Ryan Lucas
Ryan Lucas covers the Justice Department for NPR.
He focuses on the national security side of the Justice beat, including counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Lucas also covers a host of other justice issues, including the Trump administration's "tough-on-crime" agenda and anti-trust enforcement.
Before joining NPR, Lucas worked for a decade as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press based in Poland, Egypt and Lebanon. In Poland, he covered the fallout from the revelations about secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, he reported on the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the turmoil that followed. He also covered the Libyan civil war, the Syrian conflict and the rise of the Islamic State. He reported from Iraq during the U.S. occupation and later during the Islamic State takeover of Mosul in 2014.
He also covered intelligence and national security for Congressional Quarterly.
Lucas earned a bachelor's degree from The College of William and Mary, and a master's degree from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.
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Founded during the Cold War to project American soft power and foreign policy expertise, the federally funded nonprofit think tank is now in the White House's crosshairs. -
While Trump's executive order takes aim at Perkins Coie, the judge said it "casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportion across the entire legal profession." -
Perkins Coie's lawsuit is in response to President Trump's executive order that accused the firm of "dishonest and dangerous activity" that sought to overturn laws and elections and of allegedly discriminatory DEI policies. -
New Justice Department leaders say past enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is "the prototypical example" of what they call "the weaponization of law enforcement." -
President Trump has named right-wing podcast host Dan Bongino as the FBI's deputy director. That means Bongino will be the number two official behind the recently confirmed director Kash Patel.
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Republicans welcomed Kash Patel's confirmation, seeing him as someone who can fix the FBI's alleged targeting of conservatives in recent years. -
The No. 2 acting official at the DOJ, Emil Bove, has been shaking up the agency and its past work on the 2021 Capitol riot. But he also has his own history with Jan. 6 cases.
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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. -
The disconnect between Emil Bove's aggressive stance at the time to hold rioters accountable — and his current hostility toward the Jan. 6 probe — has troubled some former colleagues. -
The DOJ is moving to implement President Trump's agenda for the agency, including reevaluating past criminal cases against him.
