The Lawfare Podcast

Public discourse is in bad shape these days. We all yell at and cancel each other on social media and college campuses, and politicians—especially those on the Trumpist right—lie so much that the very notion of truth threatens to lose any meaning. But, Jonathan Rauch is optimistic that this can change for the better. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of, most...

Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo are professors at Columbia Law School, and they are co-authors of a recent article on Lawfare entitled, " Toward a New Era for Federal and State Oversight of Local Police ." Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to discuss the article, the history of the federal-state relationship in law enforcement, how the feds came to play an oversight role with respect to police depar...

If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on the platform’s decision to ban President Trump’s account. The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off the platform, but criticized the slapdash way Facebook made that call and provided a long list of...

For years, Congress and the Defense Department have debated how best to handle the pernicious problem of sexual assault in the military. Now, a bipartisan majority in the Senate appears to have settled on a set of reforms that would make unprecedented changes to the military justice system. But do these changes actually get at the root cause of the military sexual assault problem? Or do they simpl...

Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and she has a beef with the current debate over influence operations. Put simply, we don't really know what works in countering them, and the studies of the subject all seem to be case studies using different methodologies and examining different things. Benjamin...

It's been more than a year since the first contact tracing and exposure notification apps for the novel coronavirus have appeared, and the apps have not at all lived up to the hype. In fact, they've almost invariably stumbled or not really worked at all. Jacob Schulz sat down with Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfa...

In March 2019, a shooter carried out two mass killings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreaming the first shooting on Facebook. Two months later, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron convened the Christchurch Call—a commitment joined by both governments and technology companies “to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.” It...

Recent events have shown that Russian intelligence efforts against the United States and the West have continued since the end of the Cold War and have perhaps increased in recent years. In particular, Vladimir Putin appears determined to get even with the U.S. for Russian losses at the end of the Cold War. To discuss the role that intelligence has played in Russia's efforts, David Priess sat down...

Remember Maria Butina? She was the Russian graduate student at American University and gun enthusiast who was arrested for being an unregistered foreign agent shortly after the Russian electoral interference scandal broke. She eventually pled guilty to a lesser charge, served her time and was deported back to Russia. She is now the subject of a six-part podcast series by Celia Aniskovich called Sp...

In the final episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, " After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency ," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore whether and how we can repair the damage that the Trump presidency has done to the Republic. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testified on domestic violent extremism before the Senate Appropriations Committee. They talked about what they consider the most pressing threats and answered senators' questions about what their agencies are doing about them. There were also some questions about other topics such as border securi...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast 's series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with the journalist Will Oremus, who until recently was a senior writer at the technology publication OneZero and who is one of the most astute observers of online platforms and their relationship to the media. They dug into Will’s reporting on the social media p...

The situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is growing heated. Protests over the forced dislocation of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have escalated into violent confrontations with Israeli police forces, including in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the sacred grounds of the al-Aqsa Mosque, interrupting prayers there during the holy month of Ramadan. Over the past few days, t...

David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently ran a lengthy column about the machinations of Kash Patel in the executive branch during the presidential transition. Patel, a former staffer for Devin Nunes, held a variety of positions in the months before Donald Trump left office, and Donald Trump considered him for a variety of other positions. It's a remarkable story that raises a...

In the fifth episode of "After Trump," the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, " After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency ," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we consider whether the Justice Department is really independent of the president. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over its first 100 days in office, the Biden administration has faced a difficult set of policy challenges at America's southern border, ranging from new waves of individuals driven to try to cross the border by the effects of the global pandemic, to the often difficult legacy left by some of his predecessor's draconian immigration policies. As a candidate, Biden channeled Democrats' outrage with...

The wait is over. Four months after Facebook indefinitely banned Donald Trump from its platform following the Capitol riot, the Facebook Oversight Board—the platform’s self-appointed quasi-court—has weighed in on whether or not it was permissible for Facebook to do so. And the answer is ... complicated. Mark Zuckerberg can still keep Trump off his platform for now, but the board says that Facebook...

Rudy Giuliani played a central role, both in President Trump’s response to the Mueller investigation and in the drama in Ukraine that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment. Now, a year later, Giuliani is back in the news, thanks to reports of a search of his apartment by federal investigators in the Southern District of New York. What exactly is Giuliani being investigated for, and how does...

2020 was a remarkable year in so many ways, not least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Why did so many countries bungle their responses to it so badly? And what should their leaders have learned from earlier disasters and the pathologies clearly visible in the responses of their predecessors to them? Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at...

In the fourth episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, " After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, " by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore how and when a president is held to account for wild and sometimes criminal behavior. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When President Biden entered office, he inherited a bilateral relationship with Turkey that was strained to the limits by the growing independent streak in that country's foreign policy—and one that had been pushed in unfamiliar directions by his predecessor's direct and often unpredictable personal relationship with Turkey's longstanding president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This past week, the Biden...

Odds are, you probably haven’t heard of the Israeli government’s “Cyber Unit,” but it’s worth paying attention to whether or not you live in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s an entity that, among other things, reaches out to major online platforms like Facebook and Twitter with requests that the platforms remove content. It’s one of a number of such agencies around the globe, which are...

The Biden administration has now responded to two major cyberattacks—one from Russia, the SolarWinds attack, and the other from China, the so-called Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attack. Recently, Lawfare has run articles on both of these incidents—a piece from Dmitri Alperovitch , the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, and a piece from Alex Iftimie , a former Justice Department officia...

The Russian GRU Unit 29155 is in the news again. Czech authorities pin the blame on it for a series of explosions in 2014 that killed two people, and then they expelled an unusually high number of Russian diplomats, dramatically reducing Russia's diplomatic presence in Czechia and perhaps harming its intelligence efforts across Central Europe. To talk about it, David Priess sat down with Michael S...

In the third episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, " After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency ," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore the pardon power and what happens when a president abuses it. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.