Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Troy Edwards unpacked the indictment of journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and seven other defendants, who were charged under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and the conspiracy against rights statute in connection with their presence at a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The trio also parsed through the hours of footage from Lemon’s livestream video of the protest to assess the viability of the government’s allegations in court.
Bower, Columbus, and Edwards also assessed the indictments of the St. Paul Church protestors and Lemon in the context of the Trump administration’s ongoing weaponization of the justice system for political theater.
On Lawfare Live, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roger Parloff, Bower, Columbus, and Edwards to discuss the affidavits supporting the search warrant executed by the FBI at the Fulton County election center, updates from Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-Ariz.) suit against the Department of Defense, the government’s brief seeking to restart its criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James, and more.
Tyler McBrien shared the two affidavits filed by the Justice Department in support of the search warrant executed at the Fulton County election office to seize election records and ballots from the 2020 presidential race.
On Lawfare Daily, Natalie K. Orpett sat down with Molly Roberts, Columbus, and Parloff to discuss a congressional hearing into Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s (ICE) use of force in Minneapolis and Chicago, oral argument over the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy, the district court’s rejection of Minnesota’s 10th Amendment challenge to Operation Metro Surge, and more.
Hannah Berkman and Stacy Livingston unpacked the potential First Amendment violations of the Department of Homeland Security’s reported plan to create a database of ICE protestors, aimed at “exposing” them for efforts to monitor ICE.
On Lawfare Daily, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick joined Columbus to discuss what immigration policy may look like during the second year of the second Trump administration in light of Customs and Border Patrol’s and ICE’s recent tactics.
Irene Loewenson broke down the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee on high-skilled foreign workers trying to acquire H-1B visa status.
Jamie Conrad analyzed several high-profile cases involving senior Trump administration lawyers evading state ethics oversight in the courts.
Wittes assessed the potentially overlooked meaning of the 14 exclamation marks in Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s order issuing a preliminary injunction in Senator Kelly’s civil suit against the Department of Defense.
On Lawfare Daily, Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes joined McBrien to discuss the trend of disappearing local news sources, how this trend affects reporting and transparency in the courts, and more.
Wittes examined the recent refusals of grand juries to indict political opponents of President Trump—including members of Congress accused over protected speech—and emphasized the role of grand juries as a vital constitutional safeguard.
In her penultimate lecture of the Lawfare Lecture series, Dr. Laura Field explained how the national conservative movement has successfully shaped the new right around nationalist principles, what this shift means in contemporary politics, what makes the national conservatives different from other factions, and more.
Watching from a café window in war-scarred Kharkiv, Ukraine, Wittes reflected on the willingness of Americans entrenched in the U.S. political climate to look away from the self-inflicted erosion of U.S. democracy.
On Rational Security, Anastasiia Lapatina and Wittes joined Scott R. Anderson to discuss the latest developments in Ukraine, including Russia’s ongoing campaign to attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure during a frigid winter, the lack of progress in U.S.-backed negotiations between the two countries, the use of drone technology, and more.
Katsiaryna Shmatsina explained how the Trump administration’s outreach to Belarus marks a transactional shift in U.S. foreign policy, as Washington lifts sanctions on Belarusian potash and deepens engagement with Alexander Lukashenka.
In one of the latest editions of the Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Raphael S. Cohen considered how examining Israel’s tactics in the war against Hamas could provide new insights into counterinsurgency theory.
As part of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law’s (CERL) conference on precision lethality and civilian harm mitigation, Christopher J. Fuller argued that modern targeted killings by the U.S. government are shaped as much by their visual presentation as by their political effects. Fuller analyzed how the “precision aesthetic” curated over four administrations through strike imagery, Situation Room photos, and gun-camera crosshairs has framed the use of lethal force as controlled and humane.
On Lawfare Daily, Claire O. Finkelstein, Christopher Maier, Larry Lewis, and Geoffrey S. Corn joined Anderson in a panel discussion for the CERL conference to unpack the challenges of harm mitigation for civilians in urban warfare, the mistakes made in Gaza, how mitigation intersects with media coverage and legitimacy, and more.
Kristina Daugirdas and Katerina Linos outlined some of the challenges that President Trump’s Board of Peace may face as it attempts to solidify itself on the international stage. Using three similar “coalition of the willing” organizations as case studies, Daugirdas and Linos argued that, without the United Nation’s support, the Board of Peace will struggle to have the legitimacy it needs for effective global governance.
As part of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Ariane Tabatabai and John Drennan explained how President Trump's renewed reliance on coercion in international relations—threatening tariffs, territorial annexation, and even military force against allies—undermines the trust that makes alliances, such as NATO, legitimate and weakens the global security environment for all member countries, including the U.S.
Erin Sikorsky and Siena Cicarelli examined how the NATO’s food systems have become increasingly reliant on digital and biological systems that make agriculture a growing target of coercive cyber threats.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren explored Microsoft’s backsliding on its security goals, leaked documents from China describing its plans for disruptive infrastructure attacks on neighboring countries, the effects of the U.S. cyber operation that disrupted Iranian air defense systems, and more.
As part of Lawfare’s Research Initiative, Justin Curl, Sayash Kapoor, and Arvind Narayanan explained why three structural bottlenecks—regulation, adversarial dynamics, and human oversight limits—may prevent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) from lowering legal costs or expanding access to justice.
On Lawfare Daily, Alan Z. Rozenshtein sat down with Curl and Narayanan to discuss their latest Lawfare research report, the future of AI in the legal field, the barriers the law may face in implementing AI, and more.
Isabel Arroyo analyzed the rise of digital age-assurance laws and argued that the common tools required to enforce them—age-gating, age verification, and age estimation—pose serious risks to privacy, anonymity, and the structure of the internet.
Bruce Schneier, Oleg Brodt, Elad Feldman, and Ben Nassi asserted that prompt injection, a method of embedding malicious instructions into inputs to influence a large language model (LLM), may be just the first of a seven step process in a full, malware-style attack on an AI system.
On Scaling Laws, David Rand joined Renée DiResta and Rozenshtein to discuss how AI can influence its users’ political beliefs in positive and negative directions, the political stakes of training AI models, the case for transparency requirements in AI policy, and more.
And that was the week that was.
