Hey, this is Alan and I am in Mooresville, North Carolina currently waiting in line to pick up my kids after school.

It's a whole lot of sitting and waiting, but it's also the perfect time to get my dose of the NPR politics podcast.

This one was recorded at 132 p.m. on Thursday, August 4th, 2022.

Remember that things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show!

Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Usma Khalid, I cover the White House.

I'm Carrie Johnson, I cover the Justice Department.

And we've got a special guest on the podcast today. Tom dries back from NPR's Investigations team is here with us. Good to have you on.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So before we dive in to the main topic of our podcast today, Carrie, since you cover the Justice Department and you are with us,

we have some news into the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor from the Justice Department.

Can you fill us in on what's the latest?

Some big news. In fact, the Attorney General, Marit Garland, announced that four current and former Louisville police officers have been charged with federal crimes related to the death of Breonna Taylor two years ago.

Two of the officers allegedly submitted what they knew was a false affidavit to get a search warrant for her home and setting off a chain of events that resulted in her death to other officers at least conspired after the fact to obstruct justice, one lied to the federal investigators.

And then the fourth officer is charged with using excessive force for shooting 10 times through the window after the search was executed. So those are long awaited charges.

Remember Breonna Taylor's death along with George Floyd's death at the hands of police helped us spur an international movement for police accountability and racial justice.

Now the Justice Department is involved here.

Thank you for that update, Carrie. And I'm looking forward to hearing more of your reporting on that today on the show. We're going to shift gears and we're going to look at two sides of the ongoing litigation surrounding the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Tom, there have been concerns that the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were not isolated incidents, but in fact a harbinger of things to come and that in fact there was going to be a more organized effort heading into this fall with the midterm elections or even into 2024 and and key to this effort is a Republican lawyer named Clita Mitchell. Remind us who she is.

Yeah, so Clita Mitchell's a long time Republican elections attorney. I think the reason many listeners might have heard of her in the first place though was from this audio of a January 2nd 2021 call.

So this is right before the Capitol right when Donald Trump was on the phone with Georgia election officials and he was pressuring them to essentially overturn the election result in Georgia.

Right find 11,000 votes he kept saying Clita Mitchell was on that call offering backup since then she has been subpoenaed by the Select Committee investigating January 6th and she's also been subpoenaed by a grand jury as part of a Georgia district attorneys criminal investigation into Trump's election efforts after the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, she is now part of this new organization called the Election Integrity Network which is under the umbrella of the conservative partnership institute a major pro Trump nonprofit in Washington DC.

...