This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on October 3 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott Anderson spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s immunity motion in the Jan 6 case against former President Trump, what it means for the future of the case and of course took audience questions. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/law...
Oct 06, 2024•1 hr 20 min
From October 11, 2023: This past Saturday, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprecedented raid from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel that left more than 1000 people – most of them Israeli civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly – brutally murdered. Dozens more were taken as hostages back into Gaza. A shocked Israel has in turn responded with missile attacks into Gaza that have killed more than 800 Palestinians there, and is planning a broader offensive there. And as peop...
Oct 05, 2024•1 hr
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed SB 1047, the controversial AI safety bill passed by the California legislature. Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sat down with St. Thomas University College of Law Assistant Professor Kevin Frazier and George Mason University Mercatus Research Fellow Dean Ball to discuss what was in the bill, why Newsom vetoed it, and where AI safety policing goes from here. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Suppo...
Oct 04, 2024•48 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic, and Tyler McBrien to try to make sense of the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Pulling Up the Escalation Ladder.” Israel’s escalating campaign against Hezbollah turned regional yesterday, as Iran launched a salvo of more than 180 ballistic missiles against Israel. While the damage was limited, both Israel and the United States have promised consequences. What strategies are Israel, Ir...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 28 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Richard Gowan, the U.N. Director for the International Crisis Group, to review what went down at the recent U.N. General Assembly High-Level Week. They discussed how the national leaders who gathered in New York for the meetings responded to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan; how strategic competition between China, Russia, and the United States shaped the proceedings; and what it can t...
Oct 03, 2024•50 min
Israel has hit Hezbollah very hard over the past few days, killing much of its senior leadership and eroding its capabilities. It has also displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and now has ground forces in Lebanon. Iran has responded with a missile barrage against Israel, to which an Israeli response is widely expected. To discuss the latest events in the expanding war, Lawfare 's Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Firas Maksad of the Middle East Institute, Natan Sachs of the Br...
Oct 02, 2024•55 min
Conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish control of global finance and politics have been circulating and influencing popular culture for centuries, with the spotlight often falling on the Rothschild family. Author Mike Rothschild (no relation), who has researched and written about the phenomenon in his book Jewish Space Lasers , joined David Priess to discuss the appeal of conspiracy theories overall, the genesis of the Rothschilds' wealth, legends about the family's involvemen...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to explain how increased use of AI agents may lead humans to form troublingly and even addictive relationships with artificial systems. Robert also shares the significance of his research on common uses of existing generative AI systems. This interview builds on Robert’s recent piece in the MI...
Oct 01, 2024•36 min
New York Mayor Eric Adams is facing indictment in connection with a foreign influence scheme involving Turkey. It’s the latest in a long string of actions by the Justice Department to counter foreign efforts to interfere in the American political system. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic, and Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack to discuss the charges against Adams and the larger pattern of which they...
Sep 30, 2024•44 min
From September 21, 2022: This past Monday, the criminal trial of Thomas Barrack began in federal court in the Eastern District of New York. Barrack, who served as an informal advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign and then as chair of Trump's inaugural committee, is alleged to have acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates. According to the indictment, Barrack acted as a back channel for the UAE to influence U.S. foreign policy. Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett sat down with ...
Sep 29, 2024•39 min
This episode of “Lawfare Live: National Security and the 2024 Election” was recorded on September 24 in front of a live audience on Youtube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Molly Reynolds, Quinta Jurecic, and Anna Bower and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School Nate Persily. They discussed how Congress has prepared for the 2024 election, including the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2...
Sep 28, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Geoff Schaefer, Head of Responsible AI at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Alyssa Lefaivre Škopac, an independent responsible AI strategist, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to detail the Responsible AI Top-20 Controls . As governments, corporations, and nonprofits face increasing pressure to integrate AI into their operations, how to do so in an ethical and responsible fashion has remained an open question. Geoff and...
Sep 27, 2024•41 min
This week, Scott was joined by Natalie Orpett, Anna Bower, and Matt Gluck to talk over some of the week's big national security news, including: “Some Assembly Required.” On Tuesday, President Biden gave his fourth and final speech as president to the U.N. General Assembly. He used the occasion to reflect on the many foreign policy decisions of his presidency, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the (thus far unsuccessful) pursuit of a cease...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Steve Coll’s latest book, “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” seeks to explain why Saddam Hussein would put his regime at risk over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that didn’t exist. Saddam ultimately lost his regime, and his life, in part because he saw America as an omniscient puppeteer seeking to dominate the Middle East. The United States put thousands of troops in harm’s way in pursuit of a rogue WMD program that turned out ...
Sep 26, 2024•58 min
Itsiq Benizri, counsel in WilmerHale’s Brussels office, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the shocking and significant resignation of former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. Breton served as the EU’s commissioner for the internal market and played a major role in shaping and enforcing the EU’s digital regulations. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at ww...
Sep 25, 2024•34 min
The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 riveted millions of Americans, who watched the horrific event live on television. What they didn’t know then was that the tragedy was largely preventable, a disastrous result of hubris and “magical thinking” as much as flawed engineering. Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” is a definitive account of what went wrong, and how NASA failed to le...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Israel and Hezbollah seem to be headed for a major war. Over the past several weeks, Israel has taken a series of escalatory steps along its northern border, targeting major Hezbollah figures, blowing up pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and—most recently—hitting targets all over southern Lebanon associated with Hezbollah. Will it lead to all-out war? Lawfare ’s Editor-in-Chief, Benjamin Wittes, sat down with Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman ...
Sep 24, 2024•56 min
Lindsay Chervinsky is the Executive Director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon. She is also the author of a much celebrated new book on the John Adams presidency that is focused primarily on the national security decision-making of the second president and how it set norms for the conduct of the presidency and its powers with which we still live today. She sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about how Adams defended presidential power while it was under a...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 8 min
From: January 5, 2022: Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy program at Brookings and an Iran specialist; Dan Byman, terro...
Sep 22, 2024•52 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on September 19 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff about Judge McAfee’s order dismissing 3 counts from the Fulton County indictment, what filings we are waiting on in D.C., a recent New York Times story on the Supreme Court’s handling of this term’s Trump cases, and more. Learn ...
Sep 21, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Bob Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, and Liza Goitein, Senior Director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the emergency powers afforded to the president under the National Emergency Act, International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Insurrection Act. The trio also inspect ...
Sep 20, 2024•47 min
This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare team members Alan Rozenshtein, Tyler McBrien, and RatSec newbie Anastasiia "Nastya" Lapatina to talk through the week's national security headlines, including: “A Shot Across the Rubicon.” Reports indicate that President Biden and his U.K. allies may be on the verge of giving Ukraine approval to use their advanced weapons systems to strike deep into Russia, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat that doing so would be seen as an act o...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 13 min
On April 14, 2022, New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac woke up to a stunning four-word tweet from Elon Musk’s Twitter account: “I made an offer.” Having long covered the technology and social media beat, they read Musk’s terse post as the “unbelievable but inevitable culmination of two storylines we had pursued for a decade as journalists in Silicon Valley.” On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke to Conger and Mac about the cloak-and-...
Sep 19, 2024•42 min
Science journalist Sarah Scoles has written extensively about astronomy and the UFO community, including in her 2021 book They Are Already Here . She joined David Priess to discuss how scientists look at ETs, pop cultural takes on first contact with extraterrestrials, the incredible influence of Carl Sagan's Contact , the Allan Hills meteorite, the evolution over time of beliefs about aliens contacting humans, how the Roswell myth emerged, the International U...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Jane Bambauer, Professor at Levin College of Law; Ramya Krishnan, Senior Staff Attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School; Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to break down the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ hearing in TikTok v. Garland , in whi...
Sep 18, 2024•42 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, for a deep dive on the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in these last few weeks before what could be a pivotal U.S. election. They discussed the state of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, recent developments relating to al-Haram al-Sharif and the West Bank, the state of Israel’s ...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr
It's been a rough couple of weeks in Ukraine, as Russian forces have hit major cities with intense bombardments, killing an unusually large number of people. Moreover, the front in Donetsk continues to erode. On the other hand, Ukrainian forces are still in Kursk, occupying about 500 square miles of Russian territory, in an embarrassing show of forces to the Russians, and discussions continue with Western governments about relaxing restrictions on Ukrainian use of long-range missiles inside of R...
Sep 17, 2024•46 min
Gharun Lacy has an unusual job. He’s the head of cybersecurity at the State Department, responsible for securing computers and their users in every embassy and consulate and responsible for making sure senior diplomats can communicate securely even in the most forbidding overseas environments. In a wide-ranging conversation, he sat down with Lawfare ’s Benjamin Wittes to talk about the challenging work of the Diplomatic Security Service generally and its work in the cyber and technology security...
Sep 16, 2024•50 min
From December 24, 2016: Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm Crowdstrike recently released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how should the United States respond? In War on the Rocks, ...
Sep 15, 2024•47 min
In a live recording on September 10, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a panel discussion featuring Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Scott R. Anderson, Co-Founder and Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator Dmitri Alperovitch, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Kori Schake, and the Center for Middle East Policy Director and Brookings Senior Fellow Natan Sachs. They discussed Harris’s policy positions on U.S. military and eco...
Sep 14, 2024•1 hr 39 min
