Deep Sh!t State: Trump’s Retribution Campaign

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Episode: Deep Sh!t State: Trump’s Retribution Campaign
Release Date: August 14, 2025

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Introduction

In the August 14, 2025 episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, host Jon Stewart delves into the controversial topic of the "Deep State" within the United States government. Joined by two distinguished guests—Michael Feinberg, a former FBI agent with 16 years of service, and Devlin Barrett, a seasoned reporter from The New York Times covering the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI—the episode explores the alleged retribution campaign against officials tied to the Trump administration.

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Michael Feinberg's Resignation and Allegations ([01:07] - [05:02])

Jon Stewart opens the discussion by introducing Michael Feinberg, who recently resigned from his position at the FBI. Feinberg explains that his resignation was precipitated by his association with Pete Strzok, an FBI agent known for being on former President Trump's "shit list." At [03:40], Feinberg states:

"I have zero problem whatsoever testifying about anything in my life... But Dan Bongino found out I was friends with Pete Strzok, and my career was essentially over."

Feinberg recounts his commendable career trajectory within the FBI, highlighting his role in a major Chinese counterintelligence case involving Huawei at [05:34]:

"I received the FBI's highest investigative commendation, the Director's Award for a major Chinese counterintelligence case."

Despite his accomplishments, Feinberg was abruptly informed by Dan Bongino, the FBI's Deputy Director, that his promotions were halted and he faced potential demotion due to his personal associations, leading to his decision to resign at [06:36].

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Institutional Impact and the "Deep State" ([06:05] - [10:48])

Devlin Barrett provides critical analysis of Feinberg's situation, questioning the integrity of the DOJ and FBI:

"This flies in the face of civil service laws and how the rules have always worked at the Bureau." ([08:15])

Barrett emphasizes the broader implications of such actions, noting the chilling effect on other agents who might fear retaliation for prosecuting politically sensitive cases. Feinberg adds:

"They are being fired vindictively based on... cases that the present administration thinks they shouldn't have worked on." ([10:42])

This segment underscores concerns about political interference undermining the DOJ and FBI's ability to function impartially.

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Comparing Trump Administrations' Impact ([18:36] - [22:57])

The conversation shifts to contrast the first Trump administration with the present one. Feinberg asserts that while the initial term involved aggressive actions by figures like Jeff Sessions and William Barr, there was still an underlying respect for DOJ norms. In contrast, the current administration, led by Kash Patel, lacks this reverence:

"We have a criminal defense team... these people have no reverence for the norms and traditions of the Robert F. Kennedy building." ([19:55])

Barrett further elaborates, describing the administration's actions as part of a broader "human story" of retribution against perceived enemies:

"It's a very human retribution campaign against all of the people that he's mad at." ([15:22])

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Legal Framework and Supreme Court Decisions ([20:13] - [26:15])

The discussion touches upon recent Supreme Court decisions affecting public corruption prosecutions. Feinberg references the Blagojevich case and the narrowing of the "quid pro quo" standard, arguing that explicit corruption remains prosecutable:

"In most public corruption cases, there's not a lot of gray area. The quid pro quo is pretty explicit." ([45:54])

Barrett adds that recent immunity decisions by the Supreme Court significantly hinder investigations like the Mueller probe:

"The immunity decision basically would make the Mueller investigation never happen now." ([48:42])

This segment highlights the legal challenges facing the DOJ in pursuing corruption cases under the current judicial climate.

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Operation and Functioning of the FBI in Current Climate ([30:13] - [43:46])

Jon Stewart, Feinberg, and Barrett discuss the operational shifts within the FBI, particularly the deployment of agents in roles uncharacteristic of their training, such as street patrols in Washington, D.C. Feinberg expresses concern over the lack of formal guidelines:

"We were just sort of told, and never in writing, that the Attorney General has authorized you to do this." ([38:49])

Barrett warns of the long-term damage to the FBI's functionality and public trust:

"Pushing out all those people... there is a great scraping that has happened within these institutions of institutional clout and knowledge and experience." ([80:11])

Feinberg underscores the detrimental impact of prioritizing political loyalty over professional competence:

"The integrity of the organization is totally destroyed if your number one priority is ideological rigor or political loyalty." ([43:40])

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The "Deep State" Concept and Its Reality ([52:19] - [66:36])

The guests critically examine the notion of the "Deep State," suggesting it is a self-created narrative by officials like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino aiming to consolidate power by eliminating dissent within the DOJ and FBI. Stewart asserts:

"The deep state never existed... what Patel and Bongino are doing are actually creating it." ([58:15])

Feinberg discusses how conspiracy theories, such as the role of Ray Epps in January 6th, have been weaponized to delegitimize legitimate investigations:

"The deep state is a problem... When we get in there, we're going to expose the deep state... and then they get in there and bupkis." ([58:15])

Barrett emphasizes the human behavior aspect, noting that even with extensive documentation, certain segments of the population remain skeptical:

"January 6th was the most videotaped, most recorded crime... but there are still many who believe it was some sort of con." ([63:15])

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Future of DOJ and FBI Institutions ([71:09] - [85:59])

The conversation turns toward the long-term implications for the DOJ and FBI. Feinberg raises concerns about the erosion of institutional knowledge and the challenges of maintaining a competent workforce under politically driven leadership:

"If the first order of hiring is purely that you are ideologically in line... how do they fill out an organization of competent people?" ([42:43])

Stewart reflects on historical lessons, expressing pessimism about the current administration's ability to restore institutional integrity:

"If we started fixing things today... it would take a minimum of a decade." ([82:35])

Barrett adds that power is increasingly centralized within the executive branch, undermining checks and balances:

"Power is bleeding away from Congress and bleeding away from the courts, and it's pooling into the executive." ([69:56])

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Conclusion and Future Steps ([89:03] - [93:19])

As the episode nears its end, Feinberg and Barrett discuss their future endeavors post-resignation. Feinberg mentions his involvement with organizations like Justice Connection and starting a fellowship with Lawfare to advocate for national security and rule of law. Stewart concludes on a somber note, expressing deep concern for the country's trajectory:

"I'm in near despair about the future of our country... half the nation isn't going to want to have that reconciliation because they see nothing wrong with what's happening." ([85:59])

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Notable Quotes

• Michael Feinberg ([05:34]):
  "I received the FBI's highest investigative commendation, the Director's Award for a major Chinese counterintelligence case."

• Devlin Barrett ([08:15]):
  "This flies in the face of civil service laws and how the rules have always worked at the Bureau."

• Jon Stewart ([58:15]):
  "The deep state never existed... what Patel and Bongino are doing are actually creating it."

• Devlin Barrett ([63:15]):
  "January 6th was the most videotaped, most recorded crime... but there are still many who believe it was some sort of con."

• Jon Stewart ([85:59]):
  "I'm in near despair about the future of our country... half the nation isn't going to want to have that reconciliation because they see nothing wrong with what's happening."

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Final Thoughts

This episode provides a critical examination of the current state of the DOJ and FBI under the Trump administration, highlighting concerns about political interference, the erosion of institutional integrity, and the perpetuation of conspiracy theories undermining public trust. Through insightful dialogue, Stewart, Feinberg, and Barrett shed light on the challenges facing American law enforcement and the broader implications for democracy.

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Note: Portions of the transcript containing advertisements and non-content sections have been omitted to focus solely on the substantive discussions.

Transcript

[Jon Stewart]

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[Michael Feinberg]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. We are coming to you. Oh, on a beautiful August mugginess day. The humidity is 180%. It is Wednesday, August 13th. I. What are we doing this? It's the middle of August. You don't want to hear me. You want to be sitting somewhere with your feet in the water, sipping yourself a nice. What do they call it there? Aperol spritz? Or perhaps maybe knowing our audience a little better, little maestro, a little meister brow and a bong hit. Whatever it is that you want to do to get yourselves through these, these, these August dog days of summer. We are going to be talking about for our final episode of the summer, a little thing called the Deep State. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the deep state. It's the part of this state that's very. It's. Boy, it's embedded in there. You can't, you can't get it. There's a splinter in the heart of the body politic that is corrupting all of it. And we've got two guests who are going to be discussing the deep state in the Department of Justice and the FBI, one of whom actually has worked at the FBI for 16 years and was just let go because he was friends with someone that the Trump administration doesn't like. And the other is a reporter on the Department of Justice on the deep state. And so we're going to dig into it all today in the. It's. It's the deep state. Deep in the heart of August, deep in the heart of summer. Let's get right to it. Going to get to our guest. We've got Michael Fibri, who I assume we. We would say a former FBI agent. We've got Devlin Barrett, who is a New York Times reporter on FBI, Department of Justice, all. All these types of. Of issues. I want to thank you guys both for joining us here. Devlin is, Is, uh, for those of you who are watching this on. On YouTube, in a secure location, uh, I don't know where, in the bowels of, uh, the Department of Justice, uh, Michael Feinberg. I. I'm going to start with you, Michael.

[Jon Stewart]

Okay.

[Michael Feinberg]

Since. Since you are in many ways at the top of the news, you just resigned. How long ago? Two weeks ago.

[Jon Stewart]

No, it was. It. I sent the letter of resignation on June 1, I believe.

[Michael Feinberg]

June 1.

[Jon Stewart]

It was either May 31 or June 1, whichever was Sunday of that weekend.

[Michael Feinberg]

So you've. You've. You resigned from the FBI rather than. And I'll let you tell the story, rather than have to testify about, under oath, about your relationship with a friend of yours who used to work at the FBI?

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. So it's a. It's a little bit more complicated than that. I hope so. I have. Yeah, I have. I have zero problem whatsoever testifying about anything in my life, whether it's social relationships, personal life, professional work, whatever. I've nothing to hide or be ashamed of. But Dan Bongino, the current individual occupying the office of the FBI's deputy director, found out somehow, I'm still not exactly quite sure of the mechanics, that I was friends with Pete Strzok.

[Michael Feinberg]

Pete Strock is a former FBI agent who is famously on Trump's shit list.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Michael Feinberg]

Along with his, I guess, former girlfriend of his, Lisa Page. Is that correct?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes. And, you know, somehow Dan Bongino discovered this, and it was made very clear to me through a series of phone calls with my special Agent in charge, who was in direct communication with Bongino, that my career was essentially over. I was in for a number of promotions to the Senior Executive Service.

[Michael Feinberg]

How long had you been with the FBI, Michael, if you don't mind me, 16 years. So you'd been there 16 years, and in those 16 years, I'm assuming you had a lot of commendations. You had. You had worked your way up through the process there.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, I was what we refer to as a senior leader. I was the number two in charge of one of our field offices. I received the FBI's highest investigative commendation, the Director's Award for a major Chinese counterintelligence case.

[Michael Feinberg]

Now, this was with Huawei. Is that the case?

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. So I was sort of the overall architect of that investigation. And I've received a number of commendations from the Director of National Intelligence and other FBI awards. My career was going very well and I was sort of on a glide path to a senior executive position. And when Dan Bongino discovered that I was friends with Pete, I was told those, those promotions are never going to happen.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right?

[Jon Stewart]

That I should prepare to actually be demoted, which usually means a relocation. And my wife was in her seventh month of a high risk pregnancy. And also that I was going to the very least be polygraphed about the nature of my relationship with Pete. And given all that, and given what was going on in my personal life, as heartbreaking as it was, to quote the Stones, I decided to walk before they made me run.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Resigned.

[Michael Feinberg]

How many FBI agents do you think quote the Stones on their way out the door?

[Jon Stewart]

Probably not that many. Crossfire Hurricane. You know, the investigation which sort of started this all does come from a jumping Jack Flashline.

[Michael Feinberg]

It all goes back to the Stones. Devlin Barrett, I'm going to ask you to. To jump in here. So Michael is basically relaying a story of an exemplary FBI agent, one who has been commended at the highest levels of service. He is on his path, on a track, moving up. This is the kind of institutional knowledge and skill that any organization would need to function at the highest level. Who has been suddenly demoted based on, and I hate to throw this back, but some sort of middle school, you're friends with a kid that we don't like. So now we're going to remove you from law enforcement. Devlin, how insane, not to prajoritize the question, how insane is this?

[Devlin Barrett]

This is a problem that exists now that has not existed in the FBI in the entire post Watergate era. Like what you're seeing. Mike's case is an important example, but there are lots of other important example where senior or low level FBI agents get letters saying, under the President's constitutional authority, you're out.

[Michael Feinberg]

These letters are from Cash Patel, who is the head of the FBI, or Dan Bongino, who is the deputy. Because in Michael's case it was Dan Bongino and the other. Are these usually from Cash Patel?

[Devlin Barrett]

I've seen both versions. I've seen some from Cash and I've seen some from Bongino. These fly in the face of civil service laws. These fly in the face of how the rules have always worked at the Bureau.

[Michael Feinberg]

It is. It is so cute. It is so cute. To me that you would. You would say, hey, this is. This is civil service.

[Devlin Barrett]

Right. But here's why it matters. Right?

[Michael Feinberg]

Like, yeah, yeah.

[Devlin Barrett]

All due respect to Mike, like, it's not really about Mike's career. It's about all the other agents at the bureau who see what happens to Mike and are and now have to worry. Wait, if I catch a case that, like, pisses somebody at headquarters off, am I, like, I'm not just in trouble. I'm done. And to be clear, like, Mike didn't catch such a case. Mike just knows a guy socially that they don't like. That's a different issue. But the lesson that keeps these firings. I often have this discussion with people who are like, look, so they're firing federal workers. There's a lot of people in this country who would say, good, fire more federal workers. We don't care. But here's the thing about firing federal workers. Whatever you think the size of the federal government should be, whatever you think the size of the FBI should be, it's important for these institutions to have some walls around them so they can do their jobs and do difficult things. Well, difficult things like investigate corruption. Difficult things like investigate spies. And if what you're doing in these firings is you are sending a message to the workforce, not Mike. The people who are still there.

[Michael Feinberg]

Sure.

[Devlin Barrett]

That if you cross the people who are running the show, if you cross them, you will. Your career is dead.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, I think it's also a question of, you know, look, any organization has. When a new administration comes in, there's going to be a different set of metrics that are going to go for promotions or for demotions. There's going to be a different culture that's been instituted. I think the question here is that these people aren't being fired for incompetence. They're not being fired for bloat. Let's say it's, you know, organizational bloat. They are being fired vindictively based on. No. Through no fault of their own. That they worked on cases that the present administration thinks they shouldn't have worked on. Would that be correct?

[Devlin Barrett]

Yeah. I mean, they're firing people for a lot of different reasons, but that is one of the primary reasons they are firing people.

[Michael Feinberg]

Michael, are you still in touch with, you know, when Devlin talks about. This isn't so much about the people who've been fired, although, I think, you know, for the people that are fired, they probably feel that way. But are you in touch with people who say, yeah, this. This changes the way we do our. Or can do our jobs.

[Jon Stewart]

Oh, absolutely. It's been really interesting in a very sorrowful way for me to go through this process because I'm in this odd situation where in the. The week or two after I left, I lost 90% of my close friends. I'm talking about people who are at my wedding. I'll explain. I'll explain. Like people who are at my wedding, people who are at my bachelor party, people with whom I vacation, celebrated the holidays with. They're afraid to be associated with me now. And they've got mortgages, they've got tuition payments, they've got families they need to take care of. They. They can't afford to get fired simply because we're friends. And with the spate of polygraphs and weird social First Amendment association oversight that's going on, they're really afraid to be in touch with me. But at the same time, I'm getting contacted over Signal or LinkedIn.

[Michael Feinberg]

Oh, by. By Pete Hegseth giving you details of no.

[Jon Stewart]

By no by complete strangers from both DOJ and the FBI who are looking to me now for guidance as to how they should handle very anomalous situations with ambiguous authorities in which they're being told to do things they're not entirely.

[Michael Feinberg]

Comfortable with without giving away names or necessarily how that goes. But when you say anomalous situations, can you be more specific on that?

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, I'll just pull one from the news. In the past few days, like, it is not normal for FBI special agents to be doing street patrols in the District of Columbia. It's only happened once in history. That was also during the first Trump administration, during the civil unrest and protests that occurred after the death of George Floyd.

[Devlin Barrett]

The.

[Jon Stewart]

This is not something FBI agents are trained to do. It's not something they have practice with. It's not something they really have a lot of legal authorities or a use of force continuum to which they can look to moderate how they act with the public. It's just not normal in the scope of American history to have them doing this. And a lot of them are really concerned. All right, we get that we're being ordered do this now, but eventually, assuming democracy does not collapse, which I think is an open question, like there's going to be a change of administration or there's going to be a change in congressional minorities majorities and there's going to be oversight hearings or inspector general investigations and what's going to happen to the people who are doing things that are clearly going to be politically disfavored by the next administration.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, that, that gets us into Devlin. That's, you know, look, we've talked a little bit about, you know, a new administration comes in, they fire people that worked on cases that they disfavored. And it puts a chilling effect on there. Are we now, Devlin, entering a cycle, a sort of Maoist cycle of purges and retribution on the change of, of every administration? Or is this so particular to this one administration who's, I mean, let's face facts. The fuel at the, the nuclear core of this administration is vengeance and vindictiveness.

[Devlin Barrett]

Right? This is a lot about retribution and this is a lot about going after the institutions that Trump blames for the case against the cases against him. You know, I think one of the ways to understand what's happening right now is, is this is actually a very human story, which is, I don't know a single person who's ever had their home searched by detectives, agents, whatever. No matter what the evidence showed, I don't know a single person who's gone through that experience and is, does not come out of it deeply, deeply, deeply bitter against the people who did that. And what you're seeing is, I think, a very human retribution campaign against all of the people that he's mad at or even thinks he's mad at.

[Michael Feinberg]

I think that's the nicest way I've ever heard that put in terms of ex excusing. But I would suggest that Trump, his original, before anybody had ever searched his house, was a locker up guy. He gave speeches in 2015 like he wanted to jail political opponents. He wanted to be the strong man he, he always seems to have admired. He used to talk about Victor Orban and Erdogan and Putin. Is this really a question of a guy who's been, you know, emotionally scarred by law enforcement overreach? Because it doesn't feel that way. Hey, everybody. You know, I know most of your probably just fast forward into the pod to get to these ad reads because they are delightful and you love them. And today's episode is brought to you by Ground News. If you didn't fast forward through the podcast to get to the Ground News, then you don't know what you're talking about. Ground News is this website and it's an app and they're on a mission. They're giving readers an easier, more data driven way to read the news. So they, unlike the way that I read in a completely discombobulated fashion, they will organize articles from around the world by story and provide breakdowns a political bias to help you understand what you're reading. And we all know most of the headlines out there designed to provoke what we like to call fear and anger. You got to get the reptile brain engaged. You got to get the clicks, my brothers. Well, rest assured, Ground News is the response to that. Prioritizing media literacy, helping readers sort through the noise, get to the heart of the news. It is a great resource to get clear information and help you form your own, oh, God bless them. Independent opinions. What the. So no more blaming your bad opinions on me or being ill informed. Go to ground news.com stewart subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access Vantage subscription. That brings the price down to about $5 a month. Well worth it. That's ground news.com stewart or scan the QR code on screen.

[Devlin Barrett]

So two things.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah.

[Devlin Barrett]

One, I joke with sources all the time. It is not 2025. It is 2016 Part 9. We are still trapped on the tread on the, you know, hamster wheel of 2016 politics. And I don't know when we're getting off it. So that's one. I take the point. But I will say most of the people I cover and talk to and I'd be very curious what mike's of this. Most of the people I talk to and cover say that this administration is profoundly different in how it approaches and manages the Justice Department than the first Trump administration. That what is going on now is deeply, deeply different and more damaging than what happened in the first one. And that's not to say the first one was all like sunshine and flowers, but this is different. And this is much more alarming to a lot of the career agents and prosecutors who've been through both.

[Michael Feinberg]

Michael, you were there for both of those. What's your thought?

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, so I think the main difference is that during the first Trump administration, you still had institutionalists being appointed to cabinet level positions. Jeff Sessions had been a U.S. attorney, William Barr had been an attorney general beforehand. They were certainly more aggressive on the right wing side of things. And they were larger believers in the unitary executive theory than predecessors. But they still had a respect for the norms largely of the Justice Department. And say what you will about the Federalist Society, when Leonard Leo was picking nominees for positions you knew they'd at least been through, certain schools, held certain jobs gone through, they trod a certain path that made them familiar with the organs of US Government and they had a knowledge of the history of those particular buildings and cabinet departments. Now you've got a criminal defense team yeah. Emil Bovet and Todd Blanche were AUSAs. That's not really a high ranking position, right, DOJ.

[Michael Feinberg]

They were more personal lawyers for. For Donald Trump.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, they were his criminal defense team. I mean, same with. I don't think Pam Bondi ever held a federal government position. These are people who have no reverence for the norms and traditions of the Robert F. Kennedy building. These are people who.

[Michael Feinberg]

Let's talk about that. So let's, let's do a defense of norms and traditions. I will happily do that because in my mind, you know, I hear this a lot about. These guys are violating norms and traditions. That's not by definition a bad thing. And we can talk about the FBI. Look, there is a strong history within the FBI. Obviously, J. Edgar Hoover most famously weaponized it, not necessarily for a particular executive, but for J. Edgar Hoover. So he used it. You know, they just released the, you know, MLK files where it was very clear the FBI attempted to drive madness and suicide based on that. It's not as though even the, the reports about the Russia investigation into Trump or Comey's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails are rife with all kinds of instances of overreach. So the question isn't necessarily that the norms and traditions are so pristine, it's that this is abjectly corrupt and personal. Wouldn't that be the case?

[Jon Stewart]

I would take slight issue, please, with your characterization. I think.

[Michael Feinberg]

No, no, somebody's got to.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, just. I think the narrative you just provided is 100% true, basically, up until 1974, 75 and 76. And then in the aftermath of Watergate, the FBI and the intelligence community is subject to a number of congressional hearings, most famously the Church Committee, but also the pike and Rockefeller commissions. And out of that, you get a new statutory framework and you get a new tradition of independence of the Justice Department from the White House, which I really think does hold for the next roughly 40 or 50 years. But a lot of it's not codified, the notion that presidents don't take a personal role in prosecutorial decisions or sentencing memorandums or things of those nature. It's really held, but it's entirely by a respect for the norms that happened after Watergate and a recognition by largely responsible presidents and officials, regardless of their politics, that Watergate was a bad thing. It's not something we want to repeat. And. And that's just gone. That's just gone.

[Michael Feinberg]

Can I talk about that framework? Yeah, because I want to talk about that framework that, that was established and whether or not it was followed through. And, and go ahead.

[Devlin Barrett]

So here's how I would characterize it and I would actually kind of disagree with both of you a little bit. In a sense, since 2016, there has been this long running political debate about the rule of law, right? We have to uphold the rule of law. We have to protect the rule of law. And I think the mistake that a lot of liberals made in sort of talking about and defending the Justice Department and the FBI, which are not perfect places, they make mistakes, but they are ideals that are, that people try to uphold. And in talking about the rule of law, the argument was always made, the rule of law is above politics. The rule of law protects the political system. And I'll be honest, as someone who has been covering this world for, you know, since the late 90s, I just never have believed that to be true. The political system is above and protects the rule of law. And I think what you are actually seeing and what we've been experiencing through this whole arc, whenever you want to start the clock, is that the rule of law system, these institutions tried to assert dominance over the political system and the political system said, no, we will not allow that. And so what you have now is you have a Congress that is not going to save the FBI. You have a Congress that is not going to save the Justice Department.

[Michael Feinberg]

Go, go back to this, Devin. So you say that the, the justice system tried to assert dominance over the political system. In, in what sense?

[Devlin Barrett]

So look at, I don't, I don't mean they deliberately set out to do that. I, I, what I'm saying is if you look at what Comey did, not to harp on an old thing, but if you look at what Comey did in 2016, Comey had an outsized influence on that election. And I think the sort of behavioral lesson that everyone took from that.

[Michael Feinberg]

Now, to go back, to give context to that, I think what you're referring to is in the, so there's the Hillary Clinton email investigation. There's the thought that Russia has, I mean, this is sort of, if we go back and unravel the whole original sin of this story arc, at least it kind of begins with the meetings at Trump Tower where supposedly Russian influencers agents said, or we have information on Hillary Clinton or we'll get information, or they were asked by the Trump administration to get information. And this has kicked off this cycle, which goes into Trump has a server in the basement where he's connected to banks, which turns out not to be true. The Steele dossier, which turns out to be filled with falsehoods. But ultimately, the real lever moment that you're talking about, Devlin, is a few weeks before the election, Comey says, I'm reopening an investigation right into Hillary Clinton's emails, and her numbers plunge 3 to 4 percentage points immediately.

[Devlin Barrett]

Correct.

[Michael Feinberg]

Would that be accurate?

[Devlin Barrett]

Yes. And I think that essentially opened Pandora's box for everything that has happened since. That's my whole theory of the case.

[Michael Feinberg]

Michael, in terms of being at the FBI in that moment, as Devlin is talking about, how aware is the rank and file about this email investigation, the Russia. What is the conversation around all these issues that's going on in the FBI at 2015, 2016?

[Jon Stewart]

So it's a little difficult for me to generalize because at that time, I came to headquarters as a supervisor in the counterintelligence division in the end of 2015, when a lot of this stuff was going on.

[Michael Feinberg]

Okay.

[Jon Stewart]

And as a result, like the people who were working on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the people who were working on the Russia investigation in its really nascent stages, these were all friends of mine. These are the people I socialized with, the people I carpooled with, the people with whom, you know, I got beers after work or coffee during the workday.

[Michael Feinberg]

Mm. How big is this? I mean, give us a sense of how big this system is.

[Jon Stewart]

It's huge. So, I mean, by virtue of these sort of social connections and the people with whom I worked, I had inklings of what was going on. But despite what the public perception is, it's not like the entire FBI, or even all of headquarters was aware of every step in these cases. They were pretty locked down. Like I said, I had inklings because I knew people, but they weren't giving me details on a day to day basis remotely of anything that was going on. So most of the FBI, certainly everybody in the field offices outside of D.C. and everybody outside of the counterintelligence division at headquarters was not really tracking. We all knew that the Clinton email investigation was occurring because that was a matter of public record. The Russia investigation, people forget, was pretty locked down until after the election, or at least until after the intel community assessment about Russian interference came out. These investigations are what we would call restricted, which means I can't even go into FBI systems and look things up if I'm not a member of the case team. They did a really good job of locking down the details of the Clinton email investigation because everybody knew it was going on because the Justice Department had announced. So it was a public referral that originally led to the opening the Russia investigation. We knew there was something going on because there were these previously unused rooms that now had people going in and out of them, and people, people were pulled from their original assignments to go sit other places. So we knew there was something in the air, but we had no idea what it was. The fact that there was an investigation into members of the Trump campaign and potential connectivity to the Russian intelligence services was not something the general workforce knew at all.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, so Devlin, you know, what are the rules in place? So this is all taking place that certain members of the FBI are off on the Hillary Clinton investigation, Certain members of the FBI are simultaneously investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. You just said you don't really buy the idea that politics and law enforcement are these two separate entities, but that law enforcement kind of inserted itself into this political scene and this is the blowback from that. Is that what's happening in that moment?

[Devlin Barrett]

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the public sort of election turmoil, let's say, that the FBI created or participated in, in 2016, was really about Clinton email. Right. Because most of the details, most of our understanding of the Russia investigation prior to the election wasn't known to the public at that time. We could see little bits and pieces. But, you know, I think in some ways the public was even more in the dark than Mike was in terms of, like, what this Russia investigation was about until well after the election. And I think, like I said, no institution is perfect. There were significant errors of judgment made in, I would say, both the Russia investigation and the Clinton email investigation, and they are both sort of cautionary tales in why it is very dangerous to pick up a radioactive, highly political, presidential campaign related investigation and expect to come out of that unscathed. I think the FBI leadership in that moment misjudged how much credibility it had with the American people and misused its position at a key moment, particularly on the announcement of the Clinton email case. But at the end of the day, you need a good, well functioning FBI. At the end of the day, you need a good, well functioning Justice Department. And I think what you're seeing now as we come to, like, more and more iterations of, of this political fight around doj, you're seeing a less and less functional version of those institutions. And the joke I always have made is like, look, I cover federal law enforcement. If I'm on the front page of the paper on any particular day, that's just a regular day. If what I cover is on the front page of the paper, Maybe two different stories or maybe three different stories the same day the country's got a problem like there is, that is not a good place for the country to be in. If what I do for a living is that front and center to sort of the public discussion of what's happening in this country. And we've been in that situation now for years.

[Michael Feinberg]

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[Devlin Barrett]

I think it is. And I think that works in two ways. One, that has long been essentially a conservative argument about executive power. Right. There are ways in which what Trump is doing fits into a broader argument that conservatives have made in this country for years. But there are some parts of this that are unique to Trump's desire for total control and Trump's desire for revenge and retribution. And, you know, I was saying, when the D.C. takeover of the, when the federal takeover of the D.C. police force happened, you know, one of the things I said to a colleague is like, look, many days he tries to be the mayor of the United States. He is a incorrigible micromanager in that sense. And I think there are ways in which these institutions were not designed for that. These institutions don't work well in that environment. I think the FBI is certainly one of them. You've got, just to Mike's point about, you know, agents being out on the street, you know, lost in all this, is like, agents don't carry Tasers. Like, forget the training for a second. If an agent encounters a problem on the street. One, most of those agents have never, never done, you know, street law enforcement. And they have one tool at their disposal, and that's a gun. That is not smart. That is, that has risks with it. Now, I think FBI agents are pretty smart. I think FBI agents understand what they don't know and are careful in that way, most of them. But the, the way these institutions are now being used at Trump's direction are not the ways they were designed to be used. And there are risks in that that I don't think are immediately obvious to.

[Michael Feinberg]

The public, is that Michael is, is, is that the, the worry for you with those. Like, for instance, you're a guy who is. You've worked on all these cases and espionage cases with China, you speak Mandarin. And by the way, let's be clear with the audience. Michael is not a dyed in the wool, bleeding heart liberal that's been removed for his things. You, you were a member of the Federalist Society at Northwestern. Consider yourself a conservative, a constitutional conservative, which is, I think, at this point, a relatively unique creature. But is that your concern, that he's basically using really specialized tools as hammers?

[Jon Stewart]

I have a lot of concerns. That is certainly one of them. Devlin is very correct. The FBI. I mentioned this earlier, but I realize I should probably explain what I mean by it. Because a lot of people in the audience have never worked in law enforcement. If you are a patrol officer for a state or local police department, you have what's called the use of force continuum. If the person you're talking to punches you, you can maybe use a chemical agent. If they continue to fight you, you could escalate to a baton or a taser. Those may not be the exact examples, but it's like there are steps.

[Michael Feinberg]

You can change rules of engagement.

[Jon Stewart]

Exactly. The FBI, because traditionally we're only dealing with our subjects when we're doing an arrest or a court ordered search or an interview. We don't have that. We have a set of rules for what to do if our life is threatened. Okay, but like, we don't carry tasers. It's pretty rare to carry a baton or a chemical agent. You have a Glock. And if there is an imminent threat to your life or a civilian's life, you're authorized to use it. But we're not trained for dealing with protests in the street or crowds of people getting unruly.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, even in chain of command, Michael, I'm just curious. You know, just now we're just talking, you know, logistically. So let's say 500 FBI agents are deployed onto the streets of Washington, D.C. in support of maybe National Guard, which has also been deployed, or maybe Metropolitan police, which are, I think, normally deployed. What is the chain of command? Who would your. Is your, I guess, authority still Cash Patel?

[Jon Stewart]

So it's weird. And when we very suddenly were ordered into the streets in 2020, that was a question a lot of us were asking, what is our statutory authority for doing this? What are the legal violations we're investigating? We were just sort of told, and never in writing, that the Attorney General of the United States has authorized you to do this. And we were deeply uncomfortable with that. And the only thing that really kept us within the boundaries of what's acceptable in American civic culture is, frankly, the good judgment of the squad supervisors. And I'm not just saying that to puff myself up, because I was one at the time. But you had squads of agents led by a supervisor walking the streets in D.C. and those supervisors were making judgment calls in every tricky situation about how to handle it. And in general, I think they acquitted themselves very well. Well, but that even. That's not enough for this administration, because there was one group of squads that got surrounded by protesters who were yelling and shouting at them, and they decided to take a knee to deescalate the situation.

[Michael Feinberg]

Sure.

[Jon Stewart]

Now we can debate about whether that was the right course of action. There is certainly a wide variety of opinion within the FBI itself. But all of those agents, as of a few weeks ago, when I left the FBI, they were being punished for something that occurred five years ago. So every agent who took.

[Michael Feinberg]

Wait, they were being punished for every.

[Jon Stewart]

Every agent who took a knee in 2020, in 2025, was removed from their position of leadership.

[Michael Feinberg]

Whoa. So wait, what are the. So right now within the FBI, if you're an FBI agent.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

Up until now, what are the offenses that you could have committed that would get you removed? So it's being friends with an agent who worked on or is an enemy, supposedly of the president. Is it anybody who worked on these Russia investigations?

[Jon Stewart]

It's simpler than that. It's simpler than that. What is really happening is they are trying to turn over as many leaders and line personnel as humanly possible so they can replace them with people who are inculcated in their own values. Most of the special agents.

[Michael Feinberg]

Ideologues. Ideologues on the line.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. Every special agent in charge who's been removed or told they're going to be transferred if they don't retire or what have you. The overwhelming majority of these people just had the misfortune to be appointed by Chris Wray during the Biden years. There's no real allegation of impropriety.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, that's what I was going to say.

[Jon Stewart]

They're just cleaning the decks.

[Michael Feinberg]

There may be plenty of people who agree wholeheartedly with Donald Trump who were working on the Russia investigation because that was their job, not because they were ideologically opposed to him.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, we don't. We never got to pick the investigations on which we worked like we were assigned them.

[Michael Feinberg]

So what is that, Michael? Let me ask you, what does that do to the nation's law enforcement institutional knowledge and readiness. If the first order of hiring is purely that you are ideologically in line, that you pledge your fealty to Donald Trump, how do you. Can they fill out an organization of competent people who also do that?

[Jon Stewart]

No. The integrity of the organization is totally destroyed if your number one priority is ideological rigor or political loyalty. By definition, there are going to be certain cases you choose to pursue, in certain cases you choose not to pursue. I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen the gutting of the DOJ and FBI's Public Corruption Program.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

Both domestically and internationally under the Foreign Corrupt Practices act since this administration came.

[Michael Feinberg]

Talk about specifically what. When you talk about the gutting of. Of corruption agencies, because that's something. Look, the Supreme Court has issued decisions that it's almost impossible to get, I would think, corruption convictions anymore, because there has to be explicit quid pro quo. And in terms of executive privilege, there is almost total immunity. So even forget about what they're doing with the ideological function within the FBI. What about just the legal framework around getting corruption cases going?

[Jon Stewart]

So the only area in which the Supreme Court has really spoken extensively about this the past few years is with respect to executive power under Article 2 to the President. It's important to note that the overwhelming majority of public corruption prosecutions have nothing to do with the White House or the executive branch.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, let's go. Do you remember the Governor of Virginia, McDonald? I don't know if you. You worked on. On that case at all, but do you remember that corruption case in Virginia?

[Jon Stewart]

I do. Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

So he was convicted of, you know, getting a gold watch and all these other things for favors. There was a Supreme Court case that basically said, well, we don't find, I guess, explicit quid pro quo, so that's fine. Doesn't that change the bar of corruption for what FBI agents would investigate?

[Jon Stewart]

It doesn't. It doesn't. You know, in most public corruption cases, there's not a lot of gray area. The quid pro quo is pretty explicit. There was a decision involving, I think it was Rob Blagojevich, that there used to be something called the honest services statute, and that basically said it was a real malleable law, which basically said, if you're depriving the people of honest services, you can go to jail for public corruption. And this is sort of famously when Rod Blagojevich attempted to auction off, essentially.

[Michael Feinberg]

Barack Obama's right, a Senate seat. Yeah.

[Jon Stewart]

That ruling had a lot of effect on how easy public corruption prosecutions were, simply because that was an easy law to leverage, precisely because it was so vague. And there's a very colorable argument that it was too vague and the court was right to narrow it down a little bit.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

I generally think we want our laws to have as much specificity as possible, because I don't want. As an FBI agent, I'm not an elected official. There is no real democratic accountability for me with the electorate. So I want very specific laws that take away my discretion just as a member of a functioning democracy. The quid pro quo thing, I would say in the overwhelming majority of public corruption cases, you do have that quid pro quo happening to such a degree that it's not going to be an issue. So I'm, I'm.

[Michael Feinberg]

You don't think this then will have a chilling effect on the ability to bring public corruption. Forget about the politicized nature of it. But even, you know, when the president says we're going to make it legal to bribe foreign governments for, you know.

[Jon Stewart]

That'S a different thing. The quid pro quo decision I'm less concerned about, largely because the quid pro quos are happening explicitly in most cases. And secondly, if you're engaged in public corruption, you're also engaged in a whole host of other legal activity, usually laundering proceeds or committing wire fraud or what have you that you could still be indicted on. There, you know, know there's more than one way to skin a cat.

[Michael Feinberg]

There are ancillary crimes that go along with some sort of. Because you have to hide the profits of corruption.

[Jon Stewart]

Exactly. So, so I'm not super concerned with the quid pro quo decision. I am immensely concerned with the executive immunity decisions, partly because, I mean, it makes it impossible to ever go after a president for pretty much any conduct whatsoever. But I also think it's totally at odds with US History and founding ideals.

[Devlin Barrett]

One DOJ person said to me years ago, trump is going to do a lot of cases that are good for Trump and bad for the country. That's just how this is going to play out. And if you look at the immunity decision, for example, one of the things I think is amazing about the immunity decision that the Supreme Court handed up is that under the terms of that decision, the Mueller investigation would basically never happen now.

[Michael Feinberg]

There'd be no way to have any information.

[Devlin Barrett]

The premise of it wouldn't fly, and the factual gathering of the information would also not fly. And so there's almost no way to sort of imagine a Mueller investigation in this environment. And honestly, I don't think that's an accident. I think that is a significant number of conservatives on the Supreme Court expressing their dismay and distrust of how the DOJ has done this in recent years.

[Michael Feinberg]

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[Jon Stewart]

Look, I am a conservative. I studied constitutional law literally under one of the founders of the Federalist Society, Steve Calabresi. Um, but the unitary executive theory, that's pretty far afield from what any of the founders ever intended the President to be like. The whole point was to place restrictions on the operation of government, not to create an expansive executive power. So this is, in my view, that seems to be.

[Michael Feinberg]

You know, this gets us to maybe the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the MAGA movement, which is it is a movement that absolutely cloaks itself in constitutional rhetoric and almost fetishizes, you know, how many of the guys I got the Constitution here, they wrap their buses in. Yeah, we the people. But it is, if anything, it's better with the. It's. It's anti Federalist, it's more Articles of Confederation. It doesn't appear to be in any way have any fealty to constitutional principles of free speech, you know, checks and balances, any of those things.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. I would humbly suggest if your devotion to the Constitution is largely manifested through we the people tattoo and an affinity for the Gadsden flag, your understanding of Federalist principles is probably not, not as deep as you think it is. I mean, I'm just going to be like you're saying they may not in.

[Michael Feinberg]

Fact be tread on. Is that what I'm hearing?

[Jon Stewart]

As somebody who, like, I really do consider myself a philosophical and constitutional conservative.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

But that requires a lot of thought and a lot of penetrating discussions about what words mean and like, were the founders looking at Locke and Mill or Burke or what have you when they were coming up with these systems? It's not simply saying, I don't like what you're doing, therefore it's unconstitutional. You have to actually engage with these ideas on a regular basis in a way that even makes you question your own beliefs, or the project has no intellectual integrity. And when I was coming of intellectual age in college and law school, the conservative movement, I think, was very into that. Your audience would probably disagree with a lot of the conclusions we came to, but there was an honest rigor of thought that is totally lacking in the MAGA movement.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, because I think what. What they've done is they've sort of ceded any kind of that rigor to the emotional kind of impulse of. Of one individual.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Michael Feinberg]

That they believe stands above kind of all of it. And they've even, I think, infused him with a sort of religious fervor. But, Devlin, you know, you've got these organizations, you know, the. The doj, the FBI. I mean, we're talking about law enforcement. Trump's influence writ large has been enormous. But if he rewrites the purpose and principle of. Of all those organizations, have we lost the one thing that maybe made America exceptional, which is the stability of these institutions? Are we now in a kind of retribution cycle? Because if I'm the Democrats, I'm watching Donald Trump and going, oh, my God, he's just exposed a whole host of levers of power that we never exercised that now we will.

[Devlin Barrett]

I think that's right. And there's. There's a couple ways of thinking about that. One is the Cash Patel selection. As. As the FBI director, I think it's safe to say that whenever a Democrat comes into power, Kash Patel will no longer be the FBI director, and you will have lost one of the sort of, you know, institutional sandbars that protected that institution from political changes. Now, some people will say, certainly some people in the Bureau will say it's a good thing if Democrats replace Kash Patel when that situation comes to pass, but the other way to think about this problem. And again, I am a Justice Department. I do not cover politics. But politics has swamped the Justice Department, clearly. And politics. To me, it seems pretty clear that politics is less and less about what people believe, and it's more and more about who people hate. And so in that model, in that model, places like the Justice Department and places like the FBI, which investigate politicians, are going to be under greater and greater pressure. Pressure. And I think after 9 11, there was a significant debate about should we abolish some part of the FBI and reconstitute it in a different way. I think the FBI, if you destroyed it tomorrow, not saying that's going to happen or should, but if you destroy the FBI tomorrow, it would be rebuilt in some form because the American people still on some basic level believe there should be an entity like the FBI. But at the same time, it has to be a credible, reliable, trustworthy institution for it to do its job well. And that is the part that is really difficult right now for a whole host of reasons. One of the biggest ones being Donald Trump.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right? I mean, I would say. So this gets us back to sort of the characterization of those institutions as the deep state. You know, Trump came in and he basically characterized any of these sort of organizations within the government that may not have expressed loyalty to him as the deep state. So now it's in the minds. Look, there's always been a distrust, I think through civil libertarians or through different political groups of law enforcement of DOJ, of FBI after 9 11, the Patriot act supercharged, certain kind of digital espionage and all kinds of other things that people I think were, were very and rightfully so uncomfortable with how it was going to be exercised. But this concept of deep state is a really powerful, is a really powerful one and can be utilized by anybody who has some concerns about how government is going to use its authority. And Michael, I'll ask you because, look, Cash Patel and Dan Bungino are deep state guys. They're the ones who are like, the deep state is a problem. When we get in there, we're going to expose the deep state. We're going to expose that Ray Eps is a plant and a fed. We're going to expose the Epstein files and then they get in there and bupkis. So what happened there?

[Jon Stewart]

So there's a real irony here in that the deep state never existed. The notion that the FBI as an institution was a hotbed of anti Trump activity in 2015 and 2016 is pretty ludicrous. I don't think it's going to come as a shock to anybody that most FBI agents probably lean for. Right. Despite what people think, we don't really talk about it at work. It is a pretty apolitical place. But most people who choose to go into law enforcement for a career are the sort of people who are rooting for Javert when they read Les Mis Rob. It's a certain mindset. So there never was a deep state. But ironically, what Patel and Bongino are doing in terms of trying to root it out, are actually creating it. They're getting rid of people who really value political independence, institutional integrity, ideological blindness. The only people that are going to be left by the time they're done three and a half years by now are people at the executive levels who are willing to be. Bend their principles for the party in power.

[Michael Feinberg]

How cynical was this, Michael? Like, when, you know. So all the stuff about Ray Epps being a Fed and January 6th being a government op that was, you know, a bunch of feds urging on Antifa to storm the Capitol and get it done, or that the Deep State was protecting the Epstein list because of that. How much did they believe that? How cynical was that? And what is the process? Why is this Epstein thing suddenly now? Oh, yeah, no, I mean, if anything looks like Deep State, it's the President's personal lawyer going to interview Galain Maxwell and then a week later. Right, and then a week later her being transferred to a minimum security prison where sex offenders are. Are not allowed to be transferred to.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, it's. I mean, there's a couple things to unpack there. First of all, in terms of the cynicism, you know, there's probably a lot of people throughout the country who really do believe that January 6th was some sort of inside job. I think it's a ludicrous belief, but I don't doubt that there are massive numbers of people who sincerely hold that belief.

[Michael Feinberg]

But were Patel and Bongino amongst them?

[Jon Stewart]

The notion that anybody, anybody who was involved in the Stop the Steal rally, any of the organizers, they know that's horseshit, right? I mean, are you really telling me that, like, the PhD holders at the Claremont Institute, or various professors across the country, including some at Ivy League universities, or, you know, like, they know they're pedaling bullshit to the masses, right? Like, so there is an immense amount of cynicism at the top levels and a lot of gullible people at the lower levels who are being taken advantage of. And I don't know how a country survives that.

[Michael Feinberg]

Devlin, how does you know when you talk about. How many times have I read Ray Epps? If you look at Ray Epps, the whole thing unravels from January 6, it was all an inside job by the Feds. Or when we get in there, day one, you're going to see all the names on the Epstein client list and you're going to see, well, now we know Trump is on the list or allegedly on the list, and Ghislaine Maxwell, after talking to the president's personal lawyer, is transferred to a minimum security prison. And I'm assuming getting surf and turf like Devlin. Is there a deep state? Was there not a deep state? Was this all cynical bullshit?

[Devlin Barrett]

So there is a lot of cynicism to many of the things you describe, but there are also some human behavior issues that I think are important, like in. In the darker moments at the Justice Department and the FBI. I think I don't really cover law enforcement. I don't really cover crime. I cover human behavior. And so let's take the J6 issue, because I think that's an important example. You know, there is an argument that is made that if you just put enough facts on the table, you will show the reality. And even the people who don't want to believe you will accede to your reality based on the facts you have shown them to that, I would just say simply, January 6th was the most videotaped, most recorded, most well documented crime to ever occur in human history. And there are still a very significant number of people in this country that who believe it was some kind of con. There. There is a smaller group of people who say they believe it was a con, but I am skeptical that they really believe that. And I think we are dealing with a human behavior problem, not a fact problem.

[Michael Feinberg]

And, but what about then, Devlin, if, If. If it's the most videotaped and some people still think it's a con, but the people that thought it was a con viewed Trump's reelection as the moment, sort of like in a cult, when they say, like, the world will end May 17, but they viewed his election as, finally, the con will be exposed. What happens when the con isn't exposed?

[Devlin Barrett]

Well, I think you're seeing this. This plays out multiple ways. One, you're seeing a constant demand from Trump's own supporters for that to happen. You're seeing demands for indictments. You're seeing demands for the classic demand for frog march them out of the building. That exists in the January 6 space, that exists certainly in the Epstein space. And one of the things that happens, I think, with this war on the deep state, this professed declared war on the deep state, is one of the features of it as a human behavior function, is you're constantly promising the future retribution. And I think one of the challenges that the Epstein thing in particular shows is that there's a real potential price to be paid for never delivering that, even when you are in charge. There is a challenge to having someone like Kash Patel in Charge of the FBI, which makes arrests. When you don't arrest the people who rooted for Kash Patel, when Kash Patel does not make a lot of those rests, there is a potential political price to pay for that. And I think we are just sort of starting to test the limits of that. And I think it's going to be a very interesting. Like, one of the ways to measure this right, is when the Epstein stuff was in a really bad place, put the administration in a really bad place. A few weeks ago, there was a very quick amping up of the talk about retribution for the Russia investigation.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right. Obama, Clapper, they were all going down.

[Devlin Barrett]

Yes. And you have seen an increase. You know, if you think about levels on a soundboard, you saw them turn down the level, try to turn down the levels on Epstein and try to turn up the levels on the Russia retribution stuff. And I think that is part of a general process, a part of a general behavior of a lot of folks who think this is their season of retribution. But at the end of the day, if you're going to arrest people, if you're going to indict people, I talk to people who are in the crosshairs of that all the time. And one of the things they say and I think, you know, I take them at their word is, look, at the end of the day, I still have some faith in the criminal justice system that in theory, could you investigate me? In theory, could you indict me for something? Sure. But I think no judge and jury would. Would buy that maybe they're wrong. I want to be clear, like, there's a world in which that's not true.

[Michael Feinberg]

Michael, you're there.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

When you're at the FBI and you're seeing online Ray Eps is a fed, and that's why January 6th, what. What is the recourse within the FBI to disprove that? Is there any kind of energy to disprove it? Does everyone just have to hold their powder?

[Jon Stewart]

So this is. This actually raises a larger issue with, with whether the FBI as it's historically been constituted, is able, in our current political moment, in an age of mass media, to maintain the trust of the American people. Traditionally, the FBI, with a few exceptions, Comey's press conference on Clinton being one of them. But even I'll defend even aspects of that. You know, the FBI has spoken through indictments and through criminal complaints. We have not generally. I apologize, I still say we. They have not. They have not generally done pressers. They have not met off the record or one on One very frequently with journalists, they only talk through indictments. So there's never really been been a way for the FBI to push back against the conspiracy theorists or to try and argue its own case outside of the prosecutorial process. And that was particularly true under Director Wray, who was temperamentally loathe to do anything like that. And that's never really been an issue because you've always had adults in the White House. We don't have that now. We have an attorney general, we have a president, we have an FBI director, an FBI deputy director who spent eight years trafficking in conspiracy theories as a way of consolidating their own power. So I don't know how you ameliorate that situation. People have asked me, friends, family, other interviewers, how does the FBI come back from this? And I'm pretty pessimistic about it. If we started fixing things today, six months after this administration came into power, seven, eight months after this administration came into power, I think it would take a minimum of a decade. We are not in for an easy road to rebuild what's being lost this year.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, and now what the courts are doing is they're saying, actually, you know what, take what you want. We're actually done. We're too tired.

[Devlin Barrett]

Part of my point before when we were talking about the rule of law versus the law of politics, is that relationship is actually the opposite of what a lot of people think. And the courts are, especially the Supreme Court. This administration has a lot riding on the Supreme Court conservative majority agreeing with them most of the time. And I think that is something that a lot of the public probably doesn't, hasn't digested or considered very much because.

[Michael Feinberg]

It'S pretty well how the interesting thing is going to be. How is the Supreme Court going to flip over on its back when a Democrat is in office and wants to exercise that same level of executive control? If the unitary executive only works in Republican administrations, that's going to seem like a larger issue than anything else. Right.

[Devlin Barrett]

And, and, and look what is happening in the country, I would say in the government, let's just stick with the government. What is happening in the federal government, long term, big picture is that power is bleeding away from Congress and bleeding away from the courts, and it's pooling into the executive. That has been true for decades. But Trump is essentially an accelerant to that, an aggressive, power grabby kind of accelerant to that. And that's going to keep happening.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, I imagine what, what you're seeing now is, is what you see in, in the countries that are, have a more autocratic bent. And what you see then is the law enforcement arms being used explicitly for vengeance, for consolidation of power and for all those, those different elements. Or, or you see somebody running to say, again, I'll weed out the deep state. And we're just in this bizarro deep state cycle.

[Jon Stewart]

We get in a cycle. Yeah, you know, and I've got a lot, like, I don't have a lot of worries about the FBI workforce. The average agent is somebody whose integrity I trust implicitly. What worries me.

[Michael Feinberg]

But you've said yourself that they're concerned about, you know, they've got families and lives and kids and they may have to go along to get along. And, and so shouldn't you worry about them?

[Jon Stewart]

There's ways to sort of put sand in the gears if you're really uncomfortable doing something. What concerns me more are the people who are now getting promoted to SAC who have been explicitly.

[Michael Feinberg]

What's sac?

[Jon Stewart]

The Special Agent in charge. I'm sorry, the head of a field office. There's 55 of them, three throughout the country. The people who are being made division heads, they're explicitly being told, and I've heard this from some of them, that like, you are not going to criticize the Director, you are not going to criticize the Deputy director, and you are not going to push back against administration priorities. And if you do, you're going to be removed. People who are willing to make that sort of compromise can't stay now.

[Michael Feinberg]

But, but wouldn't you, wouldn't you normally say that in an organization that sounds like, I don't know many organizations that would say your job is to push back against our priorities?

[Jon Stewart]

No, I would argue what I just described is totally antithetical to the FBI. I knew for the better part of two decades. So what would push against, for example, there, there is. I'm not going to get into the specific.

[Michael Feinberg]

You don't mean publicly. You mean internally?

[Jon Stewart]

Internally, yeah. I mean, it was not uncommon under Mueller or Comey or Wray for a special agent in charge or an assistant Director to vociferously push back against them to the point of raising voices, almost yelling about their decisions. There was a give and take. There was an understanding of, like, look, the only way this organization works is, is you hire smart people with a good moral compass and you give them a voice. And at the end of the day, it is a chain of command. So what the Director says is going to go, but if we're going to be effective. You need to have an environment where you allow people to voice their honest opinion and push back. It's the.

[Michael Feinberg]

Generally. Is the pushback, Michael? Is it, is it generally a pushback on norms and morality? Like, what, what would pushback look like? We can't do that because that's interfering in a political process or we're substituting our judgment for the judgment of our leadership. What, what would that pushback look like?

[Jon Stewart]

All of the above. I mean, the FBI was in a really tricky situation with the Clinton email investigations and the Russia investigation, you know, in the sense that, like, there was literally nothing the organization could do that was not in some form or fashion gonna put a thumb, however slight on the scale. That's not intentionally. Just like we were investigating.

[Michael Feinberg]

Would the alternative have been not to investigate them at all or to have them, which you can't.

[Jon Stewart]

Which you can't do either. So, you know, but the reason I bring it up is I can tell you I know for a fact that there was a lot of dissent up until the very last moment in both those investigations about what steps should be taken.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

And I think they, you know, a lot of people have issues with both of those investigations, but trust me when I say they could have been so much worse if people did not have the freedom to honestly voice their opinion about what should be done.

[Michael Feinberg]

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[Devlin Barrett]

So I think a lot of people at the Justice Department this term have been shocked by how much different this Trump term has been than the first Trump term. I think you see that in the way that hundreds of civil rights lawyers left the department earlier this year, just said, this is nothing like what we imagined it would be. I can't stay here and do and use the civil rights laws of America this way. I think there is a desire on the part of many people to dig in and hold on. If you think back, there's this was a big deal at the time, but it's sort of forgotten now because, you know, there's always so much chaos in this space. But if you think back to there was a, there was an email that the head of the New York FBI office sent out early on in the Trump administration that basically talked about, look, we're dealing with problems. We, I understand that. I'm telling you as a former Marine, when things get bad, you dig in and you dig a trench and you keep your head down and do your job. And I think a lot of people at the time covered that email as if it was, you know, this call to arms terms. And I actually read that email completely differently because I thought he was saying something much more sophisticated and thoughtful, which was that dig a trench, like, dig a foxhole, get in it, stay down. And that is how you live to fight another day. Correct. And I think that is the view of a lot of people. Obviously, hundreds of lawyers have left the doj, obviously, people like, like you're getting fired for reasons that don't pass the smell test. But there are still many more people, I can tell you, because I talked to a fair number of them who are like, they will have to give me that letter. They will have to make me go, because I believe, and I don't want.

[Michael Feinberg]

To misrepresent the scale of, of the problem. I, I don't have that much of a sense of how large the DOJ FBI is. I imagine it's massive.

[Devlin Barrett]

So here's the thing.

[Michael Feinberg]

And are we talking about, like, a few people around the margins and there's generally this large ball of knowledge that stays or what? Or does that ball just like it goes to wherever it's forced?

[Devlin Barrett]

There's a couple ways to think about this. For the Justice Department, the most important people, I would argue in the system historically have been the layer of senior career officials. Those are not people that change over during administrations. Those are people who have worked, for example, terrorism cases or supervised.

[Michael Feinberg]

So they have an institutional knowledge of decades, the security of the country.

[Devlin Barrett]

Exactly. And one of the first things the administration did, they pushed out all those people. So they just scraped that layer off. And again, I think sometimes that stuff gets covered as like, you know, oh, what a tragedy for these people. And I, I do not discount in any way the personal strife that has brought to people. But the real issue is that all the careers under them see which way the wind is blowing and see that there is no choice but to do exactly what you are told, exactly the way you were told to do it. And being told to do it by people who have not done this before. There is a great scraping that has happened within these institutions of institutional clout and knowledge and experience. And those have. You know, the thing, the word that gets expressed to me all the time is, look, we can go out and walk a post for 30 days like, we're not. We're not babies. We don't have glass jaws like, fine, whatever, but like, I have guys cracking phones in childploitation case.

[Michael Feinberg]

What. What are we taking our eyes off of?

[Devlin Barrett]

What are we going to miss what you are. Are we going to get caught, Caught out because we're not on the Stick. Of all these very specialized things that we normally would be doing.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right. And you won't know till you know.

[Devlin Barrett]

And you won't know till you know.

[Michael Feinberg]

I think, I think we lost Devlin.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

So, Michael, is it your sense that the DOJ operates or had operated similarly or other. You know, I don't, I, I don't know if you have much contact with CIA or Homeland Security or NSA or any of the other 800 organizations.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

Currently tasked with watching us and arresting us, you know, or the deprioritizing of atf, you know, the, the various things there. Is it your sense that this is a process that's going on throughout all of this infrastructure?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes and no. FBI and DOJ are unique in that they're mandates are incredibly broad. There are very few criminal laws or national security priorities that the FBI and DOJ do not handle. In organization like ice. They're really only doing one thing right.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, now FBI is, is working.

[Jon Stewart]

I know.

[Michael Feinberg]

Is working with ice.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. It's, it's, it's insane. And this is a much longer conversation about why that's a terrible is idea. But like, I think in a functioning democracy, you actually want prosecutorial enforcement powers dispersed. You don't want to centralize that. That's how you get a police state. So it was always a good thing that these agencies were working on separate matters. Now that you're unifying them into these weird Homeland Security task forces where everybody's involved in immigration and violent gangs, the ones being chosen to prosecute, I'm sure, coincidentally all come from South America. Like this is.

[Michael Feinberg]

It just so happens.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. This sort of centralization of law enforcement authority and operations is something that we've seen. I'm not going to violate Godwin's law here.

[Michael Feinberg]

Please don't.

[Jon Stewart]

But like, I'm just.

[Michael Feinberg]

Please don't go there.

[Jon Stewart]

There, There are, there are eras of history where this has happened and countries where this has happened, and they're generally not things we want to emulate.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right. Have you through, you know, and obviously you're a. Not just an agent, but also, it seems, a historian of a lot of this. Have you seen those moments where, where countries move into more authoritative states and these things get, you know, look, we still do at present time have elections. This still can be undone at present time. This will be the last Trump administration, at least constituted by what we presently think of as the laws against running for another term. Is it the kind of thing that a country in your experience can find its way out of?

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, absolutely. I mean, you look at, look, Japan and Germany are vibrant, functioning democracies. South Africa post apartheid had the Chinese even.

[Michael Feinberg]

Both of those countries have made recently. I mean Japan has an ultra right party. That's it does.

[Jon Stewart]

And you have, you have alternative for Deutsche land Germany, but like they don't run the country yet. And there is significant pushback about them. Neither, neither of those parties have the broad based support that the MAGA movement has in the United States.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

But to answer your question, like if and when this ends, like absence, some sort of national reconciliation process where we really do the sort of internal searching about how a lot of this consolidation of power and destruction of norms happened. I don't know how we come back and I know that sounds really negative. It is. I'm in near despair about the future of our country. And what makes me even more worried is half the nation isn't going to want to have that reconciliation because they see nothing wrong with what's happening. So if I knew how to.

[Michael Feinberg]

Not only nothing wrong, but they see it as final.

[Jon Stewart]

Good. Yeah.

[Michael Feinberg]

Finally this is what we're doing.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. I mean like, look, I don't want to take like an overly Calvinist view of humanity or get too hot here.

[Michael Feinberg]

But like it's been done here before, so you might as well.

[Jon Stewart]

I do think human beings just in general, like we don't know as much as we think we do. We're pretty craven, were pretty tribal and like for about 250 years we had a really good system of checks and balances that tamped down on that. It never got rid of it. There are very dark moments obviously in American history.

[Michael Feinberg]

Look, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most progressive amongst us, interned the Japanese. Japanese American somehow got back from that.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes, exactly. But like we needed to have honest conversations afterwards about why that was wrong. And I don't know that a lot of the country is interested in those conversations.

[Michael Feinberg]

Not only that, they're removing those conversations from our historical record.

[Jon Stewart]

I mean Smithsonian is going through an audit. It's.

[Michael Feinberg]

That's right. Yeah, but, but, and also they seem very particular concerned with how the country is presented through its racial history. Segregation and slavery being. Hey, we shouldn't teach that because that's not patriotic or that's not, you know, we are starting to go through different processes not just with law enforcement, but with the historical record of who we even are.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah. And like, look, even the notion that we shouldn't be debating and even now atoning for the sin of slavery, even Thomas Jefferson, who most of the MAGA movement Tends to like you know, famously said, I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just specifically in reference to slavery. You need to have a serious intellectual honesty and an ability to confront uncomfortable truths to really know and in that knowledge, love your country. And that is something that what passes for the conservative movement today is not willing to do.

[Michael Feinberg]

Well, it's, you know, I do wonder if maybe the answer is, you know, look, it is. There is something appealing about the great man theory. There is something appealing about a hero will rise amongst us and, and we always do sort of celebrate that in the United States. You know, Abraham Lincoln, the great man stood up and held the country together through this, the Civil War or. And it does. There's almost a wish fulfillment of well, maybe the bizarro Trump will rise and that will be the person. But there's very little faith that the system will self correct. That's the part that seems highly unlikely.

[Jon Stewart]

Well, our system has a fundamental flaw. And not to keep going back to the founders, but you know, as a good philosophical like bastards.

[Michael Feinberg]

What did they do?

[Jon Stewart]

No, no, I'm about to, to praise them.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, fair enough.

[Jon Stewart]

There was a very clear recognition in all of their writings that the system we set up is only going to work as long as it is populated by men of virtue. And we don't have that now. I mean let's expand it to men and women of virtue obviously. But like the system was premised on a notion that there would be disinterested selfless patriots who placed the well being of their country above themselves, which is what patriotism is supposed to be. We don't have that. We talked earlier in the podcast about the situation the FBI found itself in with both Clinton and Trump investigations and how that caused the FBI to lose trust, to lose the American people's trust. It's deeper than that, I think. I think regardless of your political views, in terms of a lack of self interest and altruism, neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were really exemplars of people who are willing to put aside ambition for the greater good. And we were confronted in that election with two people who thought the rules didn't apply to them. Now, I think in like Clinton maintaining an email server that's beyond the slightly different order is different. Yeah, right.

[Michael Feinberg]

But like it's still getting people to storm the Capitol to prevent.

[Jon Stewart]

Exactly. Or talking to a foreign intelligence service. But like it's still indicative of people who thought in some measure, admittedly very different degrees that the normal rules that govern politics didn't apply to them. And unfortunately, the only organization that was in a position to push back against either of them was the FBI. And I will make a much less lofty quote than I have before. I'm going to quote the tagline for Alien versus Predator. Whoever wins. I thought we were going Burke. No, we could. We could.

[Michael Feinberg]

No, no, we're going Weaver. We're going Weaver.

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, we're good. Not even Weaver. We're going with one. Like the bad knockoff sequels 20 years later, like Alien vs. Predator. Like, whoever wins, we lose. If Clinton won, there was going to be some form of retribution for the email investigation. Trump won. There were forms of retribution for the Russia investigation. Like, there was no way the FBI was going to come out of 2016 and its aftermath intact. The only thing I'm amazed about is that nine years later, it's still happening.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right. And that it's still going well. We so appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I also want to congratulate you. I know that you just had a little baby boy in that. And. And certainly in this time, you. You stepping away for a bit. I should have. What I should have done is forget about the podcast. Just let you nap for an hour, and that way you'd be. You'd be ready to go.

[Jon Stewart]

I'm sure in a couple years that will be an option.

[Michael Feinberg]

Have you thought about your next sort of step? Have you been in touch with some folks that are still allowed to talk to you?

[Jon Stewart]

Yeah, so I'm doing a couple things. Like, I still. This is going to sound very cliche and cheesy. My oath to the Constitution did not come with an expiration date simply because I left government. So I'm working with a number of organizations that are still fighting for national security at the rule of law and the area of the Venn diagram where those two things connect. I'm on the advisory committee for a group called Justice Connection, which provides free legal representation to DOJ and FBI employees who are put in positions because of their political beliefs or asked to do something illegal.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right.

[Jon Stewart]

And I'm going to be starting a fellowship with a website called Lawfare, where I'm going to be writing about the same issues for the general public.

[Michael Feinberg]

Right. Well, we certainly appreciate your service over all these years and definitely find it hard to imagine the injustice of having that all be erased based on, you know, look, it'd be one thing if, you know, they said you're a spy, but, you know, you're friends with a guy we don't like. But we really appreciate you being here. Michael Feinberg, former FBI agent, been there for. For many, many years and let go for the most ridiculous of reasons. And Devlin Barrett, who he had on from the New York Times, who reports on these things, was at the DOJ and had his connection, I'm going to say, mysteriously cut. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to stick with the deep state. Ended up cutting Devlin Barrett's feed, and that's why he was no longer. We hope he's okay. That's what I'm going to say. Michael. Thanks again.

[Jon Stewart]

Thanks for having me.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, bye. Bye. I thought that was excellent, but I have no idea what it's going to sound like, because it was like we did an interview with 2, and Michael was in, like, literally at a bris for his newborn son. And it turns out at the Department of Justice, they have shitty WI fi. Like, there was so much shit going on there, I don't even know. I have never. No idea what that is going to sound like.

[Jon Stewart]

No one's doing it like us.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, this is my Super Bowl, Lauren. This is. I like. And by the way, for the people at home, like, they've got three hours. Like, they've got Nicole, Rob, Lauren, like, they've got three hours to make this thing sound like something coherent. Superstar team. It really is. It. It is a superstar team. I feel so badly for Michael. Like, talk about a, like, warrior philosopher dude. Like, quoting Weber and Burke and on the line and removed. Because he still is friendly with a guy they don't like. I love how he thought he was the first person to wax poetic about.

[Jon Stewart]

John Locke on this podcast. Sir, you have no idea.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, join the club. You do not know what you're dealing with, my friend. But he. He's. He's one of the few guys who had quoted. I guess it was Veber, but then also, where did he pull up? Was it something from Star wars or was that me?

[Jon Stewart]

I don't know.

[Michael Feinberg]

Alien versus Predator, Alien versus Rolling Stones. Alien versus Predator. Like, that is a dude. If he had been in your dorm in college, you'd have just been like, I want us to sit here forever.

[Jon Stewart]

A deep thinker.

[Michael Feinberg]

I don't ever. I don't know what's going to happen when the gummy wears off, but right now, you're my favorite person in the world. All good stuff. Brittany, before we go off for summer, is there anything anybody wants to know before we're. We're gone?

[Devlin Barrett]

There always.

[Michael Feinberg]

There is. All right. What do they got John.

[Jon Stewart]

What lessons should Chuck Schumer learn from Joe Biden's decision making not to step aside earlier.

[Michael Feinberg]

That's exactly right. Schumer has to learn that you got to stay in there no matter what, until one day you look up and the angels are either dragging you towards the light or towards the darkness. And that is the only way that from now on, you can only be removed from the Senate or our government by the great claw arm in the sky that dips. It's what. It's what his nipples are for. It comes down, they grab them both on the nipple and pull him out of the machine.

[Jon Stewart]

And you might not be far off.

[Michael Feinberg]

We're about to get an octagon at the White House.

[Devlin Barrett]

You never know day, man.

[Michael Feinberg]

July 4th. It's not. America can't celebrate it's glorious history without two people beating the out of each other in the Rose Garden. It is going to be Chuck Schumer. I mean, there was recently, I think a senator might have been Dick Durbin, who was like, I've made the decision not to run anymore. Like, 82. And everybody was like, wow, that's incredible. Like a guy stepping away in his mid-80s.

[Jon Stewart]

Amazing.

[Michael Feinberg]

Why leave so early, young man? You know, it's like when you read about, like, an NFL player being like, I've decided to retire at 25. Like, just fucking crazy. What else they got? What else they got?

[Jon Stewart]

Do you watch Fox News? Do you have a favorite show on?

[Michael Feinberg]

Do I watch Fox News? Look at me, look. Is this. Would this happen to some? You think this erosion happens naturally? You think this is just wind, sun, and rain? No, this is the corrosive acid rain that flows from America's newsroom on a daily basis and has. Look, look, look.

[Devlin Barrett]

That's the Jesse Waters glow.

[Michael Feinberg]

I think it's.

[Jon Stewart]

Yes.

[Michael Feinberg]

This is what happens to a human being who is exposed to that level of radiation.

[Jon Stewart]

John's skincare routine is the five.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, you guys gonna have a good rest of the summer? You can enjoy yourselves. What do we got, like, three weeks off? Yeah, we'll be back this second week in September. You guys have crushed it this year. My friends, please, you've earned a wonderful vacation, all of you. I hope you all have a a great time and come back nice and crisp and ready to go. Brittany, how can they keep in touch with us while we're all gone?

[Jon Stewart]

Twitter. We are weekly show pod.

[Devlin Barrett]

Instagram threads.

[Jon Stewart]

Tick Tock, Blue Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast.

[Devlin Barrett]

And you can, like, subscribe and comment.

[Jon Stewart]

On our YouTube channel the weekly show with Jon Stewart.

[Michael Feinberg]

All right, Lead producer Lauren Walker, Producer Brittanyvik video editor and Engineer Rob Atoll, audio Editor and engineer Nicole Boyce Researcher and Associate producer Jillian Spear and our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Guys, fantastic job as always. Have a wonderful summer break and I look forward to seeing everybody in September. Talk to you guys soon. Bye Bye. The Weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bustboy Productions.

[Devlin Barrett]

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[Jon Stewart]

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[Michael Feinberg]

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[Devlin Barrett]

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[Michael Feinberg]

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[Devlin Barrett]

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[Michael Feinberg]

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