The Lawfare Podcast

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down withSenior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the confirmation hearing for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, subpoenas sent to New York Times reporters, a judicial opinion voiding President Trump’s settlement with the IRS, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Tru...

From August 25, 2023: Earlier this month, there was big trouble in little Marion, Kansas, where an entire police department raided the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned newspaper about 60 miles north of Wichita, with seven employees and a circulation of about 4,000.

To discuss this alarming violation of press freedom, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Caitlin Vogus, Deputy Director of Advoc...

From February 3, 2025: Nema Milaninia, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and a current partner at the law firm King & Spalding, joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to discuss legislation in the U.S. Congress and recent executive actions taken by the Trump administration to, once again, sanction the International Criminal Court. 

Mila...

On July 17 at 11am ET, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Michael Feinberg and Molly Roberts and Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta to discuss President Trump's primetime address on July 16 where he discussed elections.

Lawfare Senior Editor Renée DiResta sits down with Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Elissa Redmiles, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. They examine the people who create AI-generated sexual content and whether prominent technical proposals can actually prevent AI systems from generating exploitative content.

For further reading:

• Jaron Mink, Lucy Qin, and Elissa M. Redmiles, “‘Unlimited...

This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Lawfare 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 news in foreign policy, including:

• “Truce or Consequences.” The fragile ceasefire that had paused the U.S...

On today’s episode, Lawfare’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks to Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about how the Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy sites are shifting attitudes towards the war inside Russia. They also discuss Maria’s latest report, co-authored with Jade McGlynn, called “Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as th...

On this episode, Senior Editor Kate Klonick speaks with Steve Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about his recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists essay on AI targeting systems. Feldstein argues that the conventional wisdom about AI warfare has it backwards: the technology's battlefield debut in Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza is real and consequential, but AI targeting is not a model you download&...

Lawfare Contributing Editor Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Eric Ciaramella, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, to take stock of the U.S.-led negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. They discuss the improvements in Ukraine's position, the structure of negotiations, territorial questions, and security commitments to Ukraine.

To re...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down withSenior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Justice Department settling a second suit with Michael Flynn, developments in the E. Jean Carroll litigation, the D.C. Circuit denying a stay pending appeal of the order to take Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center, and more.

From October 30, 2024: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has taken a leading role in coordinating efforts to secure the 2024 election—from ensuring the physical security of election workers, to protecting election systems from cyber threats, to identifying foreign influence campaigns and preparing for deepfakes. With a week until Election Day, Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Eugenia Lostri spoke wi...

From April 10, 2025: On today's episode, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett spoke with Tara Varma, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the latest in French politics. On March 31, far-right leader Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement and banned from politics, though polling showed her in the lead for the 2027 presidential elections. In the last few weeks, current French president Emmanuel Macron has been carving out a p...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a tutorial fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. They speak about Véliz’s paradigm-shifting, free-ranging new book, “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI,” ...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief and co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editors Anna Bower and Michael Feinberg to talk through the latest in national security news, including:

• “Humphrey’s Executioner.” On June 29, the Supreme Court closed out its term with a trio of decisions on the president’s power to fire officials at supposedly independent agencies. In Tr...

For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Vox Senior Correspondent Joshua Keating to discuss his special new series on how artificial intelligence is impacting the use and development of nuclear weapons. Together, they explore what AI may mean for nuclear command and control moving forward, how it is impacting nuclear arms development, how these trends are intersecting the breakdown of the global n...

Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Loren Voss and Molly Roberts about the limits the Constitution and statutes put on the use of military in U.S. elections—as well as the arguments an eager executive might make to skirt those restrictions. They discuss how the history of domestic deployment law shows that legislators have long believed voting deserves special protecti...

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Lawfare Senior Editor Mike Feinberg and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which was created to oversee the intelligence community. But much like the IC itself, the ODNI is somewhat mysterious to the general public—which makes it difficult to tell when something is going wrong. They talk a...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down withSenior Editors Eric Columbus, Kate Klonick, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s rulings in the birthright citizenship case and Slaughter, indictments over purported vandalism at the Reflecting Pool, former CIA Director John Brennan’s civil suit against the Department of Justice, geofencing warrants,...

From September 1, 2023: The National Intelligence Strategy is out, and David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, sat down to talk about it with Michael Collins, the acting head of the National Intelligence Council. They discussed many aspects of U.S. national security, defense, cyber, and intelligence strategy, including the increasing geopolitical significance of non-state entities, and even the meaning of the word intelligence it...