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Every episode
The Lawfare Podcast
30 episodes
Lawfare Daily: Trans and Indispensable in the Trump White House
Aug 17, 2026 · 58 min
Julia Curlee was a long-time CIA officer; she served as Vice President Mike Pence’s briefer for more than a year; and she was a senior NSC official when the second Trump administration began. She is also a trans woman. In two articles published recently—this one on Lawfare and this one today in The Atlantic—she describes the purge of the NSC in the first 70 days of Trump’s second presidency. In the Lawfare article, she talks about the institutional damage to U.S. national security. In The Atlant…
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, August 14
Aug 16, 2026 · 1 hr 50 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff to discuss a fired Justice Department prosecutor challenging his firing, a nationwide preliminary injunction against President Trump’s mail-in ballot executive order, the new birthright citizenship order, and more.. You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigati…
Lawfare Archive: The Return of the Syrian Civil War
Aug 15, 2026 · 36 min
From December 3, 2024: Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and Georgetown professor Daniel Byman sits down with Charles Lister, Director of Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism Programs at the Middle East Institute for an update on the Syrian opposition taking Aleppo and the prospects for the civil war going forward. They discuss the status of the Syrian conflict; the nature of the key group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham; why conflict happened now; and what might happen going forward. You can watch a vi…
Scaling Laws: AI Consciousness with Anil Seth
Aug 14, 2026 · 54 min
Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to examine whether artificial intelligence could ever be conscious. Drawing on Seth’s essay, “The Mythology of Conscious AI,” the pair attempt to define consciousness, develop the strongest arguments for an…
Rational Security: The "Sloop John Stamos" Edition
Aug 13, 2026 · 1 hr 31 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Alan Rozenshtein, Michael Feinberg, and Loren Voss to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “Under Pressure.” Over the past two weeks, hackers have breached the industrial control systems of water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states, prompting an urgent joint warning from federal agencies. The intruders locked operators out of internet-connected control devices, changed passwords, and in some cases ca…
Lawfare Daily: Purges and Power Plays in Domestic Ukrainian Politics
Aug 13, 2026 · 52 min
Weeks after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the fallout is still reshaping Kyiv's political landscape. Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina is joined by Danylo Mokryk, a war crimes investigator at the Kyiv Independent and the author of a YouTube blog about domestic Ukrainian Politics, to unpack what's happened since Federov's departure. They discuss the dismissal of General Syrskyi, Fedorov's rejection of a hollow "vice prime minister"…
Lawfare Daily: Trump's New Plan for Gaza, with Joel Braunold
Aug 12, 2026 · 49 min
Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Contributing Editor Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the Center Project, for the latest installment of their podcast series on developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Together, they discuss the Trump administration's new plan for Gaza, why Israel doesn't appear to be on board with it, related developments in Lebanon and the West Bank, and how it is all intersecting with Israel's impending elections. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a…
Lawfare Daily: Grokipedia’s Deafening Silence with Renée DiResta
Aug 11, 2026 · 37 min
On August 6, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sat down for a live discussion on Substack with Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a Lawfare contributing editor, about her new piece with Ronald Robertson on Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia. DiResta and Robertson found that Grokipedia’s edit-review queue froze around April 24—with over 13,000 suggestions stuck “in review” and zero resolved in the last three months—with no annou…
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, August 7
Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Trump administration requesting the Supreme Court stay the district court’s order halting the enforcement of the mail-in voting executive order, updates on where TPS stands following the Supreme Court’s order, developments in the Reflecting Pool prosecution, the D.C. Circuit blocking the ballroom construction and more. You can find…
Lawfare Archive: Guantanamo, Immigration, and the U.S. Military
Aug 9, 2026 · 38 min
From February 20, 2025: On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the expansion of facilities at Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants being deported from the United States. It was the latest—and perhaps most aggressive—move to deploy the U.S. military in pursuit of the administration's immigration policies. And it's not at all clear that there's a solid legal basis for doing it. Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and aut…
Lawfare Archive: Israel: Divided at Home and at War Yet Again
Aug 8, 2026 · 40 min
From March 28, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Natan Sachs, the Director of the Middle East Program of the Brookings Institution, to discuss Israel's turbulent domestic situation and the renewal of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. Sachs explains Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political tactics, the controversies over the budget, judicial reform and the resulting protests, and the sacking of figures like Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar. Sachs also…
Scaling Laws: Daniel Kokotajlo on AI 2040: Plan A
Aug 7, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail his policy recommendation—AI 2040: Plan A. It’s a thorough analysis of a policy pathway to delaying superintelligence, which Daniel and his co-authors think is necessary to ensure that the disruptive effects of highly-capable AI systems do not outweigh the benefits. Kevin asks Dan…
Rational Security: The “Live from Mom’s Basement” Edition
Aug 6, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min
This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett, 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 national security news stories, including: “Lateral Thinking.” Five months into Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Iran war has flared back to life—and, more importantly, spread outward. Over the pas…
Lawfare Daily: The Court Against the Courts with Steve Vladeck and Kate Klonick
Aug 6, 2026 · 1 hr
On August 5, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sat down for a live discussion on Substack with Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck to discuss his forthcoming Harvard Law Review Foreword, “The Court Against the Courts,” which chronicles institutional attacks on the lower federal courts. Vladeck argues not just that the Court failed to shield district judges from impeachment threats and harassment campaigns, but that it bears “significant responsibility” for what’s happened to them. For…
Lawfare Daily: The Rise of the Military-Technology Complex with Bernice Yeung
Aug 5, 2026 · 34 min
On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Bernice Yeung, the managing editor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism investigative reporting program and author of a recent feature, “The rise of the military-technology complex,” published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They discuss the bumpy history of Big Tech’s relationship with U.S. defense contracting, how Silicon Valley has reshaped the Pentagon, and how, in turn, the Pentagon has reshaped Silicon…
Lawfare Daily: Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, and the Short War Illusion
Aug 4, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
Some countries are susceptible to believing that with the right military strategy, they can accomplish their goals with a quick war. It's called the "Short War Illusion," and as the term suggests, it rarely works out as planned. That includes the two major conflicts currently underway in Ukraine and Iran. And it could include a potential conflict in Taiwan. On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Dara Massicot, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia & Eurasia Pr…
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, July 31
Aug 3, 2026 · 1 hr 43 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Georgetown Law Professor Peter Harrell and Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff to discuss legal challenges to President Trump’s new tariffs, recent motions by James Comey in the ‘86 47 seashell’ prosecution, developments in the Reflecting Pool prosecution, a hearing on Anthropic’s summary judgement motion challenging their supply chain risk designation, and more. You can find informat…
Lawfare Archive: Jonathan Zittrain on Controlling AI Agents
Aug 2, 2026 · 49 min
From October 17, 2024: Jonathan Zittrain, Faculty Director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to dive into his recent Atlantic article, “We Need to Control AI Agents Now.” The pair discuss what distinguishes AI agents from current generative AI tools and explore the sources of Jonathan’s concerns. They also talk about potential ways of realizing the control desired by Zittra…
Lawfare Archive: The Fate of Ukraine
Aug 1, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
From February 26, 2025: On Feb. 24, Fiona Hill (Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe), Constanze Stelzenmüller, (Director at the Center on the United States and Europe; Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe; and Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Trans-Atlantic Relations), Anastasiia Lapatina (Ukraine Fellow, Lawfare), Tyler McBrien (Managing Editor, Lawfare), and Benjamin Wittes (Editor-in-Chief, Lawfare) recorded a live…
Rational Security: The “Hugging Ukraine” Edition
Jul 31, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Tyler McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Kevin Frazier to talk through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Kyiv Peace a Chance.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Oval Office on Tuesday for closed-door talks with President Trump, roughly 17 months after their first Oval Office meeting collapsed into a televised shouting match. But this meeting went rather differently. Zelensky…
Scaling Laws: Google's Kent Walker on Regulating Frontier AI
Jul 31, 2026 · 28 min
Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google and Alphabet, joins Kevin Frazier to discuss Google's proposal for a two-pronged approach to AI governance: a Frontier AI Regulatory Organization, which like FINRA, would operate as an independent, industry-based governance body overseen by a federal agency and the application of existing laws to widely-deployed, less capable systems. The two also discuss the timing behind this proposal and its relevance in light of the recent Hugging Face / Ope…
Lawfare Daily: How Our Growing Software Dependence Threatens National Security
Jul 30, 2026 · 33 min
Lawfare Book Review Editor Jonathan Cedarbaum sits down with the Soufan Center’s Executive Director Colin Clarke and Senior Research Fellow Chad Serena, to discuss the Center’s recent report, “Closing the Gap: Software Understanding and U.S. National Security.” They explore what the authors call the “software understanding gap”—the growing disconnect between the rapid pace of software development and our ability to fully understand, assess, and secure increasingly complex systems. They discuss h…
Lawfare Daily: Dispatches from the 2026 Aspen Security Forum
Jul 29, 2026 · 39 min
On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien brings you a series of edited conversations from the 2026 Aspen Security Forum, where he sat down with host and founder of the Global Dispatches Podcast and Editor-in-Chief of UN Dispatch Mark Leon Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies Kori Schake, Lawfare Contributing Editor and the founder of Capitol Peak Strategies Alex Zerden, and President and CEO of the Bulletin of t…
Lawfare Daily: Investigating Atrocities in Post-Assad Syria
Jul 28, 2026 · 58 min
On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett speaks with Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School and a Commissioner on the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria. They talk about the Commission's work investigating atrocities that occurred after the fall of the Assad regime, how to think about Syria's new government and the international community's response to it, and what it all says about global counterterrorism strategies…
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, July 24
Jul 27, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff discussed a hearing over the subpoenas sent to New York Times reporters, a hearing in the criminal case against Nicolas Maduro, the court-appointed U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington suing over his termination, the first convening of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, and more. You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawf…
Lawfare Archive: The U.S. Bombing of Yemen and the Houthi Response
Jul 26, 2026 · 23 min
From March 21, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. Johnsen explains the rationale of the Trump administration's decision to bomb Yemen but argues that it will have little effect on the Houthis. Indeed, Johnsen contends that the Houthis are spoiling for a fight with the United States and Israel, believing that this will generate support within Yemen that will…
Lawfare Archive: Making Sense of the Doppelganger Disinformation Operation, with Thomas Rid
Jul 25, 2026 · 56 min
From October 16, 2024: In early September, the U.S. Justice Department released a trove of information about the Russian influence campaign known as “Doppelganger”—a Kremlin-backed effort that created faux versions of familiar news websites and seeding them with fake material. Just a few weeks later, the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it had received a tranche of hacked materials from inside the Doppelganger operation. Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins Universi…
Lawfare Daily: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Discuss Their Bestseller, ‘Regime Change’
Jul 24, 2026 · 53 min
New York Times White House Correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan speak with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about their recent bestseller, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” They discuss how close Trump has come to suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act, how the Supreme Court’s immunity decision has shaped his conduct, his vindictive prosecutions and desire for more, his firings of national security professionals at the behest of L…
Rational Security: The “(Deep State) Friends We Make Along the Way” Edition
Jul 23, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and Senior Editors Eric Columbus and Molly Roberts to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “The Manchurian Candidates.” In a primetime address to the nation last Thursday, July 16, President Trump declassified a trove of intelligence documents that he claimed prove America’s elections are dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference—particularly by China—and revived his long-st…
Lawfare Daily: Can State Laws Protect Against Misuse of the National Guard?
Jul 23, 2026 · 59 min
On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Liza Goitein and Joseph Nunn of the Liberty and Security Program at the Brennan Center, and Lawfare Senior Editor Loren Voss. They talk about the state laws governing the National Guard—what they allow, what they prohibit, and what it means for domestic deployments in the United States. What is the National Guard allowed to do, especially when operating in a hybrid status where the mission is defined by the president but the gove…
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