Carrie Johnson

About a week after she left the judge's chamber, she ran into him at a party. I'm going to tell the next part of the story entirely from allegations in the court papers. That's in part because retelling it to me was too painful. At the party, he tried to get her to sit next to him on the couch. Eventually she left, but she got a text from him saying he needed to talk to her.

It was cold that night, so the judge suggested they chat inside his apartment. Once inside, the judge insisted she come to the bedroom. At first she sat on the corner of the bed, but he wanted her to lay down. Then, she told investigators, he grabbed her breast. She tried to pull his arm off, but he was really strong.

I just remember thinking, like there's nothing I can do about this, she told the investigators. This is about to happen. Like I always felt like this thing he could not touch. And finally, he felt like he could touch. A judge's control over the future of a young lawyer is real and lasting. With only a phone call, a judge can open doors to a lucrative job at a law firm or shut them permanently.

And there's no one really policing what happens inside a judge's chambers beside the judge themselves. Judicial independence and protecting the balance of power give judges a tremendous amount of sway over workplace rules. For nearly a year, I interviewed 42 people, current and former workers within the federal court system, about their experience.

They're men and women who work for more than two dozen judges, appointed by presidents from both major political parties. I heard from people whose self-confidence was shattered by judges who screamed so loudly others could hear from the hallways. People who were fired after a week or two on the job for no clear reason. Some describe sexual harassment like in the case of the Alaska clerk.

Many more shared episodes of bullying, and others said they faced discrimination because they had a disability or were pregnant. And things can get pretty tough for clerks who speak out. When the Alaska clerk reported the assault, she told a colleague who had been assigned to mentor her. But that mentor said she also had been coerced.

Her mentor later said the judge's power and authority contributed to the pressure she felt, and he told her he would have sway over a job she wanted. The former clerk heard from friends the judge was furious. And when she ran into him, he warned her to keep her head down and shut up.

The court system ultimately launched an investigation into the judge, Joshua Kindred. What followed were multiple rounds of interviews with investigators who cross-examined her and stress-tested her credibility. The court investigation took more than a year. All the while, two other young women clerks in the judge's chambers continued to work by his side. Then, in July...

Judge Joshua Kindred told investigators that the sexual experience was consensual and that he had no, quote, sinister intent. The special committee found the judge deliberately lied when he said nothing sexual had happened between them.

But the committee did not reach a conclusion about whether the judge sexually assaulted the former clerk, finding there was enough evidence to say the judge committed misconduct without even resolving that issue. Judge Kindred did not respond to NPR's attempts to reach him for comment. The clerk said she felt let down by the process. I was sexually assaulted.

The federal judiciary points to the departure of the Alaska judge as a demonstration the system works. The Administrative Office of the Courts, which sets policy from Washington, says they've taken extensive steps to protect clerks and other workers since the MeToo movement swept the country in 2017. And they say they hold judges to the highest standards.

But our investigation uncovered problems with the reporting system in the judicial branch. For one, there's a widespread culture of fear. And there's a good reason for that. Jamie Baker is a former judge who also worked in the White House and the military.

Not only is the relationship intense, it often comes with a huge age gap. Gabe Roth is executive director of Fix the Court. He's pushing the federal courts to be more accountable.

Another person pushing for change is Congresswoman Norma Torres, a Democrat from California.

Last fall, she convened a group of experts on the Hill to try to draw attention to the problem.

Torres says the courts operate in a patchwork, so no one's in charge of overseeing all the systems that employees use to report misconduct. She's working alongside Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson. Good morning. Pleasure to see you, sir.

Johnson's walking us through the Rayburn House office buildings. And into the Capitol to introduce the Judiciary Accountability Act. His bill would make clear the same legal protections for workers in the private sector and the executive branch also apply to the 30,000 people who work for the federal courts.

The legislation did not get a hearing before Congress left town last year. The people who work for federal judges, for probation departments, for public defenders, they can't go to the executive branch for help. And it's not clear they can sue in courts either. Aliza Schatzman runs the Legal Accountability Project.

The federal courts say they've done a lot to make sure workers are treated with dignity and respect. But I've been told clerks who run into trouble on the job still face tremendous pressure to remain silent. A bad word from a judge can derail a clerk's career, while judges serve for life. I heard it again and again.

Those judges who behave badly, often it's an open secret inside the courthouse, but nobody does anything about it. Many clerks graduated from top law schools and pride themselves on their smarts and resilience, only to break down in tears when they talk about hostile treatment they suffered working for federal judges. The judiciary protects its own, one clerk told me.

Another said, That was NPR Justice Correspondent Carrie Johnson.

Well, it's difficult to cancel Christmas, but the mood is very somber. Official ceremonies have been very muted here. Usually Bethlehem is full of lights, these amazing decorations, a huge tree in the center of Manger Square. And there are crowds, crowds and tourists and pilgrims. This year, it is empty, barren. You know, I was here last year.

And if it's possible, it feels even more empty and more somber. I've heard from so many people, they're all saying the same thing. We just never thought the situation, the war would last till another Christmas. So how are people celebrating this year? On Christmas Eve, there was the traditional parade of the Latin Patriarch entering Bethlehem. It was quiet, though.

There's usually these very cute scout troops that lead the procession in, and they were playing drums. No drums this year. No bagpipes. Some held signs reading, We Want Peace. Others held pictures of the destruction in Gaza. The latest figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza puts the known death toll there now at more than 45,000 people.

And I think the most amazing thing I just want to tell you is that I was able to go to both of those services so easily. Usually the crowds are so huge and nearly impossible to experience Christmas in Bethlehem that close.

How are they doing? The economy here is devastated. Bethlehem is dependent on tourism. Hotel occupancy is in the single digits. Stores have closed. Unemployment throughout the West Bank is nearly at 50%. The deputy mayor I spoke with, Hanna Haniya, told us Palestinians feel like the world has turned their backs on them and they're suffering.

Since the war began after Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people on October 7th in 2023, Israel has imposed tough restrictions in the West Bank with new checkpoints and barring Palestinians from working in Israel. And we're seeing Palestinian groups fighting each other here, too.

The Palestinian Authority has launched a rare crackdown on militants in the West Bank and is making for a tense and complicated situation here.

You're welcome.

Good morning.

At least a dozen people who work with special counsel Jack Smith got dismissal notices. That's according to two DOJ officials. Acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote the letters. He said he did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president.

Remember, Jack Smith brought two criminal cases against Donald Trump over January 6th and over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors moved to dismiss both cases after Trump won the election. And this purge is a big deal. One longtime lawyer told me he couldn't think of a time in modern DOJ history where a whole slew of prosecutors who worked on a particular case were dismissed.

Of course, Donald Trump had promised to fire Jack Smith, too, but Smith resigned before the inauguration.

You know, federal judges approved search warrants and other actions DOJ took in its two cases against Trump. Grand juries signed off on them. So prosecutors say it's not as if these lawyers were acting without checks and balances. But clearly, President Trump does not see it that way. He signed an executive order last week designed to root out what he calls weaponization of the government.

And the Supreme Court last year made clear that presidents have a lot of control over federal law enforcement. Now Donald Trump is using it. So what happens now to these prosecutors who worked with Jack Smith? Many of them are career civil servants who have job protection, so they could protest and eventually sue to challenge their firings, get back pay, get their jobs back.

But that could take a long time and could be very expensive for taxpayers who would wind up footing the bill if these fired officials win in court. That's exactly what happened with Andy McCabe, the deputy FBI director Trump's administration fired in his first term in office.

I'm hearing some of the most senior civil servants have been reassigned in recent days to work on a sanctuary city task force. The thinking is that's designed to get those people to quit. Yesterday, one of them did, the man who ran the public integrity unit. Lawyers who handle the environment, civil rights, national security, they've all been reassigned too.

Mary McCord worked in the Justice Department for nearly 25 years. She teaches at Georgetown University now.

McCourt says it seems like these people are being fired or reassigned because of fear they will not be loyal to Trump. She says that makes it easier for a president to misuse the Justice Department for his own retribution. NPR's Carrie Johnson, thank you for this reporting, Carrie. My pleasure.

I've worked on this project for nearly a year. I talked with 42 people who are current or former employees of the federal courts, everyone from law clerks to court reporters to people in probation and public defender offices. They told me about bad experiences with more than two dozen judges. Those judges represent both major political parties. They're men and women who work all over the country.

Well, let's start with the idea that the relationship between a federal judge and a law clerk can be pretty imbalanced. Judges have the power to make or break the career of a young lawyer with only a phone call or two. People told me they were afraid to report bullying or harassment by federal judges because the internal systems are so complicated.

The consequences for them are huge, and there's really no guarantee those people can remain anonymous.

Yes, I spoke with a former law clerk in Alaska. She moved there in 2020, and she had hoped the clerkship would jumpstart her career in the law. She was afraid to talk on tape, so we found a voice actor to share her words verbatim.

That judge, Joshua Kindred, began to text her constantly, sometimes really personal things, and after she left her clerkship, she said he sexually assaulted her. The judge later said the encounter was consensual and said he had no, quote, sinister intent.

Eventually, a court investigation found he created a hostile work environment for his clerks and had an inappropriately sexualized relationship with one of them. That judge resigned last July.

The administrative office of the courts helps set policy for the court system and handles all kinds of administrative tasks. They said the changes they put in place since the MeToo scandals in 2017 are real and that they're working. They say they're continuing to make improvements and more people are using their systems to complain.

But few of those complaints are actually about judges who behave badly. People who follow this system tell me those numbers are low because clerks are afraid to complain about judges and sometimes because clerks are discouraged from filing any paperwork at all.

There are some Democrats in the U.S. House, like Norma Torres of California and Hank Johnson of Georgia, have been pushing for some change. Their bill to give judicial workers more legal protection died last year without any action from Congress.

Thanks for having me.

Hi, Sarah.

Israel says it hit military targets. It sent 25 fighter jets. They traveled more than 1,200 miles to Yemen. They are saying the airport was hit because it is used by Iranians who back the Houthi rebels to smuggle weapons into the country and used by senior Iranian officials to get into Yemen. Israel also targeted major power stations.

The head of the World Health Organization was actually in the airport waiting to board a flight at the time of the attack and says he was just meters away from where the strike hit.

Right after the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said such strikes will continue to, quote, "...cut off the terror arm of the Iranian axis of evil and continue until we complete the job," which he added, quote, "...we are only just starting."

It's been going on for months since the war in Gaza began. The Houthis say they won't stop until Israel withdraws from Gaza, where it is fighting Hamas. They also have been targeting cargo ships in the Red Sea. That's important. It's a large conduit for international commerce. This week, though, we just saw an escalation of missiles fired from Yemen.

Air sirens went off just this morning at 3.30 a.m., That missile was intercepted by Israel's air defense system. But one last Saturday actually made it through and landed in Tel Aviv, not far from where I am, injuring dozens. Netanyahu has been threatening to take decisive action against the Houthis for days. And here he is on Wednesday.

He says here the Houthis too will learn what Hamas and Hezbollah and the Assad regime and others have learned. He listed off the recent military actions, he says, that have brought down these Iranian-backed groups.

He says that the Houthis will also be taken down and, quote, even if it takes time, he says, this lesson will be understood across the Middle East, and that's concerning many of an escalation of hostilities here in the region.

Interestingly, I was listening to a former intelligence officer, and he was saying that Israel's behind in its intelligence on the Houthis in Yemen. Yemen just wasn't their main focus for the last 20 years. Iran and Hezbollah were. And Yemen and the Houthis are a different enemy for Israel.

Yemen is far away, and it will require the assistance of other militaries, primarily the U.S., to fight the Houthis. The U.S. does have a major battle group in the Red Sea at this time, actually. And Israel is fighting wars on multiple fronts now. It's in Gaza. It's in Lebanon. It's in Syria. Continuing raids in the occupied territories. It is stretched.

And Hezbollah said it wouldn't stop attacking Israel until the Gaza war ends, the same as the Houthis are saying. But it actually did. There's a ceasefire now between Israel and Lebanon. The Houthis said the same exact thing. But for now, they are not backing down.

The acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan resigned after she faced a lot of pressure to drop a case against Democrat Eric Adams, the New York City mayor. Danielle Sassoon had only been on the job for about three weeks, but she had a strong record. of prosecuting major defendants.

She wrote a letter to DOJ saying there was really no good reason to dismiss the Eric Adams case, and in fact, prosecutors were going to add a new charge of obstruction against him for allegedly destroying evidence. She wrote that she attended a meeting with Adams' lawyers and a senior Justice Department leader in late January.

And at that meeting, the defense lawyers for Adams said he would help DOJ with its tough immigration enforcement campaign if they drop criminal charges against him. Sassoon wrote, that sounded an awful lot like an unlawful quid pro quo. And the DOJ leader in the meeting admonished one of her team members for taking notes and wanted those notes after the meeting ended.

Eric Adams quitted crime, she wrote, and there's no good faith way to walk away from that case.

For now, nothing but Emil Bovee, one of Donald Trump's former defense lawyers and the second in command at the DOJ right now. He wrote that Danielle Sassoon had been insubordinate. He was in that meeting with Adams' lawyer, and he says he was worried about those notes because of leaks to the media.

He placed two other prosecutors in the Adams case on administrative leave while they undergo an investigation by their own Justice Department. NPR has learned one of those prosecutors won two bronze stars in the military and that he clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

This mess spread beyond New York City and into Justice Department headquarters in Washington. Because the prosecutors in New York refused to back away from the Adams case, Emil Bovey transferred it to the Public Integrity Unit at Maine Justice here in D.C. Two senior lawyers quit, Kevin Driscoll and John Keller. Late yesterday, three more attorneys in D.C. quit, too.

A former senior Justice Department official told me, this is by far the worst thing we've seen from the Trump Justice Department so far, and that's a high bar. And is there any response from New York's Mayor Eric Adams? Adams has pleaded not guilty to all these corruption charges he's been spending time with President Trump.

And he says the Biden Justice Department went after him because he criticized Biden on immigration. But the prosecutors in New York started investigating Eric Adams long before that happened. When reporters asked Trump about all this last night, Trump said he didn't personally request the case be dropped and he didn't know anything about it. And where do things go from here, Carrie?

So far, the charges against Adams have not been dropped. So if senior leaders at DOJ want to do that, they're going to have to do it themselves or find someone else who will agree. We're only three weeks into this new era at the Justice Department.

We've seen so many firings of the people who prosecuted Trump, firings of prosecutors who prosecuted defendants in the Capitol riot, and FBI agents suing their bosses at the Justice Department. This is really unheard of activity at the DOJ.