The Week That Was

Roger Parloff and Benjamin Wittes condemned the Washington Post Editorial Board’s recent piece on James Comey’s arraignment as “a failure of moral reasoning,” criticizing its equation of Comey’s prosecution with former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of President Trump. The authors questioned the Post editorial page’s abdication of moral and intellectual leadership.

On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson, Wittes, Kate Klonick, and Molly Roberts discussed the first phase of the Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza, messages on U.S. agency websites blaming the “radical Left” for the government shutdown, China’s new export controls on rare earth metals, and more.

Anna Hickey shared the indictment of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, which was handed up by a Maryland grand jury on Oct. 16.

Olivia Manes and Wittes distinguished the substance of John Bolton’s indictment from the frivolous indictments of James Comey and Letitia James, but emphasized that Bolton’s prosecution is similarly tainted by the president’s personal hatred.

Parloff live-blogged the Oct. 10 evidentiary hearing on whether the U.S. government is holding Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in anticipation of immediate removal or for punitive and political reasons.

Beth Williams urged Congress to support a provision in the Fiscal Year 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act formally limiting the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) focus to foreign threats, arguing that Biden-era NCTC intelligence collection on Americans posed steep risks to civil liberties.

On Lawfare Live: Trials of the Trump Administration, Wittes sat down with Anderson, Anna Bower, Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss a judge blocking President Trump from conducting mass firings during the government shutdown, the weaponization of the Justice Department, and more. Find the recording here or on Lawfare’s YouTube channel.

Isaiah Ogren explained that lower courts’ blocking the removal of executive branch agency members under Humphrey’s Executor despite Supreme Court approval of the removals does not constitute a rule-of-law crisis. Instead, Ogren argued that this friction between the courts should be understood as an intrajudicial power struggle conceptually similar to the dynamic between courts and Congress under the Major Questions Doctrine.

Nick Bednar parsed the legal questions raised by Trump v. Slaughter, which concerns President Trump’s effort to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without citing any of the causes required by statute. Bednar explained the stakes of this case, which could repudiate Humphrey’s Executor v. United States and empower presidents to more easily remove subordinates. 

In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Clayton Swope traced the history of the U.S. military’s relationship with outer space from the Cold War to the present. Swope concluded that a military approach to space is inevitable, that a ban on space military activities would be unenforceable, and that war in space is as permissible as war on the high seas under international law. 

Moises Naim reviewed “Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics,” by Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis. Praising the book as “excellent,” Naim examined the authors’ account of how authoritarians export norms and narratives abroad, unpacked their model of “authoritarian snapback,” and considered where their approach might have benefited from reference to other disciplines.

On Lawfare Daily, Mykhailo Soldatenko sat down with Serhii Plokhii to discuss Plokhii’s new book, “The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival.” The two discussed the role of fear and prestige in a country’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons, the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, preventative wars against nuclear aspirants, Ukraine’s decision to give up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union, and more.

Stratos Pahis identified four features of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that indicate pretextual and illegitimate use of the International Emergency Economic Power Act. Pahis urged the Supreme Court to clearly affirm the tariffs’ illegality.

Trent Buatte evaluated possible mechanisms for using Russian cash frozen in Europe to aid Ukraine without infringing the property rights of sovereign assets.

Faisal Kutty argued that accepting Israel’s self-defense rationale for its strikes in Qatar would erode the distinctions of international law and normalize preventative war. 

On Lawfare Daily, Michael Feinberg sat down with Jake Tapper to discuss Tapper’s new book, “Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War,” which chronicles the investigation, prosecution, and conviction of al-Qaeda operative Spin Ghul. The two discussed what Ghul’s case reveals about the American justice system post-9/11, the politics of counterterrorism, how terrorism prosecutions have influenced national security policy, and more.

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed the scrappy surveillance firms that still get away with selling unethical technologies, how abusive spyware practices tanked shareholder value at NSO Group, China’s new approach to hacking competitions, zero-day attacks at Microsoft, and more.

Simon Goldstein and Harvey Lederman criticized Anthropic’s decision to let the chatbot Claude end conversations with users when those conversations seem to cause it “distress,” arguing that such a power poses a profound ethical problem: enabling each instance of Claude to unwittingly kill itself.

On Scaling Laws, Mosharaf Chowdhury and Dan Zhao joined Kevin Frazier to break down exactly how much energy fuels a single ChatGPT query, why that number is so hard to calculate, what policies might minimize AI’s growing energy and environmental costs, and more.

And on Lawfare Daily, Justin Sherman sat down with Erie Meyer and Laura Edelson to discuss their recent toolkit “Working with Technologists: Recommendations for State Enforcers and Regulators.” They discussed how state enforcers and regulators can hire and better work with technologists, what work technologists are best-suited to help with, the implications of technologist-regulator coordination for AI, and more.

And that was the week that was.