The Lawfare Podcast

The Insurrection Act is a provision that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. It’s been invoked dozens of times by presidents to respond to crises in the over 230 years that it’s been around, but it hasn’t been reformed in centuries. In recent years, the Insurrection Act has come back into public focus because of its implication in a number of domestic cri...

For decades, country music has had a close and special relationship to the U.S. military. In his new book,  Cold War Country , historian Joseph Thompson shows how the leaders of Nashville’s Music Row found ways to sell their listeners on military service, at the same time they sold country music to people in uniform. Shane Harris spoke with Thompson about how, as he puts it, Nashvil...

Last week, 40 Democratic members of the House of Representatives  wrote a letter  to President Biden expressing concern and outrage over an Israeli airstrike that killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen. The lawmakers urged the president to reconsider his recent authorization of an arms transfer package to Israel and withhold any future offensive arms transfers if the str...

Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2024 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. For this live recording of the  Lawfare Podcast , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2024 to talk about information ecology and 19th-century naturalism with Ali...

In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, among other effects. L...

There is a lot to keep up with in U.S. cybersecurity law and policy these days. To talk about the current regulatory landscape and the progression of the DOJ’s strategy relating to takedown and disruption efforts, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Jim Dempsey, Senior Policy Advisor at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and John Carlin, Partner at Paul...

This week on Rational Security , Alan and Quinta were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to talk through the week's big national security news, including: “A Gag Order Prevents Me From Telling You What This Segment Is Called.” After former President Donald Trump attacked the daughter of Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing his New York hush-money trial, Justice Merchan expanded t...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on April 4 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editors Roger Parloff and Quinta Jurecic to talk about Judge Cannon's order denying both Trump's motion to dismiss the classified documents case based o...

From December 2, 2020: The top Iranian nuclear scientist has been killed, apparently in an Israeli strike. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who has long been the mastermind of the Iranian nuclear program, was gunned down in an attack with a remote control machine gun. Iranian reprisals are expected, although their timing and nature is not clear. It also puts the incoming Biden administration, which is looking...

A new report from the POPVOX Foundation focuses on a little-known and hugely under-appreciated congressional effort: that of congressional staffers helping Afghan allies flee the country during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan   Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with the report’s author, Anne Meeker. They talked about what staffers did to help, the challenges they face...

The "deep state." The "blob." Foreign policy elites are often so labeled, misunderstood, and denigrated. But what influence on presidents and on public opinion do they actually have? Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia, has researched this topic deeply and written about it in her new book,  The Insiders' Game . David Priess spoke with her about her path to stud...

Paul Beckett was the Washington Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. But since the arrest of the newspaper's Russia correspondent, Evan Gershkovich, last year in Russia on bogus spying charges, he has been working full time on advocating for the reporter's release. In connection with the one-year anniversary of Gershkovich's arrest, he joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to dis...

The use of AI to make decisions about individuals raises the issue of contestability. When automated systems are used by governments to decide whether to grant or deny benefits, or calculate medical needs, the affected person has a right to know why that decision was made, and challenge it. But what does meaningful contestability of AI systems look like in practice? To discuss this question, Lawfa...

The Federal Trade Commission’s data, privacy, and AI cases have been all over the news recently, from its proposed settlement with Avast Antivirus to its lawsuit against data broker Kochava. Lawfare Contributor Justin Sherman sat down with Ben Wiseman, the Associate Director of the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the FTC, who oversees a team of attorneys and technologists working on...

In early February, the European Union approved a major overhaul of its immigration laws. If approved by EU member states, the pact will drastically curtail the rights of migrants and asylum seekers entering the European Union. It’s part of a trend we’re seeing all over the world, including here in the U.S.   Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Steve Meili, Professor of...

This week on Rational Security , Alan and Quinta were joined again by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman—also of Georgetown University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies— to talk over the week’s national security news, including: “Terror in Moscow.” On Friday, March 22, a group of gunmen unleashed an attack on a concert hall out...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 28 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio, and Senior Fellows Roger Parloff and Quinta Jurecic to talk about the Monday hearing in New York wher...

From April 7, 2018: Vladimir Kara-Murza is the vice chairman of Open Russia, the founder of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation and a contributing opinion writer for the Washington Post. On Wednesday, Kara-Murza spoke to Alina Polyakova about last month's presidential elections in Russia, the poisoning of Sergei Skirpal, and the future of Russia under and after Putin. Support this show http://supporter.a...

Shannon Togawa Mercer served as Lawfare 's Managing Editor and then went on to quite a career shift. She now negotiates with ransomware bad actors. She is a cybersecurity and privacy lawyer at WilmerHale and has developed a specialized practice in responding to cybersecurity incidents, many of them involving foreign malware gangs.   She joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk a...

Without warning, North Korea launches a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States. American satellites detect the launch within seconds, setting off a frantic, harrowing sequence of events that threatens to engulf the planet in a nuclear holocaust.  That’s the terrifying hypothetical storyline that journalist Annie Jacobsen imagines in her new book. It’s...

One of the gravest threats to U.S. national security today—and also one of the newest—is the risk of cyberattacks. They come in many forms, and they can incapacitate companies, institutions, and even the government.  To better understand these threats—and how the government is responding to them­— Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Lawfare Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack sat do...

Benjamin Nathans is a professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Pennsylvania, with a particular specialty in the history of Russian and Soviet dissidents. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the legacy of Alexei Navalny, his life and death, and how Navalny was similar to and different from other dissidents, both recent and historic. They talked about...

In February, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report declining to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified material. Earlier this month, Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee answering questions from irritated members on both sides of the aisle who were critical of Hur’s work. Hur’s report and its fallout have reignited long-simmering questions about the usefulnes...

One year ago, Elizabeth Tsurkov, a graduate student at Princeton University, was abducted by the terrorist organization Kata'ib Hezbollah in Baghdad, where she was doing fieldwork. Since that day, her sister, Emma Tsurkov, has been campaigning for and seeking her release.  On Thursday, Emma Tsurkov held a rally outside the Iraqi embassy, demanding action to free her sister. Afterward, she sat...

This week on Rational Security , Alan and Quinta were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk through the week's big national security news, including: “No v. Wade.” The long saga of the personal relationship between Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney prosecuting Donald Trump for election interference, and N...