Steve Baker, on the Jan. 6 Front Lines and in the DOJ’s Crosshairs

Politics and journalism have had a nagging way of becoming intertwined during Steve Baker’s 45 years of adult life. As an idealistic twenty-something in the early 1980s, he wanted to run for mayor of his hometown—Shreveport, Louisiana—a place with a storied history of political and judicial corruption. Mr. Baker thought he could help clean up the “terribly corrupt, almost mafioso-run government,” as he put it. So he sought advice from Kevin Doyle, the city hall reporter for The Times, Shreveport’s daily newspaper. “No, no, no, no,” Mr. Doyle told him emphatically. “You do not want to do that.”...