In the last two years, there have been at least four incidents of damaged underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. Be it Russian deliberate sabotage or accidents, NATO is looking for ways to enhance Europe’s maritime security. In this episode, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Minna Ålander, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House’s Europe Programme, to discuss what Europe can do to protect its waters. We value your feedback! Help us improve by sharing your thoughts a...
Feb 14, 2025•33 min
Only a few weeks have passed since inauguration, but President Trump's barrage of executive orders has already generated dozens of legal challenges . Which raises the question: are the courts up to the job? Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare 's Editor-in-Chief, to discuss his recent article, “ Are the Courts Up to the Situation? ,” published in Lawfare earlier this week. They talked about the courts' role in the face of unprecedented assertions of executive po...
Feb 13, 2025•47 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare teammates Tyler McBrien and Nastya Lapatina and Lawfare friend Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, to talk over the week's big national security news stories, including: “Mi Gaza Es Su Gaza.” President Donald Trump shocked the world last week when, in a joint press briefing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he announced plans for the United States to “own” Gaza, take responsibility for re...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of Lawfare , joins Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare , to talk about his recent Lawfare article discussing last year's Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States and its implications for executive power. They discuss how the ruling extends beyond presidential immunity, the broader shift toward a maximalist theory of executive authority, and ...
Feb 12, 2025•52 min
Chris Miller, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Marshall Kosloff, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and co-host of the Realignment Podcast, join Kevin Frazier, a Contributing Editor at Lawfare and adjunct professor at Delaware Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor at Lawfare and associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, to discuss AI, supply chains, and the Abundance Agenda. We val...
Feb 11, 2025•45 min
In a live conversation on February 7 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about the lawsuits against executive actions by President Trump and his administration, including the actions by DOGE to gain access to executive agencies, the attempt to dissolve USAID, the attempt to produce a list and potentially fire FBI agent and employees who were involved with the Jan. 6 investigations, and more. We value your feedbac...
Feb 10, 2025•54 min
From August 22, 2023: In 2003, President Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and in the twenty years since, the program has been credited with saving over 25 million lives and stabilizing health systems around the world. On Sept. 30, 2023, the program will expire if Congress doesn’t act, putting millions of people at risk of losing access to HIV/AIDS treatment. Lawfare Associate Editor of Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Emily Bass, a writer and activi...
Feb 09, 2025•41 min
From August 31, 2020: Earlier this month, the Trump administration re-imposed tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada, signaling a new salvo in the now years-long trade war it has been waging with countless U.S. trading partners. But what gives the president the authority to pursue such measures unilaterally, even when he lacks support from members of his own party in Congress? To talk through this question, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Kathleen Claussen of the University of Miami School of L...
Feb 08, 2025•56 min
On today’s podcast, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to Nayna Gupta, Director of Policy at the American Immigration Council, about the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation signed by President Trump in his second term, its start as a messaging bill in the last Congress, and its impact on the immigration detention system. We value your feedback! Help us improve by sharing your thoughts at lawfaremedia.org/survey . Your input ensures that we deliver what matt...
Feb 07, 2025•34 min
Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and Georgetown professor Daniel Byman sits down with Holly Berkley Fletcher, a former Senior Africa Analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, to discuss the complex and tragic situation in Sudan and her recent Lawfare article on the subject, “ The Sudan War and the Limits of American Power .” They talk about the initial hope following the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the subsequent military conflicts in Sudan, the country’s humanitarian crisis, the role of...
Feb 06, 2025•29 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Molly Reynolds, and Anna Bower to talk through another big week of national security news, including: “Checked Out and Off Balance.” Over its first two weeks in office, the Trump administration has pushed against the traditional limits of congressional authority by unlawfully impounding funds, terminating federal employees contrary to statute, and seeking to dismantle at least one federal agency contrary to statute. But the R...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 17 min
On Jan. 28, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email offering a “deferred resignation program” to over 2 million federal employees, encouraging them to resign effective Sept. 30. The offer is only open until Feb. 6—and in the intervening days since OPM announced the program, federal employees have received a blizzard of followup emails offering confusing and rapidly changing information. Writing in Lawfare , Nick Bednar has examined the OPM offer and raised questions about whet...
Feb 05, 2025•48 min
Today’s episode is a recording of Feb. 3 livestream that Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson hosted with George Ingram and Tony Pipa, both Senior Fellows in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, and Jonathan Katz, Senior Director of the Anti-Corruption, Democracy, and Security project also at Brookings—all three of whom are also alumni of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among other topics, they discussed the USAID’s tumultuous experience over the first t...
Feb 04, 2025•56 min
Nema Milaninia, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and a current partner at the law firm King & Spalding, joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to discuss legislation in the U.S. Congress and recent executive actions taken by the Trump administration to, once again, sanction the International Criminal Court. Milaninia discusses what is motivating the most recent sanctions campaign, broke down the many cr...
Feb 03, 2025•44 min
From May 9, 2022: Many individuals seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief in the U.S. are subject to a program run by Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which uses various kinds of tracking technologies as a way of keeping tabs on individuals who are not detained in ICE custody. Stephanie Pell sat down with Sejal Zota, legal director of Just Futures Law, to talk about this program and the kinds of tracking technologies it em...
Feb 02, 2025•36 min
In a live conversation on January 30 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff and contributing editor Renee DiResta about the confirmation hearings of Kash Patel to be FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy to be the health and human services secretary. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informat...
Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 7 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Chris Mirasola, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center and former Defense Department lawyer, to talk through the ways that the Trump administration is using the military to enforce its new immigration policies. They discussed the steps the Trump administration has taken thus far, from transporting migrants on military flights to threatening to send them to Guantanamo Bay; the le...
Jan 31, 2025•44 min
This week, the Office of Management and Budget announced a breathtakingly broad freeze on federal funds—before scrambling to clarify that freeze and seemingly rolling it back only two days later. The crisis touches on profound questions about the congressional power of the purse and limitations on presidential power under the Impoundment Control Act. To explain what’s going on, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Eloise Pasachoff, a professor at Georgetown Law School, and Zachary Pri...
Jan 30, 2025•50 min
This week, Scott was joined by his colleagues Kevin and Eugenia—in what is sadly her last episode before leaving Lawfare —as well as special guest Peter Harrell for a deep dive into the week’s national security news, including: “Tariff or Takeoff.” The Trump administration got into what is arguably its first major international spat this week when Colombia’s refusal to accept a U.S. military flight returning migrants to that country led President Trump to threaten an array of punitive measures, ...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Peter Hyun, then-Acting Chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission, discusses with Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman the FCC’s data security and cybersecurity enforcement authorities and how those authorities fit into addressing national security threats to the communications supply chain. He covers some recent enforcement actions and issues in this area, ranging from the FCC’s data breach notification rule to submarine cables to rip-and-replace efforts tar...
Jan 29, 2025•38 min
In today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Z. Rozenshtein speaks with his University of Minnesota Law colleague, Nick Bednar, about the wave of Day 1 executive orders affecting the civil service. Bednar recently analyzed these orders in a piece for Lawfare . They discuss what the orders say, how they might be challenged in court, and what this means for the next four years and beyond. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also s...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In a live conversation on January 23 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Alan Rozenshtein and assistant law professor at Pace University Amelia Wilson about the first batch of executive orders by President Trump in his second term, including suspending enforcement of the TikTok ban, the use of the military at the border, the birthright citizenship order, and the legal challenges some of these orders are faci...
Jan 27, 2025•56 min
From February 15, 2023: The Jan. 6 committee’s final report on the insurrection is over 800 pages, including the footnotes. But there’s still new information coming out about the committee’s findings and its work. Last week, we brought you an interview with Dean Jackson, one of the staffers who worked on the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the role of social media in the insurrection. Today, we’re featuring a conversation with Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel on the committ...
Jan 26, 2025•57 min
From November 3, 2023: Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the Israel-Hamas war has largely been fought in Gaza, a small strip of land along the border of the Mediterranean Sea. But farther inland, there has been an uptick in hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem says that at least 13 Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank have been forcibly displaced since the beginning of the war d...
Jan 25, 2025•56 min
Aram Gavoor, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at GW Law, joins Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to summarize and analyze the Trump administration’s initial moves to pivot the nation’s AI policy toward relentless innovation. The duo discuss the significance of Trump rescinding the Biden administration’s 2023 executive order on AI as well as the recently announced Stargate Project. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can ...
Jan 24, 2025•35 min
Alexis Loeb, the former Deputy Chief of the Capitol Siege Section of the Department of Justice, sits down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about President Trump's blanket pardons and commutations for everyone her unit prosecuted. She discusses how she became involved with the cases; how they were handled by prosecutors, judges, and juries; a couple of cases she personally prosecuted; and her views on the impact of Trump's pardon proclamation. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a...
Jan 23, 2025•38 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues and hosts emeriti Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic, and Alan Rozenshtein to talk through the week’s big—and we mean BIG—national security news, including: “Executive Disorder.” America’s once-and-future President Donald Trump hit the ground running, issuing dozens of executive actions on his first afternoon in office, from once again withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement to pardoning or commuting the sentences for almost everyone involv...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 21 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with a panel of leading experts to discuss the recent ceasefire in Gaza, including: Natan Sachs, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Dan Byman, Professor at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace; and Dr. Dana El-Kurd, Professor at the University of Richmond. They discussed the ...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Senior Editor at Lawfare Eugenia Lostri sits down with Kevin Frazier, Lawfare ’s Tarbell Fellow in Artificial Intelligence, to discuss recent disruptions to undersea cables. They talk about the ongoing investigations; the challenges that weather, cooperation, and jurisdiction can present; and the plans in place to protect the cables from accidents and sabotage. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare . You can also support Lawfare by making a o...
Jan 21, 2025•41 min
From July 11, 2022: We often use the terms democracy and liberal democracy interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. Democracy means majority rule and public participation. Liberal democracy means democracy plus minority rights. There's no guarantee that democracy will be liberal. And in fact, some of the same things that enable democracy can also undermine its liberal commitments. Zac Gershberg, a professor of journalism and media studies at Idaho State University and Sean Illing, the ho...
Jan 20, 2025•57 min
