Discussion on impeachment has intensified since Donald Trump assumed office this January, but what do we know about impeachment’s constitutional design and history? Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School, recently wrote an accessible account of impeachment to separate myth from history. Last week, Benjamin Wittes interviewed Sunstein on his new book "Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide." They discussed the Framers’ intent behind impeachment, what “high crimes and misdemeanors” actually means, the appropriate situations for which impeachment is called, and much more.

Matters Russia have been prevalent in U.S. politics since news of the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 elections first surfaced. It's time to pay some serious attention to the Russian surveillance apparatus. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the book, “The Red Web,” brings a unique interpretation of the Kremlin’s actions as an independent reporter in the very country Americans find so confusing. Special guest host Alina Polyakova, David M. Rubenstein fellow in Brookings’s Foreign Policy Program, interviewed Soldatov last week to discuss Russia’s perspective on the 2016 election meddling, the Kremlin’s surveillance operations, Edward Snowden, and much more.  

This is the first podcast in a new project between in which Polyakova will shed light on Russian politics and society on the Lawfare Podcast in an effort to understand the Kremlin’s intentions toward and engagement with the West.

The Wall Street Journal this morning broke a major story: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating President Trump's former national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, for allegedly plotting with Turkish officials to arrange the extrajudicial removal of Fethullah Gulen from the United States in exchange for a boatload of money. We put together an emergency podcast with Shane Harris, one of the reporters on the story, Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks, and Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes, Susan Hennessey, Paul Rosenzweig, and Steve Vladeck to cover all the angles. What does it mean? And where does it go from here?

Warning: the audio quality is a little rough in spots, recorded conference calls being what they are.

Technology presents both consumer convenience and risk, creating a conflict between security and privacy as government agencies seek to weaken the protections that consumers want heightened. Cybersecurity expert and advocate of liberal encryption policy, Susan Landau, explores this challenge and the need for maintaining cybersecurity in her new book “Listening in: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age.” Last week at the Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes and  Susan Landau discussed the issues behind encryption, whether law enforcement can manage without signals content, the impact of end-to-end encryption on security, and much more.  

Political polarization, inequality, and corruption during the period 146 to 78 BC gravely weakened the Roman Republic in the years before its collapse. In his new book “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Late Republic,” podcaster Mike Duncan explores this period and how Rome’s politics, which emerged from Rome’s success, subsequently led to the republic’s downfall. Benjamin Wittes interviewed Duncan on his new book to discuss ancient and modern populisms, the parallels between the late Roman Republic and current American politics, and the impact of demagoguery on government.

Stalin’s 1929 agricultural collectivization policy, which catalyzed the most lethal famine in European history, left millions of Ukrainian peasants dead. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Anne Applebaum recently published a book on this famine and the horrors of Stalin’s agricultural collectivization in Ukraine, revealing the more insidious intent behind the Soviet Union’s policy and enforcement. Last week, Benjamin Wittes interviewed Applebaum on her new book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, to discuss the scope of the book, the devastating impact of Stalin’s policy on Ukraine’s peasant population, and the book’s relevance to Putin’s current agenda.

What a day. Paul Manafort Jr. and Richard Gates III have been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who today also rolled out a plea deal with Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos. Lawfare contributing editors Paul Rosenzweig, who worked under Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and Robert Bauer, who served as Barack Obama's White House Counsel, join Benjamin Wittes for a discussion of the day's events.

This week marked the launch of the Texas National Security Review, a new publication from the University of Texas and War on the Rocks. At the recent launch event of the journal, War on the Rocks editor-in-chief Ryan Evans moderated a conversation with Benjamin Wittes, Kori Schake, distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Nora Bensahel, defense policy analyst and Atlantic Council scholar. Panelists discussed how countries are responding to the Trump administration and what strategies they should consider in the future, the relationship between domestic and international order, and how we should feel about the state of American democracy ten months into the new administration.

Last week, Lawfare hosted a screening and panel discussion of the new film Icarus at the Brookings Institution. Benjamin Wittes moderated the conversation with director Bryan Fogel, producer Dan Cogan, Atlantic staff writer Julia Ioffe, and Brookings President Strobe Talbott to discuss the film and its striking similarities to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Podcast listeners may recall we did an earlier Lawfare podcast with Fogel in August about the film. Warning: This discussion will make more sense for those who have seen the film--available on Netflix—or who have listened to that earlier episode.

In his recent book Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance, and the Struggle to Reform the NSA, civil liberties activist and former intelligence official Timothy Edgar calls for a renewed conversation on mass surveillance reform in the global and digital age. This month, Benjamin Wittes interviewed Edgar on his new book at the Hoover Institution’s regular book soiree. They discussed Edgar’s work as both an ACLU lawyer and an intelligence official in the Bush and Obama administrations, the substantive reform agenda Edgar envisions for mass surveillance, the nuances of protecting privacy in a global landscape, and much more.

When an American ISIS fighter turned himself in to Syrian Democratic Forces last month, the subsequent detention of the unnamed enemy combatant by U.S. forces sparked concern. To explore the implications of John Doe’s detention, Steve Vladeck joined Benjamin Wittes for a lively debate on the level of alarm that the American citizen held in military custody should raise. They discussed the facts of the event, the reasons behind the failure to disclose John Doe’s identity or provide him access to counsel, the legitimacy of his detention, and much more. 

Political Islam has been radically shifting in the past four years since the Egyptian coup and the emergence of ISIS, consequently challenging how we understand Islamist movements and their impact. To evaluate the evolution of mainstream Islamist groups and the obstacles they face in governance, Brookings Senior Fellows Shadi Hamid and Will McCants led an initiative to assess these movements across 12 countries, compiling field research from a group of leading specialists in their recently released book Rethinking Political Islam. Benjamin Wittes interviewed Shadi and Will on their book, discussing the scope of the volume, the common themes across the major movements, and the nuances of movements in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria.

Last month, Lawfare and Foreign Policy hosted an event on lawyering for the Trump presidency. Susan Hennessey spoke with former White House Counsels Bob Bauer, who served in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2011, and A.B. Culvahouse, who served in the Reagan administration from 1987 to 1989, in a lively discussion on providing legal support when your client is the president. They talked about the distinction between a president’s personal counsel and White House counsel, the challenges of defending a president during an investigation, and the quotidian aspects of the role of the White House Counsel. 

President Trump's conduct in office draws a sharp contrast between laws that formally restrict the presidency and the institutional norms that presidents have historically followed. For the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic, Jack Goldsmith addressed that distinction in his article Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency? To help answer that question, Benjamin Wittes interviewed Goldsmith last week on his latest article, discussing President Trump's errant behavior in office and its impact on future presidencies, the difference between violations of norms and violations of law, and the changing landscape of journalism under the Trump presidency. 

The Kellogg-Briand Pact is often remembered as a failure; signed in 1928 to outlaw war, it was followed in just over a decade by one of the deadliest conflicts in history. But Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro see the Pact differently. In their new book, "The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World," they argue that though it did not successfully end all war, the Pact changed the way states resolve disputes, reduced the likelihood of conquest, and set of a chain of events that led to the modern world order. On September 11, they sat down with Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree to discuss their book and its implications.

The escalating tension between North Korea and the United States has risen to an unprecedented level. Earlier this month, Stephan Haggard, Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at UC San Diego, gave a lecture at a private function on the complicated strategic and political risks that North Korea’s missile and nuclear capabilities present. He talked about the complex relationship among North Korea’s allies and adversaries, the impact of sanctions against Pyongyang, and the past and future role of the United States in addressing North Korean aggression.

The evidence of foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. elections emphasizes the significant national security threat to our democracy. Last week, Susan Hennessey joined a panel at the Brookings Institution to address the national strategy for protecting U.S. elections with retired four-star general John Allen, Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, and Dean Logan, the president for the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow in Foreign Policy, moderated the conversation. Panelists explored the nuances of impacted voter confidence in the broader context in which elections occur, as well as addressed the current cybersecurity risks in election infrastructure.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government has been a focal point in political discourse since Mueller’s appointment in May. To contribute to that discussion, Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, interviewed Benjamin Wittes at the International Student House last week. Strategies a special counsel might use when investigating, the different mechanisms for removing a president, and the misconceptions surrounding impeachment were all discussed, followed by audience questions on a range of topics. 

Please note that the audio quality is poor because of feedback in the room's audio system. 

In the past 24 hours, the Financial Times reported that Russian lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin testified before Robert Mueller's grand jury; Politico carried that the Mueller team is cooperating with the New York Attorney General to investigate Paul Manafort; and the Wall Street Journal broke that the President's lawyers have provided memos to the Special Counsel arguing that the president cannot commit obstruction of justice and questioning Jim Comey's credibility. Shane Harris and Paul Rosenzweig joined Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes to discuss the recent developments.

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes answer listener questions about Lawfare, the podcast, and current events in law and national security.

Friday morning, the White House announced it will elevate Cyber Command to a full unified combatant command. Within 60 days, the Secretary of Defense will recommend whether Cyber Command should also split from the National Security Agency. On Thursday, as rumors of the announcement surfaced, Susan Hennessey spoke to Bobby Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder of Lawfare, and Michael Sulmeyer, Director of the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center, about the organizational and operational consequences of elevating and splitting Cyber Command.

Filmmaker and cyclist Bryan Fogel talks about his new movie, Icarus, about Russian subversion of international doping rules in sports—and how it relates to the current investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The growing threat from North Korea has intensified during the past few weeks after a series of missile tests demonstrated that the Kim regime may soon be able to strike the continental United States. This week, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Mira Rapp-Hooper, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Stephan Haggard, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, to discuss recent events on the Korean peninsula and the path forward for the United States and the international community. They addressed the diplomatic and military options for addressing the North Korean threat, the likelihood that the Kim regime will respond to traditional deterrence strategies, and how a new administration in the U.S. changes the dynamics in the region. 

On December 31, 2017, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act will sunset. Officials insist that the provision authorizes critical intelligence gathering, but as of yet, Congress has not signaled whether it will give a clean reauthorization of the bill, pass it with amendments, or allow it to lapse altogether. In this week's podcast, Susan Hennessey sits down with FBI General Counsel Jim Baker and the Bureau's Executive Assistant Director of the National Security Branch Carl Ghattas to discuss the legal and operational elements of Section 702. 

This week on the Lawfare Podcast, Jack Goldsmith interviews Graham Allison at the Hoover Book Soiree about Allison's new book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?.  The conversation covers the history of rising and declining powers, how the North Korean regime affects the security dynamic between U.S. and China, and how to preserve peace where Thucydides would predict war.

At this point, it’s widely accepted that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election; the question now is what the United States should do about it. At Third Way, Mieke Eoyang, Evelyn Farkas, Ben Freeman, and Gary Ashcroft have a new paper on the subject, titled “The Last Straw: Responding to Russia’s Anti-Western Aggression.” Mieke and Evelyn came to the studio to talk with Benjamin Wittes about their proposals, which range from sanctions to FARA reforms.

This week, Ben discusses recent events in cybersecurity with Matt Tait. Matt shared his views on WannaCry, NotPetya, and what companies and governments can do to protect against such attacks in the future.

Today, Shane Harris of The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn." He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss the story in this special edition of the podcast.

This week, in Israel, Ben had two conversations about the television show Fauda. On Tuesday, Ben spoke with Avi Issacharoff, the show's co-creator and a journalist at the Times of Israel and Walla!. Then, on Thursday, Ben talked to Brig. Gen. Dov "Fufi" Sedaka, a former Israeli special operator and former head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank. With each, Ben discussed Fauda's portrayal of the complicated lives of Israeli special operators, as well as perceptions of the show in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

This week, the Lawfare Podcast brings you Jack Goldsmith's interview with Dan Drezner at the Hoover Book Soirée about Drezner's new book, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas.  The conversation covers how polarization, inequality, and mistrust are changing the way ideas influence policy and public opinion.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions faced questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee today. He answered questions on his recusal, on his role in James Comey's firing, on his disputed conversation with the former FBI Director, and on his meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He also declined to answer a lot of questions about his conversations with President Trump—without an assertion of executive privilege.

We stripped out all the extraneous material, leaving just the questions and answers: no repetition, no senatorial speechifying.

We left in every question that produced new information, and that's all we left in. It's everything you actually need from today's hearing in 90 minutes.

As the dust settles following former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Lawfare Podcast brings you expert views on what exactly happened yesterday and what it means for the Trump administration going forward. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Carrie Cordero, a former attorney at the National Security Division of the Justice Department, and Paul Rosenzweig, who worked for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, for a conversation on the Comey testimony and its implications.

In much-anticipated testimony today, former FBI Director James Comey spoke before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the subject of his many interactions with President Donald Trump prior to his dismissal. The testimony took up a tight three hours, but there were still plenty of repetitions and instances in which the former Director was unable to answer questions in an open session. To save you from all that, we at Lawfare are providing you with a bare-bones, just-the-facts version of Comey's testimony today. It's the distilled version of what we've all been waiting to hear.

With the impending sunset of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in December 2017, debate is heating up over how the crucial intelligence-gathering provision will be reauthorized by Congress—and even if it will be reauthorized at all. At the Hoover Institution, Benjamin Wittes sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the intelligence community's perspective on 702 and what lies ahead for it in these turbulent times.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Four years on, the cultural differences between Europe and the United States exposed by Edward Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance programs still loom large in transatlantic relations. At our most recent Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Russell Miller—editor of a new volume on Privacy and Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair— and Ralf Poscher—who, along with Ben, contributed a chapter to the book—to chat about privacy and surveillance oversight post-Snowden.

Over the past year, Lawfare has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of sextortion, a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases, onto the podcast to discuss her work. Now, we’re pleased to feature Mona on the podcast once again with audio of her talk last week at George Washington University Law School on prosecuting sextortion.

If you’re interested in reading our Brookings Institution reports on sextortion, you can find them here and here.

As our dependence on cyberspace increases, so too will the urgency of crafting good cybersecurity policy—but the combination of knotty problems in the realms of both technology and law often makes these issues particularly difficult to iron out. In this episode of the podcast, Susan Hennessey sits down with Trey Herr, Fellow with the Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School; Jane Chong, Deputy Managing Editor of Lawfare and National Security and Law Associate at the Hoover Institution; and Robert M. Lee, nonresident national cybersecurity fellow at New America, to chat about a new book on the subject: Cyber Insecurity: Navigating the Perils of the Next Information Age. Co-edited by Trey and Richard Harrison, Director of Operations and Defense Technology Programs at the American Foreign Policy Council, and with chapters by Jane and Robert, the book seeks provides a practitioner's roadmap to cybersecurity policy.

On Friday, March 31st, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held its first open hearing in its investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election on "Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns." The experts before the committee, including Eugene Rumer, Roy Godson, Clint Watts, Kevin Mandia, General Keith Alexander, and Thomas Rid, gave a useful rundown of the scope and mechanics of Russian influence. There's just one problem: their testimony ran five hours long. So once again, we've cut down the hearing to a snappy two hours, bringing you just the good parts. 

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute and the Hoover Institution sat down with Graeme Wood to discuss his new book, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. The book both situates ISIS within context of Islamic history and theology and chronicles Wood's meetings with ISIS supporters and sympathizers across the world in an effort to understand what's behind the group's pull. It's a useful complement to the news coming out of Iraq and Syria as we begin to consider what the future of ISIS will look like after the fall of Raqqa and Mosul.

Between leading the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's first open hearing on Russian election interference on Monday, and sparring with HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes over Nunes's odd escapades regarding possible incidental collection of communications of Trump associates, HPSCI Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff has had a busy week. On Tuesday, Lawfare and the Brookings Institution were pleased to host Rep. Schiff for an address on "The Role of Congress in Protecting Liberal Democracy." In conversation with Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, Rep. Schiff spelled out an ambitious legislative program and a vision for revitalizing the power of Congress under the Trump presidency. 

If you're interested in reading Rep. Schiff's remarks, Lawfare has published them here in article form.

On April 6th, Lawfare will be convening the third annual joint live podcast taping with Rational Security and the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast at the Triple Entente Beer Summit. Tickets are available here. We'd love to see you there!

President Donald Trump has pledged to end the defense sequester and make the development of defensive and offensive cyber capabilities a White House priority, but the contours of U.S. cyber policy under the new administration have yet to be set—in fact, the administration still hasn't released its much-heralded Executive Order on cybersecurity, though several drafts have been leaked. So what should we expect to see from the new administration regarding cybersecurity?

To answer that question, we're bringing you audio from a conference hosted by Lawfare with the Hoover Institution in Washington and Intel Security and featuring a keynote address from Steve Grobman, Chief Technology Officer at Intel, along with a panel discussion on cybersecurity and Congress moderated by Carrie Johnson of NPR with Hill staffers including Brett DeWitt, Hope Goins, Allen Souza, Michael Bahar, and Brett Freedman. 

This week on the podcast, Jack Goldsmith sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the current state of national security. What should we make of the president's tweeted allegations of politically motivated wiretapping? Of the revised executive order restricting entry into the United States from six majority-Muslim countries? Of the most recent release by Wikileaks? Of Trump's persistent attacks on the integrity of the intelligence community? Jack and Matt are here, if not to explain things, then at least to talk them through.

Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul to discuss his time as special envoy and what’s next for Guantanamo under President Trump.

Amidst the chaos surrounding Michael Flynn’s departure as national security advisor and the slowly unspooling news story on the Trump team’s reported contacts with the Russian government, it’s worth taking a step back and remembering a previous political controversy involving the Kremlin: Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow. In his recent book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft, Epstein argues that Snowden was effectively acting as a Russian spy, though he believes it’s not clear when and to what extent Snowden came under Russian influence. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Epstein at the Hoover Book Soiree to chat about the book and discuss its more controversial elements.

Donald Trump's election as president brought a surge of interest in the previously obscure Emoluments Clause, which prohibits any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States]” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, ethics experts for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have been leading the charge to hold Trump accountable under the Emoluments Clause for his failure to divest of his businesses. Recently, they filed suit against him in their capacity as chair and vice-chair of the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Benjamin Wittes chats with Norm about the Emoluments Clause, the lawsuit, and what all this has to do with national security.

On Monday, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the Justice Department not to defend President Trump's executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, only to be quickly fired by Trump. Jack Goldsmith and Marty Lederman, who have both served in senior positions in the Office of Legal Counsel, penned responses—Jack criticizing Yates's actions and Marty defending them. We got them on the line for a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast. 

President Trump kicked off the first foreign policy crisis of his new administration by signing an executive order mandating the construction of the much-promised border wall with Mexico, resulting in as-yet-unresolved confusion as to how the wall will be paid for and an ongoing diplomatic scuffle with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and writer of Lawfare's "Beyond the Border" series, to chat about what the wall might look like, how effective it will or won't be, and what this means for U.S.-Mexico relations. 

On January 13th, Benjamin Wittes and Emma Kohse released a new paper challenging the assumption that "privacy is an eroding value," worn away by the incessant collection of online data about consumer habits. Their paper, "The Privacy Paradox II: Measuring the Privacy Benefits of Privacy Threats," uses empirical data from Google consumer surveys to study how many people actually experience the technologies often accused of eroding privacy as increasing their privacy instead. 

In an event at the Brookings Institution, Ben sat down with Stewart Baker of Steptoe & Johnson and Amie Stepanovich of Access now to discuss the paper. This week, we're bringing you that conversation on the podcast. 

One note: Ben's opening remarks reference Powerpoint slides containing the survey results, which you can view in the paper itself—available here.

Jameel Jaffer, author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law, joins Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree. 

In an interview with The New York Times before his intelligence briefing on Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump called the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference a "political witch hunt." In that spirit, we brought Lawfare managing editor Susan Hennessey and former GCHQ information security specialist Matt Tait on the podcast to discuss evidence of Russian attempts to influence the presidential election and Trump's baffling response. 

Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm CrowdStrike recently released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how should the United States respond?

In War on the Rocks, Evan Perkoski and Michael Poznansky recently reviewed the possibilities in their piece "An Eye for an Eye: Deterring Russian Cyber Intrusions." They've also written on this issue before in a previous piece titled "Attribution and Secrecy in Cyber Intrusions." We brought them on the podcast to talk about what deterrence of Russian interference would look like and why it's necessary. 

The annual Cato Surveillance Conference kicked off this week with a panel on "Intelligence Under a Trump Administration," featuring former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew Olsen and Lawfare's own Susan Hennessey, Timothy Edgar, and Carrie Cordero. In a discussion moderated by Shane Harris of The Wall Street Journal (and Rational Security), the group discussed how Trump's antagonistic approach to the intelligence community and his dismissive attitude toward intelligence briefings will shape the coming administration. 

The Lawfare Podcast has made it to our 200th episode! Thank you to all our listeners, old and new.

This week at the Hoover Book Soiree, Jack Goldsmith interviewed Christopher Moran, a professor at the University of Warwick, on his book Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs, and the CIA. Moran's work is a history of CIA memoirs, but it's also a history of the Agency itself and its efforts to shape its image in the public eye. How does an organization whose work depends on keeping secrets justify its efforts within a democratic society?

This week on the podcast, we’re bringing you some post-Thanksgiving food for thought on the uncertain state of the Arab world. On November 21, Madeleine Albright, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Stephen Hadley, and Amr Hamzawy sat down at the Brookings Institution to discuss a new report on “Real Security: Governance and Stability in the Arab World." What lead to the breakdown of governance across Arab countries? What can be done to establish more stable governance and increase security? And what role does the United States have in all of this?

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bill Banks, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, to talk about Bill's book with Stephen Dycus, Soldiers on the Homefront: The Domestic Role of the American Military. The book examines how both law and culture has shaped and constrained the military's domestic activities, reviewing the legal history of the various different roles that soldiers have played at home, from law enforcement to martial law. Given the widespread concern over the strength of the next administration's commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law, it's a conversation that's unfortunately more relevant than ever. 

This week, the Lawfare Podcast brings you a joint episode of the show together with Rational Security. The usual Rational Security gang—Shane, Ben, Tamara, and Susan—reflect on the results of the election and ask: What national security themes drove Donald Trump's supporters? What challenges does Trump face forming a government? And how will America’s allies react to his election?

Two weeks ago, Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith sat down with David Priess at the Hoover Institution for a Hoover Book Soiree on Priess’s new book, The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents from Kennedy to Obama. While the book is framed as a study of the history of the President’s Daily Brief, it’s also a history of the American intelligence community since WWII and a history of how presidents deal with intelligence organizations.

Consider this Lawfare's gift to you: you don't have to suffer through yet another podcast about what's going to happen on November 8th. We're all stressed and stir-crazy over here, too. Take a listen to the podcast and give yourself a break from worrying. 

On Thursday, October 20th, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled once again on the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Guantanamo detainee convicted by a military commission for inchoate conspiracy to commit war crimes. In a divided and inconclusive en banc decision, the D.C. Circuit affirmed Bahlul’s conviction, overturning the court’s decision vacating the conviction last June, in which a three-judge panel held that Bahlul could not be convicted of the domestic law offense of conspiracy as a war crime because Article III of the Constitution only permits military commission trials of offenses against the international laws of war. The Lawfare Podcast has covered the twists and turns of Bahlul’s case in the past, and now we’re back once more with Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law and Bob Loeb, a partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe and the former Acting Deputy Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice.

On October 19th, Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard University, closed out a one-day conference on “The Next President's Fight Against Terror” at New America with a talk on “How Warfare Became Both More Humane and Harder to End.” He argues that we’ve moved toward a focus on ending war crimes and similar abuses rather than a focus on preventing war’s outbreak in the first place. And in his view, the human rights community shares culpability for this problem. It’s an issue that will be of great consequence as the next president takes office amidst U.S. involvement in numerous ongoing military interventions across the globe.

Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Lawfare's Beyond the Border series, joined Benjamin Wittes on this week's podcast to talk about the epidemic of violence plaguing Mexico and Central America. Despite the crisis going on immediately to our south, those of us in the United States who work and think on national security issues rarely consider this violence as relevant to national security. But Stephanie argues that we should.

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Rosa Brooks joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about her new book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon. The book covers an extraordinary range of territory, from Brooks' personal experiences working as a civilian advisor at the Pentagon, to the history of the laws of war, to an analysis of the U.S. military's expanded role in a world in which the lines between war and peace are increasingly uncertain. 

How should we think about the military’s responsibilities outside the realm of traditional warfare? And is it desirable, or even possible, to rethink the way we approach the distinctions between wartime and peacetime?

Last week, the National Security Division of the Justice Department celebrated its 10th anniversary by holding a major conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Judge Laurence Silberman, the intellectual and policy force behind the division's creation, spoke about the birth of NSD with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes. As co-chair of the so-called Robb-Silberman commission that examined the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq War, Judge Silberman recommended the creation of the new division. And as a judge on the FISA Court of Review, he also wrote a key opinion breaking down the “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement functions at the Justice Department.

It's been an unusual election season so far—to put it mildly. Among the many other unexpected or unprecedented occurrences that have taken place over the course of the 2016 campaign season, we've seen many people working in the usually quiet and apolitical national security space take a step into the political limelight. 

This is especially true of Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer and former Chief Policy Director for the House Republican Conference who is now running for president as an independent. Lawfare's Carrie Cordero came on the podcast to interview McMullin on how his experience in national security operations and policy influenced his decision to make a late independent bid for the presidency, and how his career would shape his approach to the important national security issues facing the country.

On September 7, the Brookings Institution convened a discussion on a pilot program to disrupt online ISIS recruitment spearheaded by Jigsaw, a technology think tank run by Alphabet. Yasmin Green, Jigsaw's Head of Research and Development, presented the organization's new "Redirect Method," which uses online advertisements to reach out to those who might be susceptible to ISIS propaganda. Will McCants of Brookings spoke about the initiative with Green, Ross Frenett of Moonshot CVE, and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. 

Michel Paradis, a senior attorney in the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel and counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, came on the podcast with Bob Loeb, a partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe and the former Acting Deputy Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. Along with Benjamin Wittes, Michel and Bob discussed the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent ruling in the Al-Nashiri case. The court denied Al-Nashiri's petition for a writ of mandamus to dissolve the military commission convened to try him and affirmed the ruling of the district court, which denied Al-Nashiri's motion for a preliminary injunction of his trial. In doing so, the D.C. Circuit abstained from ruling on Al-Nashiri’s claim that the military commission lacks jurisdiction to try him, because his alleged war crimes were committed prior to 9/11 and thus took place before the beginning of active hostilities.

Dave Aitel and Matt Tait come on the podcast to discuss their recent Lawfare essay critiquing the current status of the Vulnerability Equities Process. They argue that the process by which the US government decides whether or not to disclose software vulnerabilities is fundamentally broken, and that now is the time to discuss how to fix it.

It's the dog days of summer, and Lawfare is bringing you the special August AMA edition. All week, we've been taking your questions on Twitter under the hashtag #LawfareAMA, on topics ranging from Trump to the War Powers Resolution. Now, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes and Managing Editor Susan Hennessey are weighing in with the answers. 

Walter Pincus, the Washington Post’s recently-retired national security reporter, sat down with Benjamin Wittes at the Hoover Book Soiree to discuss Walter's recent essay, "Reflections on Secrecy and the Press from a Life in Journalism." Walter and Ben chat about Walter’s work in journalism and how his unusual career has shaped his views on the unique responsibilities and difficulties of national security reporting. 

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan came to the Brookings Institution on July 13th for a conversation with Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel on “CIA’s strategy in the face of emerging challenges.” The two discussed a range of topics, from the Arab Spring, to the drone program, to the importance of integration across intelligence agencies.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations with the Islamic World and the author of the new book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World. Shadi sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss his book, which examines Islam’s unique relationship with democratic politics and the modern world. It's a thoughtful discussion of liberalism’s complex interaction with Islamic history and politics from the Enlightenment through to the present day.

Steve Budiansky is the author of Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union. He joined Ben at the Hoover Book Soiree for a live conversation about his new book, which studies the National Security Agency’s origins in World War II codebreaking and its development throughout the Cold War. Budiansky goes deep into how the organization’s history has shaped its mission and culture. It’s a fascinating discussion of the NSA’s past, present, and future, from the Cold War to the Age of Snowden.

Will McCants, a Senior Fellow at Brookings and the Director of the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World, comes on the podcast to discuss ISIS’s involvement in the recent spate of terrorist attacks across the globe. To what extent has ISIS really been involved in these attacks? How does their involvement reflect a change in strategy or a response to recent territorial losses? And how does group that presents itself as a caliphate continue to exist without controlling any land?

It’s the Lawfare Podcast Episode #179: Will McCants on “A Caliphate Without A Caliphate.”

FBI Director James Comey faced the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this week for live long hours over the Clinton email investigation. We hacked it down to 90 minutes. Just the questions. Just the answers. None of the crap. 

Assistant Attorney General John Carlin has a new law review article on a "whole of government" and "all-tools" approach to national security cyber threats. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes this week to discuss the article and the progress the government has made in confronting bad cyber actors internationally.

Department of Justice Computer Crimes Prosecutor Mona Sedky discusses the sextortion cases she has prosecuted and the meaning and danger of this new kind of crime.

Fred Kaplan joins Benjamin Wittes at a Hoover Book Soiree to discuss "Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War."

Suzanne Spaulding, Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, joins Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes for interview on cybersecurity and the role of DHS is cyberdefense in front of a live a audience.

The Iran deal adopted in July 2015 was an effort not only to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but also to avert a nuclear arms competition in the Middle East. But uncertainties surrounding the future of the agreement, including the question of what Iran will do when key restrictions on its nuclear program expire after 15 years, could provide incentives for some of its neighbors to keep their nuclear options open. A Brookings panel--including Robert Einhorn, Richard Nephew, Suzanne Maloney, Amb. Youssef Al Otaiba of the UAE, and Derek Chollet of the German Marshall Fund--discuss a new report on the deal's implementation.

This week, the American Bar Association hosted a panel discussion on “Achieving More Transparency about Secret Intelligence Programs”, which along with Lawfare's Carrie Cordero, featured comments from Alexander Joel of Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Rachel Brand and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The panel explores recent calls for greater transparency, and examines whether recently adopted principles go far enough. Can an entity oriented towards secrecy by nature operate effectively in an environment of transparency? And just how much more transparent can intelligence agencies be without enabling legitimate targets to avoid surveillance?

Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, remain a subject of much debate. 

Last week, Jefferson Powell joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the May Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of U.S. Drone War, a new book that takes a deep look into the constitutionality of the program. Powell is a Professor of Law at Duke University, and over the hour, he argues that the killing of Anwar al Awlaki under the 2001 AUMF was constitutional, but that the Obama administration’s broader claims of authority are not. He also asserts that American citizens acting as combatants in al Qaeda are not entitled to due process protections. Yet constitutional claims should not be confused with what is moral, or indeed, what is legal under international norms. Those answers, Powell suggests, must be examined through means other than constitutional law.

This week on the show, Zachary Goldman and Samuel Rascoff of the NYU Center on Law and Security came on the show to discuss their new edited volume, “Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twentry-First Century.” The book’s contributors take a comparative approach to examining trends in intelligence oversight. And Zach and Sam join Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Bobby Chesney---yes, that same Bobby Chesney, back from the Zombie Apocalypse---to tease out the book’s chapter’s on the role of transnational oversight, the changing nature of judicial oversight, and how the executive too can create intelligence accountability.

*Correction: The voice at the beginning of the podcast is that of Zach Goldman and not Sam Rascoff as indicated.*

Last week, Juliette Kayyem joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of her new book, Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home. In their conversation, Kayyem, who served as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, distills lessons from her years of government service, outlining a number of smart, measureable guidelines that every American citizen can follow in order to enhance their own security preparedness. In her assessment, homeland security begins in the home, and we all have a responsibility to ensure that our families are prepared in the event that the unthinkable happens. 

Intel Security's Chris Young gives a talk on the current cybersecurity landscape. And we hold a debate on using Big Data to protect personal privacy, featuring Daniel Weitzner of MIT, Laura Donahue of Georgetown Law, Susan Hennessey of Brookings and Lawfare, Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and David Hoffman of Intel: Is Big Data just a privacy threat? Or is it part of the solution too?

This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes and Cliff Kupchan talk about the future of U.S-Russia relations and to delve into the Russian intervention in Syria. Kupchan is the Chairman and Practice Head for Eurasia at the Eurasia Group, where he covers Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, as well as its energy sector. He argues that the United States has good reason to talk to and work with Russia on a host of crises, including Syria. While he calls Russia a “revisionist power without a vision,” he also warns that the United States would be foolish to dismiss the country’s concerns out of hand. Instead, American officials should strive to work with Moscow in Syria, where he argues that the national interest requires it, as an anti-Russian obstructionism will benefit neither the United States nor the international community. 

Apple and the FBI may have been settled out of court, but that doesn’t mean the fight is over. With Congress on the verge of considering new legislation to compel technology companies to decrypt data, the Going Dark debate is alive and well. 

Last week on a panel at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington D.C., Lawfare's Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes and Daniel Weitzner discussed the fallout from the battle between Apple and the FBI and what is likely to come of the Going Dark debate. Weitzner is the Director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; he was formerly the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy at the White House. He and Ben parse the contours of the recent dispute between the Bureau and the technology giant, explore the boundaries of commercial use encryption, and debate the role of backdoors in law enforcement investigations. They conclude with thoughts on the policy implications of the latest reemergence of the cryptowars. 

Eric Schwartz, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and previously U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, explains why the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis. 

This week, Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of his new book, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age. Segal begins at what he calls “year Zero”—sometime between June 2012 and June 2013—explaining that the events in that year ushered in a new era of geopolitical maneuvering in cyber space, with great implications for security, privacy, and the international system. These changes, he suggests, have the potential to produce unintended and unimaginable problems for anyone with an internet connection.