The Lawfare Podcast

From July 23, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson shares some of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week.  First he sat down Shashank Joshi, the Defence Editor for The Economist to discuss the new dynamics surrounding European security, as well as the pa...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg talks with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and former CIA Case Officer John Sipher about John Ratcliffe’s tenure as the Director of Central Intelligence and cultural changes in the intelligence community writ large. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also support Lawfare by making a one-tim...

This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Senior Editors Kevin Frazier and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “P(doom) and Gloom.” Last week, a wonky corner of the tech world became national...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Eileen Guo, co-author with Gisela Perez de Acha and Martin Sona of “ How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy ,” and senior reporter with the MIT Technology Review, to discuss her research into whether the “censorship-industrial complex” was an actually entity or a pretextual justification to dismantle the gov...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director and Fritz Stern Chair of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, to discuss what’s going on in the German political scene, where a far-right party, the AfD, is making a strong showing in state elections. They talk about what the party stands for, why its emergence i...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Zoe Kurland, Senior Producer at Marfa Public Radio, and Terence O’Rourke, an attorney based in Houston, Texas. They discuss “ A Whole Other Country ,” the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning six-part podcast series, hosted and produced by Kurland, that tells the story of a secessionist movement in the mid-90s called the “Republic...

In a conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Associate Editor Peter Beck and Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss an Afghan legal permanent resident deported less than 2 months after case is filed in the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, updates in the Grand Conspiracy, a judge allowing the Pentagon to fire Stars...

From June 10, 2020: David Frum is one of the most prominent and eloquent conservative critics of the president. The former George W. Bush speechwriter and current writer for The Atlantic has written " Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy ," a book about the Trump presidency, and in this case, what comes after it. David joined Benjamin Wittes for a wide-ranging conversation of the ground he...

From December 11, 2023: The Senate last week failed to move forward the national security supplemental, which includes a large package of aid for Ukraine. The holdup? Migration at the southern border and Republican insistence that the administration and Democrats will have to swallow major policy changes in order to get the Ukraine aid through. Meanwhile, the mood in Kyiv is a little down. The cou...

On today’s episode, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sits down with five members of the Lawfare team—Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett, Senior Editor Loren Voss, and Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes—to talk about how Sept. 11 shaped the U.S. national security apparatus and the guests’ caree...

This week, Scott celebrated the fifth anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 with the return of co-hosts emeriti Shane Harris, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes. In varying degrees of witheringness, the four sat in brutal judgment of this year’s Hot Take Takedown pitches: Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee gives her informed analysis of whether we should get rid of the President’s Daily Brief. Sen...

Over a year ago, President Trump sent 800 National Guard members to the streets of Washington D.C., citing a purported crime emergency. Since then, thousands of armed troops have been deployed in D.C.—usually traveling in groups of four or more, seemingly always armed.  On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Brad Heath, a reporter at Reuters, who has been reporting...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Ambassador Nina Hachigian, President and CEO of the Alliance for Local Leaders International and the first U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy from 2022 to 2025. They discuss Hachigian’s recent piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled " The Autocrat’s Worst Enemy: Why Despots Hate Cities and the Mayors Who Run...

In a conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Boasberg’s denial of the government’s motion to dismiss Lawfare ‘s suit seeking information on international agreements entered into by the Trump administration; developments in President Trump’s targeting of mail voting; u...

From October 24, 2022: Last month, the George Washington University Program on Extremism published a report called, “ Mayhem, Murder, and Misdirection: Violent Extremist Attack Plots Against Critical Infrastructure in the United States .” To talk through that report and a recent Lawfare article on the topic, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Ilana Krill, a research fellow at the...

From September 28, 2021: Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Yascha M...

From March 29, 2023: We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do. Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called, “ The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning...

When Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, it was the first major piece of U.S. industrial policy legislation in decades and was intended to expand America's ability to manufacture the computer chips that are vital for everything from AI to phones and modern automobiles. Mike Schmidt, distinguished visitor at Princeton University's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies and a non-resident se...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Eric Columbus, and Contributing Editor Renée DiResta, to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including: “Signed, Sealed, Undelivered.” As the first mail ballots of the 2026 midterms go out this week, a fast-moving legal fight over President Trump’s effort to reshape mail-in voting is racing toward...

Peter Salib, Associate Professor at the UH Law Center and co-Director of the Center on AI Law & Risk, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare , to break down the postmortems produced by METR and Redwood Research and OpenAI on the lab’s failure to contain AI agents undergoing testing, which resulted...

In a conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court granting a stay of the district court's preliminary injunction, allowing President Trump to continue to build the White House ballroom while litigation is ongoing, and the information about the U.S. Postal Service's system for handling mai...

Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Tricia Bacon, professor at American University, and Antonia Juelich, International Security Lead at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy (CASP), to talk about how different terrorist groups are using artificial intelligence and how governments are employing AI to fight them. They discuss how Boko Haram and other terrorist grou...

In a conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, Kate Klonick, and Eric Columbus to discuss a judge finding the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation of Anthropic unlawful, significant developments in the litigation challenging President Trump’s mail in ballot executive order, the prosecution of Representative LaMonic...

From March 5, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare general counsel and senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy within Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss his new book: "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare." They discussed Fishman's own career at the c...

From February 11, 2022: Over the past few weeks, Canada has been living through its own insurrectionary moment, as a series of trucker convoys have used tractor trailer trucks to occupy much of downtown Ottawa, launch protests in other major Canadian cities, and block points of entry along the country's southern border with the United States. While nominally objecting to Canadian vaccination manda...