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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Aug. 1 Aug 04, 2025

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In a live conversation on Aug. 1, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce, and Lawfare contributors Michael Feinberg and Renee DiResta to discuss the politicization of the Justice Department, including the attorney general’s misconduct complaint against Judge Boasberg, the legal challenges to Alina Habba’s appointment to be U.S. attorney, a lawsuit by Democratic Congress members against ICE over restrictions on visiting detention facilities, agreements by universities with the Trump administration, and more.You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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Lawfare Archive: Is Complying with the Law of War a Defense to Genocide? Aug 03, 2025

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From June 13, 2024: 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.

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Lawfare Archive: Amanda Tyler on Rahimi and Taking Guns Away From Loyalists Aug 02, 2025

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From December 27, 2023: The Supreme Court last month heard oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, in which the Court will decide the constitutionality of a federal law that criminalizes the possession of firearms by individuals on whom state courts have imposed domestic violence protective orders. This case came to the Court following its June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, the Court determined that whether a law violates the Second Amendment depends on whether there is a “representative historical analogue” for the contemporary law.

Amanda Tyler, the Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, argued in a recent article in Lawfare that the many laws disarming loyalists that existed at the time of the Founding serve as a set of “historical analogues” required by Bruen to demonstrate the constitutionality of the statute at issue in Rahimi—a claim which has been disputed by Rahimi’s lawyers. Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck sat down with Tyler to discuss the Rahimi case, the nature of the Founding-era laws that stripped loyalists of their firearms, whether loyalists were members of the American political community, why that question matters for the Court’s ruling in Rahimi, and more.

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Scaling Laws: Renée DiResta and Alan Rozenshtein on the ‘Woke AI’ Executive Order Aug 01, 2025

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Renée DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, an Associate Professor at Minnesota Law, Research Director at Lawfare, and, with the exception of today, co-host on the Scaling Laws podcast, join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to take a look at the Trump Administration’s Woke AI policies, as set forth by a recent EO and explored in the AI Action Plan.

Read the Woke AI executive order
Read the AI Action Plan
Read "Generative Baseline Hell and the Regulation of Machine-Learning Foundation Models," by James Grimmelmann, Blake Reid, and Alan Rozenshtein

Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.

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Lawfare Daily: The Famine in Gaza and Its Implications, with Joel Braunold Jul 31, 2025

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For today's episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, for another of their regular updates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This time, they discussed the brutal famine afflicting Gaza, how the broader military conflict between Israel and Hamas has contributed to it, and what the rising global pressure on Israel to address it—including from the Trump administration—may mean for the trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

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Rational Security: The “SkrillEx Parte” Edition Jul 30, 2025

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett, Kevin Frazier, and Tyler McBrien to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:

“Feeding Frenzy.” The crisis in Gaza has reached a new, desperate stage. Months of a near total blockade on humanitarian assistance has created an imminent risk, if not a reality, of mass starvation among Gazan civilians. And it finally has the world—including President Donald Trump—taking notice and putting pressure on the Israeli government to change tack, including by threatening to recognize a Palestinian state. Now the Israeli government appears to be giving an inch, allowing what experts maintain is the bare minimum level of aid necessary to avoid famine into the country and even pursuing a few (largely symbolic) airlifts, while allowing other states to do the same. But how meaningful is this shift? And what could it mean for the trajectory of the broader conflict?
“Hey, It Beats an AI Inaction Plan.” After months of anticipation, the Trump administration finally released its “AI Action Plan” last week. And despite some serious reservations about its handling of “woke AI” and select other culture war issues, the plan has generally been met with cautious optimism. How should we feel about the AI Action Plan? And what does it tell us about the direction AI policy is headed?
“Pleas and No Thank You.” Earlier this month, the D.C. Circuit upheld then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s decision to nullify plea deals that several of the surviving 9/11 perpetrators had struck with those prosecuting them in the military commissions. How persuasive is the court’s argument? And what does the decision mean for the future of the tribunals?

In object lessons, Kevin highlighted a fascinating breakthrough from University of Texas engineers who developed over 1,500 AI-designed materials that can make buildings cooler and more energy efficient—an innovation that, coming from Texas, proves that necessity really is the mother of invention. Tyler took us on a wild ride into the world of Professional Bull Riders with a piece from The Baffler exploring the sport’s current state and terrifying risks. Scott brought a sobering but essential read from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about how synthetic imagery and disinformation are shaping the Iran-Israel conflict. And Natalie recommended “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” by Olga Tokarczuk, assuring us it’s not nearly as murder-y as it sounds.

Note: We will be on vacation next week but look forward to being back on August 13!

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Lawfare Daily: ‘Putin’s Sledgehammer’ with Candace Rondeaux Jul 30, 2025

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Candace Rondeaux, Senior Director of New America’s Future Frontlines program, Director of its Planetary Politics initiative, and professor of practice at Arizona State University joins Lawfare’s Justin Sherman to discuss her recently published book, "Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos." They discuss Yevgeny Prigozhin and his founding of the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company (PMC); his rise, ranging from post-Soviet 1990s Russia to growing relationships with Putin and other power figures; and Wagner’s role in Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and other Russian objectives abroad. They also discuss Wagner and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Prigozhin’s “march on Moscow” in 2023 and his subsequent death, the research techniques that go into studying a group like Wagner, and what role PMCs will play in the future of Russian power.

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Lawfare Daily: Sezaneh Seymour and Brandon Wales on Private-Sector Cyber Operations Jul 29, 2025

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Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at Lawfare, sits down with Sezaneh Seymour, Vice President and head of regulatory risk and policy at Coalition and a former Senior Adviser on the National Security Council staff, and Brandon Wales, Vice President for cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne and the former Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to discuss their new Lawfare Research Report, “Partners or Provocateurs? Private-Sector Involvement in Offensive Cyber Operations.”

They talk about why, in the face of escalating cyber threats from state and criminal actors, U.S. officials are reevaluating the policy that currently reserves offensive cyber operations as a government-only function. Rather than endorsing a change, Seymour and Wales propose a structured framework to guide the policy debate. This framework is built on three key factors: first, defining the core policy objectives for involving the private sector; second, determining the appropriate scope of authorized activities, including what actions are permissible and who can be targeted; and third, addressing the complex legal and liability considerations, especially when operations cause harm to innocent third parties. They conclude by weighing the potential for private actors to augment U.S. capabilities against the significant risks of escalation and diplomatic fallout.

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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, July 25 Jul 28, 2025

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In a live conversation on July 25, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the the Supreme Court’s rulings allowing the removal of executive officials of independent agencies, the ongoing dismantling of executive agencies like the Voice of America and U.S. Institute of Peace, developments in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, and so much more.You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch

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Lawfare Archive: A House Divided Jul 27, 2025

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From May 6, 2017: 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.

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