The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

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...

Ports in many countries are experiencing congestion. For weeks now, there have been reports that there will be delays in many common products, and people are wondering what is causing this and how it can end. David Priess sat down with Gregg Easterbrook, a former fellow in economics and in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He was a staff writer, national correspondent or contributin...

On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Pickles, the director of global public policy strategy at Twitter. They discussed a new paper just released by Twitter, “ Protecting the Open Internet: Regulatory Principles for Policy Makers ”—which sketches out, in broad strokes, the company’s vision for wh...

Jonathan David Shaub is an assistant professor of law at the University of Kentucky. He is a former OLC attorney and the author of a series of recent Lawfare posts on executive privilege, witnesses, documents and the Jan. 6 committee. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about Steve Bannon, the former president's suit against the National Archives, all of the privilege claims that are floating...

Around a hundred people have already pleaded guilty to crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection on the Capitol. What should we make of the plea deals thus far? Are they overly lenient? Are they what we might expect? To talk through the Jan. 6 plea deals, Jacob Schulz sat down on Lawfare Live with Carissa Byrne Hessick, the Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell,...

It has been a decade since the Supreme Court decided on a case involving the state secrets privilege, a common law rule that allows the government to block the release of state secrets in civil litigation. In this term, the justices will hear two cases involving the privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga. To talk about the two cases before the Suprem...

From April 25, 2020: We've covered this novel coronavirus from many angles, focusing on the disaster response issues that make up part of national security. For this episode of the  Lawfare Podcast , we have something a bit different: a case study of how pandemic control measures intersect with federalism issues and supply chain continuity and security. With a focus on what's happening in Ill...

From December 24, 2016: Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm Crowdstrike recently  released  new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's mil...

The January 6 investigating committee in the House is busily issuing subpoenas, collecting documents and negotiating with witnesses for depositions. It is also being defied by certain witnesses, and the former president is threatening to try to stop the National Archives from turning over material related to his activities and communications during and leading up to the January 6 insurrection. To...

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress has set in motion a renewed cycle of outrage over the company’s practices—and a renewed round of discussion around what, if anything, Congress should do to rein Facebook in. But how workable are these proposals, really? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jur...

Bryce Klehm sat down with Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson, to discuss the current situation in Afghanistan. They covered a range of issues, including the Taliban government's formation since the U.S. withdrawal, the current humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the international community's response. Hosted on Acast. Se...

Last week, CIA director William Burns issued a statement with a number of organizational changes and other initiatives regarding the CIA. Most media attention was drawn to the creation of a new China Mission Center, but there were several new initiatives on the technology front that also warrant attention. He talked about a new Technology Fellows program, a new Transnational and Technology Mission...

Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General released a report on the FBI's mishandling of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications. It's the latest in a string of Inspector General reports and other documents to talk about the process. To go through the latest report, why the process is so important and what it all means, Jacob Schulz sat down on Lawfare Live w...

From October 15, 2020: On this episode of  Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek spoke with Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and co-founder of Rappler, an online news site based in Manila. Maria was included in Time's Person of the Year in 2018 for her work combating fake news, and is currently fighting a conviction for “cyberlibel” in the Philippines...

The majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee has issued an interim report, entitled “ Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election .” A lot of it covers ground we knew about previously, but it contains a raft of new details about the president's pressure on the Justice Department to support his election fraud claims, the resignatio...

It's been almost a year since Trump lost the presidency and over nine months since a new administration and a new congressional majority took power. We’re moving further and further away from Trump's controversial use of presidential authorities, and it seems like we've lost momentum in the push for systemic changes to prevent future abuses. Fortunately, some people are still pushing. Natalie Orpe...

In the last few weeks, the Russian government has been turning up the heat on tech platforms in an escalation of its long-standing efforts to bring the internet under its control. First, Russia forced Apple and Google to remove an app from their app stores that would have helped voters select non-Kremlin-backed candidates in the country’s recent parliamentary elections. Then, the government threat...

Jessica Davis is the author of a new book on terrorism financing called, “Illicit Money: Financing Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century.” She's also the president and principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, and associate fellow at the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies. She sat down with Jac...

Over the weekend, news broke about U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia indicting Mohammed Khalifa, a Canadian who traveled to Syria in 2013 and later joined the Islamic state where he became the English language voice for a series of Islamic State propaganda videos. The indictment is a big deal, both because of the person it implicates and because it's a U.S. court trying a Canadi...

Bryce Klehm sat down with David Philipps, a New York Times correspondent and the author of “ Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs .” They talked about the saga of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL acquitted of stabbing an ISIS prisoner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From August 5, 2017: The growing threat from North Korea has intensified during the past few weeks after a series of missile tests demonstrated that the Kim regime may soon be able to strike the continental United States. This week, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Mira Rapp-Hooper, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Stephan Haggard, a distinguished professor of poli...

From October 9, 2018: It's easy to spend all our time focusing on American domestic politics these days, but the rest of the world is not going away. Take the European Union, for example—our neighbors from across the pond, and one of the US's most valuable economic and security relationships. There's a lot going on over there, and some of it even involves us. How is that relationship faring in the...

Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, is free, having been put on a flight from Canada back to her native China. Moments later, two Canadians held in China were also freed and put on flights back to Canada in what many are describing as hostage diplomacy by the People's Republic of China. The United States had indicted Wanzhou and Huawei for bank fraud but dropped the indictment aga...

Just two days ago, on September 28, CNN announced that it was turning off access to its Facebook pages in Australia. Why would the network cut off Facebook users Down Under? It’s not a protest of Facebook or… Australians. CNN’s move was prompted by a recent ruling by the High Court of Australia in Fairfax Media and Voller , which held that media companies can be held liable for defamatory sta...

Ronan Bergman is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of the book, “ Rise and Kill First ,” a history of Israeli targeted killings. Most recently with Farnaz Fassihi, he is the author of a lengthy New York Times investigative report entitled, “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” which is the story of the use of a ground-based robotic machine gun to kil...