A lot of people seem to have forgotten what made Donald Trump’s presidency so dangerous. Wasn’t it just a lot of loudmouthed name-calling, like tweeting that his own secretary of state was “dumb as a rock”? What did he do that was so terrible after all? NATO is intact, inflammatory policies like the so-called Muslim ban and the southern border wall were mostly thwarted, and the economy did well, at least until Covid. We survived — right?
It’s true that the Trump presidency generated hysteria and hyperbole on both sides of the political divide. But it also produced real threats to the Constitution and the rule of law. So it’s incumbent on us to separate the bluster from the genuine menace, the sound and fury from the specific, palpable ways that Trump damaged American democracy.
In “Where Tyranny Begins,” David Rohde, a longtime foreign correspondent and national security reporter now with NBC News, takes up one very serious assault on democratic norms under Trump: the naked politicization of the Justice Department.
Trump was the first president since Nixon to utterly reject the idea that federal law enforcement should operate independently of the president’s personal desires or prejudices. Rather, he sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. as instruments to help himself and his friends and to punish his enemies.
Although Rohde doesn’t hide his conviction that Trump undermined democracy with his salvos against the Justice Department’s independence, he nonetheless writes in measured, restrained language that should hold up well in the light of history. “Where Tyranny Begins” is a work of reporting and sober analysis, not polemic. While his title might sound shrill, it’s actually an allusion to words from John Locke: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”
Importantly, Rohde understands that there’s tension and ambiguity in the Justice Department’s charge: It’s expected to carry out the president’s policies yet simultaneously to investigate him and his associates neutrally. After Watergate, America enacted reforms to strengthen the latter part of the mission — to preserve the department’s autonomy. Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi issued guidelines for ensuring impartiality should Watergate-style criminality again pervade the White House.
That framework began to change under the first President Bush. In perhaps the greatest abuse of presidential power since Watergate, Bush issued pardons to six former Reagan administration officials indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, including Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, in part so that Weinberger wouldn’t be compelled to give testimony at trial that would implicate Bush himself. The erosion of norms upholding Justice Department autonomy continued under the second President Bush, who in 2006 fired several U.S. attorneys for plainly political reasons — a scandal that led to his attorney general’s resignation.
As in so many realms, Trump outdid his predecessors. This is the heart of Rohde’s multipart story: Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey after learning that the agency was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He browbeat Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the inquiry. He threatened to sack the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller. He had his next attorney general, William Barr, name another special prosecutor to investigate F.B.I. agents involved in the Russia probe. He punished agency officials, like the deputy director Andrew McCabe, who Trump believed conspired against him. He pardoned Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and other cronies. He pressured his next attorney general, Barr, and other Justice officials to abet his schemes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Some of this history will be familiar to those who followed these scandals in real time. But Rohde performs the clarifying service of pulling these events into a concise, well-told narrative, helping us see the unifying thread of Justice Department politicization. More valuable still, he conducted numerous interviews with midlevel F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who flesh out the picture of how Trump and his underlings exerted pressure on them to work his will.
We meet Jody Hunt, a career Justice official who became Sessions’s chief of staff and then the senior official in charge of the department’s Civil Division. Hunt was horrified to see people back in his home state of Alabama losing confidence in the justice system. We meet Erica Newland, a 29-year-old lawyer at the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who stayed on into the Trump administration to check his dictatorial impulses, only to feel she was “saving Trump from his own lies.” Collectively, their recollections and those of others (many from people who opted to remain anonymous, both for professional reasons — the Department of Justice values discretion — and out of fear of retribution by Trump and his allies) furnish an inside view of how these struggles played out in the corridors of power.
The second half of Rohde’s story, about the efforts by Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, to restore norms of political independence, lacks some of the urgency of the first part. And inevitably so: Accounts of legal maneuverings — the Capitol riot prosecutions, efforts to recover the classified documents Trump filched — aren’t the stuff of high drama. But even here Rohde illuminates the pernicious consequences of the department’s politicization, as Garland drew fire from the right, for being too partisan, as well as from the left, for not being partisan enough.
Rohde reveals that Garland felt pained that norms of impartiality meant that his department had “a hand tied behind its back, compared to a political actor.” But Rohde adds that for Garland to have discarded these venerable norms just because Trump had done so would have only made things worse. “We would not want to be a political actor,” Garland proclaimed. “That is the end of the rule of law.” As Trump advances toward a possible second presidential term, we would all do well to reread our Locke.
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