DOJ Reporter Panel Transcript: March 7, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00):
Welcome back from lunch, and as I was telling these folks that there must be a news blackout at DOJ because they’re all here. Pretty much everybody, easily the most senior. No offense. Carrie and Carrie, most senior
(00:22):
Correspondence at DOJ we’re fortunate to have with us today as we continue looking at how DOJ functions. And I think it’s fair to say no agency and government has been subjected to such a hostile takeover than DOJ and Trump 2.0 from purges of career officials that continued through yesterday who were deemed to be disloyal to the dismissal of criminal cases that have nothing to do with the strength of evidence. Think about that for a moment. But few know the department better than the members of this panel, Pierre Thomas at a BC News, Devlin Barrett of the New York Times, Kerry Johnson of NPR and Perry Stein of the Washington Post. Again, I’m not sure where they have found the time, but we are very grateful to them to come and discuss DOJs head spinning transformation, what it means for the Press Corps and pursuing accountability at breakneck pace. So please welcome this distinguished group.
(01:38):
I wanted to start out just by asking a question. It is about accountability and given the disdain for the press that this administration clearly has what people and lawmakers on the hill have expressed as well. I wonder if the notion of accountability, as you know it has changed and whether it affects the way you report. I mean by that I mean it used to be that you’d write a story and then members of the administration would react, change policy, whatever lawmakers would pass legislation that would reacting to what you wrote. And I wonder if a new formula has to be developed to sort of pursue the accountability that used to be inherent to the work.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (02:37):
I’ll take a horrible first stab at that. Thanks for having me and thank you for the microphone. Sincerely. So I think a couple things have changed. One, the formula you described I think doesn’t exist anymore in part just because lawmakers don’t really pass legislation anymore. That used to be a much larger part of the job. I don’t come across that very much. I’m not saying they never pass a bill, but I’m saying most of the bills they pass involve renaming buildings, which aren’t big policy decisions. So I think in that sense, has the sort of tempo and rhythms of accountability work in Washington changed? Sure. But I also think whatever people think of us on good days and bad days, and maybe they never think of us, some people, the doesn’t stay the same, the job doesn’t change. The accountability work continues. And I think it is only a reminder of what I sort of already know and already do is that I don’t think we, in the terms of reporting, should really sort of be angry or shouty when we do reporting.
(03:52):
I think we all cover pretty important subjects like the cases we cover, the issues we cover, the people who make big decisions that have pretty big consequences in the country. Those are important things. And the fact that we’re not shouting about it does not mean that it’s not important, does not mean that we’re not fully committed to the work. So my answer would be no. In a broader sense, I don’t think our piece of the accountability dance has changed at all, even if other actors in town have sort of changed what they do and how they think about it.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (04:32):
Yeah, I just said that one of the things I’ve been hearing from sources since January or December, I have a mic, just
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (04:40):
The mic. Can
Carrie Johnson/NPR (04:41):
You hear me? Not
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (04:42):
Good.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (04:43):
One of the things I’ve been hearing from sources since December or January is that they don’t necessarily count on members of Congress to step in and act as a check on most of the administration’s actions, at least not yet. And as a result, what I’m hearing from people is the journalists are where the accountability needs to happen. And I think that’s true and I think that’s a very important responsibility and one that we work pretty hard every day to try to carry out, even though it’s early days, the administration has backtracked on a few occasions because of public opinion. And as we get closer to the midterm elections next year, that may happen more often as may members of Congress start to act. But for the time being, people like us are sometimes the only avenue for allegations of wrongdoing and whistleblowers and the like. And so I think our job has never been more important in the 28, 29 years I’ve been a rope order in dc
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (05:49):
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Perry Stein/Washington Post (05:50):
I would also say I have been thinking of this question a lot because it does look very, as they’ve all said, look very different. This administration, I covered it during, I covered DOJ during Biden and before that covered the mayor and local stuff. And when you think of accountability, you usually think of, oh, I just found this wrongdoing. The administration’s going to be super pissed at me. That was a great accountability story that I did. But in this administration, I’m finding sometimes accountability I think just looks like, you know what? There’s so much news going on. I think it’s important to just get this on the record to say, look, this is what happened. And that may be the accountability story, and this is kind of a thing that I’m also learning. I didn’t cover Trump one, that what you think may think of as a negative story that really shows wrongdoing or shows something that’s different, they may think it looks really good, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not an accountability story.
(06:49):
It doesn’t have to be a got you story. I just did one story right now that I thought, oh, this is a pretty good account. It required source work, it required all this stuff and what you think of as traditional accountability reporting. But I think that the administration thought that that story made them look really good while others thought it made them look really bad. But I still think it doesn’t matter how people perceive it, and it is still accountability, it is still on the record and it is still open for people to read and understand what’s going on.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (07:21):
I think if there’s going to be a theme today that you’re going to find throughout this conversation is that whatever the dynamic is and each administration, each iteration of an administration, the dynamic changes. And while some may be perceived this to be a more hostile environment for journalists, we have to be consistent in what we do and how we do it. That is what I believe. I was at a dinner last night in which I was MCing in. One of the honorees was Leslie Stahl. And she made a very profound point that in many ways journalists are to be on the battlefield sometimes taking incoming but not responding in kind. That’s not our job to say, oh, you’re bad, you awful people. No, the job is to report, present the information and keep doing it over and over and over again, period. And to a degree, if we can keep it that simple, and I know it’s more complicated than that, but in essence that’s what we have to do even. And I think temperature rises. We have to even be more disciplined to focus on what, where, why, and to show up even when people don’t return our phone calls and let them know, look, the story’s going to still get covered. Now the challenge is when sometimes who an administration chooses to speak to or not to speak to, I can’t present a challenge,
(09:15):
But we still have a job to do. And for example, we can cover the justice department even if no one ever briefs us, right? Because they’re going to put out a release, there’ll be a court document and we can go cover the document and then use sourcing that we have to come up with our best version of what we can determine to be. The truth is, at that time and at some point at the Justice Department, there’s always a moment I found whether people come in and I think you would agree with me, a lot of the people usually who are the PR public affairs directors are usually people who come from the political side. If you look at their background, they were with the RNC or they with the DNC or they were with this campaign or that campaign. And then what I found is something will happen that is significant. It could be a mass shooting, it could be a terrorist attack or whatever. And they realize that we’re coming to them for information that’s not about politics. We are trying to find what happened, how many people died, who was responsible. And so I hope that that will always be the thing that at least on our beat that ends up driving it over time.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (10:37):
One follow up and I’ll throw it out to you all, but given the pace of things today, and I’ve never seen it quite like this goes beyond Trump one and at the Justice Department, especially FBI, how difficult has it been to pick the piece that’s going to resonate? And I see your names all over multiple stories a day, but I wonder whether or not there’s more thought going into what you choose to focus on versus the last Trump term when we’re literally running from fire to fire. But
Perry Stein/Washington Post (11:27):
Yeah, I mean I’ve always thought story selection is the hardest part about being a beat journalist or I should say one of the most important parts that can make it so you’re successful or not successful on a beat. And I think it has never been more true this administration because you just can’t do everything. And I think, I mean we’re only, I don’t know, two years, two months into it, two months. And we’re are still constantly having talks with my editor as to what makes sense to do. And sometimes it’s as random as like, well, that kind of interests me, but I think we have to pick and what is the most important. Sometimes we say, okay, maybe we can wait three days and see if we can get three more examples of this and do a bigger story. Or sometimes we mess up and we see that another one of our competitors has a story that we opted not to have and we think that, oh God, we probably should have done that. And I think it is constantly, I hope we get better at it, but it’s a huge, we just can’t do everything. And sometimes you just have to say, well, it’s important it gets covered and I’m glad my competitors covered it. But I think that’s a constant conversation. And I don’t think, I mean I’m interested to hear their answers, but I think it’s a good question because one that I think we’re all going to have to be constantly figuring out throughout this administration.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (12:54):
This ends will be very boring for Perry. I preach about this a lot when she and I work together. The job is mostly triage. I would argue if you’re doing a beat, well, the job is mostly triage. It’s especially triage right now because it’s a new administration and they’re throwing a lot of stuff out there most days. I think there’s a danger when you’re very busy. I think there’s a danger of overthinking and over planning. In my own head I try to dumb things down as much as possible. And one of the things I always fall back on is I used to be a cops reporter, just a straight street crime reporter. And when you do that, you sort of learn that you always have to give yourself the energy and the time to handle the next shooting because whatever you’re doing, if you plan out your day so that every hour is full, you will have screwed yourself. Sorry to use bad words. I know there’s some children here. And so I deliberately try as much as possible to both do triage and as much as possible put count on gap time because I assume life and reality and chaos will fill that gap.
Nicholas Anastácio | National Journal (14:09):
Excuse me, get you a water. Thank you.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (14:12):
That’s a great answer. And from a network television perspective, it’s a little easier because we are only going to do the broadest and most important story. And sometimes the challenge is trying to figure out, okay, I’ve been collecting this fodder on these sundry things and when does it coalesce to enough where I can get it on? Good morning, thank you so much. Get it on Good Morning America or World News tonight with David Muir or the Sunday talk show. But again, you fall back on what’s the most interesting, what’s the most relevant, what’s the most important and what can be done in a way where I can explain it to people where they will walk away with something.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (15:09):
NPRI think has the smallest team of almost anybody. We have two people, including myself, and I’ve been at least part-time for the last year, mostly a year working on an investigation. So that’s why it took a year because it’s been kind of busy because we only have two people and we have two hours in the morning at our morning show and two hours in the evening in our evening show, and then our website and our newscast. We have to be particularly careful about how we spend our time. And there are certain stories that I will do just for the website and if they work out for the website, then I’ll do them for the radio. For instance, I did a piece last week, two weeks ago, it all blends together about what appears to be a pattern of the new Trump administration dropping cases that seem to have a valid premise against folks who are loyal to the president or loyal to the priorities of the president.
(16:05):
And because that did kind of well on the website, we turned that into radio. Pierre will understand this, he needs pictures, but in order to do a sound rich radio piece, it takes about double the time of typing for living, which I used to do for the first more than half of my career. And so we don’t have a lot of engineers and producers to help us. I have to go out and mic up people and make sure they sound good. And putting that all together takes a little bit of extra time too. The only other thing that I can offer people is an interview with a host. So if we have a Newsmaker, I sometimes will give that person to a host, but sometimes I keep that person for myself because I’m the beat reporter and I don’t know how the host experience will be and I want to make sure it’s a good experience for somebody who’s telling me things.
(16:55):
And so that is a bit of a juggling act as well. We have a website, but we don’t put every single story up there. For example, there was a morning the day after DOJ suggested it wanted to drop the Eric Adams case. A number of things happened, Danielle, soon the acting US attorney in New York left and her resignation letter became public. And then the next day, the resignation letter of another prosecutor in New York became public. And then more and more and more things happened. And so that was a great NPR story because it was like eight or nine very powerful things altogether to create four and a half minutes of really, really good radio. But things don’t always work out that way. And that’s why people like Perry and Devlin in particular have a lot more daily bylines than I do.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (17:52):
Probably a good time. Open it up.
Shrai Popat | PBS NewsHour (17:59):
Thanks so much for doing this Shrai with PBS NewsHour. One question I had for all of you really is where, so how you got to this point in covering the Department of Justice? Did any of you have a legal background as a person that’s understanding the US legal system and the court system and the trial system? I’m kind constantly fascinated by people who have a real really great handle on that. And I’m just curious about how you got to this point and how you came to understand the Department of Justice and the very complex legal system.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (18:29):
Well, I’m not an attorney, but I’m married to one who can be a secret weapon. At times, I just became interested in law, legal, criminal justice issues. And to this point I’ve found it endlessly more interesting than politics, which I shouldn’t say loudly in Washington because there’s an intersection of so many different things, civil rights, security. There are days when there’s a story emanating on justice that may deal with concert tickets, prices, and we did that story last year.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (19:15):
There
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (19:16):
Was a swifty angle to it. So I’ve just found it to be a beat where anyone who’s got a lot of curiosity and willing to work hard can drive.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (19:29):
So I started as a crime reporter in New York. I ended up covering the courts for many years up there. I think that’s really still where my heart is. I would still, in a perfect world, I would still rather be covering trials if I could. There’s nothing to me more interesting than a trial, like hands down. And it’s not even close. I moved down here for family, not even supposed to be here like the line in the movie. And so for me, DOJ is sort of a pretty natural thing. I’m basically a one trick pony. I don’t really know how to do anything else. God help the people who ever have to make that decision for me.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (20:05):
Surprise, winner knew he is, by
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (20:07):
The way. Well, that’s kind of you. So anyway, I just think crime is the most interesting subject I’ve ever covered. It’s always been, I’ve covered other things and there’s just nothing to me as interesting as a trial. Absolutely nothing.
Perry Stein/Washington Post (20:26):
I’ll take it. I started, I’ve been at the Post for a while now and I spent a lot of time on the metro desk. And when I started, I did very kind of local general assignment stuff and I really wanted to cover a beat. I really wanted to learn how to source up, how to do the mix of accountability, breaking news, all that. And I really admired these beat reporters like this. And so they stuck me on, well, I wanted it. I applied DC schools for, I was there for almost five years and my goal was to really learn how to one day do a beat like this and the position, I didn’t particularly have an interest in DOJ, but I knew it as one of the more in all these changing journalism roles, one of the more traditional beats. And the job opened up.
(21:22):
And I guess if you guys want my advice, I would say don’t be discouraged if you don’t get a job. Because what I have learned is that it’s all kind of a crapshoot and timing as what, when you get this, I think Devlin may have more insight into this, but I think the timing worked out. There was an opening, Devlin was my beat partner when I started on this beat two and a half years ago. And he is an expert in this beat. And it gave them a chance to, it gave the paper an opportunity to give someone like me who had no experience in DOJ to be able to try this beat. And so that’s kind of Devlin and everyone on this beat has been very patient and taught me a lot, but it worked out that there was an expert on the beat already. So that’s how I got into it. And so I would say everyone be open-minded and if you don’t get it, realize it’s all about timing and it’s kind of a crapshoot. So
Carrie Johnson/NPR (22:21):
When I was in grad school, I found the one Ls, the young law students more interesting than my fellow grad school folks. So I went to a lot of law school classes with them and I saw them change over the course of the one L year. I don’t know if you’ve known people in this experience, but it can change people’s personalities sometimes for the worst. So I took away from that experience that I did not want to practice law, but I wanted to be law adjacent. Then I moved here in the nineties to work for a paper that kind of no longer exists called Legal Times, covering the local court system. And then I spent many years at the Washington Post. I was hired to cover business. I was not interested in business. I like recriminations, I like litigation, I like fighting, and I like stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which is why covering a trial so satisfying.
(23:13):
So I spent many years at the post covering a wave of white collar fraud scandals in the early two thousands, which was the most fun I’ve ever had. And then I covered the DOJ proper since about 2007. So I’ve covered about four or five different transitions at this moment. And I’m sadly old enough to remember what the W Bush era and politicized hiring the W Bush era felt and looked like. And now I can tell listeners at NPR how things are different now than they were then, but I do think it’s the best being in the world. But it is like triage every single day.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (23:54):
Definitely used the word that stray from my mind. But it sort of brings me back to the core interest that puts a little fire in the belly at a moment’s notice crime, because there’s something about crime and what it says about the human nature. Last night, as I was saying, I was MCing this event and as I’m driving home at 10 15, I get this call from a producer who says, Hey, there’s a story I’m sad to tell you, Pierre, that Mike puts you on Good Morning America tomorrow. And I’m like, ah, I want to get up again early. But he told me about it. It involved three military officials, two active duty and one army veteran who are accused of selling secrets to the Chinese, to the PRC. And when you just think about that, your mind just starts tingling, like, okay, what’s the circumstance?
(24:52):
Why would they do this? And then when I got home and finally parked my car, DOJ did something that they used to be loathed to do. They actually had photographs as a part of the complaint that had been filed. And there was a picture of a guy allegedly standing over a military PowerPoint with his iPhone taking pictures. And I was like, Hmm, how did they find out about that? So again, it is to kind of be to can generate just curiosity where you find yourself even though you’re tired just reading further because you want to figure out, well, what’s the best way to tell this story? And I had all of a minute to do it on live television, but just the story got me through it.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (25:39):
And if I could, I would just brag on Perry for a minute because when she joined the beat, her first week on the beat happened to be the week that they searched Mar-a-Lago. And Perry didn’t even process exactly how significant that was for our lives. But that first night I was just in the office and I just kept saying as loudly and as quietly as I possibly could, we’re so screwed, we’re so screwed. And I did not use the word screwed. And Perry kept saying Why? This seems like a great story.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (26:12):
I was on vacation in Chicago just taking a few days with family, and my wife just saw me go into total depression, kind of like I knew what the next few weeks and months was going to be like.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (26:25):
But total gamers, she dove in. We didn’t throw her into the deep end of the pool, we threw her into the ocean and she’s doing great. So you don’t need to know the beat to learn the beat.
Perry Stein/Washington Post (26:36):
I don’t think they knew that was going to happen when they hired me, but yeah, no, I know, but you
Kevin Johnson/NPF (26:41):
Did it anyway, so
Grant Schwab | The Detroit News (26:55):
Thank you guys. Grant 12 here with the Detroit News, though I’m based here in dc you guys talked about not wanting to return fire. You have a responsibility to not return fire report the who, what, when, where, why. But Carrie, you talked about this giving some context of I was here during the Bush years and this is what it was like. So could you guys maybe talk a little bit about your responsibility for adding context to the stories and kind of communicating how big a deal this is and the Trump administration might see that it’s returning fire for you to say this is a big fricking deal. But I don’t know, maybe if you could just talk a little about that. What do you think your responsibility for adding that context is?
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (27:36):
So the first thing I would say is I always think of it as talking to, I’m writing for a person, I’m talking to a person in my head. I have always used a kid, I went to high school with Jerry Spiegel, no idea what Jerry’s doing these days, but Jerry was a regular guy. Jerry was, I grew up in a rust belt town. Jerry was very much of that town. But I try to think very strongly about who am I trying to explain this to? And if I know who I’m trying to explain it to, I know how I want to say it. I know how much to put in context. And to be honest, we don’t get paid to write poetry and we don’t get paid to be pretty. We get paid to explain why this matters. That’s the only real value add we have to the thing.
(28:19):
So context is very important and I think the internet has only made that more important because social media and the internet generally are sort of like anticon machines. And so there’s a great book by a woman named Gino, which is all about how the internet makes mountains into molehill and vice versa. And it was the only place I’ve really sort of seen this explained well. And so our job, I think we are sort of the elevation experts and we are there to tell you this is exactly how tall this mountain is. Now the danger of that is that if you get something as we do every day and you have an hour to figure it out, we’re not going to necessarily guess the elevation perfectly right every time, which is part of the reason why you have to be calm and deliberate and thoughtful and patient even with yourself as you’re explaining this thing. There are plenty of days in the press room where we will be loudly yelling to each other and gesticulating as we read through these documents. But what comes through in the work product is very calm, deliberate and thoughtful work. And so your job is the context machine. Your job is the elevation decider. And so I think everyone here is the best people I know at that.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (29:37):
And the context is often built on perspective, either through experience of covering the beat or learning and reading past stories about the beat. I’ll give you a great example. During the speech to the joint session of Congress, I saw something, but before I went on the air with it, I wanted to make sure my perspective was right. So I had my team make some extra calls. The FBI director showed up at the joint session and I said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. And we made calls and from now maybe Jay Hoover did it and we didn’t know about it, but that was indicative of something and it was indicative of the fact that Patel seems himself as a part of the administration, which every FBI director is. But he was clearly comfortable being there, whereas other FBI directors had looked at that as a venue of politics. So they went the other way. But it’s not my job to judge whether it’s right or wrong, but it is interesting to note it. That’s context. And then one of the things I think I’ve been around the longest of anybody in here, I’m dating myself.
(31:11):
You learn things like for example, every FBI director, new FBI director comes in and I’ve all been men so far, but every FBI director comes in and typically over a period of months, sometimes in a year or so, we’ll clean out the old leadership and install the person, the people that they want around them in the immediate headquarters and in the field offices around the country. Now the difference here is that it happened in a very concentrated way, in a very fast way. And you’re sort of balancing, okay, it is the right of the incoming FBI director to do this, but in what’s different here is there serving and part of an administration where there’s a president who believes that he was wronged, that believes that the FBI and DOJ was politicized to attack him in a way he thought was unfair. And so his retribution was a winning as he said, but then to say, well, I’m not going to let the people, I think that played a key role in that keep those jobs. And the balancing act is explaining that in context and just letting the facts be what they are. So you have something that may have happened in over a period of time and something now happening in a very concentrated way. And our job is to sort of help people understand, well, here’s different about it, what’s important about the difference? And it is exhilarating, but it’s also really intense.
Perry Stein/Washington Post (33:04):
I would add to that context is a way to also just remain objective and to get your point across and show is this bad or is this good or how different it is. But it’s also a way to get your editor on board for something if you think something is important. It’s a way, I mean, I’ll just give a quick example. Last night, I know, and by the way, when we talk about press room, we all know each other because DOJ allows us to work. There’s a room in there and we all work together. That’s how we know Kevin and we all have desks and so we all work together a lot. There was an executive order about Perkins Kuey, which is a law firm, which it’s one law firm that the Trump penalized because punished, whatever word you want to use gave them all these different types of penalties and the histories that they covered, Hillary Clinton’s, they represented the Clinton campaign and revolved in some of the Russia stuff through representation.
(34:03):
And on its face, it sounds kind of boring, one law firm kind of who cares. But I had made a couple calls for the last story for a different story that related to this and what people think is that this has an effect of making it so none of the big law firms will ever take or could have an effect. Maybe this is the intention could have the effect of making it so no big law firms want to take any clients that would go against Trump. And putting it in that context allowed my editor to say, you know what? Maybe we should give you a little more space. Okay, let’s try to get it homepage play, which is important to us in this very competitive news environment. And that was it. And just to gut check myself, I called a conservative leaning attorney to be like, what do you think about this?
(34:59):
He said that he basically said, what I said, it was according to legal experts was the first part I would attribute that to. And I called a more liberal attorney who said the same thing. And that together while also talking to the White House reporter, we were able to get a good story and we proved to our editor, I mean it wasn’t a huge story, but we, I think were able to pitch it to our editors in a way that was like, no, this is more than a brief. This isn’t just a law firm thing. This is a big strategy seemingly of the Trump administration. So I think context is knowing that context and making calls, even if it’s just to pitch a story to your editor is really important.
Nicholas Anastácio | National Journal (35:38):
Hi, thank you for coming. I’m Nicholas Anastasio. I work with National Journal and Hotline. I cover senate campaigns, so I’m more in the politics side, but we’re early enough in the cycle that I’m wanting to look into the candidates that are running so far in many ways to vet them. What are some of the best resources for looking, whether that’s court cases, whether that’s reports, what is the best way to get primary source documentation,
Carrie Johnson/NPR (36:07):
FEC filings Federal Election Commission filings to the extent they’ve run before or already taking in money and have reporting obligations. Certainly court searches assembling a timeline of the person and their prior career and figuring out whether any of those prior career stages offered suggestions or hints as to competence and experience. And since sexual harassment has been kind of my beat for the last year, that’s a question I ask at the start of every reporting process too.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (36:48):
Yeah, so I would say former coworkers are a thing. I always go for, this isn’t any rocket science obviously, but former coworkers really valuable and helpful. And LinkedIn is a resource that when I had to do the most of this did not exist. And depending on what profession those people were in before they became political candidates, LinkedIn can be incredibly useful. So I would always check there, but I will caution, there is no cheap and easy way to do this. One of the things that’s fantastic about journalism, it’s a very labor intensive thing. So when I’m having that emotional reaction to the rate at Mar-a-Lago, my reaction is really about this is going to be so much work, this is going to be more work than we have done and we’ve been doing a lot of work and even in non-emergency settings, just vetting a Senate candidate.
(37:49):
It’s a lot of work. I think if you go into this thinking like, well, I’m going to have a lot of downtime and I’m really going to work on my pottery when I’m not reporting this ain’t that job. This ain’t that kind of life in my experience. And so I do think as a practical matter senate candidates, and I’ll say too, one of the things that’s really happened to the, I used to be a regional reporter before I did this, and there used to be a whole field of reporting that did things like vet senate candidates that did dives in their hometowns in their last hometowns in the last five hometowns. And that doesn’t really exist anymore. So by the time it comes to one of you guys to vet a candidate, you may actually be the first person doing this. And I think one thing that’s changed drastically from when I started is that you had the resource to fall back on of other news organizations who have probably done this over the years as the person rose to the point where they could be a Senate candidate. And that in my experience, has largely fallen away because of what’s happened in the business. So the one thing I would just caution you all is if you’re digging into a Senate candidate and you’re like, well, obviously this person’s life has been gone over with a fine tooth comb already, depending on what state you’re talking about, literally no one has looked two
Carrie Johnson/NPR (39:10):
Words. George Santos. I was going to say,
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (39:13):
Well, right, George Santos. I would argue the dynamic of Santos probably was not even possible 10 or more years ago, literally not possible. But now it is extremely possible because of the way the business has changed. And so that is both a great challenge. Like I said, it’s a lot of work. The job’s always a lot of work, but a tremendous opportunity. I mean there’s so much to do even when they’re not raiding Mar-a-Lago.
Audrey Decker | Defense One (39:49):
Hi, thank you guys so much for doing this. My name is Audrey Decker, I’m a reporter with Defense one. I cover the DOD. And just curious on to get your guys’ tips on sourcing, especially with the FBI sensitive agencies where people don’t want to talk. How do you find sources? How do you meet these people? How do you gain trust? Any other tips that you have?
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (40:14):
I think the simple answer is just doing stories. You meet people who are in that subject matter in these different agencies. Events happen. People show up who are in law enforcement to deal with those events, and you try to make connections. And I always say that journalism is as much about interpersonal relationships and building them as any profession. I think that’s out there. And it’s a process of connecting with people where you can convince ’em there’s value in what we do and that they have a role in informing the public and then establishing a track record with them where they feel like they can trust you to a, protect them and do a good job.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (41:05):
One of the things that was very successful for me as I was starting my career and even into the middle was going to things after work. So DOD and DOD adjacent people. There are these federal government contractor associations, there are awards dinners, there are breakfasts in the morning sometimes or things after work. And it’s a way to get some kinds of mid-level and high-level government officials where they may not have as much of a layer of six people surrounding them. You can actually make a beeline for them. And importantly, it’s a way to make a beeline for people without leaving a digital trace often. So if you want to communicate with somebody and you don’t want there to be an email about that, you can have a conversation with somebody that way. And I also found that it was a demonstration that I was a serious person and was seriously interested in the people I was covering to show up for those kinds of things, which a lot of beat reporters didn’t want to do because you want to go home and have dinner with your family. And also it’s boring sometimes it’s not boring. There’s also often free food. But yeah,
Perry Stein/Washington Post (42:17):
I always joke, I mean all of this is I would take that, all that advice. I always joke with my non journalist friends that I’m super good at rejection because I get it all the time. Whenever if we’re at a restaurant and they need someone to ask to add extra seats, I’m like, I got this. I get rejected every day. Don’t worry about it. They’ll probably say no, but my point is if I could show you my inbox, it’s like in addition to going all these things, you do cold reach out, especially now and some days on a good year, maybe I’m like 5% response rate. And I think you just, there’s no harm in trying and more than on this beat than on local politics. I cannot predict who is going to say yes. I just don’t know. It’s so big that I don’t know what’s going on in every aspect that I can’t say why.
(43:09):
And I know when I started this beat, I would complain to Dev. I was like, I just don’t understand people’s motivation for wanting to talk to you. How can you source up if you don’t understand why people would or would not want to talk to you? And I think I would say just ask a lot of people and you don’t know when they’ll say yes. I sent a message to someone I think 10 months ago, and they just got back to me last week and I’m like, victory, that’s maybe my success rate’s now 6%. But so I would just reach out and don’t try to predict who or who will not. I used to try to think, oh, only the older people near retirement will talk to me. But that all seems to not be true. So just don’t predict and reach out and be okay if they don’t respond. Don’t take it personally.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (43:59):
I think on a beat especially, you have to be patient and you have to always be thinking about presenting two ideas to the people you talk to. One is that you care very much about what they do. You’re not going to vanish in a week because you have to go cover the Indie 502. You want to help people understand what they do and why they do it. Almost every human being on the planet wants to be understood. And if you can make a connection with someone who feels a strong urge to have their work be understood, they’re more likely to talk to you. There’s other two little just tricks I would argue. I try to make sure that I reach out to one new person every week and one person a week is a very achievable goal. You don’t want to get swamped by the notion of I have to source up 50 people.
(44:52):
You do not have to source up 50 people. You have to have a process by which you’re always adding people. And so one new person a week, whether they engage with you or not is not the point, but you’re always reaching out to one new person a week and it forces you in addition to forcing you to reach out to them. It also forces you to think about what are my blind spots here? What am I really weak on? Or what could I improve with just one or two more people who are experts in X? And it doesn’t mean it has to be the FBI agent. Maybe it’s an ex FBI agent, maybe it’s a former prosecutor. There’s a lot of ways to get at the thing without going to the heart of the target right out of the gate because the heart of the target is the hardest part.
(45:33):
The other thing I would say that completely changed how I think about reporting is a book called What Every Body Is Saying. It’s by a former FBI agent who just studies body language. And a lot of the things in that book I sort of already knew without being able to articulate it or express it. But when I read that book, I was maybe in my late thirties, I was like, holy crap. This is the key to everything. This is all the things I’ve been trying to do and being very hit or miss about. And body language is so important to how people relate to each other. Body language is so important to whether or not people trust each other. There’s a reason why it’s very hard to have a heartfelt conversation with a crime victim when there’s 20 TV cameras all pressed in around, it’s all Pierre’s fault, but body language, I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to body language and that book to this day. I read it 15 years ago and still blows my mind.
Hannah Demissie | ABC News (46:34):
Hi, my name’s Hannah Demissie. I work at a DC News. I’m just curious how you guys are approaching just the new staffing and changes at DOJ, especially given the White House yesterday pushing back at Wall Street Journal reporting about planning on signing an executive order to dismantle education. The Department of Education White House said that was never going to happen, but they were actually planning on doing it. And Ms. Curious, that was such a direct source, the White House giving them that reporting. I’m just curious if you guys are changing your approach about how you’re working with direct lines at DOJ, if that makes sense, what I’m saying?
Carrie Johnson/NPR (47:13):
Well, we had an experience not so long ago. It was the first press conference of the New Attorney General where they announced the filing of a lawsuit, but they did not produce the actual case for a number of hours, which was irregular. And so because I work for NPR, because I’ve been doing this a long time, I told my editor, I’m going to write a story about this when I see the paperwork that has been filed with the court. And other people made a different decision, and I understand why, but it seemed to me that I needed to understand the basis of a lawsuit against a state official before saying the Justice Department was suing a state official. And because most of what DOJ does winds up in court one way or another, that is a valid thing. But you may have a fight with your editor because your competitors in the news business may take a different attack. I’m glad I waited, honestly, because NPR is a broadcast outlet, but we have more time than a lot of other networks do. And so I wasn’t sure how you got to the second 30 seconds of what I would say without fully understanding what this case was about. And so I waited.
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (48:33):
I mean, look, I think to Pierre’s point earlier, I don’t think a lot changes in terms of how you do the work. I do think a lot of the way the business works now is about go, go, go, go, go, right? I think you also have to always be willing to carrie’s point. And I think I’m one of the people who didn’t wait so long ago, it was like a week and a half ago, who can remember? But I think in a business that’s always go as fast as you can, you also have to force yourself sometimes to say, to just wait, to just take a beat, take a breath and think, well, do I have to be to go now on this? What is the potential upside of waiting versus the potential upside of not waiting and vice versa, and no one’s going to make to Carrie’s point.
(49:26):
I think in a weird way, we were both right. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to a lot of these things. I think you have to make judgments in real time. And to the degree that there’s pushback, I mean, look, sourcing is hard. There’s a reason most stories aren’t based on anonymous sources. And you should never forget that you are incurring some risk and your own credibility when you engage in sourced reporting. So we had a similar version of that last night with the EO that Perry was talking about, about the law firm where again, I went 180 from my thing the week before where I was like, you know what? I actually want to wait and see the language of this EO because this is actually fairly important what the words are, how are they going to go at Perkins? And so in that case, I decided to wait the exact opposite of the thing I did two weeks earlier.
(50:23):
I think you have to sort of be willing to debate it out in your own newsroom. I think newsrooms, one of the things I love about newsrooms is how people disagree and debate and argue. I sometimes read media stories where like, oh, there was an argument in the newsroom about this story. And I think, well, was it a day ending and why? Of course there should, if I would be very worried if there was not an argument in a newsroom about coverage. I think debate is healthy. I think disagreement and airing things out are good. The best beat partners I’ve ever had are people I probably argued with about something almost every day. I’m not going to look at Perry right now. So I think all these things are good. I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but I think you have to be patient not just with the world, but with yourself.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (51:16):
And sometimes it’s subjective. I mean, if you think about this story Carrie was talking about, it really is, you could go either way. On the one hand, it was clear that the DOJ under Pam Bundy, Bundy was going to sue New York over how they handled immigration. So that much was unassailable. But Kerry’s right in that, well, let’s see what the facts and the law is based on in terms of making that decision. Is it sound, is it not sound? Whatever. But again, that’s the beauty of the job, that there’s not a day where your brain is not required to work.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (51:57):
And going back to your point about context, I’m old enough to remember the last time an administration sued a bunch of states over immigration. So are you using that stream of arguments? Are you using other arguments or is what you maybe really want is a headline in newspapers and the television for the evening news that the Trump administration is going after the leadership of a blue state over immigration? Okay, well why? What does the law say? Do they have any merit? I want to see the paper. We did see the papers. It took four a hours, I think
Perry Stein/Washington Post (52:38):
Took a while. Yeah, it took a while. And I would say to you, this is my first Trump administration, and I was pretty nervous going into it. I felt like a lot of my colleagues had a just better grasp of how it worked. To your point is if they say they’re planning something, how likely is that to change? Should you cover it? Should they not? And I think to what Devlin said is it is trust the reporting process. If you’re doing a rigorous reporting process, I mean, I have tried not to make any assumptions about the people that I am talking with. I think we’ve now met lots of spokespeople, just two months, and everyone is very different. Everyone has different backgrounds coming into this. So you don’t go in with an antagonistic relationship assuming anyone is lying to you. But you also, just like you do in the Biden administration, make sure that they’re telling the truth or they know the facts.
(53:41):
Oftentimes, it’s not that they’re not telling the truth, it’s that they think they know the facts and they don’t know the facts. Because I mean, I think the communication chain in the Biden versus Trump administration, I would say it’s a little more, it’s not as linear maybe in this administration. There’s lots of ways that DOJ officials hear different things and that may affect what they tell you. But I mean, I think there’s a reason why when you do anonymous sourcing, you do two sources. I can’t tell you already how many amazing one source stories I have ready to go, but I am sure if I get a second source at a lot of them, the stories will turn out to be false. And that is why you have that rigorous reporting process. And we did that in the Biden administration and we got to do it in the Trump administration too. And
Devlin Barrett/New York Times (54:30):
The start of any new administration is more confusing than other times. The first month is always, I think we would all agree, yeah, we don’t love that first month. Whoever it is, whatever’s going on that first month is a bit of a bear. Like, oh, great, here’s 20 new people. And I got to make snap judgements about all of their work habits and conversational habits, even just sometimes the way a person talks can throw you. So you have to learn a whole bunch of new people. And those people themselves are learning a new building. They’re learning a new institution that they’ve just set foot in. They don’t even necessarily know where the cafeteria is.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (55:08):
Literally, I remember in the early Obama days, people were asking me where things were in the building, and I had a really big story because they really messed something up that was bad. I think it wasn’t malevolent, I think it was just massive early stage incompetence. Finally, they called me and said, will you stop writing these stories? I was like, when you stop messing up, I’ll stop writing these stories. So equal opportunity, get your act together kids and figure out where the cafeteria is and how process works inside the building.
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (55:41):
And it’s always this really weird period of time, first few weeks, months, where DOJ is sorting out its relationship with the White House. And the way it starts out is never the way it ends up. That’s for sure.
Carrie Johnson/NPR (55:59):
It always ends bad of the years fast forward,
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (56:02):
Right? But we’ll have to see. Correct.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (56:05):
Well promised all that a hard stop at three. But I wanted to add one thing that you’ll never find a more collegial, talented, and humble group than these folks here. And it was my pleasure to work with them. Most of the time I was chasing them because they’re such a talented group. So thank you so much for sharing with
Pierre Thomas/ABC News (56:31):
Us, and it is a pleasure to be here. And I would say that Kevin is skilled principal, and you’re lucky to have him engaging with you in this way very
Kevin Johnson/NPF (56:42):
Well. Absolutely. Very kind. Thank you very much.
