Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, October 9th
Listen to the October 9th livestream as a podcast.
In a conversation on YouTube, Benjamin Wittes is joined by Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Molly Roberts, and Eric Columbus for a fast-moving tour of the week’s most important Trump-era litigation. They break down the CNN v. Trump press-pool case and why Judge Kelly may be headed for a due-process ruling; the twin Harvard cases over grants and visas, where Paul Clement makes a forceful First Amendment argument; and the FTC’s campaign against NewsGuard, which could reshape how media ratings survive government pressure.
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.
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.
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.
Molly Roberts is a senior editor at Lawfare. She was previously a member of the editorial board at The Washington Post, where she covered technology, legal affairs and more, as well as wrote columns about everything from cryptocurrency grift and graft to panda diplomacy at the National Zoo.
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.
