From February 16, 2021: The Biden administration has promised significant changes to the U.S. relationship with Iran that could have a marked impact on the Middle East. What is the likelihood that this new administration will be successful? And how will other regional developments—from the Abraham Accords between Israel and a few Arab states, to the healing of the rift within the Gulf Cooperation Council, to the ongoing morass in Syria—affect the dynamics here? To address these questions, David ...
Sep 16, 2023•55 min
The question of whether the Fulton County trial of Donald Trump and his co-defendants will be removed to federal court is now before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and it's on its way to the Supreme Court. Judge Steve Jones of the District Court in the Northern District of Georgia denied Mark Meadows’ motion for removal. He has now also denied an emergency stay of that ruling, and so the question goes to the appeals court in the federal system, even as the underlying criminal case percol...
Sep 15, 2023•55 min
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 18 min
It’s been another brutal summer with seemingly constant natural disasters precipitated by climate change. The United States and other countries have rightfully begun thinking of climate change as a security issue. But extreme weather is not the only challenge we must contend with. There’s also the problem of climate change’s victims, many of whom are forced to leave their homes. Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Erin Sikorsky, Director of the Center for Climate & Security...
Sep 14, 2023•36 min
On August 30, soldiers and high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Gabon seized control of government buildings and communication channels in the capital city of Libreville, detaining Gabon’s President Ali Bongo in his residence and declaring an end to the Bongo family’s 56-year rule. It was a coup—one of nine in the last three years in West and Central Africa, including in Niger just one month prior. Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Naunihal Singh, author of the book “ Seiz...
Sep 13, 2023•44 min
The United States, the European Union, and China are involved in intense conflicts to control the digital economy, both within their borders and globally. Anu Bradford, the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, provides a framework for understanding and assessing these conflicts in her new book, entitled “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology.” Jack Goldsmith spoke to Bradford about why the EU rights-driven model is in ascendan...
Sep 12, 2023•56 min
How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem. A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with access to data provided by Facebook’s parent company Meta. The 2020 Facebook & Instagram Research Electio...
Sep 11, 2023•45 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott celebrated the second anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 by bringing back everyone's favorite game show edition: the Hot Take Takedown! But this year, instead of being contestants, they sat in judgment on the following hot takes from their Lawfare colleagues: Molly Reynolds, on whether there will be a government shutdown this month; Tyler McBrien, on what should happen with overseas U.S. troop deployments; and Benjamin Wittes, on who wil...
Sep 10, 2023•54 min
It's another episode of our weekly live stream series, “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” which takes place on YouTube each week on Thursday afternoons at 4 p.m. ET. This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, to talk about the latest events in Proud Boys sentencing and in Georgia. They talked about the hefty sentences that Enrique Tarrio and other Proud Boys received this week in federal district court...
Sep 09, 2023•1 hr 24 min
From January 19, 2021: In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol, some have called for the invocation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 disqualifies anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection against United States from public office. In particular, critics of President Trump have seized on this as a potential way of preventing him from running in 2024. Alan Rozenshtein spoke about Section 3 with professors Daniel Hemel of the University of Chicago Law School and...
Sep 09, 2023•47 min
Liberalism today is under attack, as it often has been. Samuel Moyn, the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, believes that liberalism's failures, and a path to its better future, can be discerned through a study of how liberal intellectuals reacted to the rise of fascism and Nazism during the World War II period, and especially to Soviet communism during the Cold War. Jack Goldsmith sat down to talk to Moyn about his new book on the topic, “Liberalism Against Itself:...
Sep 08, 2023•1 hr 2 min
When he was 18 years old, Ted Hall, then a Harvard undergraduate, was recruited to join the Manhattan Project, becoming the youngest physicist on the U.S. team racing to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis. When it became clear that Germany would lose the war, Hall feared that the Americans might maintain a monopoly over nuclear weapons, an imbalance he thought could lead to global tyranny. So he decided to share secret designs with the Soviet Union, which was then an ally of the United States...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 12 min
On July 26, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a final rule with new compliance and disclosure obligations surrounding material cybersecurity incidents. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Kate Hanniford, partner at Alston & Bird, to talk about the requirements and challenges this new rule presents. They talked about some of the problems and concerns that caused the SEC to engage in a rule-making process, when an incident rises to the level of a material cybersecur...
Sep 07, 2023•38 min
As the 2024 presidential election inches closer, legal scholars are hotly debating whether former President Trump’s actions in relation to Jan. 6 might have disqualified him (and many others) from public office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. But far less attention has been given to how precisely this disqualification should be implemented so as to bring the ultimate issue to the Supreme Court for decision—preferably before the 2024 election is under way. To discuss these issues, Lawfare ...
Sep 06, 2023•58 min
There is no more consequential technological development in recent years than widely accessible artificial intelligence. And there are few more consequential contemporary figures in the artificial intelligence field than Mustafa Suleyman, who is the co-founder of DeepMind Technologies, an early leading artificial intelligence firm later bought by Google, and more recently, co-founder of Inflection AI, a firm devoted to personalizing artificial intelligence. Jack Goldsmith sat down with Suleyman ...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min
From February 12, 2021: Lost in the shuffle of an impeachment trial here in the United States was big news from Canada last week. Canada’s Minister of Public Safety added the Proud Boys to Canada’s terror entity list. The listing might be in Canada, but the group had a role in the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. The listing has all sorts of interesting legal and national security implications, so Jacob Schulz talked it through with two Canadian national security experts. Jessica Davis is...
Sep 04, 2023•46 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott reunited to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Pack Your Knives and Go Home.” Vladimir Putin’s top chef has been eliminated. Wagner mercenary chief and Kremlin caterer Yevgeny Prighozin was killed in a plane crash this past week alongside a number of associates, in what the government has conceded might have been a deliberate act. If this was Putin’s revenge, what led him to take this step now? And what will it mean for his Wagner m...
Sep 03, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Today we’re bringing you a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast : another episode of our series, Trump Trials and Tribulations, recorded live on YouTube before an audience of Lawfare Material Supporters. On Thursday, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Lawfare Legal Fellows Saraphin Dhanani and Anna Bower to get an update on everything that's been going on in the Mar-a-Lago case, in the Georgia Fulton County case, and in the Jan. 6 cas...
Sep 02, 2023•1 hr 3 min
From September 3, 2016: Michel Paradis, a senior attorney in the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel and counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, came on the podcast to talk about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals' recent ruling in the Al-Nashiri case. So did Bob Loeb, a partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe and the former Acting Deputy Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. Along with Benjamin Wittes, Michel and Bob discuss the ins...
Sep 02, 2023•53 min
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 meaning of the word intelligence itself. They also cover Mike's long and illustrious career inside the U.S. intelligence com...
Sep 01, 2023•49 min
The English language has recently developed a historically unique dominance in the global marketplace--a situation that brings plenty of benefits and just as many downsides. Rosemary Salomone, Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John's University, has researched and analyzed various perspectives on English's supremacy in her recent book The Rise of English, which has a paperback version with a new preface coming early in 2024. David Priess spoke with Rosemary about her background in linguistics...
Aug 31, 2023•1 hr 20 min
Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Around 80,000 Afghans were relocated during the withdrawal, and many do not have a pathway to permanent citizenship here in the United States. To get a sense of those immigration challenges and the potential for congressional action on those issues, Bryce Klehm sat down with Shala Gafary, the Managing Attorney of Project: Afghan Legal Assistance at Human Rights First, and Jennifer Quigley, the Senior Director of G...
Aug 31, 2023•42 min
What do we mean when we talk about "cybersecurity"? There's clearly a technical component: can someone prevent, through clever hardware and software, someone else from accessing some device or data? But that just raises the question of who should have access. And that's not a technical question. It's a legal, social, and moral one. This, at least, is the argument made by Josh Goldfoot, Principal Deputy Chief at the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the ner...
Aug 30, 2023•44 min
Yesterday, August 28, was a busy day in court. In federal court in Atlanta, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows made the argument for why the charges against him in Fulton County should instead be tried before a federal judge. And in Washington, D.C., Trump’s attorneys tangled with the special counsel’s office in a hearing in the Jan. 6 case, which resulted in Judge Tanya Chutkan scheduling a trial date for March 4, 2024. Lawfare ’s devoted team headed to both courtrooms—so we’re b...
Aug 29, 2023•46 min
On August 20, Guatemalans elected a new president, Bernardo Arévalo. His landslide victory was also a major win for the country’s struggling democracy. An unexpectedly strong candidate who ran on an anti-corruption platform, Arévalo triumphed despite months of dirty tricks by institutional actors seeking to preserve the country’s status quo. To discuss Arévalo’s victory, the wild months that led up to it, and the challenges ahead, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic talked to Manuel Meléndez-Sá...
Aug 28, 2023•59 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to break down the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Home to Roost.” A judge in the military commission trying Abdul Raheem al-Nashiri, a suspect in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, has ruled that his confession is inadmissible on the grounds that it was tainted by his prior torture and interrogation at the hands of U.S. officials, even though the confession itself was extracted...
Aug 27, 2023•1 hr 25 min
Today we’re bringing you a recording of our live virtual event from this past Thursday. It’s part of our series, Trump Trials and Tribulations, where we provide regular updates on what’s going on in the criminal trials of Donald Trump in DC, Florida, and Georgia. Please join us next time by becoming a Material Supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support , or subscribing to our YouTube channel . This week, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta ...
Aug 26, 2023•1 hr 2 min
From May 15, 2017: This afternoon, the Washington Post broke a major story: Donald Trump disclosed highly classified material to the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister in the Oval Office last week, compromising a highly sensitive counterterrorism program run by an allied intelligence service. This evening, we got former DNI General Counsel Robert Litt on the line for a discussion with Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of the latest mess. Litt helped coordinate and manage the intelligence ...
Aug 26, 2023•34 min
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 Caitlin Vogus, Deputy Director of Advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They talked about what motivated the raid,...
Aug 25, 2023•31 min
On April 13, 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes conducted his first “special military operation” at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. Now, Wittes is conducting these protests abroad on what he calls the ERAS (Eradicating Russian Ambassadorial Sleep) Tour. In his conversation with Katherine Pompilio, one of Lawfare’s associate editors and this week’s Chatter guest host, Wittes talks about his most successful special military operatio...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 17 min
