The Week That Was: All of Lawfare in One Post
Published by The Lawfare Institute
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Hyemin Han reported on the Oct. 16 hearing in D.C. District Court in which Judge Tanya Chutkan heard arguments about a gag order on former President Donald Trump.
Roger Parloff reported on two Oct. 12 Garcia hearings in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, including one that Judge Aileen Cannon ended abruptly.
Quinta Jurecic discussed Trump’s motion to dismiss the Jan. 6 case in D.C. District Court on the basis of presidential immunity, his history of blurring the lines between the presidency and the person, and the motion’s repeated citations to the Justice Department’s amicus brief in Blassingame v. Trump.
On this week’s episode of “Lawfare Live: Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna Bower, Han, Jurecic, and Parloff to discuss Sidney Powell’s guilty plea in the Fulton County election interference case, a gag order on Trump in D.C. District Court, a couple of hectic hearings in D.C. and Florida, Trump’s presidential immunity argument, and more:
Parloff shared a page compiling his live-tweets from the hearings in the D.C. District Court case against Trump that he has attended. The page will be continuously updated as the trial progresses.
In a breaking-news edition of Trump’s Trials and Tribulations, Scott R. Anderson and Bower discussed Keneth Chesebro’s guilty plea in the Fulton County election interference case. Chesebro’s plea agreement comes a day after co-defendant Powell pleaded guilty:
Matt Gluck shared the government’s response to former President Donald Trump’s Oct. 5 motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 case against him.
Anna Hickey shared that Lawfare has a new page to track all Trump's ongoing criminal trials. The page compiles all Lawfare analysis and coverage of the trials and can be found here.
Katherine Pompilio shared Judge Chutkan’s formal gag order on Trump.
On Lawfare No Bull, Caleb Benjamin shared edited audio of the Oct. 19 hearing in Fulton County court in which Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges, including conspiracy to commit intentional interference of election duties:
On Lawfare No Bull, Bower shared edited audio of the Oct. 16 hearing in Fulton County court in which Chesebro and Powell’s attorneys haggled with prosecutors over questions in the jury selection questionnaire that would be handed out to potential jurors on Friday Oct. 20:
Hickey shared an application by NBCUniversal to livestream the trial proceedings of the D.C. District Court case against Trump and a media coalition’s application to broadcast the trial live from the courtroom.
Hickey also shared a ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court upholding the conviction of Jan. 6 defendant Tom Robertson for “corruptly” obstructing the electoral vote certification.
On the Lawfare Podcast, Wittes sat down with Bower, Jurecic, and Parloff to discuss recent hearings in the Fulton County case, Garcia hearings in the Mar-a-Lago case, and more:
On the Lawfare Podcast, in an edition of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s series on the information ecosystem, Jurecic sat down with Dean Jackson to discuss his new report on the challenges facing efforts to prevent the spread of election disinformation:
Wittes discussed the complex relationships between the legal, strategic, and moral axes upon which Israel’s Gaza operation must be considered.
In Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, James Jeffrey argued that Israel’s goal of “destroy[ing]” Hamas and removing it from control of Gaza will be difficult and that the U.S. should strongly support Israel as the alternative of regional escalation would be catastrophic.
Tyler McBrien discussed the current status of the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into alleged atrocities in Palestine, and examined how the current Israel-Hamas conflict might affect the investigation, and vice versa.
Kubo Mačák and Maxime Nijs discussed a recent announcement that the ICC would start collecting and reviewing evidence of cyber misconduct, and examined the gravity and attribution challenges facing potential ICC prosecutions of cyber crimes.
Dan Richman discussed how the standards set for public corruption by the Supreme Court in McDonnell v. United States could impact the legal issues Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and his co-defendants may raise in United States v. Menendez.
In the first installment of Lawfare’s Security by Design project, Chinmayi Sharma and Benjamin C. Zipursky argued products liability should act as the foundation for the new liability framework of the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy.
Jelena Vićić and Gregory H. Winger discussed the 2023 Defense Department Cyber Strategy and the practical lessons learned from the conflict in Ukraine.
On the Lawfare Podcast, in the first of two episodes, Stephanie Pell sat down with four members of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB)—the chair, Sharon Bradford Franklin, and members Travis LeBlanc, Beth Williams, and Richard DiZinno—to discuss the recently released PCLOB report on FISA Section 702. They discussed where the board members agree, the compliance problems that have plagued the FBI, and board members’ different recommendations for how to address those compliance problems:
In the second episode on the Lawfare Podcast, Pell sat down with Franklin, LeBlanc, Williams, and DiZinno—to discuss their views on the privacy and civil liberties risks posed by Section 702 and each side’s differing recommendations on how to address these issues, especially one recommendation that is the most contentious point among the two sides:
On the Lawfare Podcast, Eugenia Lostri sat down with Dakota Cary and Kristin del Rosso to discuss how China manages software vulnerabilities, how companies have adjusted to China’s rules, how their system compares to the U.S. voluntary approach, and more:
Lee C. Buchheit and Paul Stephan argued that the REPO act would not be the appropriate method for using frozen Russian to compensate Ukrainian victims of Russia’s invasion, in response to a recent piece on Lawfare by Yuliya Ziskina.
In Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Ben Connable argued that the U.S. should transfer all of its Cold War-era equipment to Ukraine and European allies.
Alka Pradhan discussed the deteriorating condition of inmates at Guantánamo Bay, the legal arguments the U.S. government has used to justify their detainment, and the opportunity the U.S. has to change course at the upcoming convening of the Human Rights Committee on the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in Geneva.
On Rational Security, Anderson, Jurecic, and Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Eric Ciaramella to discuss the ousting of the incumbent Law and Justice party in Polish elections, Israel’s military response to Hamas’s attack and the U.S.’s diplomatic response, Jim Jordan winning the Republican nomination for Speaker of the House, and more:
On the Lawfare Podcast, McBrien sat down with Stuart Reid to discuss his new book, “The Lumumba Plot,” the CIA’s complicity in Lumumba’s assassination, and the neocolonial and Cold War attitudes that led U.S. leaders to view such a tragic foreign policy misstep as an unimpeachable success:
On Chatter, Shane Harris spoke with Liza Mundy about her new book, “The Sisterhood,” why she decided to write about the women of the CIA, and what that story reveals about the hidden history of the agency:
And Han and Pompilio shared that Lawfare is now accepting Spring 2024 internship applications. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. The application period closes on Nov. 5, 2023.
And that was the week that was.