Chatter: Covering the Justice Department During and After Trump, with Katie Benner
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2023
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Katie Benner is a features writer for the New York Times, who covered the Justice Department for a number of years beginning in 2017. In a wide-ranging conversation, she sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief to talk about the challenges of walking into the Justice Department beat during the Trump administration and covering the post-election uprising within the department. She also gave a textured assessment of the department’s criminal investigation of Trump and other Jan. 6 defendants. And she talks about what makes a Justice Department source, and how the department has changed in the era of Merrick Garland.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
- The article, "Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General," by Katie Benner.
- The article," Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality," by Erica L. Green and Katie Benner
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:35.3 | This week on chatter, Katie Benner of the New York Times on covering the Justice Department during the |
| 0:43.8 | crazy. One of the interesting things about the Trump era is that Trump made it very politically |
| 0:53.1 | costly to try to hold him to account. Look at what happened to everybody who touched the |
| 0:58.6 | Mueller investigation. So after January 6th, you had a department that was still pretty shell-shocked. |
| 1:07.1 | You know, a history when we live it changes us and we're not the same people we were before the |
| 1:12.1 | thing happened and departments institutions are made up of people. You know, the Trump era |
| 1:17.6 | has forced people to ask questions they didn't have to ask before. |
| 1:23.1 | So in a post-Trump era to say we're just going to go back to regular order I thought that is |
| 1:27.5 | either extremely naive or just something that's very comforting to say. |
| 1:38.1 | So Katie, I want to start with a time I think it was right around the beginning of the Trump |
| 1:44.6 | administration when you emailed me and we'd never met and told me you were coming to DC to cover |
| 1:53.5 | the Justice Department and asked me to have coffee. And so and we met at Java House and we had a |
| 2:04.3 | protracted conversation about covering the Justice Department. It was right when you came to |
| 2:09.1 | Washington. So let's start there. When was that and how long have you been covering the Justice |
| 2:16.0 | Department for the New York Times? Oh my goodness, guess I took the job in December. I might have |
| 2:21.7 | been November of 2017. Donald Trump had been president not even a year and I was supposed to start |
| 2:28.7 | on January whatever it was right after New Year's Eve, right after New Year's maybe January |
| 2:33.1 | 3rd, 4th, 5th around that period and that's when we would have met. And I remember coming to |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Lawfare Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.