The Lawfare Podcast

On March 21, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including DOGE’s incursions on the U.S. Institute of Peace, the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, and the firing of probationary employees. Support this show http://supp...

From March 21, 2023: By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States. In a new book entitled,&nbs...

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  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. Johnsen explains the rationale of the Trump administration's decision to bomb Yemen but argues that it will have little effect on the Houthis. Indeed, Johnsen contends that the Houthis are spoiling for a fight with the...

Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss his recent paper (co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang), “ Superintelligence Strategy .” To receive ad-free podcasts, become a  Lawfare  Material Supporter at&nbs...

This week, Scott sat down with Rational Security veterans and Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “House Odds.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson scored an unlikely win last week, when he kept the narrow (and notoriously fractious) Republican house majority united enough to pass its own continuing resolution to kee...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Steven Heydemann, the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Smith College, to assess the fast-changing developments in Syria today. Heydemann discusses the surge in communal violence in Syria, the deal between the new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led government and Syria's Kurds, Israel's counterproductive int...

Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and co-author (with Ezra Klein) of  Abundance , joins Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss the theory of Abundance and it...

In a live conversation on March 14 ,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, sat down with assistant professor of law at the University of Kentucky Matt Boaz and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Scott Anderson to discuss legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive actions, including the detention of permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, the birthright citize...

From December 15, 2020: Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA analyst and an expert on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies, who recently published a paper as part of  Lawfare 's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, entitled, "Central Bank Digital Currencies: The Threat From Money Launderers and How to Stop Them." They talked a...

From October 6, 2023: The First Amendment protects speech, but what kind? True speech, sure. But what about false or misleading speech? What if it's harmful? After all, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater—or can you? To answer these questions, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at  Lawfare  spoke with Jeff Kosseff, who ...

This episode of the Lawfare Podcas t features Glen Weyl, economist and author at Microsoft Research; Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech Project at Vanderbilt; and Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center. Together with Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and Contributing Editor at...

On today’s episode, Van Jackson, Professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and Michael Brenes, Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University, join  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to talk about their new book,   “The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace a...

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and co-host emeritus Alan Rozenshtein and Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Lowering the Bar.” Last week, the Trump administration took aim at two leading law firms—Covington & Burling and Perkins Coie—by repealing lawyers’ security clearances and setting limits on the...

Jack Goldsmith sits down with Zachary Price, Professor of Law at UC Law San Francisco and author of the new book, “ Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic ,” which argues for judges to make decisions that work “symmetrically” across major partisan and ideological divides. He explores the implications of this theory in the context of the Trump administration's legal actions, particu...

Carla Reyes, Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law, and Drew Hinkes, a Partner at Winston & Strawn with a practice focused on digital assets and advising financial services clients, join Kevin Frazier, Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss the latest in cryptocurrency policy. The trio review the evolution of crypto-related policy since the Obama era, discuss the veracity...

In a live conversation on March 7 ,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett, sat down with associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School Nick Bednar and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Scott Anderson to discuss legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive actions, including DOGE attempting to enter the U.S. African Development Foundation, the fi...

From March 1, 2022: Over the past week, the United States and its allies have responded to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine with some unprecedented actions of their own—economic sanctions that target Russia in ways that have never been tried before, let alone applied to one of the world's largest economies over just a handful of days. To discuss this revolutionary sanctions strategy and what...

From February 26, 2024: At a South Carolina campaign rally on Feb. 10, former President Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that while he was president he told “one of the presidents of a big country” in the NATO alliance that he would not protect that country from a Russian invasion if that country didn’t pay. Trump then said, “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want...

For today's episode, Lawfare general counsel and senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy within Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss his new book: "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare."They discussed Fishman's own career at the cutting edge of econom...

In the first weeks of the second Trump administration, the Office of Management and Budget abruptly froze trillions of dollars in federal funds—sparking a crisis over impoundment, the executive branch’s assertion of authority to refuse to distribute money appropriated by Congress. Since then, the administration has attempted to withhold further funds disbursed by specific agencies and attempted to...

This week, Scott was joined by his Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic to work through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Kyiv Calm and Tarry On.” This past Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House for what turned into a disastrous meeting, in which President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance baited him into a heated...

For today's episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, the Managing Director for the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss the end of the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire and other recent developments relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Together, they discussed how the terms of the...

Tim Fist, Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Future Progress, and Arnab Datta, Director of Infrastructure Policy at IFP and Managing Director of Policy Implementation at Employ America, join Kevin Frazier, a Contributing Editor at Lawfare and adjunct professor at Delaware Law, to dive into the weeds of their thorough report on building America’s AI infrastructure. The duo...

In a live conversation on February 28 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center Chris Mirasol about the detention of immigrants at Guantanamo Bay, the dismantling of USAID and the foreign aid freeze, the firing of probationary employees across...