The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

After the 2020 Presidential Election, a plan was hatched in seven swing states that had voted for Joe Biden. Lawsuits challenging the election outcomes in those states continued to fail, but this plan attempted to find another path to keep Trump in office—using the Electoral College process. The idea was to create slates of electors for Trump that would oppose the duly-elected Biden electors, and to send those slates of electors to DC to be counted on Jan. 6. Then, Vice President Mike Pence was supposed to either choose the Trump electors, thereby overturning the 2020 election results, or kick the competing slates back to the states to be sorted out, thereby delaying Congress's certification of the election. It's a plan that the Jan. 6 Committee would later dub "the fraudulent electors scheme." The whole scheme relied on specific individuals in each state—the fake electors themselves. So, three and a half years later, what has happened to them? Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett spoke with Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic, who has been closely following the issue from the beginning. Last month, she published an article explaining what happened to the fake electors in these seven states with Lawfare Student Contributors Hunter Evans, Adam George, and Emma Plankey.

It's Trump's Trials and Tribulations, New York Trial Dispatch, May 14 Roger Parloff sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, and Tyler McBrien to discuss what happened in the courtroom today.The podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music.

Migration has always been a part of humanity's story. It will continue to be so long after any of us now living are gone. Population shifts in the coming century, spurred by climate change, are on track to become more extreme than at any point in our history--with hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people on the move. For this episode, David Priess spoke with Gaia Vince, self-described former scientists and author of the book Nomad Century (among other works), about various aspects of climate change-driven mass migration, including perceptions of borders across history, attitudes toward climate change mitigation vs. adaptation, why the "Dubai model" isn't a global solution, demographic shifts in the global north, migration as a cause of evolutionary and cultural development, myths about migrants and jobs and wages, nurses from the Philippines as a case study, how enlightened leadership can guide the most productive migration outcomes, and much more.Works mentioned in this episode:The book Transcendence by Gaia VinceThe book Nomad Century by Gaia VinceChatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that the United States lost a record $12.5 billion to various types of cyber crime in 2023. Law enforcement hacking is one tool increasingly used to combat transnational cyber crime. Stephanie Pell, Senior Editor at Lawfare, sat down with Gavin Wilde, Senior Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Emma Landi, Research Assistant in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to talk about their new paper exploring law enforcement efforts to “hack the hackers” in the fight against cyber crime. They talked about the types of hacking operations performed by law enforcement, when law enforcement may be better suited to address the actions of malicious cyber actors as compared with the military and private sector, and some of the major policy questions posed by law enforcement hacking.

It's Trump's Trials and Tribulations, New York Trial Dispatch, May 13 Roger Parloff sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, and Tyler McBrien to discuss what happened in the courtroom today.The podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music.

From September 12, 2015: On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sits down with Professor Gabriella Blum, professor at Harvard Law School, and Dustin Lewis, a senior researcher at Harvard Law Schools’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, to discuss their new report written with Naz Modirzadeh entitled Medical Care in Armed Conflict: IHL and State Responses to Terrorism. The conversation takes a look at whether we should consider medical care a form of illegitimate support to terrorists. Their argument? We shouldn't, because IHL lays down extensive protections for medical care, and those protections in many instances should also constrain domestic material support cases. Yet the authors make clear that in their view, there's also more to be done, as there are gaps and weaknesses in the protections afforded by IHL itself.

From May 3, 2021: In the fourth episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore how and when a president is held to account for wild and sometimes criminal behavior.

It's Trump's Trials and Tribulations, New York Trial Dispatch, May 10. Roger Parloff sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, and Business Insider's Jacob Shamsian to discuss what happened in the courtroom today.The podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music.

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, “The Constitution of the War on Drugs,” which examines the relationship between the Constitution and drug prohibitions. He joined Jack Goldsmith to talk about the constitutional history of the war on drugs and why the drug war was not curbed by constitutional doctrines about personal autonomy, limits on the federal government’s power, the Equal Protection Clause, or the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. They also talked about whether the political process is working with advancing decriminalization and how this impacts the constitutional dimension of the drug war.