The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

The Justice Department has moved the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to drop the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases, the last remaining criminal matters arising from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Lawfare’ s editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, sits down with four contributors who had intimate involvement with the cases to discuss the decision: Senior Editor Roger Parloff, who covered bot...

Ben McKenzie, co-author of “ Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud ,” and writer and director of the new documentary, “ Everyone Is Lying to You for Money ,” sits down with Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg about his years-long deep dive into the cryptocurrency industry and why his research makes him skeptical of its literal and figurative value. Hosted on...

Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and historian Frank Dikötter, the author of “ Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity ,” discuss the early years of the Chinese communist movement, the American reaction to its successes, and how our current understanding of the era greatly differs from our previous assumptions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inform...

Senior Editor Kate Klonick interviews reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz on their recent article in the New Yorker, titled “ Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? ”   In their 16,000-word piece, Farrow and Marantz create a cohesive narrative with receipts around Sam Altman, the products he's building at OpenAI, and how he's selling them not just to investors and the...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Friedman rejecting the Defense Department’s revised press rules, the D.C. Circuit denying Anthropic’s petition for a stay pending review of the enforcement of its supply chain designation, Judge Sorokin rejecting the Justi...

From October 28, 2024: Aram Gavoor, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at GW Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at  Lawfare , to summarize and analyze the first-ever national security memo on AI. The two also discuss what this memo means for AI policy going forward, given the impendi...

From September 1, 2020: On August 13, President Trump said in a news interview that he opposed supplemental funding for the United States Postal Service because such funding is needed for the delivery of universal mail-in ballots for the 2020 election. His comments sparked panic about whether the Trump administration is slowing Postal Service delivery in order to sway the election. Images of blue...

Representative Nick Begich, Alaska's at-large member of Congress, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, to discuss the current state of AI policy on the Hill. As one of the few members of Congress with a background in tech, Rep. Begich offers a unique perspective on this evolving r...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Daniel Byman, Tyler McBrien, and Natalie Orpett to talk through aspects of the week’s biggest Iran-focused news stories, including: “Situational Iran-y.” The world came into Tuesday evening fearing a major escalation in the ongoing U.S. and Israeli conflict with Iran. But instead, President Trump made a last-minute choice to accept a two-week c...

What does it look like when the government violates court orders in more than 350 separate immigration habeas cases? On today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts sits down with Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio to discuss Lawfare ’s new interactive tracker , which documents what is known about instances in which the Trump administration has failed to comply with federal court...

Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with human rights advocate Yaqiu Wang to discuss the role of emerging technologies in China’s surveillance and censorship apparatus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Professor Arne Westad of Yale University, author of “ The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History ,” discuss 19th- and 20th-century power politics, the contemporary rise of China, and how the former can inform reactions to the latter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio to discuss Lawfare ’s new database which is tracking the non-compliance with court orders by the government, Pam Bondi being fired as attorney general, legal challenges to President Trump’s new...

From March 14, 2025: This episode of the  Lawfare Podcas t features Glen Weyl, economist and author at Microsoft Research; Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech Project at Vanderbilt; and Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center.  Together with Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Geor...

From March 4, 2024: As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a vital question is whether the legal architecture governing the election is well crafted to prevent corruption and abuse. In their new book, “ How to Steal a Presidential Election ,” Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman argue that despite the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, serious abuse of the presidential election rules remai...

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is designed to protect users' privacy—including privacy online—turned 40 this year. On March 6, Lawfare hosted an event at Georgetown Law marking the event and featuring panel discussions with the authors of our paper series, Installing Updates to ECPA, in which experts from various disciplines reflected on the law, what’s changed over the last 40 y...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editors Anna Bower, Kevin Frazier, and Kate Klonick to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “The X Post Facto Rule.” The Justice Department and lawyers representing Anthropic faced off last week in a Northern California courtroom over whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s X post and som related communicati...

In this episode, Ariane Tabatabai sits down with historian, John Ghazvinian, the author of, “ America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present ,” to discuss U.S.-Iran relations. They take a step back from the current conflict to talk about the key events that have shaped the relationship between the two countries and their perceptions of one another.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

For today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold, the Managing Director of the Center Project, for the latest in their regular series on recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Together, they dig deep into the spike in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel’s new military offensive in southern Lebanon, how they both relate t...

In this episode, Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta speaks with Nathaniel Lubin, co-author of “ How Social Media Creators Shape Mass Politics ,” and Philine Widmer, co-author of a recent Nature paper, “ The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm .” Together, they discuss two different layers of online influence—a platform’s algorithms and the trusted voices inside it—and their implications...

On this month’s minipod, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey talked to Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett about whether there was any potential legal exposure for President Trump or his administration for either the strikes on boats in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean Sea or for the U.S. strikes on Iran. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff, discuss a judge granting a preliminary injunction in Anthropic’s suit challenging its supply chain designation, a Friday morning hearing in Fulton County’s suit over the federal government seizing ballots from 2020, a new push from the Trump...

From March 25, 2025: 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.

From March 19, 2025: 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...

On today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with two veterans of the intelligence community to get their take on the ongoing Iran conflict. Before leaving government last year, Aaron Faust was a senior official in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), where he had previously served as Division Chief for Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Penin...