What it came down to was instead of being someone who is a fact finder and who pursues the facts of an investigation wherever they go, I am being told what the conclusion is in advance.

And I'm also, in some cases, being told who to target. And that is like just wildly at odds with how the Justice Department and the FBI are supposed to operate.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, with Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing in Law at Yale Law School, and the co-host of Slate's weekly podcast,

Political Gab Fest. The threat now has much less to do with conservative liberal divides

and much more to do with just straight up like what does the rule of law mean in the United States

is the Justice Department, you know, simply a weapon that the

president pulls out of his pocket to inflict damage on anyone he wants or to do favors for

anyone he wants.

Today we're talking about three ambitious stories published over the past few months by

Emily and her New York Times colleagues.

In this trilogy of oral histories, they spoke with

dozens and dozens of current and former government employees at the DOJ, FBI, and DHS about their

experiences navigating the upheaval of the second Trump administration from the inside.

So, Emily, I wanted to start with just a bit of the backstory behind this

package of oral history, ambitious stories that you and colleagues have done at the New York

Times on first, the unraveling of the Justice Department, and then there was a deep dive on

Cash Patel's FBI, and then most recently a piece called The View from Inside DHS.

So I'm curious, as I said, about the backstory.

What motivated these stories and also how you decided to cover them.

I mean, it's quite an ambitious project.

You spoke with dozens and dozens of former and current government employees.

So why this big deployment of editorial resources at the times to cover it the way that you and your colleagues did?

...