The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Nearly six months have passed since the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan. As the country faces down a failing economy and looming humanitarian catastrophe, the new Taliban regime is still struggling with what it means to govern, both internally within the country and externally in its relations with the broader international community. To get a sense of the state of play in Afghanistan, Sc...

What’s the best historical analogue for the American political situation today? Often, pundits will compare our current age of rising polarization and increasing political violence to the era preceding the American Civil War. If they’re alarmed and looking for a European analogy, sometimes they’ll point to Weimar Germany. But another point of comparison from prewar Europe might be more apt: the Fr...

From July 28, 2020: For a while, there have been large numbers of alleged former Islamic State state fighters and affiliates detained by the Iraqi government and by autonomous authorities in Syria. The fate of these detainees—and the more than 60,000 people in refugee affiliated with the men who live in refugee camps in the region—remains a pressing national security issue for countries in the reg...

From January 30, 2016: Last week at The Brookings Institution, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer  participated in a discussion  with  Lawfare’s  Benjamin Wittes and Newsweek’s   Dahlia Lithwick about his new book, " The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities. " During their conversation, Justice Breyer provi...

Late last week and early this week saw fighting between Islamic State fighters and Syrian democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbreak of a Kurdish prison containing significant numbers of alleged Islamic State fighters. The makeshift jail housed Syrians, Iraqis, and also alleged fighters from Western Europe and North Africa. It's the most significant jailbreak since ISIS’s terr...

As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened. This week on...

What if we declared an end to the costly system of how we classify national security information in the United States? Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, poses this question in her article “ Secrecy’s End .” Stephanie Pell talked with Oona about some of our classification system’s most corrosive effects on our democratic system...

Over the last year, our national dialogue about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has become ever more focused on politics, congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions. But what about the people who were actually on the front lines on Jan. 6? Natalie Orpett sat down with Susan Dominus and Luke Broadwater, who recently published an article in The New York Times Magazine called, “ The Capitol Pol...

As the prospect of broader election reform has grown more remote, bipartisan discussions have increasingly come to center on one long standing law: the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Designed to regulate the process through which Congress counts electoral votes, ambiguities in this antiquated law have been a frequent source of anxiety, most recently in the wake of the 2020 election, when many feared...

From April 4, 2015: With a tenuous ceasefire holding in Ukraine, we asked  Fiona Hill  onto the show to discuss the man behind the unrest: Vladimir Putin. Hill is the co-author of  Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin ,  and a   Senior Fellow and Director of the  Center on the United States and Europe  at Brookings. On the  Lawfare Podcast , she&nbs...

From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the concept of "executive privilege," Margaret Taylor sat down with Mark Rozell, the Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the author of " Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability ,"...

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case Trump v. Thompson, denying Donald Trump's motion to block the National Archives from producing his documents to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. To drill down, Natalie Orpett talked with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson and Professor Jonathan Shaub...

In December 2020, ten state attorneys general sued Google , alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The lawsuit is ongoing, and just this January, new allegations in the states’ complaint were freshly unsealed: the states have accused Google of tinkering with its ad auctions to mislead publishers and advertisers and expand its own power in the marketpl...

Bryce Klehm sat down with Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Professor Brands is the author of the new book, “ The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today .” He is also the author of a new article in Foreign Affairs, “ The Overstretched Superpower ,” whic...

A crucial component of the story of Jan. 6 involves what members of Congress were doing on that day. What kinds of conversations did Republican lawmakers have with President Trump? To what extent did any members of Congress play a role in engineering the riot itself? These are some of the questions that the House committee on Jan. 6 is investigating—and it’s seeking information directly from membe...

From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from  164  to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in mor...

From August 14, 2020: On July 30, former President Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of Congressman John Lewis, threw his weight behind ending the Senate filibuster if necessary to pursue a voting rights agenda. His comments brought to the forefront a debate that has been simmering for years within the Democratic party. Margaret Taylor spoke with Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of s...

From October 15, 2019: A couple of weeks ago, Lawfare and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law sponsored a series of panels at the Texas Tribune Festival. For this episode, we bring you the audio of our Tribfest event on domestic terrorism—what it is, how we define it, how we outlaw it, and what more we can do about it. David Priess sat down with Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder...

There's a lot going on in Russia's near-abroad, the countries on the periphery of the Russian Federation. There’s a war brewing in Ukraine, with talks in Geneva between Russia and the West seeming to fail this week. There are also Russian troops in Kazakhstan, there at the invitation of the autocratic Kazakh government in response to protests over fuel prices. To check in on the situation, Benjami...

Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published an analysis of how popular podcasters on the American right used their shows to spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. These are the same issues that led tech platforms to crack down on misinformation in the runup to the election—and yet, the question of whether...

On Monday, January 10, a federal district court in DC heard oral argument in Trump v. Thompson. The case considers civil claims against Donald Trump and others for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It raises a number of complicated legal issues, including whether Trump is immune from these kinds of claims, whether it's possible to establish a conspiracy among the perpetrators of the...

On December 21, Harvard University chemist Dr. Charles Lieber was convicted of making false statements and other tax offenses in connection with his participation in the Chinese Thousand Talents program. Lieber’s case got a lot of attention, both because of his profile as a well known researcher at Harvard University, and because of the case’s connection with the U.S. government's occasionally con...

Last week marked one year since the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, in which a mob of Trump supporters attacked Congress in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election as president of the United States. On Thursday, the anniversary itself, Lawfare editors appeared in a Brookings event titled, “ The January 6 insurrection: One year later .” Lawfare ’s editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes...

From January 3, 2020: The American drone strike last night that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, is a seismic event in U.S.-Iranian relations—and for the broader Middle East. We put together an emergency podcast, drawing on the resources of both  Lawfare  and the Brookings Institution and reflecting the depth of the remarkable collaboration between the tw...

We're bringing you the first episode of Lawfare ’s new narrative series, The Aftermath , which we released this past Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hosted by Lawfare ’s executive editor, Natalie Orpett, and produced in partnership with Goat Rodeo, The Aftermath is a multipart series that focuses on what our democracy has been doing over the last year to confront,...