The Lawfare Podcast

From July 14, 2023: The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, just wrapped up, and the big news is that Sweden is in, and Ukraine is not. Eric Adamson of the Atlantic Council and the Swedish Defense Association is a Swedish defense policy analyst who observed the NATO summit. He joined  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the two big things that happened: the Swedish resolut...

From May 9, 2023: Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the sam...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down for a conversation about the rescissions package President Trump recently put forward to Congress, how it relates to the litigation over the president’s attempted cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, and what it all signals about how...

From April 12, 2024: The Insurrection Act is a provision that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. It’s been invoked dozens of times by presidents to respond to crises in the over 230 years that it’s been around, but it hasn’t been reformed in centuries. In recent years, the Insurrection Act has come back into public focus because of its implication in a n...

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Foreign Policy Editors Daniel Byman and Dana Stuster to talk through the week’s big news in Israel and Iran, including: “The Nuclear Option.” Israel crossed the rubicon late last week and took direct military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, among other targets, in an aggressive unilateral military campaign that...

On today's episode, Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett discussed the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Iran with Suzanne Maloney, Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. They talked about how the conflict is unfolding, the nature of U.S. involvement, an...

Greg Rosen, now an attorney at Rogers Joseph O’Donnell, spoke with James Pearce,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow, about his time prosecuting federal crimes in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. He focused mostly on the investigation and prosecution that followed the attack of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He discussed how the U.S. Attorney’s Office...

In a  live conversation on  June 13,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to discuss the legality of President Trump federalizing the California National Guard to send them to L.A., the pretrial detention hearing of Kilmar Abrego...

From December 26, 2023: The Supreme Court during World War II issued some of the most notorious opinions in its history, including the Japanese exclusion case,  Korematsu v. United States , and the Nazi saboteur military commission case,  Ex parte Quirin . For a fresh take on these and related cases and a broader perspective on the Supreme Court during World War II, Jack Goldsmith sat do...

From June 21, 2023: Carolyn Cole, a Pulitzer-Prize winning staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, has covered wars and other conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, Liberia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the U.S.-Mexico border. Over the course of her 30 year career, she has been seriously injured on the job precisely once—when members of the Minnesota State Patrol pushed Cole over a...

For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor and General Counsel Scott R. Anderson sat down with three leading legal experts on domestic military deployments: William Banks of Syracuse University College of Law, Laura Dickinson of the George Washington University Law School, and Chris Mirasola of the University of Houston Law Center. They discussed the legality of the Trump administration's dec...

Today, it’s Episode Seven of Escalation , our latest narrative series co-hosted by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina. Throughout the show, Nastya and Tyler trace the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations from the time of Ukrainian independence through the present. You can listen to Escalation in its entirety, as well as our other narrative series, on our La...

Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta sits down with Clay Risen to talk about his book “ Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America ,” exploring the historical context of McCarthyism and its relevance to contemporary issues. They discuss the dynamics of accusation versus evidence during the Red Scare, the impact of vigilantism, the erosion of civil liberties, and the...

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic, and Contributing Editor Chris Mirasola, to focus on the week’s big domestic news, including: “Drama Majors, Meet Major Drama.” In the glittering city of Los Angeles, the Trump administration has taken the dramatic step of calling up the California National Guard and deploying them alongside active duty Marines...

Christina Knight, Machine Learning Safety and Evals Lead at Scale AI and former senior policy adviser at the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas and a Senior Editor at  Lawfare , to break down what it means to test and evaluate frontier AI models as well as the status of international efforts to coordinate on those efforts. This reco...

Today, it’s Episode Six of Escalation , our latest narrative series co-hosted by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina. Throughout the show, Nastya and Tyler trace the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations from the time of Ukrainian independence through the present. You can listen to Escalation in its entirety, as well as our other narrative series, on our Lawf...

Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta sits down with Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center; Dean Jackson, Contributing Editor at Tech Policy Press   and fellow at American University's Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology; and Joan Barata, Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech Project at Va...

In a  live conversation on  June 6,  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 a breaking Supreme Court opinion which blocks discovery against DOGE, the criminal indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, President Trump’s recent executive order ta...

From March 14, 2023: For years, the international community has wrestled with how to reconcile sanctions policies targeting terrorist groups and other malevolent actors with the need to provide humanitarian assistance in areas under those groups’ control. Late last year, both the Biden administration and the UN Security Council took major steps toward a new approach on this issue, installing broad...

From January 18, 2024: Last month, the Department of Defense released its first-ever policy on civilian harm reduction. But as  Marc Garlasco recently wrote in  Lawfare , “[T]he policy comes at an awkward time … The U.S. military has issued guidance on how to protect civilians during operations just as its close ally Israel has reportedly killed thousands of Palestinians with American bo...

Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower has been on a quest. She wants to identify the administrator of DOGE. It's partly a comedic bit. And her lengthy article on the subject on Lawfare last week is laugh-out-loud funny. But it's also deadly serious. She came on the Lawfare Podcast  to discuss the serious questions behind WITAOD with Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes. To receive ad-free podcasts...

Today, it’s Episode Five of Escalation , our latest narrative series co-hosted by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina. Throughout the show, Nastya and Tyler trace the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations from the time of Ukrainian independence through the present. You can listen to Escalation in its entirety, as well as our other narrative series, on our Law...

It’s been a big week in Ukrainian-Russian relations. There were surprise attacks, an amassing of troops, the blowing up of bridges, and peace talks in Istanbul that didn’t really go anywhere. To talk through all of this and more, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko. To receive ad-free podcasts, bec...

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Contributing Editors Eric Ciaramella and Alex Zerden to talk through the week’s big national security and foreign policy news, including:  “The Road to Damascus.” Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has done an extraordinary about-face on U.S. policy towards Syria, installing almost universal except...

Political scientists who study democratic backsliding—the slow erosion of a country’s institutions—have raised alarms about the state of democracy in the United States under the second Trump administration. At the same time, the administration has embraced technology—particularly AI—as a tool for implementing many of its policies, from  immigration enforcement  to  slashing governme...