The Lawfare Podcast

It is often said that “Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.” Such distortions of history can lead to trouble, as the world witnessed last year when Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to “denazify” the neighboring country—one with a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust.

On Sunday, May 28, Turkey held a bitterly contested run-off election, with incumbent presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan winning reelection against opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Soli Özel, Senior Lecturer at Kadir Has University in Istanbul and a columnist at Habertürk daily newspaper, to discuss what was at stake in this election and the future of Turkey as Erdoğan’s next five-year term marks his 25th year in higher office. 

Thursday was sentencing day for some senior Oath Keepers, and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff spent the day in court listening to and watching the sentencing of Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs, two Oath Keepers chieftains who were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. They got a lot of time: Rhodes got 18 years; Meggs got 12. They also got a terrorism enhancement. It was a bad day if you're an Oath Keeper and a really bad day if you're a Proud Boy. 

The Supreme Court last week issued the biggest opinion in the history of the internet—except that it didn’t. Rather, it issued an opinion in a case involving the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), finding there was no cause of action and thus dismissed for further consideration the biggest case in the history of the internet.