The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

This week, Scott sat down with a particularly baritone cast of Lawfare colleagues—co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Foreign Policy Editor Dana Stuster, and Senior Editor (aka Legal Correspondent) Roger Parloff—to discuss the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Let’s Sheikh On It.” President Trump completed a surprisingly historic trip to the Persian Gulf last week, which beg...

Page Hedley, Senior Advisor at Forecasting Research Institute and co-author of the  Not for Private Gain letter  urging state attorneys general to stop OpenAI’s planned restructuring, and Gad Weiss, the Wagner Fellow in Law & Business at NYU Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at M...

Despite the frenzy of U.S.-led diplomacy around reaching a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the front line has been far from quiet. In fact, the war is now deadlier than ever before. To unpack the recent front line developments, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks with Francis Farrell, a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who covers military and security dynamics in Ukraine...

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has made a lot of headlines recently in the United States for his partnership with the Trump administration. Bukele has helped enable President Trump’s scheme to remove supposed Venezuelan gang members from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act, housing these detainees in the notorious CECOT prison. In court, the Justice Department has claimed it has no ability...

In a  live conversation on  May 16,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss legal challenges against President Trump’s executive actions, including the Friday hearing in the Abrego Garcia litigation, the Supreme Court’s ru...

From September 26, 2023: On August 21, the Human Rights Watch released a  report  detailing systematic abuses of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Researchers interviewed dozens of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers and found that Saudi border guards had used explosive weapons on them and shot migrants at close range. Lawfare ’s Associate Editor o...

From January 4, 2022: Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensur...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Contributing Editor Joel Braunold, the Managing Director of the  S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace , for the latest in their series of podcast conversations delving into the latest developments relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related regional issues. This time, they dis...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett, Tyler McBrien, and Daniel Byman to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Borderline Behavior.” A major flare-up over the disputed region of Kashmir took place this past week, leading to a major exchange of hostilities between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan before they agreed to a U.S.-brokered...

For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman talked with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, both Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss their recent Lawfare article, " Beijing's Changing Invasion Calculus: How China Might Put Taiwan in its Crosshairs ."  Together they discuss how China might use a blockade, subversion, and...

Cullen O’Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law and AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a novel AI governance framework. They dive into a paper he co-authored on the co...

Donald Trump was confident he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. It’s now been more than three months since Trump’s reelection, and even a short-term ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia remains elusive. Why did Trump fail? And what can really force Russia to stop the war? To answer these and many other questions, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina spoke wit...

In a  live conversation on  May 9,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce, and  Lawfare  contributor Preston Marquis to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the ord...

From February 22, 2024: As  a new report  on the intimidation of state and local officeholders from the Brennan Center for Justice points out, “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seemed to mark a new peak in extremist intimidation targeting public officials. But it was hardly the only act of political violence to break the period of relative stability that followed the assassinati...

From August 27, 2019: On August 5, the Indian government announced that it was revoking “special status” for the states of Jammu and Kashmir, enshrined in Article 370 of its constitution. Since then, the government has instituted a lockdown in the Kashmir valley, hundreds of people have been detained, there have been mass protests, and tens of thousands of Indian troops have been deployed to the r...

Ben Brooks, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and former head of public policy for Stability AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a sudden and significant shift toward open-sourcing leading AI models and the ramifications of that pivot for AI governance at home and abroad. Ben and Kevin specifically review OpenA...

In recent years, political scientists have given a great deal of attention to “democratic backsliding”—the slow erosion of democracy by aspiring authoritarians. The events of the last several months in the United States—with attacks from the Trump administration on the press, higher education, and any center of power outside the White House—make this research all the more relevant. But the questio...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin “The Beard” Wittes and Anastasiia (and Ava) Lapatina to discuss the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “A Waltz on Thin Ice.” Weeks after the SignalGate controversy, Mike Waltz is out as National Security Adviser and set to be nominated as U.N. Ambassador. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is in for a re...

In her  recent  Lawfare  article , Alexis Loeb—a former deputy chief of the Jan. 6 Capitol Siege Section at the U.S. Department of Justice and a current partner at Farella, Braun, and Martel—discussed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s memo dismantling the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. On today’s episode, Loeb joined  Lawfare  Associate Editor Olivia Manes to...

The TAKE IT DOWN Act is the first major U.S. federal law to squarely target non‑consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and to include a component requiring tech companies to act. Long handled via a patchwork of state laws, it criminalizes NCII at the federal level—both authentic images and AI-generated digital forgeries—and requires that platforms remove reported NCII within 48 hours of notification b...

In a  live conversation on  May 2,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, the decision by a judge th...

From July 27, 2020: Anne Applebaum is a columnist, writer, historian and most recently, the author of " Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lore of Authoritarianism ," a book that explores why authoritarian ideologies are on the ascendance in countries as diverse as Poland, Hungary, Spain, the United States and Great Britain. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Anne about the themes of the book: Why are a...

From January 16, 2024: Over the last two months, Houthi militants have waged more than 27 attacks against merchant shipping and U.S. and partner forces in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, purportedly in response to the war in Gaza. These attacks have significantly disrupted global shipping and surged the Middle East into an even more precarious security situation. Follo...

As the Trump administration seeks to escalate its immigration crackdown, the government has turned to a concerning source of information for data on immigrants: the Social Security Administration.  Reports   indicate  that Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and the Department of Homeland Security successfully pushed Social Security officials to provide access to what’s commonly known as th...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Tanvi Madan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, to discuss the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir. Madan explains how the crisis has evolved, the escalation options available to India, and the limited influence of the United States, China, and other powers to contain the crisis. Hosted on Acast. Se...