The Lawfare Podcast

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare ’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ben Smith, media columnist for the New York Times and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Ben spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the gatekeepers who hold the power to shape our public sphere. At BuzzFeed, he capitalized on the way the rise o...

While we have been dealing with an insurrection in Washington, protestors in Hong Kong are being tried under the city's new Beijing-imposed national security law. For an update on what's going on in Hong Kong and in its relationship with China, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Sophia Yan, Beijing correspondent for The Telegraph in London, and Alvin Cheung, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University a...

George Shultz passed away on February 6, just two months after passing his 100th birthday. He was a momentous and fascinating national security figure who has quite a legacy within national defense, foreign policy and even management circles in the federal government. To talk about his legacy and what made him such a special senior government leader, David Priess sat down with Ambassador Nicholas...

The Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump—the sequel—gets underway this week when the House impeachment managers and Trump's new defense team spar on the Senate floor under the gavel of Senator Patrick Leahy. What should we expect from this second round of impeachment trial? For a preview, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Molly Reynolds, Lawfare 's congressional guru and a senior fellow at the Bro...

Some countries don't just abuse their citizens within their own borders; increasingly, they target individuals after they have gone abroad. A range of nefarious acts play a role here, and together they make up a phenomenon called transnational repression. Nate Schenkkan, the director of research strategy at Freedom House, and Isabel Linzer, Freedom House's research analyst for technology and democ...

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare ’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare ’s deputy managing editor Jacob Schulz, and Jordan Schneider, host of the ChinaTalk podcast , to talk about Substack. The newsletter service is the new cool thing in the journalism world—and, like any newly popular online service, it is already running into questio...

There is an impeachment trial next week, and the two sides—the impeachment managers for the House of Representatives and the lawyers for the former president of the United States—filed their briefs before the Senate. The briefs could not be more different. One is long, legally dense and factually rich; the other is short—a mere 14 pages—and contains some interesting oddities and errors. To chew ov...

It was the second weekend of major protests in Russia, as Russians across the country took to the streets to protest the detention of Alexei Navalny. In a major show of force, the police rounded up a very large number of people and there were a number of beatings. To bring us up to speed on the situation in Russia, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European...

On January 27, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unusual National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin—unusual because it addressed solely the heightened threat environment of violence from domestic violent extremists, with no mention of foreign terrorist organizations or even the word terrorism. It's a striking document both for what it describes and for what it leaves unsaid. To discus...

Yesterday was a big day—the day that the Facebook Oversight Board released its first decisions. The independent board, an experiment in platform governance set up by Facebook, handed down five rulings weighing in on the company’s decision to remove various posts for violating Facebook’s community guidelines. It may not be Marbury v. Madison , but it’s still a big moment for online speech regulatio...

For this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare ’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Kate Klonick and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her work focuses on networked social movements, disinformation and media manipulation—so she’s the perfect person to help untang...

David Kris sat down with David Hatch, the senior historian at the U.S. National Security Agency. They discussed Project VENONA, an incredibly significant intelligence program involving encrypted Soviet messages that began during World War II and went on for many years thereafter. It's a story full of unusual events and interesting lessons about intelligence and counterintelligence and spy vs. spy....

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Michael McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of the new book, " The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution ." They discussed McConnell's textual historical approach to interpreting presidential p...

The day before last week's inauguration of President Joe Biden, four of the Biden administration's core national security nominees appeared before various Senate committees for their confirmation hearings. Avril Haines, Biden's nominee for Director of National Intelligence, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Alejandro Mayorkas, the nominee for Secretary of the Department...

It was supposed to be the big sequel to the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally-turned-riot. It was supposed to be the largest armed protest in the history of the United States, taking place in all 50 state capitals. And yet, Inauguration Day turned out to be peaceful. Protesters were few; acts of violence were even fewer. It's a major counterterrorism success, and like many major counterterrorism su...

During his inaugural address yesterday, President Biden spoke about the subject of this podcast: disinformation. “There is truth and there are lies,” Biden said, “lies told for power and for profit.” And he asked Americans to unify rather than “turn inward” against those “who don't get their news from the same sources you do.” But in an era of QAnon and pandemic disinformation, how will that unifi...

Private entities—in particular, technology giants like internet service providers, email services and social networks—play a vital role in helping law enforcement fight child pornography online. But the involvement of private entities does not eliminate the Fourth Amendment issues that come with electronic surveillance. In fact, the more the private entities cooperate with the government, the more...

In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol, some have called for the invocation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 disqualifies anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection against United States from public office. In particular, critics of President Trump have seized on this as a potential way of preventing him from running in 2024. Alan Rozenshtein spoke about Secti...

The NSA this week released a long-awaited update to its signals intelligence policy, which had not been updated since 1988. David Kris, former assistant attorney general for the National Security Division, shortly thereafter produced an even longer paper analyzing the dense and technical policy document. David joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the significance of this new policy document, what...

Yesterday, January 13, the House of Representatives impeached President Trump a second time for encouraging the violent riot in the Capitol Building on January 6. And yet, the impeachment is probably less of a crushing blow to the president than something else that’s happened in recent days: the loss of his Twitter account. After a few very eventful weeks, Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on di...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University, to talk about an important issue in the news this week: late impeachments. In the current context, the issue of a late impeachment would arise if the House of Representatives impeaches President Trump before he leaves office but the Senate does not hold the trial for Trump, with possible conviction and disqualif...

Donald Trump is headed for a second impeachment, a whole lot of people have been charged in federal and local courts in Washington, and an even larger number are probably about to be. What's more, the president's social media accounts have vanished; in fact, one of the very networks on which the president's supporters organized has itself disappeared. To talk through it all, Benjamin Wittes sat do...

Jamie Gorelick was the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno. In that capacity, she hired as her top aide and adjutant one Merrick Garland. This was before Garland became a D.C. Circuit judge, but it was a fateful period for the department, a period in which Garland supervised some high-profile cases, including the investigation of the Oklahoma City b...

The storming of the Capitol on Wednesday was a catastrophic failure of protective law enforcement, as rioters overran Capitol Police barricades and gained access to a building that a lot of police were supposed to be protecting. How did it happen? Who screwed up? And what can be done about it? Benjamin Wittes sat down with Fred Burton, the executive director of the Center for Protective Intelligen...

Today a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol following a rally at which the president spoke. Congressional efforts to count the electoral votes were suspended, and an armed standoff, in which at least one person was killed, ensued. To discuss the matter, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare managing editor Quinta Jurecic; Lawfare chief operating officer David Priess; Georgetown's Mary McCo...