This episode of “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on Oct. 10 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff. They discussed Jack’s recent op-ed in the New York Times —in which he argued that the Justice Department’s recent filing in the Jan. 6 case is in tension with department policy, and that t...
Oct 12, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Following the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, rumors and conspiracy theories about the disaster quickly began spreading online—some of them outrageous and bizarre, and some of them legitimate efforts to make sense of a confusing and frightening situation. With Hurricane Milton moving through Florida, the confusion seems unlikely to let up anytime soon. The volume of rumors circulating “is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell ...
Oct 11, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds, Kevin Frazier, and Katherine Pompilio to talk over the week's big national security news stories, including: “The Fourth Law of Robotics is, You Don’t Talk About the First Three Laws of Robotics.” California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047 this past week, a measure that would have imposed the first set of meaningful safety regulations on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—measures industry leaders said were o...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor of Lawfare , sat down with Lisa Luksch, a curator at the Architekturmuseum der TUM; Anjli Parrin, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago; and Brad Samuels, a founding partner at SITU and the Director of SITU Research. They talked about a new exhibition, “ Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law ,” which opens on Oct. 10 at the Architekturmuseum de...
Oct 10, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast For today’s episode, Loyaan Egal, the Chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”), sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and General Counsel Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Morrison Foerster partner Brandon Van Grack to discuss the FCC’s growing but often underappreciated role in advancing U.S. national security. They covered how the FCC’s mandate intersects with U.S. national security concerns, how the FCC is tackling cutting-edge i...
Oct 09, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stoicism is having a moment.The ancient philosophy--which posits that you can’t control events, but you can control how you respond to them--has lately been embraced by self-help gurus and tech bros. But Nancy Sherman writes that the tenets of Stoicism have long found a receptive audience in “the military mind.” Whether they know it or not, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are guided by many of the principles espoused by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sherman, a professor at Georgeto...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jake Effoduh, Assistant Professor at Lincoln Alexander School of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to share his research on the Global South’s perspective on AI. Jake has carved a unique and important research agenda looking into how AI advances are impacting the pursuit and realization of human rights in Africa. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at&n...
Oct 08, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kyle Cheney, Senior Legal Affairs Reporter for Politico, discusses his recent Politico article on the legal and political landmines threatening the criminal prosecutions of rioters involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff sat down with Kyle to discuss a serious legal challenge to the key misdemeanor charge leveled in more than 90 percent of Jan. 6 cases, a troubling ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit declaring most so-called “geofencing” ...
Oct 07, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
