The Lawfare Podcast

This week, Scott sat down with the AI-oriented Lawfare Senior Editors Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier to talk through the week’s top AI-focused news stories, including: “Oh Sure, Now He’s Into Free Trade.” President Trump has repealed the Biden administration’s rule setting strict limits on the diffusion of high-end AI technology, opening the door to the global transfer of the technologies powe...

It’s been nearly one year since Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in Manhattan criminal court.  Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower sits down with New York Times reporter Jonah Bromwich to talk about Jonah’s new book on the subject, “ Dragon on Centre Street ,” take a look back at the trial, consider its legacy, and discuss what comes next. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a&nbsp...

In April, we ran Episode One of our narrative podcast series Escalation on this feed. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the next few weeks, we’ll be posting the rest of the series, starting today with Episode Two. Escalation is a multi-part narrative podcast co-hosted by Lawfare ’s Managing Director Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina, covering the history of U...

John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht & Haran, 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 investigate and prosecute corruption...

From May 3, 2024: Over the past several years, governors around the country from both political parties have used their respective National Guards for an increasingly unconventional array of domestic missions, ranging from teaching in public schools to regulating immigration at the southern border. To discuss how this trend may impact the National Guard—and our broader democracy, particularly in t...

From December 4, 2023: Is the Fourth Amendment doing any work anymore? In a  forthcoming article  entitled “Government Purchases of Private Data,” Matthew Tokson, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, details how, in recent years, federal and state agencies have begun to purchase location information and other consumer data, as government attorneys have...

In a  live conversation on  May 22,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss legal challenges against President Trump’s executive actions, including the a court hearing over the attempted deportation of immigrants to South Sudan, the ar...

Global Cyber Alliance ’s President and CEO Phil Reitinger and Chief Business Officer Komal Bazaz Smith discuss with Justin Sherman critical cybersecurity issues facing core internet infrastructure, including the role of small, often under-appreciated, and frequently underfunded nonprofits in keeping the internet secure and functioning. They talk about their organization’s Common Good Cyber project...

This week, Scott sat down with a particularly baritone cast of Lawfare colleagues—co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Foreign Policy Editor Dana Stuster, and Senior Editor (aka Legal Correspondent) Roger Parloff—to discuss the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Let’s Sheikh On It.” President Trump completed a surprisingly historic trip to the Persian Gulf last week, which beg...

Page Hedley, Senior Advisor at Forecasting Research Institute and co-author of the  Not for Private Gain letter  urging state attorneys general to stop OpenAI’s planned restructuring, and Gad Weiss, the Wagner Fellow in Law & Business at NYU Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at M...

Despite the frenzy of U.S.-led diplomacy around reaching a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the front line has been far from quiet. In fact, the war is now deadlier than ever before. To unpack the recent front line developments, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks with Francis Farrell, a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who covers military and security dynamics in Ukraine...

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has made a lot of headlines recently in the United States for his partnership with the Trump administration. Bukele has helped enable President Trump’s scheme to remove supposed Venezuelan gang members from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act, housing these detainees in the notorious CECOT prison. In court, the Justice Department has claimed it has no ability...

In a  live conversation on  May 16,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss legal challenges against President Trump’s executive actions, including the Friday hearing in the Abrego Garcia litigation, the Supreme Court’s ru...

From September 26, 2023: On August 21, the Human Rights Watch released a  report  detailing systematic abuses of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Researchers interviewed dozens of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers and found that Saudi border guards had used explosive weapons on them and shot migrants at close range. Lawfare ’s Associate Editor o...

From January 4, 2022: Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensur...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Contributing Editor Joel Braunold, the Managing Director of the  S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace , for the latest in their series of podcast conversations delving into the latest developments relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related regional issues. This time, they dis...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett, Tyler McBrien, and Daniel Byman to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Borderline Behavior.” A major flare-up over the disputed region of Kashmir took place this past week, leading to a major exchange of hostilities between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan before they agreed to a U.S.-brokered...

For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman talked with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, both Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss their recent Lawfare article, " Beijing's Changing Invasion Calculus: How China Might Put Taiwan in its Crosshairs ."  Together they discuss how China might use a blockade, subversion, and...

Cullen O’Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law and AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a novel AI governance framework. They dive into a paper he co-authored on the co...

Donald Trump was confident he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. It’s now been more than three months since Trump’s reelection, and even a short-term ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia remains elusive. Why did Trump fail? And what can really force Russia to stop the war? To answer these and many other questions, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina spoke wit...

In a  live conversation on  May 9,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce, and  Lawfare  contributor Preston Marquis to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the ord...

From February 22, 2024: As  a new report  on the intimidation of state and local officeholders from the Brennan Center for Justice points out, “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seemed to mark a new peak in extremist intimidation targeting public officials. But it was hardly the only act of political violence to break the period of relative stability that followed the assassinati...

From August 27, 2019: On August 5, the Indian government announced that it was revoking “special status” for the states of Jammu and Kashmir, enshrined in Article 370 of its constitution. Since then, the government has instituted a lockdown in the Kashmir valley, hundreds of people have been detained, there have been mass protests, and tens of thousands of Indian troops have been deployed to the r...

Ben Brooks, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and former head of public policy for Stability AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a sudden and significant shift toward open-sourcing leading AI models and the ramifications of that pivot for AI governance at home and abroad. Ben and Kevin specifically review OpenA...

In recent years, political scientists have given a great deal of attention to “democratic backsliding”—the slow erosion of democracy by aspiring authoritarians. The events of the last several months in the United States—with attacks from the Trump administration on the press, higher education, and any center of power outside the White House—make this research all the more relevant. But the questio...