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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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." -
The judge said it was "reasonable" the Justice Department interpreted Trump's Jan. 6 commutations to cover the defendants' prison sentences and wipe away their terms of supervised release. -
The full implications of designating the cartels as terrorist organizations will depend, in large part, to how the administration follows through. -
Rhodes was convicted by a federal jury of sedition conspiracy in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump pardoned him on Monday. -
Pam Bondi got full support from Republicans but faced repeated questions from Democrats about whether she would protect the Justice Department from political influence. -
The long-awaited report from DOJ Inspector General office comes nearly four years after a crowd of Donald Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden's election win. -
Wray told employees at an FBI town hall that he is resigning next month to "avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray." President-elect Donald Trump called the resignation "a great day for America." -
But the department's internal watchdog found no evidence of political motivation by federal prosecutors. -
The pardon comes in the last weeks of President Biden's time in office and despite his public assurances in the past that he would neither pardon nor commute his son's sentence. -
President-elect Donald Trump tapped Matthew Whitaker as his ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Trump has long criticized for taking advantage of U.S. defense spending.
