The Lawfare Podcast

From April 10, 2025: On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett spoke with Tara Varma, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the latest in French politics. On March 31, far-right leader Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement and banned from politics, though polling showed her in the lead for the 2027 presidential elections. In the last few weeks, current French president Emman...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a tutorial fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. They speak about Véliz’s paradigm-shifting, free-ranging new book, “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracl...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief and co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editors Anna Bower and Michael Feinberg to talk through the latest in national security news, including:“Humphrey’s Executioner.” On June 29, the Supreme Court closed out its term with a trio of decisions on the president’s power to fire officials at supposedly independent agencies...

For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Vox Senior Correspondent Joshua Keating to discuss his special new series on how artificial intelligence is impacting the use and development of nuclear weapons. Together, they explore what AI may mean for nuclear command and control moving forward, how it is impacting nuclear arms development, how these trends are interse...

Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Loren Voss and Molly Roberts about the limits the Constitution and statutes put on the use of military in U.S. elections—as well as the arguments an eager executive might make to skirt those restrictions. They discuss how the history of domestic deployment law shows that legislators have long believed vot...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Lawfare Senior Editor Mike Feinberg and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which was created to oversee the intelligence community. But much like the IC itself, the ODNI is somewhat mysterious to the general public—which makes it difficult to tell when somethin...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Kate Klonick, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s rulings in the birthright citizenship case and Slaughter, indictments over purported vandalism at the Reflecting Pool, former CIA Director John Brennan’s civil suit against the Department of Justice, geo...

From September 1, 2023: The National Intelligence Strategy is out, and David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, sat down to talk about it with Michael Collins, the acting head of the National Intelligence Council. They discussed many aspects of U.S. national security, defense, cyber, and intelligence strategy, including the increasing geopolitical significance of non-state entities, and even the...

From July 2, 2025: 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 U.S. military at the U.S-Mexico border and in Los Angeles. She also...

From September 24, 2024: Israel and Hezbollah seem to be headed for a major war. Over the past several weeks, Israel has taken a series of escalatory steps along its northern border, targeting major Hezbollah figures, blowing up pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and—most recently—hitting targets all over southern Lebanon associated with Hezbollah. Will it lead to all-out war? ...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Nick Bednar, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a contributing editor at Lawfare. They talk about two Supreme Court cases issued last week that will have a huge impact on the president's authority over agencies that Congress set up to be independent. In Slaughter v. Trump, the Court held that the president has th...

Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Professor Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science and Department Chair of Political Science at Amherst College, to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to pressure Cuba and support regime change there. They discuss why the Cuban regime stays in power, the effectiveness of different U.S. policy instruments...

On this episode of Lawfare Daily, Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speak with Cory Doctorow—science fiction author, activist, journalist, adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the writer who coined "enshittification"—about his new book, “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.” Doctorow argues that the most important thing about the AI boom isn't wha...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s decisions on TPS for Haitians and Syrians and in an asylum processing case, a federal judge squashing portions of President Trump’s election executive order, John Bolton pleading guilty, an update in the criminal pros...

From June 4, 2016: This week, the Brookings Institution held an event on a new Brookings report on implementation of the Iran Deal: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) adopted by Iran and the P5+1 partners in July 2015 was an effort not only to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but also to avert a nuclear arms competition in the Middle East. But uncertainties surrounding...

From April 16, 2020: On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Camille François, the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, where she works to identify and mitigate disinformation and misinformation online. On April 15, Graphika released a report on an Iranian influence operation focused on COVID-19, an operation blaming the...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Kevin Frazier, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to talk through some of the week’s big news in AI, including:“Citizen Cain’t.” When the NAACP sued Elon Musk’s xAI under the Clean Air Act—alleging that the company built dozens of gas-fired turbines to power a data center in Mississippi without relevant air permits and exposing nearby, predominan...

Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare, speaks with Robert Wright—author of "Nonzero," "The Moral Animal," "The Evolution of God," and "Why Buddhism Is True," and the writer behind the NonZero Newsletter and podcast—about his new book, "The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning," which argues that AI is an evolutionary threshold on the scale of the entire histor...

Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editor Michael Feinberg discuss the methods and techniques the FBI used to investigate Donald Trump as part of the Arctic Frost investigation, and whether critiques of the FBI’s steps hold up.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at ht...

Brandon DeBot and Kelsey Merrick, of NYU’s Tax Law Center, speak to Senior Editor Roger Parloff about Attorney General Todd Blanche’s purported waiver of President Trump’s past tax liabilities on May 19, as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion suit against the IRS.DeBot and Merrick discuss whether those who negotiated the deal might face criminal liability under 26 USC § 7217 or § 7212, and...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the D.C. Circuit rehearing the case over Judge Boasberg’s criminal contempt inquiry into the Justice Department in sending Venezuelans to CECOT, a federal judge squashing grand jury subpoenas to top Minnesota political officials, updates...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Jasper Craven, a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans’ issues, to discuss his new book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” They speak about why the son of a peace activist embarked on this project, how military education helps explain our c...

From December 9, 2024: Kevin Xu, founder of Interconnected Capital and author of the Interconnected newsletter, joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to analyze China’s AI ambitions, its current AI capacities, and the likely effect of updated export controls on the nation’s AI efforts....

From February 21, 2025: Before January, most Americans had probably never heard of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), a Treasury Department agency that distributes payments from the federal government. But over the last month, this corner of government has appeared again and again in the headlines, as aides working with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental DOGE initiative successfully gained access...

From May 31, 2022: A few weeks ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the latest FISA transparency data. It was notable in at least two major respects: the continued decline of traditional Title I FISA applications—that is, warrants for individual surveillance—and separately, the rather large number of U.S. persons who had been searched under so-called 702 surveillance.T...