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: http...
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 ...
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
In a live conversation on May 2, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, the decision by a judge that the Alien Enemies Act invocation did not meet the invasion requirement in the law, litigation sur...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 37 min
From July 27, 2020: Anne Applebaum is a columnist, writer, historian and most recently, the author of " Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lore of Authoritarianism ," a book that explores why authoritarian ideologies are on the ascendance in countries as diverse as Poland, Hungary, Spain, the United States and Great Britain. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Anne about the themes of the book: Why are all of these authoritarian ideologies on the rise now? What is the role of social media in their rise...
May 04, 2025•39 min
From January 16, 2024: Over the last two months, Houthi militants have waged more than 27 attacks against merchant shipping and U.S. and partner forces in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, purportedly in response to the war in Gaza. These attacks have significantly disrupted global shipping and surged the Middle East into an even more precarious security situation. Following a large-scale Houthi attack on U.S. and British ships, the U.S. and U.K. on Jan. 11 launched ov...
May 03, 2025•50 min
As the Trump administration seeks to escalate its immigration crackdown, the government has turned to a concerning source of information for data on immigrants: the Social Security Administration. Reports indicate that Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and the Department of Homeland Security successfully pushed Social Security officials to provide access to what’s commonly known as the “Death Master File,” allowing the government to mark living immigrants as dead in the Social Secur...
May 02, 2025•52 min
For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Tanvi Madan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, to discuss the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir. Madan explains how the crisis has evolved, the escalation options available to India, and the limited influence of the United States, China, and other powers to contain the crisis. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can...
May 01, 2025•34 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds and James Pearce to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Rounding the ‘Feels Like It’s Been a Century’ Mark.” As President Trump comes to the end of his second first 100 days in office, he and his supporters are laying claim to FDR’s mantle as the president to accomplish the most in such a short period of time. But how much success has Trump really had in enacting his broader policy agenda? How should...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Andrew Bakaj, Chief Legal Counsel at Whistleblower Aid, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare , to discuss a declaration by a National Labor Relations Board employee Daniel Berulis that DOGE facilitated the exfiltration of potentially sensitive information to external sources. The two also analyze the merits of whistleblower protections more generally. Read more about the declaration here: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355...
Apr 30, 2025•34 min
In today’s episode, Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor at Lawfare , sits down with Matt Lawrence, Associate Professor of Law at Emory; Eloise Pasachoff, Professor of Law at Georgetown; and Zach Price, Professor of Law at UC Law San Francisco to discuss a new paper on “ Appropriations Presidentialism ,” or how the executive branch attempts to control the process of allocating federal funds at the expense of Congress. They cover the history of the Congress, the president,...
Apr 29, 2025•48 min
In a live conversation on April 25, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, 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 arrest of a Wisconsin state judge by the Department of Homeland Security, the Alien Enemy Act remova...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 34 min
From April 11, 2022: The period after Watergate and President Nixon's resignation saw an unprecedented barrage of congressional efforts at reforming the executive branch. The period after Donald Trump's departure from office has seen no comparable spree of legislative action—at least not yet. In a recent Lawfare article, Quinta Jurecic and Andrew Kent explored the disparity and the reasons for it, and they analyzed whether any of the legislative reforms that have been so far proposed...
Apr 27, 2025•48 min
From September 16, 2020: What is the proper relationship between the CIA director and the president? How should directors handle arguably illegal orders? How important is the director's role as the nation's honest broker of information during times of crisis? To get at these questions, David Priess sat down with Chris Whipple, a documentary filmmaker, journalist and the author of two books about the people around the president. " The Gatekeepers ," based upon his documentary of the same name, ex...
Apr 26, 2025•52 min
