The Lawfare Podcast

On August 5, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sat down for a live discussion on Substack with Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck to discuss his forthcoming Harvard Law Review Foreword, “ The Court Against the Courts ,” which chronicles institutional attacks on the lower federal courts. Vladeck argues not just that the Court failed to shield district judges from impeachment threats and harass...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Bernice Yeung, the managing editor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism investigative reporting program and author of a recent feature, “ The rise of the military-technology complex ,” published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They discuss the bumpy history of Big Tech’s relationship with U.S. defense contracti...

Some countries are susceptible to believing that with the right military strategy, they can accomplish their goals with a quick war. It's called the "Short War Illusion," and as the term suggests, it rarely works out as planned. That includes the two major conflicts currently underway in Ukraine and Iran. And it could include a potential conflict in Taiwan. On today's podcast, Executive Editor Nat...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Georgetown Law Professor Peter Harrell and Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff to discuss legal challenges to President Trump’s new tariffs, recent motions by James Comey in the ‘86 47 seashell’ prosecution, developments in the Reflecting Pool prosecution, a hearing on Anthropic’s summ...

From October 17, 2024: Jonathan Zittrain, Faculty Director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to dive into his recent Atlantic article , “We Need to Control AI Agents Now.” The pair discuss what distinguishes AI agents from current generative AI tools and explore the sources...

From February 26, 2025: On Feb. 24,  Fiona Hill (Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe), Constanze Stelzenmüller, (Director at the Center on the United States and Europe; Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe; and Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Trans-Atlantic Relations), Anastasiia Lapatina (Ukraine Fellow, Lawfare ), Tyle...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Tyler McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Kevin Frazier to talk through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Kyiv Peace a Chance.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Oval Office on Tuesday for closed-door talks with President Trump, roughly 17 months after their first Oval Office m...

Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google and Alphabet, joins Kevin Frazier to discuss Google's proposal for a two-pronged approach to AI governance: a Frontier AI Regulatory Organization, which like FINRA, would operate as an independent, industry-based governance body overseen by a federal agency and the application of existing laws to widely-deployed, less capable systems. The two also...

Lawfare Book Review Editor Jonathan Cedarbaum sits down with the Soufan Center’s Executive Director Colin Clarke and Senior Research Fellow Chad Serena, to discuss the Center’s recent report, “ Closing the Gap: Software Understanding and U.S. National Security .” They explore what the authors call the “software understanding gap”—the growing disconnect between the rapid pace of software developmen...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien brings you a series of edited conversations from the 2026 Aspen Security Forum, where he sat down with host and founder of the Global Dispatches Podcast and Editor-in-Chief of UN Dispatch Mark Leon Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies Kori Schake, Lawfare Contributing Edito...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School and a Commissioner on the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria. They talk about the Commission's work investigating atrocities that occurred after the fall of the Assad regime, how to think about Syria's new government and the int...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff discussed a hearing over the subpoenas sent to New York Times reporters, a hearing in the criminal case against Nicolas Maduro, the court-appointed U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington suing over his termination, the first convening of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, and more....

From March 21, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. Johnsen explains the rationale of the Trump administration's decision to bomb Yemen but argues that it will have little effect on the Houthis. Indeed, Johnsen contends that the Houthis are spoiling for a fight...

From October 16, 2024: In early September, the U.S. Justice Department released a trove of information about the Russian influence campaign known as “Doppelganger”—a Kremlin-backed effort that created faux versions of familiar news websites and seeding them with fake material. Just a few weeks later, the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it had received a tranche of hacked mater...

New York Times White House Correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan speak with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about their recent bestseller, “ Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump .” They discuss how close Trump has come to suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act, how the Supreme Court’s immunity decision has shaped his conduct, his vindicti...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and Senior Editors Eric Columbus and Molly Roberts to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “The Manchurian Candidates.” In a primetime address to the nation last Thursday, July 16, President Trump declassified a trove of intelligence documents that he claimed prove America’s electi...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Liza Goitein and Joseph Nunn of the Liberty and Security Program at the Brennan Center, and Lawfare Senior Editor Loren Voss. They talk about the state laws governing the National Guard—what they allow, what they prohibit, and what it means for domestic deployments in the United States. What is the National Guard allowed to do, esp...

On today’s episode, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks to Francis Farrell, a front line reporter at the Kyiv Independent, about the Ukrainian president’s decision to replace the country’s Minister of Defense, the mass protests it caused, and how the decision will impact the course of the war. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfa...

On today’s episode, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks to Fabian Hoffman, a senior research fellow at the Programme for Ukraine and Full-Spectrum Threats at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, about what it would take for Ukraine to produce Patriot interceptor missiles, if the United States had given it the license to do so. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare M...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the confirmation hearing for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, subpoenas sent to New York Times reporters, a judicial opinion voiding President Trump’s settlement with the IRS, and more. You can find information on legal...

From August 25, 2023: Earlier this month, there was big trouble in little Marion, Kansas, where an entire police department raided the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned newspaper about 60 miles north of Wichita, with seven employees and a circulation of about 4,000. To discuss this alarming violation of press freedom, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Cai...

From February 3, 2025: Nema Milaninia, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and a current partner at the law firm King & Spalding, joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to discuss legislation in the U.S. Congress and recent executive actions taken by the Trump administration to, once again, sanction the Inte...

On July 17 at 11am ET , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Michael Feinberg and Molly Roberts and Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta to discuss President Trump's primetime address on July 16 where he discussed elections. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also support Lawfare by maki...

Lawfare Senior Editor Renée DiResta sits down with Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Elissa Redmiles, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. They examine the people who create AI-generated sexual content and whether prominent technical proposals can actually prevent AI systems from generating exploitative content. For further reading: Jaron Mink, Lucy Qin, and Elissa M....

This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, 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 news in foreign policy, including: “Truce or Consequences.” The fragile ceasefire that had...