The Lawfare Podcast

From April 1, 2024: In early February, the European Union approved a major overhaul of its immigration laws. If approved by EU member states, the pact will drastically curtail the rights of migrants and asylum seekers entering the European Union. It’s part of a trend we’re seeing all over the world, including here in the U.S.   Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with...

From January 25, 2023: Judge Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County held a hearing on Tuesday to decide whether or not to release the Fulton County Special Grand Jury's report on 2020 election interference in Georgia.  Lawfare's  Fulton County correspondent Anna Bower was in the room  live-blogging  the matter, and  Lawfare  editor-in-chief Benjamin Wi...

Information about the recent protests in Iran and the regime's brutal crackdown are only starting to come to light, having been severely limited by the internet shutdown over the past few weeks. The picture that is emerging is horrifying: Thousands and possibly tens of thousands have been killed by regime security forces. In this episode, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Ariane Tabatabai talks to Nat...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Molly Roberts, Michael Feinberg, and Troy Edwards to talk through the week’s big warrant-related national security news, including: “Tulsi Went Down to Georgia, She Was Looking for a Vote to Steal.” This past week, the FBI executed a warrant to search Fulton County’s election center for ballots and equipment related to the 2020 election, with t...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson about the recently announced U.S. plan to take possession of Venezuelan oil, sell it on the world market, and hold the revenue from those sales in accounts based in Qatar. Scott and Lawfare Contributing Editor Alex Zerden recently published  an article in Lawfare  digging into the comp...

Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman to discuss their new book, “ The Church Committee Report Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State ,” in which they chronicle the law enforcement and intelligence community’s Cold War excesses, the Senate committee which uncovered them, and what we can learn about the...

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University, discusses her new book, " Man Up: The New Misogyny & the Rise of Violence Extremism ," with  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman. She explains how different forms of misogyny shape lead to political and social violence, why most scholarship and media accounts usually ignore the role of gender, and what individual...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Senior Editor Eric Columbus sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss the FBI search of the election center in Fulton County, the arrest of protestors in Minnesota, including Don Lemon, a decision out of the 9th Circuit regarding temporary protected status for Venezuelans, and more. You can find informati...

From January 27, 2025: In a live conversation on January 23 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Alan Rozenshtein and assistant law professor at Pace University Amelia Wilson about the first batch of executive orders by President Trump in his second term, including suspending enforcement...

From July 16, 2024: On July 15, Judge Cannon  granted former President Trump’s motion  to dismiss the indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith for the alleged mishandling of classified documents. She found that Smith was appointed as a special counsel in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. In a live podcast recording ,  Lawfare  Editor-in...

Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, speaks to  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff about the thousands of habeas corpus cases he has pored through challenging a Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most detained aliens. They discuss how judges have ruled on these cases, the degree to which those rulings do or don’t correlate with political e...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein, Eric Columbus, and Molly Roberts for a deep dive into two of the week’s big national security news stories: “Slipping Down the Slope.” Last week’s killing of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has triggered what increasingly appears to be a national backlash against the Trump a...

The crisis over President Trump's threats to annex Greenland appears to be over for now. But the second- and third-order consequences continue to unfold as NATO allies try to manage their relationship with the United States. In this episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Ariane Tabatabai, and Egmont Institute Visiting Fellow John Drennan give an overview of the...

Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Princeton PhD candidate Elizabeth Tsurkov to talk about the 903 days that she was held in captivity by Kata'ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq. Tsurkov describes the circumstances of her detention, the realities of life in captivity, and the sociological study she undertook of her captors while imprisoned. Wittes and Tsurkov also explore...

Andy Grotto, William J. Perry International Security Fellow and the founder and co-director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and Jim Dempsey, a senior policy adviser to that program and a Lecturer at the UC Berkeley Law School, join Lawfare ’s Justin Sherman to discuss their recent study on...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Eric Columbus and Lawfare Associate Editor Olivia Manes to discuss discussed the FBI searching the home of a Washington Post reporter, the Supreme Court oral arguments in President Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, the criminal in...

From December 6, 2024: For today’s podcast,  Lawfare  General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, for the latest in their series of podcast conversations on aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This time, they focused on what might be one of the most consequential develop...

From January 15, 2025: In a  live conversation on January 14 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editor Anna Bower about the confirmation hearing of Pete Hegseth by the Senate Armed Services Committee on his expected nomination to be secretary of defense, the first confirmation hearing for one of President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominations...

Jakub Kraus, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , speaks with Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Research Director at Lawfare , and Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law, a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , about Anthropic's newly released "constitution" for its AI mode...

This week, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Shane Harris and Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower and Loren Voss to talk through yet another big week in national security, including: “Minnesota N(ICE).” Amidst ongoing tensions over the Trump administration’s hyper aggressive immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota, the Justice Department has issued subpoenas to at least five state Democratic off...

Senior Editor Anna Bower spoke with Carolyn Shapiro, co-director of Chicago-Kent College of Law's Institute on the Supreme Court, and Bryna Godar, a Staff Attorney with the  State Democracy Research Initiative  at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The discussion covered the state of Minnesota’s jurisdiction to criminally investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE official who reportedly sh...

On today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold, the managing director of The Center Project and a Lawfare contributing editor, to talk over the Trump administration's recently released plans for the Board of Peace tasked with implementing its peace plan for Gaza. Together, they discuss the details of the plan, how it intersects with the Trump administratio...

Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts joins Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss her new article on the so-called “grand conspiracy” investigation, which is now the subject of a grand jury probe in Florida. The “grand conspiracy” posits that a single conspiracy to foil President Trump’s electoral prospects binds together the Russia investigation from 2016, the Mar-a-Lago search, and the Jan. 6...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Michael Feinberg and Molly Roberts to discuss the investigation of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Senator Mark Kelly’s suit against the Department of Defense, Illinois and Minnesota’s lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security over an increase...

From September 9, 2021: Let’s say you’re a freedom-loving American fed up with Big Tech’s effort to censor your posts. Where can you take your business? One option is Parler—the social media platform that became notorious for its use by the Capitol rioters. Another is Gettr—a new site started by former Trump aide Jason Miller. Unfortunately, both platforms have problems. They don’t work very well....