The Lawfare Podcast

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what may be the biggest case of the term: Moore v. Harper . In that case, North Carolina’s state legislature is arguing that the state Supreme Court lacks the legal authority to review the heavily gerrymandered congressional districts it has enacted, on the grounds that the Constitution's elections clause gives that authority exclusively to t...

Earlier this fall, the Biden administration released what it called a “ Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights ,” a policy document that lays out a five-pillar strategy for how the United States intends to wrestle with and regulate the challenges arising from the increasingly common use of artificial intelligence. In recent weeks, the European Union has been wrestling with its own AI regulation challe...

J. Edgar Hoover served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, from 1924 until 1972. Since his death, Hoover has become one of the most reviled figures in American history due to FBI operations under his leadership to spy on Americans, including government officials, in order to manipulate democratic politics. To discuss Hoover's extraordinary role in American politics in...

On Thursday afternoon, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in the amusingly captioned case Trump v. United States of America . The three-judge panel vacated District Judge Aileen Cannon's order appointing a special master to review the material seized at Mar-a-Lago by the Justice Department, and it ruled in scathing language that she had no authority to entertain the case at all&nbsp...

Plagues periodically exact a heavy toll on human life—and much more. They devastate economies, exacerbate social disorder, shock governance systems, provide fodder for political violence, and interact in surprising ways with terrorism. In this episode of Chatter , David Priess and longtime RAND Corporation terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins talk about the long nature of pandemics, the history...

From April 28, 2020: Sophia Yan, a correspondent for the London Telegraph, joined Benjamin Wittes from Beijing where she is in coronavirus lockdown after traveling to Wuhan, China, to see how it was recovering from being the coronavirus epidemic center earlier in the year. They talked about what Wuhan looks like these days, what quarantine means in China, and how close the surveillance is. And the...

U.S. Cyber Command was established on May 21, 2010, and is the second youngest unified combatant command after U.S. Space Command in the United States. As explained in the Command history, U.S. Cyber Command operates globally in real time against determined and capable adversaries. Lawyers who work in the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate at Cyber Command provide legal advice on a range of issues...

Protests have broken out in China over the zero-Covid policy, over lockdowns, and even over the rule of newly appointed third-term leader Xi Jinping. The government has begun a crackdown, there have been arrests, there have been intimidating interrogations, there have been street closures, and there has been a lot of internet content removed.  To go over it all and see what we can make of it,...

The 2002 Iraq AUMF authorized the invasion of Iraq and a variety of U.S. military activities since then, and a large bipartisan group of senators and representatives have decided it's time for it to go away. A repeal bill was passed by the House and is awaiting action in the Senate, but we don't know if there's going to be time for that action before the Senate adjourns.  It’s a good opportun...

The United States military was one of the first institutions in government to acknowledge the threat posed by climate change, as well as the science behind it, and yet it remains the largest single energy consumer in the country and the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter in the world. To talk through this strategic disconnect, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Dr. Neta...

It's been an eventful several weeks on the Korean Peninsula, with a spree of missile tests, the sudden display of a daughter of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and the articulation of a remarkably aggressive nuclear doctrine. To go over it all, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Stephan Haggard, the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at the School of...

This week on Rational Security 2.0 , a Quinta-less Alan and Scott welcomed Lawfare's dynamic associate editor duo, Katherine Pompilio and Hyemin Han, on to the show to talk through the week's big national security news stories, including: “Going Full Cleve.” Last week, former President Donald Trump  announced his intention to once again run for president —in spite of the R...

From March 30, 2021: Anti-Asian violence in the United States seems to be on the rise. On March 16, a shooter killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at several Atlanta businesses. Across the country, Asian-Americans have shared stories of attacks and harassment, some of which involved racist language in connection with the coronavirus pandemic. Yet there is very little data available t...

From May 2, 2020: Most of us don’t think of United States history as an imperial history, but the facts are there. The law and policy surrounding westward expansion, off-continent acquisitions, and a worldwide network of hundreds of bases reveal much about how and why the United States grew as it did. Last month, David Priess spoke with Daniel Immerwahr, associate professor of history at Northwest...

From December 11, 2020: This week, the Supreme Court returned once again to the complex and sometimes controversial Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, or FSIA, that protects foreign sovereigns from litigation before U.S. courts. At the same time, Congress is once again debating new exceptions to the protections provided by the FSIA on issues ranging from cybercrime to the coronavirus pandemic, an e...

For the last 29 days, Roger Parloff, Lawfare senior editor, has been sitting in on the Oath Keeper trial in Washington. The trial is now done, the jury has the case, and Roger joined Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about it. Which charges are likely to stick, and which ones seem weak? How did the various defendants do when they took the stand to defend themselves? And what kind of...

Earlier this month, officials from the government of Ethiopia and representatives from the Tigray People's Liberation Front agreed to halt the two-year conflict that has been rife with accusations of ethnic cleansing, sexual violence, and famine as a weapon of war. To discuss the current state of the conflict and the prospect of peace, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Alex de Wa...

Over the weekend, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, went into overtime as nations came to an historic agreement to establish a loss and damage fund. This fund is meant to give resources to countries who have experienced the worst effects of climate change. Some like to think of it as climate reparations.  There are a lot of factors that might have created the momentum f...

Satellites have held a special place in military planning and in spy fiction alike for more than half a century. Both domains ended up devoting much attention to satellite-based weapons and anti-satellite weaponry; both have also dealt with the problem of space debris related to the latter. In this chat, David Priess and George Washington University historian Aaron Bateman talk about Bateman's ear...

From September 23, 2017: The escalating tension between North Korea and the United States has risen to an unprecedented level. Earlier this month, Stephan Haggard, Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at UC San Diego, gave a lecture at a private function on the complicated strategic and political risks that North Korea’s missile and nuclear capabilities present. He talked...

Earlier today, in a surprise announcement, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to lead two ongoing federal investigations of former president and now official 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump. The special counsel, Jack Smith, is a longtime DOJ prosecutor and currently the chief Kosovo war crimes prosecutor in The Hague. He will take over the investigation into the...

Today, the U.S. military maintains around 800 bases in installations around the world with around 75 of those in Latin America, including perhaps its most notorious in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But it wasn't always this way. To learn more about this fraught and understudied history, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Dr. Rebecca Herman, assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley, t...

American democracy might look healthier in light of last week's midterms, but there's still a lot of skepticism across the political spectrum about how it's doing. From the right, would-be authoritarians cast doubt on elections and on the very idea of liberal democracy. But even those who reject this authoritarian impulse are frequently uncomfortable with the messiness of democratic politics, inst...

Matt Tait is a cybersecurity expert who has worked both in the private sector and for the British government at GCHQ, the UK's intelligence, security, and cyber agency. He's also a Lawfare contributor. Like a lot of us, Tait has spent the last several months thinking about Ukraine, and Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes had cybersecurity questions for him. They talked about why the Ukrainian...

Sophia Yan, pianist for the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security , is also The Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent—or at least, she was until the other day. She’s produced a new podcast entitled, “ How to become a dictator ,” about the rise and rule of Xi Jinping and her own struggles as a reporter in Xi’s China. Now Sophia’s in Taiwan after a hasty exit from the country, and she joined Lawfare ’s...