The Lawfare Podcast

The Cyber Safety Review Board was created by a Biden administration Executive Order entitled, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.” The Board reviews major cyber events and makes concrete recommendations that can drive improvements within the private and public sectors. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Robert Silvers, Under Secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans at the Depar...

As humanity builds settlements beyond Earth, myriad ethical issues will arise--many in a different way than they do terrestrially. Astrophysicist and space communicator Erika Nesvold has devoted extensive thought and research to how to ethically govern space settlements, most notably on her podcast Making New Worlds and in her book Off-Earth. In a conversation that pairs well with Shane Harris's M...

Next month, Kenneth Chesebro—the alleged architect of the fake electors plot—is set to be tried in Fulton County, Georgia, on racketeering and other charges. This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower sat down with Chesebro’s defense attorneys, Scott Grubman, Manny Arora, and Robert Wilson. In a wide-ranging conversation, they di...

On September 19, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, Kenneth Wainstein, gave a speech at the Brookings Institution on the current threat environment and the role of the Department of Homeland Security's Intelligence and Analysis Office (I&A) in confronting it. Following the speech, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Wainstein sat down...

On August 21, the Human Rights Watch released a  report  detailing systematic abuses of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Researchers interviewed dozens of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers and found that Saudi border guards had used explosive weapons on them and shot migrants at close range.  Lawfare ’s Associate Editor of Communications An...

For the past several months, Ukraine has been engaged in a grinding counteroffensive aimed at retaking lost territory from Russian invaders. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky joined President Biden for the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York to make the case for continued support of Ukraine's efforts—a message they then repeated to members of Congress concerning whether to mo...

This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare colleagues Eric Ciaramella and Saraphin Dhanani, the latter for her last episode of RatSec before departing Lawfare , to break down the week’s big national security news stories, including: “UNGA UNGA Party.” President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy made back-to-back addresses to the U.N. General Assembly, w...

This past Thursday, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson hosted “ Trump’s Trials and Tribulations ,” Lawfare ’s weekly live video chat about developments in the many ongoing trials circulating around former President Trump. He was joined by Lawfare ’s two leading court reporters, Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Legal Fellow Anna Bower, both of whom have been closely following developments in co...

From May 25, 2019: Our friends from the National Security Institute at George Mason University stopped by earlier this week to discuss U.S.-China relations. Lester Munson, Jodi Herman, Jamil Jaffer, and Dana Stroul, former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers who collaborated and sometimes competed with one another on the Committee, had a lively discussion about Huawei, cyber and tech secur...

It is commonplace for American leaders to describe their fiercest foreign adversaries as irrational, crazy, delusional, or illogical. In their new book, “ How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy ,” political scientists John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Sebastian Rosato of the University of Notre Dame argue that these claims and many similar ones are often wrong because...

The British royal family and UK intelligence operations have been linked since Queen Victoria's time, involving everything from personal protection to matters of international intrigue to concerns about blackmail. Professor and author Rory Cormac, who has conducted extensive research on the British intelligence services, has recently added to his corpus of writings in the field with a book about t...

Democratic backsliding, a term that American political scientists usually use to describe the process by which other countries transition to autocracy, has come home. Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index, which attempts to track the health of democracies around the world, recently demoted the United States from a score of 90 in 2015 to 83 in 2021, lower than every established democracy in Western...

Economic warfare isn’t a new concept. Protectionist policies, asymmetrical trade agreements, currency wars—those are just a few examples of the economic levers states have long used to control outcomes. But in their new book , two political scientists, Henry Farrell and Abe Newman, argue that a technological innovation spurred on by free market embracers and coopted by the U.S. was an accidental e...

This week, the UN General Assembly will meet in New York to discuss, among other things, international cooperation to improve global cyber security challenges. This meeting builds on national and international commitments and initiatives that have already been made this past year. One such initiative is cyber-secure nations banding together to provide aid to cyber-risk nations. Lawfare Legal Fello...

Some time soon, former President Donald Trump is expected to file a motion in U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom to dismiss the Jan. 6 case against him based on some theory of presidential immunity. In a recent piece for  Lawfare , our very own Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani and Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes write, “The bottom line is that this defense is a bit of a moon shot for...

This week on Rational Security , with Scott traveling, Quinta and Alan were joined by Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Reynolds to break down the week’s big national security news stories, including: “What is Impeachment, Really?” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has announced an impeachment inquiry against President Biden seemingly with the goal of finding something to impeach him over. Will this d...

It's another episode of “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” our weekly video conversation with Lawfare editors and writers on the ongoing Trump trials. On Thursday afternoon, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellows Saraphin Dhanani and Anna Bower. They talked about what's going on in Mar-a-Lago, what's going on in Fulton Co...

From February 16, 2021: The Biden administration has promised significant changes to the U.S. relationship with Iran that could have a marked impact on the Middle East. What is the likelihood that this new administration will be successful? And how will other regional developments—from the Abraham Accords between Israel and a few Arab states, to the healing of the rift within the Gulf Cooperation...

The question of whether the Fulton County trial of Donald Trump and his co-defendants will be removed to federal court is now before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and it's on its way to the Supreme Court. Judge Steve Jones of the District Court in the Northern District of Georgia denied Mark Meadows’ motion for removal. He has now also denied an emergency stay of that ruling, and so the q...

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s been another brutal summer with seemingly constant natural disasters precipitated by climate change. The United States and other countries have rightfully begun thinking of climate change as a security issue. But extreme weather is not the only challenge we must contend with. There’s also the problem of climate change’s victims, many of whom are forced to leave their homes.  Lawfare Exec...

On August 30, soldiers and high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Gabon seized control of government buildings and communication channels in the capital city of Libreville, detaining Gabon’s President Ali Bongo in his residence and declaring an end to the Bongo family’s 56-year rule. It was a coup—one of nine in the last three years in West and Central Africa, including in Niger just one mon...

The United States, the European Union, and China are involved in intense conflicts to control the digital economy, both within their borders and globally. Anu Bradford, the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, provides a framework for understanding and assessing these conflicts in her new book, entitled “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regula...

How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.  A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with acc...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott celebrated the second anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 by bringing back everyone's favorite game show edition: the Hot Take Takedown! But this year, instead of being contestants, they sat in judgment on the following hot takes from their  Lawfare  colleagues: Molly Reynolds, on whether there will be a government shutdown this m...