The Lawfare Podcast

Oscar Jonsson, author of the new book “The Russian General Staff,” and an associate senior lecturer at Swedish Defence University, joins Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss the origins and evolution of the Russian General Staff, its role in the early Putin system amid reforms and power consolidation, and the General Staff’s role (or lack thereof) in Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. They also discuss the General Staff’s nominal command of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU; Russia’s full-scale 2022 war on Ukraine; Russia’s evolving lessons from the war and what the General Staff gets right and wrong about modern warfare; and the future of Russian military thought and planning.

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From August 18, 2023: Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with Molly Reynolds’s work on Congress. She’s a Senior Fellow at Brookings and a Senior Editor at Lawfare—and she has a new report out at Brookings, with Naomi Maehr, on “How partisan and policy dynamics shape congressional oversight in the post-Trump era.” Molly and her team have collected an enormous amount of data over the years about how Congress conducts oversight, and the report is a thought-provoking overview of what the legislature got up to during the 117th Congress.

Today on the show, LawfareSenior Editor Quinta Jurecic talked with Molly about her report and what patterns she’s found in oversight from the 116th Congress through today. For fans of the Jan. 6 Committee’s work, they also discussed that committee’s investigation and what it does and doesn’t tell us about congressional investigations going forward.

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Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, speaks with Roberto Tallarita, assistant professor at Harvard Law School, about Anthropic's recently filed s-1 and its experiment in corporate governance. They discuss its current status as a public benefit corporation, its decision to create and empower a body of financially disinterested trustees, and its current unique class structure. Drawing on Tallarita’s research on stakeholder governance and unequal voting rights, the two also discuss what would make a commitment to safety precautions durable even when in stark tension with profit.

Tallarita lays out some of his thoughts on what could come next for Anthropic in his recent article “Profit and Mission in Anthropic’s IPO.” Frazier also has recently written an analysis of Anthropic’s post-IPO governance.

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On Monday, Nov. 9, at 3:30 p.m. ET, in light of explosive allegations about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Lawfare Senior Editors Kate Klonick and Michael Feinberg sat down on Substack Live to discuss the role of seduction in intelligence gathering and how the public should think about the growing scandal.

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In a conversation on YouTube,Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes will sit down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff, Anna Bower, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest litigation over Trump administration policies. Topics include D.C. and Virginia’s suit to block construction of the triumphal arch, the Ahmed Soliman case, the politicization of the Justice Department, election litigation in California and Alaska, Trump’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal, and more.

Find Lawfare’s litigation tracker here.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From November 17, 2022: American democracy might look healthier in light of last week's midterms, but there's still a lot of skepticism across the political spectrum about how it's doing. From the right, would-be authoritarians cast doubt on elections and on the very idea of liberal democracy. But even those who reject this authoritarian impulse are frequently uncomfortable with the messiness of democratic politics, instead preferring an anti-politics of technocratic decision-making.

Jedediah Purdy, a law professor at Duke Law School, wants to defend democracy from its critics and its skeptics. In his new book, “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope,” he argues that democratic renewal is both desirable and, most importantly, possible. Lawfaresenior editor Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Jed to talk about the book, get his thoughts about the state of American democracy, and chart the path toward a healthier democratic future.

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From November 27, 2024: Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Mike Stern, a lawyer specializing in congressional legal issues and former Senior Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Donald Sherman, Executive Director and Chief Counsel at CREW, to discuss the Senate confirmation process and expectations for congressional oversight in the 119th Congress. They discuss the tools available to the Senate now and after the start of the new Congress in January, legal questions related to President-elect Trump’s potential plans for recess appointments, and what issues related to congressional oversight to watch next year.

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In this episode, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee to discuss her new essay, “The Unhidden Hand.” The essay judges Russia’s 2016 election interference by the standards the intelligence profession uses for covert action.

Covert operations usually pay off early and then fade. They discuss why this one did the opposite: It was exposed before the votes were counted, yet Moscow’s gains have grown over the decade since, largely because of the man Russia helped elect. They also cover the dismantling of U.S. defenses against foreign election interference, the purge of the analysts and investigators who exposed the operation, and what Congress could do to build election defenses that no president can switch off.

For further reading, see:

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Senior Editor Eric Columbus; and Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai to talk through the week’s big international news stories, including:

In object lessons, Tyler recommends the new album, "No Bad Memories," by The Avalanches. Ari is blown away by the set design and acting in the stage play, "Stranger Things: The First Shadow." Scott is listening to the new revival of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, called "Still Counting." And Eric has discovered the classical music streaming service IDAGIO.

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For today's podcast, we're bringing you audio from yesterday's livestream event, Lawfare Live: Midterm 2026 Debrief. Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes was joined by Contributing Editor Molly Reynolds; Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee; and Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Eric Columbus, Michael Feinberg, and Loren Voss. They discussed how the new composition of Congress will shape many of the key national security issues we've been tracking, including the appropriations process and presidential war powers. They discussed what tools may be available to exercise oversight and pursue accountability. And they discussed what priorities the new Congress should consider to remedy the Trump Administration's damage to the national security apparatus.

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Katherine Dunn, author of the new book “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World,” and a business reporter and editor based in London, joins Lawfare Contributor Justin Sherman to discuss navigation technologies and bombing in World War II, satellites and the Cold War, and the birth and evolution of the U.S. government’s GPS program. They also discuss GPS as a combination of ideas and technologies, how the U.S. defense establishment initially tried to balance tech advancement and security in the GPS capabilities it made public, GPS and navigation in Russia-Ukraine and modern war, and the future of global navigation.

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In this episode, Lawfare’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with with Anton Antonenko, the vice president of a Ukrainian energy think tank, DiXi Group, to discuss the energy infrastructure in Kyiv, and why the upcoming winter may be the toughest yet for the Ukrainian capital.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes will sit down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss developments in litigation against Trump administration’s policies, including former FBI Director James Comey being charged for a third time, a judge ruling that Maureen Comey was unlawfully fired as an assistant U.S. attorney, updates in the Kennedy Center litigation, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From June 12, 2024: Natan Sachs is the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He joined Lawfare's Editor in Chief, Benjamin Wittes, to discuss the resignation of Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz, the fate of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government, and Israeli perceptions of the Gaza war.

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From September 11, 2023: How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.

A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with access to data provided by Facebook’s parent company Meta. The 2020 Facebook & Instagram Research Election Study, a partnership between Meta researchers and outside academics, studied the platforms’ impact on the 2020 election—and uncovered some nuanced findings, suggesting that these impacts might be less than you’d expect.

Today on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic are joined by the project’s co-leaders, Talia Stroud of the University of Texas at Austin and Joshua A. Tucker of NYU. They discussed their findings, what it was like to work with Meta, and whether or not this is a model for independent academic research on platforms going forward.

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Sander Tordoir is the Chief Economist of the Center for European Reform (CEPR) and a prominent European voice in the E.U.'s debate over its economic and technological relationship with China. With European trade policy toward China shifting over the past two years from integration towards managed trade, Sander joins Lawfare Contributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to unpack the recent E.U.-China deal involving quotas on hybrid cars and the apparent pause in what Sander refers to as "supply chain warfare."

Sander also explains the new trade instruments the European Union is developing to make itself more nimble in pushing back against Chinese trade issues and whether Europe might one day use those instruments against the U.S. as well. Harrell also answers some of Sander's questions about shifting views of trade in the U.S.

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss three-day preliminary hearing before magistrate Judge Faruqui in the criminal case of former FBI analysts charged with false statements to Congress and obstruction.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Michael Feinberg and Molly Roberts to talk through the week’s big international news stories, including:

In object lessons, Molly is keeping cozy with a surprisingly delicious parmesan cabbage soup. Scott is catching up on the historical horror book, "Between Two Fires." And for any The Velvet Underground fans, Michael recommends "Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music."

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For today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett is joined by Natan Sachs of the Center for Middle East Policy, Joel Braunold of the Center Project, and Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the Oct. 27 elections in Israel. After record turnout by Israeli voters, especially Arab Israelis, we have an outcome—but the implications are far from clear. They unpack what happened and the questions that remain: Whether longtime Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has a path to staying in power, whether opposition parties can stay unified, and whether there’s any prospect of a governing coalition or if we’re heading toward another round of elections. The future of Israeli politics is still very uncertain. They explain why.

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Andy Hendrickson, the chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), and Alice Jou, the chief of staff and deputy chief of OET, join Lawfare Contributor Justin Sherman to discuss the process for testing and certifying devices in the United States, the offshoring of that apparatus, and how some countries do not allow foreign bodies to certify equipment sold in their borders. They also discuss the national security risks of certain offshoring or foreign-owned or -based testing and certification bodies, a “Minnesota” lab that was actually based in China, the FCC’s “Bad Labs” rulemaking on the problem, and the future of the supply chain and risk space.

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Former NSC staffers Cole Bucy and Nate Swanson join Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ari Tabatabai and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee to discuss the Iran war eight months in and the administration's likely approach after the midterms.

Cole and Nate's new piece in Foreign Policy, "Trump Unleashed" outlines why the president might escalate against Iran and why none of his options is likely to get him what he wants. Ari and Julia also discuss their piece in Foreign Policy, "How Could Iran Happen? An Autopsy," examining how the president's war on the "Deep State" led to this debacle in the Middle East.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Loren Voss, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss developments in the litigation over the Trump administration’s plan for the East Potomac Park and Arch, the 9th Circuit ruling that President Trump exceeded his authority in the deployment of the National Guard in L.A., legal challenges to the Trump administration’s various actions surrounding the election, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From July 11, 2025: 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: Paramount’s $16 million settlement of Trump’s lawsuit while Paramount awaits federal approval of a merger, law firms agreeing to provide pro bono legal services to causes favored by the administration to rescind or avoid targeted executive orders, and the dismissal of the criminal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’s agreeing to further the administration’s immigration agenda.

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From November 22, 2024: After more than a year of pleas from Kyiv, the U.S. finally let Ukraine use Western long-range weapons for attacks inside Russia. Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, to talk about the strategic and tactical effects of such attacks, what’s behind the timing of this decision, and why it took so long for the U.S. to finally change course.

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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie K. Orpett talks with LawfareSenior Editors Molly Roberts and Loren Voss, Contributing Editor Renée DiResta, and Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee about what they're watching in the run-up to the midterm elections. Each of them is focused on different potential threats to election security and integrity—from what’s being challenged in the courts to what’s happening in the online information ecosystem, from concerns over physical security at the polls to concerns over the health of government institutions. They talk about how they are identifying and evaluating the threats, what impact they might have, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes; Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai; and Contributing Editor and Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace Joel Braunold, to talk through the week’s big international news stories, including:

In object lessons, Ben issues an enlightened apology to our neighbors to the north. Ari is sailing through her free time with Sleeping Gods. Scott is teaching his kids how to kick it old school in a new way. And Joel, somehow, in a way only Joel can, finds a patriotic message in this age-old battle for devotees and how you spend your weekends.

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For today’s episode, Lawfare’s Renée DiResta sits down with Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Cyndie Demeocq, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, to discuss their new research examining how existing federal criminal law applies to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and what 71 federal prosecutions reveal about the legal issues created by generative AI.

Together, they unpack the Seventh Circuit’s recent decision in United States v. Anderegg; the First Amendment distinctions between real, AI-manipulated, and wholly synthetic imagery; and why the authors argue that existing criminal statutes are proving more effective than public debate suggests. They also discuss what the prosecution data can—and cannot—tell us about the scale of the problem, and how policymakers should approach defining the responsibilities of AI developers, platforms, and safety researchers.

Please note that this episode contains content that some people may find disturbing, including conversation about child sexual abuse material. Listener discretion is advised.

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With the rise of AI-driver cybersecurity incidents, the conversation on how to monitor and assess these incidents is increasingly on the rise. Lawfare Senior Editor Kevin Frazier sits down with Asad Ramzanali, the Director of Artificial Intelligence & Technology Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. The two discuss the creation of a Cyber Safety Review Board, a mechanism based on the National Transportation Review Board designed to independently monitor cybersecurity incidents; how it would monitor incidents; and what advantages it would have over current independent monitoring firms.

Asad's article on this subject can be read here: https://vanderbiltpolicyaccelerator.substack.com/p/who-investigates-ais-cyber-attacks.

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On October 20 at 9 a.m. ET, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the October 19 hearing over President Trump's renovation plans at East Potomac Park.

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Jimmy Rushton of the Kyiv Independent and Anastasiia Lapatina, Lawfare’s Ukraine fellow, join Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the latest news from Kyiv: the grave rupture in U.S.-Ukrainian relations, reported breaks in intelligence sharing and in Ukrainian access to Starlink, the Russian assault on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and the impending arrival of winter.

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Benjamin Wittes is joined by Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus for a fast-moving tour of the week’s most important Trump-era litigation.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From April 5, 2022: On June 3, President Biden issued a national security memorandum that established the “Fight Against Corruption” as a core national security interest for the United States. The memo described the staggering costs of corruption, with it being “estimated that acts of corruption sap between 2 and 5 percent from global gross domestic product.” The memo also directed U.S. officials to develop a comprehensive presidential strategy focused on anti-corruption.

Alvaro Marañon sat down with Paul Massaro, the senior policy advisor for counter-kleptocracy at the Helsinki Commission, to speak about the United States government's latest anti-corruption efforts following the June memo. They discussed the latest developments in the efforts to combat corruption, details around the first-ever presidential strategy on anti-corruption and the kinds of messages these unified efforts send to other authoritarian regimes beyond Russia.

For more on this topic, consider watching “Countering Oligarchs, Enablers, and Lawfare,” a hearing on Wednesday, April 6, at 2:30 p.m., hosted by the Helsinki Commission.

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From December 29, 2022: On December 15, the New York Times published an article that detailed an investigation conducted by three of its reporters into how Russian state media uses American right wing and Chinese media to portray the ongoing war in Ukraine to Russian citizens. The investigation utilized thousands of leaked emails from correspondence within a Russian state media agency and with Russian security services, to uncover how the Kremlin crafts its narratives and spreads disinformation to its people.

To unpack the findings of the investigation and their implications, Lawfare associate editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with the journalists that conducted the investigation: Paul Mozur, a New York Times correspondent focused on technology and geopolitics in Asia; Adam Satariano, a New York Times technology correspondent focused on digital policy; and Aaron Krolik, an interactive news journalist and developer also at the Times. They discussed how they conducted their investigation, Russia's propaganda machine that they describe as the country's greatest wartime success, the limits of the disinformation campaign, and more.

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Over the past decade, the U.S. has expanded its use of measures including tariffs, sanctions, export controls, and investment screening to regulate the economy in the name of national security. It has also embraced new ones such as government-owned equity stakes in private companies and new stockpiles of critical materials. Kristen Eichensehr, a law professor at Harvard, and Ashley Deeks, a law professor at the University of Virginia—and former legal counsel to the National Security Council—have an article in the Harvard National Security Journal arguing that the U.S. is seeing the emergence of a "new command economy" in which the government plays a much more activist economic role than it has in many decades.

Deeks and Eichensehr join Lawfare Contributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to unpack what the new command economy is, what it means for companies and the government, and how we should be thinking about incorporating basic legal values like transparency and oversight into this emerging framework.

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman and Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Contributing Editor and partner at Steptoe LLP Michel Paradis, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:

In object lessons, Dan continues to engage in questionable forms of escapism with an endorsement of the second edition of An Infamous Traffic. Julia observes the 10th anniversary of Russian interference the 2016 elections with a recommendation of “The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World,” by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. Scott mourns the loss of a favorite RatSec Fan Club hangout—City State Brewing—and wonders where the new clubhouse will be. And Michel passes on the age-old tradition of doing your kids’ work for them with a heartfelt tribute to the Pinewood Derby.

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For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Rachel Alpert, a partner at Jenner & Block and former chief counsel for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown’s Institute of International Economic Law and former senior director for international economics at the National Security Counsel under President Biden, to walk through President Trump’s recent announcement lifting U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel fuel and signaling support for U.S. imports.

Together, they discuss the legality of Trump’s actions, what the practical ramifications will likely be, and what it all tells us about the Trump administration’s shifting views on Russia and the war in Ukraine in the lead-up to the midterm elections.

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Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with author and journalist Ben Macintyre to discuss his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy,” which details a little known intelligence coup from the Cold War that changed the strategies of great powers in the Middle East.

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Benjamin Wittes is joined by Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus for a fast-moving tour of the week’s most important Trump-era litigation. They break down the CNN v. Trump press-pool case and why Judge Kelly may be headed for a due-process ruling; the twin Harvard cases over grants and visas, where Paul Clement makes a forceful First Amendment argument; and the FTC’s campaign against NewsGuard, which could reshape how media ratings survive government pressure.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From November 18, 2024: Christie Hicks, the Managing Attorney overseeing Earthjustice's Clean Energy Program, and Mandy DeRoche, a Deputy Managing Attorney in Earthjustice's Clean Energy Program, join Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to explore the intersection of environmental law and national security as the Biden administration prioritizes AI development. Drawing on the extensive experience of Christie and Mandy in utility regulation and environmental advocacy, they collectively examine the tensions between the push for advances in emerging technologies and existing environmental commitments, grid stability requirements, and clean energy goals.

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From October 2, 2025: In a live conversation on October 1,LawfareSenior Editor Scott R. Anderson spoke to Managing Director at S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace Joel Braunold about President Trump’s proposed peace plan for Gaza and what it means for the future of Iraeli-Palestinian relations.

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From September 16, 2024: On Sept. 24, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a panel discussion featuring Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds, Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Quinta Jurecic, LawfareSenior Editor Anna Bower, and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School Nate Persily.

The panel discussed how Congress has prepared for the 2024 election, including the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, how the government and social media companies are addressing election-related disinformation, and how states have used the lessons of 2020 to prepare for the 2024 election.

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For today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Dr. Omar Mohammed, a senior researcher with the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University and the author of the blog Mosul Eye, which anonymously documented life under ISIS control in Iraq; Amb. Doug Silliman, President of the Arab Gulf States Institute and a former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq; and Victoria Taylor, Director of the Iraq Initiative and the Syria Project at the Atlantic Council and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iraq and Iran at the U.S. Department of State.

They discuss the recent withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq, what lessons can be drawn from the experience with the prior withdrawal in 2011, whether the current Iraqi government is up to preventing a resurgence of ISIS and pushing back against Iranian interests without a U.S. military presence, and what it all might mean for the future of the two countries, 23 years after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

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This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare Editor in Chief and cohost emeritus Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts, and Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:

In object lessons, Molly L. is a notebook-carrying member of the pink soup club. Ben, in ingesting the Congressional Precedents into RAGtime, discovers what Senators may ingest on the floor. Scott expresses his concern over the state of the United States Code. And Molly E. once again makes the case for the pleasures of regionally produced NPR, with a story that manages to combine two of her favorite things: excellent local journalism and the legislative process.

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Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee talks with former CIA analyst Shawn Howard and Ariane Tabatabai of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about Shawn’s new Foreign Policy essay on how the Gulf states are coping with a war they didn’t start. They discuss why U.S. protection has made the Gulf states targets, how Tehran sees them, Iran’s strikes on the mediators, the possibility of a UAE side deal, and what a post-midterm return to U.S. bombing would mean for the region.

Mentioned in this episode:

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On today’s episode, LawfareManaging Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, the diplomatic correspondent at The Washington Sun, to discuss Ahmed’s new book “Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza.” They talk about the top officials in the administration who drove Biden’s Gaza policy, how the war quickly became a moral and strategic disaster, and what the heavy civilian death toll might augur for the future.

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LawfareForeign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Peter Bergen, author of “All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror,” to discuss counterterrorism in the 25 years after 9/11, reviewing the many mistakes the United States and al-Qaeda made, as well as some of the surprising successes. Peter also draws lessons from the war in Iran today for how to better respond to a future terrorist attack.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareExecutive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss a legal challenge addressing the president’s authority to wage the Iran war, litigation over the cancellation of foreign aid funds, the Supreme Court allowing third country removals, Renee Good’s family filing civil suits against the federal government, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From May 20, 2025: El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has made a lot of headlines recently in the United States for his partnership with the Trump administration. Bukele has helped enable President Trump’s scheme to remove supposed Venezuelan gang members from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act, housing these detainees in the notorious CECOT prison. In court, the Justice Department has claimed it has no ability to request that Bukele return these detainees to the United States, even after Bukele posed for photos next to Trump in the Oval Office.

The use of CECOT is key to the Trump administration’s effort to paint migrants as dangerous criminals. But what is Bukele getting out of the scheme, and what do things look like from within El Salvador?

To understand this, LawfareSenior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Noah Bullock, Executive Director of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal. Their conversation places CECOT in context of broader efforts by Bukele to consolidate his power and erode Salvadoran democracy. It also addresses Bukele’s ongoing crackdown on dissent in El Salvador over the last week—a crackdown that most recently included the sudden arrest on May 18 of Noah’s colleague Ruth López, who heads Cristosal’s anti-corruption work.

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From July 16, 2025: 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 Pearsall, Partner at Gibson Dunn and directs the International Claims and Reparations Project at Columbia Law School.

Markiyan and Patrick played a key role in proposing and designing Ukraine's reparations strategy soon after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They discuss how they came up with the idea and pitched it to President Zelensky, the G-7, and the UN General Assembly; the proposed reparations mechanism; the fate of frozen Russian assets; and the relevance of the reparations to the Ukraine-Russia talks.

You may want to look at the following materials relevant to the discussion.

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Martin Chorzempa is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a leading U.S. expert on China's economy and tech sector. In this week's episode, Peter and Martin unpack President Trump's September 24 summit with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping, talk about the balance of leverage in the geopolitical and economic relationship, and unpack the countries' differing perspectives on—and approaches to—artificial intelligence. Martin also discusses some of his current research into Chinese open weight AI models, which American companies are using with increasing frequency across a range of business applications.

Peter and Martin also discuss Martin's recent paper arguing that China's efforts to internationalize the RMB are stalling out.

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Senior Editors Anna Bower and Michael Feinberg to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:

In object lessons, Mike has two cautionary tales about tech appeal: “When We Cease to Understand the World” and “The Maniac.” Tyler is embracing sexy technical gear with a recommendation of Field Mag. Scott is returning to an old favorite that just understands him: “Fantasy Football Punishments for Your Work League that Violate the Geneva Convention.” And Anna is delighted by a more cutthroat side of cutting-edge: the National Havoc Robot League.

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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Rachel VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and a retired Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, to talk about the many ways in which the Trump administration has been remaking DoD. Some changes are announced loudly—the ban on transgender service members and the so-called “High-T” initiative—while others are taking place through quiet bureaucratic moves, like changes to personnel management. But all are combining to reshape the U.S. armed forces according to a new vision. They talk about how these changes are being implemented, what’s rhetoric and what’s reality, and what impact it’s all having on the Department and the troops themselves.

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Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee sits down with Jonathan Czin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, to unpack Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, his first in 11 years.

The two former CIA and National Security Council colleagues discuss what each side walked away with, including a two-month extension of the trade truce and potential channels on artificial intelligence and military crisis communications. They look at the implications for Taiwan, the war in Iran, and how the loss of China expertise and policy staff showed in the summit’s preparation and readouts.

For further reading, see:

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On September 29 at 9:30 a.m. ET, the full D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument over Judge Boasberg's inquiry into whether top Trump administration officials committed criminal contempt when they sent 137 Venezuelans to CECOT, a notorious El Salvador prison. LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to break down what happened.

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Lawfare Senior Editor Kevin Frazier is joined by Scaling Laws co-host Assemblyman Alex Bores of New York, AVERI Director of U.S. Policy Nat Purser, and Institute of Law and AI Managing Director of U.S. Law Mackenzie Arnold to discuss recent developments in the AI risk environment, what led us here, and what comes next for domestic and AI foreign policy. They also touch on other major pieces of AI news including President Trump’s announcement of an “AI Force” and an AI Czar, projections for the September 24 U.S.-China Summit, and other recent developments.

If you want to catch up on some of the major incidents driving the vibe shift, check out the podcast, “Lawfare Daily: Peter Salib on the Legal and Policy Ramifications of the OpenAI-Hugging Face Postmortems.”

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareSenior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff discussed the D.C. Circuit rejecting Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon’s exclusion of Claude from its supply chain, the Supreme Court allowing the Department of Homeland Security to use the SAVE database with social security information, DHS requesting the Supreme Court allow third country removals, a permanent injunction issued regarding overcrowded immigration detention centers, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From April 23, 2025: On today's episode, Mikhail Zygar, a renowned Russian journalist living in exile in the U.S. and the author of multiple books on Vladimir Putin, joined Lawfare Associate Editor Olivia Manes to discuss his experience as the founder of one of the last independent Russian media channels, TV Rain. They talked about the incentives underlying Putin's actions in Ukraine, how the Russian president has clamped down on independent journalism, global disillusionment with liberal democracy, and more.

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From October 1, 2024: 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 MIT Tech Review, which he co-authored with Pat Pataranutaporn.

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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett is joined by Ariane Tabatabai and Julia Curlee. Ari is Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare, and Julia Curlee is a Public Service Fellow at Lawfare. They talk about the war in Iran: where things stand today, and how we got here—including how the gutting of the national security apparatus in Washington affected the way the war is being waged by Tehran.

Ari and Julia's Foreign Policy piece is available here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/09/trump-iran-deep-state-purges-intelligence-bureaucracy/?utm_content=gifting&tpcc=gifting_article&gifting_article=dHJ1bXAtaXJhbi1kZWVwLXN0YXRlLXB1cmdlcy1pbnRlbGxpZ2VuY2UtYnVyZWF1Y3JhY3k=&pid=PNIGUh1udtg297d

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:

In object lessons, Natalie, following in the footsteps of others before, has found a heartwarming use for AI, relatively speaking. Scott continues to nerd out over treaty law and the museums that love it. And Julia has a slightly less uplifting AI story—but one that could come with merch!

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For today's episode, LawfareForeign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Gregory Johnsen, non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf State Institute, to discuss the current war in Yemen. 

The two discuss the latest developments in the war, the reasons for the Houthis' successes so far, the dilemmas facing Saudi Arabia, and why the situation has gone from bad to worse.

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Emily Benson is the Head of Strategy at Minerva Technology Futures, a strategic consulting firm that advises companies on how geopolitics impacts their business. She has also spent time at CSIS and at the Department of Commerce, and has spent more time thinking about economic statecraft than most of us. 

Emily joins LawfareContributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to discuss what economic security actually is and how we should think about it. She recently moved to Europe, and that gives her an interesting perspective on the issue, including whether Europe needs to diversify away from U.S. technology because of U.S.-related economic security risks. They also discuss China and how the U.S. and China are wielding economic security tools against each other. 

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives. 

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Lee Gelernt, the chief ACLU litigator on Alien Enemies Act cases, speaks to Senior Editor Roger Parloff about two upcoming DC Circuit arguments he’ll be making relating to the March 15, 2025, removals of 137 Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.

In one, the en banc court will grapple with whether to permit Judge James Boasberg to conduct fact-finding on whether to seek contempt charges against high-level Trump administration officials, including current Attorney General Todd Blanche and current U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Emil Bove.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the First Circuit rejecting the Trump administration’s third country deportation policy, former fugitive ICE agent jailed in Minnesota, oral argument in the Fourth Circuit over the dismissal of the first indictment against James Comey, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From May 22, 2025: Page Hedley, Senior Advisor at Forecasting Research Institute and co-author of the Not for Private Gain letter urging state attorneys general to stop OpenAI’s planned restructuring, and Gad Weiss, the Wagner Fellow in Law & Business at NYU Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to analyze news of OpenAI once again modifying its corporate governance structure. The group break down the rationale for the proposed modification, the relevant underlying law, and the significance of corporate governance in shaping the direction of AI development.

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From July 23, 2025: For today's episode, LawfareSenior 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 Ferguson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was until recently the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, about the strategic significance of the Arctic and how it plays into the modern dynamics of major power competition.

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Senior Editor Michael Feinberg talks with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and former CIA Case Officer John Sipher about John Ratcliffe’s tenure as the Director of Central Intelligence and cultural changes in the intelligence community writ large.

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This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Senior Editors Kevin Frazier and Roger Parloff, andLawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:

In object lessons, Kevin is putting the “community” in community college with high praise for the AI Literacy initiative in Alabama. Roger seams to think that the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum in London is knot your average exhibit. Scott finds weekend mornings watching Hilda with his kids to be a magical, enchanted adventure. And Ari is decidedly not in the Middle of Nowhere with her love for the new Kacey Musgraves album. 

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Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Eileen Guo, co-author with Gisela Perez de Acha and Martin Sona of “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy,” and senior reporter with the MIT Technology Review, to discuss her research into whether the “censorship-industrial complex” was an actually entity or a pretextual justification to dismantle the government’s anti-disinformation apparatus.

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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director and Fritz Stern Chair of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, to discuss what’s going on in the German political scene, where a far-right party, the AfD, is making a strong showing in state elections. They talk about what the party stands for, why its emergence is alarming the pro-democracy community, and what it all means for Germany, for Europe, for the United States, and for the future of Western democracies.

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On today’s episode, LawfareManaging Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Zoe Kurland, Senior Producer at Marfa Public Radio, and Terence O’Rourke, an attorney based in Houston, Texas. They discuss “A Whole Other Country,” the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning six-part podcast series, hosted and produced by Kurland, that tells the story of a secessionist movement in the mid-90s called the “Republic of Texas.” They talk about the group’s dubious legal claim that the federal government had improperly annexed Texas back in 1845; how its leader, Rick McLaren, styled himself “Ambassador of the Republic of Texas” and sought international recognition; and why McLaren, in the midst of a hostage crisis of his own making, picked up the phone to call O’Rourke to represent him. 

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Associate Editor Peter Beck and Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss an Afghan legal permanent resident deported less than 2 months after case is filed in the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, updates in the Grand Conspiracy, a judge allowing the Pentagon to fire Stars and Stripes journalists, developments in President Trump’s attack on mail voting, litigation over the use of SAVE data for elections, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From June 10, 2020: David Frum is one of the most prominent and eloquent conservative critics of the president. The former George W. Bush speechwriter and current writer for The Atlantic has written "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy," a book about the Trump presidency, and in this case, what comes after it. David joined Benjamin Wittes for a wide-ranging conversation of the ground he covers in the book: how you rebuild after Trump, how you satisfy elements of Trumpism without letting them descend back into authoritarian populism, what policies and approaches a new administration should take and how we should treat the "Trumpists" and their most diehard supporters.

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From December 11, 2023: The Senate last week failed to move forward the national security supplemental, which includes a large package of aid for Ukraine. The holdup? Migration at the southern border and Republican insistence that the administration and Democrats will have to swallow major policy changes in order to get the Ukraine aid through. Meanwhile, the mood in Kyiv is a little down. The counteroffensive did not go as planned, the U.S. aid situation and the European commitment to Ukraine is alarming, and domestic politics are returning after a hiatus during the first couple years of the war.  

To chew over the state of Ukraine and its support from the United States, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former CIA Ukraine analyst, and Molly Reynolds, LawfareSenior Editor and Congressional Guru. They talked about the state of the Ukraine aid package in Congress, about whether a deal on the border is possible, about whether such a deal could pass the House, and about Ciaramella's recent trip to Kyiv and the mood there as Congress dithers.

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On today’s episode, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, LawfareAssociate Editor Katherine Pompilio sits down with five members of the Lawfareteam—Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett, Senior Editor Loren Voss, and Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes—to talk about how Sept. 11 shaped the U.S. national security apparatus and the guests’ careers. 

Together they examine what the country's national security institutions looked like before 9/11, which of the legal and institutional structures built in response have outlived their original purpose, and what a younger generation—one that has never known anything else—should understand about the world those structures were built to answer.

ReadLawfare's collection"9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,"examining how 9/11 remains—or doesn't—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks.

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This week, Scott celebrated the fifth anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 with the return of co-hosts emeriti Shane Harris, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes. In varying degrees of witheringness, the four sat in brutal judgment of this year’s Hot Take Takedown pitches:

Which takes are too cold and bland, which are too hot and spicy, and which are just right? Listen in and decide for yourself!

Meanwhile in object lessons, Shane introduces us to GrandpaSpy on Instagram, bringing out the “wholesome, family fun” side of espionage. Quinta has a pleasant encounter with a “Cool Machine.” Scott remembered Rational Security 2.0’s anniversary before he remembered his own wedding anniversary but celebrates them both. And Ben revisits an old, unfinished pandemic project, much to Scott’s chagrin.

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Over a year ago, President Trump sent 800 National Guard members to the streets of Washington D.C., citing a purported crime emergency. Since then, thousands of armed troops have been deployed in D.C.—usually traveling in groups of four or more, seemingly always armed. 

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Brad Heath, a reporter at Reuters, who has been reporting on the Guard’s presence in D.C.. He recently published an article, titled “Trump put thousands of soldiers on Washington’s streets. They seldom stop crime.” They talk about what he found after reviewing thousands of criminal cases charged in D.C. Superior Court, what he learned from talking to everyone from National Guard members to D.C. officials, and how it all maps onto the legal analysis of whether the Guard is operating lawfully in D.C. 

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On today’s episode, LawfareManaging Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Ambassador Nina Hachigian, President and CEO of the Alliance for Local Leaders International and the first U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy from 2022 to 2025.

They discuss Hachigian’s recent piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled "The Autocrat’s Worst Enemy: Why Despots Hate Cities and the Mayors Who Run Them,” how cities are both “laboratories of democracy” and backstops against democratic backsliding, and what U.S. mayors can learn about resisting autocracy from their counterparts abroad.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Boasberg’s denial of the government’s motion to dismiss Lawfare‘s suit seeking information on international agreements entered into by the Trump administration; developments in President Trump’s targeting of mail voting; updates in litigation over the Triumphal Arch; a judge ruling that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it used national security to revoke the legal status of students who espoused pro-Palestinian views; and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From October 24, 2022: Last month, the George Washington University Program on Extremism published a report called, “Mayhem, Murder, and Misdirection: Violent Extremist Attack Plots Against Critical Infrastructure in the United States.” To talk through that report and a recent Lawfare article on the topic, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Ilana Krill, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism, and Seamus Hughes, the program's deputy director. They discussed the white supremacists and Salafi-jihadists who make up these movements, the encrypted channels through which propaganda and plans are spread, and what's to be done to protect critical infrastructure in the United States.

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From September 28, 2021: Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, both of whom are experts in German politics. They talked about the election, how to make sense of the results, and what everything means for the bigger picture of European politics, Germany's role in the world and more.

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From March 29, 2023: We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do.

Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called, “The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.” Juliette is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a CNN national security analyst, and David Priess sat down with her to talk about it all. They talked about the traditional focus of the disaster framework; consequences minimalization; the paradox of preparedness; and a variety of disasters and what we can learn from them, ranging from the Y2K incident, to Super Bowl XLVII, to the shipping incident in the Suez Canal back in 2021. They talk a lot about how to recover from disasters, and how to deal with them in a way that stops the bleeding and keeps them from getting worse, even as they’re occurring.

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When Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, it was the first major piece of U.S. industrial policy legislation in decades and was intended to expand America's ability to manufacture the computer chips that are vital for everything from AI to phones and modern automobiles. Mike Schmidt, distinguished visitor at Princeton University's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies and a non-resident senior fellow at the Institute for Progress, was the first employee of the Commerce Department office tasked with turning the CHIPS Act into an actual program that is today supporting the construction of hundreds of billions of dollars of new semiconductor factories in places from Arizona and Texas to New York. 

Schmidt joins LawfareContributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to discuss how the CHIPS program came together, challenges in implementation, and lessons for U.S. industrial policy in other critical sectors. 

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Eric Columbus, and Contributing Editor Renée DiResta, to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including:

In object lessons, the summer has left most of our crew hungry for more. Eric is eating up the tropical goodness of certain (glass-free) Outshine fruit bars. Molly is savoring the simplicity of an in-season tomato. Scott is perfecting his process for perfect pizza. And Renée stands alone snackless, squeezing out the last of her summer stress with a NeeDoh squishy.

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Peter Salib, Associate Professor at the UH Law Center and co-Director of the Center on AI Law & Risk, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to break down the postmortems produced by METR and Redwood Research and OpenAI on the lab’s failure to contain AI agents undergoing testing, which resulted in a hack of Hugging Face.

The duo briefly cover the timeline of what exactly transpired and explore the technical reasons and policy decisions that allowed the hack to transpire. They then reflect on what that means for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.

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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court granting a stay of the district court's preliminary injunction, allowing President Trump to continue to build the White House ballroom while litigation is ongoing, and the information about the U.S. Postal Service's system for handling mail ballots released by a whistleblower to Senator Blumenthal.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s homepage on the litigation, Bluesky account, and WITOAD merch.

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Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Tricia Bacon, professor at American University, and Antonia Juelich, International Security Lead at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy (CASP), to talk about how different terrorist groups are using artificial intelligence and how governments are employing AI to fight them. They discuss how Boko Haram and other terrorist groups are using AI to become more deadly, terrorist group problems with using AI, the risk of catastrophic AI-enabled terrorism, and what governments and companies need to do better.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, Kate Klonick, and Eric Columbus to discuss a judge finding the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation of Anthropic unlawful, significant developments in the litigation challenging President Trump’s mail in ballot executive order, the prosecution of Representative LaMonica McIver, a filing from Trump suggesting that the Kennedy Center may be torn down, a district judge denying Minnesota’s motion to extradite an indicted ICE agent, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From March 5, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare general counsel and senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy within Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss his new book: "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare."

They discussed Fishman's own career at the cutting edge of economic statecraft, the evolving toolkit it has come to present U.S. policymakers, the role he thinks it will play in our new era of major power competition, and what it may all mean for the future of the global order.

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From February 11, 2022: Over the past few weeks, Canada has been living through its own insurrectionary moment, as a series of trucker convoys have used tractor trailer trucks to occupy much of downtown Ottawa, launch protests in other major Canadian cities, and block points of entry along the country's southern border with the United States. While nominally objecting to Canadian vaccination mandates, particularly as applied to truckers, the convoy movement has at times made even more ambitious demands, including the dissolution of the Trudeau government, and it has close ties to far right-wing nationalists and ethno-nationalist organizations, both in Canada and the United States. While the convoy movement began in Canada, there are signs that is beginning to spread, with similar efforts appearing in Australia and New Zealand and intelligence reports suggesting the same may soon happen in the United States.

To put these recent developments in context, Scott R. Anderson sat down with three Canadian national security experts who have been following the convoy crisis closely: Amarnath Amarasingam, assistant professor at Queen’s University; Stephanie Carvin, associate professor at Carleton University; and Jessica Davis, president of Insight Threat Intelligence. They discussed the origins of the convoy movement, its relationship with domestic violent extremism and what it might mean for both Canada and the rest of the world.

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Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, to discuss who is likely to win the October 27 Israeli elections and what the consequences might be for wars in Gaza and Iran as well as Israeli domestic politics. They also talk about the role of small parties and how Trump might sway the vote.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Contributing Editor Alex Zerden to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:

In object lessons, Ben is not giving away his shot to call out the Daily Caller on not delivering on its headline. Julia is reminding us of her love of all things Lawfare. Scott reminds us that the world may never be the same after seeing it through the eyes of a poet. And Alex is bobbing his head to his reimagining of Bombs Over Baghdad.

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Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, and guest co-host Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick, to discuss what frontier AI companies can learn from the Oversight Board. Yoshino recently co-authored a Tech Policy Press piece with fellow Board member Ronaldo Lemos arguing that meaningful AI oversight should feature independent and representative overseers, external standards, and transparent, reasoned decisions.

The trio tests that proposal against some of the hardest questions raised by the Oversight Board’s own experience. Can a selective, precedent-setting institution provide meaningful oversight at AI scale? What gives a privately created board legitimacy to constrain decisions with global consequences? What powers would an AI oversight body actually need? And when does private oversight complement democratic regulation—and when might it merely give corporate power a new source of legitimacy?

Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.

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Lawfare Public Service Julia Curlee has written an article on the incentives facing intelligence community members when they are purged from government. Entitled “The Censorship Machine: Silencing the National Security Workforce,” and published on August 26, the piece explains why more former public servants are not speaking out about what they saw in government. She and former FBI Special Agent Mike Feinberg, now a Lawfare senior editor, joined Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the article, the pressures former officials are facing not to talk, and the sheer numbers who are keeping quiet.

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Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Andrew Yeo, senior fellow and the Korea Foundation Chair at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies and professor of politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to talk about Trump's decision to engage in talks with North Korea's leader while curtailing military exercises with South Korea. They discuss what might be expected from negotiations with North Korea, how Seoul perceives Trump's policy changes, and how curtailing military exercises will affect South Korean and U.S. capabilities.

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From September 13, 2023: On August 30, soldiers and high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Gabon seized control of government buildings and communication channels in the capital city of Libreville, detaining Gabon’s President Ali Bongo in his residence and declaring an end to the Bongo family’s 56-year rule. It was a coup—one of nine in the last three years in West and Central Africa, including in Niger just one month prior.  

LawfareManaging Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Naunihal Singh, author of the book Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, to discuss the spate of coups in the region, the origins of coups, what makes certain countries more coup-prone than others, and the rise and fall of anti-coup norms during and after the Cold War. They also dispelled several coup myths, including the myth of the coup contagion.  

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From April 11, 2025: For today's episode, LawfareForeign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Tom Karako, the Director of the Missile Defense Program at CSIS, to discuss the Trump administration's missile defense proposals known as "Golden Dome." Karako explains the purpose of Golden Dome, its feasibility and cost, the likely reactions of China and Russia, and what realistic success would look like.

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In a conversation on YouTube, LawfareEditor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus to discuss Chief Justice Roberts issuing a stay of the injunction preventing the construction of the White House ballroom, updates in the prosecution of Don Lemon, two courts of appeal ruling against acting U.S. attorneys, developments in the Kennedy Center litigation and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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Matt Abrams, technologist, investor, and co-founder of $1 Billion for Trust, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor atLawfare, to discuss the collapse of institutional trust and how AI may accelerate—or potentially help reverse—that trend.

The conversation explores Matt’s work to rebuild trust in information ecosystems, interpersonal relationships, and major institutions. Along the way, the duo examine the relationship between AI, information integrity, labor disruption, institutional legitimacy, and democratic resilience.

Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.

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