Friday morning, the House of Representatives suddenly—after failing to do so earlier in the week—took up the reauthorization of FISA 702. They considered a bunch of amendments, one of which failed on a tie vote, and then proceeded to pass reauthorization of 702. 

Immediately after the votes, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Senior Editors Stephanie Pell and Molly Reynolds, and Lawfare Student Contributor Preston Marquis. They talked about how the center beat the coalition of the left and right on the key question of warrant requirements for U.S. person queries, about whether the civil liberties community gained anything in this protracted process or whether the administration just kicked its butt, about what happens now as the bill goes back to the Senate, and about all the little details that went into this bill. 

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Today marks the start of the first criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York City. Trump is facing 34 felony counts for his alleged falsification of business records related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and others after the 2016 election. After months of pretrial hearings, motions to dismiss and for an adjournment, motions for recusal, and more, jury selection in the case begins today.

In light of today’s events, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff who will be covering the trial at length. They discussed the case’s background, Trump’s various attempts to delay the proceedings, how jury selection will work, our plans for covering the trial, and more.

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This week on Rational Security, Alan and Quinta were joined again by Brookings Senior Fellow and Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Reynolds to talk over the week’s national security news, including:

• “The 702nd Time’s the Charm?” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was originally set to expire on December 31, 2023. But somehow, Congress has managed to keep kicking the can down the road—and we’re once again in the middle of an argument about whether and to what extent the legislature should reform the bulk surveillance authority. How did we end up here, and is there any indication that Congress will manage to pass a lasting reauthorization in some form this time around?
• “Magic Mike.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s troubles don’t stop with FISA, however. He’s also tangled up in a prolonged dispute with his caucus over the U.S. aid to Ukraine—which is becoming a matter of rapidly increasing urgency, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning that his country “will lose the war” if the aid is not approved. Johnson now says he’ll put his own aid package on the table, still tying that aid to another tranche of aid to Israel. But will the House actually vote this time, or is this just another head fake?
• “Finally, We Can Talk About Linux.” A few weeks ago, a single software engineer alerted the world to an alarming discovery: malicious code inside a key piece of Linux software that, had it gone undetected, could have caused a catastrophic cyberattack. What on earth actually happened here? And what could stop it from happening again?

For object lessons, Alan recommended an adorable giraffe growth chart for keeping track of your child's height. Quinta took a cue from Molly and endorsed a podcast by a local NPR affiliate—“Lost Patients,” a series about mental health care from KUOW and the Seattle Times. And Molly shared a story about misprinted pens from the Clinton impeachment trial, as told in Peter Baker’s book "The Breach."

Other references from this week’s show:

• A chart explaining how dark it gets during a total solar eclipse
• Bruce Schneier’s Lawfare article about the XZ Utils backdoor

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It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on April 11 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about the upcoming jury selection in the hush money case against Trump in New York City and what Judge Cannon is up to in Florida, including her ruling on whether to unseal witness names. They also checked in on Fulton County to see what Fani Willis was up to and talked about Jack Smith's brief to the Supreme Court in Trump's presidential immunity defense. And of course, they took audience questions from Lawfare Material Supporters on Riverside.

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From January 17, 2015: This week, Ben Wittes and Matt Waxman sat down with Daniel Reisner, former head of the International Law Branch of the Israeli Defense Forces and current partner with Herzog, Fox and Neeman. Reisner has also served as a senior member of Israel’s peace delegations over the years, participating in negotiation sessions and summits including those at Camp David. He continues to advise senior members of the Israeli government on a variety of issues relating to international law and operational security issues. Colonel Reisner was in New York on a visit sponsored by Academic Exchange for a series of events and discussions on contemporary national security challenges. His experiences set up a wide-ranging conversation touching on everything from the law of targeted killing to the role of morality in operational law advice.

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The Insurrection Act is a provision that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. It’s been invoked dozens of times by presidents to respond to crises in the over 230 years that it’s been around, but it hasn’t been reformed in centuries. In recent years, the Insurrection Act has come back into public focus because of its implication in a number of domestic crises, prompting a renewed conversation about whether it’s finally time to curb the sweeping powers afforded to the executive in this unique federal law.

On April 8, the American Law Institute released a set of principles for Insurrection Act reform, prepared by a group of 10 individuals with backgrounds in constitutional law, national security law, and military law. The co-chairs of this group were Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare Co-Founder and Harvard Law School Professor, and Bob Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law. They joined Lawfare Associate Editor Hyemin Han to talk about the history of the Insurrection Act, to parse out the recommendations the American Law Institute is making for reform, and to make the case for reforming the act in 2024. 

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For decades, country music has had a close and special relationship to the U.S. military. In his new book, Cold War Country, historian Joseph Thompson shows how the leaders of Nashville’s Music Row found ways to sell their listeners on military service, at the same time they sold country music to people in uniform.

Shane Harris spoke with Thompson about how, as he puts it, Nashville and the Pentagon “created the sound of American patriotism.” Thompson’s story spans decades and is filled with famous singers like Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Lee Greenwood. Collectively, Thompson says, these artists helped to forge the close bonds between their genre and the military, but also helped to transform ideas of race, partisanship, and influenced the idea of what it means to be an American. 

Songs, people, TV shows, and books discussed in this episode include: 

Thompson’s book Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism https://uncpress.org/book/9781469678368/cold-war-country/ 

“Goin’ Steady” by Faron Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNqhVyPxPk8 

Grandpa Jones https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/grandpa-jones 

“Hee Haw” https://www.heehaw.com/ 

The Black Opry https://www.blackopry.com/ 

“Okie from Muskogee” by Merle Haggard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cbjlLFl4U 

“Cowboy Carter” by Beyoncé https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beyonce-cowboy-carter-tops-country-album-chart-number-one-1234998548/ 

“God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KoXt9pZLGM 

Learn more about Joseph Thompson and his work: 

https://www.josephmthompson.com/ 

https://www.history.msstate.edu/directory/jmt50 

https://twitter.com/jm_thompson?lang=en 

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Last week, 40 Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote a letter to President Biden expressing concern and outrage over an Israeli airstrike that killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen. The lawmakers urged the president to reconsider his recent authorization of an arms transfer package to Israel and withhold any future offensive arms transfers if the strike was found to have violated U.S. or international law. They also urged Biden to withhold arms transfers if the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate. 

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Sarah Harrison, a Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group’s U.S. program and former Associate General Counsel at the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. They talked about the laws and policies that govern U.S. security assistance, what recent reporting may or may not tell us about Israel’s law of war compliance, and the difficulty of some of these assessments. They also discussed what President Biden risks by not applying conditions on military aid abroad.

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Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2024 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. For this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2024 to talk about information ecology and 19th-century naturalism with Alicia Wanless, the Director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Chinmayi Sharma, an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School.

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In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, among other effects.

Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck discussed the bridge’s collapse, how authorities responded to it, and what it all means for the resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure and the state of crisis response with Juliette Kayyem, a professor of international security at the Harvard Kennedy School—who recently wrote a book on disaster management. Was the bridge adequately protected? How should governments and the private sector prepare to both prevent crises, but perhaps more importantly, prepare for the aftermath when they inevitably occur? 

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