On June 28, the Supreme Court released its opinion in Fischer v. U.S. , narrowing the interpretation of an obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), used by the Department of Justice to charge over 300 Jan. 6 defendants, including former President Trump. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes talked to Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff about the decision, what happens to the Jan. 6 defendants charged with § 1512(c)(2), and how this ruling affects Special Counsel Jack Sm...
Jul 01, 2024•51 min
From April 1, 2021: This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast ’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Issie Lapowsky, a senior reporter at the tech journalism publication Protocol. They discussed last week’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee with the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter—the first time the companies had been called to testify on the Hill after the Capitol riot, which focused public attention on t...
Jun 30, 2024•54 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 27 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor about the Monday and Tuesday hearings in the classified documents case, the Georgia Court of Appeals pausing all trial proceedings in Fulton County, and more. And of course, they took audience questions from Lawfare Material Supporters on Zoom. ...
Jun 29, 2024•1 hr 28 min
On June 26, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Murthy v. Missouri —the “jawboning” case, concerning a First Amendment challenge to the government practice of pressuring social media companies to moderate content on their platforms. But instead of providing a clear answer one way or the other, the Court tossed out the case on standing. What now? Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes discussed the case with Kate Klonick of St. Johns University School of Law and Matt Perault, Director ...
Jun 28, 2024•42 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined once again by Lawfare Tarbell Fellow Kevin Frazier to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: Wiki-plea-ks.” After more than a decade in effective confinement—first at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, then in a British prison—Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is set to plead guilty in a U.S. federal court in Saipan to a single violation of the Espionage Act for his role in securing and publishing troves of classified U.S. diploma...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min
For today's episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes speaks with Katsiaryna Shmatsina, a Belarusian political analyst and think tanker currently on trial for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government. Shmatsina discusses the charges against her, the trial process, and the broader political situation in Belarus. She delves into the history of the Lukashenko regime, its ties with Russia, and the repression of opposition voices. The conversation also covers the 2020 election and the su...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr
On June 10, the jury reached a verdict in the federal trial against Chiquita Banana. It found that the company had financed a paramilitary group in Colombia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, resulting in the deaths of eight men, and it awarded the victims' families $38 million in damages. It's the culmination of a 17-year-long multi-district litigation that had faced significant procedural, evidentiary, and legal challenges. And it may represent a new frontier in the fight to hold corporations ...
Jun 26, 2024•47 min
Libertarianism doesn’t fit easily on the traditional left-right spectrum of American politics. The philosophy upholds personal liberty as a core value. What does it have to say about matters of foreign policy and national security, which encompass ideas about self-defense but also protection of the state? Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Shane Harris to discuss the libertarian view on war and diplomacy, how it approaches the question of nation-state conflicts, and the differences between liber...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Larry Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at the Harvard Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss the open letter published by 13 current or former AI lab employees calling for a Right to Warn of AI dangers. This conversation dives into Lessig's representation of some of those employees as they push for a Right to Warn of AI dangers, the potential scope of that right, and the need for such a right in the first place. All signs suggest this won't...
Jun 25, 2024•41 min
Just months after many of the mandates in the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) have gone into effect, interoperability and data portability are fresh on the policy world’s mind. But what does the history of interoperability suggest about its ability to help the Internet regain its former openness? Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare , spoke with Alexander Rigby, a law clerk on Delaware Court of Chancery, and Chinmayi ...
Jun 24, 2024•42 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 21 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower, University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky, and Georgetown Law professor Martin Lederman about the Friday hearing on the legality of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment in the classified documents case, the appellate issues at hand in Trump’s NYC case, the late...
Jun 23, 2024•1 hr 30 min
From August 17, 2020: In a surprise announcement last week, the United Arab Emirates and Israel are normalizing relations, and Israel is putting on hold its plans for annexation of West Bank territory. To discuss the announcement and its diverse implications for various actors, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare senior editor Scott Anderson; Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist who is acting head of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings; Natan Sachs, the director of the Brookings Center for Mid...
Jun 22, 2024•47 min
For today's episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to discuss the various Ukraine-related agreements that came out of the G7 and subsequent Ukraine peace summit last week, with Contributing Editor and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Eric Ciaramella, Ukrainian journalist Anastasiia Lapatina, and Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Fellow Scott R. Anderson. They discussed the joint communique that came out of the Ukraine peace summit (and tho...
Jun 21, 2024•1 hr 5 min
This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Contributing Editor and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Eric Ciaramella to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Prime Deliverables, in Two Days or Less.” The Biden administration and its European allies coughed up a number of big wins for Ukraine at a meeting of the G7 and subsequent Ukraine peace summit this past week, ranging from a new U.S.-Ukraine security agreement to a commitment to p...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 12 min
The Cyber Safety Review Board’s (CSRB) report on the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion sheds light on how a series of flaws in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and security processes allowed a hacking group associated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to strike the “equivalent of gold” in accessing the official email accounts of many of the most senior U.S. government officials managing the U.S. government’s relationship with the PRC. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sa...
Jun 20, 2024•57 min
From June 29, 2020: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Eric Posner, the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the author of the new book, " The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump ." They discussed why demagogues are a characteristic threat in democracies, how the founders of the U.S. Constitution tried to ensure elite control and prevent a demagogue from becoming president, how these safeguards weak...
Jun 19, 2024•58 min
Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality . Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks ab...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 18 min
On June 2, Mexico held one of the largest elections in its history, and the electorate voted in the country's first woman, and Jewish, president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum was endorsed by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who critics charge as pushing a series of anti-democratic policies including a substantial judicial overhaul. To discuss this historic election and what President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum may do in office, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna ...
Jun 18, 2024•44 min
Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic checked in on the status of Senator Bob Menendez’s ongoing criminal trial in the Southern District of New York. Together with Dan Richman of Columbia Law School and Eric Columbus, who previously served as special litigation counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of General Counsel, they discussed the challenges faced by prosecutors in bringing corruption charges against a sitting member of Congress. The Justice Department all...
Jun 17, 2024•52 min
From July 17, 2020: Darrell West and John Allen are the authors of the book, " Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence ," a broad look at the impact that artificial intelligence systems are likely to have on everything from the military, to health care, to vehicles and transportation, and to international great power competition. They spoke with Benjamin Wittes about the book and the question of how we should govern AI systems. What makes for ethical uses of AI? What ma...
Jun 16, 2024•49 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 13 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey talked to Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic about Judge Cannon's order denying in part former President Trump's motion to dismiss the classified document case, what Judge McAfee is up to in Fulton County, and of course, they took audience questions from Lawfare Material Supporters...
Jun 15, 2024•1 hr 11 min
On today’s episode, Matt Gluck, Research Fellow at Lawfare , spoke with Sean Mirski and Aaron Sobel of Arnold & Porter. Mirski practices foreign-relations, international, and appellate law, and Sobel practices international and appellate law. They discussed Mirski and Sobel’s recent Lawfare piece , co-authored with John Bellinger and Catherine McCarthy, on the Eighth Circuit’s decision reviving part of Missouri’s coronavirus-related lawsuit against several defendants connected to the Chinese...
Jun 14, 2024•46 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk through some of the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Save the Last Gantz.” Leading opposition figure Benny Gantz has left Israel’s war cabinet over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to establish post-conflict plans for Gaza, raising serious questions about the stability of Netanyahu’s far-right government. What does Gantz’s departure mean for the future of the con...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 18 min
On today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Gabor Rona, Professor of Practice at Cardozo Law, and Natalie Orpett, Lawfare ’s Executive Editor, to discuss their recent Lawfare piece examining whether a state pursuing an armed conflict in compliance with international humanitarian law could nonetheless violate the Genocide Convention. They discussed how these two areas of law intersect, their relevance to the ongoing proceedings over Israel’s condu...
Jun 13, 2024•53 min
Natan Sachs is the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He joined Lawfare 's Editor in Chief, Benjamin Wittes, to discuss the resignation of Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz, the fate of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government, and Israeli perceptions of the Gaza war. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/c/tr...
Jun 12, 2024•46 min
Paul Sparrow, who served as Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum from 2015 to 2022, has written the book Awakening the Spirit of America about the war of words between FDR and Charles Lindbergh in 1940-41. He joined host David Priess to discuss his path to the FDR Library, the history of presidential libraries, how the Roosevelt-Lindbergh war of words reveals much about the American experience before and during the Second World War, why Lindbergh never ran for pr...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 17 min
The first criminal trial of a former president of the United States began in April and reached a verdict on May 30. As Lawfare readers and listeners know, we covered the trial in great detail. Normally based in Washington, D.C., we opened a temporary “bureau” in New York City so that we could report on each and every day of the proceedings from inside the courtroom. We produced written and oral dispatches every day on top of our usual deep-dive analysis of the legal issues at stake. So we’ve tal...
Jun 11, 2024•49 min
Charlotte Willner, Executive Director of the Trust and Safety Professional Association, and David Sullivan, Executive Director of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, join Lawfare' s Tarbell Fellow Kevin Frazier and Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic to discuss content moderation in the age of AI. Following 97 self-described data labellers, content moderators, and AI workers publishing an open letter describing deplorable working conditions, Charlotte and David break down what's new and what's ...
Jun 10, 2024•45 min
From March 3, 2020: The population of Africa is projected to double by 2050, giving the continent one quarter of the world's people by then. Nigeria alone will have a larger population than the United States. To the extent they aren't so already, the world's problems and opportunities will be Africa's, too, and African problems and opportunities will also be the world's. David Priess spoke about developments in African politics and international engagement with two experts from the Africa Progra...
Jun 09, 2024•44 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 6 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes talked to Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, Lawfare Courts Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower, and New York Times reporter Alan Feuer about the Georgia Court of Appeal's order staying trial court proceedings in the Fulton County case, what Judge Cannon has been up to in the Southern District of Florida, including scheduling d...
Jun 08, 2024•1 hr 25 min
