The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Lawfare Daily: Shane Harris Talks ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Mar 26, 2025

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Shane Harris of The Atlantic joins Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about war planning on Signal, the Trump administration’s remarkable security lapse, and the testimony of the country’s intelligence chiefs that came in its wake.

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Lawfare Daily: Tom Kent on the Dismantling of American Government Broadcasting Mar 25, 2025

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Tom Kent ran Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is a longtime Russia watcher. He talks to Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes about President Trump’s executive order dismantling Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, March 21 Mar 24, 2025

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On March 21, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including DOGE’s incursions on the U.S. Institute of Peace, the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, and the firing of probationary employees.

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Lawfare Archive: Charles Dunst on Defeating the Dictators Mar 23, 2025

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From March 21, 2023: By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States.

In a new book entitled, “Defeating the Dictators,” Charles Dunst, a former journalist and current deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group, lays out what he sees as the right strategy for making democracies more effective and defeating the appeal of authoritarian government. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with him to discuss his new book, the importance he places on Singapore as a case study, and how the domestic remedies he focuses on translate into foreign policy.

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Lawfare Archive: El Salvador’s President Cracks Down on Gangs—and Democracy Mar 22, 2025

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From May 9, 2023: Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the same time, Bukele really does seem to have been successful in curbing gang violence, and his popularity is sky high.

To understand the situation in El Salvador, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Harvard University who has written about Bukele on Lawfare. They discussed why Bukele’s crackdown on the gangs seems to be working, why it might fall apart in the long term, and what Bukele’s rise means for democracy in El Salvador and around the world.

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Lawfare Daily: The U.S. Bombing of Yemen and the Houthi Response Mar 21, 2025

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For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Gregory Johnsen, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. Johnsen explains the rationale of the Trump administration's decision to bomb Yemen but argues that it will have little effect on the Houthis. Indeed, Johnsen contends that the Houthis are spoiling for a fight with the United States and Israel, believing that this will generate support within Yemen that will help them increase their power.

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Lawfare Daily: Dan Hendrycks on National Security in the Age of Superintelligent AI Mar 20, 2025

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Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare, to discuss his recent paper (co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang), “Superintelligence Strategy.”

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Rational Security: The “Berry Boy Blue” Edition Mar 19, 2025

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This week, Scott sat down with Rational Security veterans and Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big national security news, including:

“House Odds.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson scored an unlikely win last week, when he kept the narrow (and notoriously fractious) Republican house majority united enough to pass its own continuing resolution to keep the government open—and then successfully got enough Democrats to acquiesce to debate on it for it to pass through the Senate without amendment. What does this tell us about the current dynamics in Congress—and what the Democratic minority in either chamber might realistically hope to achieve moving forward?
“This Pressure Goes to Eleven.” The Trump administration amped up military operations in the Middle East this week, taking out a senior ISIS leader in Iraq, pursuing an aggressive set of airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, and greenlighting a renewal of Israeli hostilities in Gaza, seemingly ending the weeks-long ceasefire that had prevailed there. The common thread across all three sets of action seems to be Iran, a regime that the Trump administration has both socked with a return of maximum pressure sanctions and sought to engage on possible negotiations over its nuclear program. Is this new maximum maximum-pressure campaign likely to work? What risks and benefits does it present?
“Saying the Quiet Part Incredibly Loud and at Length.” President Trump gave an unprecedented speech at the Justice Department last week, where he spent over an hour misrepresenting the criminal cases that had been made against him prior to his rising to the presidency and naming specific individuals as enemies who he indicated should be arrested. What motivated his address? And what will it mean for the campaign of vengeance he is slowly rolling out against his perceived political enemies?

In object lessons, Molly momentarily set aside her usual evangelism for regional NPR-affiliate podcasts to champion Good Politics/Bad Politics, a Substack deep-dive into U.S. elections and governance by Jonathan Bernstein, Julia Azari, and David S. Bernstein. Scott, ever the escapist, steered clear of wands and wizardry but still embraced fantasy with Lev Grossman’s “The Bright Sword.” And Ben lamented the recent gutting of Voice of America—only to note that those voices haven’t vanished. They’re just looking for a new frequency.

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Lawfare Daily: The New Syrian Government and Its Problems Mar 19, 2025

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For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Steven Heydemann, the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Smith College, to assess the fast-changing developments in Syria today. Heydemann discusses the surge in communal violence in Syria, the deal between the new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led government and Syria's Kurds, Israel's counterproductive interventions, and U.S. policy toward the new regime in Damascus.

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Lawfare Daily: Derek Thompson on Abundance and a New Political Order Mar 18, 2025

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Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and co-author (with Ezra Klein) of Abundance, joins Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and Contributing Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the theory of Abundance and its feasibility in an age of political discord and institutional distrust.

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