The Lawfare Podcast

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Eric Columbus, and Contributing Editor Renée DiResta, to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including:
“Signed, Sealed, Undelivered.” As the first mail ballots of the 2026 midterms go out this week, a fast-moving legal fight over President Trump’s effort to reshape mail-in voting is racing toward the Supreme Court. At issue is a new U.S. Postal Service rule—stemming from a Trump executive order—that requires states to submit absentee voters’ information to a federal portal before USPS will deliver their mail-in ballots. A federal ruling in Massachusetts blocked key parts of the rule last week, the administration is appealing, and a separate challenge is pending in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, an anonymous whistleblower in the U.S. Postal Service has come forward and warned that the hastily built portal it intends to use to vet mailed ballots is so untested and unforgiving that a single scanning error could stop tens of thousands of ballots from reaching voters. How did we get here? And what is it likely to mean for November’s election?
“Meta Culpa.” Last week, Meta abruptly settled a landmark child-safety case midway through trial, agreeing to pay a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general as much as $17 billion and to overhaul how teenagers experience Instagram and Facebook. The proposed consent judgment—which has been approved by a federal judge in California—would require a default two-hour daily time limit for users under 18, a midnight-to-6 a.m. “night mode,” hidden “like” counts, stronger age checks, and a school-hours notification cutback, most of it locked in for a decade. It’s being billed as the largest big-tech settlement ever, but some children’s advocates are warning that its terms don’t touch the recommendation algorithms at the heart of the problem. Is this a turning point for social media regulation—or just a manageable cost of doing business?
“Strictly Ballroom.” On Monday, a divided Supreme Court cleared the way for President Trump to keep building his enormous new White House ballroom, staying a lower-court injunction that had halted construction on the site of the now-demolished East Wing. But the 5-4 ruling in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation didn’t actually decide whether the project is lawful. Instead, the majority held that the challengers—led by an architectural historian who regularly walks her dog past the White House—lacked standing to sue, deeming her objection to the ballroom mere “offense” rather than a concrete aesthetic injury. In an unusual twist, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the principal dissent, joined by the Court’s three Democratic appointees, arguing that the Court has left standing doctrine even murkier than it found it. So what did the Court actually decide? And what might it mean for other legal challenges to Trump’s refashioning of our nation’s capital, and beyond?
In object lessons, the summer has left most of our crew hungry for more. Eric is eating up the tropical goodness of certain (glass-free) Outshine fruit bars. Molly is savoring the simplicity of an in-season tomato. Scott is perfecting his process for perfect pizza. And Renée stands alone snackless, squeezing out the last of her summer stress with a NeeDoh squishy.
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Peter Salib, Associate Professor at the UH Law Center and co-Director of the Center on AI Law & Risk, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to break down the postmortems produced by METR and Redwood Research and OpenAI on the lab’s failure to contain AI agents undergoing testing, which resulted in a hack of Hugging Face.
The duo briefly cover the timeline of what exactly transpired and explore the technical reasons and policy decisions that allowed the hack to transpire. They then reflect on what that means for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.
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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court granting a stay of the district court's preliminary injunction, allowing President Trump to continue to build the White House ballroom while litigation is ongoing, and the information about the U.S. Postal Service's system for handling mail ballots released by a whistleblower to Senator Blumenthal.
You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s homepage on the litigation, Bluesky account, and WITOAD merch.
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Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Tricia Bacon, professor at American University, and Antonia Juelich, International Security Lead at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy (CASP), to talk about how different terrorist groups are using artificial intelligence and how governments are employing AI to fight them. They discuss how Boko Haram and other terrorist groups are using AI to become more deadly, terrorist group problems with using AI, the risk of catastrophic AI-enabled terrorism, and what governments and companies need to do better.
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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, Kate Klonick, and Eric Columbus to discuss a judge finding the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation of Anthropic unlawful, significant developments in the litigation challenging President Trump’s mail in ballot executive order, the prosecution of Representative LaMonica McIver, a filing from Trump suggesting that the Kennedy Center may be torn down, a district judge denying Minnesota’s motion to extradite an indicted ICE agent, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
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