Carrie Johnson
Carrie Johnson is NPR's National Justice Correspondent.
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. Johnson regularly appears on the NPR Politics Podcast.
Prior to coming to NPR in 2010, Johnson worked at the Washington Post for 10 years. 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, and SABEW. She served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University from 2019-2020. In 2021, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers honored Johnson with a rarely-bestowed Champion of Justice award for her journalism work.
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. She sits on the advisory board for the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-M and the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit. [Copyright 2025 NPR]
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Inside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Monday, tensions over the potential for federal overreach broke into open court. -
Maxwell spoke with top DOJ officials over the course of two days in late July. Asked about President Trump, she said she had never witnessed him "in any inappropriate setting in any way." -
President Trump called for the release of the grand jury transcripts after growing pressure to divulge more information about Jeffrey Epstein's case, but the judge on the case said there is nothing new to release. -
James prosecuted the president and his companies, winning millions of dollars in fines linked to fraud allegations. Her attorney called the probe "an attack on the rule of law." -
The Department of Justice has fired hundreds of employees this year, transforming a federal workforce that enjoys vast powers and responsibility over issues affecting the lives of everyday Americans. -
Bove's nomination to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals now moves to the full Senate. Scores of former DOJ lawyers and retired judges say they fear his loyalty to Trump would carry over onto the bench. -
The DOJ has sued the entire federal district court in Maryland over an order that puts a temporary hold on deportations, intensifying a confrontation between the Trump administration and the courts. -
The confirmation of the president's former personal lawyer Emil Bove to an appellate judgeship could be fairly smooth, as Wednesday's hearing included no critical words from Senate Republicans. -
The accusations from a veteran government lawyer add to broader concern about the Trump administration's repeated clashes with the judiciary. -
The race became a microcosm for the clashes and pressures on the American legal system this year, in part because one of the two top candidates is the younger brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
