Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security.

And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions.

You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at

202-643-8474 or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare

at gmail.com by December 16th.

I'm Isabella Royo, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for November 30th, 2025.

On November 21st, social media platform X began rolling out a new transparency-oriented feature allowing users to see what country an account is based in. Though

X has acknowledged that the location feature could potentially be affected by recent travel,

temporary relocation, or virtual private network usage, the publication of users' accounts seems to have revealed that a number of accounts focused on U.S. politics and purporting to be published by Americans actually originate abroad in countries such as Russia, India, and Bangladesh.

As reported by the BBC, while some of these accounts may be part of more concerted and traditional nation-state influence activities,

many location fakers are just individuals trying

to earn more money from monetized accounts by posing as Americans. So far, such accounts appear to

have disproportionately targeted the American right, and often voiced support for the MAGA movement.

For today's archive, I selected an episode from November 29, 2004, in which Olivia Maness and Marlene Larwell

discussed the financial, ideological, and historical connections between the American far-right and

Russia, as well as the distinction between confluence and influence, white supremacist notions

of a pan-white nation embodied by Russia, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in fostering

connections, and more.

I'm Olivia Manus, Associate Editor of Lawfare, with Marlene Larwell, a research professor of

of international affairs and political science at the George Washington University,

and director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program.

I think the notion of conservative values matter, but also the notion of refusing liberalism and naming liberalism at the enemy

...