The Lawfare Podcast

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:"The Xi-Quel." This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for a three-day state visit—his first to the U.S. capital in more than a decade, and the second Trump-Xi summit of 2026 after the president’s own trip to Beijing in May. The pageantry will be considerable: Trump plans to greet Xi personally at Joint Base Andrews, followed by a Rose Garden honor guard, a bilate...

For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign 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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.Support this show http://supporter.a...

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 Lawfare Contributing 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 t...

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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.pa...

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor 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.To r...

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...

From July 23, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson shares some of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week. First he sat down Shashank Joshi, the Defence Editor for The Economist to discuss the new dynamics surrounding European security, as well as the path toward (and implications of) a Europe less dependent on the United States for its security.Scott then talked with Iris Ferguson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was until r...

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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Senior Editors Kevin Frazier and Roger Parloff, 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 national security news stories, including:“P(doom) and Gloom.” Last week, a wonky corner of the tech world became national news when Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher, resigned from Anthropic and posted a viral thread accusing his employer and its rival OpenAI of racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our live...

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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.Support th...

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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a L...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing 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 internation...

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor 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 ad...

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 "...

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.  ...

On today’s episode, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sits down with five members of the Lawfare team—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...

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:Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee gives her informed analysis of whether we should get rid of the President’s Daily Brief.Senior Editor Mike Feinberg has strong feelings about who is the bad guy in the Bourne movies.Senior Editor Molly Roberts cooks up a theory on whether we should move concerns about Trump’s plans for Gr...

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...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing 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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Ma...

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor 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...