On January 11, 2024, Donald J. Trump arrived in a New York courtroom for closing arguments in the civil fraud case against the former president, his company, and his adult sons. The suit, brought by the state’s attorney general Letitia James, alleges that Trump and his company misled lenders about the former president’s net worth in order to secure better business deals. The case is not Trump’s only legal trouble, but it’s one that could have a consequential impact for his family business and th...
Jan 12, 2024•44 min
Brandon Stoddard was one of the most accomplished executives in broadcast television history. In his career at ABC, he helped bring to the small screen such legendary mini-series as “Roots” and “The Winds of War,” as well as the acclaimed television series “Moonlighting” and “Roseanne.” But arguably his most consequential and controversial decision was to air the made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” which graphically depicted the effects of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Un...
Jan 11, 2024•52 min
The Israeli Supreme Court—in the middle of the war in Gaza—handed down a decision that amounts to a kind of death blow to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's judicial reform project. Before October 7, judicial overhaul was all that anybody was talking about in Israeli politics—you know, a five-part legislative plan to assert parliamentary control over the judiciary and reduce Israel's checks and balances into a more majoritarian system. Only one part of it passed, and the Supreme Court has now struc...
Jan 11, 2024•56 min
Yesterday, a panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in former President Trump's appeal of Judge Chutkan's denial of his claims of presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case. On a livestream yesterday afternoon to talk over what happened in every phase of the oral arguments, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower who was in the room for the arguments, and Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, and Roge...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr
Michael J. Gottlieb is a litigation partner at the Willkie law firm. He is a long-time national security lawyer, served in Barack Obama's White House Counsel's office, and used to be the civilian lead on a task force that built rule of law institutions in Afghanistan. Late last year, he won a $148 million dollar judgment against Rudy Giuliani on behalf of election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the case, how he and the advocac...
Jan 09, 2024•52 min
On Tuesday, Jan. 9, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hear oral argument in United States v. Trump . Trump, indicted in D.C. for alleged crimes related to election interference, is appealing the trial court’s denial of his motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity and constitutional grounds. Ahead of the hearing, we gathered an all-star team to discuss the merits of Trump’s appeal and how the D.C. Circuit might rule. Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower sat d...
Jan 08, 2024•51 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Hamas, No Más.” A senior Hamas official was recently killed in an attack in Beirut, in what many believe was an operation by Israel—a country whose leaders have pledged to target Hamas’s leaders wherever they might be, though it has not formally acknowledged involvement in this particular attack. But pursuing such action across a bord...
Jan 07, 2024•1 hr 7 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 4 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to discuss all of the Section 3 litigation happening across the country from Colorado to Maine. They talked about where the D.C. case stands and whether the Jan. 6 trial will start on March 4. And they took questions from a live audience. This ...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 25 min
From December 11, 2018: Last week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Gregory Johnsen, a former member of the U.N. Security Council Panel of Experts on Yemen and the author of the book "The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia," to do a deep dive on the conflict in Yemen: its origins; its current state; and the role Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States have played and are likely to play moving forward. Joining Ben and Greg was Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Ins...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Last month, at COP28 in Dubai, the Republic of the Marshall Islands unveiled its sweeping national climate adaptation plan, the multi-year product of government officials interviewing thousands of Marshallese residents across the country’s dozens of coral atolls. The plan is ambitious and groundbreaking because it has to be. As John Silk, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, said in September, “We call it our national adaptation plan, but it is really our survival plan.” Lawfare Managing Ed...
Jan 05, 2024•43 min
From the protests in Brazil initially focused on bus fares to the protests in Hong Kong seeking to stop an extradition bill to the protests across the Middle East now collectively referred to as the "Arab Spring," the political and economic mass demonstrations from 2010 to 2020 made it a decade of public protest like no other. Yet the vast majority of these efforts failed to bring about their desired changes--and many of them actually led to the opposite of what they wanted. Vincent Bevins, auth...
Jan 04, 2024•1 hr 13 min
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is provoking heated debates about which side is in the right. Each accuses the other of things like war crimes. Oftentimes, they’re expressing a political or moral judgment—but the fact is, these are also legal terms. So for this discussion, we’re going to step back from the debates and try to take a dispassionate look at the law that applies here—international humanitarian law, or IHL. To do that, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gabor ...
Jan 04, 2024•57 min
In May 2023, Montana passed a new law that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more limited ban against the use of TikTok on state-owned devices. What should we make of these rulings, and how should ...
Jan 03, 2024•49 min
Welcome to our annual “Ask Us Anything” episode, a hallowed Lawfare tradition. Every news alert in 2023 seemed to bring new questions. But fear not, because Lawfare has answers. Lawfare senior editors answered listener-submitted questions on the Israel-Gaza War, military aid to Ukraine, the Trump trials, gag orders against the former president, the presidential pardon ability, violence against elected officials, efforts to combat corruption, and more. What a year! Support this show http://suppor...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 24 min
From September 27, 2014: A few weeks ago, Benjamin Wittes began listening to a podcast called Hardcore History , which is the brainchild of a fellow named Dan Carlin. Carlin was doing a series of episodes on World War I, and Hardcore History is—let's just say—a different sort of podcast. The episodes are very long, very involved, and to Ben at least, completely riveting. Ben can't recommend it highly enough. Carlin, a former radio talk show host, also runs a podcast called Common Sense , which f...
Jan 01, 2024•45 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott rang in the New Year with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes by discussing some listener-submitted topics, including: What does the AUKUS deal mean for the Five Eyes intelligence relationship? How can courts enforce a gag order against former President Trump? What would a President Nikki Haley mean for the Republican Party’s foreign policy? Which is better, wizards or fighters? Could anything stop former President Trump from appointing a cabinet of...
Dec 31, 2023•1 hr 35 min
From February 9, 2019: From the increasing development of autonomous weapons systems to the expansion of the traditional battlefield to cyber and outer space, the evolution of warfare invites ethical and legal questions about what the future holds. In November 2018, Arnold & Porter's Veterans and Affiliates Leadership Organization hosted a panel discussion to explain what warfare will be like for the military veterans of the future. Former Air Force and Army general counsel and current Arnol...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 23 min
Former President Trump’s prosecution for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate has brought an old law back to the front pages—the Espionage Act. Enacted more than a century ago, parts of that law allowing for the prosecution of those who mishandle or unduly disclose sensitive national security information, have helped provide the legal infrastructure for the modern classification system used to protect our country's most important secrets. And by some accounts, to limit debat...
Dec 29, 2023•55 min
This week, we're taking time off for the holidays, so we reached into the Chatter archives for one of our favorites. In this episode from January 13, 2022, Shane Harris and David Priess teamed up to talk with John Sipher, a former senior intelligence officer who has gone Hollywood. With his partners at Spycraft Entertainment, John is bringing compelling and, yes, accurate stories about espionage to the screen. Before working in the entertainment industry, he spent 28 years in the CIA, where he s...
Dec 28, 2023•1 hr 43 min
Between 1865 and 1872, the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror across the former Confederate States, harassing, intimidating, and murdering freedpeople and their white allies. As violence spread with impunity across the South, Congress, at President Ulysses S. Grant’s urging, passed three Enforcement Acts, which radically expanded the federal government's ability to protect individuals from violence when their state governments could or would not. Lawfare Associate Ed...
Dec 28, 2023•41 min
The Supreme Court last month heard oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi , in which the Court will decide the constitutionality of a federal law that criminalizes the possession of firearms by individuals on whom state courts have imposed domestic violence protective orders. This case came to the Court following its June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen . In that case, the Court determined that whether a law violates the Second Amendment depends on whethe...
Dec 27, 2023•40 min
The Supreme Court during World War II issued some of the most notorious opinions in its history, including the Japanese exclusion case, Korematsu v. United States , and the Nazi saboteur military commission case, Ex parte Quirin . For a fresh take on these and related cases and a broader perspective on the Supreme Court during World War II, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Cliff Sloan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center and a former Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, to discuss his new book , w...
Dec 26, 2023•1 hr 3 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Cyber Fellow Eugenia Lostri to talk through the big national security news waking us up from our long winter’s nap this week, including: “Rocky Mountain, Bye.” Colorado’s Supreme Court has bid goodbye to former President Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy (for now, at least), holding in a 4-3 ruling that he is disqualified as a candidate by virtue of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Will this ...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 13 min
It's part two of our Lawfare year-end event. Yesterday, we brought you the headliner conversation with Adam Kinzinger. Today, it's three panels of Lawfare insiders talking about the year to come and the year that's passed. We did a panel on democracy, the Trump trials, and related matters. We did a panel on cybersecurity, cyber defense, and AI. And of course, we did a panel on foreign policy and the various crises that are overtaking American foreign policy. You can watch a video version of thei...
Dec 24, 2023•1 hr 30 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” this one recorded on December 21 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and special guest Anthony Michael Kreis from the Georgia State University College of Law. They talked about the 11th Circuit's denial of Mark Meadows’s removal request in Fulton County, about why the order may have worrisome secondary effects, and of course, abo...
Dec 23, 2023•1 hr 11 min
The other day before a live audience, we had our Lawfare year-end extravaganza. It was two hours long, so we've broken it up for purposes of the podcast. In this episode, you'll hear Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes interview Adam Kinzinger, former representative and member of the Jan. 6 committee, who headlined the event. They talked about the big national security stories of 2023, both domestically and abroad. They talked about what to expect in 2024, and how the international stories a...
Dec 23, 2023•37 min
Secure by Design means different things to different people. As part of Lawfare ’s ongoing project to understand what Secure by Design might mean in practice, we are trying to identify the open questions—areas where research or inquiry might help our collective understanding of the concept and how it might work. Lawfare Contributing Editor Paul Rosenzweig sat down with three Senior Advisers to CISA—Lauren Zabierek, Jack Cable, and Bob Lord—who work on the cutting edge of SbD design and implement...
Dec 22, 2023•54 min
Modern representative democracy was born in darkness. Transparency in representative bodies can spur unintended consequences for freedom, while secrecy in those bodies can lead to optimal outcomes for the public. These are uncomfortable truths that emerge from the history of the US and French revolutionary experiences. Many of our governance challenges today, from malign misinformation to persistent leaks to skepticism toward authority, derive in part from the fact that fundamental issues about ...
Dec 21, 2023•59 min
In an end-of-the-day ruling on Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court struck Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot on grounds that he was disqualified for the presidency as a result of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The decision now appears to be fast-tracked to Supreme Court consideration that could obliterate it or make it apply nationally. To go over all the twists and turns, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Gerard Magliocc...
Dec 21, 2023•51 min
In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings , which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “ Broken Code ”— which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as ...
Dec 20, 2023•54 min
