The headline for this NYT review of David Rhode’s new is puzzling. It says
I thought the story was going to be about DOJ employees being afraid of getting in trouble if they spilled the beans to David Rhode. But it doesn’t really reveal anything like that except a passing reference to the fear for their jobs if Trump wins in November and to say that Merrick Garland wanted to preserve the norms of the Justice Department and that was hard because Trump is such a lying criminal.
Be that as it may, it sounds like an interesting book anyway:
Trump was the first president since Nixon to utterly reject the idea that federal law enforcement should operate independently of the president’s personal desires or prejudices. Rather, he sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. as instruments to help himself and his friends and to punish his enemies.
Although Rohde doesn’t hide his conviction that Trump undermined democracy with his salvos against the Justice Department’s independence, he nonetheless writes in measured, restrained language that should hold up well in the light of history. “Where Tyranny Begins” is a work of reporting and sober analysis, not polemic. While his title might sound shrill, it’s actually an allusion to words from John Locke: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”
Importantly, Rohde understands that there’s tension and ambiguity in the Justice Department’s charge: It’s expected to carry out the president’s policies yet simultaneously to investigate him and his associates neutrally. After Watergate, America enacted reforms to strengthen the latter part of the mission — to preserve the department’s autonomy. Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi issued guidelines for ensuring impartiality should Watergate-style criminality again pervade the White House.
That framework began to change under the first President Bush. In perhaps the greatest abuse of presidential power since Watergate, Bush issued pardons to six former Reagan administration officials indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, including Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, in part so that Weinberger wouldn’t be compelled to give testimony at trial that would implicate Bush himself. The erosion of norms upholding Justice Department autonomy continued under the second President Bush, who in 2006 fired several U.S. attorneys for plainly political reasons — a scandal that led to his attorney general’s resignation.
As in so many realms, Trump outdid his predecessors. This is the heart of Rohde’s multipart story: Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey after learning that the agency was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He browbeat Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the inquiry. He threatened to sack the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller. He had his next attorney general, William Barr, name another special prosecutor to investigate F.B.I. agents involved in the Russia probe. He punished agency officials, like the deputy director Andrew McCabe, who Trump believed conspired against him. He pardoned Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and other cronies. He pressured Barr and other Justice officials to abet his schemes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
There is a bit of a myth that “the guardrails held” and that nobody in the Trump administration actually let him get away with his crazy schemes. To be sure, they sometimes did and we know that it will be worse in a second term because he’s got people around him who have learned the system’s weaknesses and Trump himself is ready to take it to the limit.
But it’s a fact that they succeeded in many norm-busting assaults on the rule of law and just because Bill Barr finally balked at the end, it doesn’t make him a hero. Look at what he actually did do.
Apparently, Rhode got some of the DOJ people to spill how they were pressured into doing Trump and Barr’s will and hating themselves for doing it. And he spends a lot of the book looking at how Garland and his deputies have been trying to resuscitate the Justice Department’s credibility and reputation.
I haven’t read the book and so I can’t say whether ot not that speaks well of the Garland DOJ or not. Rhode writes about “the pernicious consequences of the department’s politicization, as Garland drew fire from the right, for being too partisan, as well as from the left, for not being partisan enough.” I would argue that the left wasn’t ever saying that Garland wasn’t being “partisan enough.” They were arguing that by being so cautious and deliberate he was giving Trump privileges that no other American would receive which is the opposite of the United States’ alleged dedication to equal justice under the law.
Rohde reveals that Garland felt pained that norms of impartiality meant that his department had “a hand tied behind its back, compared to a political actor.” But Rohde adds that for Garland to have discarded these venerable norms just because Trump had done so would have only made things worse. “We would not want to be a political actor,” Garland proclaimed. “That is the end of the rule of law.” As Trump advances toward a possible second presidential term, we would all do well to reread our Locke.
I get that this is a complicated call. And there are political actors who have even more responsibility for what Trump has done (such as Republicans who refused to convict him in his second impeachment trial which would have ended the specific threat of Trump in 2021.) But being a stickler for norms that the other side doesn’t recognize is a recipe for being run over. I understand the need to keep them alive but I’m not sure they couldn’t have survived more aggressive action to hold Trump accountable.