The Lawfare Podcast

This week, a Scott-less Alan and Quinta sat down with Lawfare Tarbell Fellow Kevin Frazier and law school-bound Associate Editor Hyemin Han to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.” Unlike Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden’s underwhelming performance...

From March 22, 2021: Benjamin Wittes sat down on  Lawfare Live  with Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, and Alan Rozenshtein, a Lawfare senior editor and professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, to talk about the group of cases that have been filed in connection with the January 6 riot and insurrection. They talked...

Anupam Chander, Scott Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown Law; Kyle Langvhardt, Assistant Professor at the Nebraska College of Law; and Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor at Lawfare and Associate Professor at Minnesota Law, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss the Supreme Court's decis...

As the Second World War started, an unsung cadre of US librarians and other information management professionals was making its way to Europe to acquire printed material that could help American analysts understand international threats. As the war went on, the mission of these experts expanded to also include an unprecedented effort to locate, preserve, and ultimately decide w...

It’s the decision we’ve all been waiting for: on the very last day of the Supreme Court’s 2023 term, the Court handed down its ruling in  Trump v. United States,  concerning the former president’s potential immunity from prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Rather than resolving the issue clearly, a 6-3 conservative majority found that presidents enjoy some immunit...

On June 28, the Supreme Court released its  opinion  in  Fischer v. U.S. , narrowing the interpretation of an obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), used by the Department of Justice to charge over 300 Jan. 6 defendants, including former President Trump. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes talked to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff...

From April 1, 2021: This week on Arbiters of Truth, the  Lawfare Podcast ’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Issie Lapowsky, a senior reporter at the tech journalism publication Protocol. They discussed last week’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee with the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter—the first time the co...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 27 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 about the Monday and Tuesday hearings in the classified documents case, the Georgia Court of Appeals pa...

On June 26, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Murthy v. Missouri —the “jawboning” case, concerning a First Amendment challenge to the government practice of pressuring social media companies to moderate content on their platforms. But instead of providing a clear answer one way or the other, the Court tossed out the case on standing. What now? Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes di...

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined once again by Lawfare Tarbell Fellow Kevin Frazier to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: Wiki-plea-ks.” After more than a decade in effective confinement—first at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, then in a British prison—Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is set to plead guilty in a U.S. federal court in Saipan to a single viol...

For today's episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes speaks with Katsiaryna Shmatsina, a Belarusian political analyst and think tanker currently on trial for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government. Shmatsina discusses the charges against her, the trial process, and the broader political situation in Belarus. She delves into the history of the Lukashenko regime, its ties with Russia...

On June 10, the jury reached a verdict in the federal trial against Chiquita Banana. It found that the company had financed a paramilitary group in Colombia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, resulting in the deaths of eight men, and it awarded the victims' families $38 million in damages. It's the culmination of a 17-year-long multi-district litigation that had faced significant procedural, evide...

Libertarianism doesn’t fit easily on the traditional left-right spectrum of American politics. The philosophy upholds personal liberty as a core value. What does it have to say about matters of foreign policy and national security, which encompass ideas about self-defense but also protection of the state?  Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Shane Harris to discuss the libertarian vi...

Larry Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at the Harvard Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss the open letter published by 13 current or former AI lab employees calling for a Right to Warn of AI dangers. This conversation dives into Lessig's representation of some of those employees as they push for a Right to Warn of AI dangers, the potential...

Just months after many of the mandates in the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) have gone into effect, interoperability and data portability are fresh on the policy world’s mind. But what does the history of interoperability suggest about its ability to help the Internet regain its former openness? Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Edit...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 21 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, University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky, and Georgetown Law professor Martin Lederman about the Friday hearing on the legality of Spe...

From August 17, 2020: In a surprise announcement last week, the United Arab Emirates and Israel are normalizing relations, and Israel is putting on hold its plans for annexation of West Bank territory. To discuss the announcement and its diverse implications for various actors, Benjamin Wittes spoke with  Lawfare  senior editor Scott Anderson; Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist who is a...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to discuss the various Ukraine-related agreements that came out of the G7 and subsequent Ukraine peace summit last week, with Contributing Editor and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Eric Ciaramella, Ukrainian journalist Anastasiia Lapatina, and  Lawfare  Senior Editor and Brook...

This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by  Lawfare  Contributing Editor and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Eric Ciaramella to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Prime Deliverables, in Two Days or Less.” The Biden administration and its European allies coughed up a number of big wins for Ukraine at a meeting of the G7 and subsequ...

The Cyber Safety Review Board’s (CSRB)  report  on the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion sheds light on how a series of flaws in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and security processes allowed a hacking group associated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to strike the “equivalent of gold” in accessing the official email accounts of many of the most senior U.S. govern...

From June 29, 2020: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Eric Posner, the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the author of the new book, " The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump ." They discussed why demagogues are a characteristic threat in democracies, how the founders of the U.S. Constitution trie...

Renée DiResta is the author of  Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality . Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no long...

On June 2, Mexico held one of the largest elections in its history, and the electorate voted in the country's first woman, and Jewish, president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum was endorsed by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who critics charge as pushing a series of anti-democratic policies including a substantial judicial overhaul.  To discuss this historic election and...

Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic checked in on the status of Senator Bob Menendez’s ongoing criminal trial in the Southern District of New York. Together with Dan Richman of Columbia Law School and Eric Columbus, who previously served as special litigation counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of General Counsel, they discussed the challenges faced by prosecu...

From July 17, 2020: Darrell West and John Allen are the authors of the book, " Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence ," a broad look at the impact that artificial intelligence systems are likely to have on everything from the military, to health care, to vehicles and transportation, and to international great power competition. They spoke with Benjamin Wittes about the...