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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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. -
After classified documents were discovered in Biden's home and a Washington, D.C. office, the DOJ tasked special counsel Robert Hur to investigate. -
The FBI director says Chinese state-sponsored hackers targeting of U.S critical infrastructure — including water treatment plants, pipelines and the power to grid — poses a national security threat. -
The indictment unsealed in federal court is at least the third Iran-based murder-for-hire plot prosecuted by the Justice Department since 2022. -
Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was convicted last year for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. -
The Justice Department's critical incident review comes more than a year and a half after the gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. -
Federal prosecutors said Friday that they will seek the death penalty against a white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at the Tops supermarket in 2022. -
The indictment, unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia, marks the first time the U.S. has brought war crimes charges in connection with the Russian assault on Ukraine.
