Carrie Johnson
speaker
1,251 appearances
127 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 4 Sep
Carrie Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 108 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 20.
Appearances
Consider This from NPR · When it comes to harassment, are federal judges above the law? · 3 Mar 2025
podcast
Another said, That was NPR Justice Correspondent Carrie Johnson.
Up First from NPR · Zelenskyy in London, Gaza Ceasefire Status, Judicial Accountability · 3 Mar 2025
podcast
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.
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?
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