Benjamin Wittes announced the release of RAGtime, a new Lawfare research platform available in beta to material supporters. A video demonstration of RAGtime is available here and here.
On Lawfare Daily, Natalie Orpett spoke with Elora Mukherjee, Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, about the legal landscape of immigration detention. The two discussed what rights detained immigrants have, why it's so hard to enforce them, and why it's even harder to get a remedy when rights are violated.
Michael Feinberg continued his dive into the conspiracies around Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation into President Trump and his allies’ attempts to overturn the 2020 Election. Feinberg examined lawmakers’ efforts to portray the investigation as deviating from the FBI’s rules and norms.
Molly Roberts reported from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit where a three judge panel heard oral argument on Trump’s ongoing attempt to build a ballroom on the site of White House’s erstwhile East Wing.
On Lawfare Daily, Wittes spoke to Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Roberts to discuss oral argument at the D.C. Circuit over the White House ballroom, the status of the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the superseding SPLC indictment, and more.
On Rational Security, Roberts, Wittes, and Feinberg joined Anderson to discuss Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as attorney general, where FISA Section 702 stands amidst bipartisan pushback over Federal Housing Finance Director Bill Pulte’s acting appointment, voter fraud conspiracies around the California primary elections, and more.
Ilya Somin argued that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which bars nearly all use of the Voting Rights Act to create majority-minority congressional districts, is not wholly without merit, and to the extent that it has issues, those issues should not be addressed through court-packing.
On Lawfare Daily, Feinberg sat down with Andrew Weissmann to discuss Weissmann’s new book, “Liar's Kingdom: How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America,” falsehoods in political discourse, and how to possibly disincentivize lies on the campaign trail.
Anderson explained the legal effects of both chambers of Congress voting to severely curtail U.S. military operations against Iran, even though the resolutions lack the force of law, and what strategies Congress could use to amplify these effects.
On Lawfare Daily, Orpett spoke with Anderson to discuss what Congress can do to direct the president to end the war in Iran and Anderson’s recent article in Lawfare that explains why a likely presidential veto of a War Powers Resolution is not the end of the story.
William "Chip" Usher explored the international ramifications of the U.S. providing assistance for the Khamenei strike and why the executive branch needs to work out what the rules of leadership decapitation are before the next war.
On Lawfare Daily, Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold for the latest in their regular series on recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related issues. Together, they dug into recent escalations between Israel and Lebanon and their bearing on the broader Iran conflict, including tensions between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the impact on efforts at regional integration, and how it might serve as a spoiler for broader efforts to negotiate the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
John Balouziyeh and Charles Lister argued that keeping Syria on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list hinders its ability to recover and settle its outstanding judgments from the Assad regime.
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay Series, Liya Khan and Andrew Mines assessed the consequences of the slashing of aid to Afghanistan to national security as refugees from Iran and Pakistan exacerbate an existing humanitarian crisis, enabling the growth of groups like the Islamic State-Khorasan Province in the country.
Roxana Vatanparast reviewed Samanatha Subramanian’s book, “The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.” Vatanparast wrote that though the book offers a compelling narrative of undersea cables’ precariousness, it does not fully confront the cables’ implications for governance and sovereignty.
Herb Lin explained how Russia’s aerial attack on Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum violates international humanitarian law and how it fits into Russia’s information warfare aimed at targeting Ukrainian identity and resistance.
Christopher Nye explored the Chinese Communist Party’s new supply chain regulations, which empower regulators to penalize routine supply chain investigations and impose sweeping countermeasures on foreign companies, and how the United States and its allies should respond.
Micah Musser examined the legal, technological, and political factors that have made a collision between transparency-focused artificial intelligence (AI) regulations and the Constitution’s Taking Clause increasingly likely.
On Scaling Laws, Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock joined Alan Rozenshtein to discuss their new paper “Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty,” which argues that, given the possibility of transformative AI within the next decade and deep uncertainty about its capabilities and risks, governments should aggressively build the institutional capacity to regulate competently when needed, rather than either deferring to the market or locking in premature substantive rules.
Shaun Ee and Jam Kraprayoon argued that managing access to frontier AI buys cyber defenders a head start, but without triage, translation, and distribution, that window will be wasted. They call for an ”Operation Warp Speed” approach to cyber defense that triages the most vulnerable defenders, translates frontier AI into deployable tools, and distributes those tools at scale.
