The Lawfare Podcast

Today's  Lawfare Daily  is  Lawfare's  annual "Ask Us Anything" mailbag episode where  Lawfare  contributors answered listener-submitted questions. Scott R. Anderson, Natalie Orpett, Benjamin Wittes, Kevin Frazier, Eric Columbus, Loren Voss, Molly Roberts, Jakub Kraus, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff address questions on everything from presidential immunity to AI regul...

From April 16, 2024: Friday morning, the House of Representatives suddenly—after failing to do so earlier in the week—took up the reauthorization of FISA 702. They considered a bunch of amendments, one of which failed on a tie vote, and then proceeded to pass reauthorization of 702.  Immediately after the votes,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with  Lawfare &nbs...

From April 4, 2023: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it.  But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at...

For the podcast’s annual end-of-year episode, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Senior Editor Anna Bower, and Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to talk over listener-submitted topics and object lessons, including: Which sphere of influence is Western Europe in today? What should we make of President Trump's lawsuit against BBC? After nearly a year of the Trump Administration, how d...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Tom Brzozowski, formerly of the Justice Department, sit down to talk over recent changes set in motion by the White House and Justice Department with respect to domestic terrorism investigations and prosecutions, and sound a warning from history at how these changes hearken back to pre-Church Committee practices. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a  Lawfar...

In this episode, Ariane Tabatabai, Scott R. Anderson, and Loren Voss discuss the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026. They take stock of how Congress is reasserting itself vis-a-vis the Trump administration on matters related to the national defense, as well as the NDAA’s key provisions.  Relevant links: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 United...

From March 6, 2024: Executive branch constraints and the posture of the media have shifted in significant ways over the past two decades. Lyrissa Lidsky and Christina Koningisor, law professors at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco, respectively, argue in  a forthcoming law review article  that these changes—including the erosion of certain post-Wate...

From January 2, 2025: You called in with your questions, and  Lawfare  contributors have answers! Benjamin Wittes, Kevin Frazier, Quinta Jurecic, Eugenia Lostri, Alan Rozenshtein, Scott R. Anderson, Natalie Orpett, Amelia Wilson, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff addressed questions on everything from presidential pardons to the risks of AI to the domestic deployment of the military. Thank y...

Every year,  Lawfare  publishes a retrospective of the year that passed. Today, we’re pleased to bring you an audio debrief of that article, The Year That Was: 2025, which you can read in full on our website starting December 31. Lawfare  is focused on producing timely, rigorous, and non-partisan analysis of “hard national security choices.” And this year, that work was—to use an ex...

From October 18, 2017: If you were unsure about whether your hosts are geeks, this episode will help settle the question. But before we get to what Professors Chesney and Vladeck think they know but don’t really, here’s the stuff they actually do know something about! First, the travel ban. Buckle up, there’s a new nationwide TRO, out of Hawaii, enjoining enforcement of most of Travel Ban 3.0. Sec...

From September 19, 2024: On April 14, 2022, New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac woke up to a stunning four-word tweet from Elon Musk’s Twitter account: “I made an offer.” Having long covered the technology and social media beat, they read Musk’s terse post as the “unbelievable but inevitable culmination of two storylines we had pursued for a decade as journalists in Silico...

Loren Voss, Public Service Fellow at  Lawfare , sits down with Kori Schake, senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Carrie Lee, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund's Strategic Democracy Initiatives. They discuss how they assess a healthy civil-military relationship, the current state of civil-mi...

In a live conversation on YouTube ,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss the government’s failure to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, a jury finding Judge Hannah Dugan guilty of obstructing immigration age...

From November 20, 2023: Over the past few weeks, the country of Pakistan has pursued an aggressive wave of deportations targeting thousands of Afghan refugees, some of whom have been in Pakistan for generations. Many fear that this move will add to the already precarious and humanitarian situation facing Afghanistan. But the Taliban regime, for one, has reacted in a way few expected. To talk throu...

From July 1, 2022: When a Russian missile recently struck a TV tower in Kyiv, near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust, some saw the attack as a potent symbol of the tragic occurrence of violence in Ukraine. To talk through the historical significance of the attack, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Maksym Rokmaniko, an architect, designer, entrepreneur,...

Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with SITU’s Deputy Director of Research Gauri Bahuguna, Detention Watch Network’s Advocacy Director Setareh Ghandehari, the American Immigration Council’s Policy Director Nayna Gupta, and Just Futures Law’s Executive Director Paromita Shah to discuss the rise of the immigration enforcement economy following the recent release of  “Deportat...

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Cristin Dorgelo, a former senior adviser for management at the Office of Management and Budget, and Rob Storch, who served as the inspector general of the Defense Department until the Trump administration fired him and many of his colleagues in January of this year. They discuss those firings, other Trump administration attacks on the offices of...

This week, Scott down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein and Ari Tabatabai to talk through a few of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop.” The Trump administration has given a green light to Nvidia to export its powerful H200 chips to China, opening a potentially significant new market while jumpstarting China’s strategically significant...

Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speaks with Scott Anderson, Senior Editor at Lawfare , fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and non-resident senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School, who recently wrote a report about how social media platforms should handle unrecognized regimes like the Taliban. They discuss how social media platforms r...

At the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia held clear naval superiority in the Black Sea. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has developed an asymmetric maritime strategy using unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), achieving strategic effects against a superior naval force. Ukraine has largely shifted from importing complete drone systems to assembling them domestically using foreign...

In a live conversation on YouTube,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss next week's contempt hearings in  J.G.G. v. Trump , the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from ICE custody, domestic deployments litigation, and mor...

From May 16, 2022: Today, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo released the first two episodes of Allies , a podcast series that traces the U.S.’s efforts to protect Afghan interpreters, translators and other partners through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. That effort culminated in the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan in August 2021, when thousands of the U.S.’s local partners were left behind. In se...

From November 16, 2024: Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Alan Rozenshtein, and Quinta Jurecic and Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection Mary McCord about Donald Trump's picks for his Cabinet and senior-level administration positions, including Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Pete Hegseth as...

At  10 am ET on Dec. 11 ,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson;  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at CSIS Daniel Byman; and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at AEI Kori Schake to discuss the Trump administration’s 2025 Nat...

News of a U.S. attack on a boat off the coast of Venezuela—which included a second strike on survivors of the first—has raised new concerns about the administration’s operations against alleged drug traffickers. Legal analysts, including  some at Lawfare , call the second strike clearly unlawful. So why did the U.S. military agree to follow the order? On today’s episode, Executive Editor Nata...