Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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Washington, DC, USA · Published by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with the Brookings Institution · lawfaremedia.org
Lawfare is an American nonprofit multimedia publication dedicated to the intersection of national security, law, and policy — the space where the executive branch's powers to protect the country encounter the legal and constitutional limits on those powers, and where technology, geopolitics, and democratic governance intersect in ways that require both legal precision and policy intelligence to understand. It was launched in September 2010 as a blog by three people: Benjamin Wittes, a former editorial writer for The Washington Post who had developed a specialty in legal affairs and had become a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who had served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration's Department of Justice — the office that reviews the legality of executive branch actions; and Robert Chesney, a University of Texas law professor who had served on an Obama administration detention-policy task force. The combination of expertise was deliberate: Goldsmith brought Bush-era OLC experience, Chesney brought Obama-era national security law knowledge, and Wittes brought editorial skill and a commitment to public engagement that neither academic lawyer alone possessed.
The name "Lawfare" — defined on the site's About page as "the use of law as a weapon of conflict" — captured the founders' interest in a specific and contested phenomenon: the use of legal processes by both governments and their adversaries to advance national security objectives. The term was, and remains, contested: critics from across the political spectrum have used "lawfare" to describe whatever legal challenges they dislike. Wittes, Goldsmith, and Chesney chose it deliberately as a name that acknowledged the phenomenon's complexity rather than taking a partisan position on it. The publication has grown from that nuanced starting point into one of the most influential outlets covering national security law, executive power, and democratic governance in the United States.
The founding trio's institutional backgrounds give Lawfare an unusual analytical posture — genuinely bipartisan in the sense of having co-founders who served both Bush and Obama administrations, and therefore genuinely capable of analyzing executive power questions without reflexive partisan alignment. Jack Goldsmith's tenure as head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was itself significant: he is known for having withdrawn the "torture memos" authorized by his predecessor John Yoo — legal opinions that had authorized enhanced interrogation techniques — on the grounds that they were legally flawed, an act that required considerable institutional courage and that established Goldsmith's reputation as a serious legal thinker rather than a political operative. Robert Chesney's Obama-era service on the detention task force gave the founding team equivalent credibility with the other major party's national security apparatus. Benjamin Wittes's Washington Post background — nine years as an editorial writer specializing in legal affairs — gave the publication its editorial voice and its commitment to writing that is legible to a non-specialist audience as well as an expert one.
Lawfare grew steadily through its first six years as an authoritative but specialist blog. The first Trump administration transformed it into a mass-audience publication. When Trump took office in January 2017, the questions Lawfare had been analyzing — executive power, national security law, the role of courts in constraining the executive branch — became the central questions of American public life. The travel ban, the Mueller investigation, the firing of James Comey (whose interactions with Trump Wittes, as Comey's friend, was a primary source for the May 2017 New York Times report), the Emoluments Clause litigation, the impeachments: Lawfare had both the expertise and the institutional credibility to analyze these developments with legal precision at a moment when demand for such analysis was enormous. In 2017 alone, the site registered 15 million page views. Wittes was named #15 on the Politico 50 list for 2017, described as the "Bard of the Deep State."
In June 2023, Lawfare formally transitioned from a blog to a full multimedia publication, with a redesigned website at lawfaremedia.org that expanded its editorial formats, launched new podcast series, introduced a newsletter, and added live events. The redesign reflected both the organization's institutional maturation and the changing media landscape — moving from a single text-based format to an integrated publication producing articles, podcasts, videos, and live programming. The second Trump administration has produced a new surge in the publication's relevance, with Lawfare's coverage of DOGE's activities inside federal agencies, immigration enforcement legal challenges, and executive power assertions receiving wide distribution.
Lawfare's coverage spans the full range of topics at the national security–law–policy intersection. Its core national security coverage addresses counterterrorism law, the law of armed conflict, detention policy, surveillance and intelligence law, military operations and war powers, and the legal frameworks governing US foreign policy and military action. Its technology coverage — which has grown substantially as a share of the site's output — addresses cybersecurity policy, AI governance and liability, content moderation law, platform regulation, and the intersection of emerging technology with national security. Its governance coverage — perhaps its most visible strand during the Trump years — addresses executive power, the rule of law, democratic backsliding, congressional oversight, and the judicial review of executive action. It covers international law, foreign policy, and the legal dimensions of specific geopolitical situations, including the Russia-Ukraine war, the Middle East, and US-China competition. Quinta Jurecic, a Senior Editor, has been particularly associated with the democracy and rule-of-law coverage; Scott R. Anderson has covered national security and foreign policy; Alan Rozenshtein has covered cybersecurity and technology law.
Active · Flagship
The Lawfare Podcast
The flagship daily podcast — expert discussions with academics, former government officials, journalists, and policy figures on national security, law, governance, and technology. Daily cadence; one of the most established national security podcasts in the US. Available on all major podcast platforms.
Active
Lawfare Daily
Daily rapid-response analysis of breaking national security, legal, and policy news — shorter than the main podcast, designed for situational awareness on fast-moving stories. Scott R. Anderson and colleagues provide timely legal framing of the day's significant developments.
Active · Deep analysis
Deep Dive
Long-form deep dives into specific national security law and policy topics — extended treatment of complex legal questions, historical cases, and ongoing policy debates that cannot be adequately addressed in the podcast's standard format.
Concluded Dec 2024
Chatter
Weekly long-form conversation podcast hosted by Shane Harris (Washington Post) and David Priess (Lawfare) — wide-ranging discussions with authors, national security figures, visual media creatives, and technical experts at the creative edges of national security. Final episode December 2024.
Series
Arbiters of Truth
A podcast series on disinformation and misinformation — conversations with Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein and experts on content moderation, online speech, and the erosion of shared factual discourse. Addressed TikTok divestiture, election disinformation, and platform liability.
Narrative series
The Aftermath
A narrative podcast series exploring the government's response to the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack — from prosecutions to congressional hearings to policy reforms. Tells the story of the legal and institutional aftermath of the insurrection through reporting and expert analysis.
Lawfare is published by the Lawfare Institute — a nonprofit organization incorporated specifically to publish the site — in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, the prominent centrist Washington think tank. Wittes is president of the Lawfare Institute; Goldsmith serves as treasurer; Chesney as secretary. Wittes is simultaneously a Senior Fellow at Brookings, which provides institutional affiliation and some resources. The cooperation agreement does not give Brookings editorial control over Lawfare's content — the publication maintains independent editorial judgment, which it has demonstrated by publishing analysis critical of both Democratic and Republican administrations and by covering stories that reflect badly on both.
InfluenceWatch characterizes Lawfare as center-left and notes its Brookings affiliation and the composition of its contributor base. The publication's own self-description emphasizes analytical seriousness and expertise rather than ideological positioning. Its bipartisan founding — with the Bush OLC head and the Obama detention policy adviser as co-founders alongside a centrist Washington journalist — reflects a founding commitment to analyzing national security law as a legal question rather than a partisan one, though the publication's disproportionate skepticism toward the Trump administration's legal positions has been noted by conservative critics.
Lawfare publishes all content freely at lawfaremedia.org. Podcasts are available through all standard podcast platforms. The weekly newsletter summarizing site content is available by subscription through the website. Lawfare accepts financial support from readers through Patreon at patreon.com/lawfare (which provides ad-free podcast access) and one-time donations at givebutter.com/lawfare-institute. Summer 2026 internship applications are open through the website. Lawfare is accepting article submissions from experts with relevant expertise in national security, law, and policy.