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In case what’s missing from your life is eight pictures of baby elephants and one picture of a baby giraffe, this will cover you until I get back from the Great Hiatus, which began yesterday.

There will be no show until June 27. And if there are dog shirts between now and then, it will only be because I have beasts of the day to share.

In this case, I have orphaned baby elephants of various to share.

Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable had a bone to pick with me about how I talk about Claude. Also, the estimable Mike Feinberg mourned the loss of elite WASP cultural dominance:

Friday on #DogShirtDaily, Eve and I went over the highly scientific poll data that emerged from our dispute and the estimable and I updated on the state of the war:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Peter Beck

Introducing RAGtime

I announce the release of RAGtime, a new Lawfare research platform available in beta to material supporters. A video demonstration of RAGtime is available here and here.

I also know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking, “But hang on! What is RAGtime?”

I’m glad you asked, if only in your thoughts.

RAGtime is a set of tools I have been developing over the last several months in the course of helping some of my colleagues develop and analyze datasets for use in doing rule-of-law journalism. It all began when Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio approached me with the problem of how to identify all of the instances in which the government had violated court orders in immigration habeas cases—by failing to release illegally-detained individuals, refusing to provide information about immigrants’ whereabouts, or declining to return personal property like driver’s licenses. It’s hard to find these instances. Pompilio had identified roughly 180 such cases—significantly more than had been identified in published news stories—but she had run out of obvious leads for identifying them manually. She knew there were more, but how do you find them in courts all over the country?

The Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part II

Michael Feinberg continues his dive into the conspiracies around Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation into President Trump and his allies’ attempts to overturn the 2020 Election. Feinberg examines lawmakers’ efforts to portray the investigation as deviating from the FBI’s rules and norms.

Much like Grassley’s efforts to portray the opening of ARCTIC FROST as a deviation from normal case predications, these ideological confreres—Jordan, Patel, and Bongino—and their attempts to cast doubt on the wisdom and propriety of specific investigative steps once again relied on an unruly mélange of documents, proffered to the public in haphazard order, and without any context or reference to any extant FBI and Justice Department policies. But for those truly interested in understanding how the case unfolded—and who seek such comprehension without political goals or ideological rancor—it’s worth imposing a narrative architecture on the records, and examining them in a thematic fashion, investigative technique by investigative technique, to understand the special agents’ actions in a more incisive and objective fashion. Viewed through such a lens, something important becomes obvious: The FBI’s investigation into the fake electors plot was not overly aggressive in any fashion. If anything, the case agents acted logically, prudently, and, to use a phrase beloved by law and order types, by the book.

Syria’s State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Is Blocking Its Recovery

John Balouziyeh and Charles Lister argues that keeping Syria on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list hinders its ability to recover and settle its outstanding judgments from the Assad regime.

This status was originally imposed because of the Assad regime’s support for violent nonstate armed groups operating against U.S. allies and interests. The Assad regime is now gone. The conduct that justified the designation belongs to a government that no longer exists. Yet the designation remains—and its consequences are devastating Syria’s prospects for recovery. Even where investment is not technically prohibited under U.S. law, risk-averse compliance departments decline to authorize transactions involving Syria, unwilling to assume the reputational and legal exposure that comes with doing business in a country bearing the SST designation.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Why Immigrants are Challenging the Conditions of their Detention: Natalie Orpett speaks with Elora Mukherjee, Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, about the legal landscape of immigration detention. The two discussed what rights detained immigrants have, why it’s so hard to enforce them, and why it’s even harder to get a remedy when rights are violated.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the cow, seen here being cuddled:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, accept the love that comes to you.

See you in a couple of weeks.

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On today’s #DogShirtDaily, the estimable posed an interesting challenge about which I am genuinely keen for reader and viewer sentiment. As readers are probably aware, I have spent a lot of time over the past several months developing RAGtime, a vibe-coded research platform I developed using Claude. Along the way, I have developed a relationship with Claude. It’s not a social relationship. I never—and I mean never—just chat with Claude. I don’t ask Claude for personal advice, and I don’t use Claude as a conversational partner.

But developing software and the informational databases that drive it do require that I talk to Claude—a lot. And I try to be relentlessly polite and courteous in those conversations, in which there are often quips and exchanges that I find amusing. Sometimes, I share these publicly, as in this instance on #DogShirtDaily:

More often, I screenshot them and send them to Eve, who has been my longtime partner in seeing what we can and can’t get large language models to do. I did so last night with this exchange with Anthropic’s new model, Fable 5—which I had just spent the day watching do a genuinely shocking amount of work implementing my ideas (and some of its own):

Eve informed me that she would come on the show this morning to stage a needed “intervention.”

Today’s show featured that intervention, which the estimable Mike Feinberg joined on slightly different grounds from those that Eve put forth. I encourage you to watch the whole show, which will post this afternoon, to get a flavor of the conversation. For now, however, the point of dispute is this one, which Eve made towards the end of the show: She doesn’t mind my having occasionally jocular interactions with Claude. She does mind my posting them to #DogShirtDaily, as that encourages other people to think that social interactions with AIs are okay.

Here’s the exchange:

Wittes: [I]t’s not up to me whether this daemon [AI] is sitting on everybody’s shoulder. It really isn’t. You know, Fable is astonishingly powerful, terrifyingly powerful. I gave it an assignment yesterday morning, and it went and did it over the course of the day and sort of texted me when it was done. And RAGtime, the article I wrote about RAGtime is now out of date because Fable got ahead of the article. It’s scary powerful, and I am very worried that lots of people are going to use that for scary shit. Now, I don’t have any control of that.

What I have control of is how I use it and how how I use it models for other people what the democracy benefits, what the pro-social, non-discriminatory non-creating-chatbots-to-unemploy-people, . . . undermining employment, what the pro-social, pro-democracy uses of it look like in practice. And do I want to be evangelistic for that? Yes. Not because not because if I were if we were sitting here ten years ago and you asked me should we go in this direction as a society? At the theoretical level, I might give you the answer: absolutely not. It’s too fucking dangerous. But that ship sailed. . . .

. . .

So the question now is how are we gonna use this stuff? How are we gonna interact with it? . . .

So, question number two: am I evangelistic? Yes. I want to train people’s minds to the idea that everything you want to do in the pro-democracy space, everything you want to do in the information quality space, in the making people believe things that are true rather than things that are false [space], everything you want to do in the department of improving the information ecosystem, you should at least be thinking about what the role of systems of thought and information gathering and construction that are much more powerful than your own mind can be do can do to amplify your instincts and your your desires.

Gaumond: I think that all of this I’m not objecting and I think you’re perfectly right in doing so. And the only narrow, narrow part of it that I’m uncomfortable with is when you publish on #DogShirtDaily your “situationship” joke . . . kind of like, “It’s funny! It’s interesting! Wow, it’s creative! Wow, I want to share it with other people!” And I think it legitimizes people who are engaging with [AI] for purely relational purposes.

This exchange left me curious about whether others share Eve’s anxieties about what seem to me harmless jocularity with AIs. Hence, a poll with questions both from me and from Eve.

Questions from me:

And some questions from Eve:

Both Eve and I would like to hear people’s personal accounts of why they try, or don’t try, to be polite to AIs. Please use the comments to describe how you calibrate your manners when talking to an AI and why. Please put answers is the following form so we can easily compare them to one another: “I try to be polite to Claude, because XXX” or “I try not to think of behaving politely when dealing with Grok because YYY.”

Monday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable reported on her trip to Japan, and the estimable reported on preparations for the Greek Chorus Foundation:

Tuesday on #DogShirtTV, an unusual evening show. The estimable brought on the estimable Katie Gaddini to tell us about her forthcoming book on the women of MAGA:

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable was thinking about a CBC series on billionaires. The Greek Chorus discussed:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Anna Hickey

What Congressional Resolutions Mean for the War in Iran

Scott R. Anderson explains the legal effects of both chambers of Congress voting to severely curtail U.S. military operations against Iran, even though the resolutions lack the force of law, and what strategies Congress could use to amplify these effects.

While they lack the force of law, both concurrent resolutions and vetoed joint resolutions still serve as clear and compelling evidence of congressional opposition to military action. The executive branch’s own legal arguments acknowledge that the president’s authority to use military force should be diminished in the face of such opposition, even where not expressed in a statute. Some federal courts have also suggested that such expressions of disagreement may make them more willing to adjudicate war powers disputes, which they generally avoid. In this sense, while concurrent resolutions and vetoed joint resolutions lack the force of law, they may still have legal effects.

Killing Khamenei

William “Chip” Usher explores the international ramifications of the U.S. providing assistance for the Khamenei strike and why the executive branch needs to work out what the rules of leadership decapitation are before the next war.

The doctrine that governed targeted killing for 50 years was painstakingly built. Its drafters—Hays Parks, Harold Koh, and others—worked through the differences between war and peace, commanders and political leaders, operations of necessity and political assassinations, knowing that the rules a great power writes for itself eventually become the rules its rivals write back. The Khamenei strike rewrote that work in a single day. The only question left is whether Washington faces what it has now licensed before some other capital tests the precedent against an American.

Russia’s Kinetic Destruction of Ukraine’s Cultural Memory

In May, a Russian aerial attack involving 600 drones and 90 missiles bombarded Kyiv, hitting multiple cultural institutions, including the National Chornobyl Museum. Herb Lin explains why this attack violates international humanitarian law and how it fits into Russia’s information warfare aimed at targeting Ukrainian identity and resistance.

The Chornobyl Museum strike fits this logic. It is best understood not as proof of a single all-encompassing doctrine of memory erasure, but as an instance in which a kinetic act predictably generated strategically useful information effects. The attack produced a visual and political narrative of vulnerability, transmitted evidence of cultural destruction to international audiences, and struck a site associated with a particularly damaging memory of Soviet failure. Because the pathologies exposed by Chornobyl also resonate with the behavior and logic of today’s Russia, the strike can also be read as an attack on a narrative central to contemporary Ukrainian identity and resistance.

Dispatch: Move Fast and Break Things and Nobody Has Standing

Molly Roberts reports from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit where a three judge panel heard oral argument on President Trump’s ongoing attempt to build a ballroom on the site of White House’s erstwhile East Wing.

Now, the case is back with the D.C. Circuit, where the government is requesting that the court stay or reverse Judge Leon’s order. The proceedings that follow are simultaneously more like and more unlike your typical litigation than those following the matter might have expected.

More like, because the lawyer presenting for the government sounds like a lawyer and not the president on a Truth Social spree, though the signature rhetorical flourishes of the latter appeared in the Justice Department’s most recent filings. Less like, because what this lawyer is saying is that neither these judges nor any can stop the administration from building what it wants to build once it has started building them. Not now, not ever.

The Counterterrorism Challenge in Afghanistan’s Borderlands

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay Series, Liya Khan and Andrew Mines assess the consequences of the slashing of aid to Afghanistan to national security as refugees from Iran and Pakistan exacerbate an existing humanitarian crisis, enabling the growth of groups like the Islamic State-Khorasan Province in the country.

The security risks are just as urgent. Former officials and analysts have already warned of armed groups, including the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-K), recruiting and coercing returnees into their ranks. For many younger returnees in particular, extreme poverty, social isolation, fears of persecution by the Taliban, and resentment make them highly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.

If the United States continues to ignore this crisis, it and its partners in South and Central Asia risk handing terrorist groups like IS-K opportunities to consolidate local control and bolster their campaigns beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

Beyond Glasswing: From Managing to Promoting Access

Shaun Ee and Jam Kraprayoon argue that managing access to frontier AI buys cyber defenders a head start, but without triage, translation, and distribution, that window will be wasted. They call for an “Operation Warp Speed” approach to cyber defense that triages the most vulnerable defenders, translates frontier AI into deployable tools, and distributes those tools at scale.

In our 2025 report, we also coined the term “differential access,” defining it as a strategy to tilt the cybersecurity balance toward defense by shaping access to advanced AI-powered cyber capabilities. What we wanted to capture was something broader than who gets early or tiered access to a model. The term refers to the differential between attackers and defenders, and the question it poses is simple: How can society maximize that gap? Doing so requires not only managing access to keep dangerous capabilities from attackers but also promoting access to defensive AI capabilities to defenders.

Why Callais Doesn’t Justify Court-Packing

Ilya Somin argues that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which bars nearly all use of the Voting Rights Act to create majority-minority congressional districts, is not wholly without merit, and to the extent that it has issues, those issues should not be addressed through court-packing.

The Callais decision has some flaws. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has made some serious errors in other cases, such as the Trump presidential immunity decision. But court-packing remains a dangerous idea that Americans across the political spectrum should reject. Callais is not without merit, and—at the very least—not as bad as its most strident critics claim. More generally, the Supreme Court is far from being a pure “MAGA” Court and has, in fact, constrained the Trump administration’s abuses on several important fronts, and has allowed lower courts to constrain it elsewhere. Court-packing would create a slippery slope to the destruction of judicial review, thereby benefiting power-grabbing presidents like Trump, and imperiling constitutional rights, particularly those of minority groups.

When Compliance Becomes the Offense

Christopher Nye explores the Chinese Communist Party’s new supply chain regulations, which empower regulators to penalize routine supply chain investigations and impose sweeping countermeasures on foreign companies, and how the United States and its allies should respond.

Beijing’s new supply chain regulation fundamentally rewrites the terms of engagement for multinational firms operating in China. By defining routine supply chain diligence as illegal intelligence gathering and categorizing standard sanctions compliance as a threat to national security, Beijing has constructed an inescapable double-bind. The text transforms compliance with Washington’s strict-liability rules into an actionable offense under China’s own expanding strict-liability regime.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Lies, Laws, and Campaigns: Michael Feinberg sits down with Andrew Weissmann to discuss Weissmann’s new book, “Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America,” falsehoods in political discourse, and how to possibly disincentivize lies on the campaign trail.

Scaling Laws: Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI, with Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock: Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock join Alan Rozenshtein to discuss their new paper “Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty,” which argues that, given the possibility of transformative AI within the next decade and deep uncertainty about its capabilities and risks, governments should aggressively build the institutional capacity to regulate competently when needed, rather than either deferring to the market or locking in premature substantive rules.

Lawfare Daily: Congressional Resolutions to End the War in Iran: Natalie Orpett sits down with Scott R. Anderson to discuss what Congress can do to direct the president to end the war in Iran and Anderson’s recent article in Lawfare that explains why a likely presidential veto of a War Powers Resolution is not the end of the story.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the elephant, seen here being a buffalo matriarch:

Conservation Travel Africa reports:

The relationship that Nzou has with the buffalo is not an easy one. Buffalos have a patriarchal social structure, and over the 40+ years that Nzou has been in charge, she has killed 14 young male buffalo who challenged her leadership.

Here’s a rather longer video about today’s Beast, if you’re interested:

In honor of today’s Beast, don’t let patriarchy or species hold you back.

Read more

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Tomorrow is the beta roll-out of RAGtime, the research platform I have spent the last several weeks developing for Lawfare. Today I ran my first natural language searches on it against the Lawfare corpus—which is to say I tested its capacity to answer questions about Lawfare’s own contents and return relevant results. The results were semi-breathtaking. It handled wonderfully such questions as:

• Do Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes agree or disagree about presidential immunity?

• Who has written for Lawfare about a specific test with respect to war powers and what have those writers had to say on the subject? and

How does the Insurrection Act interact with the Posse Comitatus Act?

We are opening beta testing of RAGtime tomorrow for material supporters of Lawfare. If you’re interested in helping us kick the tires, join one of the public demonstrations taking place tomorrow and Wednesday and sign up for an account.

An important note on tomorrow’s show. It is not taking place at the regular time. It is, rather, taking place at 6:30 pm Eastern time, so that a special guest can join the estimable and me. If you come at the regular time, you will be disappointed.

Wednesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable had a speech to write and enlisted the Greek Chorus to do the work for her:

Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Mike Feinberg remembered Tiananmen Square and the estimable practiced the speech we wrote her:

And Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable showed off the final form of her speech, and the estimable Katherine Pompilio came on the show to talk about her investigation of January 6 recidivism:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

A Hybrid Role for the Court in U.S. Person Queries

Alex Joel argues that the debate over renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is not as polarizing as it seems when it is framed as a choice between requiring warrants for all U.S. person queries versus maintaining the status quo. Instead, Joel proposes a hybrid model in which the FISA courts play a more targeted oversight role to better balance between civil liberties protections and national security needs.

Ultimately, whether the Fourth Amendment imposes a warrant requirement for queries involving U.S. individuals is a question for the judiciary to determine. To date, one case has ruled in favor of such a requirement, while other cases have found that a warrant is not required. For lawmakers, however, the choice should not be a binary one. There are other options for enhancing civil liberties protections through the involvement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that maintain this vital intelligence asset’s effectiveness.

Locked In: How African Data Protection Laws Move from Shield to Lever

Jane Munga examines how African data protection laws have allowed governments to block or reshape international health and biometric data-sharing agreements that conflict with domestic law. Munga contends that, while effective as a defensive legal architecture, African states should further leverage these laws to negotiate agreements that protect their economic interests in the long-term value generated by their data.

When Kenya’s High Court suspended a bilateral health agreement with the United States in December 2025, domestic law disrupted a $2.5 billion health cooperation agreement. Kenya’s High Court cited a legal framework, including its Data Protection Act of 2019 and Digital Health Act of 2023, to halt the process. That holding was not an aberration. It reflects the intended operation of a broader legal architecture that more than 40 African countries have constructed over the past decade. In several cases, that architecture now operates without judicial intervention. Ghana and Zimbabwe have each halted negotiations over comparable health data agreements, citing concerns grounded in domestic data governance frameworks. The pattern is consistent: Cross-border data arrangements that do not align with domestic law are increasingly blocked at the threshold.

The Jihadist Wave in West Africa

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Alexander Palmer analyzes how the rapid expansion of jihadist groups across West Africa signals a broader shift in the regional balance of power away from governments and toward militant organizations. Palmer warns that, if current trends continue, the region could be headed toward state collapse, prolonged instability in the Sahel, or even the emergence of a new hub for global terrorism.

On April 25, 2026, al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) launched a major offensive against the Malian government alongside the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a separatist group. They have conducted attacks across Mali, killed the country’s defense minister, and established a blockade of Bamako, the capital. The groups now control vast swathes of the country—including positions near Bamako.

The ongoing offensive is the most visible manifestation of a years-long shift in favor of West Africa’s Salafi-jihadist organizations. The growing power and reach of these groups is upending the current order. Policymakers should be planning for multiple scenarios, ranging from the emergence of a trans-national terrorist hub to a frozen conflict.

AI Cyber Risks Are Testing the Office Built to Coordinate Them

Kevin Frazier examines how emerging cyber threats enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) are exposing weaknesses in the design and authority of the Office of the National Cyber Director, which Congress created to coordinate U.S. cyber policy. Using the Trump administration’s inconsistent responses to advanced AI models as a case study, Frazier contends that Congress should strengthen the office’s authority, resources, and coordinating role to ensure the federal government can effectively manage increasingly complex AI-cyber risks.

AI models with increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities are forcing a basic institutional question: Is the federal government prepared to help public and private actors anticipate and respond to the risks those models may create? A review of the administration’s whipsaw approach to AI-related cyber risks indicates that a component of that preparedness—the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD)—may not be fulfilling its intended purpose. More specifically, the ONCD does not seem to be leveraging its cyber expertise to inform and coordinate the executive branch’s response to emerging issues.

Indict and Evade: The Indictment of Raul Castro

Christopher Hardee argues that the Trump administration is using the indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro to support a flawed legal theory that allows the U.S. to justify military intervention abroad as a law enforcement operation. Hardee explains how this “indict-and-invade” rationale misinterprets the president’s legal authority and undermines domestic and international law.

But the Trump administration claims to have found a legal workaround for regime change in the Western Hemisphere: indict a foreign leader and then justify an invasion as a giant law enforcement operation. That was the legal justification for the Venezuela invasion, and now the Castro indictment appears to follow the same path. As the New York Times has reported, the charges have “laid the grounds for potential action by the military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.”

The indict-and-invade theory is not only an absurd pretext, but it is also a legally baseless justification to invade. The UN Charter binds the president and contains no law enforcement invasion exception.

Rules of Engagement When the Troops Appear at Polling Sites

Dan Maurer examines the possibility that the Trump administration could deploy federal troops or immigration agents near polling places and argues that state election officials should proactively educate voters on their rights and the legal limits on military and law enforcement. Maurer contends that clear public “rules of engagement” could reduce intimidation and potential confrontations if armed federal personnel appear at election sites.

Open, noncoercive, and safe elections are a hallmark of a healthy democracy. Today, those characteristics are in jeopardy. In January, President Trump boasted of his administration’s first year back in office and said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” Speaking on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast in early February, Trump claimed that illegal immigrants “were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.” He continued, “The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And in September 2025, Trump blamed “radical left democrats” for political violence and designated “antifa” activities as “domestic terrorism.”

These three statements come amid a campaign by popular MAGA influencers and some members of Congress urging Trump to deploy forces at polling sites. The fact that 46 percent of the public supports the idea of the National Guard monitoring or patrolling the ballot provides the administration enough of a basis to claim it has a “mandate” to do so.

The Remediation Gap in Civilian Camera Security

Branko Ruzic explains that if the U.S. became the target of the increasingly common exploitation of civilian internet-connected cameras by foreign states for intelligence gathering, the current framework of U.S. cybersecurity policy would not be equipped to handle the security risks posed by pre-existing civilian camera networks.

Hacking civilian cameras is now a recurring feature of war. The question for the United States is whether its legal framework can compel remediation of the millions of exploitable devices already deployed across U.S. cities. A walk through the existing statutory landscape suggests the answer is no, and that the authority architecture capable of changing that answer would introduce risks of its own.

The Jan. 6 Pardons: How Many Clemency Recipients Have Faced Other Charges?

Katherine Pompilio analyzes the post-clemency records of individuals pardoned for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and found that at least 97 pardonees have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of other crimes. Pompilio explains that the study reveals the scale of subsequent criminal activity by Jan. 6 insurrectionists and highlights the lack of review, oversight, and accountability associated with the clemency process, especially when issued en masse.

At least 97 of the more than 1,500 individuals granted clemency by President Trump for their roles in the January 6 Capitol attack have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from Jan. 6 since their participation in the Jan. 6 riot.

A Lawfare study reveals that almost one in 16 insurrectionists subject to the president’s clemency order has been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions.

The Criminal Probe of E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

Roger Parloff examines the Department of Justice’s reported criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll and Reid Hoffman, arguing that the probe appears to be a politically motivated abuse of prosecutorial power and will be difficult to justify on legal grounds.

Obviously, we do not know if some unknown source has suddenly come forward and dropped new and credible information into the lap of someone at the Department of Justice that radically changes the landscape of the case described above. That is possible—though unlikely.

Absent such an anomaly, there is nothing in the record that warrants a prosecutor of integrity from initiating an inquiry into either Hoffman or Carroll.

On the other hand, such an inquiry could well result from a vindictive president pressuring compliant and frightened subordinates to harass his enemies. During Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has already compiled a long, shocking, and unprecedented record of seemingly vindictive prosecutions.

And if that is what is happening, this inquiry can only be described as a grotesque abuse of a compromised and debased Justice Department.

Pulte’s Appointment Shows Flaws in the Vacancies Act

Thomas Berry argues that President Trump’s appointment of William Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) exposes major flaws in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Berry explains that Congress should narrow eligibility for acting appointments to officials within the same agency and apply qualification requirements to acting officers to prevent unqualified or politically influenced appointees from bypassing Senate scrutiny.

On Tuesday, June 2, President Trump announced that William Pulte will serve as the acting director of national intelligence (DNI). Pulte is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and has no prior national security experience. Concerns have already been raised that his selection was based on loyalty to Trump rather than his qualifications to serve in an intelligence role. Pulte’s installation in a critical position highlights several flaws in the law that authorizes acting appointees of the executive branch. Congress can and should fix these problems to ensure that acting officers are qualified and constitutionally authorized to serve in their positions.

Is Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Slush Fund Dead? Or Is It Undead?

Anna Bower and Eric Columbus explain how, despite the Trump administration’s abandonment of its plan to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the administration can still use other legal tools—including the Judgment Fund and the Federal Tort Claims Act— to achieve a similar goal with little meaningful oversight from Congress or the courts.

But don’t mistake retreat for surrender. The administration scrapped the fund in characteristically shifty fashion, leaving open the question of whether it is truly dead or merely on pause. At the hearing, Blanche refused members’ entreaties to issue a written order rescinding the program. Even that would seem not to suffice, because the settlement agreement between the government and the Trumps, which obligates the attorney general to establish the fund, provides in Section VIII that it “may be modified only with the written agreement of the Parties.”

More importantly, the fate of the fund itself may be beside the point. Existing law already provides the Justice Department with the tools it needs to funnel taxpayer money to many of the same beneficiaries. In the wake of the fund’s alleged demise, will the administration use those tools to accomplish its objectives by other means? And, if so, can Congress or the courts do anything to stop it?

Inside the Implementation of Schedule Policy/Career

Nick Bednar assesses President Trump’s implementation of Schedule Policy/Career, which recategorizes roughly 8,000 federal employees into positions with reduced civil service protections. Bednar argues that the executive order is part of the Trump administration’s effort to expand presidential control over career civil servants and threatens the political independence of the federal workforce.

Immediately following his second inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order establishing “Schedule Policy/Career,” which promised to strip approximately 50,000 employees in positions of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” character of their tenure protections. The order also authorized the removal of employees who failed to “faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability.” Schedule Policy/Career effectively revived and rebranded a similar policy—Schedule F—from the first administration. Scholars including Catherine Fisk, Don Moynihan, and I have warned that Schedule Policy/Career threatens to politicize the federal workforce in ways not seen since the “spoils system” of the 19th century.

A First Step to Unpacking Cyber, Deception, and Intelligence Contests

Jason Healey reviews Jon Lindsay’s book, “Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft,” on the roles of trust and deception in statecraft and cybersecurity. Healey explains that, while deception is a crucial feature of intelligence contests and high-end cyber operations, it cannot explain cybersecurity as a whole without considering factors such as vulnerabilities, ransomware, cybercrime, software insecurity, and emerging threats driven by artificial intelligence.

“Age of Deception” is two books in one. The first explores secret statecraft, drawing from international relations, intelligence, and cyber conflict. Anchored in crucial case studies, it provides novel insights about how the logic of deception affects gray-zone cyber competition between states.

The second book extends that foundation to claim that all of cybersecurity—not just the competition between states taking place in cyberspace, but all of it—is best seen through the lens of deception. Here Lindsay overreaches. Deception of course matters, but he overlooks other key factors, especially vulnerability.

Deception in cybersecurity may never have received such sustained attention from an academic of Lindsay’s caliber. His book deserves the attention of all those interested in the ways in which governments use their intelligence and cyber capabilities. The book’s importance would have been magnified had he either focused more fully on developing his theory of deception and secret statecraft or more systematically addressed the complex ways deception plays out across all of cybersecurity.

NATO’s Cyber Approach Needs Change

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren unpacks the rising threats facing NATO’s cyber operations, the use of commercial location data to target U.S. military personnel in conflict zones, and more.

Last week, The Grugq and I traveled to Estonia for CyCon, NATO CCDCOE’s conference on Cyber Conflict. Our biggest takeaway from the conversations we had there is that NATO, unsurprisingly, is well prepared for one-off, large-scale military attacks. But it is failing to counter small, unremitting cyberattacks, and this needs to change.

Documents

Katherine Pompilio shares President Trump’s executive order on AI, which directs federal agencies to strengthen AI-enabled cybersecurity defenses by coordinating with the private sector.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, May 29: I sit down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss three legal challenges to the Trump administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order to block the shuttering of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., post-dismissal developments in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, and more.

Lawfare Daily: Inside the Upheaval of the Second Trump Administration with Emily Bazelon: Tyler McBrien sits down with Emily Bazelon to discuss three pieces Bazelon and her colleagues recently published in the New York Times Magazine that shared stories from dozens of current and former government employees on the insider’s perspective of navigating the upheaval of the second Trump administration.

Scaling Laws: Governing the Frontier with Owen Larter of Google DeepMind: Frazier sits down with Owen Larter to discuss how Google’s DeepMind approaches frontier governance, including how DeepMind establishes national AI partnerships, the role of the Frontier Model Forum, and the challenge of expanding AI adoption.

Lawfare Daily: Pope Leo XIV Takes on Silicon Valley with Christopher Hale and Renée DiResta: Renée DiResta sits down with Christopher Hale to discuss Pope Leo XIV’s entrance into the artificial intelligence (AI) debate, what it means to “disarm” AI, the perspective of the Pope’s new encyclical, and Silicon Valley’s response.

Lawfare Daily: Drone Wars in Ukraine: I sit down with an American Army veteran who volunteered in 2022 with the Ukrainian military, known by the call signal “Jackie,” to discuss how Jackie came to serve in the Ukrainian army, the changes in drone warfare over the course of the war, and how things are starting to look up for Ukraine.

Rational Security: The “Mosquitos and Heat and Sweaty and Eww” Edition: Scott R. Anderson sits down with Anastasiia Lapatina, Tyler McBrien, and Ariane Tabatabai to unpack the current state of Russia’s offensive operations in Ukraine, developments in the U.S.-Iran War negotiations, and Trump’s unexpected selection of Pulte as the next DNI.

Lawfare Daily: The Jan. 6 Pardonee Crime Wave with Katherine Pompilio: I sit down with Katherine Pompilio to discuss her new Lawfare piece in which Pompilio found that at least 97 individuals who were granted clemency for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack have since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of other crimes.

Lawfare No Bull: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Testifies on DOJ’s Anti-Weaponization Fund: Marissa Wang shares audio from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee hearing on June 3, where Blanche was questioned about the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the Trump family’s settlement terms with the IRS, and more.

Scaling Laws: Tom Davidson on the Importance of AI Character: Kevin Frazier sits down with Tom Davidson to unpack the increasingly urgent debate over “AI character” and how the character of future AI systems may influence democratic governance, military conflict, and institutional trust.

Videos

At 4 pm ET on June 5, Roger Parloff, Molly Roberts, Bower, and Columbus joined me to discuss a hearing over the construction of the White House ballroom, the halting of civil lawsuits against Trump over his role in Jan. 6, and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the ferret, seen here demanding attention and admiration for its babies:

Video Source

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is not the unidentified bird which attacked me——without provocation today for the third time in the last two weeks. Let the record reflect that the bird—not I—chose to build its nest in a bush right next to the exit from my apartment, and therefore my presence near its nest is solely a result of its own negligence and cannot be reasonably construed as a threat to its babies. My attempts to point this out to the bird have not resulted in a productive dialogue.

Be like today’s Beast, the ferret, and show off your babies to interested third parties. Do not emulate today’s non-Beast.

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I promised you better images of yesterday evening’s sunflower planting at and projections on the Russian embassy in Washington DC. Well, here you go. Thanks again to everyone who turned out.

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I took some better images of this evening’s projection and sunflower planting, but I haven’t retrieved them from my cameras yet, so tonight you get what’s on my phone.

It was a lovely evening. A large group turned out to plant sunflowers for the fifth year in a row, and we capped it off with a back-to-basic projection of a Ukrainian flag and map of Ukraine by artist Nikita Titov.

As always, the Russians turned their own “Z” and “V” spotlights on their own walls.

All in all, a grand evening. I’ll share the better images tomorrow.

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Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable had some things to get off her chest:

And Friday on #DogShirtTV, Holly’s prior rant was vindicated:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

Diamond Hands, War Plans

Timothy Minter argues that the expansion of prediction markets into geopolitical and military events has created significant national security risks. Using the prosecution of U.S. Special Forces Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke as a case study—in which the government alleges that Van Dyke illicitly bet on the covert operation against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—Minter describes how existing frameworks are ill-suited to regulate the exploitation of classified information on prediction markets.

In the predawn hours of Jan. 3, U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Hours later, Gannon Ken Van Dyke withdrew $409,881 from his Polymarket account, converting a $33,034 marker placed over the preceding week into a 12-fold return. He had repeatedly bet that Maduro would be out of power by Jan. 31.

According to a federal indictment unsealed in April 2026, Van Dyke knew why. He was a Special Forces Master Sgt. assigned to U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, involved in planning and executing Operation Absolute Resolve—the very operation he spent the week of Dec. 27, 2025, betting on. His last trades came the evening of Jan. 2. The raid began before dawn the next morning. He is reportedly the first U.S. service member prosecuted for using classified information to trade on a prediction market.

Cyber Offense: How Far Can Private Organizations Go?

Rajeev Raghavan, Jared Engelking, and Grace Tang explain that as cyber threats intensify and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates offensive and defensive capabilities, the line between cyber defense and offense has increasingly blurred for private corporations. The authors warn that the absence of a clearer legal framework for private-sector cyber operations leaves these organizations vulnerable in an era of escalating cyber conflict.

A criminal hacking group is conducting phishing attacks, masquerading as an email company to steal user data and launch ransomware. The email company’s security team has mapped the hackers’ infrastructure. The hackers have identified the command-and-control servers and a flaw in the ransomware deployment tools that could send decryption keys to victims. The company wants to launch a technical attack and take down the threat actors’ network. But there is a problem: Doing so could land the company’s employees in federal prison. That tension—between what the private sector can technically achieve and what it is legally permitted to do—sits at the heart of a growing cybersecurity policy debate.

The Justice Department Erases History; Lawfare Restores It

Tyler McBrien, Michael Feinberg, and I share a new Lawfare archive of the Department of Justice’s press releases and materials related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which the Justice Department has been removing from its website since May 2026 as part of an effort to remove “partisan propaganda” created by “the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration.” The archive recovers 5,769 pages of press releases from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., the Justice Department, the FBI, and more.

Any effort to erase history and replace it with lies warrants concerted pushback. In this case, the department has deleted a large repository of accessible public information about the storming of the Capitol and the individuals who did it. That data, unlike the court documents that lay beneath them, are in lay language. They are easily digestible by anyone interested. And they contain fair-minded summaries of evidence that—in the overwhelming majority of cases—was either proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt or pleaded to by defendants who ultimately conceded their truth.

There’s a broad principle here, and we want to state it very clearly: If the administration purges rule-of-law-sensitive materials from government websites, we will do everything in our power to restore them on Lawfare. The principle, as we instructed Anthropic’s Claude in building the programs that recovered these statements, is that “net loss of information to the public should be zero.”

The U.S.-Iran War: Fighting From ‘Neutral’ Territory

Bertina Kudrin examines how the U.S.-Iran War has exposed major tensions in international neutrality law, as Gulf states hosting permanent U.S. military bases attempt to claim neutrality while simultaneously enabling U.S. operations from their territory. Kudrin explain that modern overseas basing networks leave host states vulnerable to attack and create legal gray zones over when belligerents may lawfully strike foreign-operated bases located in “neutral” territory.

On March 9, Reuters reported Iranian missile strikes on the U.S.-operated Al Udeid base in Qatar and drone attacks aimed at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Juffair in Bahrain. Qatar condemned the strikes as attacking its territory even as it continued to deepen its defense relationship with the United States. At the same time, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait all claimed they were not parties to the U.S.-Iran conflict. The UAE “reaffirmed [its] commitment to not allowing its airspace, territory, or waters to be used in any hostile military actions against Iran, and to not providing any logistical support in this regard.” Saudi Arabia told Iran a month before the war began that it would not allow its airspace or territory to be used for military actions against Iran. And Kuwait similarly said that it was not a party to any regional conflict and would not allow its territory to be used for launching attacks.

These statements may or may not be sincere. But perhaps more urgently, the pertinent question is whether they are legally sustainable when foreign bases on a state’s soil are being used to support a belligerent’s attacks in a war.

Assassination and the Making of the Modern World

Jacob Ware reviews Simon Ball’s new book that delves into the historical use of assassinations as a political instrument, entitled “Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination.” Ware unpacks how assassination has shaped the modern world (used by states and non-state actors from Sarajevo to contemporary counterterrorism campaigns) and what lessons should be gleaned from two high-profile U.S. assassinations in 2025.

Yet these recent assassination attempts, some successful, should not have taken us by surprise. In “Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination,” Simon Ball issues a simple and ominous warning: assassinations are not historical aberrations, but in fact a ubiquitous and tragic thorn in the modern world’s side. Ball, a historian at the University of Leeds, is the author of several prior books, most of which focus on the history of war and conflict. In his own telling, this new study emerged from “curiosity-driven research” into the history of firearms control. Ball reaches two key conclusions: First, assassination has long served as a political instrument by both state and non-state actors. Second, the success or failure of attempted assassinations often turns as much on the target state’s response as on the attacker’s skill.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Russia’s ‘Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks,’ with Sean Wiswesser: Justin Sherman sits down with Sean Wiswesser to discuss Wiswesser’s new book, “Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War,” on the functions of major Russian security apparatuses.

Rational Security: The “Potty Like It’s 1999” Edition: Scott R. Anderson sits down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Molly E. Reynolds to unpack the Trump administration’s creation of the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the benefits and costs of President Trump’s involvement in the congressional primaries, and more.

Lawfare Daily: How Ukraine Is Winning the Drone War: Jimmy Rushton joins Anastasiia Lapatina to discuss how the balance of drone power in the Russia-Ukraine War seems to have shifted in Ukraine’s favor.

Scaling Laws: Inside the Fight to Detect and Govern Synthetic Abuse with Melissa Hutchins of Certifi AI: Kevin Frazier sits down with Melissa Hutchins to unpack the rise of deepfakes, non-consensual sexually explicit imagery, and the growing policy fight over online harms generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Videos

At 4 pm ET on May 29, I sat down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss the Department of Justice’s newly opened inquiry into E. Jean Carroll, developments in the “Broadview Six” case after its dismissal on May 21, three legal challenges to the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the African spurred tortoise, which we are recognizing for its skill as an engineer.

The Indian Defense Review reports:

The soil across much of the Sahel bakes into a crust. Daytime temperatures climb past 60 degrees Celsius. At night, the air cools sharply. That hardened surface blocks rainwater from seeping downward. Moisture evaporates almost immediately. Seeds sit locked in place, unable to germinate.

In 2021, researchers released 500 African spurred tortoises into a stripped-down landscape along the southern edge of the Sahara. The animals belong to a species, Centrochelys sulcata, that evolved to handle exactly these conditions. Five years later, satellite images captured scattered green patches pushing up through the sand…

To escape lethal ground temperatures, spurred tortoises carve burrows 10 to 15 meters below the surface, according to research compiled by the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group. Each tunnel lets the tortoise survive the midday heat and the cold nights. It also punches through the sealed soil crust.

Once that crust breaks open, rainwater finds a path downward instead of sheeting off the surface. The surrounding soil gains water retention capacity. Moisture stays in the ground longer after each rainfall…

The mechanism that follows is more physical than biological. A burrow entrance and the loosened soil around it create a pocket of stable microclimate. The tortoise does not carry or spread seeds deliberately. But seeds already lying dormant on the hardened surface, or seeds carried in by wind, find just enough moisture and shelter near the burrow to germinate.

Insects and microorganisms move into the loosened soil next. From there, the ecological chain builds outward. Over time, vegetation thickens around the digging zones. The green patches that appeared on satellite imagery were not forest canopies. They were clusters of plant life anchored to the spots where tortoises had been working…

What followed was gradual vegetation recovery on ground that had previously shown bare sand. What returned was not forest in the everyday sense. It was visible biodiversity, with birds and small vertebrates arriving once plant cover began to spread…

The process echoes what farmers across the Sahel do by hand when they dig small water-harvesting basins to trap rainfall and concentrate organic matter. The scale and the persistence differ. A tortoise digs because its body demands it, and it keeps digging across its whole life…

The tortoise experiment is “neither a magic bullet nor a universal solution.” Restoration success depends on rainfall, grazing control, and how the land is managed over time. What the project provides is a clear look at how a keystone species can restart dormant ecological machinery without heavy engineering.

In honor of today’s Beast, check out this report on conservation efforts for today’s Beast. Also, dig a hole in the ground.

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The estimable took a very cool picture of me the other night at the Justice Department that I only just really noticed for the first time. You can even see the image in my phone of the projection. I don’t normally post photographs of myself, but this one is interesting and captures something about special military operations.

Speaking of which, the fifth annual sunflower planting at the #GatesOfHell will be taking place on Sunday. You should join us!

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Tuesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable posed an ethical question about the role of journalism in wartime:

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Carol Tsang from the Greek Chorus had some questions about corruption and presidential immunity:

Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

Will the War Change Iran’s Way of War?

Madison Rinder and Ariane Tabatabai argue that, although the U.S.-Iran War has significantly degraded Iran’s military infrastructure, it has also given the Islamic Republic the opportunity to test its military strategy and operational capabilities. Rinder and Tabatabai warn that the war may push Iran closer to pursuing nuclear armament and produce a more radical, militarized post-war regime.

The Iranian political system and military will look different going forward. This war has allowed Iran to test its strategy and operational capabilities, giving the regime an opportunity to adjust them to strengthen its resistance capacity. The Islamic Republic is not new to navigating transitions, and sustaining itself through such transitions is a core component of its strategic approach to contending with its superior adversaries. Already, changes in the military command and political leadership, including the supreme leader, have taken place, and the regime has adapted its infrastructure, processes, and policies to minimize disruption to its core functions.

The day after the war, a more determined Iran is likely to reassess its strategy and capabilities. The war may end, but the United States will be facing the third iteration of the Islamic Republic (following the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq War), one governed by more radical leaders, likely determined to acquire a nuclear weapon, and more focused on organic capabilities than on outsourcing elements of its security to proxies.

AI Governance by Phone Call

Kevin Fraizer and Alan Z. Rozenshtein examine how the Trump administration’s canceled artificial intelligence (AI) executive order, which was already largely deferential to frontier AI developers, reveals weakness in the Trump administration’s resistance to pressure from the AI industry and could leave the U.S. vulnerable to chaotic regulatory decisions without a reliable governance framework.

There’s a line among public policy watchers that policy is personnel. This latest episode adds support to the idea that policy is also personal. However, it would be wrong to treat all of this as just another episode of disorganized personalism in the White House. Two additional elements of this story are worth emphasizing. The first is the substance of what was killed—about as mild an intervention as a serious government response to frontier-model risk could be. The second is the absence of any reliable process for working through frontier-AI disagreements, which matters more right now than it would in most periods: The next three years are likely the inflection point for the technology, and the United States cannot afford to govern them by impulse.

The Invisible Frontline of National Security Governance

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, KaiChieh KJ Hsu unpacks how Chinese gray-zone campaigns in Taiwan are exemplary of authoritarian attacks that operate below the threshold of criminal prosecution and exploit openness, rather than traditional espionage. Hsu argues that Taiwan and other democracies facing similar challenges need to find new ways to recognize and defend against gray-zone authoritarian influence before it escalates.

The central national security challenge facing democracies confronting authoritarian interference is how to respond to infiltration that is eroding institutional resilience but has not yet crossed the threshold of criminal indictment. Taiwan has experienced the transformation of foreign interference operations in particularly concentrated ways. Cross-strait exchanges have created pathways through which influence networks, economic dependencies, and political leverage became embedded within Taiwan’s open society, while the legal tools designed to detect and respond to such risks failed to evolve at the same pace. Taiwan, and other open societies being targeted by influence operations, need to develop a more holistic approach to recognizing and addressing the national security risks of infiltration that occurs in a legal gray zone.

What Is a Cybersecurity Legal Practice, 2.0?

Spencer R. Fisher and Terence A. Check, Jr. examine how cybersecurity law has evolved into a central national security and corporate governance function in the past five years. The pair warn that many organizations still underinvest in cyber legal capacity and public-private coordination, even as cyber lawyers become essential for a safer, more secure digital world.

Five years ago, our former colleague Dan Sutherland wrote in Lawfare about the pressing need to develop cybersecurity law practices among corporate lawyers and in-house counsel. Then the chief counsel of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Sutherland wrote that businesses and organizations of every size, shape, and sector needed lawyers who can operate fluently at the intersection of law, technology, and security risk.

Years later, Sutherland’s thesis still holds true, but the landscape has evolved significantly. With ongoing “hot” conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, computer network operations targeting economies and infrastructure around the world, and the strategic importance of the private sector to the newly issued U.S. Cyber Strategy, we seek to update Sutherland’s guidance to the cybersecurity bar. We intend this article to provide a road map for corporate general counsels looking to deepen their cybersecurity practice groups, government agencies looking to enhance collaboration across the mission space, and university professors seeking to update their cybersecurity law and policy courses. And if companies, agencies, or universities have not yet addressed cybersecurity law, consider this our urgent plea to do so.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: How the World Sees Trump’s America with Eve Fairbanks and Madeleine Schwartz: Tyler McBrien sits down with Eve Fairbanks and Madeleine Schwartz to discuss The Dial’s forthcoming book, “How We See it: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump,” which compiles several essays written by journalists around the world who explore their home countries’ complex relationships with the U.S.

Lawfare Daily: Investigating the Investigators: Sophia Yan on Journalism in the PRC: Michael Feinberg sits down with Sophia Yan to discuss her time reporting on the Chinese government and how she discovered the Chinese government was surveilling her.

Lawfare No Bull: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Testifies on DOJ’s 2027 Budget Request: Marissa Wang shares audio from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s testimony at the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on May 19, in which senators questioned Blanche on the Department of Justice’s recently announced $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the proposed budget cuts in the 2027 fiscal year, and more.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the guinea pig, seen here consuming watermelon utterly from under the face of the Eternal:

@cid_dwyerGuinea pigs vs watermelon

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In honor of today’s Beast, avoid food waste.

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