The Lawfare Podcast

From August 12, 2017: The new Netflix documentary  Icarus  may seem at first glance off the beaten path for  Lawfare . It's a film about doping in international sports, not national security law or policy. But as Benjamin Wittes explained when he  reviewed it here , it's really about much more than that: Icarus  is not about  L’Affaire Russe  or Russian interfere...

For the past decade, Tunisia's democracy has stood out as one of the few remaining bright spots of the Arab Spring. But earlier this week, it entered its own crisis as President Kais Saied declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and stated his intent to move forward with widespread prosecutions as part of a long-promised anti-corruption effort. Some argue that Saied's strong-arm tactic...

The attempted insurrection on January 6 is back in the headlines. This week, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot began its work with its very first hearing. So for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, Evelyn Douek interviewed Quinta Jurecic about social media’s role in warning of the riot. Specifically, they talked about an essay Quinta wrote in...

Yesterday saw the first hearing of the special House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riots and insurrection. Four law enforcement officers testified before the committee, which consisted of the Democrats along with two renegade Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. To chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare congressional guru Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the...

The United States is just over a month out from completing its full military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but as U.S. troops have moved on, the situation on the ground has only gotten more challenging, with the Taliban claiming control of a growing portion of the country. In recent days, the United States even reentered the arena with airstrikes on the Taliban intended to reinforce U.S. support fo...

There are some stunning revelations coming out of the new blockbuster book by Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, “ I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year .” If you thought you knew how bad some things during that final year of the Trump presidency were, this book will surprise you with what it tells us about the things that even those of us who watched the presidency closely did...

From August 10, 2019: The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister. It also has a looming cliff it is careening toward and about to leap off of on Halloween of this year. This week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with his Brookings colleague Amanda Sloat to talk about all things Brexit. They talked about the new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his views on Brexit, the deadlock between Britain and t...

From November 24, 2018: John Carlin served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division from April 2014 to October 2016. In his new book with Garrett Graff, called “Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat," Carlin explains the cyber conflicts the U.S. faces and how the government fights back. Benjamin...

It's been a busy couple of weeks at Guantanamo Bay, a place that has not had a busy couple of weeks in a while. There was a transfer, there was a resumption of military commissions, and the chief prosecutor of military commissions resigned abruptly. To go over these events, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Steve Vladeck, a Lawfare contributing editor and a professor at the University of Texas, and La...

This week we're bringing you the breakdown of the heavyweight bout of the century—a battle over vaccine misinformation. In the left corner we have the White House. Known for its impressive arsenal and bully pulpit, this week it asked for the fight and came out swinging with claims that Facebook is a killer—and not in a good way. In the right corner we have Facebook, known for its ability to just k...

Yemen remains a mess. Many years of warfare have left it politically fractured, economically shattered and with a true humanitarian crisis of multiple dimensions. And yet there are some small signs of hope, with the Biden administration increasing its engagement to achieve progress and the United Nations resetting its efforts with a new special envoy to the country.  To talk through it, David...

It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software Pegasus, which seems to have gathered data from the phones of a shockingly large number of people. Then, starting Sunday evening and into Monday morning, the Biden administration announced a multi-lateral response to China's Microsoft Exchange Server...

U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other day. Scott Anderson knows something about withdrawals. He served at U.S. Embassy Baghdad shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the Afghan withdrawal, his memories of the Iraq withdr...

From February 16, 2013: Fawzia Koofi ( website ,  Twitter ) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly. She is also running for President of Afghanistan in the planned April 2014 elections, and would be the first female president in Afghan history. She has a remarkable backstory: Born as the nineteenth of her father's twenty-three children, Koofi...

From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome  Eric Schwartz , the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In his conversation with Benjamin Wittes, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protect...

National security attention rarely focuses for long on Sub-Saharan Africa, and when it does, it's largely on the most populous countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Former intelligence community and National Security Council official Judd Devermont, now director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wants to change that. A...

On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companies, predictably, sued—and on June 30, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction against the law. The legislation , which purported to end “censorship” online by “big tech,” rec...

Jack Goldsmith is feeling a little bit grouchy. In a piece on Lawfare entitled, " Empty Threats and Warnings on Cyber ," he blasts the Biden administration and its predecessors for "publicly pledging to impose 'consequences' on Russia for its cyber actions for at least five years—usually, as here, following a hand-wringing government deliberation in the face of a devastating cyber incident." Golds...

Last week, the country of Haiti was rocked by the assassination of its controversial president, Jovenel Moïse, who was killed in a bizarre plot, the details of which are still being uncovered. Moïse's death is yet another shock for a Haitian political system that was already in a state of crisis and has some calling for foreign intervention, a controversial proposal with which Haiti has a long and...

Dmitri Alperovitch sat down with Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, to discuss the Biden administration's cybersecurity strategy. The conversation was originally recorded at a Silverado Policy Accelerator event on June 29, 2021. They discussed the latest executive order that the president signed on cybersecurity, the administration's strategy to com...

From August 25, 2020: Jack Goldsmith spoke with Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, about his new book, " The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News ." They discussed the long and interesting history of the contentious relationship between presidents and the pres...

From July 11, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But, America’s history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings launch of his newest book entitled,  “What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,”  ...

For many Americans, the events of the past several years—from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the January 6 assault on the Capitol building—have driven home a disturbing conclusion: that the problems of extremism, violence and terrorism are not just overseas phenomena, but have taken root here in the United States. One of President Biden's first actions upon assumin...

The news business in America is in crisis. Between 2008 and 2019, newspapers in the U.S. lost half of their newsroom employees . Journalism jobs cut during the pandemic number in the tens of thousands. Local news is suffering the most, with cutbacks across the country and many communities left without a reliable source of information for what’s going on in their area. Why is this a crisis not just...

The United States Secret Service has many important missions, the most public of which is protecting the president of the United States. And in this mission, its motto is "Zero Fail." There is no window for them to let their guard down when it comes to protecting the commander-in-chief. And yet, the past several decades of the Secret Service's protection have seen gaps, mistakes and exposures of s...