The Lawfare Podcast

Just before the holiday weekend, as you were drifting out of town, the Washington Post dropped its 15 kiloton Kushner bomb. Over the weekend, the New York Times piled on, and by the time we got here this morning, there was only one thing to do: A special edition of the podcast.

Carrie Cordero, Susan Hennessey, and Benjamin Wittes talked through the details of the latest bizarro revelations about the attempted secret back channel between the Trump transition and the Russians, using Russian diplomatic technical means. 

If you'd like to read Carrie's Lawfare post on the Kushner story, you can find it here

Direct download: Episode_229.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:01pm EDT

Amidst the hurricane of news coming out of the White House in recent weeks, one question has surfaced again and again: why isn't White House Counsel Don McGahn stopping Donald Trump from doing all this? This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel for Barack Obama, to talk about the Office of the White House Counsel and how President Trump can and can't be restrained.

 
 
Direct download: Episode_228.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:20pm EDT

It's been a long and stressful week on the domestic front, so we at the Lawfare Podcast are bringing you a podcast on a cheerier subject: the looming crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Mira Rapp-Hooper, Senior Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, to chat about the recent series of escalating North Korean missile tests and the crisis we're all being distracted from. 

 
 
Direct download: Episode_227.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:49am EDT

It has been, to put it mildly, a busy week. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that when Benjamin Wittes sat down with former attorney general to President George W. Bush Michael Mukasey and former Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston this morning at a Federalist Society panel on the unitary executive, Mukasey and Eggleston made some news of their own—pointedly criticizing the Trump White House's recent handling of the Russia investigation and the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey. Now we're bringing you audio of the panel on a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast, featuring Mukasey and Eggleston's expert thoughts on recent news events as well as their considerations of the state of the unitary executive. 

Direct download: Episode_226.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:10am EDT

This afternoon, the Washington Post broke a major story: Donald Trump disclosed highly classified material to the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister in the Oval Office last week, compromising a highly sensitive counterterrorism program run by an allied intelligence service. This evening, we got former DNI General Counsel Robert Litt on the line for a discussion with Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of the latest mess. Litt helped coordinate and manage the intelligence community's response to the Edward Snowden revelations, so he knows a little something about responding to massive intelligence disclosures. We talked about how bad the disclosure may be, what the remedies for it are, and what we still don't know. 

Direct download: Episode_225.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:08pm EDT

It’s been a long week, so after our special emergency edition on the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the Lawfare Podcast is coming to your rescue with an episode that has nothing at all to do with the crisis at the FBI. Instead, take a listen to Jack Goldsmith’s interview of Mark Moyar at the Hoover Book Soiree about Moyar’s new book, Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces. The conversation delves into the history of special operations forces and how they’ve been used and misused over time.

Direct download: Episode_224.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:04pm EDT

The sound quality is, well, substandard, and we apologize for that. But people on Twitter were asking for an emergency podcast on FBI Director James Comey's firing today, and we put together an incredible group to discuss the day's events. In a recorded conference call this evening, we heard from—in addition to the two of us—Jack Goldmith, who knows a little something about confrontations between the White House and Justice Department officials; Carrie Cordero, who knows a little something about national security investigations (having served at NSD for years); and Paul Rosenzweig, who knows a little something about special prosecutor investigations (having served under Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr). By the time you listen to this, it may be out of date, but we're confident it's the best discussion you'll hear on the subject tonight.

Direct download: Episode_223.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:07pm EDT

Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the President and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to ponder the question are former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden, former acting and deputy director of CIA John McLaughlin, and former deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism Juan Zarate, who spoke with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in a recent event at the Aspen Institute.

Direct download: Episode_222.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:53am EDT

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