From October 30, 2020: Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was foreign policy advisor for the Hillary Clinton campaign four years ago, where she had to respond to Russian information operations against the campaign in real time. She has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics ever since, and she is the author of two recent significant articles—one in Foreign Affairs and one on Lawfare—both on the subject of foreign influence operations and interference in U.S. politics. She joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the strategic purpose of these operations, whether we have to fear more operations during or after the election, and if U.S. voters should have confidence in their system.

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From January 8, 2021: The storming of the Capitol on Wednesday was a catastrophic failure of protective law enforcement, as rioters overran Capitol Police barricades and gained access to a building that a lot of police were supposed to be protecting. How did it happen? Who screwed up? And what can be done about it? Benjamin Wittes sat down with Fred Burton, the executive director of the Center for Protective Intelligence at Ontic and a former protective officer; Garrett Graff, a journalist who covers federal law enforcement and who wrote a book about continuity in government; and Lawfare's executive editor Susan Hennessey. They talked about how bad the failure was on the part of the Capitol Police, who is responsible for it, what can be done now to bring the perpetrators to justice and how we should think about changing security protocols on Capitol Hill going forward.

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From November 1, 2022: In recent weeks, the Biden administration has released a trio of long-awaited strategy documents, including the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the Nuclear Posture Review. But how should we read these documents, and what do they actually tell us about how the Biden administration intends to approach the world?

To answer these questions, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, who is himself also a former National Security Council official and senior congressional adviser. They discussed the role these strategy documents play in U.S. foreign policy, what we can learn from them, and what they say about the state of the world and the United States’ role in it.

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This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on June 13 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom.

Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey talked to Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic about Judge Cannon's order denying in part former President Trump's motion to dismiss the classified document case, what Judge McAfee is up to in Fulton County, and of course, they took audience questions from Lawfare Material Supporters on Zoom.

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While the U.S. Congress has been doing hearing after hearing with tech executives that include a lot of yelling and not much progress, Europe has been quietly working away on some major tech regulations. Last month, it reached agreement on the content moderation piece of this package: the Digital Services Act. It's sweeping in scope and likely to have effects far beyond Europe. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek sat down with Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, to get the rundown. What exactly is in the act? What does she like and what doesn't she? And how will the internet look different once it comes into force?

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Catarina Buchatskiy was—until a couple of months ago—a student at Stanford University. For the past couple of years, she has run The Shadows Project, an online forum devoted to the preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. A couple of months ago, she took a leave to go to Poland where she has been shuttling protective equipment into Ukraine to help museums preserve artifacts. She joined Benjamin Wittes from Krakow to talk about The Shadows Project, about preservation of artifacts in the middle of the war in Ukraine and about what it means to be a Ukrainian nationalist as a young person in 2022.

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Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2022 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. On this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2022 to talk about cybersecurity and Ukraine with a truly remarkable panel: Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, Megan Stifel of the Institute for Security and Technology, and Mieke Eoyang, currently the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy.

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Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is putting one of its closest partners, China, in a difficult position. Just weeks before the conflict began, China and Russia announced a new partnership without limits that was seen as a shared bulwark against pressure by the United States and its allies. But Russia's choice to attack its neighbor Ukraine is an awkward tension with China's long-standing position against the use of force between states, and some cracks may be showing in the new relationship as China has so far not proven willing to come as wholeheartedly to Russia’s support as its pre-war declaration might have suggested.

To better understand how the war in Ukraine is impacting China's strategy toward the rest of the world, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts: Dr. Patricia Kim, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in China policy, and Professor Julian Ku, a professor at Hofstra University School of Law who has studied China's approach to the international system. They discussed the new relationship between China and Russia, China's role in the Ukraine conflict and what lessons it is taking away from the Western response, including for its own interests in Taiwan. 

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This week on Rational Security, Alan Rozenshtein and Scott R. Anderson were joined by Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett and law professor extraordinaire Kate Klonick to hash through some of the week's big national security news, including: 

• “Time to Musk Up.” Prototypical eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has just finalized a deal to purchase Twitter, bring it private and implement a number of changes he claims are intended to expand freedom of speech. What will this mean for the future of Twitter and other social media platforms?
• “Lvivin’ so Soon?” The Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State just finished a visit to Kyiv, where they committed more support and to gradually restaff the U.S. diplomatic presence in-country. Why are U.S. diplomats behind Europe in returning to Kyiv? Should the Biden administration move more quickly?
• “Too Much MTG Gives Me Headaches.” Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gave several hours of testimony at a hearing on Friday triggered by efforts by progressive activists to disqualify her from holding office for supporting the Jan. 6 insurrection, pursuant to section 3 of the 14th Amendment. What did we learn about Greene’s activities that day? And what should we make of the broader effort to disqualify legislators? 

For object lessons, Alan endorsed the sci-fi action adventure comedy drama "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and its stirring depiction of laundromats and the IRS. Kate shouted out her decade old "Loose Tweets Sink Fleets" poster and celebrated the fact that it becomes more relevant by the day. Scott announced that his effort to make flavored rotten pineapple water succeeded with flying colors, and encouraged listeners to use pineapple scraps to make their own tepache. And Natalie finally took a stand in support of comprehension and encouraged others to do the same with tee shirts that practically shout one's preference for the Oxford Comma from the rooftops.

Be sure to visit our show page at www.lawfareblog.com and to follow the show on Twitter at @RatlSecurity. 

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From August 22, 2012: This is the second in a series of interviews Ritika Singh is doing with scholars around town who have non-legal expertise that bears on the national security law issues Lawfare readers care about. As she did in her first piece with Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, she is posting the full interview as an episode of the Lawfare Podcast and writing up a summary of their conversation as well.

The subject this time is Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, and a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. Byman is one of the country’s foremost experts on counterterrorism and the Middle East. He served as a staff member on the 9/11 Commission, and has worked for the U.S. government and at the RAND Corporation. He recently published a paper entitled Breaking the Bonds between Al Qaeda and its Affiliate Organizations that Ritika describes in more detail here. They sat down for a discussion of the major themes that make up his paper—themes that dovetail with those Ritika discussed with Riedel in her first interview. 

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

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Last week, a federal district judge in Florida named Kathryn Mizelle struck down the Biden administration's policy requiring that individuals wear masks on airplanes and other forms of interstate travel. In doing so, she adopted an extremely narrow reading of relevant public health statutes to conclude that they did not authorize any such masking policies, a move that has since triggered more questions about what public health tools the federal government will have left if Mizelle’s decision is left to stand. 

To better understand this decision and its ramifications, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts: Lindsay Wiley, a professor specializing in health, law and policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, a Lawfare senior editor and professor of, among other things, legislative and regulatory law at the University of Minnesota Law School. They talked about Mizelle’s approach to statutory interpretation, the role of the major questions doctrine, whether her views are likely to survive appeal and how the entire endeavor is likely to impact ongoing efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke to Charlotte Willner, who has been working in content moderation longer than just about anyone. Charlotte is now the executive director of the Trust and Safety Professionals Association, an organization that brings together the professionals that write and enforce the rules for what’s fair game and what’s not on online platforms. Before that, she worked in Trust and Safety at Pinterest and before that she built the very first safety operations team at Facebook. Evelyn asked Charlotte what it was like trying to build a content moderation system from the ground up, what has changed since those early days (spoilers: it’s a lot!) and—of course—if she had any advice for Twitter’s new owner given all her experience helping keep platforms safe.

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Finlandization is a troubled concept. It is generally used to describe the attempt by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to hold Finland in a position of neutrality and friendliness toward the Soviet Union, even while politically, Finland was more aligned with the West. In recent years—before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—it was sometimes brought up as a model for Ukraine to straddle the boundary between east and west. But for Finns, Finlandization meant something quite dark—the long-term subjugation of Finland's politics to the will of an authoritarian neighbor.

David Priess sat down with Antti Ruokonen, who wrote an article recently for Lawfare titled, “Why Finlandization is a Terrible Model for Ukraine.” They spoke about Finland's experience in the second World War, the imposed restrictions on its sovereignty because of this Finlandization during the Cold War, and the dangers of seeing Finlandization as a model for peaceful coexistence with Russia.

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Vladislav Davidzon is a journalist and author. He is a New Yorker, a Parisian and an Odessa resident. He's the author of “From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” and he joined Benjamin Wittes from Odessa where he is covering the war.

It's a wide-ranging conversation about the course of the war, the state of life in Odessa today and the current state of Ukrainian politics. They talked about how the war is really going, about myths and facts about denazification of Ukraine and about what Ukraine will look like as a political society when the war is over. 

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On today’s episode, Matt Gluck, Research Fellow at Lawfare, spoke with Sean Mirski and Aaron Sobel of Arnold & Porter. Mirski practices foreign-relations, international, and appellate law, and Sobel practices international and appellate law. They discussed Mirski and Sobel’s recent Lawfare piece, co-authored with John Bellinger and Catherine McCarthy, on the Eighth Circuit’s decision reviving part of Missouri’s coronavirus-related lawsuit against several defendants connected to the Chinese government.

They spoke about the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Missouri’s claims and why one of them survived the Eighth Circuit’s jurisdictional review, how this decision might affect other coronavirus lawsuits, and the potential implications of the decision for U.S. foreign policy, among other topics.

Check out Mirski’s recent book, “We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus,” which examines the roots of the United States’ ascension to hegemony and was rated by Kirkus as one of the 100 best non-fiction books of 2023.

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/c/trumptrials.

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Emily Hoge is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Russian veterans groups from the Afghan war and their evolution over time. She wrote a recent piece in Lawfare about how these groups, which started as anti-war, anti-state, pro-veterans activist organizations, morphed into a big part of Vladimir Putin's propaganda operations. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the history of these groups, how they emerged from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union to represent veterans all over the country, how Putin adopted their victimization narrative and made it key to his vision of the state's relations with the international order more broadly, and how these groups are now promoting the war in Ukraine. 

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In this episode of Chatter, a podcast hosted by David Priess and Shane Harris that features in-depth discussions with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security, Harris and Priess speak jointly with former intelligence officer, prominent yacht-watcher and book author Alex Finley. They talk about her career in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which became the National Clandestine Service during her tenure there), her keen observation and analysis of Russian oligarchs' mega-yachts (which brought her onto cable news networks this spring after several countries started to seize the ships in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine), and her experience writing a series of spy satire novels (which take espionage absurdity to a new level). The three of them also kicked around views on a range of spy satire films, from 1985's Spies Like Us to the puppet-centric Team America to Spy with Melissa McCarthy. Learn more about Chatter at https://shows.acast.com/chatter.

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From July 12, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes—or some of them, anyway—are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But the United States's history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts there since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings Institution launch event for his newest book entitled, “What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow and Director of the Intelligence Project at Brookings, discussed lessons the United States can learn from its successful efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in Afghanistan. In his talk, Riedel discusses why the American intelligence operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s was so successful, and what, if any lessons, the United States can apply to its ongoing operations in the country. Riedel also explored the complex personalities and individuals who shaped the war, and explained how their influence still affects the region today. Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks and moderated the conversation.

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

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In this live recording of the Lawfare Live event, “Ukraine and the Future of National Security Law,” Natalie Orpett moderated a panel of experts, including Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group; Chimene Keitner, professor of international law at UC Hastings; Todd Huntley, director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown Law; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. They talked about a wide range of issues coming out of the current conflict in Ukraine, ranging from war crimes, to sanctions, to information operations, to the multidimensional role that technology is playing. They talked about what we're seeing now and what it may mean for the future of national security law and international law. 

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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with a reporter who has carved out a unique beat writing about not just technology but the creativity and peculiarities of the people who use it—Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at the Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Her recent writing includes reporting on “algospeak”—that is, how algorithmic amplification changes how people talk online—and coverage of the viral Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which promotes social media posts of LGBTQ people for right-wing mockery. They talked about the quirks of a culture shaped in conversation with algorithms, the porous border between internet culture and political life in the United States, and what it means to take the influence of social media seriously, for good and for ill.

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Monday evening on the Tucker Carlson show, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was complaining that she had to submit to sworn questioning in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. That will come on Friday in a case designed to disqualify her as an insurrectionist from future holding of office. It will take place before an administrative law judge in Georgia, her home state, and that makes this the first case brought under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to actually move to discovery. 

For an update on the Marjorie Taylor Greene case and the other Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualification litigations, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff. They talked about how this case came to an actual testimony by Marjorie Taylor Greene, where the other 14th Amendment disqualifications are and what we should expect in her livestream testimony on Friday.

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Throughout human history, democracies have been the exception, not the rule, and that's been doubly true for ethnically, religiously or linguistically diverse societies. But these are precisely the societies that benefit the most from politically stable and inclusive institutions. So why is it so hard to get them to work? And what can we do to encourage them?

Yascha Mounk teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University and is one of the leading commentators on the threats to liberal democracy. And he's just published a book, “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.” Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Yascha about his book, his diagnosis of what ails diverse democracies and what can be done to strengthen them.

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Scott R. Anderson is a senior editor at Lawfare, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow with the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He’s also the author of a new Politico Magazine piece that raises an often overlooked vulnerability in the presidential election. A lot of attention after Jan. 6 and Nov. 2020 has rightly gone to the Electoral Count Act and other similar reforms, but Scott argues that if Congress really wants to protect the presidency, it can't just reform the process for counting electoral votes. Jacob Schulz sat down with Scott to talk about his Politico article and about the broader landscape of electoral reforms in the aftermath of 2020.

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From March 6, 2019: Susan Hennessey interviewed FBI Director Chris Wray at the 2019 RSA Conference. They discussed how the Director views the cyber threat landscape 18 months into his term, his concerns about the threats posed by Russia and China, what the FBI is doing to protect the 2020 elections, and more.

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From November 14, 2012: Ritika Singh interviews American University scholar Stephen Tankel on Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation, the endgame in Afghanistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

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This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk through some of the week’s biggest national security news stories, including:

• “Save the Last Gantz.” Leading opposition figure Benny Gantz has left Israel’s war cabinet over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to establish post-conflict plans for Gaza, raising serious questions about the stability of Netanyahu’s far-right government. What does Gantz’s departure mean for the future of the conflict?
• “Congress Shall Make No Law…Abridging the Freedom of [BEEP], or of the [PRESS ENTER KEY].” California is on the verge of enacting one of the country’s first AI safety laws. But critics are arguing that the type of restrictions it imposes may run afoul of the First Amendment. How does AI fit with the freedom of speech—and does the First Amendment put it beyond regulatory reach?
• “A Stale Macron is One Tough Cookie.” Recent elections to the European Parliament saw a surge in right (and particularly far-right) parties across the continent, and most specifically in France and Germany. Fearing what this groundswell might mean for his centrist coalition, French President Emmanuel Macron has sought to cut it off at the pass by calling for snap national parliamentary elections. Is this a risky strategy or a sound one?

For object lessons, Ben asked listeners how they intended to celebrate #RussiaDay on June 12. Alan celebrated an inedible apple. Quinta followed up on last week’s discussion to share the American Immigration Council’s analysis of the new border executive order. And Scott sang the praises of Roka, a brand of glasses that finally stays on his dumb flat face.

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/c/trumptrials.

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American political life is defined by what can seem like a paradox. Our society is incredibly politically polarized, but our parties are as weak as they've ever been. How else could a reality TV star have so quickly and completely taken control of one of our major political parties?

For Larry Jacobs, a political scientist and professor at the University of Minnesota, the weakness of our parties is a major threat to American democracy. But as he explains in his new book, “Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History,” the roots of this weakness go back all the way to the earliest years of the United States and today manifest in our broken system of presidential primaries. 

Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Larry about his new book, his diagnosis of what ails American politics and what, if anything, can be done to fix it. 

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The internet is increasingly emerging as a source for identification and documentation of war crimes, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has devastatingly proven yet again. But how does an image of a possible war crime go from social media to before a tribunal in a potential war crimes prosecution? 

On a recent episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Waters, the lead on Justice and Accountability at Bellingcat, about how open-source investigators go about documenting evidence of atrocity. This week on the show, Evelyn and Quinta interviewed Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on using digital evidence for justice and accountability. They talked about how international tribunals have adapted to using new forms of evidence derived from the internet, how social media platforms have helped—and hindered—collection of this kind of evidence, and the work Alexa has done to create a playbook for investigators downloading and collecting material documenting atrocities.

Because of the nature of the conversation, this discussion contains some descriptions of violence that might be upsetting for some listeners. 

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Over the weekend, France held the first round of its presidential elections for 2022. The result was that the same two candidates as last time will move on to the final round: incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. To talk through the election results and what comes next, Jacob Schulz sat down with Agneska Bloch, a senior research assistant at a DC-based think tank where she works on European affairs. 

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Over the weekend, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star who later ascended to the role of prime minister, was removed from office. Khan lost a no confidence vote in Pakistan’s parliament that came after a few weeks of intense legal and political turmoil.

To make sense of the complicated developments, Jacob Schulz sat down with Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. They talked about how the situation has developed, how to think about the relative roles of opposition political parties and the military, and what comes next.

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The period after Watergate and President Nixon's resignation saw an unprecedented barrage of congressional efforts at reforming the executive branch. The period after Donald Trump's departure from office has seen no comparable spree of legislative action—at least not yet. In a recent Lawfare article, Quinta Jurecic and Andrew Kent explored the disparity and the reasons for it, and they analyzed whether any of the legislative reforms that have been so far proposed have any prospect of passage. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about why things are so different today than they were in the late 1970s, what happened in that period and whether Congress will actually be able to do anything now.

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From December 19, 2019: In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Peter Pomerantsev, a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." The book explores how the nature of propaganda has shifted as authoritarian governments move from silencing dissent to drowning dissent out with squalls of disinformation. Pomerantsev argues that this transformation traces back to the cynicism and chaos in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, but now it's become all too familiar around the world.

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From August 26, 2020: Yemen is home to the most tragic circumstances imaginable right now—years upon years of war, environmental disasters and severe humanitarian plight, exacerbated by cholera, diphtheria and now COVID-19. To discuss the ongoing situation, David Priess sat down with Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University, who has spent extensive time on the ground in Yemen, and Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. They talked about the roots of the Yemeni war and its humanitarian toll, its evolution through conflict and COVID-19, and prospects for improved conditions.

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Last week on Lawfare Live, Jacob Schulz sat down with Andrew Mines, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Mines helps lead the Program on Extremism's efforts to keep track of criminal charges resulting from the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill siege. They talked about the U.S military’s efforts to counter extremism within its ranks. Mines is the recent author of a Lawfare piece on the subject, and they talked through the history of the problem, the history of Defense Department efforts to fix it and where the department is still coming up short.

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We’re taking a look back at one of the stranger stories about social media platforms and the role of the press in the last presidential election. In the weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published an “October Surprise”: a set of stories on the business and personal life of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, based on emails contained on a mysterious laptop. A great deal was questionable about the Post’s reporting, including to what extent the emails in question were real and how the tabloid had obtained them in the first place. The mainstream press was far more circumspect in reporting out the story—and meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook sharply restricted circulation of the Post’s stories on their platforms. 

It’s a year and half later. And the Washington Post just published a lengthy report verifying the authenticity of some of the emails on the mysterious laptop—though a lot still remains unclear about the incident. In light of this news, how should we understand Facebook and Twitter’s actions in 2020? 

Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus weighed in on this question in his own reflection for the paper. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic asked him on the show to discuss the story. Did the social media platforms go too far in limiting access to the New York Post’s reporting? How did the mainstream press deal with the incident? What have we learned from the failures of how the press and social media responded to information operations around the 2016 election, and what can we learn from how they behaved differently in 2020?

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In the last few weeks, much has been said about how energy issues are playing into Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. It's especially coming up in the context of sanctions regimes against Russia, whose economy relies so heavily on energy production. But the war has serious implications for energy security more broadly.

Natalie Orpett sat down with Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security, to talk about how the events in Ukraine are both exposing and exacerbating threats to energy security and climate security. They discussed the effect of European dependence on Russian oil and gas, how ecological damage is causing both immediate crises and long-term threats, why the conflict is causing food insecurity at a global scale, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

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On today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Gabor Rona, Professor of Practice at Cardozo Law, and Natalie Orpett, Lawfare’s Executive Editor, to discuss their recent Lawfare piece examining whether a state pursuing an armed conflict in compliance with international humanitarian law could nonetheless violate the Genocide Convention. They discussed how these two areas of law intersect, their relevance to the ongoing proceedings over Israel’s conduct in Gaza before the International Court of Justice, and what the questions their analysis raises might mean for the future of accountability for genocide.

You can find their article, "Can Armed Attacks That Comply With IHL Nonetheless Constitute Genocide?," online at https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-armed-attacks-that-comply-with-ihl-nonetheless-constitute-genocide.

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On June 3, President Biden issued a national security memorandum that established the “Fight Against Corruption” as a core national security interest for the United States. The memo described the staggering costs of corruption, with it being “estimated that acts of corruption sap between 2 and 5 percent from global gross domestic product.” The memo also directed U.S. officials to develop a comprehensive presidential strategy focused on anti-corruption.

Alvaro Marañon sat down with Paul Massaro, the senior policy advisor for counter-kleptocracy at the Helsinki Commission, to speak about the United States government's latest anti-corruption efforts following the June memo. They discussed the latest developments in the efforts to combat corruption, details around the first-ever presidential strategy on anti-corruption and the kinds of messages these unified efforts send to other authoritarian regimes beyond Russia. 

For more on this topic, consider watching “Countering Oligarchs, Enablers, and Lawfare,” a hearing on Wednesday, April 6, at 2:30 p.m., hosted by the Helsinki Commission.

Disclaimer: Paul Massaro serves on the staff of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent an official position of the U.S. government.

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Madeleine Albright passed away on March 23. She was the first woman to serve as secretary of state in United States history, and she had a long legacy, both from her time as secretary and beyond. To talk through what made her special and what her impact was, David Priess sat down with Kori Schake and Natalie Orpett. Kori is the director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and she worked in the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the National Security Council staff. Natalie Orpett is the executive editor of Lawfare, and she worked with Secretary Albright as her executive assistant after she had left the Department of State. They talked about some of the foreign policy developments during Secretary Albright's tenure; about her personal relationships, including with those with whom she did not agree; and about her legacy when it comes to helping women in national security positions.

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From October 1, 2019: The first two years of the Trump presidency were tied up with the Russia scandal. Now, there’s another scandal involving Russia’s next-door neighbor: Ukraine. The revelation that President Trump and his envoys pressured the Ukrainian government for information about debunked claims of Biden family corruption in Ukraine have brought Ukrainian domestic politics onto the American stage. The Ukrainian side of this very American scandal is complicated yet vital to understanding the whistleblower complaint and the reality of what happened with the Ukrainian prosecutor and Joe Biden’s son. Quinta Jurecic sat down with Alina Polyakova, the Director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution, to break it all down. They talked about recent Ukrainian political developments, what exactly Joe Biden did or didn’t do in Ukraine, and what this might mean for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship going forward.

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From April 13, 2020: Whether it has been travel bans, family separation, or changes to asylum rules, the Trump administration has long been embroiled in controversies over its immigration and detention policy. Those controversies have come amidst surges in migrants and asylum seekers, particularly at the U.S. southern border. The Trump administration's new policies have been legally and technically complex, and that was all before COVID-19.

Mikhaila Fogel sat down with immigration reporters Hamed Aleaziz of Buzzfeed News and Dara Lind of ProPublica, as well as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council. They discussed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Protection, are responding to COVID-19; the changing legal landscape for those agencies before the pandemic; and the challenges faced by migrants, asylum seekers and the U.S. immigration system during coronavirus and beyond.

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Andrea Chalupa is a writer, podcaster and Ukrainian American who worked for 15 years on a screenplay about a man named Gareth Jones, a journalist who uncovered the genocide perpetrated by Stalin against Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Directed by the great filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the film is called “Mr. Jones,” and it was released in the middle of the pandemic. It is an incredible piece of work that could not be more relevant to the current news about the conflict in Ukraine. Chalupa sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss Gareth Jones; the New York Times reporter in Moscow at the time, Walter Duranty; her own grandfather; and the story of how she came to write this film. 

Please note that this episode contains brief depictions of violence, including against children, that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re turning our attention to the United Kingdom, where the government has just introduced into Parliament a broad proposal for regulating the internet: the Online Safety Bill. The U.K. government has proclaimed that the Bill represents new “world-first online safety laws” and includes “tougher and quicker criminal sanctions for tech bosses.” So … what would it actually do?

To answer this question, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ellen Judson, a senior researcher at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, a U.K. think tank. Ellen has been closely tracking the legislation as it has developed. And she helped walk us through the tangled system of regulations created by the bill. What new obligations does the Online Safety Bill create, and what companies would those obligations apply to? Why is the answer to so many questions “yet to be defined”—a phrase we kept saying again and again throughout the show—and how much of the legislation is just punting the really difficult questions for another day? What happens now that the bill has been formally introduced in Parliament?

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In the hours following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine's foreign minister tweeted out a call for what he called an international legion of fighters to come to Ukraine and fight against Russia. And so far, it seems that some have heeded that call. Jacob Schulz talked with Daniel Byman, Lawfare’s foreign policy editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who is the author of a book on foreign fighters. They talked through the history of foreign fighters in different conflicts, how to think about the inflows into Ukraine and what the downsides might be of the phenomenon of foreign fighters traveling to Ukraine. 

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We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do.

Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called, “The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.” Juliette is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a CNN national security analyst, and David Priess sat down with her to talk about it all. They talked about the traditional focus of the disaster framework; consequences minimalization; the paradox of preparedness; and a variety of disasters and what we can learn from them, ranging from the Y2K incident, to Super Bowl XLVII, to the shipping incident in the Suez Canal back in 2021. They talk a lot about how to recover from disasters, and how to deal with them in a way that stops the bleeding and keeps them from getting worse, even as they’re occurring.

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Polina Ivanova is a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and has spent the better part of the last decade reporting from Russia for that publication, for Reuters and elsewhere. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the Russian military press conference that took place on Friday in which the Ministry of Defense seemed to walk back Russia's war aims in the Ukraine conflict. Ben and Polina talked about what the Ministry of Defense said, how different or similar it is from previous Russian statements about what this war is about, whether it was intended for international or domestic consumption, or maybe both, and whether it provides a plausible basis for resolution of the conflict. 

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From February 19, 2021: On February 1, Myanmar's military overthrew the country's democratically elected government in a coup and declared a state of emergency for a year. Since then, the country has seen daily peaceful protests and large-scale strikes against military rule, at times clashing with security forces who have been seen using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. To break it all down, Rohini Kurup spoke with Aye Min Thant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist based in Myanmar. They discussed Myanmar's history of military rule, what it is like living through a coup and what to expect in the coming weeks.

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Natan Sachs is the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He joined Lawfare's Editor in Chief, Benjamin Wittes, to discuss the resignation of Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz, the fate of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government, and Israeli perceptions of the Gaza war.

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From March 4, 2021: On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Emily testified before Congress last week about the role of legacy media, and cable news in particular, in spreading disinformation, but she’s also one of the keenest observers of the online news ecosystem and knows a lot about it from her days as director of digital content for The Guardian. They talked about the relationship between online and offline media in spreading disinformation, the role different institutions need to play in fixing what’s broken and whether all the talk about “fighting misinformation” is a bit of a red herring.

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Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued rulings in two separate cases involving the state secrets privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga. To talk about the Court's decision and what it means for state secrets doctrine and executive power, Rohini Kurup sat down with Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Bob Loeb, partner in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation practice, and former acting deputy director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. Rohini first talked to them on the Lawfare Podcast back in October when they discussed the cases that were then before the Court. Now that the Court has issued its ruling, they got back together to discuss the Court's decision and what it means for the future of state secrets doctrine. 

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