Welcome to Talking Fed's one-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating

and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. We know all too well about

the public side of the abuses that the Department of Justice has instituted in its policies,

legal positions, appointments, and more, but we know only snippets of the reaction inside the building where the ethos of justice without fear or favor

and of reverence for the work of career attorneys always reigned until Trump and Bondi came to town.

And I've been doing all I can, including with the few survivors I know, to

understand the post-apocalyptic landscape at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. Now a friend of the

podcast and a friend of mine has written the article, I've been waiting for for months.

A new piece out a couple days ago on the collapse of the Justice Department as we once knew it.

And I got to say it is, and you see this as a refrain in her really expertly reported piece,

worse than you could have thought, heartbreaking, infuriating,

astonishing, and more.

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, where this piece ran Sunday

morning.

She co-hosts Slate's weekly Political Gab Fest podcast.

She teaches at Yale Law School, where she's the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law. And she's an award-winning and best-selling author,

most recently charged the new movement to transform American prosecution and en masse incarceration.

Lots of recent reporting in the magazine about Trump 2.0, but this sweeping account of where things

stand and how the DOJ has been hollowed out is drawn from 60 interviews with veterans of the

department who recently resigned or were

fired from the DOJ, leaving them free to talk with Emily and her colleagues. And much of the

account in the piece is told for the first time. Thank you so much, Emily Basilan, for

...