The Lawfare Podcast

Today we’re bringing you an episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. This episode features audio of the first of a series of public hearings held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The hearing included testimony from documentarian Nick Quested and Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, as well as video footage of interviews from a number of Trump aides.Learn more and subscribe to Lawfare No Bull.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Thursday, June 16, the Jan. 6 committee held its third day of public hearings. Afterwards, the Lawfare team convened once again in Twitter Spaces for a live recording of the podcast. Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic talked with editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, executive editor Natalie Orpett, and senior editor Alan Rozenshtein about the substance of the day’s hearing, which focused on President Trump’s efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the results of the 2020 election.The committee’s next hearing is currently scheduled for Tuesday, June 21, at 1pm Eastern. We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces after every hearing. Find us on Twitter @lawfareblog for more details.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you loaded up the internet or turned on the television somewhere in the United States over the last two months, it’s been impossible to avoid news coverage of the defamation trial of actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard—both of whom sued each other over a dispute relating to allegations by Heard of domestic abuse by Depp. In early June, a Virginia jury found that both had defamed the other. The litigation has received a great deal of coverage for what it might say about the fate of the Me Too movement—but the flood of falsehoods online around the trial raises questions about how useful defamation law can really be in countering lies. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with RonNell Andersen Jones, the Lee E. Teitelbaum Professor of Law at the University of Utah College of Law and an expert on the First Amendment and the interaction between the press and the courts. Along with Lyrissa Lidsky, she’s written about defamation law, disinformation, and the Depp-Heard litigation. They talked about why some commentators think defamation could be a useful route to counter falsehoods, why RonNell thinks the celebrity litigation undercuts that argument, and the few cases in which claims of libel or slander really could have an impact in limiting the spread of lies.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Monday, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion titled, “Allies: How America failed its partners in Afghanistan.” The event featured comments from Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, a preview clip of Episode 6 of the podcast Allies, and a moderated discussion with an all-star panel.Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm sat down with Shala Gafary, the managing attorney for Project: Afghan Legal Assistance at Human Rights First; Col. Steven Miska, who serves on the steering committee of the Evacuate Our Allies Coalition; and Matt Zeller, a U.S. Army veteran, co-founder of No One Left Behind, and an advisory board chair of the Association of Wartime Allies. They discussed some of the past failures that led to a situation where tens of thousands of the U.S.’s allies were left behind in Afghanistan. They also discussed current resettlement issues and relocation for those still in Afghanistan or other third countries. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded almost immediately after the Jan. 6 committee conducted its second public hearing, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter Spaces with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic, Natalie Orpett, and Rohini Kurup. They talked about what the committee accomplished in this second hearing, what evidence it put forth, and whether Donald Trump actually knew that the election lies were false or whether he had convinced himself that they were true.We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces the morning after every hearing. Find us on Twitter for more details.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff has been following in a way that just about nobody else has the litigation to keep people off ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—the part of the amendment that says that if you engaged in an insurrection, you're excluded from public office. It was the subject of a recent major Fourth Circuit opinion, and the state of Section 3 litigation is also the subject of a significant new Roger Parloff piece on Lawfare entitled, “After the Cawthorn Ruling, Can Trump Be Saved From Section 3 of the 14th Amendment?”Roger joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the piece. What are the major legal arguments that people involved in Jan. 6 are using to keep themselves on the ballots? How strong are the factual cases against different gubernatorial and congressional actors? And why is Donald Trump uniquely vulnerable to a challenge on this basis?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When the term "intelligence" comes up regarding an organization, most of us immediately think of government institutions. And there's a good reason for that: nation-states have become the centers of the most prominent intelligence collection, analysis, and direct action. But that's far from the whole story. Increasingly, corporations are developing intelligence units of their own to uncover and assess threats to their personnel and facilities, analyze geopolitical and environmental risks that might affect their business prospects, and even take actions traditionally associated with governments.In this episode of Chatter, David Priess chats about all of this and more with Lewis Sage-Passant, who has built on his experiences in British military intelligence, private sector intelligence, crisis management, and related PhD research to explore the history, evolution, and ethics of this intriguing and challenging domain. They discuss the long history of private sector intelligence efforts, the difficulty disentangling early commercial efforts from government purposes, the fabled Pinkertons in the United States, the development of intelligence around modern corporations, the ethical issues that arise in this realm—and James Bond.Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Thursday, the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack held the first in a series of public hearings that they will use to present the findings of its ongoing investigation. The hearing laid out the evidence of Trump's culpability in bringing about the attack and also heard from witnesses about the role of the Proud Boys and the experience of law enforcement officers guarding the Capitol that day.On Friday, June 10, the morning after the hearing, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic, Molly Reynolds, and Roger Parloff to discuss their impressions and answer questions from the audience. We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces the morning after every hearing, and you can join us for the next one on Tuesday, June 14, at 8:30 AM Eastern. Find us on Twitter for more details.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oleksandra Matviychuk is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. She founded the organization to work on internal reform in her own country, but for the last eight years, she has spent a great deal of her time investigating and documenting Russian war crimes. She began this in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion of the Donbas and Crimea, but the work has really accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of this year. While in Washington to talk to U.S. policymakers about her vision of a hybrid tribunal to try Russian war crimes, she took some time to speak with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes. It's a wide-ranging conversation covering her own history as a war crimes investigator and documenter, the current challenge of documenting and prosecuting Russian war crimes on a scale we haven't seen in a very long time, and how the Ukrainian war effort relates to the project of defending civilians and preventing further war crimes.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On May 31, by a five-four vote, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law from going into effect that would have sharply limited how social media companies could moderate their platforms and required companies to abide by various transparency requirements. We’ve covered the law on this show before—we recorded an episode right after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Texas to implement the law, in the same ruling that the Supreme Court just vacated. But there’s enough interesting stuff in the Supreme Court’s order—and in Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent—that we thought it was worth another bite at the apple. So this week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago and Evelyn’s colleague at the Knight First Amendment Institute, to walk us through just what happened. What exactly did the Supreme Court do? Why does Justice Alito seem to think that the Texas law has a decent chance of surviving a First Amendment challenge? And what does this suggest about the possible futures of the extremely unsettled landscape of First Amendment law?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.