The Lawfare Podcast

This week on the podcast, Jack Goldsmith sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the current state of national security. What should we make of the president's tweeted allegations of politically motivated wiretapping? Of the revised executive order restricting entry into the United States from six majority-Muslim countries? Of the most recent...

Yesterday, Just Security and the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law hosted Benjamin Wittes for a conversation on a question he and I have posed about the path of the Trump presidency so far: what happens when we can’t take the president’s oath of office seriously? Ben’s talk focused on an essay by him and myself that went up on Lawfare simultaneously, in which we argue...

Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. Benjamin...

Amidst the chaos surrounding Michael Flynn’s departure as national security advisor and the slowly unspooling news story on the Trump team’s reported contacts with the Russian government, it’s worth taking a step back and remembering a previous political controversy involving the Kremlin: Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow. In his recent book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man an...

Donald Trump's election as president brought a surge of interest in the previously obscure Emoluments Clause, which prohibits any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States]” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, ethics experts for Presidents Barack Obama...

On Monday, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the Justice Department not to defend President Trump's executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, only to be quickly fired by Trump. Jack Goldsmith and Marty Lederman, who have both served in senior positions in the Office of Legal Counsel, penned responses—Jack criticizing Yates's actions and Marty d...

President Trump kicked off the first foreign policy crisis of his new administration by signing an executive order mandating the construction of the much-promised border wall with Mexico, resulting in as-yet-unresolved confusion as to how the wall will be paid for and an ongoing diplomatic scuffle with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico S...

On January 13th, Benjamin Wittes and Emma Kohse released a new paper challenging the assumption that "privacy is an eroding value," worn away by the incessant collection of online data about consumer habits. Their paper, " The Privacy Paradox II: Measuring the Privacy Benefits of Privacy Threats ," uses empirical data from Google consumer surveys to study how many people actually experience the te...

Jameel Jaffer, author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law , joins Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree.  Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an interview with  The New York Times  before his intelligence briefing on Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump called the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference a "political witch hunt." In that spirit, we brought Lawfare  managing editor Susan Hennessey and former GCHQ information security specialist Matt Tait on the po...

Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm CrowdStrike recently  released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how s...

The annual Cato Surveillance Conference  kicked off this week with a panel on "Intelligence Under a Trump Administration," featuring former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew Olsen and  Lawfare 's own Susan Hennessey, Timothy Edgar, and Carrie Cordero. In a discussion moderated by Shane Harris of  The Wall Street Journal  (and  Rational Security ), the group discussed how Tru...

The Lawfare Podcast  has made it to our 200th episode! Thank you to all our listeners, old and new. This week at the Hoover Book Soiree, Jack Goldsmith interviewed Christopher Moran, a professor at the University of Warwick, on his book Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs, and the CIA.  Moran's work is a history of CIA memoirs, but it's also a history of the Agency itself and its efforts to shap...

Earlier this week, the  New York Times  published a story by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti informing us that the Obama administration had changed its interpretation of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to more broadly cover the use of force against al-Shabaab, expanding its previous reading of the AUMF as only authorizing force against members of al-Shabaab ind...

This week on the podcast, we’re bringing you some post-Thanksgiving food for thought on the uncertain state of the Arab world. On November 21, Madeleine Albright, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Stephen Hadley, and Amr Hamzawy sat down at the Brookings Institution to discuss a new report on “Real Security: Governance and Stability in the Arab World." What lead to the breakdown of governance across Arab coun...

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bill Banks, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, to talk about Bill's book with Stephen Dycus,  Soldiers on the Homefront: The Domestic Role of the American Military .  The book examines how both law and culture has shaped and constrained the mi...

This week, the  Lawfare Podcast   brings you a joint episode of the show together with Rational Security . The usual  Rational Security  gang—Shane, Ben, Tamara, and Susan—reflect on the results of the election and ask: What national security themes drove Donald Trump's supporters? What challenges does Trump face forming a government? And how will America’s allies react to his election? Support th...

Two weeks ago, Lawfare ’s Jack Goldsmith sat down with David Priess at the Hoover Institution for a Hoover Book Soiree on Priess’s new book, The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents from Kennedy to Obama . While the book is framed as a study of the history of the President’s Daily Brief, it’s also a history of the American intelligence com...

On Thursday, October 20th, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled once again on the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Guantanamo detainee convicted by a military commission for inchoate conspiracy to commit war crimes. In a divided and inconclusive en banc decision, the D.C. Circuit affirmed Bahlul’s conviction, overturning the court’s decision vacating the conviction last June, in which a three-jud...

On October 19th, Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard University, closed out a one-day conference on “The Next President's Fight Against Terror” at New America with a talk on “How Warfare Became Both More Humane and Harder to End.” He argues that we’ve moved toward a focus on ending war crimes and similar abuses rather than a focus on preventing war’s outbreak in the first place. A...

When audio dropped last Friday of Donald Trump boasting of attacks on women, the news quickly eclipsed another, just-as-important election story released right alongside it: reports that the United States government had decided to formally lay the blame for the recent hacking of Democratic Party information at the Kremlin's feet. In any other year, Russia's apparent attempts to interfere with the...

Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of  Lawfare 's Beyond the Border series, joined Benjamin Wittes on this week's podcast to talk about the epidemic of violence plaguing Mexico and Central America. Despite the crisis going on immediately to our south, those of us in the United States who work and think on national security i...

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Rosa Brooks joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about her new book,  How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.  The book covers an extraordinary range of territory, from Brooks' personal experiences working as a civilian advisor at the Pentagon, to the history of the laws of war, to an analysis of the U.S. military's expand...

Last week, the National Security Division of the Justice Department celebrated its 10th anniversary by holding a major conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Judge Laurence Silberman, the intellectual and policy force behind the division's creation, spoke about the birth of NSD with Lawfare ’s Benjamin Wittes. As co-chair of the so-called Robb-Silberman commission that e...

It's been an unusual election season so far—to put it mildly. Among the many other unexpected or unprecedented occurrences that have taken place over the course of the 2016 campaign season, we've seen many people working in the usually quiet and apolitical national security space take a step into the political limelight.  This is especially true of Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer and former Ch...