A large dam on the Dnipro River has been destroyed, causing massive flooding and a dangerous environmental catastrophe in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainians are blaming the Russians; the Russians are blaming the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that the CIA was actually tipped off about the coming destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines last year—and that it was tipped off that a Ukrainian military team was planning to do it. The blockbuster story is the latest bit of evide...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 8 min
On January 1, 2023, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as president of Brazil. A week later, insurrectionists in Brazil stormed government buildings, including the president’s palace, the Supreme Federal Court, and the National Congress building to violently disrupt the democratic transition of power and challenge the results of the election. Lula, however, remained undeterred and forged ahead. It’s been roughly 150 days since those events, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down ...
Jun 07, 2023•42 min
On May 31, CNN reported that federal prosecutors investigating the unlawful removal of classified documents from the White House to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence have obtained an audio recording in which the former president acknowledges that he knowingly kept a classified Department of Defense document that contained details about a potential attack on Iran. According to CNN, the tape indicates that Trump “understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House.” Trump’s ...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min
It's been about six months since the Attorney General issued new guidelines on compulsory process to members of the press in criminal and national security investigations, and two officials of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press—Bruce Brown and Gabe Rottman—wrote a detailed analysis of the document in two parts for Lawfare . Rottman joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to go through the document carefully: the long history that led to it, the shifting policies that have go...
Jun 05, 2023•40 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by their Brookings and Lawfare colleague Molly Reynolds to talk all things Congress in the week’s national security news, including: Shattering the Must-Pass Ceiling.” Earlier this week, President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced a deal on raising the debt ceiling, and thereby avoiding a potential financial catastrophe. The question now is whether they can sell it to enough members of Congress, where right-wing members of McCarthy’s ca...
Jun 04, 2023•1 hr 17 min
From October 1, 2016: At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Rosa Brooks joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about her new book, “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.” The book covers an extraordinary range of territory, from Brooks' personal experiences working as a civilian advisor at the Pentagon, to the history of the laws of war, to an analysis of the U.S. military's expanded role in a world in which the lines between war and peace are increasingly u...
Jun 03, 2023•53 min
It is often said that “Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.” Such distortions of history can lead to trouble, as the world witnessed last year when Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to “denazify” the neighboring country—one with a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. As Megan Buskey writes in her new memoir, “ Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return ”: “How could a country know itself unless it knew all the things it ha...
Jun 02, 2023•35 min
Alicia Wanless is one of the pioneers of the idea of information ecology, the notion that we should think about information and disinformation as part of a complex ecosystem, the management of which she analogizes to environmental policy. Wanless has been complaining for several years that the war on “disinformation” skates over important question: What are the collateral effects of anti-disinformation policies? How do interventions against information pollution operate in the real world? In her...
Jun 01, 2023•55 min
The war in Ukraine is approaching a pivotal moment. Russia remains in control of the hotly contested city of Bakhmut. But the ruthlessly effective mercenary forces of the Wagner Group—the same group whose leader, Yevgeny Prighozin, has openly bickered with the regular Russian military and reportedly offered to trade Russian troop positions to Ukrainian intelligence—are withdrawing. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, are preparing for a reported counteroffensive, even as unclaimed attacks are taking pl...
Jun 01, 2023•52 min
On Sunday, May 28, Turkey held a bitterly contested run-off election, with incumbent presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan winning reelection against opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Soli Özel, Senior Lecturer at Kadir Has University in Istanbul and a columnist at Habertürk daily newspaper, to discuss what was at stake in this election and the future of Turkey as Erdoğan’s next five-year term marks his 25th year in higher office. ...
May 31, 2023•47 min
Tim Mak was an NPR reporter in Kyiv since the beginning of the full-scale invasion last year. He recently stepped down and started his own Substack from the Ukrainian capital, called The Counteroffensive , and Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Tim to talk about the publication. What makes a reporter leave an established news organization like NPR to start a startup in a war zone? What is The Counteroffensive going to cover? How will it be different from other stuff you might ...
May 30, 2023•49 min
From January 20, 2018: This week on the Lawfare Podcast , the Guardian's Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker joined special guest host Alina Polyakova to discuss his new book " The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past ." They discussed Putin's use of Russian history as political strategy, the pulse of Russian politics as its elections approach in March, the changing landscape of Russia's lesser-known cities since the 1990s, and much more. Support this show http://supporter....
May 29, 2023•45 min
From the birth of the republic, American presidents have communicated with the public in one form or another. The frequency and exact nature of such efforts have varied quite a bit over time due to variables ranging from the extent of partisanship in the media to each commander in chief's personal preference to travel technology. Political scientist Anne Pluta has explored this history deeply, including extensive analysis of contemporary newspaper accounts back to the late 18th century. And her ...
May 28, 2023•1 hr 11 min
From April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she focused on climate policy. She and Benjamin Wittes sat ...
May 27, 2023•45 min
Thursday was sentencing day for some senior Oath Keepers, and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff spent the day in court listening to and watching the sentencing of Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs, two Oath Keepers chieftains who were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. They got a lot of time: Rhodes got 18 years; Meggs got 12. They also got a terrorism enhancement. It was a bad day if you're an Oath Keeper and a really bad day if you're a Proud...
May 26, 2023•41 min
At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a bomb built by Timothy McVeigh exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people died and hundreds more were injured in what remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Jeffrey Toobin has a new book about the bombing and trial called, “ Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism .” Toobin joined Jack Goldsmith to discuss the new and revealing information h...
May 25, 2023•58 min
The Supreme Court last week issued the biggest opinion in the history of the internet—except that it didn’t. Rather, it issued an opinion in a case involving the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), finding there was no cause of action and thus dismissed for further consideration the biggest case in the history of the internet. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Alan Rozenshtein, and Quint...
May 24, 2023•43 min
Hacking and cybersecurity are evergreen issues, in the news and on Lawfare . Scott Shapiro, the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, has a new book on how and why hacking works and what to do about it, called “ Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks .” Scott joined Jack Goldsmith to talk about how his pre-law-professor obsession with computers combined with his recent work in international la...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 1 min
In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson came out in opposition to a compromise that would have resulted in Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty and thereby put the nail in the coffin of an international agreement that he had spent months negotiating and would have secured U.S. participation in one of his greatest legacies, the League of Nations. Wilson's self-defeating decision shocked many who had been involved in the treaty negotiation, including a young diplomat and journalist name...
May 22, 2023•51 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan and Scott were joined by co-host emeritus (and Washington Post star reporter) Shane Harris to talk over the week's news! Including: “Flight of the Valkyries.” Recently leaked U.S. intelligence reports allege that Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prighozin—who has privately and publicly feuded with the Russian military leadership in recent weeks and even threatened to pull his mercenary troops from the conflict—has been in contact with Ukrainian intelligence and o...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 6 min
From September 9, 2020: It was a big week for manipulated video and audio content. In just 36 hours, senior republicans or people associated with the Trump campaign tweeted, posted or shared manipulated audio or video on social media three times, prompting backlash from media and tech companies. Last week, Lawfare 's managing editor, Quinta Jurecic, and associate editor, Jacob Schulz, wrote a piece analyzing these incidents . To talk through issues of deep fakes and cheap fakes, Benjamin Wittes ...
May 20, 2023•45 min
Over the past two weeks, the Department of Justice has issued two press releases announcing disruption efforts it has taken against malicious cyber actors. One operation involved the disruption of Russia’s so-called Snake Malware Network, and the other involved the indictment of a Russian national for ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. To talk about these disruption efforts, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Alex Iftimie, Partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, an...
May 19, 2023•42 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. It involved 14 theater stage lights that Wittes and other activists used to project images of the Ukrainian flag onto embassy walls. Since then, Wittes’s special military operations have garnered increased attention and become more complex—technically and diplomatically. In his conversation with Kathe...
May 18, 2023•1 hr 20 min
Think about the world. You might be picturing a globe in a classroom, with its patchwork of multi-colored nations. Or perhaps you have an image of a 2-D map in your head, the famous Mercator projection, a static jigsaw puzzle of borders and countries. From elementary school classrooms to the Olympic stage, the globe and the map tell a story of how the world works, one in which state sovereignty reigns supreme, from the Treaty of Westphalia until now. But what if that’s only part of the story? As...
May 18, 2023•57 min
The House’s select committee on Jan. 6 may have wound down its work at the end of December 2022, but questions about why law enforcement, including the U.S. Capitol Police, were unprepared for the possibility of an insurrection remain. A new report from the Project on Government Oversight sheds some light on the role that dysfunction in the department’s intelligence division played in leaving the force ill-equipped for what happened on that day. Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Sen...
May 17, 2023•51 min
In recent years, the Supreme Court's non-merits “shadow docket” has become a topic of contestation and controversy, especially the Court's emergency orders rulings on issues ranging from immigration to abortion to Covid-19 restrictions. To discuss these issues, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Stephen Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law, who is the author of a new book entitled, “ The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Ruli...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 8 min
Though the threat of climate change has come sharply into focus in recent decades, humans have long endeavored to shape and reshape the natural world, carving it up and making sense of it through technological innovations. In just one example, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore’s total land area by 25 percent. The Changi airport sits on land that was once ocean. As Surabhi Ranganathan discusses in her recent article, “ The Law of the Sea ” for The Dial, this poses a unique challeng...
May 15, 2023•50 min
Olivia Nuzzi gets Washington in a way many journalists don’t. As the Washington correspondent for New York magazine, she has written perceptive, piercing, and enduring portraits of Donald Trump and the bizarre characters in his orbit. Now she’s turning her reporter’s eye to history, hosting a companion podcast to HBO's “White House Plumbers,” a five-part series that imagines the Watergate scandal through the lives of two notorious Nixon operatives, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Olivia came...
May 14, 2023•1 hr 6 min
From May 7, 2021: Over its first 100 days in office, the Biden administration has faced a difficult set of policy challenges at America's southern border, ranging from new waves of individuals driven to try to cross the border by the effects of the global pandemic, to the often difficult legacy left by some of his predecessor's draconian immigration policies. As a candidate, Biden channeled Democrats' outrage with former President Trump's actions on immigration and pledged to reverse them. But n...
May 13, 2023•53 min
Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work. That’s the short description, but the paper is really about so much more—about how the work of content moderation actually takes place, how contemporary analyses of the harms of social media fail to address the history of how platforms addressed Is...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min
