The Lawfare Podcast

Our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem has been taking a bit of a hiatus—but we’re back! On today’s episode, we’re discussing the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in NetChoice v. Paxton , upholding a Texas law that binds large social media platforms to certain transparency requirements and significantly limits their ability to moderate cont...

There's enormous debate about how much social media platforms should be doing to moderate extremist content. But that debate often lacks nuance about the many different ways that platforms can moderate and that moderation is not an all or nothing proposition.  Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and Lawfare ’s foreign policy editor. He recently pub...

This past Monday, the criminal trial of Thomas Barrack began in federal court in the Eastern District of New York. Barrack, who served as an informal advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign and then as chair of Trump's inaugural committee, is alleged to have acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates. According to the indictment, Barrack acted as a back channel for the UAE to influence U.S. f...

Geoffrey Berman was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the Trump administration. He was appointed under peculiar circumstances, and he was fired under even more peculiar circumstances. He is now a partner at the law firm of Fried Frank, and he’s the author of the new book, “ Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent U.S. Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trum...

On September 15, Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida issued two key rulings in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. She appointed Judge Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York as the special master reviewing the documents and denied the Justice Department’s motion for a partial stay of her previous injunction barring the department from using th...

Of all of the Central Intelligence Agency's activities, paramilitary operations might remain the least understood. This, in part, is both a cause and a consequence of inaccurate portrayals of such work in prominent movies; it's also because fewer memoirs come from the CIA's Special Activities Division than from traditional human intelligence collectors and from analysts. David Priess chatted with...

From March 17, 2018: In 1963, John Feerick became a witness to and a framer of our constitutional history. Within two years of graduating from law school, Feerick had written an influential law review article on presidential disability and succession, joined the ABA’s blue-ribbon commission to create a solution to those problems, and became a confidant and an adviser to the members of Congress who...

Ken Starr, the former federal judge and independent counsel who became famous for his investigation of President Bill Clinton, died this week on September 13 at age 76. Starr was a complex and controversial figure: after running the Whitewater and Lewinsky investigations, he went on to serve as president of Baylor University, only to resign over the mishandling of a sex abuse scandal involving the...

Dmitri Alperovitch is the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitics think tank in Washington, and the impresario of the Geopolitics Decanted podcast. He joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv Oblast last week. They discussed whether the Ukrainian retaking of large swaths of territory is a big deal, what’s going to come next, and if this is a prel...

Amid the war and instability in Afghanistan over the last two decades, the opium industry has seen explosive growth. In fact, Afghanistan accounts for the vast majority of the world's opium supply. The Taliban vowed to crack down on the production of illicit drugs, and in March, they issued a total ban on opium cultivation, which has stripped many rural Afghans of their livelihoods. But in the mea...

Since his 1991 death, Rainer Sonntag has been remembered as a martyr by generations of neo-Nazis and other far-right activists, especially in his native Germany. Less discussed, however, is the fact that he was also a spy for the communist authorities of East Germany and their counterparts in the Soviet Union—and that a young KGB operative named Vladimir Putin played a prominent role in his rise t...

Pakistan is experiencing one of the largest natural disasters in modern history. The massive floods there, combined with glacier melt, have led to one third of the country being submerged underwater with more than one million people displaced and tens of billions of dollars in damage. Lawfare publisher David Priess sat down with Erin Sikorsky, the director for the Center for Climate and Security,...

From January 25, 2022: In this bonus episode of Chatter , David Priess talks with professor and author Marita Sturken about 9/11-related memorials, museums, and architecture. Her research and writings have examined everything from visual culture to the connection between memory and consumerism, with much of her recent work addressing memory of the attacks on September 11, 2001, as both the battleg...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by co-host emeriti Ben Wittes and Shane Harris for a very special anniversary edition of Rational Security that pits their national security hot takes up against each other. Which of the following takes will the team find to be "too hot," which "undercooked," and which "just right"? Americans (and especially progressives) will re...

From September 3, 2020: This week on  Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alissa Starzak, the head of public policy at Cloudflare—a company that provides key components of the infrastructure that helps websites stay online. They talked about two high-profile incidents in which Cloudflare decided to pull its services from websites p...

On August 25, the Defense Department released its long-awaited Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan , something that human rights advocates have called on the Pentagon to do for the past 20 years. To discuss it, former Lawfare associate editor Tia Sewell sat down with Todd Huntley, a former JAG and current director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown University Law Cent...

On August 23, the Washington Post published a story about a whistleblower complaint filed by Peiter Zatko, the former security lead and member of Twitter's executive team responsible for information security, privacy, physical security, and information technology. In the whistleblower complaint, Zatko describes extreme problems and deficiencies with the security, privacy, and integrity of Twitter'...

Monday afternoon, a federal judge in Florida acceded to Donald Trump's motion to appoint a special master to review privilege claims arising out of the Mar-a-Lago search. The ruling was not a particular surprise given that the judge had foreshadowed that it was coming, but it shocked observers nonetheless on a number of different bases. The decision raised questions of how it would affect the Just...

Late last month, investigative journalists at Bellingcat and partner organizations published a story exposing the identity of a Russian spy named Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, who over the course of 10 years had charmed her way into the social circles of NATO members in Naples. Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Christo Grozev, Bellingcat's lead Russia investigator, who walked us t...

Oleksandra Povoroznik is a (⁦ @rynkrynk ) is a Kyiv-based journalist, film critic and translator, who joins us to discuss the changing politics of language in Ukraine, as well as the country's defiant wartime culture and humor. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From September 24, 2020: Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, about her new book: “ How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict .” The book chronicles Nina’s journey around Europe, tracing down how information operations spearheaded by Russia have played out in countries in the former Soviet bloc,...

From February 15, 2014: 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. I edited the podcast version of the debate for length and got rid of the introductions and audience questions. It thus proceeds a...

In recent months, the country of Iraq has been living through the latest in a series of political crises as different factions have struggled for control of its governing institutions. Earlier this week, that tension broke out into the open as rioters occupied government office buildings and militias associated with other factions responded with violence. To learn more, Lawfare senior editor Scott...

On Tuesday night, running up against the 11:59 PM deadline, the Justice Department filed its 40-page motion opposing Donald Trump's request that a special master be appointed to oversee the handling of documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. To wade through that meaty document and its implications, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien was joined by Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, COO and publish...

In February 2020, police in the town of Rexburg, Idaho, uncovered evidence of what seemed like an unthinkable crime: two children murdered by one of their parents. The investigation that followed revealed not only more possible murders but also two alleged perpetrators possessed of a radical belief system that both justified their use of violence and shared common threads with the beliefs of numer...