The Lawfare Podcast

Lee Gelernt, the chief ACLU litigator on Alien Enemies Act cases, speaks to Senior Editor Roger Parloff about two upcoming DC Circuit arguments he’ll be making relating to the March 15, 2025, removals of 137 Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.In one, the en banc court will grapple with whether to permit Judge James Boasberg to conduct fact-finding on whether to seek contempt charges against high-level Trump administration officials, including current Attorney General Todd Blanche and current U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Emil Bove.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the First Circuit rejecting the Trump administration’s third country deportation policy, former fugitive ICE agent jailed in Minnesota, oral argument in the Fourth Circuit over the dismissal of the first indictment against James Comey, 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.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

From May 22, 2025: Page Hedley, Senior Advisor at Forecasting Research Institute and co-author of the Not for Private Gain letter urging state attorneys general to stop OpenAI’s planned restructuring, and Gad Weiss, the Wagner Fellow in Law & Business at NYU Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to analyze news of OpenAI once again modifying its corporate governance structure. The group break down the rationale for the proposed modification, the relevant underlying law, and the significance of corporate governance in shaping the direction of AI development.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

From July 23, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson shares some of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week. First he sat down Shashank Joshi, the Defence Editor for The Economist to discuss the new dynamics surrounding European security, as well as the path toward (and implications of) a Europe less dependent on the United States for its security.Scott then talked with Iris Ferguson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was until recently the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, about the strategic significance of the Arctic and how it plays into the modern dynamics of major power competition.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg talks with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee and former CIA Case Officer John Sipher about John Ratcliffe’s tenure as the Director of Central Intelligence and cultural changes in the intelligence community writ large.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Senior Editors Kevin Frazier and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:“P(doom) and Gloom.” Last week, a wonky corner of the tech world became national news when Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher, resigned from Anthropic and posted a viral thread accusing his employer and its rival OpenAI of racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” His warning was quickly amplified by current Anthropic staff—and, days later, by CEO Dario Amodei himself, who published a lengthy essay urging the industry to slow down, drawing rare public agreement from Sam Altman and Elon Musk, a slide in AI stocks, and fresh calls for regulation in Washington. Is this the moment AI-safety fears finally broke into the mainstream? And should the rest of us be as worried as the people building these systems say they are?“Trains, Planes, and Provocations.” Tensions along NATO’s eastern flank are spiking over an increasing number of Russian provocations in and near NATO territory relating to the Ukraine conflict. Recent examples have included an explosives-laden drone at a German airport, another drone shot down in Lithuanian airspace, and repeated incursions into Poland and Romania related to border and port facilities adjacent to Ukraine. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte pledged to bolster the alliance’s defenses and insisted the West won’t be “scared” off of supporting Kyiv, even as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the coming months could bring intensified Russian action and possible spillover onto NATO soil. Is this a deliberate campaign by Russia to test and divide the alliance? And how much escalation risk does it actually carry?“Seeking the Plane Truth.” On September 29, the full D.C. Circuit will hear en banc arguments in what may be one of the most consequential rule-of-law fights of Trump’s second term: whether Chief Judge James Boasberg may investigate who in the administration defied his March 2025 order to turn around planes carrying Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act. While Boasberg found probable cause for criminal contempt, panels dominated by Trump appointees have twice blocked him from doing so—with the Justice Department, whose own senior officials are reportedly implicated in some of the relevant discussions, arguing that all a judge may do is refer the matter to the Department itself to decide whether to investigate and prosecute. What is really at stake when the branch accused of contempt gets to decide whether anyone is charged? And how is the full court likely to rule?In object lessons, Kevin is putting the “community” in community college with high praise for the AI Literacy initiative in Alabama. Roger seams to think that the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum in London is knot your average exhibit. Scott finds weekend mornings watching Hilda with his kids to be a magical, enchanted adventure. And Ari is decidedly not in the Middle of Nowhere with her love for the new Kacey Musgraves album. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Eileen Guo, co-author with Gisela Perez de Acha and Martin Sona of “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy,” and senior reporter with the MIT Technology Review, to discuss her research into whether the “censorship-industrial complex” was an actually entity or a pretextual justification to dismantle the government’s anti-disinformation apparatus.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sits down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director and Fritz Stern Chair of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, to discuss what’s going on in the German political scene, where a far-right party, the AfD, is making a strong showing in state elections. They talk about what the party stands for, why its emergence is alarming the pro-democracy community, and what it all means for Germany, for Europe, for the United States, and for the future of Western democracies.To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Zoe Kurland, Senior Producer at Marfa Public Radio, and Terence O’Rourke, an attorney based in Houston, Texas. They discuss “A Whole Other Country,” the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning six-part podcast series, hosted and produced by Kurland, that tells the story of a secessionist movement in the mid-90s called the “Republic of Texas.” They talk about the group’s dubious legal claim that the federal government had improperly annexed Texas back in 1845; how its leader, Rick McLaren, styled himself “Ambassador of the Republic of Texas” and sought international recognition; and why McLaren, in the midst of a hostage crisis of his own making, picked up the phone to call O’Rourke to represent him. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.