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I spent the yesterday in a monocle—initially unknowingly. At some point while I was sleeping or getting dressed yesterday morning, one of my lenses fell out of my glasses. I didn’t notice the loss until the estimable pointed it out to me on the street—as did a number of other people over the course of the day. When I came back to my hotel room last night, I scoured the floor for my lens, and it turns out it was on the carpet. Today’s project: fixing the frame so that this won’t happen again. In the meantime, I remain a cyclops.

Friday on #DogShirtTV, various members of the Greek Chorus brought up questions about military leadership in the Trump era:

Friday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

Oral Argument Preview: Chatrie v. United States

Ben Evelev and Olivia Parker unpack the arguments presented in Chatrie v. United States, a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of geofence warrants and whether such warrants constitute permissible forms of Fourth Amendment “searches.”

On April 27, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Chatrie v. United States, a case that represents a fundamental clash between the Fourth Amendment and emerging technological investigative techniques. The Court will assess the constitutionality of geofence warrants, which allow law enforcement to obtain location data stored by a service provider such as Google or Apple within the bounds, or “fence,” of a specific time and area in order to identify a potential suspect. The case may present two principal questions: First, whether the geofence warrant issued to Google constituted a Fourth Amendment “search,” and second, if so, whether it was a permissible form of a search.

Safe Havens for Rebels

Yelena Biberman reviews Jenny Huangfu Day’s new book, “Transborder Fugitives, Extradition, and Political Crimes in Modern China,” which presents a narrative of British imperialism in China and models of rebellion against colonial rule. Biberman describes how Britain’s “political offense exception” created conditional safe havens for Chinese rebels and served as an example of extradition law that reflects state power, rather than neutral liberal principles.

Britain had treated political crimes with similar severity as China. That is, until 1870, when it passed the Extradition Act. The new measure established the “political offense exception,” which barred extradition for crimes deemed political rather than ordinary criminal acts. What the Qing saw as rebellion or treason, British authorities came to treat as political offenses and dismissed. This effectively turned territories under British jurisdiction into safe havens for rebels.

What explains the shift in Britain’s stance? What new insights does the ensuing legal conflict provide into the strategies of rebellion? What does it reveal about the workings of imperialism? Day’s book brings these questions into focus and offers a compelling set of answers, outlined below. While grounded in historical analysis, it provides empirically rich material for social scientists seeking to build theories that integrate legal regimes and practices into models of rebellion and colonial rule. It also sheds light on a little-known dimension of modern China’s relations with the West.

Musk Snubs French Authorities

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren unpacks an ongoing French criminal investigation into illegal content on X and sexual abuse material created by the Grok artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, the debates over the congressional reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, and more.

The Congressional reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will require some horse trading.

Section 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to compel service providers to help conduct targeted surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S. It has been described by U.S. officials as the “crown jewel” of the country’s surveillance programs.

Despite that, it has not been without controversy. Collection takes place on U.S. soil and Americans can get caught up in what is known as incidental collection. Then there was the time that the FBI really screwed up.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: The TPS Cases at the Supreme Court, with Geoffrey Pipoly and Andrew Tauber: Roger Parloff sits down with Geoffrey Pipoly and Andrew Tauber to discuss the pair’s work in Trump v. Miot, an upcoming Supreme Court case over the Trump administration’s attempts to terminate temporary protected status for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants.

Scaling Laws: Facts & Myths About AI’s Energy Usage with Gavin McCormick: Gavin McCormick joins Kevin Frazier to discuss how AI and satellite imagery are lifting the veil on the “black box” of global greenhouse gas emissions. They also discussed the legal implications of “radical transparency,” how AI-driven data can be used to enforce regulations and measure claims, and the myths and facts of AI’s environmental consequences.

Videos

At 4 pm ET on April 24, I sat down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Troy Edwards, and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the Department of Justice’s investigation of the ‘grand conspiracy’ against President Trump, the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the pangolin, which I——encountered as a leather sculpture this weekend at the Smithsonian Craft Show:

Today’s Beast is the creation of the artist Wendy Ellertson. In honor of today’s Beast, check out these other leather Beasts she’s created. They are mostly ineligible to be Beasts of the Day on account of being fantasy Beasts, but they are still extremely estimable and worthy of recognition.

The Rule O’ Law Roundup, April 26, 2026

• Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services v. Mullin, No. 25-5243 (D.C. Circuit)

On Friday, April 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services v. Mullin, No. 25-5243, holding unlawful President Trump’s January 20, 2025 proclamation purporting to suspend asylum and withholding-of-removal claims at the southern border, along with the Department of Homeland Security guidance implementing it.

A divided panel produced two opinions totaling 120 pages. U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, wrote the 56-page majority opinion, joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee. U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote a 64-page opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. The court entered a per curiam judgment affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment and class certification, as clarified by the prior stay-panel order.

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The Childs majority anchored its analysis in the Immigration and Nationality Act’s text, structure, and history. The court held that Section 212(f)—which authorizes the President to “suspend the entry” of noncitizens by proclamation—does not authorize the President to install a parallel summary-removal system or to override the asylum, withholding-of-removal, and Convention Against Torture procedures Congress enacted. The proclamation and DHS guidance were unlawful insofar as they purported to do those things:

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The answer to the question in the headline is that it looks something like this:

And this:

And this:

And once you have seen them, the question of any anyone would do it kind of answers itself. Photo and video credits: The estimable Mariia Hlyten (aka Marichka).

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Wednesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable came on to discuss the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the estimable had some thoughts on Kash Patel:

Yesteday on #DogShirtTV, some discussion of two abrasive, talented men with very little else in common:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

Designating Cartels as Terrorists Has Sweeping Legal Consequences

Poorvika Mehra and Katherine Tomaszewski argue that the Trump administration’s expansive application of the terrorist group designation to drug cartels and gangs opens the door for an overbroad use of executive power, enables militarized responses and legal overreach, and undermines the rule of law in counterterrorism frameworks.

In other words, while a designation is not itself a war authorization, it can supply the legal and political predicate through which other authorities are mobilized. Cartels, gangs, and criminal syndicates, once dealt with through law enforcement cooperation and anti-narcotics strategies, are now being reclassified as transnational terrorist threats to be terminated by state-sanctioned armed force. Furthermore, the broad power that the U.S. national security framework vests in the administration is being weaponized to justify imperialist motives in Venezuela, with Trump publicly stating the U.S. “will run” Venezuela—likely due to its large oil reserves—instead of backing the current opposition leader in the country. This rapid expansion of the counterterrorism framework demonstrates the broad and dangerous power that terrorism laws can enable within the administration.

Cruel and Unusual: Israel’s “Death Penalty for Terrorists” Law

Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany unpack the context and provisions of Israel’s new law that extends the application of the death penalty to people convicted of murder carried out with the goal of denying the existence of the state of Israel. Cohen and Shany explain how the law represents a major break from Israel’s longstanding near-abolitionist practice by not only expanding capital punishment, but also weakening due process protections in potentially discriminatory ways.

On March 30, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed on third and final reading the “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law. The law marks a radical shift in Israel’s policies on the death penalty: The country has only ever carried out two executions in its history (the last of which was in 1962), rendering it a de facto abolitionist state. The terms of the new law add further grounds for concern by removing important due process protections and appearing to apply discriminatory legal criteria. This law and another bill regarding the Oct. 7 trials—which is still pending before the Knesset—have the potential to significantly expand the use of the death penalty in Israel, raising serious concerns under both international and domestic law.

On a deeper level, the law seems to signal a legal-cultural move in Israel away from Western liberal traditions—which largely reject capital punishment and enshrine values of due process and equality—to a more populist and vindictive political system that uses the law in overtly politicized and discriminatory ways. In response, petitions have already been filed with the Israeli Supreme Court (see here, here and here), calling on it to intervene by striking down key provisions of the law. How the court will respond remains to be seen.

Blame the Pentagon, Not AI, for Preventable Targeting Mistakes

Rebecca Crootof argues that recent civilian casualties from U.S. strikes are primarily the result of flawed Pentagon decision-making processes, rather than the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Crootof contends that the real failure lies in the Department of Defense’s abandonment of prior civilian harm mitigation policies, its resistance to external accountability, and a broader cultural shift prioritizing efficiency and lethality.

Children and other civilians were killed, needlessly, in a mistaken attack. But the problem is not whether AI was incorporated in the targeting kill chain. Rather, it’s that the Defense Department employed—and is likely still employing—a deeply flawed decision-making process for target selection.

The U.S. military already has the tools it needs to deploy AI responsibly and reduce civilian harm. It just needs an institutional commitment to doing so.

Absent that, there will be more preventable tragedies.

Implementing Cybercom 2.0 Should Not Postpone Establishing a Cyber Force

Erica D. Lonergan and Mark Montgomery explain why the Pentagon’s “Cybercom 2.0” initiative, which is aimed at improving cyber force generation through new authorities and organizations, cannot fully solve the military’s cyber readiness and talent problems. Instead, the duo write the initiative should serve as a foundation—rather than a substitute—for establishing an independent cyber force.

In recent remarks, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) reflected on the dire state of the U.S. military’s readiness in the cyber domain. Fallon lamented that, despite the military having had two decades to build a cadre of cyber leadership, “of the 13 or so general and flag officers assigned to Cyber Command, there is only one single one-star [general] with a cyber background.” This is not an outlier perspective. Indeed, there is a broad consensus that the U.S. military’s current force generation model for the cyber domain—how the military organizes, trains, and equips forces—is broken. The Pentagon acknowledged in 2025 that the status quo approach to building cyber talent “is not keeping pace with the rapidly evolving and increasingly contested cyberspace domain.”

Experts have coalesced around two paths forward. The first is to provide U.S. Cyber Command, the unified combatant command responsible for the military’s cyber operations, with greater budgetary control and acquisition authorities, an initiative dubbed “Cybercom 2.0.” The second is to establish a new branch of the armed forces, a Cyber Force, with the primary responsibility for force generation for the cyber domain. The policy debate falsely presents these as mutually exclusive options. Meanwhile, too many experts who support Cybercom 2.0 portray it as a faster, more efficient solution, overlooking its flaws.

Documents

Marissa Wang shares the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which accuses the prominent civil rights non-profit of engaging in a nine years’ long fraud operation and paying over $3 million in donations to informants inside violent extremist groups.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: ‘The Criminal State’ with Lawrence Douglas: Tyler McBrien sits down with Lawrence Douglas to discuss the latter’s new book, “The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice,” and unpack how and why international criminal justice shifted from a focus on the crime of aggression to an “atrocity paradigm.”

Lawfare Daily: Breaking Down the Lebanon Ceasefire: Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold, Daniel Byman, and Mona Yacoubian to break down the recent ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel and what it may mean for their ongoing conflict, and the broader conflict with Iran.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the chimpanzee, currently engaged in civil war. A new paper in Science reports:

In this work, we report a clear and extensively documented permanent fission of a chimpanzee group and the lethal aggression that followed. We analyzed 24 years of social networks, 10 years of GPS-based ranging, and 30 years of demographic data from the Ngogo chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. We identified three key stages: (i) an abrupt shift from cohesion to polarization, defined as the consolidation of relationships into two cohesive clusters with reduced cross-cluster interaction; (ii) 2 years of increasing avoidance that led to the formation of two groups; and (iii) lethal aggression between former group members. These findings provide evidence that shifting relationships, independent of cultural markers, can fracture a community and catalyze collective violence.

In honor of today’s Beast, read the whole paper. Seriously, it’s very neat.

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Monday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Elizabeth Tsurkov came on the show to tell us about the Israeli perspective on the war with Iran:

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, after the great labor of providing such an estimable guest the day before, I left the show to the estimable to run. We talked about the referendum in Virginia on redistricting, which passed. And we talked about drones in Ukraine—ground robotics and flying drones:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

How a Gambling Warrant Could Change Immigration Enforcement Authority

Gigi Liman explains how a class-action lawsuit over an immigration roundup in Idaho that stemmed from a gambling investigation uses novel legal theories, relying on Reconstruction-era statutes, that could lead to more avenues to challenge federal immigration enforcement.

On a Sunday afternoon in October 2025, hundreds of community members from the majority Latino city of Wilder, Idaho, poured into the La Catedral horse racetrack for a popular weekly event with horse racing, Mexican food vendors, music, and family-friendly games. In the weeks prior, the FBI had obtained warrants to arrest five individuals—including the racetrack’s owner—for allegedly gambling without a license, along with a warrant to search portions of the property related to the gambling. The investigators executed those warrants on that Sunday.

What unfolded, however, bore little resemblance to a typical search and arrest for nonviolent gambling offenses. As the attendees began to gather for lunch, 200 federal, state, and local officers descended on the property, armed with guns and tactical gear, with helicopters and drones overhead. The consortium of law enforcement officers detained 400 adults and children, the majority of whom were citizens or lawful residents, hours after those accused of gambling violations were taken into custody until their citizenship status could be verified. Detainees were reportedly grouped based on perceived ethnicity; Latino-appearing attendees were allegedly denied water, referred to as “monsters,” and treated with more physical aggression than their lighter-skinned counterparts.

Tarasoff Meets the AI Age

Anat Lior argues that imposing a negligence-based duty to warn or protect against foreseeable harm on artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot companies would clarify company liability and resolve tensions between privacy interests and safety concerns, especially as these platforms increasingly encounter users exhibiting dangerous behavior.

When a therapist learns that their patient intends to harm someone, the law may require them to act. This principle, born from the landmark Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California decision, raises an urgent and largely unresolved question in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI): What happens when the entity with foreknowledge of harm is not a human clinician, but a chatbot? As OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI companies deploy increasingly powerful conversational systems, they may find themselves in possession of information suggesting that a user—or someone that user intends to target—is at serious risk.

The Russia-Iran Partnership

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Delaney Soliday unpacks the current state of Russia-Iran relations by examining Russia’s aid to Iran in its current conflict with the U.S. and Israel and Moscow’s motivations in the partnership.

The war in Ukraine was a turning point for the Russia-Iran partnership, spurred by Russia’s need to purchase and mass-produce thousands of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). Now, it’s Tehran’s turn to ask for help, and the dangerous effects of this partnership are threatening American lives directly. Almost as soon as Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28, Russia began sharing intelligence with Iranian troops—including the location of U.S. personnel and satellite photos of U.S. military assets positioned in the region. More recent reporting revealed that Moscow is also helping Tehran improve its drone operations based on lessons learned from the aerial battlefields over Ukraine and organizing shipments of one-way attack drones to boost Iran’s offensive capabilities. One of Washington’s main adversaries—armed with several thousand nuclear warheads—is now aiding its ally in a major war against the United States. If policymakers had any doubts in the past about the importance of disrupting the Russia-Iran partnership, this should be their wake-up call.

The Serious but Not Literal Blockade

Todd Huntley argues that—despite President Trump’s initial declaration on social media platforms of plans to execute an unlawful total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—the U.S. ultimately implemented a narrower, legally compliant blockade targeting Iranian ports. Huntley then evaluates the legality of the Trump administration’s actions in the strait, including the question of congressional authorization and international law concerns.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” So wrote President Trump in a Truth Social post on Sunday, April 12, that was then also posted to the White House’s official X account. Despite floating the idea earlier that the U.S. would enter into a joint venture with Iran to charge tolls, Trump, in the same post, “instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.” He continued, “No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.” Trump had previously stated that he was thinking of charging tolls on ships for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz as a joint venture with Iran.

El Niño Will Supercharge Shocks Like the Iran War

Tom Ellison explains how the convergence of the Iran war and the El Niño weather pattern in June will significantly exacerbate global energy, food, and geopolitical instability. Ellison contends that while the conflict has already disrupted oil, gas, and fertilizer markets, El Niño-driven extreme weather—including heat, drought, and flooding—will intensify these shocks, worsening supply chains and humanitarian crises.

The Iran war has sparked generational shocks to global energy and food security. As the effects of these shocks—from fuel shortages to food price spikes—become increasingly apparent, they will strain peace and stability worldwide. Some of these impacts are already unavoidable, with disruptions intensifying if the conflict persists. But independent of U.S. actions in the region, the coming of a hotter, more dangerous weather pattern known as El Niño is set to exacerbate the food and energy security fallout of Iran—reminding us that Mother Nature gets a vote on our priorities, too, and that climate resilience is inseparable from global security goals.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, April 17: I sit down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Roger Parloff to discuss the disbarment of John Eastman, the Justice Department’s motion to drop the last Jan. 6 criminal matters, a warrant issued in the investigation of the first state criminal charges against an ICE agent, the firing of six immigration judges, and more.

Lawfare Daily: DOJ’s Very Online Civil Rights Head, with Quinta Jurecic and Anna Bower: Anna Bower and Quinta Jurecic join Tyler McBrien to unpack the tenure of Department of Justice’s current head of the civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon; her extensive social media presence; and why there may be limits to how high she can climb in the Trump administration.

Scaling Laws: AI as Abnormal Technology? Scott Sullivan Analyzes AI in the Military Domain: Kevin Frazier sits down with Scott Sullivan to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) diffusion in the military challenges prevailing AI governance frameworks, what current military deployments reveal about the trajectory of AI adoption, and whether existing legal and policy tools can keep up with the pace of technological integration.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is Harpo, who might:

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In honor of today’s Beast, be grateful for your remaining fingers.

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This morning, as I sipped my coffee, I typed into Google on my phone: “how easy is it,” fully intending to finish the query with the words “to add RAM to a Mac mini” (answer, alas: virtually impossible).

I stopped after the word “it” when I saw the above list of suggested Google responses. I had half a mind to spend this dog shirt answering these questions, as though they were New York Times headline questions.

But imma just gonna leave ‘em here.

And I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking, “Ben, why do you need to increase your Mac Mini’s RAM?”

Well, let me tell you: Because it’s RAGtime.

For the past few weeks, I have been working on a wild project that, rather to my surprise, has come together spectacularly over the past several days. At first, the project involved using Claude to help the estimable Katherine Pompilio identify immigration habeas cases in which the government was violating court orders. Then, it shifted to helping other colleagues find needles in the giant haystacks of federal litigation related to their work. The estimable wanted to see cases in which the government had filed administrative records. Katherine had a different project that required isolating dozens or hundreds of a different sort of case from a sea of noise. Other colleagues were looking for other lists.

And all of a sudden, I realized I had stumbled upon a methodology for extracting signal from noise—not in a creepy surveillance way but in a surveillance of complex systems kind of way. You know, the kind of way that lets you hold government accountable for violating court orders. Without any coding skills at all—just with Claude and a certain sophistication about the way litigation documents work—I could isolate huge bodies of data about the courts and find amazing things in them.

And then I realized that what I was doing on a bespoke basis by hand I could systematize and build into tools I could make available to others.

And so began my project to create a search tool for all public litigation documents in the U.S. federal court system—but not just a search tool in the sense that it returns documents you might want to see. It’s a tool designed to extract meaning from very large groups of court documents.

I am currently building a giant database of every scrap of paper on every federal docket in the United States in every litigation filed since the beginning of the second Trump administration. When I’m done, the database will update itself every day. It will be available to the public. It will enable journalists, researchers, activists, litigants and others to see what’s going on in cases across jurisdictions for radically less money than is currently charged by data-brokers for search tools that are quite honestly not that good. And it will allow the user to use Claude to look for patterns across very large numbers of cases. It’s basically a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for federal court documents. Hence the working name RAGtime.

But all of this requires me to download every docket and every scrap of paper filed in every federal court in America over the past year.

And that turns out to require more than 8 GB of RAM—though my Mac Mini has been holding up remarkably well.

I hope to have a full-functional prototype of the system ready tonight. I have seldom been so excited about any project I have worked on.

Thursday on #DogShirtTV, I recorded an episode of the Lawfare Podcast with various estimable personages on the Justice Department’s very non-estimable decision to drop charges against the only Jan. 6 perpetrators whose convictions still stood—the very worst of the worst:

Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable had some thoughts on the definition of autocracy, in light of the Hungarian election that he wanted to argue with me about. It turns out, however, that we basically agreed. It’s actually a great conversation:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

How Hungary Escaped Electoral Autocracy

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, R. Daniel Kelemen explains how the electoral defeat of Hungarian politician Viktor Orbán reveals both the vulnerabilities of electoral autocracy and the conditions under which it can be overturned. Kelemen contends that this outcome will have broader implications for the European Union, Russia, and aspiring autocracies.

In 1989, a dashing young Viktor Orbán launched his political career with a speech at Heroes’ Square in Budapest, calling for a transition to democracy and for the Russians to get out of Hungary. Last week, Péter Magyar rallied his supporters at the same square, calling on them to end Orbán’s political career to restore democracy and get the Russians out of Hungary.

The scenes dripped with irony. In a generation, the young democrat had become an aging autocrat. In 1989, Orbán had stood up to the Soviets and helped topple the communist system. Eventually he became the most important European asset of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent. When Orbán’s party Fidesz (the Young Democrats Alliance) was founded, it was a youth movement that didn’t accept members over age 35. Just over 35 years later, Fidesz was ousted by a new youth movement.

Was the Attack on an Iranian Primary School a War Crime?

Akshaya Kumar argues that the strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran—likely caused by U.S. forces—could constitute a war crime even if the strike did not deliberately target the school because the U.S. may not have taken adequate precautions to avoid civilian harm.

To be sure, there is a difference between deliberate attacks on protected objects and attacks that result in incidental civilian casualties. However, a finding that mistakes were made in the target selection for the Minab attack does not excuse responsibility. If U.S. forces failed to take the necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties, including maintaining updated “no strike” lists, they could be considered in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL)—and, if individuals acted sufficiently recklessly, they may be guilty of a war crime. Consequently, the investigation should also consider whether recent moves by Secretary Hegseth to dismantle the military architecture built to reduce civilian harm played a part in enabling the attack.

As the U.S. military’s inquiry goes forward, it is essential for the investigators to treat this incident with the seriousness such recklessness warrants under IHL, and to consider whether it meets the mens rea (criminal intent) standard for war crimes.

The Red Tape of Ukraine’s Semi-Open Arms Exports

Oleksandr Matviienko examines how Ukraine’s highly restrictive and bureaucratic arms export system has prevented it from capitalizing on global demand—particularly for cost-effective drone technologies—despite strong interest from partners in the Gulf and the West.

From a legal standpoint, Ukraine never had an outright ban on arms exports. But in practice, exports simply didn’t happen.

Because the government wanted the exports to remain shut, the interagency commission under the National Security and Defense Council, which is one of the key bodies responsible for authorizing exports, either didn’t convene or simply rejected all applications. Other responsible government agencies rejected all export applications, as well.

Then, in the summer of 2025, after months of lobbying by Ukrainian defense companies, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine would begin to export its technologies and open joint production lines with partner countries abroad.

From Endless Frontier to Enemy of the People: The Assault on Public Science

Wendy Wagner reviews Michael E. Mann & Peter J. Hotez’s new book, “Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” a narrative of the threats and fear campaigns used to discredit scientists and their work. Wagner describes how these coordinated attacks on public science are a systemic threat to scientific research and knowledge production that must be confronted before it is too late.

Nearly 20 years ago, a colleague and I documented the campaign against climate scientist Michael Mann after he developed what became known as the “hockey stick” reconstruction of historical temperature patterns. For the oil and gas sector, already facing mounting public pressure, Mann’s findings were deeply unwelcome.

What struck us most at the time, however, was not simply pressure from private actors but the degree to which governmental institutions themselves became vehicles for the attack. In 2004, for example, a congressional committee subpoenaed Mann’s scientific records, correspondence, and data stretching back decades. As we documented in our 2012 book “Bending Science,” legal and political tools were increasingly deployed to harass, suppress, or reshape research that political figures, often working at the behest of industry backers, sought to discredit in the eyes of the public.

Twenty years ago, Mann’s case felt exceptional. Two decades later, it no longer does.

Section 230 After ‘@Grok Is This True?’

Joshua Villanueva analyzes how platforms like X complicate immunity protections derived from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 by both distributing potentially false third-party content and generating responses to “verify” its authenticity through its artificial intelligence (AI) powered Grok-on-X tool.

On X, a slew of content requires a critical eye. Fake wartime videos swirl around as users are swept up in synthetic, recycled, and misleading war images. A video of a mega-earthquake or a crumbling bridge goes viral. And deepfake footage of politicians and celebrities seems to bend reality. Users, seeking clarity, ask Grok-on-X, “Hey, @Grok is this true?”

When the same service both distributes content and generates an answer about whether that content is real, it raises questions under Section 230—the statute that generally shields online platforms from liability based on third-party content by preventing courts from treating them as the publisher or speaker of that content. In the context of “@Grok is this true?,” is the resulting claim still best analyzed as third-party speech for purposes of Section 230? Or does the platform’s own output become part of the challenged information?

It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren unpacks the national security and privacy risks of geolocation data through an American adtech surveillance system, how threat actors are leveraging AI tools to accelerate criminal activities, and more.

The overall lesson here is not that AI allowed a hacking campaign to do new and unprecedented things. The techniques used in the campaign itself are not novel. And Gambit says there is evidence the systems compromised were end-of-life or out-of-support, and did not have relevant security updates applied.

But what AI did do was enable a single individual to operate at far greater speed than they could previously.

Documents

Anna Bower shares the $1.25 million settlement agreement between the U.S. government and former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn to resolve a lawsuit in which Flynn claimed he was maliciously prosecuted for allegedly lying to federal investigators.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Crypto, Corruption, and Cons, with Ben McKenzie: Benjamin McKenzie joins Michael Feinberg to discuss McKenzie’s new documentary, “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” a deep dive into the cryptocurrency industry, and what the years-long research project has taught him of cryptocurrency’s literal and figurative value.

Lawfare Daily: The Justice Department Throws Out the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper Cases: Troy Edwards, Michael Feinberg, Roger Parloff, and James Pearce join me to discuss the Department of Justice’s motion to drop the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases, the last remaining criminal matter from the prosecutions of Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists.

Videos

At 4 pm on April 17, I sat down with Eric Columbus, Bower, and Parloff to unpack the D.C. Circuit’s blocking of Judge James Boasberg’s contempt inquiry in an Alien Enemies Act case, a nationwide warrant for an ICE agent over alleged actions taken during Operation Metro Surge, the firing of six immigration judges, and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the horse, seen here being desensitized to various scary stimuli:

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In honor of today’s Beast, consider exposure therapy.

The Rule O’ Law Roundup: Week of April 13, 2026

It’s been a busy week. Here are the major developments.

• In re Donald J. Trump et al. (D.C. Cir., No. 25-5452):

The D.C. Circuit voted 2-to-1 on April 14 to issue a writ of mandamus ordering Chief Judge James Boasberg to terminate his criminal contempt proceedings concerning the March 2025 Alien Enemies Act deportation flights to El Salvador. This is not the first time a Neomi Rao-Justin Walker majority has blocked this inquiry. Judge Rao describes the case as follows:

The Supreme Court vacated the district court’s order because it was premised on a legal error and the plaintiffs’ suit was brought in the wrong court. Nonetheless, the district court threatened to hold government officials in criminal contempt unless they complied with the now-vacated order by, for instance, taking back custody of the plaintiffs. We issued a writ of mandamus vacating the court’s first contempt order.

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I tend to doubt it.

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Tuesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable brought on the estimable Deece Eckstein (aka ) to talk to us about the political situation in Texas:

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Quinta Jurecic came on to tell us about Trump’s head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

One Emergency After Another

Ben Diamond examines how President Trump has more frequently and broadly invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act compared to previous administrations. Diamond argues that the judiciary is best positioned to constrain presidential abuse of emergency powers.

President Trump is not the first president to invoke emergency powers for less-than-crisis-level policy matters. But the sheer scale, pace, and breadth of emergency powers deployed by this administration presents an opportunity for courts to reject this behavior and rein in executive overreach. The tariffs case is a step in the right direction. Courts should continue to heed Justice Jackson’s prescient warnings and prevent this administration—and all future ones—from eroding the separation of powers under the guise of emergency.

The Justice Department’s Bid to Avoid Accountability

Bruce A. Green and Rebecca Roiphe unpack the Department of Justice’s proposed regulation directing state disciplinary authorities to delay investigations into allegations of misconduct by federal government lawyers until the Justice Department conducts its own review.

During her tenure as attorney general, Pam Bondi proposed a regulation that would require state disciplinary authorities to delay investigations and proceedings against federal government lawyers until the Department of Justice has conducted its own inquiry. While the new regulation is a misguided and likely unenforceable effort to insulate government lawyers from discipline, it also exposes real faults in the current regulatory system.

Did Trump Already Pardon the Alleged Jan. 5, 2021, Pipe Bomber?

Eric Columbus explains how the Trump administration’s poor drafting and shifting application of the Jan. 6 pardons are now critical pieces for the defense in the case of Brian Cole Jr., who is being prosecuted for allegedly planting pipe bombs in front of the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters in 2021.

After nearly five years, the FBI finally arrested someone in December 2025 for planting pipe bombs in front of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters the evening before Jan. 6, 2021. The evidence against Brian Cole Jr. seems considerable: According to prosecutors, his cell phone interacted with nearby cell towers at relevant times, his credit cards were used to purchase a wide variety of pipe bomb materials between 2018 and 2020, and he confessed to FBI agents in a video-recorded interrogation following his arrest.

But in a recent filing, Cole’s lawyers tried to play a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, filing a motion to dismiss his indictment on the ground that President Trump had actually pardoned Cole under the blanket pardon he issued for Jan. 6-related offenses on his first day in office. Cole argues that his alleged actions were “related to” Jan. 6 and that he is thus covered by the pardon. Is he right?

AI Verification: Infrastructure for Prosperity, Governance, and Peace

Ben Harack argues that privacy-preserving data verification techniques could transform how policymakers approach artificial intelligence (AI) governance, encouraging countries and AI firms to partake in mutual inspections—without the risk of sharing sensitive information with a competitor.

Whether you’re checking that a child has brushed their teeth or that your nuclear-armed foe is abiding by an arms control agreement, much of civilization revolves around our ability to determine whether others are following rules. While governments needed to build many tools to control nuclear arms, parents needed nothing similar for monitoring tooth-brushing. Why? Primarily because it’s (usually) fairly obvious whether a child is or was brushing their teeth (no matter how hard they try to fool their parents). But unlike with children, information about the behavior of a nuclear-armed state might be incomplete, sensitive, and deliberately obfuscated.

Unfortunately, verifying the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be on the more difficult end of this spectrum. Policymakers and users alike might want AI governance for myriad reasons, but the scale of the industry, the complexity of AI technologies, and geopolitics all increase the difficulty of creating serious AI agreements and then verifying that they are being followed. Building on the findings of a report on international AI verification, I contend that verifying behavior in the domain of artificial intelligence is possible, but it is not trivial. The problem of AI verification generally looks less like overseeing a child’s dental care and more like arms control.

Podcasts

On Tuesday’s Lawfare Daily, Kate Klonick sits down with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz to discuss the pair’s recent article on Sam Altman and the path he is forging as CEO of OpenAI.

On Scaling Laws, Miles Brundage joins Alan Z. Rozenshtein to unpack the weaknesses of current state AI regulations, the limitations of safety benchmarks in AI testing, and market-based mechanisms that are driving the adoption of audit processes.

On Wednesday’s Lawfare Daily, Michael Feinberg sits down with Frank Dikötter to discuss the latter’s new book, “Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity,” and unpack the early years of the Chinese communist movement, the American reaction to its successes, and how the current understanding of the era differs from prior assumptions.

On Lawfare No Bull, Marissa Wang shares the audio from the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the case of Trump v. Barbara, which centered on a 14th Amendment challenge to the president’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship.

Announcements

On May 7, Lawfare will co-present a screening of Deportation Inc. in New York with e-flux, The Architectural League of New York, and SITU Research. Deportation Inc. is an ongoing investigative video series by SITU and Lawfare that examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. Learn more about the event and get tickets here.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the ground-nesting bee, recently found to be ground-nesting in extraordinary density. Scientific American reports:

A New York State cemetery may be home to nearly 5.6 million ground-nesting bees, according to a new study. The colony is one of the largest ever recorded and likely one of the oldest, the researchers note…

Scientist have known that one species of these bees, Andrena regularis, has been at the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, N.Y., since at least 1935. (The cemetery dates back to 1878.) But no one knew exactly how many bees lived there.

Over about a month and a half in 2023, researchers at Cornell University collected bees at various sites at around the cemetery and estimated how many members of A. regularis were living underground… the group estimated that 5.56 million bees “emerged”—ventured out to forage and mate—in the spring of 2023 across an area of about 6,500 square meters…

“I was completely floored when we did the calculations,” Danforth says. “I have seen published estimates of bee aggregations in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined that it would be 5.56 million bees.

In honor of today’s Beast, here’s a very dumb joke that popped into my head:

What do Mary Shelley and 5.56 million bees have in common? Both ventured out to a cemetery to mate.

Graveyards, not separate beds, are the secret to great sex.

Tell Me Something Interesting

I——am always in the market for historical evidence of the universality of certain human experiences, and I have found an unusually excellent example. Specifically, I have found what I believe to be the earliest textual evidence of a teenager telling their guardian, “You’re not my real dad.”

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Seen at a Metro station in Washington DC. It’s unclear to me whether it refers to the president or to your unpleasant husband. Either way, I find it encouraging.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the Ugandan military chief wants Turkey’s most beautiful woman. Also, Victor Orban’s out. It was an unusually good show:

Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

The Principle-Policy Gap in American Tax Attitudes

Ajay K. Mehrotra reviews Andrea Campbell’s new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” on the American public’s opinion on taxes and its impact on U.S. tax policies. Mehrotra unpacks how Campbell addresses provocative questions on taxation, her predictions on the future of tax policy, and the implications of her findings.

One of the great puzzles of the recent tax-cutting frenzy is why have so many everyday Americans agreed to this new policy prescription? Why aren’t the majority of taxpayers in favor of higher taxes on the rich? Why do they support limiting estate taxes, which affect only the wealthiest Americans, or cutting the corporate tax? Self-interest, after all, would suggest that the non-rich majority would favor higher taxes on the minority of uber-wealthy individuals and companies that have prospered in our New Gilded Age from growing inequality and greater concentrations of wealth.

In her fascinating new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” MIT political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell takes on that set of questions. More broadly, Campbell addresses the fundamental query: “Why is it so hard to raise taxes in the United States? Why is it so difficult to fund government?” As one of the country’s leading experts on public opinion and American politics, she naturally turns for answers to public attitudes toward taxes.

America Used to Own the Internet. Now It’s Running Scared.

Nikolas Guggenberger argues that the United States’ increasingly restrictive attitude toward data exports is a sign of geostrategic weakness. Guggenberger explains how this defensive approach implies a lack of confidence in U.S. technological dominance, reveals a self-perception of vulnerability, and suggests a lack of control over platforms and tech infrastructure.

For most of the internet era, the United States has preached the gospel that free data should flow across open borders for information with no barriers to digital trade. When the European Union limited the flow of personal data across the Atlantic, U.S. officials cried foul. What the EU presented as fundamental rights grounded in human dignity, U.S. officials dismissed as thinly veiled protectionism, compensating for European weakness. The U.S. position was clear: Free data flows are good, and anyone who disagrees is either afraid or falling behind.

Then TikTok emerged—and the U.S. blinked.

Pulling Reports, Playing Politics

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Joseph Stabile examines the CIA’s intelligence assessment of the role of women in white supremacist violence, one of the many reports agency leadership has retracted for not meeting the CIA’s analytical standards. Stabile argues that the assessment’s withdrawal has less to do with a failed quality assurance test and more to do with a seemingly ongoing effort on the part of the intelligence community to appease the Trump administration’s political agenda.

Among these assessments, the retraction of one product in particular, “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist [REMVE] Radicalization and Recruitment,” carries several concerning implications. The withdrawal of the report belies observable evidence about transnational extremist threats, contributes to the politicization of the intelligence community, and raises alarm in light of the administration’s ongoing spread of white supremacist rhetoric.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, I sit down with Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the D.C. Circuit’s denial of Anthropic’s motion to stay its supply chain designation, Judge Paul Friedman‘s rejection of the Pentagon’s revised press rules, Judge Leo Sorokin’s rejection of the Department of Justice’s attempt to obtain Massachusetts voter records, and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the python, seen here being surprising:

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In honor of today’s Beast, eat a Lufthansa airplane.

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