From April 4, 2023: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it. But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at the Brookings Institution, Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Professor of International La...
Dec 31, 2025•1 hr 29 min
For the podcast’s annual end-of-year episode, Scott sat down with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Senior Editor Anna Bower, and Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to talk over listener-submitted topics and object lessons, including: Which sphere of influence is Western Europe in today? What should we make of President Trump's lawsuit against BBC? After nearly a year of the Trump Administration, how do you view the record of Attorney General Merrick Garland? What does the military campaign against a...
Dec 30, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Senior Editor Michael Feinberg and Tom Brzozowski, formerly of the Justice Department, sit down to talk over recent changes set in motion by the White House and Justice Department with respect to domestic terrorism investigations and prosecutions, and sound a warning from history at how these changes hearken back to pre-Church Committee practices. 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 donati...
Dec 30, 2025•53 min
In this episode, Ariane Tabatabai, Scott R. Anderson, and Loren Voss discuss the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026. They take stock of how Congress is reasserting itself vis-a-vis the Trump administration on matters related to the national defense, as well as the NDAA’s key provisions. Relevant links: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 United States Senate Committee on Armed Services Executive Summary of the 2026 NDAA “ Senate passes defense bill...
Dec 29, 2025•1 hr 1 min
From March 6, 2024: Executive branch constraints and the posture of the media have shifted in significant ways over the past two decades. Lyrissa Lidsky and Christina Koningisor, law professors at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco, respectively, argue in a forthcoming law review article that these changes—including the erosion of certain post-Watergate reforms and the decline of local news—have created a First Amendment disequilibrium. They contend that the...
Dec 28, 2025•51 min
From January 2, 2025: You called in with your questions, and Lawfare contributors have answers! Benjamin Wittes, Kevin Frazier, Quinta Jurecic, Eugenia Lostri, Alan Rozenshtein, Scott R. Anderson, Natalie Orpett, Amelia Wilson, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff addressed questions on everything from presidential pardons to the risks of AI to the domestic deployment of the military. Thank you for your questions. And as always, thank you for listening. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Mat...
Dec 27, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Every year, Lawfare publishes a retrospective of the year that passed. Today, we’re pleased to bring you an audio debrief of that article, The Year That Was: 2025, which you can read in full on our website starting December 31. Lawfare is focused on producing timely, rigorous, and non-partisan analysis of “hard national security choices.” And this year, that work was—to use an expression as tired as we are—like drinking from a firehose. We did our best to keep up. We published more than 1,000 ar...
Dec 26, 2025•56 min
From October 18, 2017: If you were unsure about whether your hosts are geeks, this episode will help settle the question. But before we get to what Professors Chesney and Vladeck think they know but don’t really, here’s the stuff they actually do know something about! First, the travel ban. Buckle up, there’s a new nationwide TRO, out of Hawaii, enjoining enforcement of most of Travel Ban 3.0. Second, a double-shot of the Nashiri military commissions case. The Supreme Court denied cert. , seemin...
Dec 25, 2025•58 min
From September 19, 2024: 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 t...
Dec 24, 2025•43 min
Loren Voss, Public Service Fellow at Lawfare , sits down with Kori Schake, senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Carrie Lee, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund's Strategic Democracy Initiatives. They discuss how they assess a healthy civil-military relationship, the current state of civil-military affairs, potential unlawful orders, and what we should watch going forward. Lee and Schake outline the frameworks they ...
Dec 23, 2025•53 min
In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss the government’s failure to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, a jury finding Judge Hannah Dugan guilty of obstructing immigration agents, a legal challenge to the White House ballroom construction, and more.You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administ...
Dec 22, 2025•1 hr 44 min
From November 20, 2023: Over the past few weeks, the country of Pakistan has pursued an aggressive wave of deportations targeting thousands of Afghan refugees, some of whom have been in Pakistan for generations. Many fear that this move will add to the already precarious and humanitarian situation facing Afghanistan. But the Taliban regime, for one, has reacted in a way few expected. To talk through these refugee removals and their ramifications, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down ...
Dec 21, 2025•43 min
From July 1, 2022: When a Russian missile recently struck a TV tower in Kyiv, near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust, some saw the attack as a potent symbol of the tragic occurrence of violence in Ukraine. To talk through the historical significance of the attack, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Maksym Rokmaniko, an architect, designer, entrepreneur, and director at the Center for Spatial Technologies in Kyiv, and Linda Kinstler, a PhD candidate in...
Dec 20, 2025•45 min
Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with SITU’s Deputy Director of Research Gauri Bahuguna, Detention Watch Network’s Advocacy Director Setareh Ghandehari, the American Immigration Council’s Policy Director Nayna Gupta, and Just Futures Law’s Executive Director Paromita Shah to discuss the rise of the immigration enforcement economy following the recent release of “Deportation, Inc.” a new video series from SITU and Lawfare . They talk about why the government outsources the critical...
Dec 19, 2025•46 min
Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Cristin Dorgelo, a former senior adviser for management at the Office of Management and Budget, and Rob Storch, who served as the inspector general of the Defense Department until the Trump administration fired him and many of his colleagues in January of this year. They discuss those firings, other Trump administration attacks on the offices of the inspector general, and various attempts by the administration to undermine oversight and evade ...
Dec 18, 2025•49 min
This week, Scott down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein and Ari Tabatabai to talk through a few of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop.” The Trump administration has given a green light to Nvidia to export its powerful H200 chips to China, opening a potentially significant new market while jumpstarting China’s strategically significant AI industry—or, perhaps, making it reliant on U.S. technology. What explains this decision? And how...
Dec 17, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speaks with Scott Anderson, Senior Editor at Lawfare , fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and non-resident senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School, who recently wrote a report about how social media platforms should handle unrecognized regimes like the Taliban. They discuss how social media platforms responded to the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021; the divergent approaches of Meta, YouTube...
Dec 17, 2025•43 min
At the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia held clear naval superiority in the Black Sea. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has developed an asymmetric maritime strategy using unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), achieving strategic effects against a superior naval force. Ukraine has largely shifted from importing complete drone systems to assembling them domestically using foreign components, with China remaining a key supplier of many critical parts. What is more, Ukraine is now...
Dec 16, 2025•39 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Loren Voss to discuss next week's contempt hearings in J.G.G. v. Trump , the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from ICE custody, domestic deployments litigation, and moreYou can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here . And check out Lawfare ’s new homepage on the litigation ,...
Dec 15, 2025•1 hr 37 min
From May 16, 2022: Today, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo released the first two episodes of Allies , a podcast series that traces the U.S.’s efforts to protect Afghan interpreters, translators and other partners through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. That effort culminated in the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan in August 2021, when thousands of the U.S.’s local partners were left behind. In seven episodes, Allies will take listeners through the decade-long effort to honor America’s promises ...
Dec 14, 2025•36 min
From November 16, 2024: Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Alan Rozenshtein, and Quinta Jurecic and Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection Mary McCord about Donald Trump's picks for his Cabinet and senior-level administration positions, including Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, the possibility of Trump using the recess appointment power, and more. Editor’s note: Duri...
Dec 13, 2025•1 hr 9 min
At 10 am ET on Dec. 11 , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson; Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at CSIS Daniel Byman; and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at AEI Kori Schake to discuss the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy. They talked about its emphasis on immigration as a national security threat and its implications for U.S. foreign pol...
Dec 12, 2025•56 min
News of a U.S. attack on a boat off the coast of Venezuela—which included a second strike on survivors of the first—has raised new concerns about the administration’s operations against alleged drug traffickers. Legal analysts, including some at Lawfare , call the second strike clearly unlawful. So why did the U.S. military agree to follow the order? On today’s episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett discusses the roles and responsibilities of military personnel with Frank Rosenblatt, a profess...
Dec 11, 2025•53 min
This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Contributing Editor Alex Zerden to talk through a few of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Finding the Road to Damascus.” Former dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Syria one year ago this week, bringing a precipitous end to the country’s more than decade-long civil war. In the year since, has the country been able to make progress toward the optimistic future many hoped would follow al-Assad’s ouster? An...
Dec 10, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Susannah Glickman, an assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University who specializes in the political economy of computation and information, sat down with Lawfare Associate Editor Olivia Manes to discuss the role of defense tech in the second Trump administration. Susannah unpacked her recent article in the New York Review of Books tracing the historical relationship between tech, defense, and the U.S. government, and explained how defense tech firms which have benefitted from U.S. in...
Dec 10, 2025•52 min
Wikipedia is more than an encyclopedia. It’s a key part of the internet’s information infrastructure—shaping what people know, what AI models learn, and what the public sees as true. But in an era of geopolitical conflict, AI disruption, and fracturing trust, Wikipedia has come under attack. In this episode, Renée DiResta talks with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about his new book, “ The Seven Rules of Trust ,” and about how Wikipedia has managed to remain one of the most trusted sites on the in...
Dec 09, 2025•51 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Michael Feinberg, Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff and Eric Columbus and Lawfare Contributing Editor James Pearce to discuss the arrest of a suspect in the attempted bombing on Jan. 6, 2021, a hearing in NPR’s lawsuit over the Trump administration cutting its funding, where the prosecutions of Letitia James and James Comey stand, and more.You can find information on legal chall...
Dec 08, 2025•1 hr 38 min
From January 24, 2023: In 2019, investigative journalist and photographer Lynzy Billing went to Afghanistan to investigate a very personal story: her own past. In the process, she discovered what she came to call a classified war, one with lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong. Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Lynzy to talk through her four-year investigation , published last month in ProPublica. They discussed Af...
Dec 07, 2025•42 min
From April 5, 2024: A new report from the POPVOX Foundation focuses on a little-known and hugely under-appreciated congressional effort: that of congressional staffers helping Afghan allies flee the country during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with the report’s author, Anne Meeker. They talked about what staffers did to help, the challenges they faced, and how the experience exposed both weaknesses and strengths in how Congress functions. ...
Dec 06, 2025•38 min
On Dec. 5, the European Commission announced that they are fining X (formerlly Twitter) 120 million euros for impersonation scams with “verification,” broken advertising transpaency system, and blocking researchers from its platform. On a Lawfare Live, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Lawfare Contributing Editor Renee DiResta analyzed the decision, what happens next, and how this fits into the geopolitical struggle over free speech. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Ho...
Dec 05, 2025•36 min
