Hey, y'all.

This is Question Everything from KCRW in Placement Theory.

I'm Brian Reed.

And today we're joined by somebody that a bunch of you have been asking us pretty urgently to get back on the show.

Someone who, when we had him on last fall, was dedicating himself to preparing for this very moment,

a moment when Donald Trump would be trying to overpower the Constitution.

I'm a little boldover

by the pace of events

and by the tornado

of illegal actions

by the president.

Barton Gellman on the front lines.

Stick around.

Over the last month, a bunch of you have asked us to follow up with Barton Gellman.

Barton's a legendary investigative reporter.

He's won three Pulitzer Prizes.

He worked for the Washington Post for years, covering national security and other beats. He was one of the reporters Edward Snowden came to with the massive NSA leak. And then he reported on threats to our election system for the Atlantic. We had Barton on the show back in September before the election. If you haven't heard that episode, go check it out. It's one of my favorites. It's in our feed called The Journalist and the Firefighter. In that episode, we told the story of how a little

more than a year ago, Barton decided to suddenly quit journalism to join the Brennan Center for

Justice, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Barton joined the Brennan Center with a very specific mission

to prepare for a possible second Trump term.

He wanted to strategize ways for how to legally and tactically restrain Donald Trump from taking authoritarian acts as president.

And he'd lost faith in journalism's effectiveness at doing that.

...