The Lawfare Podcast

In a  live conversation on  July 11,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling in  Trump v. AFGE,  which allows for the mass terminations of federal employees, what happened in the multiple hearings in the criminal and civil cases involvi...

From April 12, 2019: Julian Mortenson, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is the author of a remarkable new article entitled "Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative," forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review and  available  on SSRN. Recently, Benjamin Wittes spoke with the professor about the article, which Mortenson has been working on for years—as long a...

From April 9, 2024: In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, am...

John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht, Haran, & Williams, channeled his experience as the former chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to talk about bribery with James Pearce, Lawfare Legal Fellow. After explaining the basics of bribery law and whether a current or former president could face a bribery prosecution, Keller analyzed whether three episodes...

On July 8, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a bonus edition of Lawfare Live with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss Kilmar Abrego Garcia's July 7 hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland.  To receive ad-free podcasts, become a  Lawfare  Material Supporter at  www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also support  Lawfare&nbsp...

Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management and author of the “One Useful Thing”  Substack , joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , to analyze the latest research in AI adoption, specifically its use by professionals an...

This week, Scott sat down with fellow Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Alan Rozenshtein to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “One Bill to rule them all, One Bill to find them, One Bill to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” Republicans in Congress narrowly enacted President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last week, just in advance of the July 4 deadline h...

Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sits down with Ashley Deeks, the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, to discuss her new book, “ The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability .” They talk about the core metaphor of the book: the idea that the use of artif...

Until late May, Michael Feinberg was a senior FBI counterintelligence agent focused on China. All that changed one weekend, when the Deputy FBI Director found out that he was still friends with a former FBI official who had been fired years ago. In his first interview following his essay, “ Goodbye to All That ,” in Lawfare last week. Feinberg sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes...

Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of  DistrictCon , joins  Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss her recently released report " Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace ." They discuss the offensive cyber industry, the private sector and indiv...

In a live conversation on July 3,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the civil and criminal cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a D.C. district court judge's injunction against the Trump administration’s invasion proclamation, attacks on...

From February 16, 2024: The EU has finally agreed to its AI Act. Despite the political agreement reached in December 2023, some nations maintained some reservations about the text, making it uncertain whether there was a final agreement or not. They recently reached an agreement on the technical text, moving the process closer to a successful conclusion. The challenge now will be effective impleme...

From November 7, 2023: You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term.  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all throu...

Teun Jansenn is a staff member at the European Parliament who works on issues of EU expansion and support for Ukraine. He joined Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the prospects of Europe's stepping up for Ukraine as the United States backs away. He also talked about why EU enlargement is essential to getting EU governance under control and the role that Ukraine might play in that proce...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the Naval War College and Columbia University, to discuss the Trump administration's handling of the U.S. military. Cohn discusses the firings of senior military officials, military parades, and the use of the U.S. military at the U.S-Mexico border and in Los Angeles....

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Lindsay Freeman, Director of Technology, Law & Policy at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law, to discuss  her recent  Lawfare  article, “War Crimes for Fun and Profit. ” They talk about how and why so-called war influencers linked to private military companies such as the Wag...

In a  live conversation on  June 27,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case, the whistleblower complaint about Emil Bove’s actions as deputy attorney...

From March 19, 2020: What can the president do in a national emergency? What limits what the president can do? What authorizes the president to do all those things he can do in a national emergency? Is the president abusing, misusing, using appropriately, or under-using emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis? And what are the logical end points for how far this could go? For this bonus edi...

From December 5, 2015: The show this week features  Natan Sachs , a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, who recently  published an article  in Foreign Affairs on anti-solutionism as strategy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. During his conversation with  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes, Sachs argues that the apparent absence of a long-term...

Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Eric Ciaramella, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at Rand Corporation, to discuss the key issues in the Ukraine-Russia talks. They chat about the national interests of the interested parties, whether a negotiated settlement is possible, and what form a potentia...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Natalie Orpett, and University of Virginia School of Law professor Ashley Deeks, to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Bracing for Fallout.” In a surprise move, President Trump joined Israel’s military campaign against Iran over the weekend, using a specialized U.S. ordinance to hit Iranian nucle...

Max Smeets, Co-Director of Virtual Routes and Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, joins Lawfare ’s Jonathan Cedarbaum and Justin Sherman to discuss his recently released book “ Ransom War: How Cybercrime Became a Threat to National Security .” They discuss the history of ransomware (including the term itself), how the threats have evolved over the years, and some of the major drivers of innovati...

In the wake of controversy over OpenAI’s restrictive nondisclosure agreements, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced the AI Whistleblower Protection Act. In this episode, Lawfare Research Director Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Charlie Bullock, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI and co-author of a new  Lawfare  article on the bill, about its key provisions. The...

In a live conversation on June 23 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott Anderson,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor and CSIS fellow Daniel Byman, and Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution Suzanne Maloney about the American attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, what the reaction within Iran has...

In a  live conversation on  June 20,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff to discuss the litigation over President Trump federalizing the California National Guard to send them to L.A., the the order for the release of Mahmoud Kha...