Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, March 13
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 93 minutes
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Summary
In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Kate Klonick to Judge Boasberg’s opinion quashing subpoenas to Fed Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Anthropic’s suit challenged the Defense Department’s designation of it as a supply chain risk, Judge Lambert finding that Kari Lake was unlawfully running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. |
| 0:23.2 | Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. |
| 0:26.4 | That's lawfaremedia.org slash, D.C. on a windy day. And you are watching Lawfare |
| 0:58.1 | Live, the trials of the Trump administration. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare. |
| 1:04.3 | And I am here with four Lawfare senior editors, Scott R. Anderson, Roger Parloff, Eric Columbus, and Kate Klonick. |
| 1:15.7 | This is Kate's first trials of the Trump administration. And we're going to get to Kate in |
| 1:21.8 | just a moment, but we have breaking news. Judge James Bosberg, the perhaps who has yet earned the title, the bane of the existence of the |
| 1:35.5 | entire Trump administration, I'm not sure. |
| 1:38.0 | There's some competition for that, has issued a 27-page memorandum opinion that the New York Times calls blistering. |
| 1:48.8 | Roger Parloff, I haven't read it. |
| 1:51.8 | It concerns Jerome Powell and a subpoena that was issued to the Fed. |
| 1:58.9 | Number one is the word blistering a fair characterization? Did you emerge |
| 2:04.2 | with blisters when you read it? And number two, what does it say? I think blistering is fair |
| 2:11.4 | comment here. And it is 27 pages. I haven't finished. And Eric Columbus will help me out, I'm sure, on things I miss. But the one of the, I guess the gist of it, there were two grand jury subpoenas that, as you probably know, Janine Piro issued to, actually to the Fed, I think, but aiming to put pressure |
| 2:38.3 | on Powell, Jerome Powell, the chair. And the final line is, or nearly final, a mountain of |
| 2:48.3 | evidence suggests that the government served these subpoenas on the board |
| 2:51.7 | to pressure its chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning. On the other side of the |
| 2:57.9 | scale, the government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime. |
| 3:04.4 | Indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the court can only conclude |
... |
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