The Week That Was: All of Lawfare in One Post

Receive in your inbox every weekend by subscribing to the newsletter.

Benjamin Pollard shared a livestream of the seventh House select committee hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection:

Elena Kagan shared an episode of Lawfare No Bull featuring the substantive audio from the committee’s hearing:

And Katherine Pompilio shared an episode of the Lawfare Podcast, in which Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a conversation with Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about the hearing:

Bob Bauer and Benjamin Wittes contended that Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House select committee demonstrated that Trump—through his lawyers—lied about the events on and preceding Jan. 6 during the 2021 impeachment process. 

Jacob Levin summarized the D.C. Circuit’s July 8 ruling upholding the House of Representatives’s authority to subpoena former President Trump’s financial records while narrowing the scope of the subpoena. 

Alan Rozenshtein shared an episode of the Lawfare Podcast in which he spoke with Zac Gershberg, a professor of journalism and media studies at Idaho State University, and Sean Illing, the host of the Vox Conversations podcast, about their new book, “The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion.” The conversation covered the current state of American democracy, its evolution over time, and how to strengthen the foundations of liberal democracy:

Colin P. Clarke and Joseph C. Shelzi examined the dangers associated with do-it-yourself (DIY) weapons in light of the assasination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

Wittes also introduced Lawfare’s newest podcast, #LiveFromUkraine, in which he interviews individuals connected to, and knowledgeable about, the conflict in Ukraine. Pompilio shared the latest episode of #LiveFromUkraine, which features Wittes’s conversation with Katya Savchenko, a Ukrainian woman who lived through several days of the barbarous Russian occupation of Bucha:

evelyn douek and Quinta Juricec shared the next episode in the “Arbiters of Truth” series. They spoke with Nick Sawyer and Taylor Nichols, emergency medicine physicians and cofounders of the organization No License for Disinformation, about the role of state medical boards in combating disinformation related to the coronavirus:

douek and Tia Sewell discussed the late release of several Meta Oversight Board decisions and why this tardiness matters. 

David Priess shared an episode of Chatter, in which Priess spoke with Josh Campbell, a reporter at CNN. Priess and Campbell discussed reporting on mass shootings in light of Campbell’s experience working as an FBI special agent:

Katherine Harvey examined the political climate in Iraq related to the U.S. effort to establish a regional coalition aimed at containing Iran. 

Adam Chan described the Supreme Court’s ruling in Torres v. Texas Dep’t of Public Safety and considered its consequences for congressional war powers moving forward.

Sewell also shared a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Majid S. Khan, a Pakistani man who has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since 2006 and whose sentence ended on March 1, 2022. 

Daphne Keller and Max Levy considered the possible avenues for platform transparency regulations—particularly in light of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, privacy concerns, and the First Amendment, among other principles. 

Mark Visger argued that a recent speech given by the U.K. attorney general may pave the way for the establishment of cyber norms by shifting states’ focus from sovereignty to the cyberspace activities that should be prohibited. 

Lennart Maschmeyer asserted that although cyber operations have substantial strategic promise, they are limited by trade-offs related to operational speed, the significance of their effects, and the extent to which they can be controlled. Jason Healy responded to Maschmeyer’s piece, arguing that Maschmeyer’s framing of a “subversive trilemma” overstates the effects of subversion. 

Paul Rosenzweig shared the Cyber Safety Review Board’s first report, which examines the Log4j breach and organizations’ responses to it in the context of broader security frameworks. 

Raquel Leslie and Brian Liu discussed the U.S.-China technology news from the last two weeks, including U.S. senators’ request for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate TikTok after reports surfaced that the company’s employees in China are accessing U.S. user data. 

Jordan Schneider shared an episode of ChinaTalk in which Schneider, Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts, and Sam George, who just completed a masters degree at Stanford, spoke with David Engerman, the author of “Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts.” They discussed the evolution of U.S. expertise related to Soviet policy and how that evolution informs modern China studies:

Stewart Baker shared an episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast in which he spoke with Dave Aitel, Jane Bambauer, and Dmitri Alperovich about the role of hacking in certain legal disputes; a new proposal in the U.K. related to content moderation; and the U.S.’s effort to prevent a Dutch firm from selling chip-producing machines to China:

Pompilio also shared an episode of the Lawfare Podcast in which former Lawfare Associate Editor Bryce Klehm spoke with Elizabeth Saunders, an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, about Saunders’s recent article: “Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy.” Klehm and Saunders discussed who foreign policy elites really are, why they act how they do, and whether there are alternatives to an elite-driven foreign policy:

Matthew Tokson and Paul Ohm asserted that the Carpenter test should replace the Katz test as the measure of the constitutionality of Fourth Amendment searches. 

And Alvaro Marañon shared an episode of the Lawfare Podcast in which Marañon spoke with Reuters reporters Chris Bing and Raphael Satter about the development of the “hackers for hire” industry:

And that was the week that was