The Lawfare Podcast

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 25 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower discussed all of the Section 3 litigation occuring across the country and Roger Parloff's recent article about whether the president is an office...

From March 12, 2021: President Joe Biden has conducted military strikes in Syria, has articulated legal theories under which the series of strikes were proper and has temporarily reined in the use of drone strikes. To talk about Biden and war powers, Benjamin Wittes sat down with John Bellinger, who served as the legal adviser at the State Department and the legal adviser for the National Security...

In front of a live audience at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference in Miami, Florida, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Hon. Kenneth L. Wainstein, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security; Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic abo...

Outer space is back in style. For the first time in decades, NASA is sending astronauts back to the moon. Millionaires are exiting the atmosphere on a regular basis. And Elon Musk says humans may land on Mars to set up settlements by 2030. But would mastering space be worth it? In their new book, “A City on Mars,” co-authors (and spouses) Dr. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue that it’s probably not...

Heather Cox Richardson is the author of the book “ Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America ,” which looks at the evolution of American democracy and traces the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” to the earliest days of the republic. Lawfare ’s Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Richardson to discuss the state of American democracy today, the hi...

Software liability has been dubbed the “ third rail of cybersecurity policy .” But the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy directly takes it on, seeking to  shift liability  onto those who should be taking reasonable precautions to secure their software.  What should a software liability regime look like? Jim Dempsey, a Senior Policy Adviser at the Stanford Cyber...

The fallout from the SolarWinds intrusion took a new turn with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to file a cybersecurity-related enforcement action against the SolarWinds corporation and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, on October 30 of last year. To talk about the details and significance of this enforcement action, Lawfare Senior Editor St...

There is much debate among academics and policy experts over the power the Constitution affords to the president and Congress to initiate military conflicts. But as Michael Ramsey and Matthew Waxman, law professors at the University of San Diego and Columbia, respectively, point out in a  recent law review article , this focus misses the mark. In fact, the most salient constitutional war powe...

This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk through some big stories at the intersection of politics and national security, including: “Over the Hill.” Congress is back in town and up to its old tricks, kicking the can of government funding down the road and still debating a funding package fo...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 18 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff discussed where the Section 3 disqualification litigation stands across the country and at the Supreme Court, about some amicus briefs, about the lack of actio...

From January 28, 2017: President Trump kicked off the first foreign policy crisis of his new administration by signing an executive order mandating the construction of the much-promised border wall with Mexico, resulting in as-yet-unresolved confusion as to how the wall will be paid for and an ongoing diplomatic scuffle with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephani...

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with location data broker X-Mode Social. X-Mode collects over 10 billion location data points from all over the world every day, and sells it to clients in a range of industries, like advertisers, consulting firms, and private government contractors. The FTC argued that the data broker was conducting unfair business practices, incl...

Lloyd Austin's hospitalization and delayed communication about it have spurred much commentary and questions about the role of the secretary of defense in the US nuclear-strike chain of command. David Priess spoke with Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, about his path to expertise on nuclear issues, the chain of command for nuclea...

Last month, the Department of Defense released its first-ever policy on civilian harm reduction. But as  Marc Garlasco recently wrote in  Lawfare , “[T]he policy comes at an awkward time … The U.S. military has issued guidance on how to protect civilians during operations just as its close ally Israel has reportedly killed thousands of Palestinians with American bombs.”  And yet, ma...

Chimène Keitner is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis. She is a leading international law authority and served for a number of years at the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. She is the author of a lengthy piece in Lawfare about South Africa's petition under the Genocide Convention against Israel in the International Court of Just...

Over the last two months, Houthi militants have waged more than 27 attacks against merchant shipping and U.S. and partner forces in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, purportedly in response to the war in Gaza. These attacks have significantly disrupted global shipping and surged the Middle East into an even more precarious security situation. Following a large-scale Hout...

From March 4, 2017: Yesterday,  Just Security  and the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law hosted Benjamin Wittes for a  conversation  on a question about the path of the Trump presidency so far: what happens when we can’t take the president’s oath of office seriously? Ben’s talk focused on an  essay  he and Quinta Jurecic posted to  L...

This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to discuss the week’s big national security and courtroom news, including: “Ergo Omnes.” South Africa has brought Israel to the International Court of Justice for actions relating to its military campaign in Gaza, based on a novel legal theory that alleges Israeli violations of the...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 11 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, about the closing arguments in the New York civil case, about the Supreme Court's decision to grant Trump's petiti...

From September 26, 2015: On this week’s  Lawfare Podcast , Gregory Johnsen outlines the current state-of-play in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for  Buzzfeed News , a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’...

On January 11, 2024, Donald J. Trump arrived in a New York courtroom for closing arguments in the civil fraud case against the former president, his company, and his adult sons. The suit, brought by the state’s attorney general Letitia James, alleges that Trump and his company misled lenders about the former president’s net worth in order to secure better business deals. The case is not Trump’s on...

Brandon Stoddard was one of the most accomplished executives in broadcast television history. In his career at ABC, he helped bring to the small screen such legendary mini-series as “Roots” and “The Winds of War,” as well as the acclaimed television series “Moonlighting” and “Roseanne.” But arguably his most consequential and controversial decision was to air the made-for-TV movie “The Day After,”...

The Israeli Supreme Court—in the middle of the war in Gaza—handed down a decision that amounts to a kind of death blow to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's judicial reform project.  Before October 7, judicial overhaul was all that anybody was talking about in Israeli politics—you know, a five-part legislative plan to assert parliamentary control over the judiciary and reduce Israel's checks and...

Yesterday, a panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in former President Trump's appeal of Judge Chutkan's denial of his claims of presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case. On a livestream yesterday afternoon to talk over what happened in every phase of the oral arguments, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower who was i...

Michael J. Gottlieb is a litigation partner at the Willkie law firm. He is a long-time national security lawyer, served in Barack Obama's White House Counsel's office, and used to be the civilian lead on a task force that built rule of law institutions in Afghanistan. Late last year, he won a $148 million dollar judgment against Rudy Giuliani on behalf of election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freem...