The Lawfare Podcast

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 21 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about Trump's SCOTUS brief in his presidential immunity appeal and recent evidentiary rulings from Judge Merchan in t...

From May 16, 2022: In order to tell you this story, we need to start at the beginning, just before the U.S. invasion. After 9/11, the CIA set their sights on al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan. After a military invasion that fall, people up and down the chain of command learned that in order to fight this war the U.S. needed local partners to help. Allies is a podcast about America’s eyes and ears ove...

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the platform or face TikTok being banned in the United States. Although prospects for the bill in...

Charlie Sykes recently stepped down as host of the Bulwark Podcast. He's a regular commentator on MSNBC, and has written a number of books. He tells the story here of his political journey, from being a page for the Wisconsin delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to being a working journalist increasingly disenchanted with conventional liberalism, to finding a home in R...

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri , concerning the potential First Amendment implications of government outreach to social media platforms—what’s sometimes known as jawboning. The case arrived at the Supreme Court with a somewhat shaky evidentiary record, but...

Since World War II, the United States and its currency, the dollar, have come to play a central role in the broader global economy. And in recent decades, policymakers have used this role as a weapon, cutting off access to malign actors and punishing those who act contrary to U.S. national security interests. But cultivating such primacy has proven to be a double-edged sword, with more complicated...

Last May, Microsoft announced that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group, Volt Typhoon, appeared to be targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and entities abroad in part through establishing a presence in a malware-infected network, or botnet, consisting of old devices located in the United States. At the end of January, the Justice Department announced it had removed the botnet from hundreds of...

Friday morning in Fulton County, Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee issued an opinion in the matter of the disqualification of District Attorney Fani Willis. It was not a complete victory for anybody. The defense didn't get Fani Willis booted from the case, but they did get Nathan Wade booted from the case. And Fani Willis has to contend with the loss of her special prosecutor, as well as some scorching...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott got together for the last time before Scott’s paternity leave to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Kitchen Table Issues.” President Biden delivered a feisty State of the Union last week, one that took aim at both those worrying about his age and his apparent 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump. But what does...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 14 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk about the Thursday hearing in the Mar-a-Lago case and everything Judge Cannon still needs to rule...

From November 10, 2018: With the firing of Jeff Sessions and his replacement with former U.S. attorney Matthew Whitaker, all eyes this week are focused on whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians will get to run its full course. But even before the Sessions firing, Benja...

Tim Mak is the editor, writer, and entrepreneur behind the Substack site, The Counteroffensive , which covers the Ukraine-Russia war through personal stories on the ground in Ukraine. He has been in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion when he was an NPR reporter, and he has done some of the best English-language reporting from that country. Lawfare Editor-in-Chef Benjamin Wittes...

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard stories about the CIA’s experiments with drugs, particularly LSD, during the infamous MKUltra program. But you may not know that the characters involved in that dubious effort connect to one of the 20th Century’s most famous and revered scientists, the anthropologist Margaret Mead.  Shane Harris talked with historian Benjamin...

On March 13, Judge McAfee released an order quashing six counts in the Fulton County electoral interference indictment against former President Trump and his numerous co-defendants. These charges were related to alleged solicitation of violations of oath of office, and Judge McAfee quashed the charges due to insufficient evidence. To talk over the order and its implications, Lawfare Editor-in-Chie...

On February 28, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order (EO) entitled “Preventing Access to Americans’ Bulk Sensitive Personal Data and United States Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern.” Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Devin DeBacker and Lee Licata, the Chief and one of the Deputy Chiefs of the Foreign Investment Review Section in the National Security Di...

Progress in deepfake technology and artificial intelligence can make manipulated media hard to identify, making deepfakes an appealing tool for governments seeking to advance their national security objectives. But in a low-trust information environment, balancing the risks and rewards of a government-run deepfake campaign is trickier than it may seem. To talk through how democracies should think...

On March 4, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Anderson , holding that states cannot disqualify Donald Trump from appearing on the presidential ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 3 bars former officeholders who have since engaged in insurrection from taking future public office—and in recent months, a slew of lawsuits from voters and advocacy groups have pointed to the pr...

This week on Rational Security ,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien joined Alan, Quinta, and Scott to discuss the week's big national security news, including: “Operation Humbled Drop.” After months of unsuccessfully pushing the Israeli government to allow more aid into besieged Gaza, the Biden administration has taken matters into its own hands and begun airlifting it in itself. Bu...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 7 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk about recent filings in the Southern District of Florida and what Judge Cannon needs to rule on. T...

From September 28, 2019: At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, Benjamin Wittes sat down in front of a live audience with Judge John Bates, a senior district judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bates has served on the court since 2001, and from 2009 to 2013, he served as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. Wittes and Judge...

The practice of surveillance capitalism—the widespread private collection and commodification of personal data—is well understood. Less well understood is the extent to which the U.S. government purchases this data in the commercial marketplace to use it for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.  Byron Tau, when he was a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, did more than anyone to brin...

Jonna Mendez advanced in her Central Intelligence Agency career to become Chief of Disguise despite the many institutional challenges to women's promotions. And now she has written a memoir, In True Face , about it all. David Priess spoke with Jonna about career options for women at CIA in the early Cold War, her own start there in the 1960s, how photography classes set her on a path that ultimate...

Everyone agrees that the United States has a serious cybersecurity problem. But how to fix it—that's another question entirely. Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged across multiple administrations that NIST—the National Institute of Standards and Technology—is the right body to set cybersecurity standards for both the government and private industry. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor...

Executive branch constraints and the posture of the media have shifted in significant ways over the past two decades. Lyrissa Lidsky and Christina Koningisor, law professors at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco, respectively, argue in  a forthcoming law review article  that these changes—including the erosion of certain post-Watergate reforms and th...

In mid-February, Chinese cybersecurity firm i-Soon appeared to suffer a massive data leak, which offered unprecedented insight into the operations of the company, known to contract for many Chinese government agencies. The more than 500 documents include conversations between employees, sales pitches, and internal documents, and expose the firm’s hacking methods, tools, and victims. They also show...