The Lawfare Podcast

Benjamin Wittes sat down with an all-Lawfare crew to discuss the election. Scott Anderson, David Priess, Jacob Schulz, Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey joined Ben to talk about where the election is, whether we are in a transition or in a contested election, the challenges a Biden transition team might face and what concerns the team finds particularly alarming as they imagine the next few weeks and months.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a conversation completely unrelated to yesterday's election, Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk and Matthew Klein, author of the recent "Trade Wars Are Class Wars," spoke with Adam Tooze, a professor at Columbia University and an economic historian. They discussed what we can learn from the diplomatic and economic modes of the 1930s, why Nazi legal theory resonates so well in China today, how Xinjiang's camps echo the logic of Soviet gulags, whether the U.S. in fact lost the Cold War and the bureaucracies in which Adam would have loved to work.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this Election Day, we are checking in on how healthy the election actually is. Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School and Charles Stewart III of MIT together run the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. Zahavah Levine and Chelsey Davidson manage the project on the Stanford side. Together, they have supervised a collection of students who have produced 32 articles for Lawfare on election administration as part of the project. Benjamin Wittes sat down with all four of them to discuss how the election is actually going, what the rules of mail-in voting are, how litigation has affected the conduct of the vote, if we have enough poll workers and what results we can expect this evening.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're all hoping for a peaceful Election Day tomorrow, but some people are worried about violence at the polls. Two of those people are Dan Byman, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare and a professor at Georgetown University; and Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center and an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Together, they wrote a piece on the Brookings FixGov blog on why the risk of election violence is high. They joined Benjamin Wittes for an unnerving conversation about the set of facts that led them to write such an alarming piece, how violence could manifest at the polls and what could ease the threat.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was foreign policy advisor for the Hillary Clinton campaign four years ago, where she had to respond to Russian information operations against the campaign in real time. She has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics ever since, and she is the author of two recent significant articles—one in Foreign Affairs and one on Lawfare—both on the subject of foreign influence operations and interference in U.S. politics. She joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the strategic purpose of these operations, whether we have to fear more operations during or after the election, and if U.S. voters should have confidence in their system.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Casey Newton, veteran Silicon Valley editor for The Verge who recently went independent to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Few people have followed the stories of platforms and content moderation in recent years as closely and carefully as Casey, so Evelyn and Quinta asked him about what’s changed in the last four years—especially in the lead-up to the election. They also spoke about the challenges of reporting on the tech industry and whether the increased willingness of platforms to moderate content means that the name of this podcast series will have to change.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a human rights crisis going on in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has been rounding up minority groups, most notably the Uighurs, and putting them into forced labor and reeducation camps. The government has gone to great lengths to keep Xinjiang away from international attention, and it has had some success in doing so. Jordan Schneider, the host of the ChinaTalk podcast, wrote an essay on Lawfare last week outlining how the U.S. can respond and push back on the Chinese government's abuses in the region. During a live event for ChinaTalk, Lawfare's Jacob Schulz talked through Xinjiang and potential U.S. responses with Schneider and Sheena Greitens, an associate professor at UT Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of the new book, "Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy." They discussed the surprising World War II origins of U.S. hegemonic militarism, the changes in what it meant to be an internationalist during this period and the domestic political origins of the U.S. embrace of the UN Charter. They also discussed the relationship between Wertheim's book and his work for the Quincy Institute, a think tank devoted to fostering U.S. military restraint.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research released a report entitled, "Rightly Scaled, Carefully Open, Infinitely Agile: Reconfiguring to Win the Innovation Race in the Intelligence Community." Susan Hennessey sat down with Subcommittee Chair Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut to discuss the challenges the United States is facing with near-peer national competitors in science and technology and the impact on the intelligence community. They talked about the role of China, stemming intelligence community brain drain, the need for basic research and how Congress can heal itself to become part of the solution.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's been a wild couple of days of disinformation in the electoral context. Intelligence community officials are warning about Russian and Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election—and claiming that Iran is responsible for sending threatening emails from fake Proud Boys to Democratic voters. What exactly is going on here? To talk through the developments and the questions that linger, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Susan Hennessey and Quinta Jurecic.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.