander-in-chief, or with each other, or how the sitting president should treat his or her predecessors. But over time, we have developed a body of norms about how to do so appropriately. Donald Trump has, to put it mildly, changed expectations about the relationships that presidents past and present have...

President Trump on Friday fired the inspector general of the State Department. It was the fourth time he had fired or removed an inspector general in just the last six weeks. As he explained in a letter to Capitol Hill leadership, he had lost confidence in the inspector general, though Democrats were quick to point out that he appeared to be investigating Mike Pompeo on a number of matters, and Mi...

The global pandemic has raised searching questions about the relationship between a public health emergency and free speech. Jack Goldsmith sat down with David Kaye, the outgoing U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, to talk about Kaye’s new U.N. report on “Disease pandemics and the freedom of opinion and expression.” The pair di...

The global coronavirus pandemic has changed the way different corners of the world interact with each other, perhaps forever. Nowhere is this more true than the global economy, where a decade's long trend toward the easier exchange of trade and investment was already under increasing political pressure when the pandemic broke. It may now be facing a truly unprecedented set of challenges. To discus...

On this week's episode of Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek spoke with Craig Silverman, the media editor for Buzzfeed News and one of the leading journalists covering the disinformation beat. Craig is credited with coining the phrase “Fake News.” Evelyn spoke with him about how he feels about that, especially now that the phrase has taken on a life of its own. The...

Scott R. Anderson sat down with Elizabeth Shackelford, a former foreign service officer whose late 2017 resignation became a sign of growing discontent with the Trump administration within the diplomatic corps. They talked about her new book, "The Dissent Channel," out this week, which discusses her experience as a young diplomat living through a period of crisis in South Sudan, and the lessons it...

The Supreme Court today held arguments in a blockbuster case. Do the Trump tax returns and associated financial documents at firms like Mazars and Deutsche Bank need to be turned over in response to congressional subpoenas and a subpoena by a New York State grand jury? Joining Benjamin Wittes to discuss it are Steve Vladeck, Quinta Jurecic and Margaret Taylor. They talked about how this confrontat...

From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations? Where did they come from, and how great is the damage? "Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office," by Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, which is excerpted in this episode, situates Trump era scandals and outrages in the dee...

The Justice Department moved this week to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn, a man who had pled guilty to lying to the FBI. It was an extraordinary move, one that provoked glee among the president's supporters and outrage among Justice Department traditionalists and critics of the president. On Friday, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare 's Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey, as well as wit...

Margaret Taylor sat down with Tony Mills, director of science policy at the R Street Institute, to talk about an article he recently wrote with Robert Cook-Deegan titled, " Where's Congress? Don't Just Blame Trump for the Coronavirus Catastrophe ." They talked about the limited role of Congress in responding to the current crisis, and more broadly, its diminished institutional capacity to absorb a...

For this week's episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Alina Polyakova talked to Aric Toler of Bellingcat, a collective that has quickly become the gold-standard for open source and social media investigations. Aric recently published a blog post in response to a New York Times article on Russian influence campaigns—one retweeted by former President Barak Obama...

Representative John Ratcliffe testified before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee as a part of his nomination for the position of Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe was asked about his views on Russian interference, about the threat posed by North Korea, about how he would handle a variety of issues posed by the coronavirus pandemic and much more. The hearing was fairly substantive...

Jung Pak is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former CIA analyst and a North Korea specialist. She is the author of "Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Analyst’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator.” She joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss Kim Jong Un, the recent questions about whether he had died or become seriously ill, his rise to power and his confrontations with...

Most of us don’t think of United States history as an imperial history, but the facts are there. The law and policy surrounding westward expansion, off-continent acquisitions, and a worldwide network of hundreds of bases reveal much about how and why the United States grew as it did. Last month, David Priess spoke with Daniel Immerwahr, associate professor of history at Northwestern University and...