This is Brian Lair's Daily Politics Podcasts from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, January 16th.

It's the Brian Lair Show on WNYC.

I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom filling in for Brian today.

He's out because he's taking care of a family member who's dealing with some health issues.

As we were thinking about some of the this week's top news stories, we noticed a pretty striking theme running through a lot of them.

Whether it was Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's announcement

that he was under criminal investigation, or the decision by six career prosecutors in Minneapolis

to resign their posts over a push to investigate the widow of Renee Macklin Good, the woman

who was shot and killed by immigration and customs enforcement officer last week.

And even the norm-breaking search of a Washington Post reporter's home on Wednesday in connection

with an investigation related to a government contractor, in theory. These stories are just the tip

of the iceberg, of course, and the constant in all of them is the Justice Department, a powerful agency with broad authority that in previous administrations operated with a fierce independence.

So when we decided we would take a look at the state of the Justice Department after a full year of the second Trump presidency.

We couldn't think of anyone better than my next guest to help us dig into this week's news

and to help us understand how we got here. Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times

magazine. She also contributes to the Times editorials on legal affairs.

She teaches at Yale Law School where she is the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law and co-host of Slate's weekly podcast political gab fest.

Emily, welcome back to the show. It's always great to speak with you.

For having me.

Emily, I ticked off some of this week's stories, and we're going to dig into those in a moment.

But as someone who has been studying the evolution of the Justice Department, how are you viewing some of what we're seeing today?

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