Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at Lawfare , sits down with Sezaneh Seymour, Vice President and head of regulatory risk and policy at Coalition and a former Senior Adviser on the National Security Council staff, and Brandon Wales, Vice President for cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne and the former Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to discuss their new Lawfare Research Report, “ Partners or Provocateurs? Private-Sector Inv...
Jul 29, 2025•48 min
In a live conversation on July 25, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the the Supreme Court’s rulings allowing the removal of executive officials of independent agencies, the ongoing dismantling of executive agencies like the Voice of America and U.S. Institute of Peace, developments in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, and so much more.You can find information on legal...
Jul 28, 2025•1 hr 44 min
From May 6, 2017: Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the president and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to ponder the question are former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden, former acting and deput...
Jul 27, 2025•56 min
From July 23, 2024: Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sat down with Alexander Macgillivray, known to all as "amac," who was the former Principle Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States in the Biden Administration and General Counsel at Twitter. amac recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about m...
Jul 26, 2025•41 min
Janet Egan, Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security; Jessica Brandt, Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Council on Foreign Relations; Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy at Abundance Institute; and Tim Fist, Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare for a special...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 4 min
For today's episode, Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson is sharing more of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week. First, he is joined by Ali Nazary, the head of foreign relations for the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, to discuss the Front's position nearly four years after the collapse of Kabul—and what Russia's recent recognition of the Taliban may mean for Afghanistan's futur...
Jul 24, 2025•55 min
For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson shares some of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week. First he sat down Shashank Joshi, the Defence Editor for The Economist to discuss the new dynamics surrounding European security, as well as the path toward (and implications of) a Europe less dependent on the United States for its security. Scott then talked with Iris Fer...
Jul 23, 2025•44 min
Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor at Lawfare and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, speaks with Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, about the Supreme Court's recent decision to greatly limit the practice of universal injunctions. The ruling came in a case involving a Trump administration executive order on birthright citizenship, and while many commentators have viewed the decision as a dangerous loss for the rule of law, Noah argues ...
Jul 22, 2025•51 min
Scott recorded this week’s special episode live from the 2025 Aspen Security Forum , where he sat down with a panel of top national security journalists—including co-host emeritus Shane Harris of The Atlantic, Mark Goldberg of the Global Dispatches podcast, and Alex Ward of the Wall Street Journal—to talk about some of the issues that have emerged at and around this year’s Forum, including: “Putting the Ass in Aspen.” Twenty-four hours before the Aspen Security Forum was set to begin, the Defens...
Jul 21, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In a live conversation on July 18, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Contributor Nicholas Bednar to discuss the Supreme Court’s rulings in Trump v. AFGE and McMahon v. New York, which allows for the mass terminations of federal employees, what happened in the hearing this week in the criminal case involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, politicization of the Justice Department, and more. Support this show http://supporte...
Jul 21, 2025•1 hr 39 min
From December 28, 2022: In the last few weeks, over a dozen U.S. states have banned TikTok from government devices, citing national security concerns. A similar bill was included in the omnibus spending bill, requiring the social media video app to be removed from the devices used by federal agencies. But addressing the concerns over how the Chinese government could coerce TikTok’s parent company to get access to Americans' data raises interesting questions about the existing data protection and...
Jul 20, 2025•46 min
From February 14, 2023: Last month's brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police has once again sparked a national conversation about the causes of and remedies for persistent police misconduct and abuse. To explore this issue, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA School of Law, who is the author of a new book called, “ Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable .” The book argues that police abuse is a result of pervasive pathologies in the legal system tha...
Jul 19, 2025•1 hr 15 min
In this Scaling Laws Academy "class," Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , speaks with Eugene Volokh , a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and long-time professor of law at UCLA, on libel in the AI context. The two dive into Volokh's paper, “ Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output .” Extra credit for those who give it a full read and explore some of the "homework" below: “ Beyond Section 230: Principles for AI Governance ,” 138 ...
Jul 18, 2025•59 min
Since Jan. 20, 84% of U.S. Agency for International Development grants and contracts have been terminated and 93% of agency staff have been fired. On July 1, the State Department absorbed the remaining staff and grants. On Lawfare Daily , Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof about the global impact of the Trump administration's dismantling of the USAID and foreign assistance cuts. They discussed what Kristof saw in his...
Jul 17, 2025•38 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “With Arms Wide Open.” After years of open skepticism toward Ukraine (and uncharacteristic deference to Russia), it seems President Trump may have turned a page. His rhetoric has grown cooler toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he has proven more willing to provide arms to Ukraine, even over contrary efforts by some of his ad...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 18 min
Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sit down with Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi, Executive Director of the Register of Damage for Ukraine at the Council of Europe and a former legal advisor of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Patrick W. Pearsall, an international arbitration and disputes partner in the Washington D.C. office of Gibson Dunn and Global Co-Chair of the Geopolitical Strategy and International Law practice who directs the Internati...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at Lawfare , sits down with David Noll, a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, to discuss his new Lawfare Research Report, “ Civil Contempt Against a Defiant Executive .” They talk about the widespread assumption that the judiciary is powerless if the executive branch chooses to defy court orders, largely because enforcement mechanisms like the U.S. Marshals Service reside within the executive branch. Noll argues that this view is mistaken...
Jul 15, 2025•1 hr 11 min
In a live conversation on July 11, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. AFGE, which allows for the mass terminations of federal employees, what happened in the multiple hearings in the criminal and civil cases involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a nationwide injunction on President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, and more. Support this show http://sup...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr 47 min
From April 12, 2019: Julian Mortenson, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is the author of a remarkable new article entitled "Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative," forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review and available on SSRN. Recently, Benjamin Wittes spoke with the professor about the article, which Mortenson has been working on for years—as long as the two have known each other. The article explores the history of exactly three words of the U.S. Constitutio...
Jul 13, 2025•51 min
From April 9, 2024: In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, among other effects. Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck discussed the bridge’s collapse, how authoriti...
Jul 12, 2025•42 min
John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht, Haran, & Williams, channeled his experience as the former chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to talk about bribery with James Pearce, Lawfare Legal Fellow. After explaining the basics of bribery law and whether a current or former president could face a bribery prosecution, Keller analyzed whether three episodes from the first six months of the second Trump administration could plausibly be characterized as bribery:...
Jul 11, 2025•59 min
On July 8, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a bonus edition of Lawfare Live with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss Kilmar Abrego Garcia's July 7 hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. 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/lawfare-institute . Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hos...
Jul 10, 2025•39 min
Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management and author of the “One Useful Thing” Substack , joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , to analyze the latest research in AI adoption, specifically its use by professionals and educators. The trio also analyze the trajectory of AI development and related, ongoing policy discussion...
Jul 10, 2025•1 hr 6 min
This week, Scott sat down with fellow Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Alan Rozenshtein to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “One Bill to rule them all, One Bill to find them, One Bill to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” Republicans in Congress narrowly enacted President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last week, just in advance of the July 4 deadline he had set early in the year. What will its contents mean for elements of Trump’s national security a...
Jul 09, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sits down with Ashley Deeks, the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, to discuss her new book, “ The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability .” They talk about the core metaphor of the book: the idea that the use of artificial intelligence in the national security space creates a "double black box." The first box is the tradition...
Jul 09, 2025•56 min
Until late May, Michael Feinberg was a senior FBI counterintelligence agent focused on China. All that changed one weekend, when the Deputy FBI Director found out that he was still friends with a former FBI official who had been fired years ago. In his first interview following his essay, “ Goodbye to All That ,” in Lawfare last week. Feinberg sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss his career, his resignation, and the climate inside the Bureau. To receive ad-free podcas...
Jul 08, 2025•53 min
Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of DistrictCon , joins Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss her recently released report " Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace ." They discuss the offensive cyber industry, the private sector and individual players, and the government procurement pipelines in the United States and China. They also discuss the strengt...
Jul 07, 2025•40 min
In a live conversation on July 3, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the civil and criminal cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a D.C. district court judge's injunction against the Trump administration’s invasion proclamation, attacks on law firms, and more. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 40 min
From February 16, 2024: The EU has finally agreed to its AI Act. Despite the political agreement reached in December 2023, some nations maintained some reservations about the text, making it uncertain whether there was a final agreement or not. They recently reached an agreement on the technical text, moving the process closer to a successful conclusion. The challenge now will be effective implementation. To discuss the act and its implications, Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugeni...
Jul 05, 2025•44 min
From November 7, 2023: You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all through. They talked about Israel aid, Ukraine aid, Taiwan assistance, the border, FISA Section 702, government shutdowns, and mo...
Jul 04, 2025•50 min
