Benjamin Wittes is the editor-in-chief and a co-founder of Lawfare, the nonprofit national-security-law publication he launched in 2010 with Robert Chesney and Jack Goldsmith. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he serves as research director in public law (Sources: en.wikipedia.org, lawfaremedia.org).
Background
Wittes was an editorial writer for The Washington Post before founding Lawfare (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Lawfare
Lawfare was founded as a blog on September 1, 2010 and is produced by The Lawfare Institute in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, where its 2015 relaunch was announced. Wittes co-founded it with Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration's Justice Department, and Chesney, who served on an Obama administration detention-policy task force. Contributors include legal scholars, law students, and former officials of both administrations. The publication is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and Roger Parloff serves alongside Wittes as an editor (Source: en.wikipedia.org). In June 2023 Wittes described Lawfare as having become "a full-featured multimedia magazine" (Source: lawfaremedia.org).
Through Lawfare, Wittes is a frequent commentator on national-security law and policy, a remit that by the mid-2020s increasingly encompassed the legal and governance questions raised by AI in cybersecurity, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and intelligence.
Commentary and public role
Lawfare's coverage of intelligence and legal matters relating to the first Trump administration brought the site substantial increases in readership. In February 2017, President Trump quoted a line from a Wittes post criticizing the reasoning in the Ninth Circuit ruling that blocked his first refugee-and-travel ban; Wittes, who supported the ruling, said Trump had distorted the article's argument (Source: en.wikipedia.org). In May 2017 Wittes was the principal source for a New York Times report on President Trump's interactions with FBI Director James Comey, a friend of Wittes, and the circumstances of Comey's dismissal (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Assessments of the publication differ. Columnist David Ignatius described Lawfare as "one of the most fair-minded chroniclers of national security issues," while attorney and journalist Glenn Greenwald criticised it for what he called a "courtier Beltway mentality" devoted to "serving, venerating and justifying the acts of those in power" (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Relationships
- related: Lawfare — publication he co-founded and edits.
- related: Robert Chesney, Jack Goldsmith — Lawfare co-founders.