The Lawfare Podcast
Episodes
Taylor Lorenz on Taking Internet Culture Seriously
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with a reporter who has carved o...
Marjorie Taylor Greene Faces Insurrection Questions
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Monday evening on the Tucker Carlson show, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was complaining that she had to submit to sworn questioning in connec...
Yascha Mounk on the Future of Diverse Democracies
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout human history, democracies have been the exception, not the rule, and that's been doubly true for ethnically, religiously or linguistically...
Scott Anderson on an Overlooked Presidential Election Vulnerability
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Scott R. Anderson is a senior editor at Lawfare, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow with the National Security Law Program at C...
Lawfare Archive: FBI Director Wray on Combating Cyberthreats
17 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From March 6, 2019: Susan Hennessey interviewed FBI Director Chris Wray at the 2019 RSA Conference. They discussed how the Director views the cyber th...
Lawfare Archive: Stephen Tankel on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba
16 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From November 14, 2012: Ritika Singh interviews American University scholar Stephen Tankel on Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation, the endgame in A...
Larry Jacobs on America's Broken Political Process
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
American political life is defined by what can seem like a paradox. Our society is incredibly politically polarized, but our parties are as weak as th...
Bringing Evidence of War Crimes From Twitter to the Hague
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The internet is increasingly emerging as a source for identification and documentation of war crimes, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has devastati...
Round One of France’s Presidential Election
13 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the weekend, France held the first round of its presidential elections for 2022. The result was that the same two candidates as last time will mo...
What’s Going On in Pakistani Politics?
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the weekend, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star who later ascended to the role of prime minister, was remov...
The Legislative Dog That Hasn’t Barked
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The period after Watergate and President Nixon's resignation saw an unprecedented barrage of congressional efforts at reforming the executive branch. ...
Lawfare Archive: Peter Pomerantsev on the War Against Reality
10 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From December 19, 2019: In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Peter Pomerantsev, a...
Lawfare Archive: Yemen's Ongoing Tragedy
09 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From August 26, 2020: Yemen is home to the most tragic circumstances imaginable right now—years upon years of war, environmental disasters and sever...
Countering Extremism Within the Military
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last week on Lawfare Live, Jacob Schulz sat down with Andrew Mines, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Mines ...
How the Press and the Platforms Handled the Hunter Biden Laptop
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We’re taking a look back at one of the stranger stories about social media platforms and the role of the press in the last presidential election. In...
How Russia's War in Ukraine Affects Energy and Climate Security
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the last few weeks, much has been said about how energy issues are playing into Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. It's especially coming up in the c...
Paul Massaro on the United States’ Latest Efforts to Combat Corruption
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On June 3, President Biden issued a national security memorandum that established the “Fight Against Corruption” as a core national security inter...
The Legacy of Madeleine Albright, with Kori Schake and Natalie Orpett
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Madeleine Albright passed away on March 23. She was the first woman to serve as secretary of state in United States history, and she had a long l...
Lawfare Archive: WTF, Ukraine!
03 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From October 1, 2019: The first two years of the Trump presidency were tied up with the Russia scandal. Now, there’s another scandal involving Russi...
Lawfare Archive: ICE, CBP and Coronavirus Response
02 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From April 13, 2020: Whether it has been travel bans, family separation, or changes to asylum rules, the Trump administration has long been embroiled ...
Andrea Chalupa on 'Mr. Jones' and Russia and Ukraine, Then and Now
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Andrea Chalupa is a writer, podcaster and Ukrainian American who worked for 15 years on a screenplay about a man named Gareth Jones, a journalist who ...
What’s in the U.K. Online Safety Bill?
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re turning our attention to the United Kingdom, where the gover...
Foreign Fighters in Ukraine
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the hours following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine's foreign minister tweeted out a call for what he called an international legion of fight...
Juliette Kayyem on Dealing with Disasters
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventi...
Polina Ivanova on Russia's New Line
28 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Polina Ivanova is a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and has spent the better part of the last decade reporting from Russia for that publ...
Lawfare Archive: The Coup in Myanmar
27 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From February 19, 2021: On February 1, Myanmar's military overthrew the country's democratically elected government in a coup and declared a state of ...
Lawfare Archive: Emily Bell on Journalism in the Platform Era
26 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From March 4, 2021: On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek a...
The Supreme Court Rules on State Secrets
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued rulings in two separate cases involving the state secrets privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah a...
Getting Information Into Russia
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the war in Ukraine on this series—how the Russian, Ukrainian and American governments are levera...
Thomas Rid on Ukraine and Cyberwar
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cyberwar is here, proclaims Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in a New...
Gen. John Baker on the 9/11 Plea Negotiations
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
General John Baker served until December as the chief defense council at the military commissions. The military commissions’ prosecutors and defense...
Tracking Russian Oligarch Yachts
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, who now is a novelist and a writer. Most recently, though, Alex has taken up a...
Lawfare Archive: Joshua Yaffa on Putin’s Russia
20 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From February 8, 2020: Russia continues to sporadically poke its head into American media headlines, whether it be for its role in Syria or for anxiet...
The Aftermath, Episode 2: Scattered to the Four Winds
19 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We're bringing you the second episode of Lawfare’s new narrative series, The Aftermath, which deals specifically with the early phases of the crimin...
All About the Oath Keepers
18 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, one of the groups receiving the most attention for its participation in the insurrection on the Hill was ...
How Open-Source Investigators are Documenting the War in Ukraine
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Open-source investigations—sometimes referred to as OSINT, or open-source intelligence—have been crucial to public understanding of the Russian in...
Negotiating with the Russians, with Alexander Stubb
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alexander Stubb is the former prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister of Finland. Back in 2008, after the Russian invasion of Georgia, h...
A 1/6 Check-in with Roger Parloff
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's been an eventful week in the department of criminal cases arising out of Jan. 6. We had the first jury verdict convicting an alleged 1/6 perpetra...
How Ukraine is Changing European Security
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine has undermined some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the security of Europe through much of the post-Wo...
Lawfare Archive: Andrew Bacevich on 'The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory'
13 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From February 18, 2020: In what ways did American foreign policy fail to capitalize on victory in the Cold War? Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus at...
Lawfare Archive: Alex Vindman Talks Eastern Europe
12 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From November 20, 2020: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.) is the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute. You've heard his story, likel...
Michael Kofman on the State of the War in Ukraine
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the war in Ukraine grinds into its third week, conditions on the ground have grown increasingly brutal. While Ukrainian forces have proven remarkab...
How Tech Platforms are Navigating the War in Ukraine
10 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine continues, tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been key geopolitical players in the conflict. The Kremli...
Watergate Revisited with Garrett Graff
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
You may think you know all that you need to about the Watergate scandal, its origins, its evolution and its implications. But there has been a lot of ...
A Conversation with a Refugee Law Student from Kharkiv
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kateryna is a fourth-year law student at a university in Kharkiv, Ukraine—at least she was until a few days ago. That's when the Russian army came i...
Russia’s Ukraine Operation One Week In
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues full blast with a great deal of brutality, a great deal of destruction and indeterminate levels of success. ...
Lawfare Archive: Mikhail Zygar on the Accidental King
06 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From December 9, 2017: When the Department of Justice required RT, the Russian-funded news outlet, to register as a foreign agent last month, the Russ...
Lawfare Archive: An Address by NATO's Secretary General
05 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From March 22, 2014: On March 19, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) hosted NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen for ...
Data Federalism
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past two decades, much of the public's attention has been focused on private markets for individual data, but another equally invasive and ex...
You Can’t Handle the Truth (Social)
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Almost immediately since he was banned from Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, Donald Trump has been promising the launch of a new, Trump-run platf...
Dan Solove and Woody Hartzog on ‘Breached!’
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For the past two decades, there has been an epidemic of data breaches, from Target, to Home Depot, to Equifax, to Uber, just to name a few. In their n...
Making Sense of the Unprecedented Sanctions on Russia
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past week, the United States and its allies have responded to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine with some unprecedented actions of their ...
China’s Illicit Economies
28 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the national security world, including on Lawfare, a lot of attention gets paid to China's tech sector and other parts of its economy. Comparativel...
Lawfare Archive: Putin's Imperial Gamble
27 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From October 31, 2015: Perhaps you’ve heard, but tensions between the United States and Russia are heating up. With Putin upping the ante in Syria,&...
Lawfare Archive: Alina and Scott Talk Ukraine and Russia
26 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From November 27, 2018: This week, Russia and Ukraine went at it in the Kerch Strait, which separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov. It's the lat...
Matthieu Aikins on Traveling as an Afghan Refugee
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bryce Klehm sat down with Matthieu Aikins, a Canadian journalist and the author of the new book, “The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Jou...
The Information War in Ukraine
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last several weeks, Russian aggression toward Ukraine has escalated dramatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that ...
Russia Attacks Ukraine
23 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Vladimir Putin has recognized two separatist regions in Ukraine, he has sent Russian troops as so-called peacekeepers to defend them, and all of this ...
U.S. Intelligence with Amy Zegart
22 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security and Lawfare hosted an event with Amy Zegart, a professor ...
Chatter: Presidents' Day and Washington's Legacy with Lindsay Chervinsky
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Happy Presidents' Day! To mark the day, Lawfare publisher David Priess recorded a special episode of Chatter with historian and author Lindsay Chervin...
Lawfare Archive: Anne Applebaum on the Red Famine
20 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From November 1, 2017: Stalin’s 1929 agricultural collectivization policy, which catalyzed the most lethal famine in European history, left millions...
Lawfare Archive: Andrei Soldatov on Russian Intel Ops and Surveillance
19 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From November 12, 2017: Matters Russia have been prevalent in U.S. politics since news of the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 elections first surface...
Madison Cawthorn and the 14th Amendment
18 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Madison Cawthorn is a Republican congressman from North Carolina. His candidacy for reelection is the subject of challenge under Section 3 of the 14th...
The Nuts and Bolts of Social Media Transparency
17 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company...
Rep. Jamie Raskin Speaks at Brookings on the Future of American Democracy
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has been one of the most prominent voices in Congress speaking about Jan. 6 and the aftermath of the insurrection. He ha...
The Biden Administration and Afghanistan’s Frozen Assets
15 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Biden administration on Friday notified a court of a novel proposal to dispose of $7 billion in frozen Afghanistan assets, producing some pretty c...
Where is the Department of Justice on the Trump Obstruction Offenses?
14 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today on Lawfare, we’re publishing a piece by our editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic that revisits the Mueller...
Lawfare Archive: Why You Should Buy Back Your Bitcoin
13 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From January 16, 2016: Last week, we hated on bitcoin. This week we give it some love. This week, Brookings hosted a discussion on Bitcoin a...
Lawfare Archive: Nick Weaver on Why You Should Sell Your Bitcoin
12 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From January 9, 2016: This week we have Nick Weaver on the show. Nick's a regular Lawfare contributor, senior staff researcher at ...
The Trucker Convoys and Domestic Unrest in Canada
11 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few weeks, Canada has been living through its own insurrectionary moment, as a series of trucker convoys have used tractor trailer truck...
Spotify Faces the Content Moderation Music
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the most popular podcast in the world—and it’s been at the center of a weeks-long controversy over COVID ...
Universal Jurisdiction Cases
09 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, a court in Germany convicted a senior Assad government official for a crime against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison for activ...
Congress Moves on China
08 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The House of Representatives last week passed the COMPETES Act, its counterpart to a Senate bill last year on competitiveness with China. What's in th...
The Bomb Threats at HBCUs
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last week was scary for historically black colleges and universities, 17 of which received bomb threats that caused disruptions, building closures and...
Lawfare Archive: Alex Klass on the Texas Energy Crisis
06 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From February 23, 2021: For more than a week now, Texas has been struggling with a massive power outage caused by record low temperatures. Millions ha...
Lawfare Archive: Syria and The Al-Baghdadi Raid
05 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From October 28, 2019: President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, died in a raid...
Another ISIS Leader Killed
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last night, U.S. forces in Northern Syria killed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi who until yesterday was the current leader of ISIS. It was an...
Is Block Party the Future of Content Moderation?
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We talk a lot on this show about the responsibility of major tech platforms when it comes to content moderation. But what about problems the plat...
YouTube Influencers and the Chinese Government
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, the New York Times ran a story about YouTube videos promoting tourism to China and promoting messages sympathetic to the Chinese governmen...
Afghanistan Six Months After the Taliban Takeover
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly six months have passed since the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan. As the country faces down a failing economy and looming humanitari...
What the French Third Republic Can Teach Us About January 6
31 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the best historical analogue for the American political situation today? Often, pundits will compare our current age of rising polarization a...
Lawfare Archive: What to Do With Detained Islamic State Fighters in Iraq and Syria
30 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From July 28, 2020: For a while, there have been large numbers of alleged former Islamic State state fighters and affiliates detained by the Iraqi gov...
Lawfare Archive: Justice Stephen Breyer on ‘The Court and the World’
29 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From January 30, 2016: Last week at The Brookings Institution, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer participated in a dis...
An Islamic State Jailbreak
28 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Late last week and early this week saw fighting between Islamic State fighters and Syrian democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbr...
Defunding the Insurrectionists
27 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the ma...
Oona Hathaway and Secrecy’s End
26 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What if we declared an end to the costly system of how we classify national security information in the United States? Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. an...
The Capitol Police and the Enduring Effects of Jan. 6
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last year, our national dialogue about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has become ever more focused on politics, congressional investigations and c...
Ned Foley on Electoral Count Act Reform
24 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the prospect of broader election reform has grown more remote, bipartisan discussions have increasingly come to center on one long standing law: th...
Lawfare Archive: Who is Vladimir Putin?
23 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From April 4, 2015: With a tenuous ceasefire holding in Ukraine, we asked Fiona Hill onto the show to discuss the man behind the unrest: Vla...
Lawfare Archive: Mark Rozell on 'Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability'
22 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the ...
Trump’s Documents, the Jan. 6 Committee and the Supreme Court
21 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case Trump v. Thompson, denying Donald Trump's motion to block the National Archives fro...
Why the Online Advertising Market is Broken
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2020, ten state attorneys general sued Google, alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The l...
Hal Brands on Lessons from the Cold War
19 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bryce Klehm sat down with Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Interna...
What Happens When Congress Investigates Itself?
18 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A crucial component of the story of Jan. 6 involves what members of Congress were doing on that day. What kinds of conversations did Republican lawmak...
Lawfare Archive: Paul Lewis on Not Closing Guantanamo
17 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administ...
Lawfare Archive: Adam Jentleson and Molly Reynolds on Getting Rid of the Senate Filibuster
16 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From August 14, 2020: On July 30, former President Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of Congressman John Lewis, threw his weight behind ending the...
Lawfare Archive: Chesney, Monaco, McCord, and Rasmussen on Domestic Terrorism
15 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From October 15, 2019: A couple of weeks ago, Lawfare and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law sponsored a series of panels at the Te...
Trouble in Ukraine and Kazakhstan
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There's a lot going on in Russia's near-abroad, the countries on the periphery of the Russian Federation. There’s a war brewing in Ukraine, with tal...
Podcasts Are the Laboratories of Misinformation
13 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published an analysis of how popular podcasters on the Ame...
Benjamin Wittes and Alan Rozenshtein on Thompson v. Trump, Presidential Immunity and the First Amendment
12 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On Monday, January 10, a federal district court in DC heard oral argument in Thompson v. Trump. The case considers civil claims against Donald Trump a...