The Lawfare Podcast

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and the co-host of Slate’s weekly podcast, “Political Gabfest.” They discuss three stories Bazelon and her colleagues recently published in the New York Times Magazine. For this t...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss three legal challenges to the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a federal judge’s decision to stop the shuttering of the Kennedy Center, post-dismissal developments in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, a...

From October 9, 2021: The majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee has issued an interim report, entitled “ Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election .” A lot of it covers ground we knew about previously, but it contains a raft of new details about the president's pressure on the Justice Department to support his election fraud...

From May 27, 2025: 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 discuss three recent developments with James Pearce,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow. They discussed proposed changes to the Public Integrity Section that could hamper the Justice Department’s ability to...

Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Jimmy Rushton, a Kyiv-based journalist and security analyst who recently published, “ How Ukraine gained the upper hand in the drone war against Russia ,” in the Kyiv Independent. They talk about how the balance of power in the drone war seems to have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, Russia's latest missile strike on Kyiv, and what it all means for...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower and Eric Columbus, and his Brookings colleague Molly Reynolds, to talk through a couple of the week’s big news stories in domestic politics, including: “The Grift That Keeps On Giving.” Last week, the Justice Department announced the creation of a so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund of nearly 1.8 billion taxpayer dollars, from which pu...

Sean Wiswesser, author of the new book, “ Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War ,” and a former senior operations officer with the CIA, joins Lawfare ’s Justin Sherman to discuss the major Russian security organs and their training, characteristics of Russian “sticks-and-bricks” surveillance and counter-surveillance tradecraft, and the Russians’ use of...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Sophia Yan, a senior foreign correspondent with The Telegraph, to discuss her time reporting on the Chinese government, and how it leveraged its security services to investigate her in turn. Sophia recently wrote in-depth about this experience in “ The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me ,” in The Telegraph. To receive ad-free...

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Eve Fairbanks, a writer and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor-in-chief of  The Dial, a magazine of international writing , to discuss The Dial’s forthcoming book,  “How We See it: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump” (out June 9 from The...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff discussed the Department of Justice’s newly-announced “Anti-Weaponization Fund” which purports to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare,” oral argument in Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War before the Cour...

From April 2, 2025: Atul Gawande is a surgeon and a public health expert. He's also the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that the Trump administration has prioritized for dismantling since its first day in office. On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gawande to discuss what USAID does, the consequences of...

From January 23, 2025: Alexis Loeb, the former Deputy Chief of the Capitol Siege Section of the Department of Justice, sits down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about President Trump's blanket pardons and commutations for everyone her unit prosecuted.  She discusses how she became involved with the cases; how they were handled by prosecutors, judges, and juri...

This week, the Department of Justice announced that Trump and his sons dropped their lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury in exchange for a $1.776 billion fund for Trump’s allies and blanket immunity from government suits for the Trump family. Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Senior Editor Eric Columbus about what the settlement means, where it came from, and what can be done abo...

This week, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Brookings Senior Fellow Kari Heerman to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “With Friends Like Xi.” This past week, top U.S. officials and business CEOs traveled with President Trump to Beijing for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit had a warm air to it, with Trump going so far a...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Daniel Bell, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, who recently wrote, “ Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future .” They discuss the ongoing influence of ancient Chinese political theory on the contemporary policies of the PRC and its domestic debates. To receive ad-free podcasts, become...

Loren Voss, Senior Editor at  Lawfare , sits down with Jeffrey Stern to discuss his new book " The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare ." They talk about the development of the Paveway bomb and the importance of precision weapons to modern warfare. Stern grapples with their complicated effects on warfare, both adding precision to warfare that can reduce...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Antonia Senior, whose new book on the history of the Cambridge spy ring, “ Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire ,” comes out in the United States at end of this month. They talk about the history of the spy ring, how they were recruited, how they were unmasked, and their lasting effect on the culture of espionage. T...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Boulee denying Fulton County’s motion for the return of the 2020 election ballots seized by the FBI, a judge ordering the National Endowment for Humanities to rescind DOGE-backed cancellation of grants, oral argument in Mark...

From May 15, 2025: For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman talked with Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara, both Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss their recent  Lawfare  article, " Beijing's Changing Invasion Calculus: How China Might Put Taiwan in its Crosshairs ."  Together they discuss how C...

From January 10, 2023: District Attorney of Fulton County Fani Willis has completed her special grand jury investigation of election tampering in 2020. The special purpose grand jury has completed its report and has been dissolved, and the supervising judge yesterday scheduled a hearing for January 24 to decide whether to make the report public. What will happen next? Will there be indictments? Ar...

Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Danylo Mokryk, a war crimes investigator at the Kyiv Independent and the author of a YouTube blog about domestic Ukrainian Politics, to talk about the latest corruption saga engulfing the Ukrainian government—and why, despite so many arrows pointing toward Zelensky personally, no one is calling for his removal. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Foreign Policy Editor Dana Stuster for a little chat with the guys about the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Minding Your Bs and Ts.” President Trump arrived in China this week alongside top U.S. officials and business executives for a much-anticipated summit with President Xi Jinping. U...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Rep. Sara Jacobs, who represents California’s 51st congressional district. As a member of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, Rep. Jacobs has taken a lead role on an array of foreign affairs-related legislation. Before being elected to Congress, she worked for the U.S. Department of State and the United...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Holly Berkley Fletcher, former CIA Africa analyst, and Alexander Palmer, fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss the growth of terrorism and instability in East and West Africa, the fragility of regional governments, and how the United States and other out...

Candace Rondeaux, the founder and principal of Frontline Atlas, an independent geopolitical risk intelligence hub; a professor with the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University; and a senior fellow in global security at New America joins Lawfare ’s Justin Sherman to discuss the latest geopolitics, operations, and state of Russian private military companies (PMCs). They discuss the cu...