The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition - The Lawfare Institute

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Countering Extremism Within the Military Apr 08, 2022

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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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How the Press and the Platforms Handled the Hunter Biden Laptop Apr 07, 2022

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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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How Russia's War in Ukraine Affects Energy and Climate Security Apr 06, 2022

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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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Paul Massaro on the United States’ Latest Efforts to Combat Corruption Apr 05, 2022

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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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The Legacy of Madeleine Albright, with Kori Schake and Natalie Orpett Apr 04, 2022

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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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Lawfare Archive: WTF, Ukraine! Apr 03, 2022

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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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Lawfare Archive: ICE, CBP and Coronavirus Response Apr 02, 2022

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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 on 'Mr. Jones' and Russia and Ukraine, Then and Now Apr 01, 2022

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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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What’s in the U.K. Online Safety Bill? Mar 31, 2022

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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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Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Mar 30, 2022

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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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