The Lawfare Podcast

Former NSC staffers Cole Bucy and Nate Swanson join Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ari Tabatabai and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee to discuss the Iran war eight months in and the administration's likely approach after the midterms.
Cole and Nate's new piece in Foreign Policy, "Trump Unleashed" outlines why the president might escalate against Iran and why none of his options is likely to get him what he wants. Ari and Julia also discuss their piece in Foreign Policy, "How Could Iran Happen? An Autopsy," examining how the president's war on the "Deep State" led to this debacle in the Middle East.
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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Loren Voss, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss developments in the litigation over the Trump administration’s plan for the East Potomac Park and Arch, the 9th Circuit ruling that President Trump exceeded his authority in the deployment of the National Guard in L.A., legal challenges to the Trump administration’s various actions surrounding the election, 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 July 11, 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 talk about bribery with James Pearce, Lawfare Legal Fellow. After explaining the basics of bribery law and whether a current or former president could face a bribery prosecution, Keller analyzed whether three episodes from the first six months of the second Trump administration could plausibly be characterized as bribery: Paramount’s $16 million settlement of Trump’s lawsuit while Paramount awaits federal approval of a merger, law firms agreeing to provide pro bono legal services to causes favored by the administration to rescind or avoid targeted executive orders, and the dismissal of the criminal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’s agreeing to further the administration’s immigration agenda.
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From November 22, 2024: After more than a year of pleas from Kyiv, the U.S. finally let Ukraine use Western long-range weapons for attacks inside Russia. Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, to talk about the strategic and tactical effects of such attacks, what’s behind the timing of this decision, and why it took so long for the U.S. to finally change course.
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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie K. Orpett talks with Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Loren Voss, Contributing Editor Renée DiResta, and Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee about what they're watching in the run-up to the midterm elections. Each of them is focused on different potential threats to election security and integrity—from what’s being challenged in the courts to what’s happening in the online information ecosystem, from concerns over physical security at the polls to concerns over the health of government institutions. They talk about how they are identifying and evaluating the threats, what impact they might have, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
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