Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, March 27
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 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 Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff, discuss a judge granting a preliminary injunction in Anthropic’s suit challenging its supply chain designation, a Friday morning hearing in Fulton County’s suit over the federal government seizing ballots from 2020, a new push from the Trump administration to investigate New York AG Letitia James, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is Friday, March 27th, 20206. It is 4 o'clock p.m. in Washington, D.C. and you are watching |
| 0:19.1 | Lawfare Live. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, |
| 0:23.1 | and I am here with Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff, |
| 0:28.0 | both senior editors of Lawfare, |
| 0:30.4 | in what has been a comparatively light week |
| 0:35.0 | in the Trials and Tribulations department of the Trump administration. |
| 0:41.9 | But yesterday evening was definitely a tribulation. |
| 0:47.5 | If your name happens to be Pete Pegseth, the Northern District of California picked you up bodily and threw you down on the mat in the first page of a 43-page opinion and then kicked you over and over and over again for 43 pages. |
| 1:10.2 | Molly, let's start with Anthropic versus Department of War. |
| 1:17.3 | And the really important question, did Judge Lynn reform her ways and refer to the Secretary |
| 1:26.5 | of Defense as the Secretary of Defense and the Department |
| 1:32.3 | of Defense by its proper name? Or did she keep humoring this delusional renaming and false consciousness |
| 1:43.4 | on the part of a giant federal agency. |
| 1:46.9 | If I recall correctly, there was a lot of DOW in there, but if I missed something, let me know. |
| 1:52.5 | No, you are quite correct. She did not reform her ways, and I'm salty about it. Well, we will say Department of Defense as many times as possible |
| 2:06.4 | in discussing the case to make up for it. But I fear that as the litigation continues, |
| 2:12.1 | we're going to hear much more Department of War and Secretary of War. I don't know that |
| 2:15.7 | anybody said Sec War, which for some reason grates on me even more. So as long as they keep doing the extended title or full title, |
| 2:22.7 | I'll feel a little better. All right. So what did we make of this opinion? Is there any good news |
| 2:32.5 | in it for the government? |
| 2:42.1 | Oof. Not really. The only good news in it, I suppose, is that it stayed for seven days to give them time to appeal and presumably to seek a stay from the Ninth Circuit. But otherwise, |
| 2:48.5 | it looked pretty bad for the government. I mean, really, they lost |
... |
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