The Lawfare Podcast

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a tutorial fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. They speak about Véliz’s paradigm-shifting, free-ranging new book, “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI,” including discussions on the history of prediction, why a healthy democracy—and a life well lived—requires uncertainty, and Véliz’s belief that “artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi and tech executives the new prophets.”
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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief and co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes and Senior Editors Anna Bower and Michael Feinberg to talk through the latest in national security news, including:
“Humphrey’s Executioner.” On June 29, the Supreme Court closed out its term with a trio of decisions on the president’s power to fire officials at supposedly independent agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6–3 majority upheld Trump’s firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and overruled the 90-year-old precedent Humphrey’s Executor, handing the president at-will removal power over roughly two dozen multimember agencies. The same day, in Trump v. Cook, the Court refused 5–4 to let Trump remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, carving out a special exemption for the central bank. And a day later, in Blanche v. Perlmutter, the justices declined to let Trump oust Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, whose office sits within the legislative branch. Taken together, what do these cases tell us about the unitary executive and the future of agency independence?
“For Your Lies Only.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is in freefall. Since Bill Pulte—a housing-finance official with no intelligence background—took over as acting DNI on June 19, he has demanded a roster of every employee, fired the head of the office that oversees the President’s Daily Brief, and all but liquidated the National Intelligence Council. The fight over his appointment has already cost the government its Section 702 surveillance authority, which lawmakers let lapse rather than leave in his hands, and Trump abruptly canceled the confirmation hearing for his own permanent nominee, Jay Clayton, to keep the “less shackled” Pulte in place. How did the nation’s top intelligence coordinator get here—and how much damage can a politicized ODNI actually do?
“Fixer Upper.” In one of the stranger turns of the Trump era, Michael Cohen—the former “fixer” whose testimony helped convict Trump of 34 felonies—says he and the president have reconciled. Cohen, who once vowed to flee the country if Trump won, said that the ice between them “didn’t just melt, it broke,” and he is now taking a weekend slot on a conservative station with what he says was Trump’s “glowing recommendation.” The thaw arrives as Trump’s appeal of his New York conviction and related civil fraud judgment grind forward—and after Cohen publicly claimed he felt “pressured and coerced” to testify. What might Cohen’s turn mean for that pending appeal?
In object lessons, everyone is in a unifying mood. Ben demonstrates how RAGtime, his co-creation with AI overlord Claude to develop and analyze datasets, can find common cause between this week’s co-hosts. Mike is enthusiastic about the new Criterion Collection bringing together all of Stanley Kubrick’s works. Scott is reaching for perhaps humanity’s greatest unifier—a certain beverage that can be enjoyed across political persuasions and coasts alike. And Anna is bringing us all to the world of personal essays with Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter.”
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For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Vox Senior Correspondent Joshua Keating to discuss his special new series on how artificial intelligence is impacting the use and development of nuclear weapons. Together, they explore what AI may mean for nuclear command and control moving forward, how it is impacting nuclear arms development, how these trends are intersecting the breakdown of the global nonproliferation regime, and what it all means for the risk of nuclear escalation moving forward.
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Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes talks with Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Loren Voss and Molly Roberts about the limits the Constitution and statutes put on the use of military in U.S. elections—as well as the arguments an eager executive might make to skirt those restrictions. They discuss how the history of domestic deployment law shows that legislators have long believed voting deserves special protection from military involvement. They also explain why, ahead of the 2026 midterms, that isn't as reassuring as it might sound.
For more on this topic, see two recently published articles by Orpett, Voss, and Roberts in Lawfare on how the law does—and doesn’t—keep the military out of elections.
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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Lawfare Senior Editor Mike Feinberg and Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which was created to oversee the intelligence community. But much like the IC itself, the ODNI is somewhat mysterious to the general public—which makes it difficult to tell when something is going wrong. They talk about what ODNI does, why it exists at all, and how recent developments are undermining its mission.
Read more of Mike and Julia’s analysis in their recent article in Lawfare, “Gradually, and Then Suddenly: The Decline and Fall of ODNI.”
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