STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
John Cruden served with U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam. He took his law school aptitude test while still in Saigon, and he later became a government lawyer. Now he's the new chief of the environmental division at the Justice Department. He gave his first interview to NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: For John Cruden, the new role means coming home to a place where he worked as a career lawyer for 20 years. Cruden's been around long enough to have supervised the Exxon Valdez spill case, a record setter until the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
JOHN CRUDEN: In most of our minds are those nearly three months of watching the impact of the spill, but also a gigantic economic effect.
JOHNSON: This week, Cruden heads to New Orleans to oversee the next phase of the case against BP.
CRUDEN: It clearly ranks up there as one of the most significant environmental disasters of our lifetime and deserves all of our energy to try to make sure nothing like this happens again.
JOHNSON: The portfolio is sweeping, not just BP, but also defending court challenges to the administration's actions on climate change, a huge source of contention with many Republicans in Congress. Another priority, Cruden says, is to stop illegal trafficking of animals.
CRUDEN: We should be fighting for the survival of some of the world's most protected and iconic species and then working across the government and across the planet to end the illegal trade in wildlife.
JOHNSON: This month, his prosecutors convicted an auction house in Florida for selling rhino horn, elephant ivory and coral objects smuggled into China. He sees a symbol of that work every day in front of his office.
CRUDEN: The huge bear that we have, that was actually a trial exhibit in one of our cases, an endangered species. And so when the trial was over, we brought it here and it's now famous.
JOHNSON: Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.