Two-time Pulitzer Prize-recognized investigative reporter David Rohde argues that since 2016, Trump has used conspiracy theories, co-option and threats to bend Justice Department and FBI officials to his will. Rohde's new book is “Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy.”
On August 8, 2022: The FBI executed the search of Donald Trump’s Florida home and country club at Mar-a-Lago in an unprecedented escalation of law enforcement scrutiny of the former president. Trump wasn’t at the estate at the time, which was shuttered for the season. Trump disclosed the search in a fiery public statement on social media. He asserted agents had opened up a safe at his home in what he called an “unannounced raid” that he likened to “prosecutorial misconduct.” He called it a violation of “attorney client privilege.”
The search was the culmination of a months-long probe into how top secret and classified documents ended up in boxes of White House records located at Mar-a-Lago. It occurs amid a separate grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and adds to the potential legal peril for Trump as he was preparing for another run for the White House.
Trump and his allies cast the search as a weaponization of the criminal justice system aimed at keeping him from potentially winning another presidential term.
President Joe Biden’s White House said it had no prior knowledge of the search, and the current FBI director was originally appointed by Trump.
Federal prosecutors, led by special counsel Jack Smith, accused Trump of breaking the law by taking highly sensitive national security documents when he left the White House in January 2021. He stashed those documents haphazardly throughout his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstructed the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve them, prosecutors allege. On at least two occasions, Trump showed classified documents to individuals who were not authorized to view them, prosecutors say. During one of those episodes — which was audio-recorded — Trump allegedly displayed a top-secret military plan of attack while telling visitors, “As president I could have declassified it” but “now I can’t,” adding that the document he was showing them was “still a secret.”
The FBI raid and investigations into Trump have led to many leading Republicans to call for the defunding of the FBI. They are claiming it was weaponized by Democratic President Joe Biden to eliminate a political rival.
Simultaneously, the left has pointed to evidence that Trump broke the law, and these investigations were carried out in compliance of the norms and traditions of the FBI created after the Nixon Watergate Scandal. And they submit that Trump while in office used the power of the presidency to warp the FBI and the Department of Justice for his own political purposes.
In his new book, investigative reporter Rohde shows that over the course of his presidency, Trump intimidated, silenced, and manipulated Justice Department and FBI officials. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
In “Where Tyranny Begins,” Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the country’s two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department non-partisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.
Guest:
David Rohde is the author of several books, including “In Deep: The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Truth about America’s ‘Deep State’ ”; “Beyond War: Reimagining America’s Role and Ambitions in a New Middle East”; “A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping,” co-authored with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill; and “Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II.”
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*This interview will be recorded on Wednesday, August 28, 2024.
