The Lawfare Podcast

There’s a new twist in one of the stranger subplots of  L’Affaire Russe:  Buzzfeed News reports  that Peter Smith, a Republican operative who reportedly sought to obtain missing Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, made several suspicious withdrawals from bank accounts during the timeframe of his quest for Clinton’s emails—suggesting that he may have paid people he believe...

Encryption usually takes center stage in debates over digital evidence, and the sensitivities around the issue often halt discussions before reaching practical solutions. But on July 25, the Center for Strategic and International Studies unveiled a new report detailing solutions to other, less-fraught challenges that digital evidence presents to federal law enforcement. The launch event featured a...

Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo, and video editing software, are nothing new, but what happens when these technologies are paired with artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic media of things that never happened? This new phenomenon, called "deep fakes," poses significant problems for lawyers, policymakers, and technologists. On July 19, Klon Kitch...

For years, Shane Harris of The Washington Post has been fascinated with the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe. But that search raises a profound question: Should we try to communicate with aliens? Is there a risk to alerting a potentially hostile species to our presence? On July 12, Shane moderated a conversation hosted by Future Tense with Lucianne Walkowicz, the Chair of Astrobiol...

The British government is falling apart, Brexit talks are on the rocks, and into the maelstrom walks Donald Trump to walk in front of the Queen after having tea with her. It's been a bad period in the Brexit negotiations. To talk it through, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Tom Wright, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe; Amanda Sloat, the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Cent...

Justice Kennedy's resignation and the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his replacement promises to usher in a new era of the U.S. Supreme Court, not least in the areas of foreign relations and national security law. To hash out what these changes might mean, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson spoke with Jen Mascott of the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, Steve Vl...

The Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance on U.S. trade relations, opting for bilateral negotiations, and in many cases, eschewing the multilateral trade order. The administration is collapsing the distinction between economic security and national security, and this has been painfully apparent in our trade war with China. Tensions with China are escalating. On Tuesday, Lawfare senio...

On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki for their first one-on-one summit, where the U.S. president said that he trusted the Russian president's denial of election interference over his own intelligence community. In the United States, furor followed on both sides of the aisle. To break down what happened and what it means, Alina Polyakova sat do...

On Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for their role in the theft and dissemination of documents from the DNC, the DCCC and the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election. Susan Hennessey, David Kris, Paul Rosenzweig, Matt Tait and Benjamin Wittes got together to make sense of the news. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Ac...

#AbolishICE is the hashtag that has proliferated all over Twitter. Anger over the family separation policy of the Trump administration has many people doubting whether the agency that does interior immigration enforcement is up to a humane performance of its task. Paul Rosenzweig, former policy guru at DHS where he supervised immigration matters, and Carrie Cordero, who has been actively engaged o...

It's been a bad week for Polish democracy, with the government removing a bunch of judges from the country's Supreme Court in order to replace them with party loyalists. In response, protestors took to the streets to push back against the deconsolidation of Polish democracy. Radek Sikorski joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the week's events and the larger degradation of Polish governance of which...

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the Turkish election the other day, and becomes the first president under Turkey's new empowered presidential system. His party, in coalition with ultra-nationalists, will control the Parliament as well, so it's a big win for the Turkish president. It may be a loss for democratic values. On Tuesday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Amanda Sloat, Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at...

On June 22, the Supreme Court released its long-awaited ruling in Carpenter v. United States , a case challenging whether law enforcement agencies need a search warrant to acquire the history of a cell phone's location from a wireless provider. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the five-justice majority that doing so amounts to a 4th Amendment search, a decision that will have far-reaching impl...

With the media and political commentators focused on family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, few are paying attention to how developments along Mexico's southern border affect the United States. On Monday, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at The University of Texas at Austin, who has spent the past several weeks in the field studying the...

Gen. Michael Hayden has served as the head of both the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency—and he says that intelligence is under attack. In his latest book, “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies,” Gen. Hayden argues that in what he calls a post-truth world, the United States needs its intelligence community now as much as ever. All the mor...

From manufacturing to healthcare, and from criminal justice to national security, artificial intelligence is changing nearly every sector of the global economy and many aspects of our public and private lives. And as artificial intelligence technology races ahead, its political, legal, and ethical considerations cannot be left undiscussed. Last Tuesday, as part of the A. Alfred Taubman Forum on Pu...

This week, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a gigantic report on the FBI's handling of the Clinton emails matter/investigation during the 2016 election cycle. On Friday, Benjamin Wittes got together with Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare's managing editor; Carrie Cordero, former Justice Department official and Lawfare contributor; and Marty Lederman of Just Security and the Geo...

On Tuesday, in Singapore, after doubts about whether the Summit would happen, President Trump met for several hours with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, culminating in a joint declaration between the two heads of state. Just after the declaration dropped, North Korea experts Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at Yale's Paul Tsai China Center, and Steph Haggard, a professor at UC San Diego, joined...

Economic welfare and national security have never been mutually exclusive, but trade has factored into the national security discourse prominently in recent days, with the administration announcing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in the name of national security, the backlash from American allies, and the current standoff with China. On Thursday, June 7, Shannon Mercer sat down with Megan Re...

Former FBI agent and Army officer Clint Watts has spent years hunting down terrorists and Russian disinformation on the Internet in his spare time. In his new book, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News, Watts documents what he learned from his experience. On Monday, he sat down with Benjamin Wittes in the Jungle Studio for a conv...

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) plays an essential role in advising the president on how to exercise his or her authority to block foreign investments that might let the U.S.'s adversaries acquire sensitive American technology or intellectual property. A bipartisan proposal in Congress aims to expand CFIUS's powers. On Thursday, the Center for Strategic and Interna...

In January 2017, Donald Trump inherited a complex, multifaceted counterterrorism campaign, and since taking office, he has escalated it rhetorically and operationally. On Tuesday, New America convened a panel with Joshua Geltzer and Luke Hartig, both former senior fellows for counterterrorism on the Obama National Security Council; Stephen Tankel, a professor at American University; and Shamila Ch...

Vladimir Milov is the current economic advisor to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the former deputy minister of energy in the Russian government. This week, Milov spoke to Alina Polyakova about the Russian economy, the recent Cabinet reshuffles in the Kremlin, and how local politics are back in Russia. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast....

Bob Bauer, Jack Goldsmith and David Kris join Benjamin Wittes to discuss the sequence of events between the Justice Department, the FBI, the House intelligence committee and the White House over the last few days and the resolution arranged at the White House on Monday afternoon. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The past week saw the culmination of a major shift in US policy as the United States formally opened its embassy in Jerusalem. Yet ongoing protests along the border with the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government’s harsh response have provided a sharp contrast to the hopeful rhetoric surrounding the embassy’s opening ceremony. On Friday, Lawfare senior editor Scott Anderson spoke with Khaled Elgind...