The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Roger Parloff, and Julia Curlee to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Two Huangs Don’t Make a Right.” This past weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at a Singapore-based Nvidia customer whom U.S. intelligence has reportedly concluded was working for China’s Ministry of State Security—and whose company has been scrutinized for allegedly funneling Nvidia chips to China in violation of U.S. export controls. Nvidia’s board has launched an independent investigation, the FBI is reportedly looking into the matter, and incoming Democratic majorities are promising congressional inquiries. But the scandal is also raising hard questions for the White House, as reporting now indicates that President Trump was warned about the relationship before personally inviting Huang along on his May trip to Beijing—all while Huang was pressing the administration to loosen restrictions on chip sales to China. What does this mean for Nvidia, for U.S. export control policies, and for the AI industry that Nvidia’s chips play an indispensable part in? “Massie Destruction.” This week, lame-duck Republican Rep. Thomas Massie forced the House forced a vote on eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of waging an unlawful war in Iran, pursuing extrajudicial killings through the administration’s ongoing boat strikes, and “kidnapping” Nicolás Maduro, among other charges. House Republicans rallied to successfully kill the measure through a procedural vote on Tuesday evening, but both Massie and House Democrats have suggested this might not be the last we see of this effort. Is impeachment the right tool for holding Hegseth—and the administration—accountable? And what does this effort foreshadow for the next Congress?“Arch Nemesis.” Last Thursday, the National Capital Planning Commission—chaired by a White House official and stacked with Trump appointees—voted 8-4 to give final approval to President Trump’s 250-foot “triumphal arch,” which is to be located between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery and has been framed as an object central to the military defense of Washington, D.C. But barely an hour later, Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a temporary restraining order blocking construction, finding that D.C. and Virginia—who have both sued to stop the project—are likely to succeed in arguing that it requires congressional authorization under the Commemorative Works Act. Will Trump’s monument to American greatness—or, by his own account, to himself—ever get built? And what does this fight tell us about the limits on the president’s ability to remake the nation’s capital?In object lessons, Julia pulls out an old lesson on the psychology of military incompetence. Roger takes a stroll through the history of Foggy Bottom. Scott calls out an instant children’s classic that really gets kids cooking. And Ben regrets how he answered the conundrum of whether to walk to Lichtenstein. Plus, stay tuned for a bonus object lesson from producer Noam!

Aya Ibrahim is a rising progressive thought leader and advocate in Democratic national security and economic circles. Aya is currently a Senior Fellow at the AI Now Institute, where she focuses on AI's impacts on national security. She previously worked in government on Capitol Hill, where she served as Rep. Ayanna Pressley's (D-Mass.) senior economic adviser, and in the Executive Branch. In the Biden Administration, Aya served on the National Economic Council, at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she was the lead author of the Administration's "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights," and on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. Aya joins Lawfare Contributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to talk about a progressive agenda for the next Congress, about AI regulation, and about U.S.-China policy. Aya and Peter also look back at things that the Biden Administration got right—and wrong—about U.S.-China competition, and they close by talking about how to balance security economics with the domestic economy. This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

Oscar Jonsson, author of the new book “The Russian General Staff,” and an associate senior lecturer at Swedish Defence University, joins Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss the origins and evolution of the Russian General Staff, its role in the early Putin system amid reforms and power consolidation, and the General Staff’s role (or lack thereof) in Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. They also discuss the General Staff’s nominal command of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU; Russia’s full-scale 2022 war on Ukraine; Russia’s evolving lessons from the war and what the General Staff gets right and wrong about modern warfare; and the future of Russian military thought and planning.

From August 18, 2023: Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with Molly Reynolds’s work on Congress. She’s a Senior Fellow at Brookings and a Senior Editor at Lawfare—and she has a new report out at Brookings, with Naomi Maehr, on “How partisan and policy dynamics shape congressional oversight in the post-Trump era.” Molly and her team have collected an enormous amount of data over the years about how Congress conducts oversight, and the report is a thought-provoking overview of what the legislature got up to during the 117th Congress. Today on the show, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic talked with Molly about her report and what patterns she’s found in oversight from the 116th Congress through today. For fans of the Jan. 6 Committee’s work, they also discussed that committee’s investigation and what it does and doesn’t tell us about congressional investigations going forward.

Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, speaks with Roberto Tallarita, assistant professor at Harvard Law School, about Anthropic's recently filed s-1 and its experiment in corporate governance. They discuss its current status as a public benefit corporation, its decision to create and empower a body of financially disinterested trustees, and its current unique class structure. Drawing on Tallarita’s research on stakeholder governance and unequal voting rights, the two also discuss what would make a commitment to safety precautions durable even when in stark tension with profit.Tallarita lays out some of his thoughts on what could come next for Anthropic in his recent article “Profit and Mission in Anthropic’s IPO.” Frazier also has recently written an analysis of Anthropic’s post-IPO governance.

On Monday, Nov. 9, at 3:30 p.m. ET, in light of explosive allegations about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Lawfare Senior Editors Kate Klonick and Michael Feinberg sat down on Substack Live to discuss the role of seduction in intelligence gathering and how the public should think about the growing scandal.

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes will sit down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts, Roger Parloff, Anna Bower, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest litigation over Trump administration policies. Topics include D.C. and Virginia’s suit to block construction of the triumphal arch, the Ahmed Soliman case, the politicization of the Justice Department, election litigation in California and Alaska, Trump’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal, and more.Find Lawfare’s litigation tracker here.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 November 17, 2022: American democracy might look healthier in light of last week's midterms, but there's still a lot of skepticism across the political spectrum about how it's doing. From the right, would-be authoritarians cast doubt on elections and on the very idea of liberal democracy. But even those who reject this authoritarian impulse are frequently uncomfortable with the messiness of democratic politics, instead preferring an anti-politics of technocratic decision-making.Jedediah Purdy, a law professor at Duke Law School, wants to defend democracy from its critics and its skeptics. In his new book, “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope,” he argues that democratic renewal is both desirable and, most importantly, possible. Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Jed to talk about the book, get his thoughts about the state of American democracy, and chart the path toward a healthier democratic future.

From November 27, 2024: Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Mike Stern, a lawyer specializing in congressional legal issues and former Senior Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Donald Sherman, Executive Director and Chief Counsel at CREW, to discuss the Senate confirmation process and expectations for congressional oversight in the 119th Congress. They discuss the tools available to the Senate now and after the start of the new Congress in January, legal questions related to President-elect Trump’s potential plans for recess appointments, and what issues related to congressional oversight to watch next year.