The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition - The Lawfare Institute

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Rational Security: The “Tortured Pundits Department” Edition Sep 26, 2024

Show notes

This week, Scott was joined by Natalie Orpett, Anna Bower, and Matt Gluck to talk over some of the week's big national security news, including:

“Some Assembly Required.” On Tuesday, President Biden gave his fourth and final speech as president to the U.N. General Assembly. He used the occasion to reflect on the many foreign policy decisions of his presidency, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the (thus far unsuccessful) pursuit of a ceasefire in the conflict in Gaza. What does this speech—and the year’s U.N. General Assembly more broadly—tell us about the state of his foreign policy legacy?
“Keeping it Peachy.” Georgia’s state election board is in the news for rules changes that some allege could delay finalization of the 2024 election results, opening a possible door for Congress to manipulate the results. But what will these rules changes really mean? And what does it tell us about the potential for (and limits on) efforts to manipulate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election?
“Memo-ries of the Way We Were.” Last week, the New York Timespublished excerpts from several memoranda prepared by then-President Trump’s White House Counsel addressing questions he appears to have posed regarding his ability to direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute individuals. Given Trump’s repeated pledges of vengeance if he were to return to the White House, what do these memoranda tell us about what he might be able to accomplish? And what obstacles may lie in his way, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s intervening decision on presidential immunity?

For object lessons, Natalie recommended Helen Phillips' new novel “Hum.” Anna stole Scott's object lesson and recommended season two of Rings of Poweralong with season three of Industry. Scott sang the praises of the best tiny speaker he ever did see (er, hear). And Matt Gluck dug into the sportsball file to urge listeners to begin following the Detroit Tigers' historic playoffs run.

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Lawfare Daily: Steve Coll on Saddam Hussein and the Limits of American Power in the Middle East Sep 26, 2024

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Steve Coll’s latest book, “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” seeks to explain why Saddam Hussein would put his regime at risk over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that didn’t exist. Saddam ultimately lost his regime, and his life, in part because he saw America as an omniscient puppeteer seeking to dominate the Middle East. The United States put thousands of troops in harm’s way in pursuit of a rogue WMD program that turned out to be a fiction. Were these outcomes inevitable?

Lawfare Student Contributor Preston Marquis sat down with Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, to explore this question. “The Achilles Trap” is unique in that it relies on Saddam’s secret tapes and archives to unpack twists and turns in the U.S.-Iraq bilateral relationship dating back to the Cold War. The full review is available on the Lawfare website.

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Lawfare Daily: Itsiq Benizri on the Regulatory and Political Implications of Thierry Breton’s Resignation from the EU Commission Sep 25, 2024

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Itsiq Benizri, counsel in WilmerHale’s Brussels office, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to review the shocking and significant resignation of former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. Breton served as the EU’s commissioner for the internal market and played a major role in shaping and enforcing the EU’s digital regulations.

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Chatter: The Inside Story of the Challenger Disaster with Adam Higginbotham Sep 24, 2024

Show notes

The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 riveted millions of Americans, who watched the horrific event live on television. What they didn’t know then was that the tragedy was largely preventable, a disastrous result of hubris and “magical thinking” as much as flawed engineering.

Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” is a definitive account of what went wrong, and how NASA failed to learn from its own mistakes. Higginbotham’s story begins with an earlier fatal accident, a fire in the capsule of the Apollo 1 mission, which presaged Challenger’s fate. He then recounts the early days of the space shuttle program. Astonishingly, the very mechanical flaws that led to Challenger’s destruction were known, but the warnings of a few engineers were ignored by more senior officials, who by the time Challenger was set to launch the first teacher into space faced tremendous political and public pressure to make the mission happen, despite obvious risks.

Higginbotham spoke with Shane Harris about his book, why he wanted to tell the Challenger story, and the future of human spaceflight.

Books, events, and people discussed on this episode include:

“Challenger”: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Challenger/Adam-Higginbotham/9781982176617

“Midnight in Chernobyl”:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Midnight-in-Chernobyl/Adam-Higginbotham/9781508278511

The Apollo 1 fire:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/apollo-1/

Roger Boisjoly, rocket engineer:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/02/06/146490064/remembering-roger-boisjoly-he-tried-to-stop-shuttle-challenger-launch

The crew of Challenger STS-51L:

https://www.nasa.gov/challenger-sts-51l-accident/

The Columbia disaster:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/09/denial-of-shuttle-image-requests-questioned/80957e7c-92f1-48ae-8272-0dcfbcb57b9d/

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Jay Venables of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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Lawfare Daily: Exploding Pagers and Air Strikes Sep 24, 2024

Show notes

Israel and Hezbollah seem to be headed for a major war. Over the past several weeks, Israel has taken a series of escalatory steps along its northern border, targeting major Hezbollah figures, blowing up pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and—most recently—hitting targets all over southern Lebanon associated with Hezbollah. Will it lead to all-out war? Lawfare’s Editor-in-Chief, Benjamin Wittes, sat down with Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman to talk over the latest developments between Israel and its most capable military foe.

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Lawfare Daily: Lindsay Chervinsky on ‘Making the Presidency’ Sep 23, 2024

Show notes

Lindsay Chervinsky is the Executive Director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon. She is also the author of a much celebrated new book on the John Adams presidency that is focused primarily on the national security decision-making of the second president and how it set norms for the conduct of the presidency and its powers with which we still live today. She sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about how Adams defended presidential power while it was under assault by both his Jeffersonian foes and the radicals of his own Federalist party.

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Lawfare Archive: The Soleimani Strike Two Years Later Sep 22, 2024

Show notes

From: January 5, 2022: Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy program at Brookings and an Iran specialist; Dan Byman, terrorism expert, Middle East scholar and Lawfare’s foreign policy editor; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and Brookings fellow, to talk about what two years has wrought. They discussed whether the threat of terrorism and escalation in response to the strike was overstated, if U.S. interests were harmed in Iraq as a result of the strike, and what may have kept the Iranian regime from taking stronger action than it eventually took.

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Lawfare Daily: Trump Trials and Tribulations Weekly Round-up (September 19, 2024) Sep 21, 2024

Show notes

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on September 19 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom.Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff about Judge McAfee’s order dismissing 3 counts from the Fulton County indictment, what filings we are waiting on in D.C., a recent New York Times story on the Supreme Court’s handling of this term’s Trump cases, and more.

Learn more about Lawfare’s new livestream series about the national security issues under debate during the 2024 presidential election.

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Lawfare Daily: Bob Bauer and Liza Goitein on Emergency Powers Reform Sep 20, 2024

Show notes

Bob Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, and Liza Goitein, Senior Director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to review the emergency powers afforded to the president under the National Emergency Act, International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Insurrection Act. The trio also inspect ongoing bipartisan efforts to reform emergency powers.

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Rational Security: The “Ms. Jackson, if You’re Nastya” Edition Sep 19, 2024

Show notes

This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare team members Alan Rozenshtein, Tyler McBrien, and RatSec newbie Anastasiia "Nastya" Lapatina to talk through the week's national security headlines, including:

“A Shot Across the Rubicon.” Reports indicate that President Biden and his U.K. allies may be on the verge of giving Ukraine approval to use their advanced weapons systems to strike deep into Russia, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat that doing so would be seen as an act of war. How risky a move is this?
“TikTok on the DokKit.” Challengers of the federal law that would ban TikTok had their (first) day in court on Tuesday in oral arguments before the D.C. Circuit. How were their criticisms received by the three-judge panel? And what will the implications of their ruling be for the law, and for TikTok more generally?
“Dialing M.” Thousands of Lebanese—many of them members of the terrorist group and political movement Hezbollah—were killed or injured this week, when their pagers detonated in what many suspect was a complex terrorism operation by Israel. While some are proclaiming this to be the most accurate counter-terrorism operation in history, others are saying it was indiscriminate in its disregard for possible civilian loss of life. What should we make of this operation? And what impact will it have on the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

For object lessons, Alan endorsed the new Vince Vaughn series Bad Monkeyfor finally giving the nice guy a shot. Tyler recommended the album "Manning Fireworks" by MJ Lenderman (as recently profiled in The New Yorker). Scott doubled-down on a prior Alan recommendation by encouraging folks to check out sci-fi author Ray Nayler's latest book, "The Tusks of Extinction,"and the exceptional collection of short stories he's published online. And Nastya urged listeners to check out Serhii Plohky's new book, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History."

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