The Lawfare Podcast

When she's not hosting The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow has been diving deep into the history of fascism in America. First on her podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra , and most recently in her new book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism , she has unearthed the stories for popular audiences both of an earlier era of foreign authoritarian influence in American politics and...

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin completed a productive six-year tenure as the UN Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights last week. Among other issues, she examined how financing counterterrorism and new technologies used for counterterrorism affect human rights. She also analyzed the protection of human rights in several locations with different political contexts, including visits to Guantan...

You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all through. They talked about Israel aid, Ukraine aid,...

In the debate about data privacy and harms, one issue has not received adequate attention by the press or in policy conversations relative to the severity and volume of harm: the link between publicly available information and stalking and gendered violence.  To discuss how “people search” data brokers use public information and contribute to stalking and abuse, Lawfare ’s Fellow in Technolog...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri to tackle some of the overlooked national security stories that have been percolating the past few weeks, including: “BrokenAI?” The Biden administration has rolled out a groundbreaking new Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence that seeks to take the first steps t...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded live on Zoom before an audience of Lawfare Material Supporters. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, and Josh Gerstein of Politico to talk about Wednesday’s hearing in the Mar-a-Lago case, Section 3 disqualification litigation in Minnesota and C...

From June 26, 2018: With the media and political commentators focused on family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, few are paying attention to how developments along Mexico's southern border affect the United States. On Monday, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at The University of Texas at Austin, who has spent the past several weeks in th...

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the Israel-Hamas war has largely been fought in Gaza, a small strip of land along the border of the Mediterranean Sea. But farther inland, there has been an uptick in hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem says that at least 13 Palestinian herding communities i...

The British Empire was already buckling under its own internal tensions in the 1920s. One hundred years later, historian and author Matthew Parker uses stories from across the globe to fill his new book One Fine Day , centered on the territorial peak of the empire on September 29, 1923. It reveals much about the limits of empire, the effects of liberation movements on colonized peoples around the...

A few weeks ago, an organization that works in the democracy protection space asked Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson to give a talk about what would happen if Donald Trump both got convicted and got elected. And for this episode of the Lawfare Podcast , we’ve reprised that conversation, with an accompanying YouTube version including their PowerPoi...

In the wake of Donald Trump's role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, lawsuits in states around the country are seeking to disqualify him from the 2024 election. Challengers to his eligibility invoke Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides in relevant part that "No person shall . . . hold any office . . . under the United States . . . w...

It’s been a rough few months for Senator Bob Menendez. The powerful New Jersey Democrat has pleaded not guilty to federal charges related to an alleged bribery scheme under which, according to prosecutors, Menendez carried out favors for the government of Egypt.  But while the allegations set out in the indictment sound pretty unsavory, recent decisions by the Supreme Court—in particular, the...

We are a little more than a year out from the 2024 election—an election that, in countless ways, promises to be unlike any other. One way it may be different is the very real prospect of a scenario in which neither major party candidate secures enough electoral votes to win, kicking the decision to the House of Representatives in what is called a “contingent election.” Possible third parties are a...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott came together in the virtual studio to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Stuck in the Middle (East) with You.” The Biden administration is finding itself increasingly pilloried from both sides for its handling of the Oct. 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas and Israel’s ensuing military response in the Gaza Strip, as t...

It's another episode of “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” recorded live before an audience of Lawfare Material Supporters on Thursday. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Roger Parloff and Quinta Jurecic, and Lawfare Fulton County Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower to talk about all the pleas that have happened in Fulton County and all the pleas tha...

From July 3, 2018: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the Turkish election the other day, and becomes the first president under Turkey's new empowered presidential system. His party, in coalition with ultra-nationalists, will control the Parliament as well, so it's a big win for the Turkish president. It may be a loss for democratic values. On Tuesday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Amanda Sloat, Robert Bosc...

It’s probably fair to say that the Israeli government was not the only one caught flat-footed by the deadly attack launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. On that day, several of the U.S. government’s top diplomatic posts in the Middle East were vacant, and the Biden administration had long focused most of its attention elsewhere in the world. And, in  a now infamous episode  from only a week prior...

Many will recognize the voice of Steve Inskeep from his nearly two decades-long role hosting NPR's Morning Edition . But he's also the author of what is now a trilogy of books about political relationships in the United States during the 19th century, including his newly published Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. His newest book uses a unique framework to study Lincoln's...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week faintly endorsed the Justice Department’s reading of a critical felony charge, “corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding,” which the department has relied on to prosecute at least 317 individuals for their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In the case,  United States v. Thomas Robertson , the court affirmed the Justice Department’s conc...

Another morning, another surprise plea deal in Fulton County Superior Court. It was Jenna Ellis this time, in front of Judge Scott McAfee, pleading out of the Fulton County election interference case. There was a tearful colloquy and a letter of apology to the people of Georgia. There is a cooperation agreement of some kind, and there is yet another sentence of probation.  Lawfare Editor-in-C...

Thanks to advances in digital technologies, it is now easier than ever for civilians to get involved in military cyber operations. From private civilian companies being involved in cyber defense to individuals engaging in offensive cyber operations against enemy targets, the increased participation of civilians in armed conflict is a risky trend. Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia...

The promise and risks posed by artificial intelligence appear to have captured our collective imagination. The risks seem to span from global doom brought about by a rogue AI to the enshrinement of harmful bias and discrimination in systems that can determine whether you get a loan. The stakes require governments to step up and regulate the field, with several key companies advocating for governme...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by their Lawfare colleague and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Eric Ciaramella to discuss the week’s big national security news, including: “PiS Off.” Elections in Poland appear set to oust the incumbent Law and Justice (or “PiS”) party, which has spent the past several years in power undermining many of...

It's another episode of “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” our weekly YouTube livestream conducted on Zoom for Lawfare Material Supporters. It was a breaking news day on Thursday: Sidney Powell, the Kraken lawyer, pled guilty in a plea deal in Fulton County Superior Court, one day before she and Ken Chesebro were going to trial. To unpack it all, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down wi...

From July 7, 2018: It's been a bad week for Polish democracy, with the government removing a bunch of judges from the country's Supreme Court in order to replace them with party loyalists. In response, protestors took to the streets to push back against the deconsolidation of Polish democracy. Radek Sikorski joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the week's events and the larger degradation of Polish g...