The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

From August 17, 2020: In a surprise announcement last week, the United Arab Emirates and Israel are normalizing relations, and Israel is putting on hold its plans for annexation of West Bank territory. To discuss the announcement and its diverse implications for various actors, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare senior editor Scott Anderson; Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist who is acting head of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings; Natan Sachs, the director of the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy; and Hady Amr, a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings who served as the United States deputy special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. They talked about what the deal covers; its implications for the domestic politics of Israel, Iran and the United States; how it might affect the larger regional dynamics and what it means for the Palestinians.

For today's episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to discuss the various Ukraine-related agreements that came out of the G7 and subsequent Ukraine peace summit last week, with Contributing Editor and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Eric Ciaramella, Ukrainian journalist Anastasiia Lapatina, and Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Fellow Scott R. Anderson.They discussed the joint communique that came out of the Ukraine peace summit (and those who didn't join it), the new U.S.-Ukraine security agreement, the G7's new funding mechanism for Ukraine assistance, and what it all means for the state of the fight against Russia.

This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Contributing Editor and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Eric Ciaramella to talk over the week’s big national security news, including:“Prime Deliverables, in Two Days or Less.” The Biden administration and its European allies coughed up a number of big wins for Ukraine at a meeting of the G7 and subsequent Ukraine peace summit this past week, ranging from a new U.S.-Ukraine security agreement to a commitment to provide $50 billion in assistance derived from frozen Russian assets. But are these measures game-changers—especially with political changes in both Europe and the United States on the horizon?“Trying to F Us.” Policy advisors to former President Trump reportedly have some big plans for government employees if he is elected to a second stint in the White House—including the return of Schedule F, an reorganization of the civil service that would have gutted job protections and made it easier to replace civil servants with partisan loyalists. How big a problem are these plans? And how feasible are they really?“Revenge of the Nerds.” A little known intelligence agency within the State Department—the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR—has gotten some great press of late, celebrating several notable analytic victories it’s secured, often in dissent from the rest of the intelligence community. Is there some secret to INR’s success? Or is it overblown?For object lessons, Quinta shared more important NJ political corruption news. Scott awarded his song of the summer to “Right Back to It,” the single off Waxahatchee’s phenomenal “Tiger’s Blood.” And Eric recommended “Sovietistan,” a travelogue about Central Asia by Norwegian anthropologist Erika Fatland.

The Cyber Safety Review Board’s (CSRB) report on the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion sheds light on how a series of flaws in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and security processes allowed a hacking group associated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to strike the “equivalent of gold” in accessing the official email accounts of many of the most senior U.S. government officials managing the U.S. government’s relationship with the PRC. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down Maia Hamin, Associate Director with the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative; Trey Herr, Assistant Professor of cybersecurity and policy at American University’s School of International Service and Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council; and Marc Rogers, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for the AI observability startup nbhd.ai, to discuss their recent Lawfare piece about the CSRB’s report and the lagging state of cloud security policy. They talked about ways to improve cloud service provider transparency, other investigative and regulatory tools that could facilitate better cloud security, and their thoughts on Microsoft’s response to the CSRB’s report. 

From June 29, 2020: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Eric Posner, the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the author of the new book, "The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump." They discussed why demagogues are a characteristic threat in democracies, how the founders of the U.S. Constitution tried to ensure elite control and prevent a demagogue from becoming president, how these safeguards weakened over time and how Donald Trump's demagoguery helped him win election as president. They also explored how Posner's perception of Trump as a threat to American democracy fits with his writings in support of a powerful president.

Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

On June 2, Mexico held one of the largest elections in its history, and the electorate voted in the country's first woman, and Jewish, president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum was endorsed by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who critics charge as pushing a series of anti-democratic policies including a substantial judicial overhaul. To discuss this historic election and what President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum may do in office, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey sat down with former United States Ambassador Roberta Jacobson. They discussed the issues voters were concerned about, political violence by cartels plaguing the country, and whether Sheinbaum will follow AMLO's trajectory as a populist or chart her own path. 

Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic checked in on the status of Senator Bob Menendez’s ongoing criminal trial in the Southern District of New York. Together with Dan Richman of Columbia Law School and Eric Columbus, who previously served as special litigation counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of General Counsel, they discussed the challenges faced by prosecutors in bringing corruption charges against a sitting member of Congress. The Justice Department alleges that Menendez took bribes in exchange for unregistered lobbying for the governments of Egypt and Qatar—among other incidents of unsavory behavior. But after the Supreme Court’s decision in McDonnell v. United States, and given the protections available to members of Congress under the Speech or Debate Clause, will prosecutors be able to make the charges stick?

From July 17, 2020: Darrell West and John Allen are the authors of the book, "Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence," a broad look at the impact that artificial intelligence systems are likely to have on everything from the military, to health care, to vehicles and transportation, and to international great power competition. They spoke with Benjamin Wittes about the book and the question of how we should govern AI systems. What makes for ethical uses of AI? What makes it scary? What are the anxieties that people have about artificial intelligence, and to what extent are the fears legitimate?