I'm Brian Boydler, editor in chief of Crooked.com, and you're listening to Crooked Conversations.

For today's episode, I spoke with Venita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference

on Civil and Human Rights, and former head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department

of Justice under Barack Obama.

She joined me to discuss the Civil Rights Movement's resistance to the Trump administration and

the threats Trump poses to the rule of law and America's democratic institutions.

If there's tampering with the Mueller investigation, I think we all need to be out in the streets,

every in every community.

I hope you enjoy it.

The need of Gupta, thanks for agreeing to have this conversation.

Great to be here.

So we're sitting in your office at the headquarters of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human

Rights of which you are president.

So how did you end up here?

So I ended up here after stepping down at the Justice Department on January 19, 2017.

I took some time off and wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next.

And very soon, just days into post-enaguration, the travel ban came out of the Trump administration,

and it just felt like from there on, there was one assault on Civil and Human Rights after

another.

And I just knew I couldn't sit on the sidelines as much as there was a part of me that

wanted to crawl under us so far for the next four years.

And so I wanted to go someplace that was multi-issued that had a real platform for organizing

...