The Lawfare Podcast

Supreme Court advocate Michael Dreeben walks through nearly a century of Fourth Amendment law to explain why a 40-year-old privacy statute can't keep up with modern technology.

The Rational Security panel tackles three intersecting national security stories: the federal court ruling blocking the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation against Anthropic, the economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz closure during the Iran conflict, and the Artemis 2 moon mission.

Historian John Gazvinian traces U.S.-Iran relations back to the 1720s, when colonial American newspapers devoted up to a third of their pages to news about the Persian Empire.

Joel Braunold of The Center Project joins Lawfare's Scott Anderson to break down the surge of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has escalated to near-daily attacks even as the world's attention remains focused on the Iran conflict.

Lawfare contributing editor Renee DiResta hosts a conversation with researcher Nathaniel Lubin and economist Helene Widmer about two complementary studies on how social media shapes political opinion.

Benjamin Wittes and senior editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff break down a week of Trump administration legal battles, leading with a 43-page ruling in Anthropic v.

Tom Kent, former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, joins Benjamin Wittes to explain what the Trump administration's executive order dismantling the U.S.

Three months after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria’s interim president Ahmad al-Shara has built the framework for a political transition while steadily consolidating personal authority in ways that echo Erdogan’s Turkey.

Two intelligence community veterans assess the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began in late February, examining the gap between the administration's maximalist stated objectives and the realistic outcomes achievable through airpower alone.

Retired Major General Linda Singh and law professor Chris Mirasola break down why the legal framework governing domestic military deployments is riddled with gaps that norms historically papered over but can no longer contain.

The Lawfare team covers three national security stories: landmark jury verdicts against Meta for harming children through algorithmic design, the congressional fight over the SAVE America Act and DHS funding, and the rise and risks of open-source intelligence (OSINT) in online media.

Tom Kemp, executive director of California's privacy agency CalPrivacy, explains the state's new DELETE Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP), which lets Californians submit a single request to have their data deleted from all 580-plus registered data brokers instead of contacting each one individually.

Three weeks into a U.S.-Israeli conventional war against Iran, Lawfare's Ariane Tabatabai and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Elisa Catalano assess how Iran has managed to hold the Strait of Hormuz at risk while lowering its own costs and raising them for the global economy.

Lawfare's panel of Benjamin Wittes, Roger Parloff, Kate Klonick, and Molly Roberts breaks down the federal court hearing on Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction against the Department of Defense over its supply chain risk designation.

Benjamin Wittes and five Lawfare senior editors cover a packed week of Trump administration legal battles, from the Anthropic v.

Three legal analysts break down the Supreme Court oral arguments over the law requiring TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a U.S.

A $42 million jury verdict held government contractor CACI liable for conspiracy to commit torture at Abu Ghraib prison, marking the first successful accountability case against a private security firm for war-on-terror abuses.

A 17-page draft executive order has been circulating that would have the president declare a national emergency to assert federal control over U.S.

Three weeks into the US and Israeli air campaign against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to most shipping, crude oil has topped $100 a barrel, and European allies are refusing to help reopen it.

Former DOJ national security prosecutor Troy Edwards argues that Iran has both the capability and the historical pattern to retaliate against the United States on American soil, while the agencies tasked with preventing such attacks have been gutted of leadership and experience.

Former FBI officials Michael Feinberg and Derek Piper break down the distinction between counterintelligence and counterespionage, two disciplines routinely conflated in media coverage following the firing of an FBI squad focused on Iranian matters.

Hanna Nott, Eurasia director at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, explains how the Russia-Iran relationship is built on decades of mutual mistrust despite their current cooperation, and how the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is creating both short-term benefits and long-term anxieties for Moscow.

Judge James Boasberg quashes grand jury subpoenas targeting Fed Chair Jerome Powell, finding abundant evidence the subpoenas were issued to pressure Powell into lowering interest rates or resigning rather than to investigate any actual crime.

Kevin Frazier interviews Elliot Jones of the Ada Lovelace Institute about why current methods for testing AI systems remain inadequate for the scale of risk they present.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll discusses his book The Achilles Trap, which uses Saddam Hussein's own tape-recorded cabinet meetings to reconstruct why the Iraqi dictator sacrificed his regime over a weapons program that no longer existed.

Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute walks through the dramatic transformation of Syria over the past 15 months, from the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 through the transitional government's rapid international re-engagement to the military conflict with the SDF in early 2026 that reshaped the country's internal power map.

The Lawfare team examines three national security stories: Anthropic's dual lawsuits against the Department of Defense over its designation as a supply chain risk for refusing to remove ethical guardrails from its Claude AI model, Iran's historical pattern of asymmetric retaliation and the possibility of overseas terrorism during the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign, and the FBI's new investigations into 2020 election fraud allegations in Fulton County and Maricopa County ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Former Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matt Olsen tells Benjamin Wittes that the FBI agents most experienced in countering Iranian terrorism inside the United States were fired days before the bombing of Tehran began.

Iranian Shahed drones are large, slow, and light up radar like a Christmas tree, yet they have proven difficult for the U.S.

The FBI's active investigations into nihilistic violent extremism have jumped from roughly 100 to 425 in about a year, driven by online groups like 764 that combine ritualized child sexual exploitation with accelerationist violence.

Lawfare's legal panel covers several active cases in the Trump administration orbit, including a new lawsuit challenging TikTok's qualified divestiture, the DOD's supply chain risk designation of Anthropic, 30 additional arrests in the Don Lemon case in Minnesota, and the DOJ's abrupt reversal on dropping appeals in the law firm executive order cases.

Two national security law professors dissect the legal authority behind the U.S.

Recorded in October 2024 and resurfaced as a Lawfare Archive episode after U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began in February 2026, this roundtable discussion features Firas Maksad, Nathan Sachs, and Scott Anderson unpacking Israel's escalating campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon — from the pager and walkie-talkie attacks to the killing of Hassan Nasrallah.

What if AI could make its own regulation nearly free to comply with?

The Lawfare team devotes a full episode to analyzing President Trump's decision to launch a major military campaign against Iran, including the strike that killed Ayatollah Khamenei, marking the most significant military action of the second Trump administration.

A group of about a dozen left-wing activists converged on an ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas on July 4, 2025 for what defendants say was a noise demonstration — but shots were fired, a police officer was struck, and now nine defendants face charges including material support to terrorism under 18 USC 2339A, a statute typically reserved for cases with foreign terrorist organization connections.

A panel of Georgetown Law professors breaks down the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down all IEPA-based tariffs, finding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose revenue-generating tariffs on imports.

The Lawfare Podcast examines the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, following Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's January memorandum requiring that military AI contracts permit all lawful uses of the systems.

The Lawfare team covers a superseding indictment in the City Church protest case that expanded defendants from 10 to 39 while leaving factual inaccuracies and legal weaknesses uncorrected, and the FBI firing of all agents who worked on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

Lawfare analysts discuss confirmed U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who ruled for 37 years since 1989 and oversaw Iran's nuclear program development, proxy network expansion, and recent killing of 7,000-32,000 protesters.

Stephanie Leutert of the Mexico Security Initiative at UT Austin joins Benjamin Wittes to lay out the scale of violence in Mexico and Central America, where at least 150,000 Mexicans have been murdered and another 30,000 have disappeared since 2005.

Presented as a Lawfare Archive episode following the Supreme Court's February 2026 ruling in Learning Resources v.

University of Texas law professor Lee Kowarski introduces the concept of patronage pardons, presidential pardons that serve a dual function of sparing recipients from punishment while signaling to future supporters that loyalty will be rewarded with legal protection.

Stuart Casey-Maslen of the Geneva Academy presents findings from a comprehensive annual report covering major armed conflicts from July 2024 through 2025, concluding that international humanitarian law is approaching a breaking point though not yet existential crisis.

The Lawfare team breaks down a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that struck down Trump's IEEPA-based tariffs, the killing of Jalisco cartel leader El Mencho by Mexican forces under U.S.

Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes and senior editor Anna Bower break down the evidentiary hearing in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia vindictive prosecution case, held in the Middle District of Tennessee on February 26, 2026.

Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes speaks with Iran policy expert Ari Tabatabai and nuclear analyst Eric Brewer about whether the U.S.

Guardian journalist Jason Burke discusses his new book The Revolutionists with Lawfare's Michael Feinberg, tracing how 1970s leftist terrorism in Europe and Palestinian nationalist violence shared surprising ideological overlap with the early Islamist movements that would later produce Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Supreme Court strikes down the Trump administration's IEPA tariff program in a 6-3 ruling, eliminating roughly 70 percent of the president's tariff authority and putting approximately $200 billion in collected tariffs in line for refunds.

University of Minnesota law professor Nick Bednar joins Lawfare to break down Trump's day-one executive orders targeting the civil service, with Schedule F (renamed Schedule Policy Career) as the centerpiece, which reclassifies potentially 50,000 to 100,000+ federal employees as at-will by labeling them 'policymaking' based on criteria as broad as viewing policy documents.