The Lawfare Podcast

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Contributing Editor Alex Zerden to talk through a few of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Finding the Road to Damascus.” Former dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Syria one year ago this week, bringing a precipitous end to the country’s more than decade-long civil war. In the year since, has the country b...

Susannah Glickman, an assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University who specializes in the political economy of computation and information, sat down with  Lawfare  Associate Editor Olivia Manes to discuss the role of defense tech in the second Trump administration. Susannah unpacked her recent article in the New York Review of Books tracing the historical relationship between...

Wikipedia is more than an encyclopedia. It’s a key part of the internet’s information infrastructure—shaping what people know, what AI models learn, and what the public sees as true. But in an era of geopolitical conflict, AI disruption, and fracturing trust, Wikipedia has come under attack. In this episode, Renée DiResta talks with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about his new book, “ The Seven Rul...

In a  live conversation on  YouTube,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Michael Feinberg, Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Contributing Editor James Pearce to discuss the arrest of a suspect in the attempted bombing on Jan. 6, 2021, a hearing in NPR’s lawsuit over the Trump...

From January 24, 2023: In 2019, investigative journalist and photographer Lynzy Billing went to Afghanistan to investigate a very personal story: her own past. In the process, she discovered what she came to call a classified war, one with lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong. Lawfare  managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with...

From April 5, 2024: A new  report  from the POPVOX Foundation focuses on a little-known and hugely under-appreciated congressional effort: that of congressional staffers helping Afghan allies flee the country during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with the report’s author, Anne Meeker. They talked about what staffers did...

On Dec. 5, the European Commission announced that they are fining X (formerlly Twitter) 120 million euros for impersonation scams with “verification,” broken advertising transpaency system, and blocking researchers from its platform. On a Lawfare Live, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Lawfare Contributing Editor Renee DiResta analyzed the decision, what happens next, and how this fits into t...

Caleb Withers , a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss how frontier models shift the balance in favor of attackers in cyberspace. The two discuss how labs and governments can take steps to address these asymmetries favoring attackers, and the fu...

New START, the last bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, will expire in February 2026 if Washington and Moscow do not reach an understanding on its extension—as they have signaled they are interested to do. What would the end of New START mean for U.S.-Russia relations and the arms control architecture that had for decades contributed to stability among great...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Natalie Orpett and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “The Art of the Ordeal.” The Trump administration has been at the center of yet another bout of shuttle diplomacy the last several weeks, after an initial “28-point plan” for peace in Ukraine it appeared to hash out with...

Veteran legal journalist Reynolds Holding, author of " Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts ," and U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, one of the judges featured in his book, sit down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to discuss the role of district judges in our justice system. They also discuss the attacks those judges are enduring today from the Departmen...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Seth Jones, the President of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic & International Studies to discuss Seth's new book about the U.S and Chinese industrial bases, " The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance ." To receive ad-free...

Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is the Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He spent 32 years in the Navy as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, retiring as a rear admiral in 2017. After leaving the Navy, Admiral Montgomery worked as policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee during Senator John McCai...

From November 19, 2024: Lawfare  Associate Editor Olivia Manes sat down with with Marlene Laruelle, a Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at The George Washington University, and Director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program, to discuss the financial, ideological, and historical connections between the American far-right and Russia. Marle...

From November 26, 2024: Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, to discuss the legal and practical considerations surrounding a president’s ability to deploy the military at the U.S. southern border, particularly in light of President-elect Trump’s recent endorsement of “declar[ing] a national...

From October 18, 2024: Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Ukrainian Parliament outlining his victory plan,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They talked about the components of the plan, the reaction from the Uni...

From November 25, 2024: At a  recent conference  co-hosted by  Lawfare  and the Georgetown Institute for Law and Technology, Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm moderated a conversation on "AI Regulation and Free Speech: Navigating the Government’s Tightrope,” between  Lawfare  Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein, Fordham law professor Chinny Sharma, and Eugene Volokh, a sen...

Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace join Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the last week's machinations surrounding a potential Russia-Ukraine peace deal. What is the actual American position? Is the United States abandoning Ukraine? Or is it now backing off the 28-point document it reportedly put together with R...

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editor Michael Feinberg about their recent Lawfare article examining a little-noticed piece of legislation that was slipped into the deal to end the government shutdown—one that gives senators a civil right of action to sue the U.S. government when their phone or metadata is accessed without notice, with...

At 4 pm ET, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett will sit down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Contributor James Pearce to discuss a judge dismissing the indictments against both former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed to served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia....

In a  live conversation on  YouTube,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff and Eric Columbus and  Lawfare  Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss a judge ordering the Trump administration to end the National Guard deployment in D.C., updates in the prosecutions of Letitia James and...

From April 13, 2023: A few weeks ago, China made headlines for brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to thaw diplomatic relations after seven years of cutting ties and even more years of tense relations. Since then, we've already begun to see some downstream effects of this deal, with significant movement on the war in Yemen and the reopening of Iran's embassy in Saudi Arabia. This is a s...

From August 16, 2023: On July 18, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel  unveiled criminal charges  against 16 people—the “fake electors” from that state who featured in Trump’s effort to hold onto power in 2020. Just a few weeks later, a special counsel in Michigan announced additional charges related to the 2020 election,  this time against   three people  who allegedly...

For today’s episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and a  Lawfare  contributing editor, and Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, the John C. Whitehead Visiting Fellow in International Diplomacy at the Brookings Institution, who previously served as Undersecretary General for...

Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina has written two recent articles for Lawfare on energy and the Ukraine war. The first deals with the ongoing Russian attacks on the Ukrainian civilian power grid—attacks which actually interfered with the recording of this very podcast. The second details an ongoing corruption scandal rocking the Ukrainian political system, emerging from an alleged kickbac...