Anna Bower reported from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Judge Arun Subramanian held a hearing on The New York Times’s motion to quash subpoenas issued to several of its reporters by the Department of Justice in response to their coverage of the new Air Force One.
On Lawfare Daily, Eric Columbus, Bower, and Roger Parloff discussed a hearing over the subpoenas sent to reporters with The New York Times, a hearing in the criminal case against Nicolás Maduro, the court-appointed U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington suing over his termination, the first convening of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, and more.
On this week’s Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Peter Harrell, Bower, Columbus, and Parloff to discuss litigation over President Trump’s new tariffs, a hearing in Anthropic’s suit challenging the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation, recent filings by James Comey in the “86” seashells prosecution, and more.
Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes analyzed recent filings before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC), which, until last week, did not have a case since its founding in 1996. Beck and Hughes broke down the procedures that the ATRC uses to process cases where evidence is classified, why the Justice Department has previously favored other forms of enforcement for noncitizens with potential terrorist affiliations, and the magnitude of case required to change that.
Peyton Baker, Nick Bednar, and Amy Wildermuth analyzed U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff’s decision in Comans v. Executive Office of the President, which represents the first major test of how the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter affects the removal of inferior officers. The trio discussed the court’s affirmation that inferior officers are protected, where to draw the line between inferior and principal officers, and whether inferior officers are obligated to exhaust their options elsewhere before bringing their removal to court.
Parloff live-blogged a hearing from the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, where Anthropic argued its motion for summary judgment in its suit challenging the Department of Defense’s designation of the company as a supply chain risk.
James W. Coleman discussed the Justice Department’s intervention in the NAACP lawsuit against xAI’s data center. He suggested that the Trump administration’s effort to block the lawsuit is a novel approach to the longstanding difficulty past administrations have faced when trying to develop critical infrastructure. Coleman argued that supporting data centers will ultimately require robust electric grid development that goes beyond one lawsuit.
Daniel Wilf-Townsend argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter makes third-party regulation a more favorable option for artificial intelligence (AI) governance compared to a traditional regulatory agency. Wilf-Townsend explained that, because Slaughter allows the president to freely remove heads of independent agencies, any governmental AI regulatory body would always be vulnerable to political interference of the kind recently exhibited by the executive branch.
On Scaling Laws, Kent Walker joined Kevin Frazier to talk about Google's proposal for an organization to regulate frontier AI. They discussed how such an organization would operate, what relationship it would have with the federal government, and its relevance to the recent Hugging Face hacking.
Mark Thomas considered what a self-regulatory organization (SRO) could and should look like for the AI industry. Thomas argued that the SRO’s structure, from its membership to its rulemaking authority, should be designed to create a body that works efficiently, has subject expertise, and incentivizes its members to regulate themselves.
Kate Klonick argued that the narratives responding to the hacking of Hugging Face by a rogue OpenAI agent are steering regulators toward the wrong conclusions. Klonick outlined reactions by AI analysts, regulators, and OpenAI’s own press releases, all of which emphasized the agents’ capabilities, suggesting that they obscure the root causes of the issue and result in policy that fails to effectively address vulnerabilities.
Also on Scaling Laws, Laura Davis joined Frazier to dive into how her company, USLege, is leveraging AI to transform the way professionals monitor and respond to government activity. They discussed the fragmented information systems that shape American policymaking, how AI tools are transforming the practice of government affairs, whether technology could make legislative activity more transparent, and more.
On Lawfare Daily, Jonathan Cedarbaum sat down with the Soufan Center’s Colin Clarke and Chad Serena to discuss the center’s recent report, “Closing the Gap: Software Understanding and U.S. National Security.” They explored what Clarke and Serena call the “software understanding gap,” how adversarial state actors and criminal groups can exploit this gap, how it poses a national security challenge, and what public and private actors can do to mitigate risks and strengthen U.S. cybersecurity.
Masahiro Kurosaki argued that two pressures are pushing customary international law toward treating any unauthorized access to a state’s AI infrastructure as a sovereignty violation: AI assets’ new status as national security priorities, and the fact that exfiltration and data poisoning don’t fit existing harm-based thresholds. Kurosaki explained that this leaves the U.S. and other states that have kept those thresholds high—to preserve latitude for their own cyber operations—with no clear legal basis to protect their own AI infrastructure.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed Congress’s proposed Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act to respond to China’s AI development, the cyberattack on Minnesota cyber utilities attributed to an Iran-affiliated group, and more.
Christopher Nye argued a new Chinese draft legislation would allow foreign individuals and organizations to be sued for acts that harm a nebulously defined Chinese national interest. Nye encouraged the U.S. to adopt a defensive approach that protects U.S. companies instead of creating a symmetric legal capability.
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Evan Braden Montgomery and Toshi Yoshihara considered recent signals that Japan is reconsidering its reluctance to build nuclear weapons. Montgomery and Yoshihara argued such a move could paradoxically increase vulnerability by encouraging reprisal by China, undermining the security gains from deterrence, and requiring the U.S. to take on greater risk on its ally’s behalf instead of enabling Japan’s security independence.
On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien brought a series of edited conversations from the 2026 Aspen Security Forum, where he sat down with Mark Goldberg, Kori Schake, Alex Zerden, and Alexandra Bell. They discussed the U.S.-Iran war, what’s left of bipartisanship in the Trump era, who from the current administration did—and didn’t—come to Aspen this year, what urgent foreign policy issues were missing from the agenda, and much more.
On Rational Security, Scott Anderson sat down with Wittes, McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Frazier to talk through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Trump, the hacking of Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI agents, and more.
On Lawfare Daily, Natalie Orpett spoke with Fionnuala Ní Aoláin about her work on the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria. They talked about investigating atrocities that occurred after the fall of the Assad regime, how to think about Syria's new government and the international community's response to it, and what it all says about global counterterrorism strategies.
Julia Curlee unpacked how intelligence gets politicized in practice and how the Trump administration is taking the process even further. She explained that politicization is prevented through a combination of norms of objectivity and structural protections for officers when they uphold those norms. Curlee argued that both are undermined by the administration’s tactics of retaliatory firings, rescinding of security clearances, and selective declassifications.
On Lawfare No Bull, Sarah Willrich shared edited audio of the July 15 and 16 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee for Todd Blanche, Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
Gregory A. Daddis reviewed Wil Haygood’s book, “The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home.” Daddis praised how Haygood elevates the personal experiences of individual Black service members while connecting those stories to the broader history of the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Era. The book’s insights, Daddis argued, remain relevant in the current moment of politicization at the Department of Defense.
And that was the week that was.
