The Lawfare Podcast

Until late May, Michael Feinberg was a senior FBI counterintelligence agent focused on China. All that changed one weekend, when the Deputy FBI Director found out that he was still friends with a former FBI official who had been fired years ago. In his first interview following his essay, “ Goodbye to All That ,” in Lawfare last week. Feinberg sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes...

Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of  DistrictCon , joins  Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss her recently released report " Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace ." They discuss the offensive cyber industry, the private sector and indiv...

In a live conversation on July 3,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the civil and criminal cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a D.C. district court judge's injunction against the Trump administration’s invasion proclamation, attacks on...

From February 16, 2024: The EU has finally agreed to its AI Act. Despite the political agreement reached in December 2023, some nations maintained some reservations about the text, making it uncertain whether there was a final agreement or not. They recently reached an agreement on the technical text, moving the process closer to a successful conclusion. The challenge now will be effective impleme...

From November 7, 2023: You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term.  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all throu...

Teun Jansenn is a staff member at the European Parliament who works on issues of EU expansion and support for Ukraine. He joined Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the prospects of Europe's stepping up for Ukraine as the United States backs away. He also talked about why EU enlargement is essential to getting EU governance under control and the role that Ukraine might play in that proce...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the Naval War College and Columbia University, to discuss the Trump administration's handling of the U.S. military. Cohn discusses the firings of senior military officials, military parades, and the use of the U.S. military at the U.S-Mexico border and in Los Angeles....

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Lindsay Freeman, Director of Technology, Law & Policy at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law, to discuss  her recent  Lawfare  article, “War Crimes for Fun and Profit. ” They talk about how and why so-called war influencers linked to private military companies such as the Wag...

In a  live conversation on  June 27,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case, the whistleblower complaint about Emil Bove’s actions as deputy attorney...

From March 19, 2020: What can the president do in a national emergency? What limits what the president can do? What authorizes the president to do all those things he can do in a national emergency? Is the president abusing, misusing, using appropriately, or under-using emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis? And what are the logical end points for how far this could go? For this bonus edi...

From December 5, 2015: The show this week features  Natan Sachs , a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, who recently  published an article  in Foreign Affairs on anti-solutionism as strategy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. During his conversation with  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes, Sachs argues that the apparent absence of a long-term...

Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Eric Ciaramella, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at Rand Corporation, to discuss the key issues in the Ukraine-Russia talks. They chat about the national interests of the interested parties, whether a negotiated settlement is possible, and what form a potentia...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Natalie Orpett, and University of Virginia School of Law professor Ashley Deeks, to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Bracing for Fallout.” In a surprise move, President Trump joined Israel’s military campaign against Iran over the weekend, using a specialized U.S. ordinance to hit Iranian nucle...

Max Smeets, Co-Director of Virtual Routes and Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, joins Lawfare ’s Jonathan Cedarbaum and Justin Sherman to discuss his recently released book “ Ransom War: How Cybercrime Became a Threat to National Security .” They discuss the history of ransomware (including the term itself), how the threats have evolved over the years, and some of the major drivers of innovati...

In the wake of controversy over OpenAI’s restrictive nondisclosure agreements, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced the AI Whistleblower Protection Act. In this episode, Lawfare Research Director Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Charlie Bullock, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI and co-author of a new  Lawfare  article on the bill, about its key provisions. The...

In a live conversation on June 23 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott Anderson,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor and CSIS fellow Daniel Byman, and Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution Suzanne Maloney about the American attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, what the reaction within Iran has...

In a  live conversation on  June 20,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff to discuss the litigation over President Trump federalizing the California National Guard to send them to L.A., the the order for the release of Mahmoud Kha...

From July 14, 2023: The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, just wrapped up, and the big news is that Sweden is in, and Ukraine is not. Eric Adamson of the Atlantic Council and the Swedish Defense Association is a Swedish defense policy analyst who observed the NATO summit. He joined  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the two big things that happened: the Swedish resolut...

From May 9, 2023: Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the sam...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down for a conversation about the rescissions package President Trump recently put forward to Congress, how it relates to the litigation over the president’s attempted cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, and what it all signals about how...

From April 12, 2024: The Insurrection Act is a provision that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. It’s been invoked dozens of times by presidents to respond to crises in the over 230 years that it’s been around, but it hasn’t been reformed in centuries. In recent years, the Insurrection Act has come back into public focus because of its implication in a n...

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Foreign Policy Editors Daniel Byman and Dana Stuster to talk through the week’s big news in Israel and Iran, including: “The Nuclear Option.” Israel crossed the rubicon late last week and took direct military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, among other targets, in an aggressive unilateral military campaign that...

On today's episode, Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett discussed the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Iran with Suzanne Maloney, Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. They talked about how the conflict is unfolding, the nature of U.S. involvement, an...

Greg Rosen, now an attorney at Rogers Joseph O’Donnell, spoke with James Pearce,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow, about his time prosecuting federal crimes in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. He focused mostly on the investigation and prosecution that followed the attack of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He discussed how the U.S. Attorney’s Office...

In a  live conversation on  June 13,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to discuss the legality of President Trump federalizing the California National Guard to send them to L.A., the pretrial detention hearing of Kilmar Abrego...