The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

It was a big day in the legal travails of Donald Trump. We awoke this morning to news from the former president himself that he had received another target letter from special counsel Jack Smith, this time from the Jan. 6 grand jury. An indictment seems to be imminent. Incoming Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower spent the day in federal court in Fort Pierce, where Judge Aileen Cannon was hearing the first major status conference of the Mar-a-Lago case. And just as Anna was coming out of court, the Attorney General of Michigan announced that she had brought cases against several fake electors from the 2020 election in that state.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna and with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff for a live taping of The Lawfare Podcast to go over it all. What do we know about the apparently forthcoming new case against Donald Trump? What do we know about the fake electors case in Michigan? And what happened in the courtroom when Judge Cannon faced her first hearing as the presiding judge in the Mar-a-Lago case?

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It was a busy weekend in the waters off of Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainians hit—for the second time—the Kerch Bridge, which connects the Russian mainland with occupied Crimea. The Russians, meanwhile, announced that they are not renewing the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the complex agreement by which Ukraine has managed to export grain through the port of Odessa.

What do we know about what happened on the Kerch Bridge? How big a deal is it? Is it connected to the Russian withdrawal from the grain initiative? And what does the scotching of the Black Sea Grain Initiative mean for the Ukrainian economy? To chew it all over, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Dmitri Alperovitch of Silverado Policy Accelerator and the Geopolitics Decanted podcast, and Mykhailo Soldatenko, a visiting researcher at the Harvard Law School and an international lawyer who has written for Lawfare about the Black Sea Grain Initiative. 

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The only thing more impressive than the performance of generative AI systems like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion is the sheer volume of training data that went into these systems. GPT was reportedly trained on, essentially, the entire Internet, while Stable Diffusion and other image-generation models rely on hundred of millions if not billions of existing pieces of artwork. Of course, much of this content is copyrighted, and the authors and artists whose work is being used to train these models and, potentially, threaten their own livelihoods are paying attention. A number of high-profile lawsuits are making their way through the courts, and the outcome of these cases could hugely shape, and potentially even stop, progress in machine learning.

To explore these issues, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Pam Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the pioneers in the study of digital copyright law. She's just published a new piece in the journal Science titled "Generative AI meets copyright,” in which she analyzes the current litigation around generative AI and where it might lead.

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This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Ravi Agrawal, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, to talk through the week’s big natsec news, including: 

• “Pledge Week.” In a sign of strength, NATO held its annual summit in the capital of Vilnius this week, just kilometers from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. But those hoping to join the club have gotten mixed receptions, with NATO members securing a clear path for Sweden to join the alliance without presenting a clear way forward for embattled Ukraine. What did we learn about the state of the alliance from this week’s historic meeting?
• “Cluster Ruck(us).” Late last week, the Biden administration made the controversial decision to provide U.S. cluster munitions—a type of weapon that many U.S. allies have banned by treaty, due to concerns about civilian casualties—to its ally Ukraine. Is it the right move? And what might it mean on the battlefield—and after the war is over?
• “Needling and Threads.” Mark Zuckerberg appears to have finally gotten under the skin of tech billionaire Elon Musk, as his recently launched competitor to Musk’s beleaguered Twitter, Threads, launched last week and soon secured over 100 million users. Has Twitter finally met its match? And what will Threads and other competitors mean for the future of the information (and disinformation) economy? 

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Earlier this year, Donald J. Trump became the first former president to be criminally indicted. A few months later, he became the first former president to be indicted a second time, this time in federal court. And it’s not clear that he is done, as Trump and his close associates remain at the center of at least two and possibly more ongoing criminal investigations that have not yet resulted in charges. Nor are Trump’s legal troubles limited to the criminal side of the ledger, as he and the Trump Organization he runs are also involved in a number of ongoing civil lawsuits. As a result, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is expected to spend much of that year in court. 

To get a sense of the complex litigation landscape facing the president and to catch up on the latest developments, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Lawfare’s two leading trial watchers: Senior Editor Roger Parloff and incoming Legal Fellow Anna Bower. They talked about the criminal cases Trump is facing, what charges may yet be coming down the pike, and how his overlapping trials—and the forthcoming election—fit into his apparent legal defense. 

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On July 4, a federal judge in Louisiana issued one of the most dramatic First Amendment rulings in recent memory. The case involves a variety of individuals, organizations, and conservative state governments who accuse the Biden administration of unconstitutional "jawboning”—that is, informally pressuring social media companies to censor speech, especially about controversial topics like COVID vaccines and election integrity.

Describing the allegations as the "most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history," Judge Terry Doughty enjoined by name dozens of high-level Biden administration officials, and potentially thousands more unnamed government employees, from communicating with social media companies about taking down First Amendment-protected user content.

If the opinion stands, it will have a dramatic effect on the ability of the government to communicate with social media platforms, a practice that administrations of both parties have engaged in for years. Earlier this week, Judge Doughty rejected a motion from the government to stay the injunction pending appeal; the government has since asked the Fifth Circuit to do so instead and, in a sign of how seriously it is taking the ruling, has signaled that it may ask the Supreme Court to step in if the Fifth Circuit does not.

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke to two of the leading experts on the government's relationship with social media platforms to work through the implications of this decision. Derek Bambauer is the Irving Cypen Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and is the author of an influential law review article on jawboning in the context of internet speech. Jeff Kosseff is an associate professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy and a Lawfare contributing editor and the author of numerous books and articles about online speech issues.

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