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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Mike Casey tells NPR that the scale of spying against the United States is "impressive and terrifying." He says: "More players are getting into it with more tools, going after more targets." -
The Justice Department has taken an active — and public — stand against alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. But it's been nearly silent on possible war crimes in the Israel-Hamas war. -
Special counsel Hur defended his work in the Biden classified documents probe in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. -
Prosecutors say at the same time that Linwei Ding was working for Google and stealing the building blocks of its AI technology, he was also secretly employed by two China-based tech companies. -
The request comes almost a year after Teixeira was arrested and charged with the illegal retention and transmission of national defense information. He originally pleaded not guilty to the charges. -
Hunter Biden appeared behind closed doors to provide testimony in the House GOP impeachment inquiry into his father, President Joe Biden. -
State-sponsored assassination plots on U.S. soil may sound like the stuff of movies, but the Department of Justice says it has foiled four such cases since 2022. -
Federal prosecutors say that Alexander Smirnov admitted to authorities that "officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story" about President Biden's son, Hunter. -
The watchdog's reporting comes in the wake of several high-profile deaths in federal lockups in recent years, most notably the murder James "Whitey" Bulger and the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. -
It paints a picture of FBI employees who repeatedly engaged in activities that violated Justice Department and FBI policies, and exposed them to possible extortion and blackmail.
