The Lawfare Podcast

From November 12, 2017: Matters Russia have been prevalent in U.S. politics since news of the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 elections first surfaced. It's time to pay some serious attention to the Russian surveillance apparatus. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the book, “The Red Web,” brings a unique interpretation of the Kremlin’s actions as an independent reporter in the very country Americans find so confusing. Special guest host Alina Polyakova, David M. Rubenstein fellow in Brookings’s Foreign Policy Program, interviewed Soldatov last week to discuss Russia’s perspective on the 2016 election meddling, the Kremlin’s surveillance operations, Edward Snowden, and much more.

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Madison Cawthorn is a Republican congressman from North Carolina. His candidacy for reelection is the subject of challenge under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—the part that says that people who engage in insurrection are disqualified from holding future office under the Constitution.

Roger Parloff has written a lengthy article on Lawfare on the Cawthorn case, entitled “Can Madison Cawthorn Be Blocked From the North Carolina Ballot as an Insurrectionist?” He joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the various ins and outs of this case, what constitutes an insurrection for purposes of the section, what Madison Cawthorn did, why he—of all members of Congress—is the one who is being subjected to this challenge, and who gets to decide who gets disqualified.

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Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company acquired CrowdTangle, a startup designed to provide insight into what content is performing well on Facebook and Instagram, and he left in October 2021, in the midst of a debate over how much information the company should make public about its platform. As the New York Times described it, CrowdTangle “had increasingly become an irritant” to Facebook’s leadership “as it revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information.”

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brandon about what we mean when we talk about transparency from social media platforms and why that transparency matters. They also discussed his work with the Congress and other regulators to advise on what legislation ensuring more openness from platforms would look like—and why it’s so hard to draft regulation that works.

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Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has been one of the most prominent voices in Congress speaking about Jan. 6 and the aftermath of the insurrection. He has a uniquely personal relationship with the violence that day: he lost his son shortly before the riot, and went on to serve both as an impeachment manager prosecuting the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and as a member of the House select committee on Jan. 6, on which he still sits. 

On February 15, the Brookings Institution welcomed Representative Raskin to discuss his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.” For this special episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we’re bringing you audio of the event. First, you’ll hear Brookings President John R. Allen in conversation with Rep. Raskin. Then, you’ll hear a panel of Brookings scholars discuss Jan. 6 and Rep. Raskin’s reflections. Brookings senior fellow Sarah Binder moderated a discussion with Brookings senior fellows Fiona Hill, Rashawn Ray, Molly Reynolds, and Brookings fellow Quinta Jurecic. 

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The Biden administration on Friday notified a court of a novel proposal to dispose of $7 billion in frozen Afghanistan assets, producing some pretty confusing media and a lot of anger. To try to unpack it, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alex Zerden, the founder and principal of Capitol Peak Strategies and the former lead of the Treasury Department's office at the U.S.-Kabul embassy, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson. They talked about what the Biden administration did and its executive order on Friday, how the media subtly got it wrong, what the implications are for pending litigation and for providing relief to the Afghan people, and whether the administration has successfully threaded a needle.

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Today on Lawfare, we’re publishing a piece by our editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic that revisits the Mueller report. Why? Because as of today, the statutes of limitations on potential obstruction charges against Donald Trump are beginning to expire.

Trump's attorney general declined to prosecute, but we have heard nothing from the current Department of Justice about what, if anything, it is thinking about potential obstruction charges against the now former president. Natalie Orpett sat down with Ben and Quinta to talk about why that may be, what could be going on inside DOJ, and what we can expect from Attorney General Garland.

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From January 16, 2016: Last week, we hated on bitcoin. This week we give it some love. This week, Brookings hosted a discussion on Bitcoin and the technology that undergirds the currency, specifically focusing on the promise of the distributed-ledger. The panel featured David Wessel, Michael Barr, Brad Peterson, Barry Silbert, and Margaret Liu, on how the blockchain could revolutionize payment flows and reduce the cost of financial transactions, all while securing information and enhancing privacy. They also tackle some of the most pressing policy questions facing the technology—from consumer protection to terrorists' finances—and how those tensions can be addressed.It's a relatively positive take on Bitcoin and its future potential and an argument for why you should buy back your Bitcoin if you sold it after last week's show featuring Lawfare's Bitcoin skeptic, Nick Weaver.

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From January 9, 2016: This week we have Nick Weaver on the show. Nick's a regular Lawfare contributor, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and as you’ll see, quite the Bitcoin skeptic. Nick walks Ben through what exactly Bitcoin is, answering whether the platform is really a financial opportunity of historic proportions, the massive criminal problem law enforcement officials have suggested, or something else entirely: a waste of everyone's time and money. He also outlines some of the design flaws he sees in Bitcoin and why those flaws, which many in the Bitcoin community view as important features, will actually lead to the platform’s eventual downfall.

It’s a discussion of Ponzi schemes, the limits of the blockchain, and the future of international currency transactions.

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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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The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the most popular podcast in the world—and it’s been at the center of a weeks-long controversy over COVID misinformation and content moderation. After Rogan invited on a guest who told falsehoods about the safety of COVID vaccines, outrage mounted toward Spotify, the podcasting and music streaming company that recently signed an exclusive deal with Rogan to distribute his show. Spotify came under pressure to intervene, as nearly 300 experts sent the company a letter demanding it take action, and musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music from Spotify’s streaming service. And the controversy only seems to be growing. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ashley Carman, a senior reporter at The Verge who writes the newsletter Hot Pod, covering the podcast and audio industry. She’s broken news on Spotify’s content guidelines and Spotify CEO’s Daniel Ek’s comments to the company’s staff, and we couldn’t think of a better person to talk to about this slow-moving disaster. How has Spotify responded to the complaints over Rogan, and what does that tell us about how the company is thinking about its responsibilities in curating content? What’s Ashley’s read on the state of content moderation in the podcast industry more broadly? And … is this debate even about content moderation at all?

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Last month, a court in Germany convicted a senior Assad government official for a crime against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison for activities overseeing detention centers in Syria, where the government interrogated and tortured suspected antigovernment activists. The case was unique, not just for the profile of the defendant, but for the fact that the crime had no nexus to Germany. Instead, it's an example of what scholars call a universal jurisdiction case. In these cases, a country like Germany exercises criminal jurisdiction over certain crimes like war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. A collection of European countries, as well as Argentina, have incorporated provisions like this into their criminal code, and universal jurisdiction cases have served to bring justice for offenses committed in a range of conflicts across the world. 

To talk through the most recent developments and the phenomenon of universal jurisdiction cases, Jacob Schulz sat down with Hayley Evans, a research fellow working on Afghanistan projects at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and Rule of Law.

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The House of Representatives last week passed the COMPETES Act, its counterpart to a Senate bill last year on competitiveness with China. What's in the bill? What would it do? How similar is it to the Senate bill? And how close are we to a major piece of China legislation?

Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Susan Thornton, a retired U.S. diplomat who is currently a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School and a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center, and Jordan Schneider, the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter. They talked about the legislation, the prospects for reconciling it for the Senate bill, and whether this is a real start or just window dressing.

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Last week was scary for historically black colleges and universities, 17 of which received bomb threats that caused disruptions, building closures and class cancellations. The FBI is investigating, but we don't know a lot about what happened. To go over what we do know, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Andy McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI who ran his share of counter-terrorism investigations, and Yasmin Cader, a deputy legal director at the ACLU and the director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality. They talked about what we know about the investigation, how these investigations take place, and the tensions they involve between the FBI and communities of color. They also talked about the role of HBCUs and why people may be targeting them, whether the FBI is well positioned to investigate hate crimes, and what it needs to do to better position itself for this mission. They even talked about Jan. 6 and what the FBI's preparedness for that event says about its preparedness now.

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From February 23, 2021: For more than a week now, Texas has been struggling with a massive power outage caused by record low temperatures. Millions have been without power, heat and running water, and at least dozens have been confirmed to have died as a result. All states are confronting extreme weather, but Texas is unique in that its electricity is almost completely independent from the rest of the United States' grid. This has at times lowered costs and increased innovation in the Texas energy markets, but as the current crisis shows, Texas's energy exceptionalism comes at a cost. Alexandra Klass is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a nationally recognized expert on energy law and policy who recently wrote about the Texas energy crisis for Lawfare. Alan Rozenshtein spoke with her about the current situation and the future of energy policy, both for Texas and for the United States.

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From October 28, 2019: President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, died in a raid conducted by U.S. Special Operation Forces. The president used highly unusual language to describe the raid, including that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog.” He also stated that the U.S. would be “leaving soldiers to secure the oil.” Scott R. Anderson and Dan Byman join Benjamin Wittes to discuss the raid, what it means for the future of the Islamic State, Trump’s speech and what it all means for the broader region.

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Last night, U.S. forces in Northern Syria killed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi who until yesterday was the current leader of ISIS. It was an operation in which at least 13 people, including civilians, were killed, apparently when al-Qurayshi detonated a bomb that destroyed the building they were in. 

What are the implications for the future of ISIS, for the future of Syria and for the future of the U.S. military, which is supposedly at peace these days? To chew it over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson, and Hassan Hassan, editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine. They talked about who al-Qurayshi was, what we know about him, who on the ground was helping the United States, the future of Syria and its new political landscape, and what this all means for Joe Biden.

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We talk a lot on this show about the responsibility of major tech platforms when it comes to content moderation. But what about problems the platforms can’t—or won’t—fix? Tracy Chou’s solution involves going around platforms entirely and creating tools that give power back to users to control their own experience. She’s the engineer behind Block Party, an app that allows Twitter users to protect themselves against online harassment and abuse. It’s a fine-tuned solution to a problem that a lot of Twitter users struggle with, especially women and particularly women of color. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Tracy about her work developing Block Party and how the persistent lack of diversity in Silicon Valley contributes to an environment where users have little protection against harassment. They also talked about what it’s like working with the platforms that Block Party and other apps like it are seeking to improve. And they discussed what content moderation problems these kinds of user-driven tools might help solve–and which they won’t.

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Last month, the New York Times ran a story about YouTube videos promoting tourism to China and promoting messages sympathetic to the Chinese government. The accounts are a part of a broader network of profiles on Twitter, YouTube and other social media, spreading pro-Beijing narratives. To talk through the story and what to make of the accounts, Jacob Schulz sat down with one of the story's authors, Paul Mozur, a reporter at the New York Times, and Darren Linvill, an associate professor at the University of Clemson. They talked through who exactly these accounts are, what messages they promote and how to think about what impact they're having.

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Nearly six months have passed since the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan. As the country faces down a failing economy and looming humanitarian catastrophe, the new Taliban regime is still struggling with what it means to govern, both internally within the country and externally in its relations with the broader international community.

To get a sense of the state of play in Afghanistan, Scott R. Anderson sat down with a panel of experts: Laurel Miller, director of the International Crisis Group’s Asia Program; Andrew Watkins, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace; and Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer at the American University in Afghanistan and a visiting scholar at The New School. They talked about the Taliban's approach to governing, its changing relationships with the outside world and what it all means for Afghanistan's future.

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What’s the best historical analogue for the American political situation today? Often, pundits will compare our current age of rising polarization and increasing political violence to the era preceding the American Civil War. If they’re alarmed and looking for a European analogy, sometimes they’ll point to Weimar Germany. But another point of comparison from prewar Europe might be more apt: the French Third Republic, from the late 19th century leading up to World War II.

Lawfare Managing Editor Jacob Schulz and Quinta Jurecic spoke with John Ganz, who writes the Substack newsletter Unpopular Front and is working on a book about American politics in the 1990s. He’s written in depth about the political crises roiling the Third Republic, from the Dreyfus Affair to February 6, 1934—a violent riot outside the French National Assembly, which has striking echoes in January 6. So why is France a more apt comparison than Germany or Italy? What can studying the Third Republic, and February 6, tell us about January 6 and the rise of an American far right? And what might we learn from the striking differences between how French civil society responded to February 6, as opposed to the more muted American response to a similar riot almost 90 years later?

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From July 28, 2020: For a while, there have been large numbers of alleged former Islamic State state fighters and affiliates detained by the Iraqi government and by autonomous authorities in Syria. The fate of these detainees—and the more than 60,000 people in refugee affiliated with the men who live in refugee camps in the region—remains a pressing national security issue for countries in the region, as well as the United States and its Western allies. To talk about the situation, Jacob Schulz spoke with Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and professor of law at the University of Texas; Vera Mironova, a research fellow at Harvard and, among other things, author of a recent Lawfare post on trials of Islamic State fighters in Iraq; and Leah West, a lecturer at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University and a fellow at the McCain Institute. They talked about how the trials have gone in Iraq and Syria; how the U.S., Canada and European countries have responded to the situation; and what lessons can be drawn from U.S. experiences with post-9/11 detention and trials of suspected terrorists.

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From January 30, 2016: Last week at The Brookings Institution, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer participated in a discussion with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Newsweek’s Dahlia Lithwick about his new book, "The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities." During their conversation, Justice Breyer provides an overview of how in a globalizing world, the steady operation of American laws depends more on the cooperation of other jurisdictions than at any other time. He also examines how the Court's decisions regarding presidential power in national security have evolved throughout American history, and weighs how the Court can balance national security objectives in an increasingly connected world.

Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, introduced Justice Breyer and the panel.

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Late last week and early this week saw fighting between Islamic State fighters and Syrian democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbreak of a Kurdish prison containing significant numbers of alleged Islamic State fighters. The makeshift jail housed Syrians, Iraqis, and also alleged fighters from Western Europe and North Africa. It's the most significant jailbreak since ISIS’s territorial defeat—and a major national security story that's gone under the radar.

To talk it all through and to think about the scale of the damage and all of the things that led to this point, Jacob Schulz talked with Leah West, assistant professor of international affairs at Carleton University, and Louisa Loveluck, the Baghdad bureau chief at the Washington Post. They broke down what's happened so far and what to make of it all. 

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As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads Institute. Their goal is to serve as a watchdog for the ad industry, and they’ve just started a campaign to let companies know—and call them out—when their ads are showing up next to content published by far-right figures like Steve Bannon who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. So what is it about the ads industry that makes things so opaque, even for the companies paying to have their ads appear online? What techniques do Claire and Nandini use to trace ad distribution? And how do advertisers usually respond when Check My Ads alerts them that they’re funding “brand unsafe” content?

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What if we declared an end to the costly system of how we classify national security information in the United States? Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, poses this question in her article “Secrecy’s End.” Stephanie Pell talked with Oona about some of our classification system’s most corrosive effects on our democratic system of governance and some proposals she has for reforming it. 

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Over the last year, our national dialogue about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has become ever more focused on politics, congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions. But what about the people who were actually on the front lines on Jan. 6?

Natalie Orpett sat down with Susan Dominus and Luke Broadwater, who recently published an article in The New York Times Magazine called, “The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6.” The article tells the stories of some of the law enforcement officers who were there that day, many of whom continue to experience the impact of Jan. 6 in profoundly personal ways. They talked about what they learned through their reporting and what it means for ongoing efforts to respond to the attack.

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As the prospect of broader election reform has grown more remote, bipartisan discussions have increasingly come to center on one long standing law: the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Designed to regulate the process through which Congress counts electoral votes, ambiguities in this antiquated law have been a frequent source of anxiety, most recently in the wake of the 2020 election, when many feared outgoing President Trump would successfully capitalize on them to prevent the certification of his loss. To discuss the Electoral Count Act and its potential reform, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Ned Foley, a professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a leading expert in election law. They discussed the ordinance of the act, a recent congressional report outlining possible reforms and what limits the Constitution may put on what reform can accomplish. 

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From April 4, 2015: With a tenuous ceasefire holding in Ukraine, we asked Fiona Hill onto the show to discuss the man behind the unrest: Vladimir Putin. Hill is the co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings. On the Lawfare Podcast, she tackles the hard questions about Putin. Who exactly is he? What does he want? Is he an unhinged madman obsessed with personal appearances or a shrewd realist with a nuanced understanding of the geopolitical challenges his country faces? And how should the West respond to Russian aggression based on what we know about its leader?

It's an important look at an often caricatured but rarely understood man.

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From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the concept of "executive privilege," Margaret Taylor sat down with Mark Rozell, the Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the author of "Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability," which chronicles the history of executive privilege in its many forms since the founding of the United States. They talked about what executive privilege is, what is new in the Trump administration's handling of congressional demands for information, and what it all means for the separation of powers in our constitutional democracy.

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case Trump v. Thompson, denying Donald Trump's motion to block the National Archives from producing his documents to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. To drill down, Natalie Orpett talked with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson and Professor Jonathan Shaub of the University of Kentucky College of Law. They discussed the dispute between Trump and the committee, the central issue of executive privilege and what it all means for the committee’s investigation.

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In December 2020, ten state attorneys general sued Google, alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The lawsuit is ongoing, and just this January, new allegations in the states’ complaint were freshly unsealed: the states have accused Google of tinkering with its ad auctions to mislead publishers and advertisers and expand its own power in the marketplace. (Google told the Wall Street Journal that the complaint was “full of inaccuracies and lacks legal merit.”)

The complaint touches on a crucial debate about the online advertising industry: does it, well, work? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Tim Hwang, Substack’s general counsel and the author of the book “Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet.” Tim argues that online advertising, which underpins the structure of the internet as we know it today, is a house of cards—that advertisers aren’t nearly as good as they claim at monetizing our attention, even as they keep marketing it anyway. So how worried should we be about this structure collapsing? If ads can’t convince us to buy things, what does that mean about our understanding of the internet? And what other possibilities are there for designing a better online space?

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Bryce Klehm sat down with Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Professor Brands is the author of the new book, “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today.” He is also the author of a new article in Foreign Affairs, “The Overstretched Superpower,” which argues that the United States might have more rivals than it can handle. They covered a range of topics, including the origins of containment, the rise of Sovietology in academia and what the Biden administration could learn from the Cold War.

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A crucial component of the story of Jan. 6 involves what members of Congress were doing on that day. What kinds of conversations did Republican lawmakers have with President Trump? To what extent did any members of Congress play a role in engineering the riot itself? These are some of the questions that the House committee on Jan. 6 is investigating—and it’s seeking information directly from members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. So far, McCarthy and the other lawmakers who have received requests from the committee have vowed not to cooperate.

So will the committee subpoena fellow members of the House? What obstacles might it run into if it did? And what does it say that the committee is taking this step? Quinta Jurecic spoke with Mike Stern, a former senior counsel to the House of Representatives, and Lawfare senior editor and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds about the questions of law and norms raised by the latest turns in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation. 

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From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. And that's aside from the fact that recent news reports indicate that a former Guantanamo detainee was responsible for an ISIS suicide bombing in Mosul.

With this in mind, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul to discuss his time as special envoy, President Obama's failure to close the detention center, and what’s next for Gitmo under President Trump.

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From August 14, 2020: On July 30, former President Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of Congressman John Lewis, threw his weight behind ending the Senate filibuster if necessary to pursue a voting rights agenda. His comments brought to the forefront a debate that has been simmering for years within the Democratic party. Margaret Taylor spoke with Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid during the Obama administration, and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds, about the history of the filibuster, how it actually works and what the consequences could be if a Democratic-controlled Senate actually got rid of it.

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From October 15, 2019: A couple of weeks ago, Lawfare and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law sponsored a series of panels at the Texas Tribune Festival. For this episode, we bring you the audio of our Tribfest event on domestic terrorism—what it is, how we define it, how we outlaw it, and what more we can do about it.

David Priess sat down with Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and former U.S. government officials Lisa Monaco, Mary McCord, and Nick Rasmussen.

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There's a lot going on in Russia's near-abroad, the countries on the periphery of the Russian Federation. There’s a war brewing in Ukraine, with talks in Geneva between Russia and the West seeming to fail this week. There are also Russian troops in Kazakhstan, there at the invitation of the autocratic Kazakh government in response to protests over fuel prices.

To check in on the situation, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Alina Polyakova of the Center for European Policy Analysis; Alex Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare; Ambassador William Courtney, who served as ambassador to Kazakhstan; and Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator. They talked about what's going on in Kazakhstan, the failure of the diplomatic process in Geneva, and the war that seems to be coming in Ukraine.

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Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published an analysis of how popular podcasters on the American right used their shows to spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. These are the same issues that led tech platforms to crack down on misinformation in the runup to the election—and yet, the question of whether podcast apps have a responsibility to moderate audio content on their platforms has largely flown under the radar. 

Why is that? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked through this puzzle with Valerie and Chris. They discussed their findings about podcasts and the “big lie,” why it’s so hard to detect misinformation in podcasting, and what we should expect when it comes to content moderation in podcasts going forward. 

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On Monday, January 10, a federal district court in DC heard oral argument in Thompson v. Trump. The case considers civil claims against Donald Trump and others for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It raises a number of complicated legal issues, including whether Trump is immune from these kinds of claims, whether it's possible to establish a conspiracy among the perpetrators of the attack and how the First Amendment factors into all of this.

Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein to discuss the state of the law, the main challenges for each side and what we can garner from Monday’s five-hour proceedings. 

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On December 21, Harvard University chemist Dr. Charles Lieber was convicted of making false statements and other tax offenses in connection with his participation in the Chinese Thousand Talents program. Lieber’s case got a lot of attention, both because of his profile as a well known researcher at Harvard University, and because of the case’s connection with the U.S. government's occasionally controversial three-year-old program called the China Initiative. The program was unveiled in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and has been used by the Justice Department to investigate and charge a variety of wrongdoings connected with the Chinese government, economic espionage, research security, and other issues.

To talk through the Lieber case and the China Initiative generally, Jacob Schulz sat down with Emily Weinstein, a research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and Margaret Lewis, a professor at Seton Hall Law School. Emily and Margaret have written extensively about the China Initiative and provide thoughts on the Lieber case, as well as what to make of the initiative as a whole.

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Last week marked one year since the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, in which a mob of Trump supporters attacked Congress in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election as president of the United States. On Thursday, the anniversary itself, Lawfare editors appeared in a Brookings event titled, “The January 6 insurrection: One year later.” Lawfare’s editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a panel that included Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff, Seamus Hughes of the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, and Katie Benner, a New York Times reporter who covers the Department of Justice. On today's episode of The Lawfare Podcast, we’re bringing you a lightly edited audio recording of that event, which features discussion of the role of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, Attorney General Garland's recent remarks about the Jan. 6 prosecutions, and what happened with the Capitol Police. 

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From January 3, 2020: The American drone strike last night that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, is a seismic event in U.S.-Iranian relations—and for the broader Middle East. We put together an emergency podcast, drawing on the resources of both Lawfare and the Brookings Institution and reflecting the depth of the remarkable collaboration between the two. Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney, terrorism and Middle East scholar Daniel Byman, Middle East scholar and former State Department official Tamara Cofman Wittes and former State Department lawyer and Baghdad embassy official Scott Anderson—who is also a Lawfare senior editor—came together the morning after the strike for a diverse discussion of the reasons for the operation, the vast repercussions of it, the legality of the strike and the role Soleimani played in the Iranian regime.

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We're bringing you the first episode of Lawfare’s new narrative series, The Aftermath, which we released this past Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hosted by Lawfare’s executive editor, Natalie Orpett, and produced in partnership with Goat Rodeo, The Aftermath is a multipart series that focuses on what our democracy has been doing over the last year to confront, respond to, and deliver accountability for Jan. 6. The series explores the many questions that have arisen in the aftermath of the insurrection and how our democratic institutions are trying to answer those questions.

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Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff has a piece out on Lawfare, entitled “The Conspirators: The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Jan. 6.” It is an examination of the major conspiracy indictments flowing from the January 6 investigation. Both sets of indictments focus on far right militia organizations that participated in the attack—one set on the group called the Oath Keepers; the other on a group called the Proud Boys. In the article, Parloff argues that the Proud Boys in particular played a pivotal role in the insurrection of January 6, being the first to commit violence, the first to actually breach the Capitol barricades, and the first to destroy property. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about the indictments, why these cases are significant, what they suggest about the dynamics of January 6, and why there are so few people charged with conspiracy among the hundreds who are charged in connection with the day's events.

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One year ago, a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power as the president of the United States. The internet played a central role in the insurrection: Trump used Twitter to broadcast his falsehoods about the integrity of the election and gin up excitement over January 6, and rioters coordinated ahead of time on social media and posted pictures afterwards of the violence. In the wake of the riot, a crackdown by major social media platforms ended with Trump suspended or banned from Facebook, Twitter and other outlets.

So how have platforms been dealing with content moderation issues in the shadow of the insurrection? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic sat down for a discussion with Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz. To frame their conversation, they looked to the recent Twitter ban and Facebook suspension of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—which took place almost exactly a year after Trump’s ban.

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Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy program at Brookings and an Iran specialist; Dan Byman, terrorism expert, Middle East scholar and Lawfare’s foreign policy editor; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and Brookings fellow, to talk about what two years has wrought. They discussed whether the threat of terrorism and escalation in response to the strike was overstated, if U.S. interests were harmed in Iraq as a result of the strike, and what may have kept the Iranian regime from taking stronger action than it eventually took.

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Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensure that police investigations aren't compromised and state and local officials are getting candid advice from their staff, government secrecy directly threatens government transparency and thus democratic accountability. Alan Rozenshtein spoke about these issues with Christina Koningisor, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of “Secrecy Creep” a recently published article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, along with the Lawfare post summarizing her work.

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As is our annual tradition, we're bringing you the Lawfare “Ask Us Anything” episode. You, the listeners, sent over your questions, and we, the Lawfare staff and Lawfare contributors, have got answers. Julian Ku, Alan Rozenshtein, Benjamin Wittes, Natalie Orpett, Scott R. Anderson and David Priess tackle questions about the South China Sea, Jan. 6, and an interesting collection of questions about elected officials, the executive branch and constitutional issues.

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From February 11, 2020: Afshon Ostovar is the associate chair for research and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is also the author of "Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards." The IRGC has been in the news of late because of the killing of the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Ostovar about the fallout from the Soleimani killing, how it is all playing in Iran, and why things are so quiet. They talked about whether people made a mountain out of a molehill at the time the killing happened, or whether the blowback just hasn't happened yet.

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From April 22, 2017: Over the past year, Lawfare has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of sextortion, a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases, onto the podcast to discuss her work. Now, we’re pleased to feature Mona on the podcast once again with audio of her talk at the George Washington University Law School on prosecuting sextortion.

If you’re interested in reading our Brookings Institution reports on sextortion, you can find them here and here.

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