The Lawfare Podcast

From December 19, 2019: In this episode of  Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Peter Pomerantsev, a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." The book explores how the nature of propaganda has shifted as authoritarian governments move...

From August 26, 2020: Yemen is home to the most tragic circumstances imaginable right now—years upon years of war, environmental disasters and severe humanitarian plight, exacerbated by cholera, diphtheria and now COVID-19. To discuss the ongoing situation, David Priess sat down with Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University, w...

Last week on Lawfare Live , Jacob Schulz sat down with Andrew Mines, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Mines helps lead the Program on Extremism's efforts to keep track of criminal charges resulting from the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill siege. They talked about the U.S military’s efforts to counter extremism within its ranks. Mines is the recent author of a Lawfare p...

We’re taking a look back at one of the stranger stories about social media platforms and the role of the press in the last presidential election. In the weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published an “October Surprise”: a set of stories on the business and personal life of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, based on emails contained on a mysteriou...

In the last few weeks, much has been said about how energy issues are playing into Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. It's especially coming up in the context of sanctions regimes against Russia, whose economy relies so heavily on energy production. But the war has serious implications for energy security more broadly. Natalie Orpett sat down with Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate an...

On June 3, President Biden issued a national security memorandum that established the “Fight Against Corruption” as a core national security interest for the United States. The memo described the staggering costs of corruption, with it being “estimated that acts of corruption sap between 2 and 5 percent from global gross domestic product.” The memo also directed U.S. officials to develop a compreh...

Madeleine Albright passed away on March 23. She was the first woman to serve as secretary of state in United States history, and she had a long legacy, both from her time as secretary and beyond. To talk through what made her special and what her impact was, David Priess sat down with Kori Schake and Natalie Orpett. Kori is the director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American En...

From October 1, 2019: The first two years of the Trump presidency were tied up with the Russia scandal. Now, there’s another scandal involving Russia’s next-door neighbor: Ukraine. The revelation that President Trump and his envoys pressured the Ukrainian government for information about debunked claims of Biden family corruption in Ukraine have brought Ukrainian domestic politics onto the America...

From April 13, 2020: Whether it has been travel bans, family separation, or changes to asylum rules, the Trump administration has long been embroiled in controversies over its immigration and detention policy. Those controversies have come amidst surges in migrants and asylum seekers, particularly at the U.S. southern border. The Trump administration's new policies have been legally and technicall...

Andrea Chalupa is a writer, podcaster and Ukrainian American who worked for 15 years on a screenplay about a man named Gareth Jones, a journalist who uncovered the genocide perpetrated by Stalin against Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Directed by the great filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the film is called “Mr. Jones,” and it was released in the middle of the pandemic. It is an incredible piece of wor...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re turning our attention to the United Kingdom, where the government has just introduced into Parliament a broad proposal for regulating the internet: the Online Safety Bill . The U.K. government has proclaimed that the Bill represents new “world-first online safety laws” and includes “tougher and quicker criminal...

In the hours following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine's foreign minister tweeted out a call for what he called an international legion of fighters to come to Ukraine and fight against Russia. And so far, it seems that some have heeded that call. Jacob Schulz talked with Daniel Byman, Lawfare ’s foreign policy editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who is the author of a bo...

We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do. Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called, “ The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of...

Polina Ivanova is a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and has spent the better part of the last decade reporting from Russia for that publication, for Reuters and elsewhere. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the Russian military press conference that took place on Friday in which the Ministry of Defense seemed to walk back Russia's war aims in the Ukraine conflict. Ben and Pol...

From February 19, 2021: On February 1, Myanmar's military overthrew the country's democratically elected government in a coup and declared a state of emergency for a year. Since then, the country has seen daily peaceful protests and large-scale strikes against military rule, at times clashing with security forces who have been seen using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. To break it...

From March 4, 2021: On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the  Lawfare Podcast ’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Emily testified before Congress last week about the role of legacy media, and cable news in particular, in spreadin...

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued rulings in two separate cases involving the state secrets privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah  and  Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga. To talk about the Court's decision and what it means for state secrets doctrine and executive power, Rohini Kurup sat down with Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Progra...

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the war in Ukraine on this series—how the Russian, Ukrainian and American governments are leveraging information as part of the conflict; how tech platforms are navigating the flood of information coming out of Ukraine and the crackdown from the Kremlin; and how open-source investigators are documenting the war .  This week on Arbiters of Trut...

Cyberwar is here, proclaims Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in a New York Times op-ed last week entitled, “ Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine .” While some cyber warfare experts expected massive cyberattacks against Ukraine before Russia invaded in February of this year, Rid suggests in his o...

General John Baker served until December as the chief defense council at the military commissions. The military commissions’ prosecutors and defense lawyers are in conversations now about a possible plea deal to resolve the 9/11 case once and for all—that's the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and three others of their al-Qaeda co-conspirators. It has been hanging around in the mil...

Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, who now is a novelist and a writer. Most recently, though, Alex has taken up a different task. She is the leader of #YachtWatch , an effort to track down and monitor the movements of massive yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs. #YachtWatch has become a popular way of following and staying engaged with the fallout from the Ru...

From February 8, 2020: Russia continues to sporadically poke its head into American media headlines, whether it be for its role in Syria or for anxieties about fresh election interference in 2020. But these news stories seldom provide a window into life in Putin’s Russia. Jacob Schulz sat down with Joshua Yaffa, the Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker, to talk about his new book, "Between Two...

We're bringing you the second episode of Lawfare ’s new narrative series, The Aftermath , which deals specifically with the early phases of the criminal investigation launched by the FBI, even as the perpetrators of the riot were heading home. The episode features interviews with former FBI and Justice Department official Chuck Rosenberg, New York Times reporter Katie Benner, and Seamus Hughes of...

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, one of the groups receiving the most attention for its participation in the insurrection on the Hill was the Oath Keepers, a right-wing extremist group that's been in existence since 2009 but has taken on an increased public profile since the riot last year. In early January, the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, along with 10 others, was indicted in U.S....

Open-source investigations—sometimes referred to as OSINT, or open-source intelligence—have been crucial to public understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An enormous number of researchers have devoted their time to sifting through social media posts, satellite images, and even Google Maps to track what’s happening in Ukraine and debunk false claims about the conflict.  This week on...