The Lawfare Podcast

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, creator of the new  podcast series , Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, Season II. They discuss the ideological aftermath of World War II on the American far right, the rise of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the rhetorically incredible cast of characters around him. Why do we remember McCarthy merely as a fier...

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Katie Moussouris of Luta Security to talk bug bounties. Where do they come from? What is their proper role in cybersecurity? What are they good for, and most importantly, what are they  not  good for? Moussouris was among the hackers who first did bug bounties at scale—for Microsoft, and then for the Pentagon. Now she helps companies...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 8 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff about what Judge Chutkan has been up to in D.C., state-level prosecutions of fake electo...

From April 24, 2023: Evan Gershkovich has been in Russian detention for the last several weeks. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he’s the latest American taken hostage by the Vladimir Putin regime. His good friend Polina Ivanova is a reporter for the Financial Times, a colleague of Evan’s in Russia, and has been an outspoken advocate for his release.  She joined  Lawfare...

On today's episode, Lawfare' s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri speaks with Senior Privacy Engineer at Netflix and former Army Reserve intelligence officer, Lukas Bundonis. They talked about the relationship between law enforcement and tech companies, what that relationship looks like in the U.S. and other countries, and the different ways in which that communication can be polit...

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes to talk through the week's very big national security news stories, including: “The Waiting Game.” The Middle East is on edge this week as it awaits a possible attack by Iran or Hezbollah on Israel in response to the suspected assassination of senior Hezbollah and Hamas leaders last week, including the chairman of H...

Last week, three defendants in the 9/11 case at Guantanamo agreed to plead guilty in the military commissions. Two days later, the Secretary of Defense pulled out of the agreements. What happened? Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with General John Baker, who served as the Chief Defense Counsel of the Guantanamo Military Commissions until 2021. They talked about how the 9/11 ca...

On today's episode,  Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman speaks with Arun G. Rao, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division's Consumer Protection Branch at the Department of Justice.  They discuss DOJ’s consumer protection work, cyber crime and elder fraud, data privacy, and generative AI. You can find out more about Rao’s work at DOJ below:  DOJ-Cerebral c...

On this week’s show, Lawfare’s Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer to discuss his mémoire of political lawyering, “The Unraveling Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis.” Bauer, a longtime Lawfare contributing editor, discusses his career as a litigating street fighter on behalf of Democratic Party causes and some of the regre...

A new film from  Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines series called “The Night Won’t End”  profiles three Palestinian families as they try to survive the war in Gaza. On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien speaks to the documentary’s director, Kavitha Chekuru, along with a few of the journalists and researchers who came together to work on the project, including Emily...

Scott Wiener, California State Senator, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to explore his “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models” bill, also known as SB 1047. The bill has become a flashpoint in several larger AI debates: AI safety v. AI security, federal regulation or state regulation,...

From July 7, 2021: The United States Secret Service has many important missions, the most public of which is protecting the president of the United States. And in this mission, its motto is "Zero Fail." There is no window for them to let their guard down when it comes to protecting the commander-in-chief. And yet, the past several decades of the Secret Service's protection have seen gaps, mistakes...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 1 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff about Mark Meadows’ petition for a writ of certiorari in his attempt to remove his Fulto...

On Thursday, Russia released 16 prisoners in exchange for eight prisoners held in Western countries, including the United States. The prisoners released by the Putin regime included several Americans, most notably Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and two other journalists, and long-time prisoner Paul Whelan. Shane Harris of the Washington Post, who covered the story, and Lawfare 's Fell...

This week, Alan and Quinta were joined by Kevin Frazier to talk through some of the week’s biggest national security news, including: “KOSA Nostra.” An overwhelming majority of senators voted to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, also known as KOSA—a bipartisan piece of legislation that would impose new responsibilities on online platforms in looking after their underage users. Despite the 91-3 vote...

Anastasiia Lapatina is a Kyiv-based Ukraine Fellow at Lawfare . Marcel Plichta is a Fellow at the Centre for Global Law and Governance at the University of St. Andrews, and a former analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense who currently works as an instructor at the Grey Dynamics Intelligence School. For this episode, Lapatina sat down with Plichta to discuss Ukraine’s ongoing drone campaign agai...

For this episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Steven Cook to discuss his new book , “The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.” Together, they examined the United States’ long history in the Middle East, how it successfully (and unsuccessfully) pursued its interests there, an...

At the start of every presidential administration, the nominees for more than 1,000 civilian positions require Senate confirmation. A large number of those are in the Department of Defense, with confirmation responsibility going to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). And whether it's a new administration or not, the committee processes dozens of civilian nominations for typi...

Ryan Calo, Professor of Law at the University of Washington, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss how advances in AI are undermining already insufficient privacy protections. The two dive into Calo's  recent testimony  before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Their conversation also...

Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Legal Fellow Anna Bower to discuss their recent  Lawfare  article, “ What’s Going On in Footnote 3? ” The article looks at a very specific issue buried in the Supreme Court's recent decision in  Trump v. United States , or “the presidential immunity case”: what evidence the prosecution ca...

From July 1, 2020: As the United States continues to suffer from the effects of the coronavirus, the controversy surrounding China's alleged role in the pandemic has continued to grow. In recent weeks, it has even entered the U.S. courts, as private plaintiffs have brought claims against the Chinese government and related institutions for allegedly contributing to the spread of the virus. Meanwhil...

From February 15, 2014: Last November, the University of Richmond invited Ben and Conor Friedersdorf to participate in a debate on the ethics of drone warfare. Conor is a familiar voice in the anti-drone camp, as those who have come across his  articles  in  The Atlantic  well know. Ritika Singh edited the podcast version of the debate for length and got rid of the introduction...

Cullen O’Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law and AI, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss a novel AI governance framework. The two analyze Cullen’s  recent Lawfare essay  in which he details how regulation of AI supply chains by the U.S. and its allies could promote the safe development...

This week, Alan and Scott sat down with Lawfare Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds and Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri to talk through another week of big national security news, including: “Bye Biden.” President Biden made the historic decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race over the weekend. He swiftly endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris, who now appears poised to...

In the runup to Jan. 6, lies and falsehoods about the supposed theft of the 2020 election ran wild on Twitter. Following the insurrection, the company took action—abruptly banning 70,000 users who had promoted misinformation on the platform. But was this mass deplatforming actually effective in reducing the spread of untruths? According to a  paper recently published in Nature , the answer is...