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This episode contains references to sexual assault. Please use discretion.

There are those dogs that are the teeny tiny things that believe they're in a, you know, giant, great, danes body.

And in some respects, you know, that does capture me, that I tend to bite off a lot, but I am insistent on chewing and swallowing it down.

This is Laura Coates. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. When she was applying to college, she was asked what she liked to do for fun.

And she said she liked to write imaginary speeches about what she would have said at different moments in history if she had been in charge.

After college, she decided to go to law school. And then in 2008, she got a job with the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.

Much of her work involved investigating voter intimidation. As part of the job, Laura traveled around the United States, monitoring polling places.

I went all across the country and those me, cases that you traditionally think of as, you know, below the sort of southern southern states to those that are in the mid Atlantic and the west coast, wherever there were injustices regarding voting cases.

And the my colleagues there were phenomenal and the work they do continues to be phenomenal.

But over time, Laura says it got frustrating. There was a lot of red tape, pushback from state election officials. And she felt like her cases weren't even getting off the ground.

One of her colleagues in the Civil Rights Division often told Laura stories about a six-month detail he'd done with the US Attorney's Office.

She says she spoke about it. So, glowingly, that Laura decided she wanted to get away from all the bureaucracy and get into the courtroom.

And then in 2011, she was offered a job with the DC-US Attorney's Office as a criminal prosecutor.

And I went to my colleague expecting him to sort of perhaps pat me on the back to acknowledge the shared camaraderie and the experiences I was about to have.

And then normally, jovial, very charismatic character that he was totally changed.

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