The Lawfare Podcast

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical treats AI as the defining social question of our time: not just a technical shift, but a moral fight over dignity, labor, truth, war, and power.
In a Lawfare Live on Substack on Wednesday, May 27, Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta talked with Christopher Hale, author of the Substack newsletter “Letters from Leo,” about the Vatican entering the AI debate, what it means to “disarm” AI, and why the Pope’s new encyclical is best read not as anti-technology, but as anti-centralized-power. They discussed AI and human dignity; labor and automation; truth, democracy, and disinformation; autonomous weapons; and Silicon Valley’s response.
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On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and the co-host of Slate’s weekly podcast, “Political Gabfest.” They discuss three stories Bazelon and her colleagues recently published in the New York Times Magazine. For this trilogy of oral histories, they spoke with dozens of current and former government employees at the Department of Justice (“The Unraveling of the Justice Department”), FBI (“A Year Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.”), and Department of Homeland Security (“The View From Inside Trump’s D.H.S.”) about their experiences navigating the upheaval of the second Trump administration from the inside.
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In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss three legal challenges to the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a federal judge’s decision to stop the shuttering of the Kennedy Center, post-dismissal developments in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From October 9, 2021: The majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee has issued an interim report, entitled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.” A lot of it covers ground we knew about previously, but it contains a raft of new details about the president's pressure on the Justice Department to support his election fraud claims, the resignation of a U.S. attorney in Georgia, and the bizarre attempt to install as acting attorney general a Justice Department official who might actually support the president's ambitions.
To go over it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic, and Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm, who has been reading all of the depositions in the matter. They talked about what the committee found, what aspects of it are new and what we might do about this dramatic turn of events.
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From May 27, 2025: John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht, Haran, & Williams, channeled his experience as the former Chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to discuss three recent developments with James Pearce, Lawfare Legal Fellow. They discussed proposed changes to the Public Integrity Section that could hamper the Justice Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute corruption matters in a fair and impartial matter.
Keller weighed in on whether the Justice Department has a viable prosecution theory for criminal threats or incitement in the case of former FBI Director, Jim Comey. And they discussed criminal contempt: what it is, how it differs from civil contempt, the recent criminal contempt probable-cause finding by Judge Boasberg in an Alien Enemies Act case in the District of Columbia, and whether the federal rule permitting appointment of a special prosecutor outside the Justice Department may pose constitutional separation-of-powers concerns.
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