Today, it’s Episode 3 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 Lawfare Presents channel , wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 3 picks up the story in the late 90s, a...
May 29, 2025•40 min
Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Minna Ålander, an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Europe Programme, to discuss Russia's buildup of military infrastructure along its borders with NATO member countries, particularly along the Finnish border, and what European countries are doing to prepare for a potential clash with Russia. They also talk through Finland’s history with Russia and its security capabilities, especially in light of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the i...
May 29, 2025•37 min
This week, Scott sat down with the AI-oriented Lawfare Senior Editors Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier to talk through the week’s top AI-focused news stories, including: “Oh Sure, Now He’s Into Free Trade.” President Trump has repealed the Biden administration’s rule setting strict limits on the diffusion of high-end AI technology, opening the door to the global transfer of the technologies powering U.S. AI development, including advanced chipsets. And we’re already seeing results of that poli...
May 28, 2025•1 hr 24 min
It’s been nearly one year since Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in Manhattan criminal court. Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower sits down with New York Times reporter Jonah Bromwich to talk about Jonah’s new book on the subject, “ Dragon on Centre Street ,” take a look back at the trial, consider its legacy, and discuss what comes next. 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 dona...
May 28, 2025•53 min
In April, we ran Episode One of our narrative podcast series Escalation on this feed. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the next few weeks, we’ll be posting the rest of the series, starting today with Episode Two. Escalation is a multi-part narrative podcast co-hosted by Lawfare ’s Managing Director Tyler McBrien and Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina, covering the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations from the time of Ukrainian independence through the present. You can subscribe to the whole...
May 27, 2025•42 min
John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht & Haran, 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 investigate and prosecute corruption matters in a fair and impartial matter. Keller weighed in on whether the Justice Department has a vi...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 18 min
From May 3, 2024: Over the past several years, governors around the country from both political parties have used their respective National Guards for an increasingly unconventional array of domestic missions, ranging from teaching in public schools to regulating immigration at the southern border. To discuss how this trend may impact the National Guard—and our broader democracy, particularly in this pivotal election year— Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson recently sat down with a panel of...
May 26, 2025•1 hr 22 min
From December 4, 2023: Is the Fourth Amendment doing any work anymore? In a forthcoming article entitled “Government Purchases of Private Data,” Matthew Tokson, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, details how, in recent years, federal and state agencies have begun to purchase location information and other consumer data, as government attorneys have mostly concluded that purchasing data is a valid way to bypass Fourth Amendment restrictions. Lawfare Senior Editor S...
May 25, 2025•34 min
In a live conversation on May 22, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss legal challenges against President Trump’s executive actions, including the a court hearing over the attempted deportation of immigrants to South Sudan, the arrest of Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver, the Supreme Court opinion allowing President Trump to remove members of independent agencies, and...
May 24, 2025•1 hr 36 min
Global Cyber Alliance ’s President and CEO Phil Reitinger and Chief Business Officer Komal Bazaz Smith discuss with Justin Sherman critical cybersecurity issues facing core internet infrastructure, including the role of small, often under-appreciated, and frequently underfunded nonprofits in keeping the internet secure and functioning. They talk about their organization’s Common Good Cyber project ( video here ) to address gaps, detail how better data could help inform internet security efforts,...
May 23, 2025•43 min
This week, Scott sat down with a particularly baritone cast of Lawfare colleagues—co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Foreign Policy Editor Dana Stuster, and Senior Editor (aka Legal Correspondent) Roger Parloff—to discuss the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Let’s Sheikh On It.” President Trump completed a surprisingly historic trip to the Persian Gulf last week, which began with the type of fanfare that Trump loves and only Saudi Arabia can provide and ended with the co...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Page Hedley, Senior Advisor at Forecasting Research Institute and co-author of the Not for Private Gain letter urging state attorneys general to stop OpenAI’s planned restructuring, and Gad Weiss, the Wagner Fellow in Law & Business at NYU Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare , to analyze news of OpenAI once again modifying its corporate governa...
May 22, 2025•47 min
Despite the frenzy of U.S.-led diplomacy around reaching a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the front line has been far from quiet. In fact, the war is now deadlier than ever before. To unpack the recent front line developments, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks with Francis Farrell, a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who covers military and security dynamics in Ukraine. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You ...
May 21, 2025•55 min
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has made a lot of headlines recently in the United States for his partnership with the Trump administration. Bukele has helped enable President Trump’s scheme to remove supposed Venezuelan gang members from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act, housing these detainees in the notorious CECOT prison. In court, the Justice Department has claimed it has no ability to request that Bukele return these detainees to the United States, even after Bukele posed for phot...
May 20, 2025•51 min
In a live conversation on May 16, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss legal challenges against President Trump’s executive actions, including the Friday hearing in the Abrego Garcia litigation, the Supreme Court’s ruling in an Alien Enemies Act case, oral arguments at the Supreme Court over President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, and so much mo...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 33 min
From September 26, 2023: On August 21, the Human Rights Watch released a report detailing systematic abuses of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Researchers interviewed dozens of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers and found that Saudi border guards had used explosive weapons on them and shot migrants at close range. Lawfare ’s Associate Editor of Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Joey Shea, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division ...
May 18, 2025•28 min
From January 4, 2022: Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensure that police investigations aren't compromised and state and local officials are getting candid adv...
May 17, 2025•39 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Contributing Editor Joel Braunold, the Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace , for the latest in their series of podcast conversations delving into the latest developments relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related regional issues. This time, they discussed the state of the Gaza conflict, what Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East says about his relation...
May 16, 2025•1 hr 10 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett, Tyler McBrien, and Daniel Byman to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Borderline Behavior.” A major flare-up over the disputed region of Kashmir took place this past week, leading to a major exchange of hostilities between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan before they agreed to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire—one that is mostly holding, despite alleged violations on both sides. How durable a resol...
May 15, 2025•1 hr 17 min
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 China might use a blockade, subversion, and nuclear threats to intimidate Taiwan, the United States, and key regional states like Japan. They also dis...
May 15, 2025•36 min
Cullen O’Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law and AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a novel AI governance framework. They dive into a paper he co-authored on the concept of "Law-Following AI" or LFAI. That paper explores a near-term future. Imagine AI systems capa...
May 14, 2025•38 min
Donald Trump was confident he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. It’s now been more than three months since Trump’s reelection, and even a short-term ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia remains elusive. Why did Trump fail? And what can really force Russia to stop the war? To answer these and many other questions, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina spoke with prominent Ukrainian analyst Mykola Bielieskov, who is a Research Fellow at the National Institute ...
May 13, 2025•56 min
In a live conversation on May 9, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff, Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce, and Lawfare contributor Preston Marquis to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the order for the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, litigation over ideological deportations, legal challenge to the funding freeze targeting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 39 min
From February 22, 2024: As a new report on the intimidation of state and local officeholders from the Brennan Center for Justice points out, “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seemed to mark a new peak in extremist intimidation targeting public officials. But it was hardly the only act of political violence to break the period of relative stability that followed the assassinations of the 1960s.” Citing the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, last year’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and...
May 11, 2025•49 min
From August 27, 2019: On August 5, the Indian government announced that it was revoking “special status” for the states of Jammu and Kashmir, enshrined in Article 370 of its constitution. Since then, the government has instituted a lockdown in the Kashmir valley, hundreds of people have been detained, there have been mass protests, and tens of thousands of Indian troops have been deployed to the region. Professor Christine Fair of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program sat down with Be...
May 10, 2025•46 min
Ben Brooks, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and former head of public policy for Stability AI, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a sudden and significant shift toward open-sourcing leading AI models and the ramifications of that pivot for AI governance at home and abroad. Ben and Kevin specifically review OpenAI’s announced plans to release a new open-weights model. Coverage of OpenAI announcement: https://te...
May 09, 2025•45 min
In recent years, political scientists have given a great deal of attention to “democratic backsliding”—the slow erosion of democracy by aspiring authoritarians. The events of the last several months in the United States—with attacks from the Trump administration on the press, higher education, and any center of power outside the White House—make this research all the more relevant. But the question of how leaders chip away at democracy is only part of the picture. There’s also the question of wh...
May 08, 2025•50 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin “The Beard” Wittes and Anastasiia (and Ava) Lapatina to discuss the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “A Waltz on Thin Ice.” Weeks after the SignalGate controversy, Mike Waltz is out as National Security Adviser and set to be nominated as U.N. Ambassador. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is in for a record fourth high-ranking appointment, though rumors are circulating about just how long he may remai...
May 07, 2025•1 hr 7 min
In her recent Lawfare article , Alexis Loeb—a former deputy chief of the Jan. 6 Capitol Siege Section at the U.S. Department of Justice and a current partner at Farella, Braun, and Martel—discussed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s memo dismantling the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. On today’s episode, Loeb joined Lawfare Associate Editor Olivia Manes to talk about the work that the Kleptocracy Team conducted, why it mattered for national security, and whether the Justice Department’s actions...
May 07, 2025•46 min
The TAKE IT DOWN Act is the first major U.S. federal law to squarely target non‑consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and to include a component requiring tech companies to act. Long handled via a patchwork of state laws, it criminalizes NCII at the federal level—both authentic images and AI-generated digital forgeries—and requires that platforms remove reported NCII within 48 hours of notification by a victim or victim's representative. TAKE IT DOWN passed with wide bipartisan support—unanimously ...
May 06, 2025•48 min
