The Lawfare Podcast

We have a new president-elect here in the United States, which means changes to certain U.S. domestic policies and also a different way of doing foreign policy. So, what does Biden’s win mean for different countries and regions globally? Jacob Schulz brings you dispatches from around the world about the effects of Biden’s win with Boris Ruge on Germany and the EU, Alina Polyakova on Russia and Ukr...

Following his appearance on Friday on the Lawfare Podcast , Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute , appeared on Lawfare Live for a live video conversation and audience Q&A. It was a very good conversation—so good that we thought we would bring you an edited version of it as Part Two of our conversation with Alex Vindman. He discussed how one be...

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.) is now the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute , the newest member of the Lawfare team. You've heard his story, likely in his testimony in the impeachment proceedings for President Trump. But Benjamin Wittes sat down with him for a different reason—his substantive expertise in Eastern Europe policy, Russia matters and great power competition. They ta...

This week on Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic are bringing you a conversation with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Alex was last on the show in August to talk about the newly established Election Integrity Partnership, which he helped set up to focus on detecting and mitigating disinformation around the U.S. 2020...

In the waning days of his administration, the president has attempted to install a political loyalist as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, a position that is traditionally a merits position, not a political position. He has also issued an executive order that gives the executive branch greater control over the civil service, making it easier to hire and fire people in agencies. It a...

The world’s most dangerous job apparently has a vacancy once again. Al Qaeda’s #2 reportedly has been killed in Iran by Israeli forces acting on U.S. intelligence. In addition, there are some rumors about Al Qaeda's #1, Ayman al-Zawahri, also passing into the hereafter. To talk about the reports and the rumors, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare 's foreign policy editor, Brookings scholar and Geor...

The Islamic State in America is a topic that once garnered front-page headlines, but it has fallen a bit out of public attention in the past year or so. Jacob Schulz sat down with Seamus Hughes, the author with Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Bennett Clifford of "Homegrown: ISIS in America." They talked about the book, how the Islamic State has attracted American followers, how the organization o...

Kori Schake is a long-time Pentagon watcher; she is a former Defense Department, State Department and National Security Council official; and she leads the foreign policy and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. She is also the author of an article in The Atlantic this week about the latest mishegoss at the Pentagon—a decapitating strike against the military civilian leadershi...

On this episode of Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Marietje Schaake about how Europe is not necessarily waiting for America to get its act together and is moving ahead with tech regulation. Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for 10 years for the Dutch liberal democratic party and is now the international policy directo...

Yesterday, President Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, the latest in a string of dismissals. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is trying to put a transition together, but the head of the General Services Administration will not ascertain that the transition has begun. To talk about it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Steve Vladeck, Susan Hennessey and Scott R. Anderson. They discussed the...

Well, that's it, folks. We have a president elect in Joe Biden. And, we have a president who is now officially a lame duck. To talk through the transition from Donald Trump to a more normal presidency, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz and Susan Hennessey. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

The votes are almost all counted, but they're not quite all counted. We kind of know where the electoral votes are going, but some of them have not gone there yet. We think we know the outcome, but the outcome has not been officially called. To talk through the next several days, Benjamin Wittes sat down for a late-Thursday-evening chat with Lawfare chief operating officer David Priess, Lawfare se...

Benjamin Wittes sat down with an all- Lawfare crew to discuss the election. Scott Anderson, David Priess, Jacob Schulz, Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey joined Ben to talk about where the election is, whether we are in a transition or in a contested election, the challenges a Biden transition team might face and what concerns the team finds particularly alarming as they imagine the next few week...

In a conversation completely unrelated to yesterday's election, Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk and Matthew Klein, author of the recent "Trade Wars Are Class Wars," spoke with Adam Tooze, a professor at Columbia University and an economic historian. They discussed what we can learn from the diplomatic and economic modes of the 1930s, why Nazi legal theory resonates so well in China today, how Xinjia...

On this Election Day, we are checking in on how healthy the election actually is. Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School and Charles Stewart III of MIT together run the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project . Zahavah Levine and Chelsey Davidson manage the project on the Stanford side. Together, they have supervised a collection of students who have produced 32 articles for Lawfare on election a...

We're all hoping for a peaceful Election Day tomorrow, but some people are worried about violence at the polls. Two of those people are Dan Byman, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare and a professor at Georgetown University; and Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center and an assistant teaching pro...

Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was foreign policy advisor for the Hillary Clinton campaign four years ago, where she had to respond to Russian information operations against the campaign in real time. She has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics ev...

On this episode of Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Casey Newton, veteran Silicon Valley editor for The Verge who recently went independent to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Few people have followed the stories of platforms and content moderation in recent years as closely and carefully as Casey, so Evelyn and Quin...

There is a human rights crisis going on in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has been rounding up minority groups, most notably the Uighurs, and putting them into forced labor and reeducation camps. The government has gone to great lengths to keep Xinjiang away from international attention, and it has had some success in doing so. Jordan Schneider, the host of the ChinaTalk...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of the new book, " Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy ." They discussed the surprising World War II origins of U.S. hegemonic militarism, the changes in what it meant to be an internationalist during this period and the dome...

This month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research released a report entitled, " Rightly Scaled, Carefully Open, Infinitely Agile: Reconfiguring to Win the Innovation Race in the Intelligence Community ." Susan Hennessey sat down with Subcommittee Chair Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut to discuss the challenges the Un...

It's been a wild couple of days of disinformation in the electoral context. Intelligence community officials are warning about Russian and Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election—and claiming that Iran is responsible for sending threatening emails from fake Proud Boys to Democratic voters. What exactly is going on here? To talk through the developments and the questions that li...

On this episode of Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Janine Zacharia, the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Communication, and Andrew Grotto, director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance and the William J. Perry International Security Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. In 2016,...

While everyone’s attention has been focused on the coronavirus and the run-up to the 2020 election, a lot has been happening at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees a number of government-funded entities, including the Voice of America. Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker, was confirmed as the head of the Agency for Global Media in June after much controversy on Capitol Hill. Once i...

One of the most interesting strategic developments in the past few years has been the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad—the growing partnership between the United States, Japan, Australia and India. To look at how this institution resurrected itself after a false start back in 2007, what it is and isn't doing now, and whether China is right to look warily at this dialogue, David Priess spok...