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- [00:07]
A
Welcome to Talking Feds. One on one deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. When the full accounting of Trump's degradation of democracy is told, it will focus first and foremost on the Department of Justice, which the administration has hollowed out and utterly subverted. Now, two of the country's most prominent investigative reporters have written what promises to be an authoritative account of the Department of Justice over its most tumultuous years. From erosion in Trump 1.0 to a restoration period under Biden and Merrick Garland to to the bottom falling out with the second Trump administration. It's a riveting read and to lovers of the rule of law and the Department of Justice, an infuriating one. I'm really happy to welcome the book's co authors and I think their first discussion of the certain to be bestseller in Justice. Welcome Carol Lennig and Aaron Davis. Carol is MSNBC's senior investigative correspondent. Before moving to the network this summer, she spent 25 years at the Washington Post where she won five, count them, five Pulitzer prizes. This is her fourth book and I'm glad to say the second we've covered on Talking Feds. Carol, thanks so much for joining us to talk about injustice.
- [01:46]
B
Delighted to be here, you know.
- [01:48]
A
And Aaron Davis, an investigative reporter for the Post and himself the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes as well as three time finalist. He was a lead writer and reporter on the Post coverage of the January 6th attack that won multiple awards. It's his first time on Talking Feds. Aaron, thanks very much for joining.
- [02:08]
C
Delighted to be here. Thank you.
- [02:10]
A
So first, congratulations on a monumental achievement. It's comprehensive, sophisticated, chock full of new reporting and not least, a riveting read. You describe the grand sweep of the book, which goes from the early stages of Trump's interference in his first term through the Garland years and into the current existential crisis for the department as a tragedy in three acts told from the rooms where it happened. So let's start at the first act a little bit because there's so much new material to cover. But it's that account brought home something that maybe is faded from memory given all this come since, which is even in the first term, Trump put great pressure on the department's defining mission of justice without fear or favor. And we came a lot closer perhaps to disaster than I think people will generally recall. Just want to ask you about a couple benchmarks in the book and let's start with Andy McCabe, who served as deputy director, acting director of the FBI. You call that case a harbinger of the thumb on the scale. Why do you say that? And how was it taken within the FBI and the department?
- [03:31]
B
Harry, what's so striking about the effort to prosecute Andy McCabe is it's the first time a president was publicly calling for someone's head. The president had made, by our count, dozens of public requests for either the jailing prosecution or criminal charges against the former Deputy director, who as acting director Andy McCabe, was the person Trump held most responsible for an investigation into Trump himself. You may Remember when Comey, FBI Director James Comey was fired and McCabe is sitting there that night realizing that it was a loyalty test, Comey failed it with Trump and he begins an investigation and opens one on his own pen into whether or not Trump is personally obstructing the Russia criminal investigation. And Trump never forgot that and kept pressuring and haranguing his Attorney General for this guy's head. What we learned, Aaron, and I, was that career prosecutors, the people are supposed to assess these cases, concluded this case made them super uncomfortable. They were presenting evidence to a grand jury. They didn't think that it was in the public interest. They didn't think the evidence that he'd intentionally lied was that important or strong. And they thought the chances of winning the case were nearly nil because of Trump's own public comments and which showed that he was stoking it and that the prosecution was likely vindictive.
- [05:12]
A
Yeah, you call it a white hot terror campaign and talk about a harbinger of things to come. And of course, McCabe winds up getting a pretty handsome verdict from the DOJ for being fired 26 hours before his pension was divest. Okay, so let's move maybe to the Mueller report. And maybe I could ask you, Aaron, obviously a long saga in itself, but the very end is the summary delivered by then Attorney General Bill Barr that greatly diluted, I think you could say, uncontroversially, Mueller's findings, which included conduct by Trump amounting to obstruction of justice, even if they wouldn't prosecute because of DOJ policy. Your take on this, yours and Carol's, is old school to the end. Mueller played into a trap set on the board by the leaders of his own Justice Department. Can you sort of spell out the trap as you guys concluded, Aaron?
- [06:17]
C
Well, that quote actually does come from the book and it's regarding some internal folks who worked for Mueller, that this was their perception of how things had played out in the very end that Mueller believed that they would deliver this report, that it would be presented fairly. We spoke with people who really got into this and years later do feel some remorse about how all of this played out, that they really thought this was going to be the beginning of a national dialogue about Russian interference, about so much that had happened in those years. And in fact, as we all saw, got buried. The narrative was lost in the public, you know, to the prosecutors, the investigators working on this case. It was a travesty that so many things that they had found about, you know, the Russian government, the agents working on their behalf to hack into, you know, systems in our country that, that never really got a full airing and, you know, allowed to play out afterwards without, you know, any follow up.
- [07:22]
A
So, yeah, I mean, I think we're finding to this day an inexhaustible campaign by Trump to try to scrub that from history. This recent $230 million he's asked for from the DOJ, that's part of his relentless campaign to somehow persuade the people that all of this was a hoax and made up. And as you say, a 244 page report with quite a lot of detail. All right, so much in the book, everyone, but I want to move to the newer stuff for us, but there's a takeaway, I think, from Act 1, is that the Republic held against ferocious efforts by Trump. Justice, as you write, wasn't broken, just bruised. Well, actually, one last thing about there. One of the most dramatic moments in the book is this meeting. I think it's early January 21st, between Trump and his DOJ officials where Trump is still desperately trying to keep himself in power. Two hours long, you know, so there must have been quite a dynamic there before he finally backs down under threats from all of the department brass that they'll resign. What's your sense of how close we came to a DOJ engineered coup attempt? Because you can really, his idea was just say there was fraud to Georgia and, and my Republican congressman will take care of the rest. Just so a little chaos and I've got the subsequent plan. Your sense of, you know, how close we dodged the bullet by, I mean.
- [09:01]
B
By the telling of the individuals who are in the room. We came, you know, millimeters from a bizarre abuse and manipulation of the Department of Justice to overturn a free and fair election, to try to throw Georgia into doubt and therefore stop the certification of the vote on January 6, which really, you know, Harry, is really pro forma. But no, Trump was trying everything he could to stop it. And literally inside that room, you know, the deputy acting Deputy Attorney General, Rich Donahue, is running in muddy jeans across the Washington Mall to get to the White House for this meeting. So, so urgently does he fear that the Department of Justice is going to be taken over in a nonviolent coup? John Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, when he gets word several hours later by email from an aide to Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen that Trump has finally basically given up because all of them have threatened to resign in the meeting and threatened that more officials will resign from the Department of Justice en masse. When John Demares gets this email, he goes, oh, my gosh. Amazing. Everybody's breathing this sigh of relief because that's how close it was.
- [10:23]
A
And of course, the one guy in the room who was more than ready to go, Jeff Clark, whom Trump had said he'd appoint Attorney General. I think you can say that now in Trump 2.0. It's just kind of a lot of Jeff Clark's there and no Rosens and Donahue's or even Bill Barr. We can't. We don't have time to go into him. But he, you know, as a pretty complex figure, I think, in your telling, and not completely notwithstanding what happened in Mueller, at the end, he tells Trump, you know, there's no fraud. That's bullshit. As, as in his words. All right, let's move to Act 2, the, you know, the restoration of sorts, the Biden era. So Merrick Garland comes in on March 11. Biden casts him as an antidote to Trump's four years of contempt for our democracy, as he put it. What was his approach to just trying to right the ship that had, you know, listed at a minimum during the previous four years?
- [11:25]
C
You know, I did not realize until we got deep into writing this book that Attorney General Merrick Garland had helped craft some of the very language that was part of the principles of federal.
- [11:36]
A
As a kid with civility, right? Late 70s.
- [11:39]
C
Yeah. Yes. After his know, spent all night, like, waiting on the steps of the Supreme Court to watch some of the Watergate hearings. This was the guy in charge now at the Department of Justice and was the, you know, had literally written the chapter on separation between White House and doj, and he wanted to restore that. An arm's length, like a full arm's length. And he was not going to, you know, take any direction. And Biden, to his credit, you know, on his opening day, says, you're not supposed to answer to me. You answer to the rule of law to the American people. And I think he embodied that, you know, from day one. The question becomes of that moment, how he saw it. That was the only job. Obviously, there was a lot that had to happen in the next few years.
- [12:19]
A
Yeah. All right, so let's move to that. It's really a core part of the book. I mean, there was reporting that early on, he got his sort of tight circle around him and said, we follow wherever the evidence goes. But in your account, the investigation lags at a sluggish pace for the next year or so. Big question, I know. But, Carol, if I can serve it up to you, what were the cluster of reasons, as you and Aaron saw them, for the relatively sluggish progress?
- [12:54]
B
You know, I would boil it down to two reasons. One, as Aaron and I found in our reporting, the blows and bruises that the Justice Department and especially the FBI took in the first Trump administration were so much worse than anybody knew at the time. Even, even us, we were covering it. It was so much more bloodied. A department and a bureau of investigation on January 2021 due to Trump's very personalized attacks. You know, imitating a FBI lawyer having an orgasm on television. You know, these are. These are gutting events for people, and they were running away from Trump, essentially. The second reason was Merrick Garland, and moderate jurist with an impeccable reputation who had this idea in his mind that we're going to save justice by being the opposite of Donald Trump. The problem was Donald Trump didn't stop coming. And the softening of the ground that Garland inherited made the FBI resistant to opening investigations, made prosecutors double check themselves, made senior officials wonder. Well, Merrick Garland probably doesn't want us to go down this road looking independently from the actual January 6th riot that we are using as our starting point for this investigation. You know, Merrick Garland, I want to give him credit, he said over and over again, what good prosecutors say, you start from the bottom, you build your way up. But ultimately, when the Justice Department actually began investigating Trump's interference in the election, the evidence they cited was nothing they had gained in the year after Garland took over. It was evidence that was available on December 2020. Everything in the predicate for opening that investigation in January of 2022 had been around for a long time.
- [14:55]
C
It's hard to go back and put ourselves in that time period. But, you know, you know, we do say that that investigation and the Trump does really lag. It's because they were so focused on the rioters, right? I mean, there was a ton of work to do. But there was a real disconnect between what the public stood to be the case, which was the acting attorney, U.S. attorney in D.C. going out on the day after January 6th and saying, we're going to follow this investigation as far as it goes. And somebody says, including Donald Trump, basically, and he says, we're going to take it as far as we need to. And there were headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times that they're going to investigate Trump. And it was kind of out there in the sense that that was going on. In fact, really, they were so snowed under by all the tips and the rioters and that was taking up all the, all of their bandwidth. And they really didn't assign, and they actually pushed back from assigning people, including like Roger Stone, who was seen outside the Willard Hotel with Oath Keepers the night before the attack. And they're like, we're not investigating people, we're investigating this crime. And that really set the tone and the approach for so long.
- [15:56]
A
And we'll return to that a little if we can. I think, you know, Carol, I see it a little differently. Stone's a good example of people they were doing in that first year and Garland had given those instructions. But, you know, this is about your book and I want to focus on it. Let me, let me take up first that the really interesting and in many ways new reporting in the book about the FBI. So you really document a lot of resistance which is contrary, as you also say, to the normal mode of operation, which I can tell you personally is the FBI. Oh, you know, trying, trying to push, but especially Steve Dantuno, the head of the FBI was very reticent and why were they in particular. And he in particular so focused on basically applying the brakes?
- [16:52]
B
You know, he had a lot of reasons. Steve Dantuano was the field office SAC special agent in charge of the Washington field office, one of the most important in the FBI firmament. And he first, when he was approached about a prosecutor named J.P. cooney, who becomes an important character in Jack Smith's work when Cooney is proposing in February that they start looking directly at how Trump's allies are connected, at least they seem to be connected to the riot in some way. Roger Stone being one, Ali Alexander another and some more. When he first proposes this, he has a multi page PowerPoint. But Steve Dantuano gets word of this and is extremely concerned. Why are we going to go right to a political figure and their political campaign isn't their speech and isn't their activity Completely protected. And he backs away from that. The second time he resists. Steve Dantuano is approached by Thomas Windom, newly appointed in November 2021 at the behest of Lisa Monaco, the Deputy Attorney General, to start looking at possible links to Trump's campaign and the potential interference in the election. And when he goes to Steve Dantuano and says, here's the grand jury I'd like you to be involved in. Here's the investigation I want us to start looking at, which is Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, other Trump campaign lawyers operating out of the Willard in the days before January 6th and seeming to direct some specific actions to block the certification. Santuano says, we're not subpoenaing the frigging Willard. These exact words.
- [18:43]
A
Were those his exact words? I wonder, actually. But that has reported they were. Okay, all right.
- [18:49]
B
The reason he, he has that reaction, according to his explanation to others in the room, is this is a hotel, a big deal hotel, a luxury hotel in D.C. we're going to start pulling financial and billing records for a big hotel. Are we going to ensnare people and their privacy? Maybe somebody's having an affair and we get the records that they met their secretary at this location. But ultimately, Steve Johnshuano also is very worried about being deferential to a former president. Why are we immediately going at a former president that makes him, if not squeamish, extremely uncomfortable.
- [19:34]
C
Yeah.
- [19:34]
A
And look, again, just from my experience, that kind of reserve or concern, how it reflects on them is pretty characteristic of the FBI. We can also say, and I think the book makes this clear as well, you know, seditious conspiracy against the President, that's got a lot of traps and concerns. You can contrast it with Mar a Lago, where basically the FBI and Garland as well, pretty much green lighted right away. But yes, the FBI. We know the revelations in this book about the FBI, I think make it, you know, worth the price of admission alone. I'll just put it that way. Okay, let's move to Jack Smith as special counsel. So when we first meet him in the book, he's had this serious bike accident and he like comes across as a bionic man. He checks himself out of the hospital, takes himself off painkillers, works 11 and a half hour days. I just wanted to serve up a general question. Either give me your sense of his not prosecutorial chops, just his character. Who, who is Jack Smith?
- [20:47]
C
Thought about this a little bit as we were writing about it and you know, the, the images that are out there of him because they, you know, they're. They're pretty flat, right? This guy comes across as, you know.
- [20:58]
A
And no rocking, right?
- [21:02]
C
And we kept trying to pierce that and get into who is this guy when you're inside working in his office and how does he handle investigations? And in many ways you see a more textured version, but there's still a lot of that. There's still even among his staff that we're all about the business here. We're not here to have fun. We're here to get this job done. That comes through in a lot of different ways. There's a blow by blow of how he. The office forms and how people are around and they're standing around having cookies one time and, you know, nobody even knows each other and he's like, basically, get back to work, right? And so they, you know, off they are. And, you know, there's a sense that folks, you know, there's a certain small circle of people. And Carol brought up JP Cooney that he, that he did tell a lot to, but he was very close hold even inside that office, very careful with how he did things, you know, very careful in what was communicated back to doj. But he did follow all of the, you know, the standards. This guy knew DOJ protocol. He'd been in, you know, the leader of Penn for years. You know, nobody was surprised inside the Attorney General's office by what he was doing. I think you could say, you know, cross the T's, dot the I's. I think a lot of that really comes through.
- [22:17]
B
I just wanted to underline two things. I agree with everything Aaron said, but it is superhuman what he does physically and what he does professionally in this regard, because he's handed one case that's not formed at all and one case that has some really good meat, and that's the classified documents case. And Harry, you back check me on this, but I have never seen anybody bring an indictment in those complex cases, a kind of case in six to seven months time. It's unprecedented. And this was involving a former president and candidate for office.
- [22:59]
A
And a very checker charge for the DOJ with a lot, right. Really problematic.
- [23:04]
B
It's stunning that he was able to take that and sprint to Aaron's point about the rigor that was going on in this office. And then I want to emphasize the physical part. The guy's leg was busted up so bad, he, he was screaming at the top of his lungs in the hospital and they had to move him to a different ward because it was waking people Up. This is the guy that took himself off.
- [23:26]
A
You talk about it like a noodle.
- [23:28]
B
Oath of office.
- [23:30]
A
Yeah. Amazing. All right, this is a lead into the one point I want to try to talk about with respect to you, the thesis that about possible passivity by the doj. And that's, you know, the sprint point. So you've talked about the missteps and missed opportunities. But my question to you guys, I don't know if you've thought about in these terms, but how realistic is it that the department could have completed any prosecution of Trump before the election, not even to mention the appeals, if they brought the case a year earlier? So when the election came, recall, we were at the beginning of this process, ordered by the Supreme Court methodically at the district court level, Judge Chutkan, to go through and figure out what was immune and what wasn't. It was a certainty because it involved immunity. It would then go to the D.C. circuit and then the Supreme Court again. And that's not to mention all the other pretrial events and a defendant, of course, who was hell bent on delaying at every turn, by my calculations. And there's not even the remotest possibility of an actual trial happening. And that's regardless of the appeals, which just to tell people quickly, if it's not through the appeals, Trump, if he wins, can still dismiss the cases when he comes in. And one other point to add is Smith does get the chance to display his evidence to the American people in October as part of this part. So have you considered whether it's at all plausible that but for the things you document, there would have been a trial?
- [25:15]
C
I'll take a first whack at that. Yeah, I agree with you. If you want to put out the spreadsheet of months it's going to take for this appeal or that appeal, that all of those things. Certainly there's a heavy thought with Inside DOJ that it was impossible that whatever they did was never going to get to a trial on the January 6th case. What I don't think we can know, and that I think comes through in the book in different ways, is how the complete absence of this investigation regarding the president and his actions leads to an emboldened Donald Trump and very pivotal months in which he does not hear any footsteps, nobody's getting interviewed by the FBI, nobody's being called in and subpoenaed. In the talk about this, he goes out there more and more in public and calls January 6th, you know, a love fest, and nobody, you know, inside DOJ calls him on It. And, and so this is the question that I think we've wrestled with a lot in writing the book and I think people will continue to wrestle with beyond this book. But, you know, there is, the fact is it was a vacuum and he did not ever feel, there's no reason that he would have felt any pressure that DOJ was really looking at him. And so later, after the fact, kind of the cake is already baked as far as he's the nominee. And then he can portray it how he does in the rest of the election.
- [26:35]
B
Talking Feds is supported by the Brennan center for Justice. In this new political era, the Brennan center will do what they do, defend the Constitution and the rule of law. They're prepared to fight against presidential overreach and will continue advocating for reforms to resist weaponized government, stop billionaires from corrupting our elections, and ensure every eligible American has the freedom to vote. Stay informed by visiting Brennan Center.org all.
- [27:03]
A
Right, so let's move to the final act of the tragedy when the villain squeezes the breath out of the hero. The hero being the Department of Justice here. So we start with the pardons of January 6th offenders. Still, things have gone by. It's such a, a blazing clip. But that just always again, rises to the top of outrageous to me as an ex doj because it's, you know, complete repudiation of the work of several years. Again, because you're so, I think, such breakthrough reporting on the FBI. I wonder if you have a sense of the reaction of the career professionals, both at the department and at the FBI to that. And you know, by some lights, it's such a dereliction. You almost have to rationalize sticking around after something like that. How are they rationalizing it to themselves?
- [27:56]
B
You know, big picture, Harry, people were devastated when that happened. People had worked on the cases, even people that hadn't worked on the cases. And remember, thousands of FBI agents were involved in this and hundreds all over the country.
- [28:11]
A
Right. Every time you find someone U.S. attorneys.
- [28:13]
B
Right. I will say one thing. In the FBI, the response was ever so slightly different because some agents felt that scrubbing to the earth, as Garland insisted they do for everyone who had breached the building was not worth the candle. And they would have focused much more on those engaged in violence, felonies. Because ultimately some of them become, as, as then Chief Judge Beryl Howell remarked, little more than misdemeanor trespassing. And that use of resources bothered some agents that we interviewed very much. But remember, Harry, just as you said, blazing pace, we see this dizzying set of headlines that are going by that we're trying to cover in real time. And for the inside, the DOJ and the FBI, what are they dealing with? Right after the pardon, their colleagues start getting fired. You know, acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll gets called into a skinny down meeting with then acting Deputy Attorney General Emile Beauvais and is told, I want the names of all the FBI agents that were involved in this case. He's preparing for a purge. And so in one like very human kind of story, they're decimated that cases they worked on are tossed out as unimportant. But they have to protect their own bodies, literally, and their own colleagues. And that becomes their focus today. I still speak with sources in both the Bureau and the Department of Justice who flagged to me when the pardoned January 6th rioters are rearrested for new crimes and weirdly often child exploitation.
- [30:02]
A
Yes, it's very strange. One quick follow up to that. When Bove is at some, you know, he's not a charming fellow in the book and I think in real life though he has life tenure now he's on the Third Circuit. But at one point trying to almost sweet talk pretty please, he says to the I think it's to the Bureau folks, Stephen Miller, I just got to get five or six names of agents who worked on January 6th for Stephen Miller. Is it your sense that then or even now, you know, who's calling the shots at doj? Is Bove just an enforcer of Stephen Miller, Bondi, Trump himself? What's your sense of the real power behind the edicts?
- [30:49]
C
The people we've talked to for this book have. And then I think you've seen in some of the lawsuits that have come out in the intervening months since we've finish the manuscript that, you know, there is a sense that and even plenty of anecdotes at Bobay himself and people said that they were, you know, trying to appease the White House. And so, you know, that's what we've heard from sources. And, you know, I think some of that will play out in court.
- [31:13]
A
In general. Do you have a sense of the two part question, if I could, the attitude of career professionals toward Bondi and Blanche and then just the degree of interaction. I can say when I was in the department, it was not so unusual to, you know, encounter the biggest shots in the hall or talk about them or be in on meetings. But you got to wonder with the alienating conduct they've had if they are isolated figures at the top and the former career professionals, the ones who aren't invited to the Trump speech that you so well describe, you know, got. Have to, have to feel a big sort of gulf between them. Is that, is that fair? Is that part of your reporting?
- [32:08]
B
You know, there's something going on now that is, you know, obviously beyond the point when Aaron and I put the pen down, where career prosecutors are obviously extremely wary of themselves being fired. You know, just today two AUSAs were put on leave because they wrote the word capital riot in a sentencing memorandum. My colleague Ken Delaney broke that story today. A sentencing memorandum about a person who had been pardoned and was engaged in a new crime writing. The word capital riot is not a reason to be put on leave, but that is this sort of defensive mode that a lot of career people are in. And the other mode that they're in is they're being protected by their own bosses. In the Eastern district of Virginia, for.
- [32:53]
A
Example, where Lindsey Halligan, the sort of middle level supervisors. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
- [32:58]
B
You know, Lindsey Halligan has gone about trying to indict and has successfully indicted former FBI director James Comey. New York Attorney General Letitia James, based on evidence that prosecutors concluded was slim to non existent. And now senior prosecutors and senior supervisors that are just below Halligan are basically trying to shield their people and take one for the team by saying, you know, this case doesn't fly and then they get fired. Yeah.
- [33:30]
A
Wow. Okay. We can only, you know, skim the surface of what's an incredibly comprehensive and chock full book. I just wanted to close with a couple general questions. Your own acknowledgments. Both of you start with. I, as a former DOJ alum, was really moved by, you know, your sort of calling out the people in the department. I just want to read it. The public servants who shared their brush with history over the last 10 years to document the broader story of an institution they loved and watched suffer. This is a part of the story that hardly ever emerges from, in the reporting that we, that we get. I wondered if you just talk a little bit more. I mean, I'm sure there are different measures of fury and paranoia and fear and self interest, but can you, can you flesh out a little the, the, the place of the career professionals, one who were both, you know, booted or put on leave, but also who are still there. Just what's. What, what's the place like? It feels almost like a zombie minefield to me, but we get very little insight into it. Except from you guys.
- [34:47]
C
Well, you know, in the early Pages of the book. You know, when we were starting to write this book, our editor said, you know, it's almost like law and order, right? I mean, it's like the stories of the prosecutors and the stories of the agents. And, you know, I don't think people realized how much this work is a calling, how much, you know, that people take smaller paychecks.
- [35:06]
A
Persecutorial work is.
- [35:07]
C
Yeah, yes, yeah. Work long hours, you know, away from their families. And so, you know, the life that all of these folks, you know, we live in D.C. we see people around us who, you know, disappear from their families for days and weeks at a time working on these very cases. And, you know, to have all of that work have gone down the tubes, especially on January 6th, I think it's been super hard for a lot of them to swallow. You know, what's going on now is just in so many ways worse than people even imagined on the day that Trump was reelected. You know, we happen to be meeting with people and talking to folks at DOJ in those very weeks, and they knew this place was going to get slashed, but nobody realized it was going to be quite this bad. And now there's a sense, there really is a sense that the genie's out of the bottle, that, you know, the place is only as good as the people who work there every day of the week. And I think that's what we're dealing.
- [35:59]
A
With now, which was, I gotta say, very good. I was a contrast to the Trump speech. I was at the last speech, the sort of farewell for the last administration, Garland. And it was all about the importance, the lifeblood of the career professionals who now are tarred as a bunch of deep swamp Trump haters or whatever, man. So much to discuss. I just wanna ask you maybe one final question. So it's outside the purpose of the book, which, as you say, it's very current. It goes through Abrego Garcia, even in April, basically. But have you given some thought to if the Republic survives and we're on the other side, just given the hollowed out quality of the department, what's involved in time, effort, kind of little by little, rebuilding in the sort of restoration, do we ever get back to the department as it was? How herculean is that task and what does it entail?
- [37:08]
B
I'm so glad you asked that question, because it's something Erin and I have wrestled with. Like many of the sources we've spoken to. Do not believe the Department of Justice is going to return to this semblance of itself. For decades. I mean, the reasons are obvious to you, but for your listeners, I mean, one, we've taken out centuries of expertise in counterterrorism, in counterintelligence, in violent crimes. We've just whacked them in diplomacy like the US's representative, the Department of Justice's representative in foreign. Every foreign treaty we've ever had was Bruce Swartz Gone Day 2. So the centuries that are lost are stunning to even the colleagues who looked up to those role models. And then second, there's the issue of what do Democrats do if they become in charge? Aaron and I are not partisans. We're not weighed in to this battle. But if Trump and his Republican Party have decided to essentially sideline and or fire everyone who did their job and it happened to investigate Trump's campaign because there was evidence of a crime, multiple crimes, what's going to happen for Democrats? Are they going to have to take up that kind of Uzi in terms of how to approach doj? Because nobody believes that the way that Merrick Garland ran it is going to work. That is actually quite a sad thing to say to hear career public servants say out loud, including many who really revered him.
- [38:44]
A
I mean, it's sort of devastating on the one hand. On the other, from where we are you part of me thinks we should have such problems because it would at least mean that we've gotten past what I think remains an existential Crisis only in 45 minutes scratched the surface of a incredibly chock full book. Thank you very much. Congratulations on it. Good luck with the book, which I think is certain to be a blockbuster as well as an abiding account for the future. Great to be able to talk with you about it. Aaron and Carol, thank you so much.
- [39:20]
B
Thank you.
- [39:24]
A
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