The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Document leaking has been in the news lately—and not just stories about the leaking of U.S. intelligence documents. On March 30, 2023, the Washington Post published a series of stories about the Vulkan files, an international investigative project based on thousands of pages of leaked documents from a Russian company that reveal new details about how Russian intelligence agencies seek to operate disinformation campaigns and enhance their ability to launch cyberattacks with the help of contractors. 

To talk about the Vulkan files, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Craig Timberg, Senior Editor for Collaborative Investigations at the Washington Post, who, along with his colleague Ellen Nakashima, has bylines on these stories. They talked about how the Washington Post got involved in this investigation, what the documents revealed about Russian cyber conflict, and what Craig considered to be some of the biggest takeaways from the documents.

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On March 23, 2023, an Indian court found Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, guilty of defaming the Prime Minister and the Modi surname. He was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from Parliament in what journalists and pro-democracy groups view as yet another inflection point of democratic decline under Modi’s leadership. 

To understand the challenges facing Indian society and the current deterioration of India’s democracy, Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Debasish Roy Chowdhury, an Indian journalist based in Hong Kong and Calcutta, who has written extensively on Indian politics, society, and geopolitics. He co-authored a book titled “To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism,” which paints a chilling history and reality of the state of Indian democracy. They discussed the Rahul Gandhi case, the spillover of Hindu nationalism into mainstream politics under Modi’s leadership, and the future of India’s democracy. 

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This week on Rational Security, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to celebrate the return of the complete media madhouse and talk through the week’s big stories, including:

• I’m So Indicted and I Just Can’t Fight It.” Donald Trump became the first former president to be indicted this past week—and he celebrated with a speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate that painted the charges against him as a partisan witch-hunt. How big a step is this? And where is it likely to lead?
• “(Re)Press Pass.” Russia has jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and is preparing to prosecute him on espionage charges. What appears to be driving Russia’s decision? And how should the rest of the world respond?
• “Crossing the Finnish Line.” Finland became NATO’s newest member this week, doubling the alliance’s shared border with Russia. What does an expanding NATO mean for security in Europe?

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Rob Joyce is the Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate at the National Security Agency. He's been NSA's top cryptologic representative in the United Kingdom and has also worked in the U.S. National Security Council. 

David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, sat down with Rob to talk about his career trajectory, the quantum decryption threat, strategic competition in cyber with the People's Republic of China, and cooperation between the private sector and the government in cyberspace.

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The grand jury indictment of Donald Trump in the Supreme Court of the State of New York has been unsealed. It involves Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, David Pecker, the famous doorman, Trump Tower, and a lot of salacious stuff—and 34 counts of falsified business records with intent to facilitate other crimes.

On this emergency edition of the Lawfare Podcast, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to unpack it all with Rebecca Roiphe of the New York Law School, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare's Fulton County correspondent Anna Bower, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it. 

But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at the Brookings Institution, Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, argued that international law and institutions responded more robustly than many initially anticipated—and may yet emerge from the Ukraine conflict stronger than before.

In this episode, we are bringing you the audio of Professor Hathaway’s lecture, followed by a question and answer session with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the inaugural holder of the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations at the Brookings Institution. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson then moderated a panel discussion that included Professor Hathaway, as well as Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center; Karin Landgren, the Executive Director of Security Council Report; and Ambassador Martin Kimani, Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. 

More information on the Breyer Lecture is available on the Brookings Institution’s website.

A video recording of Professor Hathaway’s lecture is available at https://www.brookings.edu/events/russias-aggression-against-ukraine-and-the-international-legal-order/.

The text of Professor Hathaway’s lecture has been published at https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/how-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-tested-the-international-legal-order/.

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Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers—willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold.

Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime officials from Iraq and Libya, including Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. What she discovered led her to question much conventional wisdom about the Iraqi and Libyan nuclear programs, and about proliferation writ large. Her book “Unclear Physics”—which borrows its title from a typo in an Iraqi report from the late 1960s that characterized well the vague objectives of the early Iraqi nuclear program—presents intriguing information and insight on all of this.

David Priess speaks with Braut-Hegghammer about her interest in WMD proliferation, how she researched secretive nuclear programs, the value of archives, Iraq's quest for the bomb, the impact of Israel's strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, how close Iraq was to breaking out when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the origins of Libya's nuclear program, Gaddafi's turn to the A.Q. Khan network for the equipment and blueprints needed, implications for the potential proliferation paths of countries from North Korea and Iran to Saudi Arabia and South Korea, the rising salience of nuclear weapons in Arctic security debates, and Norwegian views on nuclear deterrence in today's evolving strategic environment.

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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