The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler "Spicy Tyler" McBrien to talk through the week's big national security news stories, including: “Jack Smith Takes a Mulligan on his Big Swing.” A grand jury has re-indicted former President Trump for his actions relating to the Jan. 6 insurrection, after Special Counsel Jack Smith trimmed and massaged the allegations to accom...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 28 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s superseding indictment against former President Trump in the Jan. 6 prosecution,...

On today’s episode, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, Co-Director of the Africa Security Initiative, and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution joins  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to help make sense of the recent skirmishes in northern Mali between the junta, separatist groups, Islamists, and Russian mercenaries.&nbsp...

For more than 40 years, Peter Clement has studied Russian political culture and leaders--serving for most of that time as an analyst, manager, and executive at the CIA before his retirement in 2018. He has PhD in Russian history, teaches at Columbia University, and has thought long and hard about what makes Vladimir Putin tick. He joined David Priess to discuss h...

On today’s episode, Sherri Goodman, the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security and the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) joins  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to talk about Sherri’s new book,  “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.” They discuss Sherri’s car...

On this month’s minipod episode,  Lawfare  Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey was joined by  Lawfare  Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic to discuss what the outlook is regarding efforts to prevent election-related disinformation in the run up to the 2024 election, including the recent hack of the Trump campaign by Iranian-backed actors. Read Jurecic’s article on how...

Lawfare  Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sits down with Esteban Carisimo, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Northwestern University to talk about the digital repression in Venezuela after the recent elections. Carisimo co-authored a recent  report  on the effects of the Venezuelan crisis on internet infrastructure. They discuss how internet censorship impacts the prote...

From April 26, 2023: If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has  threatened to sue  OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large langua...

From November 1, 2022: In recent weeks, the Biden administration has released a trio of long-awaited strategy documents, including the  National Security Strategy , the  National Defense Strategy , and the  Nuclear Posture Review.  But how should we read these documents, and what do they actually tell us about how the Biden administration intends to approach the world? To answe...

Richard Albert, William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, and Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to conduct a comparative analysis of what helps constitutions withstand political pressures. Richard’s extensive study of diffe...

This week, Alan and Quinta sat down with Molly Reynolds and Kevin Frazier to talk about the week’s big developments, including: “It can always get worse…” Although President Biden’s replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket has reenergized the Democrats’ bid to retain the White House, the race is still a tossup, and former President Trump could well reenter th...

Anastasiia Lapatina is a Kyiv-based Ukraine Fellow at Lawfare . Leopoldo Lopez is a Venezuelan opposition leader living in exile in Madrid, after escaping prison for leading protests against Nicolás Maduro in 2014. Lapatina and Lopez discuss the results of Venezuela’s recent presidential election, ties between Venezuela’s autocrat Nicolás Maduro and other dictatorships, and the path forward for Ve...

The fallout from the SolarWinds intrusion took a new turn with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to file a cybersecurity-related enforcement action against the SolarWinds corporation and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, in October of 2023. But In July, District Court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer dismissed a number of charges in the SEC’s compl...

It’s January 6, 2025. Congress has convened to certify electoral votes in the presidential election. But members of the U.S. military are in revolt, throwing their support behind the losing candidate. The legitimate president huddles in the Situation Room with his top advisers and Cabinet. They have six hours to prevent violent protests from exploding into civil war.  That’s the dire scenario...

For today’s episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and  Lawfare  Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack sat down with Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Investment Security Paul Rosen to talk through the groundbreaking new national security-related outbound investment regulations his office is preparing at the direction of President Biden. Together, they discuss...

As part of  Lawfare ’s  Security by Design Project , Eugenia Lostri,  Lawfare ’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, and Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, published a new paper , “Security by Design in Practice: Assessing Concepts, Definitions and Approaches.”  Lawfare  Senior Editor Stephanie Pell talked with Eugenia and Justin about the paper’s explor...

From August 2, 2023: Over the past eighteen months, Ukraine has served as the stage for a proxy battle between superpowers, with the invading Russians on one side and a U.S.-led coalition of Western allies backing Ukraine on the other. As such, it’s the closest thing we’ve yet seen to what many military strategists believe will be the defining challenge of the next strategic era: a near-peer confl...

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 15 in front of a live audience on  YouTube  and Zoom. Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff about Judge Chutkan’s order granting Jack Smith’s motion for an extension of time, brie...

French politics has had quite a summer. In early June, the French far-right made substantial gains in the European Union Parliament. The same day the results came down, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, saying that the rise of nationalists and demagogues was a danger to France and Europe. It was a shocking and risky move. In the first round of elections, the far-right came in...

This week, the whole gang—Alan, Quinta, and Scott—got back together to discuss the week's big national security news, including: “In Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine Invade You!” In an ironic reversal, Ukraine invaded Russia this past week, seizing substantial portions of the oblast of Kursk and surprising both Russian forces and Ukrainian allies in what appears to be its most successful military ventu...

Chris Hoofnagle, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College and Professor of Law in Residence at the UC Berkeley School of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , and Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare 's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, to discuss ALL things cybersecurity—its theory, history, and future. Much of their...

Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have launched a major incursion into Russia proper, occupying 1,000 square kilometers in Kursk Oblast, which borders Ukraine. The operation, which caught both Russia and the United States by surprise, is the first major Ukrainian offensive in more than a year. In this episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare 's Ukraine Fellow Anas...

Gina Bennett had a remarkable intelligence career of more than three decades, focusing on counterterrorism even before the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and continuing to apply that expertise long after 9/11. She has written a book about how national security and parenting lessons reinforce each other, taught students at Georgetown University, and mentored women entering national securi...

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, creator of the new  podcast series , Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, Season II. They discuss the ideological aftermath of World War II on the American far right, the rise of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the rhetorically incredible cast of characters around him. Why do we remember McCarthy merely as a fier...

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Katie Moussouris of Luta Security to talk bug bounties. Where do they come from? What is their proper role in cybersecurity? What are they good for, and most importantly, what are they  not  good for? Moussouris was among the hackers who first did bug bounties at scale—for Microsoft, and then for the Pentagon. Now she helps companies...