Courts & Litigation Executive Branch

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Sept. 12

Benjamin Wittes, Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Michael Feinberg, Roger Parloff
Monday, September 15, 2025, 8:00 AM
Listen to the Sept. 12 livestream as a podcast.

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Michael Feinberg to discuss the Supreme Court staying a lower court order that prevented the firing of Rebecca Slaughter as FTC Commissioner, a federal appeals court upholding E. Jean Carroll’s judgement, Fed. Governor Lisa Cook’s lawsuit challenging President Trump’s attempt to fire her, the politicization of the FBI and its impact on investigations like the search for Charlie Kirk’s shooter, 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.


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.
Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
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.
Michael Feinberg is a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he spent the overwhelming majority of his career combatting the PRC’s intelligence services. He is a recipient and multiple times nominee of the FBI’s highest recognition, the Director’s Award for Excellence, as well as numerous other Bureau honors and ODNI commendations. Prior to his service with the FBI, he was an attorney in both private and public practice. The opinions presented here are entirely his own and not that of the U.S. government.
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.
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