Lawfare Daily: The Year That Was: 2025
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every year, Lawfare publishes a retrospective of the year that passed. Today, we’re pleased to bring you an audio debrief of that article, The Year That Was: 2025, which you can read in full on our website starting December 31.
Lawfare is focused on producing timely, rigorous, and non-partisan analysis of “hard national security choices.” And this year, that work was—to use an expression as tired as we are—like drinking from a firehose. We did our best to keep up. We published more than 1,000 articles, podcasts, videos, research papers, and primary source documents. We did livestream round-ups and rapid-response videos. We produced five different podcasts and an investigative video series. We built data visualizations and trackers to make sense of complicated unfolding events. You can find all that and more for free on our website, lawfaremedia.org.
It’s impossible to capture everything that happened in 2025 in the world of national security. But here’s what stood out to the Lawfare team—and what they have to say about. In this episode, you’ll hear from Executive Editor Natalie Orpett on Lawfare’s work in 2025 and from Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes on The Situation. You’ll hear from Senior Editors Anna Bower on DOGE, Roger Parloff on the Alien Enemies Act, Molly Roberts on politicization of the Justice Department, Eric Columbus on impoundments, Scott R. Anderson on war powers, and Kevin Frazier on AI and the states. You’ll hear from Public Interest Fellows Loren Voss on domestic deployments of the military, and Ariane Tabatabai on foreign policy. You’ll hear from our Managing Editor, Tyler McBrien, on our narrative podcast series, Escalation. You’ll hear from Associate Editors Katherine Pompilio on the Jan. 6 pardons and Olivia Manes on rolling back internal checks at the Justice Department. You’ll hear from our Fellow Jakub Kraus on AI, and you’ll hear from Contributing Editor Renée DiResta on election integrity capacity.
And that’s just a sampling of Lawfare’s work.
It’s The Year That Was: 2025. We’ll see you next year.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, lawfare listeners. This is our official wrap-up year-end issue. We have a whole lot of people coming on to talk about what happened in their parts of the world and on lawfare, in their particular areas of specialty over the course of what has been a wild and |
| 0:24.0 | woolly 2025. And as you listen to this episode, I want you to think about all the value across |
| 0:33.5 | all these different domains that lawfare brings to your life. And I want you to think about that |
| 0:39.1 | when we ask for your support. We don't do it very often. We don't go all NPR on you and have |
| 0:47.4 | pledge drives or anything. But lawfare is a 501c3 nonpartisan nonprofit organization. |
| 0:55.0 | We cover a broad range of issues on national security law and policy to keep you informed. |
| 1:02.6 | But we can't do it without your support. |
| 1:05.6 | This year, nearly a third of lawfair's revenue has come from people like you. If you are not already |
| 1:12.8 | contributing to lawfare, please change that. Go to lawfaremedia.org slash support. You can be a |
| 1:21.4 | monthly supporter on Patreon or substack, or you can make a donation on Give Butter on a one-time basis. If you are |
| 1:30.7 | already giving as much as you can or want to get involved in other ways, please go to |
| 1:36.8 | lawfaremedia.org slash get involved. Thank you for listening, and thank you for supporting |
| 1:43.9 | lawfare. |
| 1:48.2 | I'm Natalie Orpet, executive editor of Lawfare, and this is the year that was 2025. |
| 1:55.0 | If you're a regular Lawfare reader, you'll know that we publish this piece every year to look back at the year that's coming to an end. |
| 2:01.4 | This year, we thought we'd do an audio version of it as well. |
| 2:04.4 | But please do be sure to go to our website, lawfaremedia.org, and read the full piece there |
| 2:09.1 | so that you can get everyone's full analysis and also see links to a lot of the work we've done this year. |
| 2:15.5 | 2025 really made a mockery of what I've said in the past few years of the year that was, |
| 2:20.5 | where I claimed it had been a very busy year in law fair's world of hard national security |
| 2:25.3 | choices. |
| 2:26.6 | To use an expression that is almost as tired as we all are, it was a lot like drinking |
... |
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