Carol Leonnig, a five-time Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Washington Post reporter, will be at Poor Richard’s bookstore in Colorado Springs Tuesday to talk about her new book, “Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.”

Leonnig, who is currently a senior investigative correspondent for MS NOW and whose daughter Molly attends Colorado College, will speak and sign books from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Rico’s Cafe and Wine Bar at Poor Richard’s. The event is free and open to the public.

Surprisingly, Leonnig’s book, co-authored by fellow Washington Post reporter Aaron C. Davis, focuses more on the Biden-era Justice Department than the department during both Trump administrations. She presents what one reviewer called the most detailed account yet of the department’s failed effort to bring President Donald Trump to trial for his connections to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Leonnig and Davis’ central thesis is that a department that has long prided itself on keeping justice “blind and impartial” has been systematically politicized over the past decade. The partisanship of the first Trump term was followed, in their view, by an overreaction by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was so fearful of accusations of partisanship in the Justice Department under him that he did little to prosecute Trump for Jan. 6 ties and election interference until it was too late.

The book shows how the actions and inactions of the Justice Department directly paved the way for Trump’s reascendance.

“It is the story of gutter politics and honor, hubris and bravery, intransigence and naïveté,” a tragedy in three acts, the authors conclude.

The book’s broader conclusion is a warning: The remaking of the Justice Department into a political instrument marks a turning point from which it will be hard to recover.

“Whether you like or dislike what the Justice Department is doing under Trump in his second term,” they write, “many inside the department fear a cycle has begun mixing politics and prosecutions that will fundamentally change justice in America for decades to come.”

Leonnig also will likely talk about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files and Leonnig’s recent exit from the Washington Post, where controversial owner Jeff Bezos is accused by some of politicizing the paper to gain favor with Trump. Dozens of the Post’s highest-profile journalists have fled the storied institution, which recently cut a third of its staff, raising red flags about its future.

Leonnig began her remarkable journalism career as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989, later joining The Charlotte Observer, where she reported on city government, covered the state legislature, and eventually became the paper’s Washington correspondent. She joined The Washington Post in 2000, where she investigated government misconduct, presidential power, the FBI and the Secret Service in addition to the Justice Department.

Her reporting revealed broad misconduct and security failures within the Secret Service that put presidents’ lives in danger, winning her the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2015. She was also part of Post teams that won Pulitzers in 2014 (for coverage of NSA surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden), 2018, 2022 and 2024.

She has authored three New York Times bestselling books in addition to “Injustice.” Two document the Trump presidency — “A Very Stable Genius” and “I Alone Can Fix It,” both co-written with Philip Rucker — and a third, “Zero Fail,” is a history of the Secret Service.