The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies have resulted in an unprecedented number of people being held in detention facilities. Now, lawsuits across the country are alleging horrific conditions in those facilities, including excessive force, unsanitary conditions, and denial of medical care. On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Elora Mukherj...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson about what Congress can do to direct the president to end the war in Iran. Scott's recent article in Lawfare , “ What Congressional Resolutions Mean for the War in Iran ,” explained why a likely presidential veto of a War Powers Resolution is not the end of the story. The War Powers Resolution gives Con...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Andrew Weissmann to discuss Weissmann’s new book, “ Liar's Kingdom: How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America ,” falsehoods in political discourse, and how to possibly disincentivize lies on the campaign trail. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss argument at the D.C. Circuit over the White House ballroom, the status of the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the superseding SPLC indictment, and more. You can find information on legal challenges...

From February 12, 2024: On January 15, Bernardo Arévalo took office as the new president of Guatemala. The transfer of power had been far from assured: after Arévalo triumphed in August elections as an anti-corruption reformer, Guatemala’s political elite did their best to throw legal obstacles in his way and prevent him from taking power. His presidency represents a stunning victory for Guatemala...

From May 2, 2025: As the Trump administration seeks to escalate its immigration crackdown, the government has turned to a concerning source of information for data on immigrants: the Social Security Administration.  Reports   indicate  that Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and the Department of Homeland Security successfully pushed Social Security officials to provide access to what’s co...

In a new report for Lawfare , Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio finds that 97 of the more than 1,500 individuals granted clemency by President Trump for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from Jan. 6 since their participation in the Jan. 6 riot. On today’s episode, Pompilio joins Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes t...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “The Empire Strikes Out.” Russia’s ground offensive in Ukraine...

"Jackie" is the call signal of an American Army veteran who volunteered in 2022 with the Ukrainian military and has been fighting the Russians ever since. He's become a significant figure in the storied Third Army Corps, which is one of the elite units of the Ukrainian military and has pioneered major advances in drone warfare. He joins Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes at the Goat Rodeo stu...

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical treats AI as the defining social question of our time: not just a technical shift, but a moral fight over dignity, labor, truth, war, and power. In a Lawfare Live on Substack on Wednesday, May 27, Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta talked with Christopher Hale , author of the Substack newsletter “ Letters from Leo ,” about the Vatican entering the AI debate,...

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and the co-host of Slate’s weekly podcast, “Political Gabfest.” They discuss three stories Bazelon and her colleagues recently published in the New York Times Magazine. For this t...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss three legal challenges to the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a federal judge’s decision to stop the shuttering of the Kennedy Center, post-dismissal developments in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, a...

From October 9, 2021: The majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee has issued an interim report, entitled “ Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election .” A lot of it covers ground we knew about previously, but it contains a raft of new details about the president's pressure on the Justice Department to support his election fraud...

From May 27, 2025: John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht, Haran, & Williams, channeled his experience as the former Chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to discuss three recent developments with James Pearce,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow. They discussed proposed changes to the Public Integrity Section that could hamper the Justice Department’s ability to...

Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Jimmy Rushton, a Kyiv-based journalist and security analyst who recently published, “ How Ukraine gained the upper hand in the drone war against Russia ,” in the Kyiv Independent. They talk about how the balance of power in the drone war seems to have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, Russia's latest missile strike on Kyiv, and what it all means for...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower and Eric Columbus, and his Brookings colleague Molly Reynolds, to talk through a couple of the week’s big news stories in domestic politics, including: “The Grift That Keeps On Giving.” Last week, the Justice Department announced the creation of a so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund of nearly 1.8 billion taxpayer dollars, from which pu...

Sean Wiswesser, author of the new book, “ Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War ,” and a former senior operations officer with the CIA, joins Lawfare ’s Justin Sherman to discuss the major Russian security organs and their training, characteristics of Russian “sticks-and-bricks” surveillance and counter-surveillance tradecraft, and the Russians’ use of...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Sophia Yan, a senior foreign correspondent with The Telegraph, to discuss her time reporting on the Chinese government, and how it leveraged its security services to investigate her in turn. Sophia recently wrote in-depth about this experience in “ The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me ,” in The Telegraph. Hosted on Acast. S...

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Eve Fairbanks, a writer and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor-in-chief of  The Dial, a magazine of international writing , to discuss The Dial’s forthcoming book,  “How We See it: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump” (out June 9 from The...

On this month’s minipod, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talked with  Lawfare Contributing Editor and a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law Bob Bauer about proposals for jurisdiction-stripping and other reforms for the Supreme Court. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff discussed the Department of Justice’s newly-announced “Anti-Weaponization Fund” which purports to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare,” oral argument in Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War before the Cour...

From April 2, 2025: Atul Gawande is a surgeon and a public health expert. He's also the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that the Trump administration has prioritized for dismantling since its first day in office. On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gawande to discuss what USAID does, the consequences of...

From January 23, 2025: Alexis Loeb, the former Deputy Chief of the Capitol Siege Section of the Department of Justice, sits down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about President Trump's blanket pardons and commutations for everyone her unit prosecuted.  She discusses how she became involved with the cases; how they were handled by prosecutors, judges, and juri...

This week, the Department of Justice announced that Trump and his sons dropped their lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury in exchange for a $1.776 billion fund for Trump’s allies and blanket immunity from government suits for the Trump family. Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Senior Editor Eric Columbus about what the settlement means, where it came from, and what can be done abo...

This week, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Brookings Senior Fellow Kari Heerman to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “With Friends Like Xi.” This past week, top U.S. officials and business CEOs traveled with President Trump to Beijing for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit had a warm air to it, with Trump going so far a...