Molly Roberts broke down the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the construction of the White House ballroom to proceed, holding that the plaintiff likely did not have standing to sue. Roberts analyzed previous cases on aesthetic standing and explained why the Court’s decision failed to clarify who has the right to sue based on aesthetic, cultural, or even environmental harms going forward.
On Lawfare Daily, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision allowing President Trump to continue to build the White House ballroom while litigation is ongoing, and information about the U.S. Postal Service's system handling of mail ballots released by a whistleblower to Sen. Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
On this week’s Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Wittes sat down with Roberts, Anna Bower, Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration, including updates in the litigation over Trump’s executive order targeting mail-in voting, the new executive order restricting birthright citizenship, and more.
Roberts reported from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, where Judge Indira Talwani heard revised motions for a preliminary injunction to halt the U.S. Postal Service’s implementation of Trump's executive order on mail-in voting.
Lawfare Daily, Wittes sat down with Bower, Roberts, Kate Klonick, and Columbus to discuss a judge’s ruling finding the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation of Anthropic unlawful, developments in the litigation challenging Trump’s mail in ballot executive order, the prosecution of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), a filing from Trump suggesting that the Kennedy Center may be torn down, a district judge’s denial of Minnesota’s motion to extradite an indicted ICE agent, and more.
On Rational Security, Scott Anderson sat down with Roberts, Columbus, and Renée DiResta to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including Trump’s efforts to reshape mail-in voting, Meta’s landmark settlement in a child-safety lawsuit against the company, the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the White House ballroom construction to continue, and more.
DiResta examined the State Department’s claim that its former Global Engagement Center (GEC) colluded with a Stanford research consortium to suppress online speech supportive of then-candidate Trump during the 2020 election. DiResta found that the latest document release doesn’t support that claim, was already public, and drastically overstates the scale at which the consortium flagged content as problematic.
Justin Levitt discussed a case before the California Supreme Court considering the legality of warrants authorizing a county sheriff—who, at the time, was running for governor—to seize and count ballots. Levitt argued the case presents the court with an opportunity to clearly define ensuring election integrity as a civil, not criminal, responsibility.
Jonathan Hafetz analyzed the risks to habeas corpus posed by detaining noncitizens in cases related to their political speech. He explained that the detention in these cases represents a distinct constitutional injury that should be addressed through separate proceedings from immigration court. Hafetz warned that the increasing conflation of detention and removal in the immigration context risks eroding critical due process protections.
Mark Pollack characterized the Trump administration’s pattern of threatening organizations and individuals to achieve favorable deals as “governance by shakedown.” Despite the process’s frequent illegality and occasional failure to achieve the administration’s preferred direct effects, Pollack argued it has still succeeded in extracting monetary gains and creating a broader environment of intimidation that encourages self-moderation.
Jeff Kosseff argued that Meta’s settlement with 47 states is a form of jawboning: restricting First Amendment rights indirectly by pressuring a third party to do what the government could not do directly. Kosseff identified three ways the settlement could limit those rights: preventing children from seeing certain content, mandating what features Meta can offer and to whom, and limiting anonymity for adult users through age verification requirements.
Aaron R. Cooper and Philip Chertoff explained the legal complications, including surveillance protections for U.S. persons and the difficulty of accurately targeting foreign criminal organizations, that companies must consider if they choose to conduct authorized cyber operations under the White House’s new plan. While the plan’s implementation is still being determined, Cooper and Chertoff advised companies to start assessing what risks participating in the plan could expose them to.
On Lawfare Daily, Peter Salib joined Kevin Frazier to break down the postmortems on OpenAI’s failure to contain artificial intelligence (AI) agents undergoing testing, which resulted in a hack of Hugging Face. The duo discussed the timeline of what exactly transpired and explored the technical reasons and policy decisions that allowed the hack to transpire. They then reflect on what that means for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.
On Scaling Laws, Bri Treece and Rob Slone joined Frazier to discuss a neglected layer of AI governance: the organizations that deploy AI in real-world products, services, and operations. They considered why PACT AI was formed, what AI assurance can learn from other industries, why evaluating AI cannot be a one-time exercise, the major barriers facing the broader AI assurance ecosystem, and more.
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier compared AI agents to genies and other magical events that give humans what they want, but not always in the way they intended. Raghavan and Schneier warned that as AI makes that process even faster, it becomes more important to think cautiously about how, when, why, and to what effect the technology is being used.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed the threat from China’s botnets, a hack at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the launch of a new water infrastructure cybersecurity initiative, and more.
Chinmayi Sharma compared how China’s AI companies are providing their open-weight models abroad to the country’s previous buildout of telecommunications networks. While China may be repeating its playbook, Sharma argued that Washington should not. She explained that attempts to restrict the spread of AI models, as the U.S. did with Huawei products, would not only be ineffective but risk preventing the U.S. from providing a competitive counteroffer to countries eager to adopt AI technologies.
Jason Healey and Jack Snyder critiqued the U.S. Cyber Command’s posture of “persistent engagement” in cyberspace, arguing that it fails to produce a stable equilibrium between great powers. Healey and Snyder argued the U.S.’s increasing focus on dominance in cyber warfare is likely to create an escalating spiral of the security dilemma.
Nicholas Weaver explained how the Federal Communications Commission’s covered list, an effective ban on purchasing certain equipment from foreign providers, evolved from a limited national security tool under President Biden to an overly broad ban on critical goods. Weaver argued that the executive is given broad deference in creating the list, enabling the Trump administration to use it to block access to cheap parts and favor administration allies, ultimately harming national security.
Sarah Willrich shared Trump’s executive order declaring a national emergency related to national security risks to the U.S. electrical grid, which authorizes the secretary of energy to prohibit transactions deemed to threaten U.S. national security.
On Lawfare Daily, Daniel Byman spoke with Tricia Bacon and Antonia Juelich about how different terrorist groups are using AI and how governments are employing AI to fight them. They discussed how Boko Haram and other terrorist groups are using AI to become more deadly, terrorist group problems with using AI, the risk of catastrophic AI-enabled terrorism, what governments and companies need to do better, and more.
In the latest edition of Lawfare's Foreign Policy Essay series, Ismail Abukar explained that Al-Shabaab’s recruitment relies primarily on family ties, not ideology—creating a self-replicating pipeline where younger initiates are recruited by family members already in the group. Abukar argued that rather than counter-messaging, interventions should focus on providing alternative social structures and meaningful political inclusion for those vulnerable to recruitment.
And on the first episode of the Security Economics podcast on Lawfare Daily, Mike Schmidt joined Peter Harrell to discuss Schmidt’s work implementing the CHIPS Act at the Department of Commerce. They considered how the CHIPS program came together, implementation challenges, lessons for U.S. industrial policy in other critical sectors, and more.
And that was the week that was.
