The Week That Was: All of Lawfare in One Post
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On “Lawfare Live: Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” Benjamin Wittes was joined by Anna Bower—reporting from Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom in Fort Pierce, Fla.—and Lee Kovarsky to discuss the hearing on one of Former President Donald Trump’s motions to dismiss his criminal charges in the Florida classified documents case.
On Lawfare Daily, Anna Hickey, Wittes, and Quinta Jurecic discussed Cannon’s partial denial of one of Trump’s motions to dismiss the classified documents case and recent developments from Judge Scott McAfee in the Fulton County case.
Michael Stern discussed the House Judiciary Committee’s lawsuits to compel a senior FBI agent and two Department of Justice attorneys to testify before Congress. He argued that the Justice Department’s response to the lawsuits, which claim that agency counsel must be present for testimonies involving sensitive executive branch information, is an overly broad interpretation of presidential authority that shields the executive from accountability.
On Lawfare Daily, Jurecic sat down with Molly Reynolds, Dan Richman, and Eric Columbus to analyze Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-N.J.) corruption trial, and questioned whether the Justice Department will be able to successfully prosecute him for receiving bribes in exchange for unregistered lobbying for the Egyptian and Qatari governments.
On Rational Security, Jurecic and Scott Anderson sat down with Eric Ciaramella to discuss the new Ukraine agreements announced at the G7 summit, Trump advisors’ potential plans to replace civil servants with partisan loyalists, and the unique analytic successes of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Anderson explained the G7’s new plan to provide Ukraine with financial assistance in part through windfall earnings from frozen Russian assets and discussed the potential legal and practical risks with the plan that could arise.
On Lawfare Daily, Wittes sat down with Ciaramella, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Anderson to discuss the joint communique from the Ukraine peace summit, the recent U.S.-Ukraine security agreement, and the funding mechanism for Ukraine assistance announced at the G7 summit.
Katsiaryna Shmatsina, a Belarusian foreign policy analyst, was accused by her government of extremism and conspiracy to overthrow the state. Shmatsinna described the ongoing trial in Belarus against her and 19 other experts, and explained the oppressive political climate in the country.
Arthur Traldi discussed the closure of the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh/ISIL (UNITAD), the primary international team responsible for gathering and analyzing evidence of Islamic State crimes in Iraq, and emphasized the urgent need for a new strategy to continue prosecutions.
On Lawfare Daily, Hickey sat down with former United States Ambassador Roberta Jacobson to discuss Claudia Sheinbaum’s historic election as Mexico’s first female and first Jewish president.
In this week’s edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Brian Blankenship highlighted challenges in the Biden administration’s efforts to bolster U.S. alliances, noting that closer relationships with allies might complicate defense burden sharing across Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
Scott Shackelford, Christos Makridis, Iain Nash, and Hannibal Travis examined the evolving regulatory landscape of software liability and argued that the United States should, like the European Union, proactively integrate cybersecurity into product liability laws to enhance software security, accountability, and transparency.
On Lawfare Daily, Stephanie Pell spoke to Maia Hamin, Trey Herr, and Marc Rogers about a recent Cyber Safety Review Board report, which detailed a Chinese hacking group’s intrusion into Microsoft Exchange. They discussed Microsoft’s cloud security flaws, the need for better transparency and regulation, and Microsoft's response to the security breach.
Dean Ball and Alan Rozenshtein discussed the challenges of state-specific AI regulation, such as California's SB 1047, which mandates stringent oversight on AI model development, and argued for federal preemption to avoid a fragmented regulatory landscape.
Kevin Frazier explored the limitations of current legislation targeting AI-generated false information, advocating for mandatory platform-level interventions that can effectively manage and reduce inauthentic content.
On Chatter, Wittes spoke to Renée DiResta about her work on the spread of disinformation and online information flows as part of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Responding to the Office of Management and Budget’s March 2024 guidance memo about artificial intelligence, Jim Dempsey and Susan Landau emphasized the need for contestability in advanced automated decisionmaking systems.
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And that was the week that was.