The Lawfare Podcast

Caleb Withers , a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss how frontier models shift the balance in favor of attackers in cyberspace. The two discuss how labs and governments can take steps to address these asymmetries favoring attackers, and the fu...

New START, the last bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, will expire in February 2026 if Washington and Moscow do not reach an understanding on its extension—as they have signaled they are interested to do. What would the end of New START mean for U.S.-Russia relations and the arms control architecture that had for decades contributed to stability among great...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Natalie Orpett and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “The Art of the Ordeal.” The Trump administration has been at the center of yet another bout of shuttle diplomacy the last several weeks, after an initial “28-point plan” for peace in Ukraine it appeared to hash out with...

Veteran legal journalist Reynolds Holding, author of " Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts ," and U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, one of the judges featured in his book, sit down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to discuss the role of district judges in our justice system. They also discuss the attacks those judges are enduring today from the Departmen...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Seth Jones, the President of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic & International Studies to discuss Seth's new book about the U.S and Chinese industrial bases, " The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance ." To receive ad-free...

Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is the Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He spent 32 years in the Navy as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, retiring as a rear admiral in 2017. After leaving the Navy, Admiral Montgomery worked as policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee during Senator John McCai...

From November 19, 2024: Lawfare  Associate Editor Olivia Manes sat down with with Marlene Laruelle, a Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at The George Washington University, and Director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program, to discuss the financial, ideological, and historical connections between the American far-right and Russia. Marle...

From November 26, 2024: Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, to discuss the legal and practical considerations surrounding a president’s ability to deploy the military at the U.S. southern border, particularly in light of President-elect Trump’s recent endorsement of “declar[ing] a national...

From October 18, 2024: Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Ukrainian Parliament outlining his victory plan,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They talked about the components of the plan, the reaction from the Uni...

From November 25, 2024: At a  recent conference  co-hosted by  Lawfare  and the Georgetown Institute for Law and Technology, Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm moderated a conversation on "AI Regulation and Free Speech: Navigating the Government’s Tightrope,” between  Lawfare  Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein, Fordham law professor Chinny Sharma, and Eugene Volokh, a sen...

Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace join Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the last week's machinations surrounding a potential Russia-Ukraine peace deal. What is the actual American position? Is the United States abandoning Ukraine? Or is it now backing off the 28-point document it reportedly put together with R...

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editor Michael Feinberg about their recent Lawfare article examining a little-noticed piece of legislation that was slipped into the deal to end the government shutdown—one that gives senators a civil right of action to sue the U.S. government when their phone or metadata is accessed without notice, with...

At 4 pm ET, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett will sit down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Contributor James Pearce to discuss a judge dismissing the indictments against both former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed to served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia....

In a  live conversation on  YouTube,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss a judge ordering the Trump administration to end the National Guard deployment in D.C., updates in the prosecutions of Letitia James and...

From April 13, 2023: A few weeks ago, China made headlines for brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to thaw diplomatic relations after seven years of cutting ties and even more years of tense relations. Since then, we've already begun to see some downstream effects of this deal, with significant movement on the war in Yemen and the reopening of Iran's embassy in Saudi Arabia. This is a s...

From August 16, 2023: 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...

For today’s episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and a  Lawfare  contributing editor, and Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, the John C. Whitehead Visiting Fellow in International Diplomacy at the Brookings Institution, who previously served as Undersecretary General for...

Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina has written two recent articles for Lawfare on energy and the Ukraine war. The first deals with the ongoing Russian attacks on the Ukrainian civilian power grid—attacks which actually interfered with the recording of this very podcast. The second details an ongoing corruption scandal rocking the Ukrainian political system, emerging from an alleged kickbac...

At 4pm ET on Nov. 19, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff to discuss two court hearings that occurred that day. First they discussed the hearing in the prosecution of James Comey. Then they briefly discussed the hearing in J.G.G. v. Trump, over potential contempt proceedings against the government concerning acti...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower, Michael Feinberg, and Roger Parloff to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including: “Diving Head First into the Shallow End of the Jury Pool.” A federal magistrate judge has concluded that the government may well have made substantial misrepresentations and other errors before the Grand Jury in the prosecution of fo...

Benjamin Wittes sits down with Emily Hoge, a historian at Clemson University, who has written a pair of pieces for  Lawfare  recently about  Russian mobsters  and the war in Ukraine. They’re getting out of prison in exchange for service at the front. Some of them are surviving their service there and returning home by way of reward—and the Russian crime rate is skyrocketing as...

Senior Editor Anna Bower speaks with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Michael Feinberg and Senior Editor Eric Columbus about the extraordinary actions taken by the Justice Department and Congress in response to calls for the release of investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The discussion covers the DOJ’s unusual “review” of the Epstein files , Congress’s oversight role, proposed legislation...

In a  live conversation on  YouTube,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss an update in the Georgia prosecution of President Trump, a hearing on whether Lindsey Halligan was lawfully appointed as U.S. attorney, a di...

From August 9, 2024: On today's episode,  Lawfare' s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri speaks with Senior Privacy Engineer at Netflix and former Army Reserve intelligence officer, Lukas Bundonis. They talked about the relationship between law enforcement and tech companies, what that relationship looks like in the U.S. and other countries, and the different ways in which that...

From November 29, 2023: Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a great deal over the last year about generative AI and how it’s going to reshape various aspects of our society. That includes elections. With one year until the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we thought it would be a good time to step back and take a look at how generative AI might and might not make a differ...