"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 84

In this episode: Trump Wants a Loyal FBI and Justice Department. Here’s How He Plans to Get It.

January 7, 2025

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 84

Episode 84: Trump Wants a Loyal FBI and Justice Department. Here’s How He Plans to Get It.

In his first term, Donald Trump did more to politicize top US law enforcement institutions than any US president, according to journalist David Rohde. Through interviews with numerous people inside Trump’s term-one FBI and Justice Department, Rohde carefully documented the impact on the FBI and DOJ during Trump round one. Join us for a conversation about what he thinks is coming in round two.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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David Rohde: Lies are working and lies have caused many Americans to not trust the country's two most powerful law enforcement institutions.

David Rohde knows a thing or two about what distrust can do to a society. In the 1990's and early 2000's, he covered countries tearing themselves apart in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. His resume as a foreign correspondent rivals some of the most swashbuckling reporters in the game.

Rohde was detained by armed groups TWICE in his career. First in Bosnia, and then in Afghanistan. The second time, in 2009, he pulled off a daring nighttime escape from the Taliban... by scaling a wall with a rope … and making his way to safety through a really rugged, remote part of northwestern Pakistan.

But if you meet him expecting to see a rope-swinging Indiana Jones type … prepare yourself for the parts of the movie where Indy was a bespectacled university professor.

ARCHIVAL Indiana Jones: Archaeology is the search for fact. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never, ever marks the spot...

Like the classroom Indiana Jones, David Rohde favors buttoned Oxford shirts. He wears a studious pair of rimless glasses. And as a storyteller, he carefully sticks to the facts.

David Rohde: I think many of the people that voted for Trump think they're defending democracy. Many of them think that, you know, the 2020 election was stolen. I think that's false. It was not stolen.

But maybe some carefully found facts would be a good thing these days. In a moment when there's plenty of hyperbole about what might be coming in a second Trump term, David Rohde offers some useful perspective, I think. After his turn as a foreign correspondent, Rohde became a top national security editor at NBC News, and he's recently published a book called Where Tyranny Begins. In the book this former reporter on foreign wars has methodically documented some forces he says threaten the stability of his own country.

David Rohde: The title of the book is based on a John Locke quote, which is “where law ends, tyranny begins.” Law separates us from the jungle, the chaos, the violence. And then when authoritarianism starts, one of the first institutions attacked are law enforcement institutions.

In his first presidential term, Donald Trump publicly attacked and undermined top law enforcement oﬃcials in the US government.

ARCHIVAL News Clip / Donald Trump: When everybody sees what's going on in the Justice Department, I always put justice now with quotes, it's a very, very sad day.

ARCHIVAL News Clip / Donald Trump: the FBI has been in turmoil, you know that, I know that, everybody knows that

ARCHIVAL News Clip / Donald Trump: …was a disaster as Attorney General. Should have never been Attorney General. He's not qualified. He's not mentally qualified to be Attorney General.

David Rohde's new book makes a convincing case that Trump did more to politicize the US Department of Justice than maybe any modern American president. Few journalists understand Trump's relationship with federal criminal justice institutions better than Rohde. And few people are better positioned to talk about what that relationship may look like in a second term.

David Rohde: It's going to be an amazing, bracing, unprecedented four years, I think.

So join me for a conversation with David Rohde ... to hear his take on what's in store for the US Department of Justice and the FBI when Trump returns to the White House. I think you'll find it refreshingly sober ... but also sobering.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

(Theme Music)

Peter Bergen: So I just finished reading the book. Congratulations. It's extremely timely. What does the book portend for the second Trump administration, both at the Department of Justice and at the FBI. Your book, did you know a masterful deep dive into what happened during the first term – so what did that first term potentially mean for the second term?

David Rohde: I think we are about to see an unprecedented level of weaponizing the Justice Department by the Trump administration to intimidate political rivals, discredit claims that Trump himself engaged in criminality, and most of all to hollow out our most powerful law enforcement institutions.

David Rhode’s disquieting prediction is based on the precedents of Trump’s first term, which Rohde meticulously chronicles in his recent book, through numerous interviews with people who served in Trump’s Department of Justice and the FBI. This was the era when Donald Trump fired his FBI director.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: President Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey. It is the latest chapter in what has been …

…and threatened the special prosecutor investigating his campaign's alleged ties to Russia…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster:… threatening to take Robert Mueller's team to court if the special counsel tries to subpoena the president.

...This was the era when Trump pardoned his associates who'd been convicted of federal crimes…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Many of the pardons issued this week have gone to friends and political supporters…

…And the era when Trump pushed other Justice Department oﬃcials to help him stay in oﬃce after losing the 2020 election.

ARCHIVAL Bennie Thompson: It was a brazen attempt to use the Justice Department to advance the President's personal political agenda.

Trump’s attempts to politicize the Justice Department pushed out talented nonpartisan public servants. One example can be found in the story of a long-serving federal lawyer named Jody Hunt.

David Rohde: He's a career civil servant in the Justice Department fairly conservative, but worked for Republican and Democratic presidents.

When Trump came into office in 2017, Hunt was one of the directors of the DOJ’s Federal Programs Branch, which defends the federal government in civil suits. In the early weeks of Trump’ s first term, Hunt was tapped to serve as chief of staff to Trump’s newly appointed attorney general.

Hunt had some early misgivings about Trump’s policies … like Trump’s first executive order banning entry to the United States for travelers from several Muslim-majority countries.

Hunt also bristled at Trump’s treatment of Hunt’s boss — the chief law enforcement oﬃcer of the federal government, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. When the Justice Department started looking into alleged connections between Russia and Trump’s political campaign, Sessions recused himself from this investigation. That’s when Trump turned on him.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself and it's a disgrace.

This was an early indication that Trump would be at odds with the institutionalists who’d upheld certain presidential norms for decades — with rare exceptions like President Richard NIxon who’d ordered the firing of a special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

David Rohde: He was very upset about how Trump treated Sessions. But basically, Hunt told himself that the presidency would change Trump and instead, Trump changed the presidency.

Peter Bergen: I underlined that in the book cause I thought it was a very shrewd observation.

David Rohde: And it's true. There's a sort of failure of imagination, ‘it won't happen here,’ and a belief that all these norms, these post Watergate norms will cause presidents to not pressure attorneys general to carry out criminal investigations against their rivals. And that was true for 50 years, Republicans and Democrats didn't want to be like Nixon, but, Trump has attacked the Justice Department, attacked special counsels. And he hasn't paid a political price. I think all previous presidents since Nixon thought they didn't dare do such things because they would pay a political price. But Trump has somehow escaped that.

David Rohde: Hunt believes it's his job as a civil servant to continue to carry out the policies of Trump, because he's a democratically elected president, and that's what a federal civil servant should do.

For as long as he could, Hunt kept his head down and did his job. But then Trump

crossed a line that he just couldn’t abide.

David Rohde: He's been working in the Civil Division. And John Bolton, the former national security advisor, has come out with a book and there's an effort by the White House to have the Civil Division block the publication of the book.

Insider memoirs often anger presidential administrations, but they rarely if ever sue to block publication. Especially if the book’s been reviewed by the National Security Council for potential classified information and the author has already made changes at the council’s request – which Bolton had. The lawsuit was widely viewed as a nakedly political move by Trump and a breach of Bolton’s right to free speech.

David Rohde: It's a completely baseless lawsuit and move that's just meant to sort of please the president. It was the clearest example of the president not carrying out a policy that voters have voted for, but just acting in a purely, personal way for personal gain. Finally Hunt’s just had enough. and he finally does resign. He is also heartbroken by how the public sees the Justice Department. They're not perfect. They all have private political views, but they do try to put them aside, and serve the public and serve the elected president, no matter the party. So it's a heartbreaking situation for Jody Hunt.

Hunt is the kind of career civil servant – one of the many thousands working all over the federal government – that make up the federal bureaucracy. Critics see them as a nefarious Deep State that operates independently, regardless of the desires of the president, and is therefore undemocratic.

But plenty of smart political thinkers see a class of permanent civil servants as one of the things that sets modern states apart from states run by kings or strongmen. A while back I interviewed a Constitutional scholar named Aziz Huq at the University of Chicago about this idea and he said something that struck me.

Aziz Huq (from In the Room Episode #32): There's a German political thinker, came to America, came to the University of Chicago, called Hannah Arendt. And Arendt has a famous metaphor for democratic politics. She says, 'Look, democratic politics is, like, all of us coming into a room and sitting down at a table where there's a bunch of chairs, and talking through our problems. And we need to do that again and again and again,‘ cause we need to live together.

And Arendt points out, well look, if every time we had to sit down, we had to recreate the table from scratch, we had to build the chairs, assemble the chairs, put them into the right order. If we had to do that every time, we would never get anything done. We could not have a collective life unless we had the table and the chairs in the room that allow us to sit down and talk things through. Those table and chairs, which are necessary for democratic political life, are the boring bureaucratic institutions that run elections, that run the criminal justice system.

So, where some people see a deep state, others see the furniture that makes the house of democracy work. And this civil servant class actually grew out of a strange episode of political violence in American history, in which President James Garfield was fatally shot by a supporter who was angry at being passed over for a patronage job.

The assassination drew attention to the problems of political cronyism and sparked the passage of a law that changed the spoils system of incoming presidents filling federal jobs with supporters from their own party.

The new law — the Pendleton Act of 1883 — created a system of hiring on merit. It banned the firing or demotion of civil servants for political reasons. And these rules now cover most federal employees.

David Rohde: It ended, you know, terrible patronage. Decades of corruption where, hangers on and others would get jobs in Washington: the assassination was enough to end that. And so it was the beginning of a professionalized civil service where people were hired after they took civil service exams.

They were hired for specific skills they had as maybe civil engineers, as diplomats, you know, speaking foreign languages. It would be a permanent workforce, meaning they would work for Republican and Democratic presidents.

And this is fair, and it's very important to carry out the broad policies of a democratically elected president. Presidents have a mandate from the people, you know, their orders should be carried out as long as they're not illegal or unethical.

Fast forward to today, this professional civil service is now the deep state. Something that's vilified. It's always been sort of criticized by some as bureaucratic and slow moving, but now it's a deep state that plots to thwart the will of democratic presidents. And, this is the second book where I've looked at this topic and I just have found no evidence of that happening on a wide scale.

However you see them — deep state saboteurs or keepers of our democratic institutions — career civil servants in organizations like the DOJ and FBI may be getting fired by the next Trump administration before they even have a chance to quit like Jody Hunt did.

Advisors and supporters of Trump have been assembling detailed plans for how to revamp the US Justice Department for quite a while now … some of these plans call for purging as many as 50,000 federal employees across the US government, in a bid to replace career civil servants with political appointees.

Trump could just fire a few top people at DOJ and leave it at that, or he could go a lot further.

David Rohde: Initially, it will only be top sort of senior oﬃcials that there's several dozen political appointees in the Justice Department and they'll be replaced. And then I think there will be a separate effort to change the entire nature of the federal workforce. If President Trump achieves it, it would shift from the president, appointing roughly 4,000 political appointees across the federal government to appointing tens of thousands of federal employees as political appointees, i.e. people that are hired and fired by the president. A massive, Tammany Hall system of the President hires you, the President fires you, so you better, prosecute the cases the President wants and it's, it's an extraordinary, reversal of the professional civil service we've had for decades.

Peter Bergen: Here we are today, You're going to turn these people who have long careers in various different agencies into basically at-will employees, which means you can fire them, or more or less, without any effort. So you mentioned there were dozens of political appointments at DOJ, the Department of Justice. What about the FBI?

David Rohde: One.

Peter Bergen: One.

David Rohde: The FBI director.

Peter Bergen: (laughs) Ok.

David Rohde: No one else. The entire FBI has one political appointee.

Peter Bergen: And, of course, that person usually serves a 10 year term to insulate him or her even further from political influence.

David Rohde: Yes, and that was to get away from the J. Edgar Hoover model. And the big desire was to not have FBI directors chosen by presidents. So, yes, a 10 year term so that the cycle would be different from the FBI than for the administrations of presidents.

Trump has broken another norm by saying he wants to replace the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, before his 10-year term is up. Wray in December beat Trump to the punch, announcing he’d step down at the end of 2024.

Trump plans to replace Wray with someone with considerably less experience, but unswerving personal fealty to Trump. The newly-nominated FBI director is a former federal prosecutor and a right wing firebrand named Kash Patel.

Patel has called for the firing of top FBI oﬃcials and he’s also called for the prosecution of journalists critical of Trump. In an interview in September, Patel also floated an interesting plan for the FBI's Washington headquarters:

ARCHIVAL Kash Patel: I’d shut down the F .B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops.

David Rohde: Kash Patel is actually a former legal aid lawyer who went through a big change in his politics and has become an incredibly, vocal proponent of claims of a deep state, of claims that all criminal investigations of Donald Trump are completely unjustified and part of plots. He's repeatedly assailed the FBI in particular, talking about how dangerous it is.

To me, it’s a middle finger to the Justice Department. But I do think it's an information war. It's to change the public's perceptions that to just bring in people that say it's not that Donald Trump committed crimes, it's that these FBI agents did.

And to just dominate, the public perception of who is the criminal, and investigate the investigators and declare the investigators the criminal. It's worked in many ways. Not every American believes it, but tens of millions, I think do.

Trump’s nominee for US Attorney General also seems to pass the loyalty litmus test: Pamela Bondi is Florida’ s former attorney general and a longtime Trump ally who defended him during his first impeachment trial. That was the one where Trump was acquitted on charges that he offered military assistance to Ukraine on the condition that Ukrainian oﬃcials investigate Hunter Biden’ s business dealings in Ukraine.

So let’s say Bondi becomes Attorney General — head of the Justice Department — and Patel becomes director of the FBI. What might that mean for the political opponents that Trump has already said he’d like to go after?

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: …corrupt influence peddlers like the Biden crime family…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: That crazy, horrible human being, Nancy Pelosi, who cheats like hell…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We're going to prosecute people that cheat on this election.

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

For argument’s sake, let’s take the case of Jack Smith. Jack Smith is the career Department of Justice prosecutor and special counsel who brought charges against Trump for election interference and mishandling of classified documents.

David Rohde: The specific charge that conservatives have brought up possibly against Jack Smith is Denial of Rights is the short title of it. And it's a provision of federal law that makes it a crime for anyone acting under color of law to deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution.

Rohde points out an irony here — that this is one of the very same charges Smith brought against Trump.

David Rohde: Jack Smith argued that Trump tried to do this by trying to reverse the results of the 2020 election, denying the rights of the voters from those states where the electors — he's trying to get the electors thrown out. I don't know what the exact criminal charge would be against Jack Smith, but I guess it would be denying certain rights to Donald Trump.

What plausibly could happen to Smith? Could Patel unleash an FBI investigation?

David Rohde: So I think Kash Patel would have a very diﬃcult time getting FBI agents to carry out these investigations.

And Rohde also says an FBI director or a president can’t just snap their fingers and order a probe.

David Rohde: It's illegal for FBI agents to carry out criminal investigations without probable cause, evidence of a crime.

But there are other options for a president and an administration hell-bent on using the justice system to go after their perceived enemies. Trump has threatened to do so.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: If I happen to be president, and I see someone who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘go down and indict them,’ they would be out of business.

David Rohde: And what would likely happen, though, is you'll have a special counsel appointed to look at Jack Smith to look at Biden family corruption. And I think you could find enough agents who are suspicious of the Biden administration that they would participate in that kind of investigation. It could drag on for years, some sort of special counsel investigating Jack Smith for somehow committing a crime during his investigation of Donald Trump.

Rohde has interviewed people, though, who are skeptical about how much of this could really stick.

David Rohde: I've talked to several people and I can't name them, who are current or former oﬃcials of the DOJ and FBI who could be targeted for these kinds of prosecutions. They say there's just no case here, that it's not even close. They, they just, these were proper prosecutions. It is illegal for an FBI agent or a federal prosecutor to bring a charge to prosecute someone unless there is probable cause of a crime. It is illegal. So they followed all these procedures.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t fear among career oﬃcials in the justice system.

David Rohde: So some people are resigning, who worked on the Trump investigations. I was actually in the Justice Department yesterday. Some are staying, and think they will be fine. And all of them are lawyering up. They could face a criminal prosecution. It's very unlikely they would be convicted by a jury, but it could be a very long process, a very drawn out process of them being criminally investigated for long periods.

But making legal moves that hold up in court isn’t always the point. Rohde says that Trump’s first term showed us this.

David Rohde: One of the chapters of the book, there's an interview with a career DOJ oﬃcial who is really puzzled by the initial legal tactics of the Trump administration, such as the Muslim ban, which is the first version is not put together very well, and it's thrown out quickly by the courts, and a nickname that she and other critics came up with was they called Trump's approach to the legal system and the law, “LOL ” - like, laugh out loud - “nothing-matters-lawyering.” And it's a view of – and this is Trump himself – it's a view of the legal system. You make a motion or you file a lawsuit to A) dominate the news cycle, B) own the libs, C) you're kind of making these crazy legal claims because it gets Trump's attention. So it's not about actually winning in the courts for a legal reason or based on the facts or the legal theory.

David Rohde: It's using the legal system as a way to win the messaging war.

Fear, intimidation, hounding by the partisan media, long, drawn-out expensive lawsuits… These are easier to execute on than activating the federal justice system. And those tactics just may be enough to erode public trust in a way that makes it harder for federal law enforcement to do its job.

David Rohde: As this battle goes on, it will be intense. There will be legal battles. Some in these, in the DOJ and FBI, will resist. Paralysis, I fear, will spread across the FBI and the DOJ.

And if paralysis and fear take hold inside the Department of Justice and FBI, Rohde says it’ll become more and more likely that career civil servants like Jody Hunt will head for the exits.

David Rohde: One of the quotes he told me was “the institutions of government have been undermined in recent years by all the exaggerated attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. This distrust in government is not grounded in reality. It's really a consequence of the rhetoric from politicians who, for their own political purposes, fuel the distrust in government.”

Peter Bergen: So, basically their whole view of the world seems predicated that there is a deep state and the deep state is largely liberal. And in fact, your previous book was called The Deep State, as I recall, and really investigated the question, and it seems that your conclusion was, the people who work at particular agencies, their loyalty is just to defend the agency they work at. So if they work at the FBI, they're trying to defend the FBI, they're not engaged in some real political effort.

But you know, you walk into the Department of Justice, this is like the most buttoned down…there's scenes in your book where people are debating whether you can, are you allowed to wear a blue shirt under your suit. These tend to be just as a general proposition, very buttoned down people who were not paid very much money, relatively speaking, they could be making a lot more money in the private sector because they believe in public service and yet they've been portrayed as something very different.

David Rohde: And that's the sort of tragedy here. And that's what's so dangerous, I think.

All that said, in December, President Joe Biden did something that was widely condemned as interference in the justice system for personal advantage. He pardoned his son Hunter for large-scale tax evasion and lying about his drug use when he purchased a gun – crimes that could have sent him away to prison for many years. It was a pardon that Biden had repeatedly said he would not grant his son.

As a parent, I get why Biden did this. But as a US citizen, it undercuts the rule of law. And Biden's pardon may well give Trump permission to do some of the things he’s threatened to do, like pardon many of the rioters convicted of assaulting the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Biden's pardon also gives fuel to Trump’ s contention that the system is "rigged, " which gives Trump the political space to appoint ultraloyalists to the Department of Justice and FBI who may try and carry out his other threats, like going after his political enemies.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: In your book you talk to the historian Timothy Naftali who used to run the Nixon Library. And you quote him as saying that the American justice system, “It's honor and shame that's kept our system on the rails.” Your book makes it clear that honor and shame aren't suﬃcient anymore. So, can you talk us through how the system has worked with these norms, at least in the last half century, and what's different now?

David Rohde: Naftali knows Nixon very well, and he said that the key difference between Nixon and Trump was that Richard Nixon had a sense of shame. Richard Nixon had a sense of history. And Richard Nixon therefore, resigned the presidency when it was clear he was going to be impeached. And Tim Naftali argues that there's just never been a person as shameless as Donald Trump who's been elected president of the United States.

Part of it is shame. Part of it is presidents fearing being driven from oﬃce, as Nixon was, if they started politicizing the justice system, if they, you know, attacked independent counsels, if they attacked the FBI. And Trump has done that and just won reelection.

And I think Trump was more successful than people realized, that he did silence people. He did intimidate them. He did co-opt people into repeating these false narratives and punishing his enemies.

An independent justice system is the best way a country has for resolving its conflicts without violence…. And if our system for resolving conflicts loses its independence … Rohde worries that the US could start to resemble the conflict zones where his career began.

David Rohde: After having watched civil war and conspiracy theories cause terrible violence in other countries, I worry that's where we could go eventually in the United States. When authoritarianism starts, one of the first institutions attacked and used for political gains are law enforcement institutions. Prosecuting your rivals, declaring them corrupt and discrediting them is one way past autocrats have consolidated their power.

So we're just in uncharted territory. I think it's going to be hard for Trump to deliver many, many of the promises he made in the 2024 campaign. It won't be simple for him to prosecute his enemies. But it's going to be an amazing, bracing, unprecedented four years, I think.

Peter Bergen: Will you write a book about it?

David Rohde: I have no desire to write another book, but you know how that goes, Peter.

[laughs]

(Theme Music)

If you’re interested in learning more about the issues and stories in this episode, we recommend Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy by David Rohde. It’ s available on Audible.

CREDITS

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