The Lawfare Podcast

There are some stunning revelations coming out of the new blockbuster book by Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.” If you thought you knew how bad some things during that final year of the Trump presidency were, this book will surprise you with what it tells us about the things that even those of us who watched the presidency closely did not know. David Priess sat down with Leonnig, a national investigative reporter at the Washington Post and author of “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service,” and Rucker, the senior White House correspondent at the Washington Post and coauthor with Carol of the book, “A Very Stable Genius,” to talk about what they discovered in their book and their reporting. They discussed not only a few of the headline scoops, but also some lesser reported stories in their book, ranging from Trump's briefing before the U.S. strike that killed Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, to Trump's attitude toward potential 2024 running mates, to what we've learned about the behavior of people around the president near the end of the administration, like Mark Milley, Bill Barr, Mark Meadows and Mike Pompeo.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From August 10, 2019: The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister. It also has a looming cliff it is careening toward and about to leap off of on Halloween of this year. This week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with his Brookings colleague Amanda Sloat to talk about all things Brexit. They talked about the new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his views on Brexit, the deadlock between Britain and the European Union, and the way the Brexit debate plays out in American politics.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From November 24, 2018: John Carlin served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division from April 2014 to October 2016. In his new book with Garrett Graff, called “Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat," Carlin explains the cyber conflicts the U.S. faces and how the government fights back. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Carlin last week to talk about the book. They talked about about the FBI and Justice Department’s fight against cyber espionage, about how the Justice Department attributes cyberattacks to the responsible actors, and about Carlin’s experience as FBI director Robert Mueller’s chief of staff.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's been a busy couple of weeks at Guantanamo Bay, a place that has not had a busy couple of weeks in a while. There was a transfer, there was a resumption of military commissions, and the chief prosecutor of military commissions resigned abruptly.To go over these events, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Steve Vladeck, a Lawfare contributing editor and a professor at the University of Texas, and Latif Nasser, a co-host of the show Radiolab from New York Public Radio, where he did an extended series about a Guantanamo Bay detainee, who just happens to be the one who was transferred this week. They talked about who the transferee was and why he was held so long, about the resumption of military commissions and why they are stagnated even when resumed, about the resignation of General Martins, and about the DC Circuit's latest forays into Guantanamo Bay.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're bringing you the breakdown of the heavyweight bout of the century—a battle over vaccine misinformation. In the left corner we have the White House. Known for its impressive arsenal and bully pulpit, this week it asked for the fight and came out swinging with claims that Facebook is a killer—and not in a good way. In the right corner we have Facebook, known for its ability to just keep taking punches while continuing to grace our screens and rake in the cash. The company has hit back with gusto, saying that Facebook has actually helped people learn the facts on vaccines. Period. Will either of them land a knockout blow? Is this just the first round of many match ups? On this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we devote the conversation to the latest slugfest between Facebook and the White House. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth University, both of whom have been working on questions of online health misinformation. Let’s get ready to rumble.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yemen remains a mess. Many years of warfare have left it politically fractured, economically shattered and with a true humanitarian crisis of multiple dimensions. And yet there are some small signs of hope, with the Biden administration increasing its engagement to achieve progress and the United Nations resetting its efforts with a new special envoy to the country. To talk through it, David Priess sat down with Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow at Pembroke College of Oxford University, who has spent significant time on the ground, especially in Eastern Yemen, and Alexandra Stark, a senior researcher at New America and the author of the recent article on Lawfare, "Giving Diplomacy a Chance in Yemen."Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software Pegasus, which seems to have gathered data from the phones of a shockingly large number of people. Then, starting Sunday evening and into Monday morning, the Biden administration announced a multi-lateral response to China's Microsoft Exchange Server hack. There were indictments, there was a toughly worded statement, but there were no sanctions. Was it enough? Benjamin Wittes sat down with Matt Tait, AKA @pwnallthethings, the chief operating officer of Corellium, and Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the co-founder of CrowdStrike. They talked about the Biden administration's response on China; the disclosure of Pegasus and what that means for iPhone security, for Apple and for the Israeli government; and they talked about mobile device security. Is it hopeless?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other day. Scott Anderson knows something about withdrawals. He served at U.S. Embassy Baghdad shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the Afghan withdrawal, his memories of the Iraq withdrawal and why these things sometimes go better and sometimes go worse. What has the Biden administration learned from the Iraq withdrawal experience? What is it doing right this time, and what is it doing wrong?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From February 16, 2013: Fawzia Koofi (website, Twitter) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly. She is also running for President of Afghanistan in the planned April 2014 elections, and would be the first female president in Afghan history. She has a remarkable backstory: Born as the nineteenth of her father's twenty-three children, Koofi was left to die from exposure as a baby girl. She survived and witnessed during her childhood father's and brother's deaths from political unrest. She was forced to leave medical school when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996 and banned the education of women and girls, and, soon after her own daughters were born, her husband died from tuberculosis he contracted while a political prisoner in a Taliban jail. After the new Afghan government was formed after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Koofi ran for and won a seat in the Afghan parliament. She currently represents the Badakshan region in northeastern Afghanistan and is a leading advocate for the rights of women and girls. Koofi has also written a recently published memoir, The Favored Daughter, about her life and her journey into politics.Koofi delivered the closing remarks at the Harvard Women's Law Association's annual conference. (Special thanks to the association's president and conference organizer, Stephanie Davidson, for arranging the interview.) Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Koofi at her snowed-in hotel about the current state of Afghanistan and the challenges facing her country. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome Eric Schwartz, the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In his conversation with Benjamin Wittes, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protects the security of the United States and at times undermines its ability to accept refugees. Schwartz, who believes the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis, outlines what a coherent refugee policy would look like, and argues that the reforms must go beyond simply accepting more refugees.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.