The Lawfare Podcast

It’s only been a few weeks since Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump. But both he and his lawyers have already been previewing their case in defense: that he was protected by the First Amendment, that he relied on the advice of counsel, and—the glue holding it all together—he really believed what he was saying.  We recently published two articles on the subject. The first , by&nb...

This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Fulton County correspondent Anna Bower to talk through the week’s big news down south, including:  “Waiting on a Midnight Complaint in Georgia.” Late on Monday night, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis finally indicted Donald Trump alongside eighteen co-conspirators for attempting to interfere with the state of Ge...

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 US needed local partners to help. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare ....

Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with Molly Reynolds’s work on Congress. She’s a Senior Fellow at Brookings and a Senior Editor at Lawfare —and she has a new report out at Brookings, with Naomi Maehr, on “ How partisan and policy dynamics shape congressional oversight in the post-Trump era .” Molly and her team have collected an enormous amount of data over the years about how Congr...

Dr. Calder Walton, assistant director of the Applied History Project and Intelligence Project at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has become one of the world's most highly respected intelligence historians. His most recent book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West , describes the long history of Russian spying--placing it into the wider c...

Lawfare Fulton County Correspondent Anna Bower is the author of the Lawfare article entitled, “ What the Heck Happened in Coffee County, Georgia? ” It is a detailed look back at the computer intrusion that shows up rather prominently in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s election interference indictment. Anna joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk it through. How did all...

On July 18, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel unveiled criminal charges against 16 people—the “fake electors” from that state who featured in Trump’s effort to hold onto power in 2020. Just a few weeks later, a special counsel in Michigan announced additional charges related to the 2020 election, this time against three people who allegedly accessed voting machines in the state without authori...

On Monday, August 14th, former President Donald Trump was indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County for his alleged attempts to manipulate the electoral vote count in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election. For this emergency edition of the podcast, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Senior Editors Quinta...

The district attorney for Fulton Co., Georgia, issued a fourth criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump late last night, for crimes relating to efforts to manipulate the 2020 election results. Lawfare will be hosting a live online discussion of the indictment and what it means. Check our website,  lawfaremedia.org , for details and links to watch. Become a Material Supporter of La...

On Aug. 6 former President Donald Trump  announced on social media  that he would “immediately” seek a “venue change ... out [of] D.C.” of his recent four-count federal indictment in Washington, D.C., for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He cited the city’s overwhelmingly majority liberal political demographics as a reason for transferring t...

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott beat back the heat to dig into the week's big national security news stories, including: “ECOWAShed?” We are now several weeks into a coup in Niger, a country once seen as one of the more reliable Western partners in the Sahel region and home to French and U.S. troops who have been helping the Nigerien military combat a local Islamist insurgency. Even as the Nige...

From June 16, 2020: The 2020 presidential election is less than five months away. As the election inches closer and closer, concerns have grown about the possibility that President Trump, should he lose the election, would refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the result. How can we think about that risk? Do we have adequate statutory and constitutional guardrails that protect us from electoral ca...

Former President Trump has been arguing for some time now that the criminal charges he’s facing in New York, Florida, and D.C. are politically motivated. At a campaign event in New Hampshire a few days ago, he also complained that the cases are forcing him “to spend time and money away from the campaign trail.” The cases haven’t even gotten to trial yet, but two of them are scheduled to take...

Katie Benner is a features writer for the New York Times, who covered the Justice Department for a number of years beginning in 2017. In a wide-ranging conversation, she sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief to talk about the challenges of walking into the Justice Department beat during the Trump administration and covering the post-election uprising within the department. She also gave a textured...

The Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web was put together by the Atlantic Council for a sprint study of the future of trust and safety in the ever-evolving internet. It issued its report, “ Scaling Trust on the Web ,” at the end of June. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with two members of the task force to talk all about it. Rose Jackson is the Director of the Democracy in Tech...

The increasingly pervasive use and abuse of spyware by governments around the world has led to calls for regulation and even outright bans. How should these technologies be controlled? Asaf Lubin, an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, thinks that the best path forward is an international agreement that would regulate, but not outlaw, these important national s...

Just weeks ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the life sentence of a Yemini national serving out his time at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. He had appealed this life sentence, in part on the grounds that his conviction was based on evidence obtained by torture. Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo military commissions, another detainee tried to appeal charges against him on t...

In the last year, the ADL and GLAAD tracked at least 356 incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism in the U.S. This marks an alarming rise over the past two years of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and violence. 49% of all incidents were perpetrated by individuals associated with extremist groups. This seems to point toward a much larger recent focus on the LGBTQ+ community by far-right extremists. Lawfar...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes to talk through the week's YUGE national security news, including: “So THAT’s What the Insurrection Act is For.” Former President Trump has been indicted for conspiring to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, including through the insurrection on Jan. 6. And while they haven’t been charg...

With the indictment and arraignment of former President Donald Trump this past week, Jan. 6 and its aftermath are very much on people's minds. So for today's Lawfare Podcast archive episode, we're bringing you the first episode of our narrative podcast series on precisely that topic. It's called The Aftermath . In this first episode, we looked at the events of Jan. 6 itself and all of the question...

On July 27, the Justice Department  announced a sprawling civil rights investigation , also known as a pattern or practice investigation, into the City of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department. The announcement came just weeks after the department’s Civil Rights Division released a report of a similar investigation into abuses at the Minneapolis Police Department. Both investigations were...

In June 2017, FBI agents arrived at the home of Reality Winner, a translator working for the NSA, to question her about an unauthorized leak of classified information concerning Russian interference in U.S. elections. Six years later, Tina Satter’s new film, “Reality,” tells the story of that fateful day, which led to Winner’s imprisonment.  Satter’s screenplay relies almost entirely on a ver...

Over the past eighteen months, Ukraine has served as the stage for a proxy battle between superpowers, with the invading Russians on one side and a U.S.-led coalition of Western allies backing Ukraine on the other. As such, it’s the closest thing we’ve yet seen to what many military strategists believe will be the defining challenge of the next strategic era: a near-peer conflict between two or mo...

On Tuesday, a D.C. grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump for a range of crimes that all involve the attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election. For this emergency edition of the podcast, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Roger Parloff, and Quinta Jurecic; Executive Editor Natalie...

In last month’s landmark settlement, the City of New York agreed to pay over $13 million to a group of 1,380 protestors who “were arrested and/or subjected to force by N.Y.P.D. officers” in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the summer of 2020. The proposed settlement marks “the largest total payout to protesters in a class-action suit in the United States,”  according to Akela Lacy at The Intercept ....