The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

In a  live conversation on  April 4,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce, and Georgetown professor Steve Vladeck to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the deportation of individuals to a...

From January 26, 2024: In front of a live audience at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference in Miami, Florida,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Hon. Kenneth L. Wainstein, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security; Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and ...

From March 20, 2024: Since World War II, the United States and its currency, the dollar, have come to play a central role in the broader global economy. And in recent decades, policymakers have used this role as a weapon, cutting off access to malign actors and punishing those who act contrary to U.S. national security interests. But cultivating such primacy has proven to be a double-edged sword,...

Hillary Hartley, the former Chief Digital Officer of Ontario and former Co-Founder and Deputy Executive Director at 18F, and David Eaves, Associate Professor of Digital Government and Co-Deputy Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss the re...

For today’s episode, we’re bringing you the opening episode of our podcast Escalation . Escalation is a multi-part narrative podcast hosted by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina. Escalation lays bare the stakes of the Russo-Ukrainian War through powerful storytelling and compelling voices. It reveals forgotten promises and fragile alliances that have shape...

This week, Scott joined his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “In Mother Russia, Sometimes Bear Poke You.” Discussions over a possible broader ceasefire in Ukraine—beyond the temporary (and limited) energy and Black Sea ceasefire agreements last week—appear to have ground to a halt over Russian demands. Many obse...

Atul Gawande is a surgeon and a public health expert. He's also the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that the Trump administration has prioritized for dismantling since its first day in office. On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gawande to discuss what USAID does, the consequences of destroying it, and w...

Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow for the Technology & Innovation team at R Street, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to review public comments submitted in response to the  Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information  on the AI Action Plan. The pair summarize their own comments...

On March 28, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes will sit down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff, Lawfare Contributing Editor James Pearce, and former ACLU National Legal Director David Cole to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the deportation of individuals under the Alien Enemies Act, the...

From January 30, 2024: U.S. military operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen have escalated rapidly in recent weeks, culminating in a number of major strikes aimed at degrading their ability to threaten Red Sea shipping traffic. But the war powers reports the Biden administration has provided to Congress are raising questions about how it is legally justifying this latest military campaign.&nbsp...

From April 22, 2021: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, and Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss their new book, " National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On ." They discussed the holding and legacy of the Pentagon Papers case,...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Natan Sachs, the Director of the Middle East Program of the Brookings Institution, to discuss Israel's turbulent domestic situation and the renewal of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. Sachs explains Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political tactics, the controversies over the budget, judicial re...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Roger Parloff to talk through the week of the most Rational Security -esque of national security news stories ever, including:  “Oopsec.” In a strong contender for the most ridiculous national security story of the year, senior Trump administration officials appear to have planned a series of airstrikes in Yemen that to...

In a live recording on March 26 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Shane Harris of The Atlantic to discuss the decision to release the text messages sent by Trump administration officials in the Houthi PC Small Group Signal group chat which accidentally included The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, testimony given in Congress by officials who were in the chat,...

Shane Harris of The Atlantic joins Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about war planning on Signal, the Trump administration’s remarkable security lapse, and the testimony of the country’s intelligence chiefs that came in its wake. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Kent ran Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is a longtime Russia watcher. He talks to Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes about President Trump’s executive order dismantling Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On March 21, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including DOGE’s incursions on the U.S. Institute of Peace, the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, and the firing of probationary employees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...

From March 21, 2023: By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States. In a new book entitled,&nbs...

From May 9, 2023: Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the sam...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. Johnsen explains the rationale of the Trump administration's decision to bomb Yemen but argues that it will have little effect on the Houthis. Indeed, Johnsen contends that the Houthis are spoiling for a fight with the...

Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss his recent paper (co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang), “ Superintelligence Strategy .” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Scott sat down with Rational Security veterans and Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “House Odds.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson scored an unlikely win last week, when he kept the narrow (and notoriously fractious) Republican house majority united enough to pass its own continuing resolution to kee...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Steven Heydemann, the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Smith College, to assess the fast-changing developments in Syria today. Heydemann discusses the surge in communal violence in Syria, the deal between the new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led government and Syria's Kurds, Israel's counterproductive int...

Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and co-author (with Ezra Klein) of  Abundance , joins Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss the theory of Abundance and it...

On this month’s minipod, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey talked to Lawfare Contributing Editor Chris Mirasola about the limits to the deployment of the military, both domestically and internationally. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.