The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

At the end of its past term, the Supreme Court took up the case of Moore v. Harper , a challenge to North Carolina State Supreme Court rulings on elections that promises to confront the controversial independent state legislature doctrine, which argues that the Constitution empowers state legislatures over other state institutions when it comes to deciding certain election matters. Court watchers...

The Cyber Safety Review Board issued its first major report this month, which focused on the Log4j disaster. So, what is the Cyber Safety Review Board, and what is Log4j? To answer these questions and others, Benjamin Wittes sat down with the deputy chair of the Cyber Safety Review Board, Heather Adkins, and board member Dmitri Alperovitch. They talked about what the board is, where it comes from,...

From July 20, 2020: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War. Though often called the "Forgotten War," the Korean War has highly conditioned much of our contemporary international politics in East Asia, and the people of Korea continue to live with its aftermath, both in the north and in the south. And the shadow of the Korean War looms large over something we often...

Lawfare No Bull is a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. This episode features audio from the Jan. 6 committee's eighth public hearing on July 21. The committee focused on former President Trump's actions and inactions during the insurrection, describing in detail the three hours during which the mob overran the Capitol and Trump refused to in...

The final hearing in the spree of hearings the Jan. 6 committee has put on this summer took place Thursday evening during prime time. It focused on Donald Trump's personal conduct in the period in which the riot was taking place. To debrief on it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down in Twitter Spaces with Lawfare publisher David Priess, Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett, and Lawfare senior editors...

The false claims of election fraud and other controversies that followed the 2020 election brought to light a number of frailties in the United States system for selecting presidents. Several have their origins in the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law whose vagaries played a central role in efforts by John Eastman and other supporters of former President Trump to keep him in the White House, despit...

When the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , overturning Roe v. Wade, the impact of the decision on the internet may not have been front of mind for most people thinking through the implications. But in the weeks after the Court’s decision, it’s become clear that the post- Dobbs legal landscape around abortion implicates many questions around not...

Over the past two decades, the Chinese government has cooperated extensively with U.S. state governments on economic issues, replacing Canada as the country with the most diplomatic relations with U.S. states. To discuss how we got here and what it means for U.S.-China relations, former Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz sat down with Ryan Scoville, professor of law at Marquette University Law S...

In recent weeks, we've brought you information and insight about Swedish and Finnish attitudes toward NATO membership, and about Turkey's machinations regarding the two country's applications. But now, Sweden and Finland have been invited to NATO - and member country ratifications are coming in. To explore the topic deeper, David Priess sat down with Katarina Tracz, the director of the Stockholm F...

Earlier this month, the Fulton County special grand jury investigating potential criminal interference into Georgia's 2020 elections subpoenaed members of former President Donald Trump's inner circle, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Senator Lindsay Graham, among others. To discuss these high profile subpoenas and some of the finer points of Georgia state criminal procedure, Lawfare Manag...

#LiveFromUkraine is an experimental project hosted on Twitter Spaces by Ben Wittes, with the goal of interviewing a diverse lineup of guests to educate and engage directly with people on the ground in Ukraine during Russia's ongoing invasion. In this episode, Ben talks with Katya Savchencko ( @shanovna_s ), who grew up in the Donbas region of Ukraine and moved to Bucha following the Russian invasi...

From April 9, 2019: On this episode of the Lawfare Podcast, our friends at the National Security Institute at George Mason University came over to have a discussion in our podcast studio about Yemen and the U.S.-Saudi alliance. Four former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers who worked with and sometimes at odds with each other participated. The conversation was moderated by Lester Munson,...

Global crises of the last 20 years have led to a backlash against elites of all kinds, but those same crises often lay bare just how much power they still have, especially informed policy. Former Lawfare Associate Editor Bryce Klehm sat down with Elizabeth Saunders, an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, to talk about her recent article in the Annual Revi...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve talked a lot on this show about how falsehoods about the coronavirus are spread and generated. For this episode, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with two emergency medicine physicians who have seen the practical effects of those falsehoods while treating patients over the last two years. Nick Sawyer and Taylor Nichols are two of the cofounders of th...

The “hackers for hire” industry continues to grow unbothered. Reports in recent years have uncovered details about governments and officials using spyware and other security and privacy circumventing tools to target dissidents and other sensitive targets. But another equally invasive and secretive industry has developed over the last decade, involving the use of foreign hackers to win lawsuits and...

We often use the terms democracy and liberal democracy interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. Democracy means majority rule and public participation. Liberal democracy means democracy plus minority rights. There's no guarantee that democracy will be liberal. And in fact, some of the same things that enable democracy can also undermine its liberal commitments. Zac Gershberg, a professor o...

Rational Security is a weekly roundtable podcast featuring Quinta Jurecic, Scott R. Anderson and Alan Z. Rozenshtein. It's a lively, irreverent discussion of news, ideas, foreign policy and law. And there’s always a laugh. This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien. They discussed the news of the week, primarily the surprise testimony given by former Whit...

From January 8th, 2019: On this episode of the Lawfare podcast, David Priess sat down with John Sipher to discuss the past, present and future history of spy swaps in reference to the 2019 Russian arrest of Paul Waylon, who is currently imprisoned in a Russian labor camp now. This is more relevant than ever, as WNBA star Brittney Griner, who is imprisoned and on trial in Russia on drug charges, se...

For decades, experts and analysts have written in great detail about the importance of liberalization and its role in promoting democracy and other western values. Specifically, many believed that once a state began this track towards liberalization, open markets and a liberal democracy was inevitable. Yet, the several decades following Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China has proven differently...

Algorithms! We hear a lot about them. They drive social media platforms and, according to popular understanding, are responsible for a great deal of what’s wrong about the internet today—and maybe the downfall of democracy itself. But … what exactly are algorithms? And, given they’re not going away, what should they be designed to do? Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jonathan Stray, a se...

Earlier this year, Finland and Sweden applied to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But both of their applications were held up, due to an objection by Turkey. NATO being a mutual security alliance, any one member can prevent new countries from joining. To fully understand the background dynamics at play here and to explain the agreement that the three countries recently signed, allowing...

Many individual police officers acted heroically on January 6th. But the successful attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, seeking to disrupt the certification of the electoral votes, remains one of the biggest policing failures in American history. Not only did the Capitol police fail to prepare for the attack, but many members of the mob were themselves police officers from around the country...

Today we’re bringing you another episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. Today’s episode features audio from the surprise sixth public hearing held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee heard explosive testimony from former white house aid, Cassidy Hutchins. Learn...

Today we’re bringing you another episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. Today’s episode features audio of the fifth of a series of public hearings held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The hearing included testimony from former Acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, form...

Chatter, a podcast from Lawfare, features weekly long-form conversations with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security. This week on Chatter, David Priess talked with former U.S. Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow to discuss the inherent dilemmas that come along with the job. One of them can arise if agents become partisan actors or allow themselves to even be perceived as...