Carrie Johnson
Carrie Johnson is a justice correspondent for the Washington Desk.
She covers a wide variety of stories about justice issues, law enforcement, and legal affairs for NPR's flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as well as the newscasts and NPR.org.
Johnson has chronicled major challenges to the landmark voting rights law, a botched law enforcement operation targeting gun traffickers along the Southwest border, and the Obama administration's deadly drone program for suspected terrorists overseas.
Prior to coming to NPR in 2010, Johnson worked at the Washington Post for 10 years, where she closely observed the FBI, the Justice Department, and criminal trials of the former leaders of Enron, HealthSouth, and Tyco. Earlier in her career, she wrote about courts for the weekly publication Legal Times.
Her work has been honored with awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the Society for Professional Journalists, SABEW, and the National Juvenile Defender Center. She has been a finalist for the Loeb Award for financial journalism and for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for team coverage of the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.
Johnson is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Benedictine University in Illinois.
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Ed Martin advanced bogus claims about election fraud in swing states in 2020, and he spoke at a boisterous rally in Washington the day before the siege on the Capitol. -
An order to dismiss the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams has sent the Justice Department into a crisis. Several top prosecutors resigned rather than obey orders to dismiss the case. -
Three senior prosecutors resigned from the DOJ after refusing to drop a corruption case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. It's raising alarms about whether politics influences decisions in Trump's DOJ.
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The acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and two top Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C., resigned after the case against New York City's mayor war order dropped. -
DOJ had already dropped the case against Trump. Now a federal appeals court has formally dismissed the remainder of that case against Trump's valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira. -
A veteran Justice Department lawyer has left the agency and is starting a new group to help advise and defend government lawyers under attack from the new administration.
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In little more than a week, the Trump administration has fired people who prosecuted the president and reassigned other career officials. -
Kash Patel is a frequent critic of the FBI who has spread conspiracy theories. He gets a Senate hearing Thursday to run the agency he wants to shake up.
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In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote that he did not believe they "could be trusted to faithfully implement the President's agenda." -
On his first day in the White House, President Donald Trump gave commutations and pardons to every defendant charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Many assaulted police.
