Courts & Litigation Executive Branch

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, May 22

Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, Jen Patja
Monday, May 25, 2026, 7:00 AM

Listen to the May 22 livestream as a podcast.

In a live conversation on YouTubeLawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff discussed the Department of Justice’s newly-announced “Anti-Weaponization Fund” which purports to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare,” oral argument in Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, 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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Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Anna Bower is a senior editor at Lawfare. Anna holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Cambridge and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. She joined Lawfare as a recipient of Harvard’s Sumner M. Redstone Fellowship in Public Service. Prior to law school, Anna worked as a judicial assistant for a Superior Court judge in the Northeastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. She also previously worked as a Fulbright Fellow at Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey. A native of Georgia, Anna is based in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Eric Columbus is a senior editor at Lawfare. He previously served as special litigation counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of General Counsel from 2020 to 2023. During the Obama administration, he served in political appointments at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
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