Renee DiResta unpacked Tulsi Gabbard’s “Fauci Files”—released in her final act as director of national intelligence— and found that the documents don’t actually support Gabbard’s headline claims that Anthony Fauci funded research that “sparked COVID,” manipulated intelligence assessments, or lied to Congress. DiResta argued that the release is a case study in declassification as political theater: put the conclusion in the headline, dump 67 documents few will actually read, and let the framing do the work.
On Lawfare Daily, Brandon DeBot and Kelsey Merrick spoke to Roger Parloff about Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s purported waiver of President Trump’s past tax liabilities as part of a settlement in Trump’s $10 billion suit against the Internal Revenue Service. DeBot and Merrick discussed whether those who negotiated the deal might face criminal liability and what steps Congress should take.
On Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Natalie Orpett sat down with Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, and Parloff to discuss the indictment of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protestors in Minnesota, a new lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's plans to redesign the West Potomac Park, and more.
On Lawfare Daily, Benjamin Wittes and Michael Feinberg discussed the methods and techniques the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used to investigate President Trump as part of the Arctic Frost investigation, and whether Congressional Republicans’ continued critiques of the investigation hold up when compared to FBI policies.
Peter Beck and Jacob Ware highlighted a key omission in the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy: extremism and violence from the far right, a position called into question by existing research and a recent attack on a mosque in San Diego. Launching rhetorical attacks against the far left, Beck and Ware argued, prevents the document from substantively addressing security threats.
On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien sat down with Jasper Craven to discuss his new book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” They discussed why Craven, the son of a peace activist, embarked on this project, how military education helps explain the current political moment in the United States, and more.
In the latest edition of Lawfare's Foreign Policy Essay series, Javier Corrales argued that the playbook used by the Trump administration in its seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is not replicable in Cuba. He explained that while the “Delcy Model” used to topple Maduro worked because Venezuela's regime was a transactional corruption enterprise susceptible to dealmaking, Cuba’s regime has spent 60 years learning to thrive under U.S. pressure, therefore making a clean insider capitulation far less likely.
On this week’s Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Orpett sat down with Roberts, Columbus, and Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s decisions allowing Trump’s cancellation of temporary protective status for Haitians and Syrians, the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that the administration’s expedited removal procedures are likely lawful, and more.
Charles Lane reviewed W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s book, “A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War,” finding that the book offers a compelling account of the deliberate cruelty endured by Civil War prisoners—and the political intransigence that turned captivity into a death sentence for tens of thousands.
On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Kevin Frazier, Parloff, and Roberts to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including the Department of Defense’s intervention in the NAACP’s lawsuit against xAI, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in election campaigns, and a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s export control order on Anthropic’s top AI models.
Justin Sherman explained that the open-source and commercial data ecosystem that the United States has long exploited for its own intelligence purposes is equally available to sophisticated foreign adversaries, and policymakers have yet to reckon with it.
Seth Stodder warned that cheap, mass-produced drones have transformed warfare in ways that pose a serious and underappreciated threat to U.S. cities and critical infrastructure, and that U.S. defenses to combat drone attacks are nearly nonexistent.
Philip Rohlfing highlighted a key restraint on Congress’s recent legislation to allow state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to respond to unmanned aircraft systems. Rohlfing explained how the changes permit non-federal law enforcement authorities to act, but only if they receive certification from a single federal schoolhouse.
Kenneth Propp analyzed the European Union’s proposed “Cloud and AI Development Act” (CADA), which seeks to reduce dependence on U.S. tech companies in a bid for technological sovereignty. Propp explained how CADA’s higher assurance levels put U.S. companies in direct conflict with U.S. law, and argued the legislation reflects a broader transatlantic estrangement accelerated by the Trump administration’s sanctions and stalled data-sharing negotiations.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed the recent call-to-action issued by the Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies about the risks of AI-powered cyberthreats, Operation Endgame’s disruption of the SocGholish botnet, and more.
Yaqiu Wang analyzed why there seems to be so little domestic pushback against AI development in China. She explained how Beijing’s centralized, top-down approach to AI, combined with its suppression of dissent, has created a self-reinforcing cycle of development and surveillance where the more AI advances, the harder it is to organize against it.
Bahrad A. Sokhansanj and Mackenzie Arnold—amid xAI’s First Amendment challenge to California’s AI training data transparency law—considered the intersection of the First Amendment and AI regulation, analyzing how laws requiring disclosures of information from AI companies, such as California’s Assembly Bill No. 2013, could constitute “compelled commercial speech” and the potential legal consequences thereof.
Jessica Tillipman argued the frontier-model evaluation framework created by President Trump’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence is nominally voluntary but becomes de facto regulation due to the government’s outsized power as a buyer of the models.
Sarah Willrich shared Trump’s executive orders on quantum computing, which direct federal agencies to implement stronger protections against quantum computing-enabled cryptographic attacks and take action to position the U.S. as the world leader in quantum computing, including a federal government effort to build a large quantum computer.
On Scaling Laws, Alan Rozenshtein and Frazier joined Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin of Justified Posteriors to explore the big question of what AI should be for, Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical about the technology, the emerging idea of positive AI alignment to promote human flourishing, and more.
In last week’s Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Uren discussed Anthropic's shutdown of its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, the lapse of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 without reauthorization, the European Union’s addition of Ukraine to its Cybersecurity Reserve, and more.
And on another episode of Scaling Laws, Rozenshtein spoke with Robert Wright about his new book, “The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning.” The conversation covered the multiple meanings of the book’s title, what it means to view AI from a “cosmic” perspective, whether these systems genuinely understand, why near-term disruptions caused by AI may matter most, and more.
And that was the week that was.
