The Lawfare Podcast

For today’s episode, Loyaan Egal, the Chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”), sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and General Counsel Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Morrison Foerster partner Brandon Van Grack to discuss the FCC’s growing but often underappreciated role in advancing U.S. national security.  They covered how the F...

Stoicism is having a moment. The ancient philosophy--which posits that you can’t control events, but you can control how you respond to them--has lately been embraced by self-help gurus and tech bros. But Nancy Sherman writes that the tenets of Stoicism have long found a receptive audience in “the military mind.” Whether they know it or not, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are guided by man...

Jake Effoduh, Assistant Professor at Lincoln Alexander School of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to  share his research  on the Global South’s perspective on AI. Jake has carved a unique and important research agenda looking into how AI advances are impacting the pursuit and realization of human right...

Kyle Cheney, Senior Legal Affairs Reporter for Politico, discusses his recent Politico article on the legal and political landmines threatening the criminal prosecutions of rioters involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff sat down with Kyle to discuss a serious legal challenge to the key misdemeanor charge leveled in more than 90 percent of Jan. 6 cases, a troublin...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on October 3 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott Anderson spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s immunity motion in the Jan 6 case against former President Trump, what it means for the future...

From October 11, 2023: This past Saturday, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprecedented raid from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel that left more than 1000 people – most of them Israeli civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly – brutally murdered. Dozens more were taken as hostages back into Gaza. A shocked Israel has in turn responded with missile attacks into Gaza that...

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed SB 1047, the controversial AI safety bill passed by the California legislature.  Lawfare  Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sat down with St. Thomas University College of Law Assistant Professor Kevin Frazier and George Mason University Mercatus Research Fellow Dean Ball to discuss what was in the bill, why Newsom vetoed it, and where AI safe...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic, and Tyler McBrien to try to make sense of the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Pulling Up the Escalation Ladder.” Israel’s escalating campaign against Hezbollah turned regional yesterday, as Iran launched a salvo of more than 180 ballistic missiles against Israel. While the damage was l...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Richard Gowan, the U.N. Director for the International Crisis Group, to review what went down at the recent U.N. General Assembly High-Level Week. They discussed how the national leaders who gathered in New York for the meetings responded to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan; how strategi...

Israel has hit Hezbollah very hard over the past few days, killing much of its senior leadership and eroding its capabilities. It has also displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and now has ground forces in Lebanon. Iran has responded with a missile barrage against Israel, to which an Israeli response is widely expected. To discuss the latest events in the expanding war, Lawfare 's Editor-in-...

Conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish control of global finance and politics have been circulating and influencing popular culture for centuries, with the spotlight often falling on the Rothschild family. Author Mike Rothschild (no relation), who has researched and written about the phenomenon in his book  Jewish Space Lasers , joined David Priess to discuss the appeal of conspi...

Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to explain how increased use of AI agents may lead humans to form troublingly and even addictive relationships with artificial systems. Robert also shares the significance of his research on common us...

New York Mayor Eric Adams is facing indictment in connection with a foreign influence scheme involving Turkey. It’s the latest in a long string of actions by the Justice Department to counter foreign efforts to interfere in the American political system. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic, and Contributin...

From September 21, 2022: This past Monday, the criminal trial of Thomas Barrack began in federal court in the Eastern District of New York. Barrack, who served as an informal advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign and then as chair of Trump's inaugural committee, is alleged to have acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates. According to the indictment, Barrack acted as a back channel for th...

This episode of “Lawfare Live: National Security and the 2024 Election” was recorded on September 24 in front of a live audience on  Youtube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Molly Reynolds, Quinta Jurecic, and Anna Bower and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School Nate Persily. They discussed how Congr...

Geoff Schaefer, Head of Responsible AI at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Alyssa Lefaivre Škopac, an independent responsible AI strategist, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to detail  the Responsible AI Top-20 Controls . As governments, corporations, and nonprofits face increasing pressure to integrate AI into their ope...

This week, Scott was joined by Natalie Orpett, Anna Bower, and Matt Gluck to talk over some of the week's big national security news, including: “Some Assembly Required.” On Tuesday, President Biden gave his fourth and final speech as president to the U.N. General Assembly. He used the occasion to reflect on the many foreign policy decisions of his presidency, including the withdrawal from Afghani...

Steve Coll’s latest book, “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” seeks to explain why Saddam Hussein would put his regime at risk over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that didn’t exist. Saddam ultimately lost his regime, and his life, in part because he saw America as an omniscient puppeteer seeking to dominate the Middle East. The Un...

Itsiq Benizri, counsel in WilmerHale’s Brussels office, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the shocking and significant resignation of former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. Breton served as the EU’s commissioner for the internal market and played a major role in shaping and enforcing the EU’s digital r...

The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 riveted millions of Americans, who watched the horrific event live on television. What they didn’t know then was that the tragedy was largely preventable, a disastrous result of hubris and “magical thinking” as much as flawed engineering.  Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and D...

Israel and Hezbollah seem to be headed for a major war. Over the past several weeks, Israel has taken a series of escalatory steps along its northern border, targeting major Hezbollah figures, blowing up pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and—most recently—hitting targets all over southern Lebanon associated with Hezbollah. Will it lead to all-out war? Lawfare ’s Editor-in-Chief, Be...

Lindsay Chervinsky is the Executive Director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon. She is also the author of a much celebrated new book on the John Adams presidency that is focused primarily on the national security decision-making of the second president and how it set norms for the conduct of the presidency and its powers with which we still live today. She sat down with Lawfare Edit...

From: January 5, 2022: Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and  Lawfare  experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzan...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on September 19 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff about Judge McAfee’s order dismissing 3 counts from the Fulton County indictment, what filings we are waiting on in D.C., a recent  New...

Bob Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, and Liza Goitein, Senior Director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the emergency powers afforded to the president under the National Emergenc...