How Trump Dismantled the Department of Justice with Carol Leonnig

Speaker 1 I remember sitting with a source high up in the Justice Department who said, This place is going to get shredded.

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 A core principle of the Justice Department used to be the pursuit of justice, quote, without fear or favor. Well, those days are clearly over, as fear and favor are in vogue.

Speaker 2 President Trump, together with his Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the FBI Director Cash Patel, is using the DOJ to target his enemies and help his allies.

Speaker 2 They claim it is retribution for the weaponization of the Justice Department under President Biden.

Speaker 2 But the erosion of the Justice Department and the FBI's independence started long before Inauguration Day 2025, way back in Trump 1.0.

Speaker 2 That's what I want to talk about with my guest today, MSNBC senior investigative reporter, best-selling author, and five-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Carol Lenig.

Speaker 2 Together with her co-author, Aaron Davis, Lennig is out with a new book called Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department. I have known Carol for a long time.

Speaker 2 She's an amazing Washington Post reporter. She worked there for 25 years, covering the Justice Department in the White House.

Speaker 2 In 2022, she was part of the Post team that won the Pulitzer for Public Service for the coverage of the January 6th capital attack.

Speaker 2 And I want to talk to Carol about a lot of things, including why so many people dropped the ball before or during January 6th, how the fear of retribution planted in Trump 1.0 impacted the Biden administration, and how we got where we are now.

Speaker 2 Our expert question this week comes from former Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division at the DOJ under President Biden, Jonathan Cantor. Stay with us.

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Speaker 2 Carol, thanks for coming on.

Speaker 2 Again, I guess, right?

Speaker 1 Again, always good to be with you.

Speaker 2 How's it going?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's crazy. It's fun.
We're landing a story, a big book in the middle of a time period when

Speaker 1 some of the worst things our sources predicted are coming true.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Absolutely.
And you yourself have had a big shift in your career, too. Now you're a TV star.

Speaker 1 Well, we all work with facts on different platforms.

Speaker 2 That's true. But let's talk about your book, Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department, which is out this week, which is a pretty heady title.
It's a whopper.

Speaker 2 You and your co-author, Aaron Davis, interviewed more than 250 people for this book, including senior officials inside both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Speaker 2 Before we get to how we got here, it's been exactly a year since President Trump was re-elected.

Speaker 2 What's the word you would use to describe his impact on the Justice Department in this administration today?

Speaker 1 Devastating. I don't mean that emotionally, Kara.

Speaker 1 I mean that in terms of the structural wrecking ball he's taken to the things that protect Americans from a terror attack, the things that protect us from corrupt public officials accepting bribes.

Speaker 1 The things he's done to frighten prosecutors from saying the truth in court filings.

Speaker 2 Or not frighten them, just eliminate them. They aren't that frightened to say them.
They just have to go then if they do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, he's fired enough people that he sent that message, right? So would you put your name on a filing that says there is no evidence that James Comey lied to Congress? No, you wouldn't.

Speaker 2 But in your book, you chronicle the erosion of the DOJ's independence since the first administration.

Speaker 2 Recently, in an op-ed, you wrote that, quote, a mixture of fear and stubborn bravery, gutter politics, and noble intentions ultimately paved the way for the unraveling of the Justice Department.

Speaker 2 We are now witnessing. For each of those four categories, fear, stubborn bravery, gutter politics, and noble intentions, who specifically are you thinking of?

Speaker 1 You know, let me start with the best of those. I'm so glad you asked.

Speaker 1 Noble intentions. Merrick Garland, the Attorney General for Joe Biden,

Speaker 1 had a noble goal when he took took over the Department of Justice. He wanted to recover it, essentially, and restore its independence, which had been strained after Trump's first presidency.

Speaker 1 Trump had tried to get all sorts of enemies prosecuted, called for his Attorney General to jail various people that he didn't like.

Speaker 1 And Biden let Merrick Garland run that show by himself. And Garland, a respected jurist, I think really did have good intentions.

Speaker 1 They just happened to be of an antiquated time and no match for what Trump was throwing at his own FBI investigators and agents and prosecutors.

Speaker 2 Because he thought you could go back to normal.

Speaker 1 He actually pulled a playbook, Kara, out of post-Watergate when he had first been a prosecutor and then eventually a supervisor in the Department of Justice, trying to go back to that time post-Nixon when the whole country, Republican and Democrat, wanted to stop those kinds of abuses in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 Well, we have a very different country now.

Speaker 2 Who is Stubborn Bravery then?

Speaker 1 Stubborn Bravery is a group of prosecutors who insisted that they were going to do what the evidence required, regardless of the fact that it pointed at the likelihood that Donald Trump, a former president and likely future candidate, had committed crimes.

Speaker 1 I mean, that group is very broad, but I'm thinking especially of a team that was under Assistant Attorney General Matt Olson.

Speaker 1 He is responsible in 2022 for the lead-up of the investigation of the mishandling of classified documents when the Department of Justice and the FBI get this referral from the National Archives saying, hey, there's a lot of classified documents in these boxes that Donald Trump returned, and we're worried that there are more back at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 1 Olson says to his team, you know, we have to be brave enough to do what we would normally do, regardless of the fact that this is Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Okay, gutter politics?

Speaker 1 Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 This is a person who

Speaker 1 personalized his attacks in his first presidency on individual agents by name.

Speaker 1 You know, Carol, maybe people have forgotten, but in the first Trump presidency, Trump was so angry about the investigation of Russian operatives connecting with his campaign.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, as you you know well, he was so furious at the suggestion that Russia got him over the line to become president and he didn't do it all on his own.

Speaker 1 The way they stoked Facebook, the way they pushed these messages, the way they tried to hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign and ultimately released a lot of damaging emails of hers that hurt the Democratic Party when she was running.

Speaker 1 He was so furious about that campaign. People may have forgotten how much he went into people's lives that that were just career public servants.
He imitated the orgasm of an FBI lawyer

Speaker 1 as he learned through information that she was having an extramarital relationship with one of her colleagues.

Speaker 1 He essentially put a bullseye on different agents' backs who had been involved in investigating him.

Speaker 1 He threatened that the deputy director of the FBI, who opened an investigation into whether or not Donald Trump was obstructing that Russia probe, Andy McCabe, you know, he basically said, you're going to indict him.

Speaker 1 I want you to indict this guy. That, we learned, Aaron and I, that just had such a scarring effect on the Department of Justice that we didn't really appreciate at the time.

Speaker 2 Right. What about fear?

Speaker 1 Fear, I have to say, is a combination of people. No one likes to be called afraid, but there was wariness, especially within the FBI.

Speaker 1 I'll never forget when we sat down with sources who were very pivotal, let's just say. I'm not going to name them, but they were very pivotal in the classified documents case.

Speaker 1 And we learned about a scene where Matt Olson and his team are pushing and pushing for the FBI to do this search. Merrick Garland, heck, he is pushing for this search.

Speaker 1 He thinks that, you know, it's very worrisome that top secret documents that could put a national security at risk are in the the wind.

Speaker 1 And in this meeting, they're fighting with the head of the FBI's Washington field office and saying, you got to do a search. We've got probable cause.
Trump is clearly lying to his lawyer.

Speaker 1 We see the tapes where his valets are moving the boxes of records. We've got the justification to do this.
It's totally legal. It's appropriate.

Speaker 1 And it's really not just appropriate, it's necessary for national security. And the head of the FBI's field office says, I'm not doing it.
I'm not doing it unless somebody orders me to.

Speaker 1 My boss has got to order me to. And as Olson and his team walk out, they confront Alan Kohler, kind of a demigod in counterintelligence investigations in the FBI.

Speaker 1 He's at this point the assistant director. And Olson knows that Alan Kohler is on his side.
So when they're alone together outside, he says, what is going on? And Kohler says, these agents are afraid.

Speaker 1 They are stepping over the bodies of FBI agents in their office who went down,

Speaker 1 whose careers are ruined because they've been under investigation by Republicans after being targeted by Trump.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for doing their jobs. And these are just career officials, not running for office, or they don't have cushions or anything else.

Speaker 2 So let's get into more detail starting with Trump's first administration.

Speaker 2 Attorney General Jeff Sessions played by the rules by recusing himself from the ongoing investigation of Russian interference interference in the 2016 election. Deputy A.G.

Speaker 2 Rod Rosenstein then appointed Robert Mueller a special counsel, but there was still a lot of pressure from the Trump DOJ appointees, including the FBI.

Speaker 2 Talk about this dynamic in Trump 1.0 between Maine Justice, as it's called, and the FBI and how it set the groundwork for what happened later.

Speaker 1 I'm grinning right now because that was, from my perspective, some really satisfying reporting. You know, everyone thinks they know everything that happened with Robert Mueller.

Speaker 1 And that investigation feels like a million years ago, right? But what we learned was that Mueller, Mr. Institutionalist, and

Speaker 1 as he was, you know, missing a few steps, getting older, and eventually, you know, showing some of the signs of the Parkinson's he would eventually develop.

Speaker 1 which really nobody knew about until this year, he was offloading a lot of his responsibilities to his deputy, Aaron Zebley. And Aaron Zebley was an institutionalist, too.
Good on him.

Speaker 1 He was deferring, just as his boss would,

Speaker 1 to their colleagues at the Department of Justice who worked for Bill Barr. Well, we all know Bill Barr was trying to help Donald Trump get elected and had no apologies or regrets about that.

Speaker 1 And indeed, his deputies were Eddie O'Callaghan were also trying to steer the ultimate report to be as mild as possible in terms of finding any wrongdoing by Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 And they tried to discourage Aaron Zempley from including things that were unflattering, anything to suggest, for example, that Russia may have wanted to help Donald Trump get elected and may have had an impact on the election of 2016.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you asked the question, Mueller and his team's view was, these are our buddies, these are our colleagues.

Speaker 1 But what they really didn't fully appreciate and what some of them now regret is that Barr's team was really working against them.

Speaker 2 Right, absolutely. Do you think his Parkinson's disease influenced the outcome of the report?

Speaker 1 The way that this has been described to us by multiple sources is

Speaker 1 that Mueller certainly was stepping away, but that his deputy was channeling overwhelmingly the caution and the carefulness and the methodicalness of Mueller.

Speaker 1 And instead of the firebrand, you know, there are two parts of Robert Mueller.

Speaker 1 Aaron Zebley and his team were definitely leaning on this other side, which was, let's be careful, let's avoid any drama, let's not color outside the lines, let's just give what we can give.

Speaker 1 But, you know, even some members of Mueller's team, as we reveal in this piece, you know, Genie Ree, Andrew Weissman, they were

Speaker 1 not in agreement with

Speaker 2 the way he worked. Now, Now, Trump publicly and privately reamed sessions for not doing what he wanted him to do, and ultimately, as you said, replaced him with Bill Barr.

Speaker 2 You write about Barr swearing in, quote, it was the beginning of a political marriage and in the very room that both men viewed as an epicenter of unequaled power in the U.S. government.

Speaker 2 Talk about his

Speaker 2 understanding of the role of Attorney General vis-à-vis the president and how it impacted the department, his role, because he's gone back and forth on Donald Trump, although mostly he's benefited from the association.

Speaker 1 I think Bill Barr is a fascinating character for lots of reasons, but one of them was he's totally unapologetic about, I'm going to get this guy reelected. It's my job.

Speaker 1 I'm not supposed to be some, you know, Caesar's wife. You know, I'm supposed to be engaged in politics.

Speaker 1 In fact, Bill Barr goes to Trump in the spring of 2020 and says, you're going to lose this election.

Speaker 1 And I'm warning you, you've got to do something different. You've got to stop going back and forth on vaccines and bleach and hydrochloricine.
And you've got to really like

Speaker 1 communicate to people what your agenda is and your policies and give them comfort. Because right now, you're freaking them out.
These are paraphrases, of course.

Speaker 1 Barr was really a person in the slog of partisanship and not worried about doing it. However, he had a line, right? He had a line he wasn't going to cross.

Speaker 1 He wasn't going to pretend there was fraud in the election when he knew there wasn't. And

Speaker 1 ultimately,

Speaker 1 Trump asks in a furious meeting, as we all know, with Trump in December of 2020, asks for Barr's resignation on the spot.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 You dedicated a portion of the book to the capital attack on January 6th, and the red flags that were missed are ignored by the FBI.

Speaker 2 You're part of the Washington team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for your reporting about January 6th.

Speaker 2 Talking to people with this book, was there anything new that you found out that surprised you? Give me some examples they should have been flagged and why they weren't.

Speaker 1 You know, when we did our series for the Washington Post, of which I'm so proud about the before, during, and after of January 6th, I worked primarily with Aaron on the series that was about before.

Speaker 1 What happened before January 6th in the lead up? Who was stoking this? And what were law enforcement doing or seeing in real time? What's new in our book, Kara, is

Speaker 1 really shocking descriptions of how much the FBI was warned ahead of time and how almost paralyzed they were to acknowledge that there was a domestic terror threat, extremely obvious, extremely articulated in

Speaker 1 open media sources, on dark web. Yeah, it was.
And they had been flagged repeatedly about people

Speaker 1 planning where to bring their guns, planning to shoot police,

Speaker 1 planning to coordinate because Donald Trump called them to try to block the certification.

Speaker 1 I think the most shocking things are how bumbling, and I say that carefully, how bumbling the FBI was when you and I know what would happen if they saw radicalized online conversations by

Speaker 1 Muslim teenagers. We know what would have happened in those situations.
And some of these people didn't even get a knock on the door. Like, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 Why are you talking about guns, staging areas, how to get, you know, your riot gear into Washington, D.C.?

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So why? Is it bumbling or because they just didn't believe they would do that or because they kind of wanted it to happen?

Speaker 1 I don't think anybody wanted it to happen. I really don't.
I don't want to name names here, but FBI agents that we spoke to said it was a combination of things.

Speaker 1 And they guilt themselves a little bit about this. One, it was incomprehensible to them that

Speaker 1 white guys from Kentucky and Ohio who love the police would beat on them with

Speaker 1 fire extinguishers and flagpoles, just incomprehensible to them. And second, they acknowledged that the FBI leadership and the DOJ leadership were a bit hangdog.
I hope that's the right word,

Speaker 1 because they were dealing with Donald Trump on a daily basis.

Speaker 1 Remember, three days before January 6th, Donald Trump tried to fire his attorney general and replace him with somebody who was going to block the certification of the election by sending a note to Georgia.

Speaker 1 That was, you know, this attempted coup on a Sunday night. I'm going to get rid of the new replacement for Bill Barr, Jeff Rosen.
I'm going to put in this guy, Jeff Clark.

Speaker 1 And that Sunday night, half dozen DOJ officials at the highest levels of that department came to the White House to try to beg Donald Trump not to do it. They succeeded in convincing him.

Speaker 1 But imagine, like, how do you lead your protest planning when you've just survived that?

Speaker 2 Right, right. So people who were brave, the officials of the National Archives were sort of unsung heroes in your book.
Another example of stubborn bravery.

Speaker 2 They flagged the fake electors' documents as potential election interference even before January 6th, and they kept flagging them despite getting blown off again and again. Why were they dismissed?

Speaker 2 And who should have been following up on this?

Speaker 1 This is also a new revelatory detail that's never been reported before. And I am, you know, really glad you noticed it.
So Willeska McClellan and her team are investigators at the National Archives.

Speaker 1 And a lawyer who's an expert in the elector certificates, because the National Archives is responsible for storing these when they come in every four years for presidential election, says to them, hey, I've got like five, now six, now seven certificates that are completely bogus.

Speaker 1 They're signed by Republican Party officials, but they claim that Donald Trump is the president. We know that wasn't the result.
What's going on?

Speaker 1 So Willeska McClellan, this investigator investigator for the archives, doesn't usually investigate electoral politics, goes to the Department of Justice prosecutors that she has met and knows in D.C.

Speaker 1 and says, hey, guys,

Speaker 1 anybody interested in this? It looks coordinated. All these certificates look the same.
There's this funny boilerplate.

Speaker 1 It's like a kid

Speaker 1 found them with some sort of

Speaker 1 app and reproduced them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, probably they did.

Speaker 1 Prosecutors on January 8th turn her down and say, yeah, we don't know what the crime is here.

Speaker 1 Maybe have some states look into it. Have those swing states look into it.
And again, you got to, it's sort of a little bit like that January 3rd, January 6th moment. Those prosecutors in the U.S.

Speaker 1 Attorney's Office all of a sudden have a thousand potential rioters in a violent bloodbath on the Capitol to investigate.

Speaker 2 And we can't get to that. That's the least of our word.

Speaker 1 They're not looking into some documents that look funny. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But But then President Biden takes office, and you make it clear there were prosecutors in the DOJ who wanted to look at the potential coordination between Trump's innovative circle and the January 6th protesters from the get-go.

Speaker 2 But there were others who refused to expand their investigations. They're still scared of Trump, despite the fact that he was at the lowest point of his political career.

Speaker 2 Who was pushing for investigating and who was against that? And what's the crux of both arguments, like move along or he can't hurt us again? What's the diff or what?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, in in the stubborn bravery category, I'd put a prosecutor in D.C., federal prosecutor named J.P. Cooney.
He used to work in the public integrity section in Maine Justice.

Speaker 1 And now he's a supervisor over in the D.C. U.S.
Attorney's Office. By the way, I should say then he was a supervisor in the U.S.
Attorney's Office in D.C. He was fired by Trump about,

Speaker 1 I don't know, two weeks in to Trump's second presidency.

Speaker 1 So Cooney, you know, knows how to investigate and he sees what everybody sees, and what the Post is reporting at the time, and that the New York Times is reporting at the time, that it's all this forensic imagery of Roger Stone at the Willard and hanging out with Proud Boys.

Speaker 1 Same with some Ali Alexander. Stop the Steel protest organizers.

Speaker 1 And what he wants to do, and what he proposes to the FBI team that he works with all the time, is, let's investigate these people that, yes, they're in Trump's orbit, but they seem to have a link to this violent attack.

Speaker 1 Were they engaged in starting it? Were they engaged in financing it? And let's figure that out.

Speaker 2 That would be a normal thing to do.

Speaker 1 Totally normal. And follow the money also, like classic assistant U.S.
Attorney 101.

Speaker 1 But it makes the interim team before Merrick Garland is confirmed uncomfortable. And it makes the FBI's

Speaker 1 field office chief in D.C. very uncomfortable.
He flags DOJ higher levels and says, I don't like this. My lieutenants don't like this.
It looks like we're going after Trump's campaign. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's political free speech. And of course, you know what happens.
They kill that plan by Cooney.

Speaker 1 And when Garland is in office and Lisa Monaco is the deputy attorney general, the U.S. Attorney's Office tries to bring it up again and also gets batted back.
Like, that's not the course.

Speaker 2 By the FBI.

Speaker 1 Well, by Maine Justice.

Speaker 2 By Merrick Garland himself.

Speaker 1 By his team, yes.

Speaker 2 By his team, including Lisa Monaco.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Because we don't want to stir the pot or what's done is done. He won't be back.
Same idea that he won't be back, right?

Speaker 1 You know, Monaco and Garland haven't told us personally why they weren't into this idea other than over and over again, the people they confided in told us Garland wanted to turn the page.

Speaker 2 Turn the page. That's right.
Yeah. Of course, now Lisa Monaco is getting attacked by Trump.
What a surprise.

Speaker 2 Biden tapped Garland to renew faith in the Department of Justice as independent, as you said, from the executive branch. But it seems like he was almost a deadweight in these investigations.

Speaker 2 I was reading it and someone said, well, who's the villain?

Speaker 4 I go, kind of Merrick Garland.

Speaker 2 But he seemed like almost deadweight in these investigations. You describe him as being very methodical, wanting everything to be reviewed and rewritten multiple times.
You also were glacial.

Speaker 2 By all means, move at a glacial pace when it came to investigating Trump. Overall, do you think he helped to hurt the DOJ's image as independent?

Speaker 2 Does he deserve any of the blame for Donald Trump being in office now? Because it feels like you have focused on him quite a bit in this book as the real problem.

Speaker 1 I feel really torn about this as a reporter, as opposed to as a human. I used to cover this federal court where he was on the bench and the court below him.

Speaker 1 He has enormous broad respect among Republicans and Democrats, among a pantheon of judges. I respect his work.

Speaker 1 I think he was a stunningly good judge, down the middle, thought about what he was going to do every time, methodical.

Speaker 1 What I have heard over and over again from the people who worked for him is that they adored him as a human being. He's a gentle and a very smart person, a gentleman and a very smart person.

Speaker 1 They have also said that they do not think he was the right person for this moment. I wonder who was the right person for the moment, Kara.
I really wonder.

Speaker 1 Because I would not, as a journalist, recommend we bust up precedent. I've covered enough federal prosecutors to know that

Speaker 1 that's not the route. But the method here

Speaker 1 made it impossible. We will never know what could have happened, but this made it impossible to get close.

Speaker 2 Right, right. I mean, I think they probably thought again that he was gone.
I thought they, that's my impression is they thought he was dead.

Speaker 2 And I was like, no, Seratu is getting up again, like that kind of thing. I kept thinking, like, hey, don't, like, you don't have to say that.
I'm saying that.

Speaker 2 But what was interesting is when you go back to the House Select Committee's investigation of January 6th, the DOJ was dragging his feet and the lawmakers put on a show.

Speaker 2 And the committee's investigation was six months ahead of the DOJs. Usually these House committees are relying on investigations of the DOJ and of the FBA, not the other way around.

Speaker 2 Talk about how unprecedented this was that Liz Cheney was sort of running the show here and what it said about the state of the DOJ at this point, because they were running circles around the, you know, that was, that was a show.

Speaker 2 That's the kind of thing you were expecting after an attack on the Capitol like that, presumably.

Speaker 1 Dead on. I mean,

Speaker 1 I don't like to say villain, but if we're going to say heroes, the investigative team that worked on this, dang, they definitely get that label because they dug in.

Speaker 1 And I think you know, congressional investigations are often a joke.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're often like they can be not always yeah not always but they often can be a joke where it's not very thorough it's for political theater a particular party wants a particular outcome and in this case a former u.s attorney comes in as liz cheney and benny thompson's investigator tim hafey from the charlottesville originally and he brings in

Speaker 1 a crop of of former prosecutors, some corporate lawyers, but mostly just amazing investigators.

Speaker 2 A little like the Watergate investigation, right? Like that gang, including Hillary Clinton, was in that crew

Speaker 2 back when. Lots of people.

Speaker 1 That might be the closest comparison, actually.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that crew was full of people who later either joined the Supreme Court or became great big lawyers, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And this investigative team got right to the point. I mean, within days, they were on the fake electors issue, right?

Speaker 1 There's one guy who gets hired to lead the team to look at potential interference by Trump and his campaign in the election.

Speaker 1 And within about five days, he has decided that the fake electors is part of the coordinated plan. It's part of the conspiracy.
And that team ends up embarrassing the Department of Justice.

Speaker 1 Nobody at Justice wants to admit that. Nobody in Garland's office wants to say, oh, we were embarrassed.

Speaker 1 But we learned that specific things the investigative team for the House did prompted instantaneous action by the Department of Justice. And happy to go into those if you want me to.

Speaker 2 Yeah, please do. I mean, now they're trying to bring it back, right? They're trying to pretend it didn't happen at this point.

Speaker 1 Like the rewrite of history, right? Well, the televised hearings is one thing. But in terms of the investigation, January 2022, let's go back there for a second.

Speaker 1 This committee begins putting together the fake elector plot and figuring out that Rudy Giuliani was kind of arm twisting Republicans in different swing states to sign on to this.

Speaker 1 And this news leaks out in January.

Speaker 1 January 11th, there are spate of news stories about what this committee is finding. They were a leaky little boat in terms of news things coming out, but whatever.

Speaker 1 I think that was primarily not their fault. But anyway,

Speaker 1 January 2022, on the 14th, Thomas Wyndham, who's the lone prosecutor that the Justice Department has chosen in November of 2021 to start looking around the edges of Trump's world and how this, how they might be connected to the riot.

Speaker 1 Thomas Wyndham reaches out to that National Archives

Speaker 1 investigator, Willeska McClellan, and says, hey, I think we're actually going to investigate this.

Speaker 1 Can we get together and chat? Because at that point, Kara, the FBI is still resisting investigating Trump's campaign and its role in election interference.

Speaker 1 So Thomas Wyndham only has one investigator to turn to, you know, a little-known office in the National Archives.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Now, in the classified documents case, it was, again, the National Archives officials who flagged Trump and taken the boxes with him to Mar-a-Lago and who ultimately made the referral to investigate him.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, there's a huge dispute, as you said, between the DOJ and FBI over the raid.

Speaker 2 They were fearful of being made a scapegoat, or they didn't want to get in trouble the way previous, like Andrew McCabe and others were.

Speaker 2 And from your reporting and others, it seems they were almost an obstruction to the process.

Speaker 2 You know, the archives keeps doing the right thing and doing all the correct referrals. Hey, you might want to go get these boxes.

Speaker 2 The DOJ drags its feet and the FBI is like, yeah, well, let's hope the Chinese spies don't get down under the pool anytime soon, right? But I mean, that's pretty much it, right?

Speaker 2 Like, if I'm the Chinese, I'm like thrilled with this entire situation. And whatever reasons Trump had keeping them, you can say all kinds of things.
I think he just wanted to have them.

Speaker 2 That's my, that would be my guess if I had to pick of all the different things. Right.

Speaker 1 What is his famous line? These are my documents.

Speaker 2 These are mine. Like, I can see it.
Like, they're mine. I'm going to write a book or whatever the heck.
I'm going to make a museum someday or whatever. Right.

Speaker 1 Theme park. Like when the investigators from the Department of Justice learn that he's waving them around at a table in Bedminster saying, it's a show, Mark.
Right.

Speaker 1 Hey, I've got the proof that Mark Milley proposed bombing Iran. Oh, I can't declassify these documents now, but they're really secret.

Speaker 2 Right, right. So what is the dynamic here with the archives seeming to be the heroes and the others either feckless or sinister almost.

Speaker 1 There were two things that were painful to watch in real time as we're reporting and writing these,

Speaker 1 I guess, better excavated descriptions of what happened at the time.

Speaker 1 One of the things that's going on is the classified documents investigators at the Department of Justice think this is a big freaking deal.

Speaker 1 The FBI agents keep referring to it in the Washington Field Office as, we're not the records police. They think this is about presidential records, right?

Speaker 1 And the Department of Justice says, no, we think he's still got more classified records. That is the worry.
The FBI says, you don't have any proof of that. Well, that all changes on May 18th.

Speaker 1 The FBI goes down with the Department of Justice, lead prosecutor on the case, to interview a woman named Molly Michael.

Speaker 1 And she had been a Trump insider, you know, one of the many very attractive women that work just outside the Oval Office in his first presidency.

Speaker 1 And in this case, she had gone on to work for him in his post-presidential office at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 1 While they're sitting there in this freezing rented legal office in Lake Worth, talking to her, you know, she's loyal to Trump. She's shivering in the air-conditioned cold.

Speaker 1 But she is not going to lie for him. And she says, look, there are a lot more boxes of documents, same boxes that we use to pack his stuff.
There's a lot more.

Speaker 1 And then she's got the picture that's worth a thousand words, a picture of 80 to 90 boxes, which tells the FBI and the Justice Department

Speaker 1 he has so many more records than 15. This still does not persuade the FBI, however.
That Washington field office chief, Steve D'Antoano, is like, we don't know what's in them.

Speaker 1 Like, why do we have to do this? And to his credit, to his credit, Merrick Garland keeps pushing for a search.

Speaker 1 Here is a place where he is, he's very firm that there is a reason to be concerned about national security information out in the wind.

Speaker 1 Anyway, eventually they get Chris Ray, the director of the FBI, and his deputies to overrule this Washington field office leader and force him to do the search.

Speaker 2 This field office leader just didn't want what? What's his name again?

Speaker 1 Steve D'Antoano.

Speaker 2 Where is he now?

Speaker 1 He's retired.

Speaker 1 And his view is not cuckoo for for Coco Puffs. You know, initially, it wasn't crazy to say, how do we know there are classified records?

Speaker 1 And indeed,

Speaker 1 you know, there was worry early on.

Speaker 1 Maybe he has a lot of records, but it's a bunch of junk. The only problem was the National Archives knew things were still missing, right? They knew things were still missing.

Speaker 2 Well, the Archives knows that. He's like every FBI director that gets run over by Bruce Willis in a movie and is wrong, like profoundly wrong, and then loses his access to the jet.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 So, after all of Garland's fastidiousness to ensure the investigation didn't appear to be political, which he was very fastidious to do, he ended up putting one man, Jack Smith, in charge of special counsel for both investigations.

Speaker 2 Even people in the department said it made it look like an anti-Trump investigation. Analysts like Ellie Hoenig said Smith didn't have a chance because he didn't have enough time.

Speaker 2 Should there have been two special counsels? And I just talked to Ellie about

Speaker 2 about that. What impact did that have, for better or worse, on the investigations?

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: You know,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 1 have never seen a prosecutor on a complex drug case bring an indictment as fast as Jack Smith did. So I don't know

Speaker 1 that appointing two would have changed that.

Speaker 1 I think he was up against a horrendous clock when he's beginning to look at these, you know, a fledgling election interference case, which Merrick Garland froze for two months before the election in a way that kind of disturbed a few prosecutors because Donald Trump wasn't on the ballot, but

Speaker 1 Merrick Garland wanted to be very conservative and recognized that he was leading Republican, so he froze the investigation right before the midterm elections. So, Jack Smith, what does he have?

Speaker 1 He has a very early, premature election interference case, and he has a pretty well-baked, classified documents case in terms of evidence when he takes over in November of 2022.

Speaker 1 It's a sprint, though, because what is he doing? He's got six months, seven months, eight months to bring a case.

Speaker 1 And there are already primary battles that are being formed. There is a very active election campaign going on in the middle of all this.

Speaker 1 And that helps enable and propel Trump because it fits beautifully into his narrative, which is

Speaker 1 they're they're prosecuting me now intentionally to hurt my campaign.

Speaker 2 Right. So Smith led to two indictments of Donald Trump, but he also flubbed key decisions.

Speaker 2 This, when I read this, was just, of course, it was obvious, but when he decided to bring the classified documents case to Florida, where he got Trump appointed Judge Eileen Cannon, now it was sort of a luck of the draw kind of thing, and they thought we can't possibly get her, but they did.

Speaker 2 And they thought it was a real miscalculation not to bring the case in D.C., correct?

Speaker 2 What was the thinking? Like, if there's any chance of getting her, like the doormat of all judges for Trump,

Speaker 2 why even take that very slim chance?

Speaker 1 So Smith's team had a legal analysis done of where is it the fairest and the most appropriate to bring the case.

Speaker 1 And their conclusion was simply Florida, because some of the withholding classified records evidence was the strongest and the case was was stronger in Florida.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean you couldn't bring it in D.C. And it's easy in hindsight for us all to say, why didn't you bring it in D.C.? But I'm saying it.
It's easy to do.

Speaker 1 And I'm saying it because I didn't know until we began reporting this book that two critical things happened. One, his team had some dissension about this.

Speaker 1 You know, a prosecutor with a ton of national security experience from the Southern District of New York basically said, you all are effing insane to go to Florida.

Speaker 1 That's That's an existential threat to the case, just as you have outlined, Kara. An existential threat if you get Cannon, it's over.
DC judges, no classified records cases.

Speaker 2 We have a, we should say nothing of her doormat. She seems incompetent, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 Right. So there's that dissension, which we didn't know about, nobody knew about until we began this reporting.

Speaker 1 And then the second thing we didn't know about was Smith's office had done a calculation. There's a thing called the wheel in every courthouse.
Who are you going to get on the wheel?

Speaker 1 The judge's wheel.

Speaker 1 And on the wheel, they had figured out that it was a one-in-six chance of getting Cannon. A little later, after they've already pretty much made the decision,

Speaker 1 but not begun presenting evidence to the grand jury in Florida, they find out it's a one-in-three chance. Well, that's pretty existential because you know where Cannon is coming from.

Speaker 1 She handled the original grand jury search issues and she leaned heavy for Trump and against all case law.

Speaker 2 Yep. I mean, you know, honestly, and a lucky son of a bitch like Donald Trump, who seems to get every turn his way, I would, ah.
But was there any way to stop that? Was Jack Smith's decision, correct?

Speaker 2 Fatal. And that's why he is where he is now.

Speaker 1 Jack Smith's decision, he presented it to Merrick Garland, who wanted to vet that, wanted that checked out. But they both concluded, okay, if you think that's where the law favors it, that's fine.

Speaker 1 He wasn't going to tell Jack Smith you can't do that because the legal analysis suggested it.

Speaker 1 I remember a couple people telling us that in the presentation, when asked, like, what about Cannon, David Newman, who was a national security prosecutor for the Department of Justice, and in the meeting where

Speaker 1 Jack Smith's making his presentation for how we're going to indict him, where we're going to do it. And Newman says, your biggest risk is Cannon.
You get her and the case is over. What about that?

Speaker 1 And Smith's response was, I'm not worried about Florida. You know, like the facts are on my side.
Once again, a Justice Department institutionalist saying,

Speaker 1 you know, this is the way it works, and we're going to be okay. Right.

Speaker 2 Now he knows. Of course, the last straw was on the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity in response to the election interference case.
The judges overturned decades of precedent.

Speaker 2 The Supreme Court had been dragging its feet, and Justice Roberts signaled the way the wind was blowing.

Speaker 2 Was there anything that Smith could have done differently, knowing the immunity ruling was a real possibility?

Speaker 1 I can't see another path. The only thing that could have helped Jack Smith is if he had been able to start sooner.
You know, I think it's important to underline here:

Speaker 1 it's possible the immunity decision would have forestalled ever bringing that election interference case in our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 No matter if Merrick Garland had authorized it on day one in March when he was confirmed, or his interim had confirmed it on January 21st,

Speaker 1 there's no way to know. But the classified documents case was a slam dunk.
And that's where he didn't have the same kind of presidential immunity claim.

Speaker 2 So here we are back in gutter politics. Even before President Trump returned to the White House, he had vowed to go after his political enemies.

Speaker 2 He's using the Department of Justice via Pam Bondi to do that. Obviously, there were recent indictments of James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton.

Speaker 2 But all year, there's been a purge going on at the DOJ. Hundreds of employees have been fired, including all the prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases.
Many others have quit in protests.

Speaker 2 And Bondi has said the DOJ works at the directive of Donald Trump. She's not even pretending.

Speaker 2 These are just a few touch points of all the things Trump has done at the DOJ, the internal pressure campaigns, attacking his enemies.

Speaker 2 Every week something happens and letting his friends off the hook. What do you think is the most lasting damage on the DOJ? Like, what's the impact over the long term?

Speaker 1 Two-part answer. As a reporter, not as a person, this makes me really sad.
I have covered prosecutors,

Speaker 1 court cases, congressional investigations that stemmed from DOJ work since I was 30 years old. I don't know how this institution is going to recover.

Speaker 1 And the people who work there and are trying to hold it together, even though they're disgusted by what's happening around them, they tell me the damage is hard to recover from in a generation or two.

Speaker 1 Not only have you taken away centuries' worth of expertise by getting rid of the entire public integrity section, by getting rid of some of the most senior representatives at the Department of Justice for fighting counterterror,

Speaker 1 in one fell swoop,

Speaker 1 Donald Trump and his deputies got rid of everyone at the leadership level of the FBI who know how to oversee complex conspiracies, who understand how to investigate a mass casualty event, who are leaders who've grown up for 20 plus years, that that's like impossible to replace.

Speaker 1 The second part is, and you hinted at it, Kara, when Pam Bondi's gone and there's a Democratic president and a Democratic appointee, how are they now supposed to operate?

Speaker 1 They're not going to take the Merrick Garland playbook, but what are they supposed to do to affirm trust in this

Speaker 1 very noble institution? Are they supposed to have a purge of Republicans who've been appointed? And when will Americans believe

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 regardless of what side you're on, right, politically, ideologically, when will Americans again believe that criminal charges are justified, not the bidding of the president, right? Right, right.

Speaker 1 Because he's already, as you said, they're not even embarrassed about it. Donald Trump told Pampandi who to indict.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So So every episode we get a question from an outside expert.
Here's yours.

Speaker 9 Hi, my name is Jonathan Cantor. I was Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the DOJ from 2021 to 2024.

Speaker 9 We can all agree that Donald Trump has obliterated the norms that stood as the foundation for the Justice Department since the Watergate era. My question is about what happens next.

Speaker 9 If and when the country decides that it's ready to rebuild the DOJ, how does it do it? Does it go back to the norms that seemed fit for purpose in the Watergate era?

Speaker 9 Or do we reimagine the Justice Department for new era, post-Donald Trump, a new political environment where the Justice Department needs to move more quickly, more decisively, and with greater independence?

Speaker 2 There's the perfect question.

Speaker 2 And include the FBI in that.

Speaker 1 The only thing I can envision, and I've talked to a lot of people who are DOJ and FBI alums about this, they are envisioning something the same,

Speaker 1 is that there's going to be a post-Watergate-like moment and a post-Trump moment in which

Speaker 1 people realize that the trust is so important in this institution, that it's so critical to the principles of the founders about fair and equal justice, and that we need to trust that, that there's going to be some incredible, impermeable line in between the White House and the Department and the FBI.

Speaker 1 You know, in the end of the first Trump presidency, we had sources telling us that Chris Ray had been warned over and over again by Bill Barr, I am protecting you from Donald Trump firing you.

Speaker 1 He wants to fire you because you haven't indicted, investigated, swooped up this person.

Speaker 1 And Chris Ray was in a little bit of a defensive crouch, right? There's got to be a world in which the FBI director and the Attorney General can be impervious from

Speaker 1 a president who's willing to break the founder's promise.

Speaker 2 So speaking of that, in a recent op-ed, you explain all the things that happen to the country without a real justice department.

Speaker 2 At the end, you write, finally, without a real justice department, a president holding the reins of a corrupted institution can remain president permanently, free to manipulate election results with no real threat of being dethroned.

Speaker 2 You're using, obviously, a king reference. Is that where you think it's heading?

Speaker 1 I'm not trying to be suspenseful, but there's some really active reporting on this that I don't want to get into.

Speaker 2 Well, you're being suspenseful then, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 I think that there are reasons that people are quite worried about a permanent non-dethroning.

Speaker 1 And I think I should stop there.

Speaker 2 Meaning, and he's mentioned it himself. People want me to stay.
And obviously Bannon has mentioned it. There's lots of people who.

Speaker 1 Sure, there are people mentioning it, but what's important? It's important how it could be possible. And I think the how it could be possible is where I have my eye.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And can you give an idea of that it is possible, therefore it is possible if you're looking at it.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, I mean, it's possible to indict a ham sandwich.

Speaker 1 We never expected we would be indicting, you know, Letitia James for mortgage fraud based on documents that show she repeatedly said, this is not my primary residence.

Speaker 1 We never expected somebody would be indicted for that,

Speaker 1 except for a president demanded it,

Speaker 1 fired everybody who resisted it, installed somebody who would do it. And we never expect that an election can be rigged or manipulated.
We never expect that machine.

Speaker 2 I expected that one, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 That one I expected.

Speaker 1 It's the how, Kara. It's the how.
And I promise when we know the how and what the details are, we'll be back with you.

Speaker 2 Will they continue with these ridiculous prosecutions? Because in this case, it's a joke. I mean, he thinks himself his prosecutions were a joke, but these are an actual joke.

Speaker 2 You know, as you said, with those documents, would Hillary Clinton be in his sites? Would others that he's talked about?

Speaker 1 Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan.

Speaker 1 The list goes on and on.

Speaker 1 I have seen internal documents about meetings that involve these subjects and where they want to go with these investigations.

Speaker 1 There have been discussions about Chris Wray and his deputies and his other leaders for allegedly withholding documents or destroying them. No evidence to back that up.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of people on Donald Trump's target list.

Speaker 2 Very last question. When you look at all this, I mean, you've been covering institutions forever, right?

Speaker 2 When you look at all this, when you started covering this, did you ever imagine this much shift? Because I think one of the things that goes through this book is,

Speaker 2 you know, every time Donald Trump does summon, I have some liberal go, can you believe it? I'm like, yes, yes, he's done it 10 times if I can believe it. And they're like, can you believe it?

Speaker 2 I'm like, yes, again. Can you believe it? As a reporter watching this happen.

Speaker 1 We put down the pen on this book, Injustice, in mid-April, first couple weeks of April of this year.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I would never have imagined some of the things that have happened. I'll tell you, the sources we talked to warned us that it was possible.
They were definitely in your camp.

Speaker 1 They were like, it's coming. You just wait.
I remember sitting with a a source high up in the Justice Department who said, this place is going to get shredded. And I thought it was

Speaker 1 dramatic, scary sounding,

Speaker 1 close to possible, but it's

Speaker 1 all happening months after we put the pen down in such

Speaker 1 horrific fashion.

Speaker 1 The idea that U.S. attorneys' offices are being ordered to indict

Speaker 1 people

Speaker 1 without a public interest and without facts.

Speaker 1 I'll just quote John Keller, former head of the public integrity section, who said when I called him, and by the way, he never talks to the press, but now he was forced out after he refused to get rid of New York Mayor Eric Adams' bribery case, refused to dismiss it because he knew the evidence was very strong, wasn't going to do that political errand.

Speaker 1 And he said, charging people without factual basis, based on a politician's wish, this is the hallmark, you know, of a dictatorship. And

Speaker 1 he's totally right.

Speaker 1 And I never would have thought that I was quoting someone as saying that when we put the pen down to injustice, we were warned by our sources that this was coming, but even some of them, I don't think they knew it would be this bad.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's absolutely true. But thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you for such a thoughtful conversation, Cara.

Speaker 2 Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Roussell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics.
If you're already following this show, you are stubbornly brave.

Speaker 2 If not, you get Judge Eileen Cannon, and good luck with that incompetent jurist. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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