From December 7, 2020: Jack Goldsmith spoke with Adam Cox and Christina Rodríguez, the authors of " The President and Immigration Law ," a new book about the historical rise and operation of a president-dominated immigration system. They discussed the various ways that Congress has delegated extraordinary power over immigration to the president, how what the authors call "de facto delegation" confers massive presidential enforcement discretion that is the basis for programs like the Deferred Act...
Jul 29, 2023•49 min
Joshua Geltzer is the Deputy Homeland Security Advisor at the White House, part of the National Security Council staff. He is the president's point person on the reauthorization battle surrounding Section 702, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section that authorizes broad collection against overseas targets using domestic infrastructure. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about 702, the problems it has had, the reasons the government thinks it needs it still and w...
Jul 28, 2023•44 min
Creators of science fiction movies and television shows often build worlds with at least some attention to governance systems and international (or interplanetary) political interactions. Sometimes, they develop central plot points out of national security matters, even if they play out in entirely different galaxies or dimensions. So it's not surprising that political scientist and author Stephen Dyson has spent years looking closely at how the genre influences--and, in turn, is influenced by--...
Jul 27, 2023•1 hr 38 min
Last month, Brazil’s highest electoral court found that former President Jair Bolsonaro had abused his political power in the 2022 elections because of his conduct in a meeting with foreign ambassadors in Brasília in July 2022. For this violation of the country’s election laws, the electoral court banned Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030. Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer, Professor of Constitutional Law at the Federal University of Minas...
Jul 27, 2023•56 min
The first phase of Israel's judicial overhaul is now law. Huge numbers of people are in the streets, reservists are resigning, the stock market is tanking, and Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes assembled an all-star panel to talk about it. Natan Sachs is the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy and a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Amichai Cohen teaches international law and national security law at the Ono Academic College in Israel. And ...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Former President Trump is facing criminal charges in Florida and New York, and indictments are reportedly likely in Fulton County, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Two of these are in federal court; two of them are in state courts. Some have facts in common; some are seemingly unrelated. Trump is also involved in multiple civil litigations. And it looks like at least parts of these proceedings will be happening all at once. How does that work? Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with B...
Jul 25, 2023•56 min
On July 12, the Justice Department appealed the sentences of seven Oath Keepers convicted for Jan. 6-related crimes. Five have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, and two others were convicted of conspiring to obstruct Congress. Lawfare Intern Gia Kokotakis sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, a former lawyer and expert on the Jan. 6 Oath Keepers prosecutions who directly observed the proceedings. They discussed who the defendants are, how their sentences were calculated, and t...
Jul 24, 2023•39 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott got together to NOT talk about that ONE big story that's not quite ripe yet. (You know the one. It involves sandwiches.) But they did chat through some of the week's other big national security news, including: “Against the Grain.” Russia backed out of the Turkey-facilitated Black Sea Grain Initiative this past week, which had allowed much needed Ukrainian grain to arrive in markets, largely in the developing world. Now not only is that av...
Jul 23, 2023•1 hr 6 min
From November 18, 2020: In the waning days of his administration, the president has attempted to install a political loyalist as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, a position that is traditionally a merits position, not a political position. He has also issued an executive order that gives the executive branch greater control over the civil service, making it easier to hire and fire people in agencies. It all raises the question: Is Donald Trump attempting to create the very deep s...
Jul 22, 2023•50 min
On June 16, the U.S. State Department discovered unauthorized access to its Exchange Online email services and reported it to Microsoft. Almost a month later, on July 11, Microsoft disclosed the attack, and attributed it to a China-based threat actor, which they call Storm-0558. The intrusion granted the hackers access to email accounts at the Commerce and State Departments, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, among other targets. Although no classified information was compromised, the c...
Jul 21, 2023•49 min
Gaming might seem far removed from national security, but Volko Ruhnke's experience proves otherwise. During his career as an intelligence analyst and manager, he designed and published many commercially successful historical board games that, in turn, informed his work. Additionally, he applied his skills in gaming to training intelligence officers. David Priess hosted Volko for a deep dive about board games that included discussion of various game types, the value of in-person vs. virtual gami...
Jul 20, 2023•1 hr 29 min
Last month, the majority staff of the Senate Rules and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report entitled “Planned in Plain Sight: A Review of the Intelligence Failures in Advance of January 6th, 2021,” which explores one of the biggest remaining questions about that day: Why didn’t the government see this coming? Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor of Lawfare , sat down with Quinta Jurecic, Senior Editor of Lawfare and Fellow at Brookings, and Ryan Reilly, Justic...
Jul 20, 2023•45 min
It was a big day in the legal travails of Donald Trump. We awoke this morning to news from the former president himself that he had received another target letter from special counsel Jack Smith, this time from the Jan. 6 grand jury. An indictment seems to be imminent. Incoming Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower spent the day in federal court in Fort Pierce, where Judge Aileen Cannon was hearing the first major status conference of the Mar-a-Lago case. And just as Anna was coming out of court, the ...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min
It was a busy weekend in the waters off of Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainians hit—for the second time—the Kerch Bridge, which connects the Russian mainland with occupied Crimea. The Russians, meanwhile, announced that they are not renewing the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the complex agreement by which Ukraine has managed to export grain through the port of Odessa. What do we know about what happened on the Kerch Bridge? How big a deal is it? Is it connected to the Russian withdrawal from the gra...
Jul 18, 2023•41 min
The only thing more impressive than the performance of generative AI systems like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion is the sheer volume of training data that went into these systems. GPT was reportedly trained on, essentially, the entire Internet, while Stable Diffusion and other image-generation models rely on hundred of millions if not billions of existing pieces of artwork. Of course, much of this content is copyrighted, and the authors and artists whose work is being used to train these models and,...
Jul 17, 2023•36 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Ravi Agrawal, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, to talk through the week’s big natsec news, including: “Pledge Week.” In a sign of strength, NATO held its annual summit in the capital of Vilnius this week, just kilometers from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. But those hoping to join the club have gotten mixed receptions, with NATO members securing a clear path for Sweden to join the alliance without presenting a clear way forward for e...
Jul 16, 2023•1 hr 13 min
From December 8, 2020: On Monday, Lawfare released the first paper in its "The Digital Social Contract" paper series. For each paper, Alan Rozenshtein will be doing a podcast interview with the author, and the first guest is law professor Kyle Langvardt of the University of Nebraska College of Law. His paper, "Platform Speech Governance and the First Amendment: A User-Centered Approach," examines how the First Amendment should and should not apply to the content moderation decisions of major int...
Jul 15, 2023•47 min
The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, just wrapped up, and the big news is that Sweden is in, and Ukraine is not. Eric Adamson of the Atlantic Council and the Swedish Defense Association is a Swedish defense policy analyst who observed the NATO summit. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the two big things that happened: the Swedish resolution of the dispute with Turkey that impeded Swedish NATO accession until now, and the frustrating failure of NATO to set a path for ...
Jul 14, 2023•37 min
Kori Schake is the Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has also worked in policy positions at the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House, taught at West Point, and more recently, served on the commission tasked with renaming military bases named for confederate figures. She sat down with Lawfare's editor in chief Ben Wittes, to talk about her unusually diverse career in national security, her work at AEI in a period when principl...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Earlier this year, Donald J. Trump became the first former president to be criminally indicted. A few months later, he became the first former president to be indicted a second time, this time in federal court. And it’s not clear that he is done, as Trump and his close associates remain at the center of at least two and possibly more ongoing criminal investigations that have not yet resulted in charges. Nor are Trump’s legal troubles limited to the criminal side of the ledger, as he and the Trum...
Jul 13, 2023•53 min
On July 4, a federal judge in Louisiana issued one of the most dramatic First Amendment rulings in recent memory. The case involves a variety of individuals, organizations, and conservative state governments who accuse the Biden administration of unconstitutional "jawboning”—that is, informally pressuring social media companies to censor speech, especially about controversial topics like COVID vaccines and election integrity. Describing the allegations as the "most massive attack against free sp...
Jul 12, 2023•58 min
What are the latest trends in the ransomware-as-a-service ecosystem? Since at least May 27, the CL0P ransomware gang has been exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability to exfiltrate data from financial services organizations, energy corporations, government agencies, and even universities. The group appears to be changing tactics—while it was previously known for its use of the “double extortion” tactic of stealing and encrypting victim data, it seems to now be relying mostly on data exfiltr...
Jul 11, 2023•54 min
Eric Goldstein is the Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, having served previously as Global Head of Cybersecurity Policy Strategy and Regulation at Goldman Sachs, where he led development of the firm's cybersecurity risk management program, and in cybersecurity positions in DHS, as well as practicing cybersecurity law in the private sector. David Kris, Lawfare Contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the Natio...
Jul 10, 2023•45 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott sat down to talk over the week's post-Independence Day national security news, including: “Oy Revolt.” Israel launched a major military operation aimed at uprooting terrorist bases in the refugee camp outside the city of Jenin in the West Bank this week. But as is so often the case, the operation not only proved deadly for Palestinian civilians but has become a point of controversy in the international community. What does this operation s...
Jul 09, 2023•1 hr 13 min
From January 17, 2015: This week, Ben and Matt Waxman sat down with Daniel Reisner , former head of the International Law Branch of the Israeli Defense Forces and current partner with Herzog, Fox and Neeman. Reisner has also served as a senior member of Israel’s peace delegations over the years, participating in negotiation sessions and summits including those at Camp David. He continues to advise senior members of the Israeli government on a variety of issues relating to international law and o...
Jul 08, 2023•1 hr 14 min
“But what about Hillary Clinton's emails,” a thousand voices have shouted since the Trump Mar-a-Lago indictment came down. It's not just politicians; it's commentators in serious magazines who seem to think that Trump's conduct is no different from that of the former secretary of state. Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff writing in Lawfare on June 26 found 703 different ways in which Trump's Mar-a-Lago conduct bears no resemblance to Clinton’s emails, and he joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benja...
Jul 07, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Political scientist Ethan Scheiner appeared on Chatter in early 2022, right before the Olympics in Beijing, to talk about the fascinating intersection of politics, security, and Olympic events. This week, he returns to talk about the compelling connections between hockey and international relations--with a special focus on Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the Cold War. His new book, Freedom To Win , uses the stories of a range of larger-than-life characters across several decades to desc...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 28 min
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is one of the most important national security offices that you have probably never heard of. Responsible for reviewing foreign investment in the United States for possible national security threats, its jurisdiction and scope of work has expanded dramatically in recent years—and may be on the verge of expanding once again, as the Biden administration considers installing similar measures for outbound U.S. investment. To discuss...
Jul 06, 2023•48 min
In April, former Vice President Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury under subpoena as part of the special counsel’s investigation into January 6. The testimony came after the district court rejected Pence’s challenge to the validity of the subpoena under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. And now, months later, Chief Judge James Boasberg has unsealed his ruling on the matter , along with other documents related to Pence’s challenge. When news of the subpoena first brok...
Jul 05, 2023•46 min
From June 11, 2019: More than two years after the 2016 presidential election, new information continues to seep into the public about the extent of Russia's sweeping and systematic efforts to interfere in the U.S. democratic process. With the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, last week, Stanford's Cyber Policy Center published a report on securing American elections, including recommendations on how the U.S. can protect elections and election infrastructure from foreign actors. On Monda...
Jul 04, 2023•47 min
