Lawfare Daily: The Year that Was

[Intro]

Benjamin Wittes: Hey there, Lawfare listeners. This is our official wrap up year end issue. We have a whole lot of people coming on to talk about what happened in their parts of the world and on Lawfare. In their particular areas of specialty over the course of what has been a wild and wooly 2025. And as you listen to this episode, I want you to think about all the value across all these different domains that Lawfare brings to your life.

And I want you to think about that. When we ask for your support, we don't do it very often. We don't go all NPR on you and have pledge drives or anything. But Lawfare is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit organization. We cover a broad range of issues on national security, law and policy to keep you informed, but we can't do it without your support.

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Thank you for listening, and thank you for supporting Lawfare.

Natalie Orpett: I am Natalie Orpett, executive editor of Lawfare, and this is ‘The Year That Was, 2025.’ If you're a regular Lawfare reader, you'll know that we publish this piece every year to look back at the year that's coming to an end. This year, we thought we'd do an audio version of it as well. But please do be sure to go to our website, lawfaremedia.org and read the full piece there so that you can get everyone's full analysis and also see links to a lot of the work we've done this year.

2025 really made a mockery of what I've said in the past few years of the year. That was where I claimed it had been a very busy year in Lawfare's world of hard national security choices to use an expression that is almost as tired as we all are. It was a lot like drinking from a fire hose. We did our best to keep up.

We published more than 1,000 articles, podcasts, videos, research papers, and primary source documents. We did weekly livestream litigation, roundups on the trials of the Trump administration and rapid response videos to things like Supreme Court decisions and breaking news events. We produced five different podcasts, including a narrative series about the U.S. relationship with Ukraine.

There was so much going on and so much of it was complicated, so we tried to make it easier to follow with things like our Domestic Deployment Tracker, our project following legal challenges to the Trump administration's executive actions, and our Alien Enemies Act Tracker. There's a lot more. You should go to our website and check it out.

As the year comes to a close, it's only fitting to take a deep breath, a very, very deep breath. So as in previous years, I asked my colleagues to reflect on what happened in 2025 in their respective areas of focus. It's a lot, but it barely scratches the surface of what we've been through This year, it's the year that was 2025. We'll see you next year.

Anna Bower: It's Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower, and here at the end of 2025, I'm thinking back to the beginning when one of the biggest stories in America centered on a fake federal department named after a meme. Yes, I'm talking about DOGE. Back in January, Trump rebranded the U.S Digital Services DOGE, pitching it as a cost cutting effort, but it quickly became something much more consequential.

Among other things, DOGE helped dismantle USAID, pushed mass layoffs across federal agencies, and gained access to sensitive data at Social Security in the Treasury Department. Of course that sparked a flood of lawsuits, which we've been covering closely throughout the year at Lawfare. Among other things, plaintiffs challenged DOGE'S actions on a wide range of grounds from the appointments clause to statutes like the Privacy Act or FOIA.

And early on, some district courts sided with the plaintiffs blocking layoffs, grant terminations, or data access. But time and time again, the Supreme Court stepped in effectively allowing DOGE’s work to continue. DOGE'S actions also raised a question that was surprisingly hard to answer who was actually in charge.

At first, Elon Musk was widely described as being the head of DOGE, but when legal challenges raised appointments, clause concerns, the White House began to give shifting answers, and even the government's own lawyers seemed unsure about who was really in charge. Eventually, Amy Gleason was named administrator of DOGE, but the central mystery endures at Lawfare.

We're still asking who really ran DOGE. Today, DOGE has mostly faded from view with some report suggesting that it no longer exists and there's little evidence that it actually saved money. But it clearly reshaped the federal bureaucracy and raised lasting questions about federal norms, civil service protections, and the balance of power between Congress and the executive.

Meanwhile, courts continue to wrestle with the fallout as multiple legal challenges to DOGE remain pending, including with regard to layoffs, the Appointments Clause, and FOIA in 2026. We'll be watching these developments closely.

Roger Parloff: I'm Roger Parloff. I'm a senior editor at Lawfare. On March 14th, President Trump secretly signed a proclamation invoking the alien enemies act for the first time in history outside the context of a declared war.

And the next day he unveiled that order and removed about 160 Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador called CECOT. They were given no hearings and no notice of where they were going. They were sent on the theory that each was a member of a gang called Trend de Aragua, which Marco Rubio had recently re-designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

And they further theorized that trend was a, arm of the Venezuelan government and that they were committing invasion or predatory incursion on the United States within the meaning of the 1798 law. A third plane left that same day. And I'll discuss that in a moment. On March 15th, the ACLU had sued, they'd gotten wind that this was happening, and they obtained temporary restraining orders to stop the removals of the Venezuelans.

But those orders were not followed for reasons that are still being thrashed out. The case went to the Supreme Court in April and it decided that the Venezuelans had in fact been denied due process. All nine justices agreed on that point, but they said that Alien Enemies Act challenges had to be brought in habeas corpus proceedings, which this one had not been.

And the one before Boasberg had purported to be a class action mainly under the, administrative Procedure Act. And so then litigation over the Alien Enemies Act splintered across many jurisdictions. And we developed a had Lawfare a Alien Enemies Act tracker to try to keep track of the holdings in all the different cases.

In April meanwhile Judge Boasberg held a hearing on exactly why his orders weren't followed, and he reached a finding of probable cause to believe the contempt had occurred. But the, but a D.C. Circuit panel by a two to one vote granted mandamus to stop those proceedings from going forward.

Each judge had a different theory, a different rationale, each of the two in the majority. And that was further attempt, the ACLU tried to appeal that to the get a rehearing and bank, the full court. And while that was pending, the individuals in El Salvador were sent to Venezuela in a prisoner swap and that that effectively rendered moot one of the panel judges rulings. So the case came back to Judge Boasberg who tried to resume his contempt inquiry, but just this month in December, a new D.C. Circuit panel stayed his efforts again by another two to one margin, and that's where that stands.

Meanwhile, I wanna talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was on that third plane that I mentioned earlier, the same day that the two ICE aircraft removed the Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act. A third aircraft took about a hundred other aliens to CECOT purportedly under different theories. One of them was Abrego Garcia. He was taken there in violation of an order of withholding that he had received which barred his return to El Salvador due to a reasonable fear of facing persecution there.

So he sued and Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland ordered basically his return that went to the Supreme Court, and they largely affirmed. They said the government did have to, in effect, facilitate his return. At that point, the government revived a previously closed criminal inquiry into Abrego for human smuggling, and it obtained an indictment in Nashville and unsealed those charges on June 6th, the day they brought him back to the United States.

A judge then granted him bail, and that led to a lot of civil wrangling over whether Abrigo could still be detained in ice custody and that is still going on right now. And in order to try to keep him in ice custody, the government at various times has claimed to be removing him to Uganda or Eswatini or Ghana. And right now, Liberia, the first three countries were.

It turned out either unaware of any efforts to move him there or had rebuffed the efforts when they learned of them. All the while he has said he is willing to go to Costa Rica, but the government has refused to send him there unless he pleads guilty on all of these issues.

Anna Bower and I have covered hearings, a lot of hearings in the Abrego cases. I did a couple deep dives about Abrego's situation the early summarizing the government's allegations that he was involved with MS 13, and also a later explanation of all the accusations leveled against him at his first criminal bail hearing in June. And also Ben Wittes has been, writing commentaries about every aspect of both of these cases. So I, I recommend you take a look at those. Thank you.

Natalie Orpett: Next is Lawfare senior editor Molly Roberts.

Molly Roberts: Early in his first term, President Trump said the saddest thing is I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. This time around, he seems to have changed his mind.

He's referring to himself as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. He started this term by purging the Justice Department of many civil servants. And he's installed loyalists in leadership positions. Lawfare has spent the past year chronicling the ways in which the administration has laid a heavy hand on the scales of justice.

The president's allies have been rewarded. Think of the pardons granted to more than 1200 people convicted of crimes related to the January 6th and insurrection cases have been dropped against everyone from Trump's co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to major crypto companies to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Lawfare has also watched as the White House's enemies have been punished. We've analyzed how the administration is discouraging dissent by, say, using the civil disorder statute to go after protestors or the material support statute to bring terrorism charges against Antifa aligned individuals. By the way, Trump has also purportedly designated Antifa, a domestic terrorism organization.

We've written that this is a legally impossible act, but it could still have profound first amendment consequences. And we've tracked the punishment of high profile Trump opponents, whose prosecutions you may remember, the president explicitly ordering in a truth social post addressed to Pam, that would be Attorney General Pam Bondi.

These perceived enemies start with former FBI Director James Comey. He was charged with counts related to lying to congress. His indictment has since been dismissed on the grounds that Lindsey Halligan, the former insurance lawyer, handpicked to pursue the case was improperly appointed. For now that dismissal has deprived the judge who was presiding of the ability to rule on lots of other motions that themselves have merit.

One of those is a claim of vindictive and/or selective prosecution. Another is an objection to the process by which the government obtained its indictment. That process included possibly collecting material illegally violating attorney-client privilege, misstating the law to the grand jury, and to top it all off, presenting an open court an indictment the grand jury did not actually vote on.

Lindsey Halligan was also picked to bring a prosecution against Letitia James. Her case was similarly riddled with prosecutorial incompetence and potential misconduct. We broke the story of the highly unusual texts Halligan sent directly to Lawfare's own, Anna Bower in which Halligan spoke about the case against James.

Meanwhile, mortgage fraud cases like those brought against James have become a favorite tool of the president in his retributive ventures. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and special attorney for mortgage fraud, Ed Martin have played so fast and so loose with the law that now a grand jury is looking into their behavior.

The charges against former National Security advisor John Bolton for mishandling classified information aren't absurd on their face, in contrast to those against Comey, James and many other everyday people. Think of anti-ICE protestors in the streets of Chicago, or the man who hurled a hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer in D.C.

Nonetheless, the context in the Bolton case presents cause for caution. Apparently not being involved with the Justice Department was too sad for Trump to bear. Now he has involved himself intimately as can be picking and choosing when, where, and against whom the law will be enforced.

Katherine Pompilio: Hi, Katherine Pompilio here. I'm one of the associate editors here at Lawfare. One of the first things that President Trump did when he entered his second term in office was to provide unconditional pardons to any individual convicted of crimes related to the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol via executive order. Trump also ordered that those held in prison on charges related to January 6th be released immediately Trump's executive order, which pardoned more than 1500 people, specifically named 14 individuals who were to have their sentences commuted.

This list included Stewart Rhodes, who was the founder of the far right group, the Oath Keepers, as well as Ethan Nordeen, a ground commander of the far right group, known as the Proud Boys. Before Trump issued these pardons, Lawfare calculated the arrests and convictions the Justice Department had amassed over its largest investigation in history.

At the time of the pardons, approximately 1,100 of the 1,583, arrested in connection to January 6th had been convicted and sentenced. 170 individuals were found guilty and awaiting sentencing, and more than 300 individuals had been charged.

After the pardons Lawfare editors, in conversation with those who had worked on these investigations and prosecutions, continue to document for the historical record what January 6th defendants pled to and the president's role according to special counsel Jack Smith as quote, the individual most responsible for what occurred that day. In the months following the pardons, Trump completely transformed the Justice Department.

He nominated members of his personal legal teams to top posts within the department, forced out high level FBI officials and purged 15 young assistant U.S. attorneys who had worked on the January 6th prosecutions.

Olivia Manes: I'm Olivia Manes. I'm one of the associate editors here at Lawfare, and one of the things we've really focused on this year have been rollbacks of Justice Department, internal checks and the cutting of programs meant to counter corruption.

And so one of the first things that we kind of took a look at is the firing of 17 inspectors general by Trump within a month of his second term. And inspector generals are essentially watchdogs who investigate and audit fraud, abuse, waste, things of that nature within the executive branch. And he did this in one fell sweep overnight.

And so Lawfare contributors took a look at this, they looked at the legality of these dismissals. One thing to note was that, you know, there's a legally required 30 days notice to Congress to dismiss inspectors general, Lawfare contributors also looked at the consequences of, of these dismissals for the functioning of government.

One thing to note about these dismissals that they kind of seem to fall into a pattern of, of action by the Trump administration that really seem to target internal democratic accountability mechanisms, particularly at DOJ. Our contributors looked at things like the pushing out of career staff, pushing out of ethics professionals like the heads of the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Government ethics.

Our contributors discussed the implications of the firing of prosecutors like Erez Reuveni who didn't walk the line that leadership wanted in terms of, you know, as Pam Bondi put it, zealously advocating on behalf of the United States and so our contributors sort of looked at these policies that sort of stifle internal dissent within the department.

We also looked at the erosion of civil service protections and whistleblower protections within the department. For example, contributor analyzed personnel changes at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which would leave federal workers susceptible to removals or dismissals that might be politically motivated. We unpacked a string of politicized appointments as well, like that of Lindsay Halligan and that of Alina Habba, which kind of didn't follow established procedure.

And then finally we looked at actions taken by the Trump administration and within the Justice Department that kind of cut back on the Justice Department's ability to counter public corruption. So things like the dismantling of the department's kleptocracy team and the gutting of the public integrity section of the criminal division. And in general, kind of a shift from prosecuting corruption to more of a focus on immigration and eliminating waste, fraud and waste within government.

Eric Columbus: I'm Eric Columbus, senior editor at Lawfare.

2025 was the year of impoundment. It's a fancy word, meaning when the president refuses to spend money appropriated by Congress as part of his vast effort to expand presidential power, Trump treated appropriations by Congress as optional and refuse to spend massive sums of money. Now the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 says, you can't do this unless Congress approves.

But in large part, Trump has gotten away with it with some help from the Supreme Court and Congress itself. In March eight states sued the Department of Education to stop it from killing various education grants. The states won in the district court. The Supreme Court said, no, you gotta go to something called the Court of Federal Claims, a court created by Congress to handle contractual disputes with the federal government.

It's a slower process and it's harder to get full and timely relief that set the pattern for a lot of the year. Now the Impoundment Control Act does allow the president to cancel spending lawfully by proposing what's known as a rescission that puts money on hold for 45 days while Congress determines whether to approve the cuts.

At one point, Trump did this successfully resulting in the rescission of $9 billion in appropriated funds, including 7 billion in foreign aid and 1 billion for public broadcasting. Now, rescissions require putting, as I said, putting spending on hold for 45 days while Congress decides whether to approve.

But what happens if you propose the rescissions less than 45 days before the funds expire at the end of the fiscal year on September 30th, and then Congress just sits on its hands. Does the funding disappear even if Congress didn't affirmatively approve the cut? This is known as a pocket rescission, and a lot of folks say, this violates the Impoundment Control Act.

Trump did this. It was in litigation. It reached Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court dodged the issue saying in late September that a private party can't challenge it. So who can? Well, the Impoundment Control Act says that the head of the government accountability office can sue to challenge any violations of the act, but a man named Gene Dodaro heads that office and did not sue at all in 2025.

It's not entirely clear why, but it could be because as a presidential appointee, he was afraid of getting fired. At any rate, his term ends on December 29th with the impoundments just keep coming.

Loren Voss: I'm Lauren Voss, Lawfare Public Service Fellow. 2025 saw an increase in federal military domestic deployments.

That's instances where the president sends federal troops into American streets rather than operations abroad. It was such at an unprecedented scale and scope. In fact, it was so unusual that Lawfare decided to launch a federal domestic deployment tracker to make sense of it all. As it turned out, just collecting the facts was a huge effort, which itself reflected a disturbing lack of public information about a critical topic.

So we start with the first military deployment back in June that was responding to civil unrest in Los Angeles. President Trump invoked a never before used provision, Title 10, Section 12406, as the mobilization authority to call up members of the National Guard. The administration also asserted that President Trump had the authority to deploy the National Guard under a so-called protective power and inherent constitutional power.

Section 12406 allows for the mobilization of National Guard troops in three situations, one invasion or danger of invasion by a foreign nation. Two, rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. And three, the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.

The president determined that the protests were threatening faithful execution of federal immigration laws. So 600 active duty Marines were also deployed to Los Angeles under a protective power argument. The administration also used this Article Two protective power to justify actions by the National Guard that would generally be considered violating the Posse Comitatus Act, also known as the PCA, which forbids the use of the military to execute the laws, except when expressly authorized by the Constitution or act of Congress.

Our analysis of the protective power found that the administration's interpretation was generally unmoored from constitutional text and is not an exception to the PCA. Although case law on the exact line of activity that would violate the PCA is ambiguous. We also discussed the ability of courts to address the PCA violations by the president, which requires a valid ultra vires claim.

Then we move on to August. In August, the president invoked his power as the commander in chief of the D.C. guard and its malicious status and Title 32 502(f) to mobilize out-of-state National Guard members for deployment in Washington, D.C. to make the city safer and more beautiful. We analyze the two statutory provisions the president could use to deploy the D.C. guard and found a lack of evidence that either was properly invoked for the deployment.

In regards to 502(f), the administration argues for no limits on the missions that troops can conduct as part of their, in the phrases other duty listed in the statute as long as the request comes for the president or the secretary of defense. Lawfare analyzed the D.C. Circuit court's decision that determined the D.C. guard deployment and the Title 32 deployment of other states national guards was not legal.

However, the D.C. Court of Appeals has stayed that decision pending appeal. Then we move on to September and October. The administration attempted additional deployments of the National Guard troops in Portland, Oregon in September, Chicago, Illinois, in October under 12406, but as of now, has only mobilized but not deployed troops due to various court orders.

Illinois v. Trump currently sits on the emergency docket of the Supreme Court with a really ongoing, interesting debate on the meaning of the phrase. Regular forces, which is in 12406 subsection three, with the requirement the president be unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States before mobilizing the National Guard under the statute.

As 2025 comes to a close, there remain significant questions on the legal authorities the administration is using to deploy federal troops, including the scope of judicial review and the level of deference courts should give to presidential determinations next year may bring some of those answers, but it's likely to raise additional questions as additional novel legal arguments are made and possibly even invoking new deployment authorities.

Scott R. Anderson: I'm Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson. 2025 was one of those years where questions of war powers and related international law questions about when the United States can use military force really put themselves back at the forefront of American law and policy conversations. In part, that reflects the fact that Trump administration, president Trump himself, has always leaned heavily on the use of force, the threat of the use of force in its foreign policy, and that trend really doubled down in 2025.

The started really within the first day of the administration. We heard in President Trump's inaugural address, and then in statements a few days afterwards, references to two situations where there was a not very subtle implied threat of U.S. military force, potentially among other course measures.

That's regarding the Panama Canal. Which President Trump said was under control of China inappropriately and should be taken back by the United States and Greenland, astrategically important territory that the President Trump said in the State of the Union, we need, the United States needs for its national security was going to get the Trump administration and senior administration officials weren't subtle, but the fact they were contemplating military force among other measures to try and coerce some sort of outcome from this, but it never really came to the fore.

Both situations have kind of fizzled, although they're also still simmering in the background. So it may see return of either issue in 2026, needless to say, the proposition that the United States could or would, or that the president could or would use military force to claim control over foreign territory.

It's a pretty dramatic break from U.S. legal and political traditions and a pretty dramatic assertion of authority if that's something that the administration actually were to rely on. Instead, the Trump administration's first use of military force occurred in the context of the continuation of the Biden Administration's US military campaign against the Houthis in the Middle East.

This is what led to the infamous signal chat in which Secretary of Defense Hegseth gave away sensitive operational secrets to the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic was inadvertently added to the thread. This was a pretty conventional use of military force, at least was a contiguous with the legal theories and actions of the prior administration.

As far as we can tell, it was a bit of an escalation, but it wasn't a dramatic assertion of new authority. And the Trump administration wound up that military campaign more or less within two months or so after kind of declaring an awkward ceasefire with the Houthis that really only applied to American vessels, not maritime traffic more broadly and even that kind of question, well, whether it's held or not, but regardless, the concentrated campaign wound up relatively quickly.

Trump administration's biggest move came over the summer in regards to Iran when it intervened in the Israeli military campaign against Iran to target Iran's underground nuclear facilities. This was a very, very big deal. This is the sort of military action that ultimate poll administrations have clearly been contemplating.

Part of the reason the United States was the country situated to do this is because it had developed kind of bunker busting armaments that could penetrate deep within Iran's subterranean nuclear facilities, or at least had the possibility of doing so in a way that Israel's armaments really couldn't threaten to do effectively.

And so the Trump administration ultimately chose to take the step ahead and vault itself directly in any of Israel's other military campaign, whether against Lebanon and Iranian proxies there, or against Iran itself. But it did ultimately take this step to hit this underground bunker. And according to it.

The Trump administration demolished it, although a lot of experts have doubted whether that's the case or not. It's a assertion of presidential authority, international legal authority that I think pushes the limits of presidential authority and international law, the most accepted conventional limits, but in ways that are almost a little more predictable and consistent with what other administrations have done.

So it's kind of a expansion of trends, not like a dramatic departure of trends, but still a, a, a robust assertion of the present authority to use military force. It was also a one-off. The Trump administration very quickly turned around and said, Israel, stop your military campaign. Now we've eliminated Iran's nuclear weapons for you.

You don't need to keep doing this. In part, I suspect, because they were worried about Iran being destabilized to the point of collapse, which would cause all sorts of negative regional ramifications. And so, that again, that was a fairly limited use of military force. The big campaign though, didn't really start until September.

That is of course the incredibly controversial and much discussed campaign against alleged narcotics traffickers operating on ships in international waters, originally in the Southern Caribbean, and now also in occasionally in the Eastern Pacific. It is a, a campaign that the Trump administration has really tried to make look like counter-terrorism operations.

They say they're designated terrorist organizations. They say they're doing exactly to them. What we've done to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State over the last 20 years, since nine 11 attacks more than 20 years at this point. The truth is there's something really dramatically different because the legal arguments that they're promising this on both domestic, international are premised on the assertion.

Smuggling drugs in the United States or in the direction of the United States 'cause in a lot of cases, these weren't narcotics directly bound in the United States by any assessment. Instead they were on some sort of chain or trafficking road that the United States alleges or as suggested, would've eventually lead to the United States.

That targeting these groups or, or using smugly narcotics in that way is the equivalent of attacking the United States with conventional weapons in arms. So you can do the exact same thing against a narcotics trafficker carrying drugs. That may are, will eventually likely end up in the United States.

Same thing you could do against a soldier carrying a weapon who's engaged in a war against the United States. That's a really, really wild and dramatic expansion of when the United States says it can use a military force, and it's one that I think really doesn't bear up to scrutiny very well and has really dramatic ramifications for international law for U.S. domestic law, if you were to accept it writ large 'cause you could extend that to all sorts of other scenarios, not just these narcotics groups.

However, some people might try and cabin or constrain that argument. I think it's a really concerning one and it's one that we've seen have really knock on effects because when you take a legal regime designed for real war and real soldiers and real threats and considerations that are involved there, and you just copy and paste it over to people doing something really different like smuggling drugs.

You end up with very, very weird outcomes like the second strike that occurred on September 2nd, that has been the focus of so much congressional inquiry the last few weeks, where you saw two survivors seemingly stranded in the water, killed in a second strike.

In circumstances that all most defense department guidance, most experts have looked at this, say. This is the sort of scenario where you're expressly told you should not be using lethal force against these people. That sort of scenario is a direct repercussion of accepting the Trump administration's proposition that when you smuggle drugs, you're basically just using weapons against the United States and it causes all sorts of negative externalities when you accept a proposition like that.

As we've explored here at Lawfare, it's also caused lots of problems. We're beginning to see diplomatic pushback. The U.K. is limiting its cooperation intelligence sharing with the United States. Other regional actors are limiting their participation in conventional counter-narcotics smuggling operations that have always been the kind of mainstay of U.S. efforts there. And there was increased discussion about, well, is this a crime against humanity? Is this a war crime? Or at least our elements of this war?

Crimes are crimes against humanity that are going to pick up more and more the more this campaign continues. But this campaign in the end may just be an aperitif for a much bigger U.S. military operation.

That's of course, an effort to oust Nicholas Maduro, the dictator in Venezuela from power Trump administration officials have not been shy that that's their goal with this narcotics trafficking campaign, majority of which, although not all of which targets Tren de Aragua, a group that they say is essentially operating on Maduro's behalf in a source of revenue forum.

And now we've seen the Trump administration pursuing unprecedented buildup of military forces in the Pacific expand to an embargo of oil shipments in and out of Venezuela authorized public publicly, supposedly covert action against the Maduro regime and all around suggests, look, we are intent on getting Maduro out of power. We're gonna pressure him to do it. They haven't yet taken that step to actually direct to military action, and Trump has resisted doing that so far.

That's maybe not that surprising even that no one has been more vocal and critical of the U.S. decision to intervene in Iraq and pursue regime change there and President Trump including very vicious ways to people in his own party. This would look a lot like that if you were to do that in the eyes of many people internationally and frankly many people in the United States.

So we do have to wait and see exactly where the Trump administration is going to act in this regard. And frankly, that's the big question we all need to bear in mind as we enter into 2026. Are we gonna end up in another campaign for regime change in another country led by a regime that we don't like this time? Not Iraq, but Venezuela?

Ariane Tabatabai: I'm Ariane Tabatabai. I am a public service fellow here at Lawfare, and I'm going to do an overview of the year that was in U.S. foreign policy. This was an incredibly packed year and a lot happened from massive shifts in the U.S. national security architecture, some of which Anna captured in her comments on DOGE to the use of force in the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere, and a personalist diplomacy seeking to end conflicts around the globe.

As the president claims to have ended eight wars, he's also cozied up to authoritarian strongman while undercutting our relationships and democratic allies. Here at Lawfare, we try to keep up with the news and we try to zoom out from time to time as well, running analysis on diplomatic efforts, military issues, intelligence matters, and more from both the legal and policy perspectives.

The through line here is captured that the Trump administration's recently released national security strategy, and that's the mounting tension with allies, especially in Europe, but also with Canada and NATO more broadly. While the first Trump administration was also dismissive of these relationships, Trump 2.0 has really accelerated and elevated some of these issues throughout the year.

The president, his team lectured Europeans about their values and political culture mused about making Canada our 51st state and taking over Greenland. And of course, we can't talk about 2025 without talking about the tariffs imposed on a large number of countries, including many close allies whose critical economic sectors were targeted by the administration.

We have covered the legal and policy underpinnings and implications of these tariffs pretty comprehensively this year. At the same time, 2025 made clear that the administration is putting competition in the Indo-Pacific on a back burner. Competition with China had for several administrations become the main focus of Washington's foreign policy, and at least that was the hope, and that included the first Trump administration.

But now the administration is really retracting to the Americas. At Lawfare, we covered both with analysis on China tech, military, econ, and diplomatic issues and more, while also kind of covering this shift to the Americas and the challenges and implications that it represents. And finally the Middle East continued to be in the news throughout the year, and we covered the various pieces of it from the Israel/Hamas conflict and ceasefire to the efforts to sustains ceasefire and the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities over the summer.

And the episode that gave us signal gate earlier in the year. That is the targeting of the Houthis. Overall, the year kept us busy with developments around the globe and the administration kept us on our toes as a remade U.S. foreign policy to be more transactional and unilateralist more centered on economic nationalism and less focused on human rights.

Tyler McBrien: My name is Tyler McBrien. I'm Lawfare’s managing editor, as well as the co-host of our narrative podcast series escalation, which we released earlier this year on February 24th, which happened to be the third anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. But it was a an undertaking took many months prior to, to the release date of course.

So it's something that we'd been working on last year as well. I co-hosted it with Lawfares Ukraine fellow Anastasia Lapatina, and co-produced it with Max Johnston of Goat Rodeo. What we wanted to to tell was the story of U.S. and Ukraine relations on their own terms which was something that we really hadn't seen before and we thought could really help explain how we got to this current moment, which would be the, the full scale invasion and beyond.

The timing of the release was unfortunately fairly prescient. If viewers recall, it was just days later that the infamous. Oval office meeting between Trump President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky met. And from there, it's just been dominating the headlines the, the war as, as we released episodes.

But the, the story that we try to tell really begins at the end of the Soviet Union with a newly independent Ukraine that found itself with a nuclear arsenal and. Ends up until basically the, the 2024 presidential election.

We also bring listeners into the halls of Congress with the Ukrainian cultural forces, musicians who, who are trying to lobby Congress for more support for the Ukrainian War effort. We cover the Orange Revolution. We cover scandals, assassinations. It's really a, a remarkable series and I'm, I'm really proud of the work that we did.

Jakub Kraus: I am Jakub Kraus. I'm a Tarbell fellow at Lawfare writing about artificial intelligence Before the second Trump administration began, it was relatively unclear what stance they would take on artificial intelligence. Now it's become a lot clearer as the year has ended. It started in the week with inauguration with the appeal of former President Biden's executive order on AI and the release of an executive order from President Trump setting the administration's goal to sustain and enhance what it termed global AI dominance.

This all couldn't have come at a more consequential time as the Chinese AI startup deep seek had released an impressive model that was dominating headlines and had sent NVIDIA's stock price tumbling. So as months went by, the policies started trickling in the Office of Management and Budget, set its priorities on AI use and acquisition in the federal government with an eye towards speed.

Elon Musk's Doge led to many tech savvy employees leaving government and President Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law the first major AI legislation from Congress. Since chat, EPT, which curbed sexually explicit, non-consensual DeepFakes generated by AI models online. He also visited the Middle East and announced plans to send top AI chips to data centers in the United Arab Emirates.

And by July, the action plan on AI came out, which clarified a lot of the administration's stances on policies and topics ranging from biological threats driven by AI models to open source software to the impact of AI on US labor markets and how to prepare. Also in the summer we saw an executive order seeking to curb so-called woke ai and another one on accelerating data center construction in the us, and a notable action taking a nearly 10% equity stake in the U.S. chip maker Intel.

And things have just continued since then. More recently, there was the Genesis mission on using AI for scientific discovery. There was the allowing H-200 chips from NVIDIA to go to China, which is a striking reversal of the Biden administration's export control policies and an executive order seeking to set a national standard on AI and challenge state AI laws.

Still, what's been missing thus far is a clear formal policy action on AI training and its copyright implications, which could come in 2026.

Kevin Frazier: I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law, and a senior editor at Lawfare. The start of 2025 posed two real questions with respect to AI governance. Who should govern and what should they govern?

So our choices were the federal government or state governments, and then the regulation of the development of AI tools, like the training of AI models versus the deployment or end uses of AI. And come the end of 2025, even though we had a lot of great analysis by many Lawfare contributors, we still don't have an answer to either one of those questions.

There's still a lot of contestation going on around what sorts of regulations the federal government should oversee with respect to AI and those that should be left to the state level. There have certainly been a lot of developments in the interim. At the state level, we've continued to see a rush to regulate many aspects of AI, and in many regards, the hundreds of bills that have been proposed to by state legislators have dealt with those end uses of ai.

How should your doctor use ai? How should AI be integrated into school systems? What sorts of training should we expect before AI is used in sensitive use cases? All of those things have been covered by many states. Some of those proposals have been signed into law. About 100 or so, AI specific bills were signed just in the 2025 session.

But some states wanted to push even further. So we saw, for example, California moved forward with SB 53, which was a frontier AI transparency bill that came in the shadow of SB 1047. SB10 47 for our Lawfare listeners was again that bill that received so much attention in California in 2024. After Governor Newsom vetoed that bill, he created a task force to study how best to move forward with AI regulation in 2025, and that culminated with SB 53, which deals with transparency requirements on the largest AI models.

Then in a late breaking plot twist, we saw that the governor of New York also adopted similar language in that state's main transparency frontier AI bill. So we saw the raise act, which was initially going to impose a wider set of standards on AI developers before they deployed tools be morphed into a sort of copycat bill of SB 53.

So that's all to say that states are moving ahead and continuing to regulate both AI development and AI deployment. At the federal level, things have been quite murky. In June, we saw that there was a potential move by the house to impose a 10 year moratorium on certain state AI bills. Ultimately, that failed by a vote of 99 to one in the Senate.

Then came July where we had the release of the AI action plan by the Trump administration, focusing on developing a national framework, making sure that there were checks in place. At the federal level of making sure that ongoing research into AI safety, into mechanistic interpretability, into the weeds of AI was ongoing at the federal level, and also making sure that we could see many efforts at the federal level to make sure that the U.S. was a leader when it came to AI innovation, AI research, and AI adoption for militaristic purposes and national security purposes.

Then the story doesn't end. We get a executive order from the Trump administration late in the year, specifying again, the need for Congress to enact a national framework for AI governance. That would in many ways, but not across the board preempt states from imposing certain AI related laws. So this executive order is still very fresh.

We're still waiting to see how it's going to be implemented, particularly with respect to the AI litigation task force it calls for, which is going to, in theory, challenge state laws that are unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful with respect to AI governance. So there's plenty to keep an eye on in 2026, and I know that our wonderful cast of Lawfare contributors will be sure to tackle this issue, and I look forward to reporting on it via Scaling Laws, via Lawfare podcasts, and of course, plenty of Lawfare essays. Thank you.

Renee DiResta: Hi, I'm Renee DiResta contributing editor at Lawfare. Russian interference in 2016 fundamentally changed how America protected its elections. The response was bipartisan and comprehensive in President Trump's first term. We saw the establishment of DH S'S Cybersecurity and Infrastructure security agency, the launching of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, and the specification of the ODNI's, foreign malign influence center in the private sector tech companies built integrity teams, developed content moderation protocols, and deployed fact checkers.

Collusion was a matter of dispute, but not interference. But by 2024, this entire apparatus had been reframed as censorship. The president who'd overseen these institution's, creation turned against those that wouldn't validate his stolen election claims. His congressional allies investigated tech companies and researchers who'd studied Stop the Steal on January 6. Research was censorship. Moderation was censorship. Fact checking became censorship.

Then came 2025. Trump launched an executive order against censorship that triggered the systematic demolition of U.S. election integrity infrastructure. Attorney General Pam Bondy disbanded the foreign influence task force and CISA election security teams were put on administrative leave.

Lawfare chronicled each step of this dismantling tech companies capitulated quickly to the referee change. Meta ended fact checking, moving to a community notes model, and Jim Jordan extracted confessions. Google admitted to Biden era pressure to moderate in certain ways. YouTube promised never to hire fact checkers that they'd never employed.

Anyway, Meta and YouTube settled lawsuits with Trump helping to fund a library under ballroom. But the most remarkable shift was an attempted rewriting of history. Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard began declassifying documents and claiming that Russian interference had been intentionally miscategorized fabricated by Obama's intelligence chiefs in a so-called treasonous coup.

She denied the documented, bipartisan confirmed reality of the internet research agency's meddling GRU, hack and leak operation, and the attempts to breach voting systems. GA's actions provided a circular logic for destruction. If Russian interference had never happened, then the institutions created to counter it were always I legitimate.

In fact, the administration argued the infrastructure built to identify foreign interference was the real interference. All along America's election integrity capacity didn't just disappear. It was systematically dismantled based on the claim that the threat it was built to counter had never existed at all and on Trump successfully selling the idea that election integrity is censorship.

Speaker 16: Editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes is here. There's a word in Hebrew av, which roughly translates to the situation and it operates as a kind of catchall phrase for Israel's security related situation. The bombs, the wars, the guns, the rockets, you know, that sort of stuff, as well as the need to do something about it at all.

And the day after President Trump was elected to his second term, I borrowed this term as the name for my column about it 'cause the basic idea was that the country was gonna be dealing with a chronic security related affliction. Only the affliction was going to be its own president and the administration that he ran, and this would.

Be an ongoing complex of disruptions to the democratic fabric that would require a commentary over time. So I've written the situation column two or three times a week ever since then, and I've tried to treat the administration kind of the way you would treat an ongoing security crisis. So for us, it's not bombs and wars and guns and rockets. The column has focused on a few other themes that are more particular to the Trump administration.

The first is lawlessness. You know, boat strikes, bribes and corruption schemes, impunity pardon, patronage, erasing historical memory of prior crimes, violating court orders, contracting detention authoritarian states, and all these questions that raise the big question of whether the courts are really up to the job of restraining this man.

The second theme is shamelessness. The malevolence and the incompetence of the Lindsay Halligans, Pete Hegseths, Kash Patels, and the many other horse men and women of the Trump apocalypse. And you know, this is the cult of unqualified authenticity, the war on the bureau, bureaucracy and quality in government service. It's also about the pervasive lying and the kind of brazen betrayal of allies.

Third major theme repression. And this overlaps with lawlessness of course, you know, and it has a lot of different elements. There's the disappearing students and the, you know, the people who just vanish off the street. There's a war on the law firms, the press, the universities, even war on fake organizations like antifa. And of course there is the going after political enemies, particularly using the criminal process, which has been a particular obsession of the situation since the advent of, well, the situation, final theme.

What are we supposed to do about the whole thing? And here are my suggestions. Stop cooperating. Make fun of the situation. Draw on the sidewalks. Don't just act like nothing's happening and go on with your life as normal, but you know, be strategic in how you follow the news. Slow down, take deep breaths. Don't be naive about where we are as a country, but don't give up on it either.

Natalie Orpett: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and escalation. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja. Our theme song is from ALIBI music. As always, thank you for listening.