This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk over the meaty week of national security news, including: “The Neighborhood is Getting Worse.” Three American service members were killed in a drone attack committed by Iran-backed militias in Jordan this past weekend. The Biden administration has promised a military response, but one of the groups believed to be responsible has just declared a unilateral ceasefire, seemingly at Iran’...
Feb 04, 2024•1 hr 16 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on February 1 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editors Roger Parloff and Quinta Jurecic about amicus briefs filed at the Supreme Court in the Trump disqualification case and Trump's financial situation given the fines and damages levied against him in multiple civil cases. They also checked in on Fulton County an...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 15 min
From January 6, 2020: On Friday, the Lawfare Podcast hosted a conversation on the wide-ranging policy implications of the U.S. strike that killed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ leader Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, deputy commander of Iraq’s quasi-official Popular Mobilization Forces and leader of the Iraqi militia and PMF Keta’ib Hezbollah. Today’s special edition episode leaves the policy debate behind to zero-in on the law behind the strike. Law of war and internationa...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Next week, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Trump v. Anderson , former President Donald Trump’s appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court’s historic decision taking him off the state’s presidential primary ballot. In determining whether the Colorado Supreme Court erred in ordering Trump excluded from the state’s ballot, the Supreme Court faces one of the most fraught questions facing our democracy today. Lawfare Associate Editor Hyemin Han asked two legal scholars who could not disagree more w...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 13 min
American aid to global victims of natural disasters might seem like a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps linked to the Marshall Plan and other major programs in the past several decades. But US efforts to assist those suffering from earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, major flooding, and other such catastrophes actually goes back to the James Madison administration, followed by a burst of intense activity and the birth of the modern US approach at the very start of the 1900s. David Priess...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 18 min
We're approaching the historic oral argument of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. Anderson . That's the case over whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars certain insurrectionists from holding certain federal and state posts. Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff sat down with James A. Heilpern, a Senior Fellow at Brigham Young University Law School. Heilpern co-authored with Michael T. Worley a new article on Section 3 tha...
Feb 01, 2024•46 min
During a late night press conference in August, an Atlanta-area prosecutor announced a sprawling criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies for their alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. In a new book, investigative reporters Dan Klaidman and Michael Isikoff tell the story of the events that led to that moment—and the local prosecutor behind at all. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower spoke with Klaidman and Isiko...
Jan 31, 2024•54 min
U.S. military operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen have escalated rapidly in recent weeks, culminating in a number of major strikes aimed at degrading their ability to threaten Red Sea shipping traffic. But the war powers reports the Biden administration has provided to Congress are raising questions about how it is legally justifying this latest military campaign. To discuss the burgeoning conflict in Yemen and what it might mean for war powers, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat ...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Everyone recognizes sanctions as one of the United States’ most powerful tools of economic statecraft. But few realize that much of the information behind sanctions designations comes from another office within the Treasury Department: specifically, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (or FinCEN). And over the past few years, as sanctions and other economic tools have become more and more important, FinCEN has been evolving its operations and activities as well. To discuss the current state...
Jan 29, 2024•45 min
This week on Rational Security , just Scott was joined for a Bizarro-world episode with guests Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds (back for a second episode in a row!) and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower! They talked over some of the week’s big stories, including: “Two Houses, Divided Against Themselves...” The fate of key national security legislation—including the Ukraine supplemental and border legislation—is increasingly coming down to the increasingly dysfuncti...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr 14 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 25 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower discussed all of the Section 3 litigation occuring across the country and Roger Parloff's recent article about whether the president is an officer of the United States. They talked about why we are still waiting on the D.C. Circuit to rule on Trump's pres...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 6 min
From March 12, 2021: President Joe Biden has conducted military strikes in Syria, has articulated legal theories under which the series of strikes were proper and has temporarily reined in the use of drone strikes. To talk about Biden and war powers, Benjamin Wittes sat down with John Bellinger, who served as the legal adviser at the State Department and the legal adviser for the National Security Council in the Bush administration; Lawfare senior editor Scott Anderson, who worked in the State D...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min
In front of a live audience at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference in Miami, Florida, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Hon. Kenneth L. Wainstein, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security; Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic about government surveillance of open source social media. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com...
Jan 26, 2024•56 min
Outer space is back in style. For the first time in decades, NASA is sending astronauts back to the moon. Millionaires are exiting the atmosphere on a regular basis. And Elon Musk says humans may land on Mars to set up settlements by 2030. But would mastering space be worth it? In their new book, “A City on Mars,” co-authors (and spouses) Dr. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue that it’s probably not. From biology to engineering to international law, they charmingly survey the many charms and dange...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Heather Cox Richardson is the author of the book “ Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America ,” which looks at the evolution of American democracy and traces the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” to the earliest days of the republic. Lawfare ’s Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Richardson to discuss the state of American democracy today, the historical context we should use to understand the current threats to democracy, and what we can learn...
Jan 25, 2024•42 min
Software liability has been dubbed the “ third rail of cybersecurity policy .” But the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy directly takes it on, seeking to shift liability onto those who should be taking reasonable precautions to secure their software. What should a software liability regime look like? Jim Dempsey, a Senior Policy Adviser at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, recently published a paper as part of Lawfare’s Security by Design project entitled “ Standards for Sof...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 4 min
The fallout from the SolarWinds intrusion took a new turn with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to file a cybersecurity-related enforcement action against the SolarWinds corporation and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, on October 30 of last year. To talk about the details and significance of this enforcement action, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Shoba Pillay, a partner at Jenner & Block and a former federal prosec...
Jan 23, 2024•38 min
There is much debate among academics and policy experts over the power the Constitution affords to the president and Congress to initiate military conflicts. But as Michael Ramsey and Matthew Waxman, law professors at the University of San Diego and Columbia, respectively, point out in a recent law review article , this focus misses the mark. In fact, the most salient constitutional war powers question—in our current era dominated by authorizations for the use of military force—is not whether th...
Jan 22, 2024•52 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk through some big stories at the intersection of politics and national security, including: “Over the Hill.” Congress is back in town and up to its old tricks, kicking the can of government funding down the road and still debating a funding package for Ukraine and other Biden administration priorities. As President Biden prepares to meet with congre...
Jan 21, 2024•1 hr 15 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 18 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff discussed where the Section 3 disqualification litigation stands across the country and at the Supreme Court, about some amicus briefs, about the lack of action from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Trump's presidential immunity defense, and about a puzzling statem...
Jan 20, 2024•1 hr 16 min
From January 28, 2017: President Trump kicked off the first foreign policy crisis of his new administration by signing an executive order mandating the construction of the much-promised border wall with Mexico, resulting in as-yet-unresolved confusion as to how the wall will be paid for and an ongoing diplomatic scuffle with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and writer of ...
Jan 20, 2024•37 min
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with location data broker X-Mode Social. X-Mode collects over 10 billion location data points from all over the world every day, and sells it to clients in a range of industries, like advertisers, consulting firms, and private government contractors. The FTC argued that the data broker was conducting unfair business practices, including selling people’s sensitive location data. To discuss the FTC settlement and its implications, ...
Jan 19, 2024•42 min
Lloyd Austin's hospitalization and delayed communication about it have spurred much commentary and questions about the role of the secretary of defense in the US nuclear-strike chain of command. David Priess spoke with Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, about his path to expertise on nuclear issues, the chain of command for nuclear strike authorization (and recent comments from elected representatives that misunderstand it), alt...
Jan 18, 2024•56 min
Last month, the Department of Defense released its first-ever policy on civilian harm reduction. But as Marc Garlasco recently wrote in Lawfare , “[T]he policy comes at an awkward time … The U.S. military has issued guidance on how to protect civilians during operations just as its close ally Israel has reportedly killed thousands of Palestinians with American bombs.” And yet, many aspects of the new policy are nothing short of groundbreaking. Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with ...
Jan 18, 2024•57 min
Chimène Keitner is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis. She is a leading international law authority and served for a number of years at the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. She is the author of a lengthy piece in Lawfare about South Africa's petition under the Genocide Convention against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Chimène joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the litigation. What is South A...
Jan 17, 2024•57 min
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 over 150 munitions target...
Jan 16, 2024•50 min
From March 4, 2017: Yesterday, Just Security and the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law hosted Benjamin Wittes for a conversation on a question about the path of the Trump presidency so far: what happens when we can’t take the president’s oath of office seriously? Ben’s talk focused on an essay he and Quinta Jurecic posted to Lawfare simultaneously with the speech, in which they argued that the presidential oath—little discussed though it may be in constitutional jur...
Jan 15, 2024•1 hr 3 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to discuss the week’s big national security and courtroom news, including: “Ergo Omnes.” South Africa has brought Israel to the International Court of Justice for actions relating to its military campaign in Gaza, based on a novel legal theory that alleges Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention and asserts standing by virtue of the universal obligation to prevent genocide. What practic...
Jan 14, 2024•1 hr 18 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 11 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, about the closing arguments in the New York civil case, about the Supreme Court's decision to grant Trump's petition for it to review the Colorado Supreme Court's decision barring him from the ballot under the 14th Amendment...
Jan 13, 2024•1 hr 23 min
From September 26, 2015: On this week’s Lawfare Podcast , Gregory Johnsen outlines the current state-of-play in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for Buzzfeed News , a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’t be viewed as just another Sunni-Shia fight. Yet while he clarifies that the issues that sparked the war are mu...
Jan 13, 2024•41 min
