Fresh Air - How Donald Trump Changed Federal Law Enforcement

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning 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. Maureen Corrigan reviews Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you read tomorrow that the Justice Department had charged a politician or business executive in your community with fraud after an FBI investigation, how would you regard the news? Would you suspect that the charges were really an inside job, the result of a personal vendetta or a political rivalry, rather than a genuine effort to root out wrongdoing? Our guest today, veteran investigative reporter David Rhoad, argues that in Donald Trump's four years as president and three years out of office,

he successfully used online attacks, conspiracy theories, and threats of violence to discredit, divide, and intimidate FBI and Justice Department officials. His new book reviews years of Trump's interaction with the justice system, from firing his first FBI director, to pardoning allies convicted of crimes, to attacking the investigation of January 6th as a witch hunt. Rode argues that the norms and practices implemented in the Justice Department after the Watergate scandal made law enforcement more vulnerable to Trump's attacks, since career government officials were reluctant to fight back lest they appear to be involved in a political dispute.

David Rode is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize who has worked for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. He was twice kidnapped and held in captivity covering conflict zones, once in Bosnia and once in Afghanistan. He's now the national security editor at NBC News. His new book is Where Tyranny Begins, The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy. David Brode, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. You know, a lot of this book covers events in the Trump years that were intensely reported on, you know, the firing of James Comey, the Mueller probe, the January 6th attack and prosecutions.

Why did you want to go back and revisit these events speaking with people in the Justice Department and the FBI? I was very interested in the career civil servants in the Justice Department and the FBI. These are people who work in the Justice Department and the FBI for decades. They serve Republican presidents and Democratic presidents and get a sense of how they viewed the Trump years and also the Biden years, where there was intense pressure from Democrats for a prosecution of former President Trump. And I was impressed by them. I found a group, generally speaking, that are committed to being fair and being impartial, to administering the law in an equal way, equal justice under law, that all Americans are treated the same in court, whether you're a president or not. And it's sort of,

you know, their story, how the hyper-partisanship of the Trump and Biden years has impacted our most powerful law enforcement agencies. You know, the title of this book, Where Tyranny Begins, is drawn from a quote by the philosopher John Locke in 1699, long before the United States was founded or the Constitution written. You want to share that quote with us and tell us why you began the book with it? Sure. It's very simple. It's where law ends, tyranny begins. And I chose it because it was, you know, as you said, centuries ago. But one place where you see authoritarian governments emerge and democracy come under threat is when a legal system is co-opted by one side or another side in a country. And that's the danger here, I think, is it's both that I think there have been some attempts to

sort of co-opt the DOJ and the FBI for political purposes. But beyond that, there's a widespread belief on both sides of the partisan divide that the other party is co-opting the legal system, co-opting the DOJ and the FBI and using it unfairly against, you know, the president that an American voter might support. You know, you mentioned in the introduction that I have covered two civil wars in the past overseas, and that makes me maybe biased in a way or maybe overly worried, But law is how we sort of resolve our differences, our political differences through laws and elections peacefully. And so having covered civil wars in other countries, you know, I am very worried about the level of rhetoric in this country. I am worried about the suspicions each side has of each other. And to me, it's not a

game because I saw in other societies how, you know, both sides in a civil war think they're the victim and they think their cause is just. And I don't think we're there yet. I don't want to, you know, overstate the situation. But part of my motivation is to sort of look at what actually happened in these institutions in an era when there's just so much charged, so much charged rhetoric and claims from both sides. Now, you begin the book with a meeting, I think it's in the FBI headquarters. This is two years ago, August 2022, between senior officials of the Justice Department and senior officials in the FBI. What were they there to talk about?

They were there to talk about the Mar-a-Lago search. One official who attended it referred to this meeting. It came after weeks of disagreement and sort of paralysis about where the investigation should go. But this official referred to that meeting as a come to Jesus meeting. And it was an effort by Justice Department prosecutors who were eager to search Mar-a-Lago. They were convinced that there were additional classified documents being held there by former President Trump. And they were afraid that a foreign power could somehow, you know, an operative could get in

Mar-a-Lago and get hold of these, you know, top secret documents, endangering sources and American spies and other Americans. And whereas the FBI folks were very hesitant, there was a feeling from the FBI agents that rushing this search played into Trump's narrative of the FBI being this sort of deep state organization that was unfairly persecuting Trump. Right. And we should note that this wasn't like the first time that they had sought documents. I mean, the archives had requested stuff, they were unable to get it. And then Trump's attorneys had finally handed over some stuff and represented that a thorough search had disclosed there was no more than the FBI had gotten information that, in fact, there were more documents that they had been moved, right? They'd

gotten security footage that showed all this. So it seemed that documents were being hidden and that investigators were being lied to. Is that about right? That's how the Justice Department prosecutors saw it. The FBI officials, particularly the head of the Washington field office, Stephen D'Antuono, felt there was a way to keep negotiating with Trump and that there was some way to get to a consensual search. And this was this sort of heated meeting. Every person in the meeting is a male. That's very common for better or worse in the DOJ and the FBI. They're all in suits and ties. And it begins and prosecutors are just saying, you know, as you mentioned, they went down to Mar-a-Lago. Trump's attorney said, here are all the remaining documents. And then they got hold of surveillance video that showed that dozens of boxes had been moved just before the DOJ prosecutors showed up down there. So there were still documents there.

There's been accounts by other journalists about this meeting. But some of the details that I was told surprised me. One was that FBI agents were so suspicious of DOJ prosecutors working the case that they had, I don't know how they got the information, but they looked up the campaign donations of Jay Bratt, one of the main Justice Department prosecutors working the case. And it turned out that he had given donations years ago to various Democratic political campaigns. And that made these FBI agents very suspicious that Jay Brat was maybe pushing too hard for this. Stephen D'Antuano kept thinking, what's the rush here? And D'Antuano wanted to be fair. He said maybe also it was ambition that Jay Brat and these

prosecutors were pushing so hard because this is this incredibly high profile case, the first at that point criminal prosecution of a former president. But it was extraordinary to me that America's hyper-partisanship had penetrated the Justice Department and the FBI to the point where it was infecting this key meeting about when to search Mar-a-Lago and delaying it. Yeah. One of the interesting things here is that you have – it's the FBI agents, in this case, Don Tuano, who was the head of the FBI field office in Washington, right? Usually, the investigators who want to go in there and get the stuff, right? We're going to knock the door down, whatever. I want to get this guy. And he's saying, hold off. And one of the things you report him saying is, if we search his place,

meaning Trump's place, we're walking right into his MO. What did he mean? He meant you're going to fuel every conspiracy theory that's out there about the FBI wanting to get Trump. And when the search actually happened, there was big questions around the country and even inside the FBI about why the search was done. There were conspiracy theories that FBI agents had planted the classified documents. That's not true at all. But D'Antuono was right in terms of just the incredible response. It was unprecedented.

Instead of some members of the Republican Party supporting the you know, the FBI always pursues classified documents. The Justice Department always pursues them. This is like a key thing to them. They had dozens of cases they've handled in recent years, which involve going into houses and searching and securing these documents. So that wasn't unusual. But one other thing that struck me was that among FBI agents, it was seen at this point as a career ender to get a highly politicized case like this. To work on it would ruin your career at the FBI because no matter what you did, you'd be criticized by both parties. If you weren't aggressive enough on Trump, Democrats would attack you. If you were too aggressive or perceived as too aggressive, Republicans would attack you. So, you know, everyone was sort of incredibly frustrated that this was dragging on and on. And even the Justice Department officials didn't relish this case. They all saw it as sort of a political hot potato and a lose-lose for them. You know, one of the norms that the Justice Department is supposed to adhere to, and my personal experience that it seems to me that they do, is that you don't talk about an ongoing investigation. And one of the reasons is that even if you suspect someone of a serious crime

and even if you've impaneled a grand jury and you're getting evidence, you know, they may not have done it. They may never be charged with a crime, and it would not be fair to tarnish their names and reputations by talking about stuff that's ongoing. So in this case, once the search was executed, the Justice Department and the FBI did not disclose it. Trump took care of that for them, right? Yes. Don Tuano was actually relieved initially after the search was completed. There was no incidents. Trump made no public statements. I think the FBI had said left or

were close to leaving. And then there was a blast from Trump about how this was, you know, nothing like this had ever been done to a former president, which was true. And just, you know, an incredibly angry message about, and he also said that the FBI was occupying Mar-a-Lago. They'd actually left at that point. And one of the things that I discovered was that there was a case of – I believe it was the Cincinnati field office was attacked by an armed individual. He tried to get inside of it. The person fled and was killed. That was one incident that occurred after Mar-a-Lago. But there were three more attempts to infiltrate FBI field offices around the country in the days after the Mar-a-Lago search.

And the Bureau kept that secret. They didn't tell the American people that. And that frustrated some FBI officials because there is a correct thing. You do not talk about a court case, a legal case, until someone's been indicted by a grand jury of their peers. It's a – going back to John Locke, it's a – you don't just have a judge indicting people. You don't have district attorneys doing it on. There has to be a jury involved. But there's a frustration that maybe the FBI is too cautious and the Justice Department in terms of not even explaining their actions, which is what happened after Mar-a-Lago. Right. This is a theme that runs through the book. I mean, once the search happens, I mean, the Justice Department's protocol says, we will do our talking in court. When and if there are charges, all of this information will

be detailed. Until then, we're not talking about it, which leaves the field wide open for their critics to say whatever they want, like it was a Gestapo-style raid, right? Exactly. Was it a Gestapo-style raid? No. I mean, there were FBI agents who came in and windbreakers and they did the search and you know, and left. But, you know, again, in terms of the hyper-partisanship of this era, you had President Biden separately investigated by a special counsel, Robert Herr, for his own, you know, mishandling of classified documents. And it was the rhetoric, you know, I think wasn't

as strong, but there was a similar dynamic. You know, when Herr published his report, and he remember he was explaining why he didn't charge Biden for mishandling documents. It was, you know, Herr said that he felt that, you know, President Biden would be seen by a jury as a, you know, well-meaning older man with memory issues. Herr was savaged by the Biden White House and by Democrats for putting that language in there. And he was, Herr was trying to explain why he didn't think he could win a conviction or a trial was merited for Biden. And, you know, I mean, some people can say

it was wrong that President Biden jumped out of the race, but President Biden having memory issues is now a, you know a widely accepted thing. And that was just an example. And I really am trying to be fair in this book. I think it's really important to have journalism that is tough on Republicans and tough on Democrats. But that was Democrats going after a prosecutor who was stating a fact that the country soon learned after the debate between Trump and Biden.

You know, you described this intense debate among FBI agents and Justice Department officials about whether it's the right thing to go in unannounced and execute a search on Trump's compound in Mar-a-Lago. On reflection, was it the right call? That meeting I mentioned goes on and on and just ends in deadlock. The DOJ officials leave and go back to the Justice Department and there's a private meeting among FBI officials. And again, Stephen D'Antuono, the head of the Washington field office, says to his colleagues, I am not carrying out this search, you know, immediately unless I'm ordered to do so by my superiors. And the person who actually does this, there is a consensus at the top of the FBI that this is the deputy FBI director, Paul Abate. He's a career public servant. There's only one political appointee in the entire FBI, and that's the director. That's Chris Wray. But it's Paul Abate who orders the Washington field office to carry out the search, they do carry it out. Most senior FBI officials decided they had to.

They had to hold the former president accountable to be consistent and to uphold the rule of law. You know, Trump and his allies accused the Justice Department and the FBI of engaging in a witch hunt and of politically targeting them, which was offensive to career officials in the department. But you note that the Justice Department and the FBI have not always pursued justice impartially. Their authority hasn't been abused. Do you want to mention a couple of those more notable cases? Yes. And one of the best known cases and the most familiar names is J. Edgar Hoover, who throughout the Cold War, you know, ran, he helped create the FBI and then ran it for decades. And during his tenure as FBI director, he targeted political groups from both the right and the left that he saw as threats to the United

States. He saw Martin Luther King as a communist and tried to smear him and plant evidence of wrongdoing by him that was false. And he also investigated the John Birch Society, a right-leaning group. And one detail about Hoover was that he also provided eight presidents, the eight presidents he served, four Democrats, four Republicans with dirt on their political rivals. And a lot of this came out after Watergate and there were sort of sweeping reforms enacted to prevent FBI directors or attorneys general from using the FBI and DOJ for political gain, whether at the behest of a president or on their own. During the Nixon years, John Mitchell, the Attorney General under Nixon, he investigated anti-Vietnam War left-leaning protesters and black nationalists. And he also investigated people who leaked politically damaging information about President Nixon. So the idea was that these post-Watergate reforms would, you know, let the American people,

that this would be an independent justice department, that it wouldn't act as a political arm of the president and itquarters and the Watergate. So what were the reforms? What were the new rules or practices that were established to try and make the Justice Department and FBI clearly impartial and apolitical? There were two key leaders. William Webster became the director of the FBI, the first one under these reforms. And he told FBI agents that they had to sort of enforce the law in the way the Constitution demands and that they should be defending the Constitution as part of their efforts to enforce the law and that he really did change the culture of the FBI. And then there was an amazing attorney general in the mid-70s named Ed Levy. He was the president of the University of Chicago, and he was appointed by President Ford. And he made a tremendous effort and gave speeches all around the country about why the role of the attorney general is somewhat confusing and contradictory. On one level, the attorney general should carry out the policy priorities of a president. If a president in terms of law enforcement wants to, you know, crack down on

corporate, you know, tax cheating, that's absolutely fine. If the president wants a crack down on violent crime, that's absolutely fine. But the attorney general must be independent when it comes to individual criminal investigations. And so it was vital that the attorney general not act on the behest of the president when they are investigating anyone. They didn't want to get into a situation where, you know, the president is telling an attorney general, go investigate, you know, that CEO because he didn't give me enough campaign donations. And that norm held for 50 years from Gerald Ford through Barack Obama, that there was a political cost that I think no presidents, no Republican, no Democratic president wanted to be seen as meddling or ordering a criminal investigation of a rival or defending an ally because they feared another Watergate. They feared being driven from office. We're speaking with David Rode.

He's a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and currently the national security editor for NBC News. His new book is Where Tyranny Begins, The Justice Department, The FBI, and The War on Democracy. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR. Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music where we discuss Latinx culture, music and heritage with the artists that create it. Listen now to the Alt Latino podcast from NPR. NPR brings you the updates you need on the day's biggest headlines. The Senate narrowly passed the debt ceiling bill that will prevent the country from defaulting on its loans. Stories from across the world. Knowing how to forage and to live with the land is integral to a nice culture. And down your block.

From CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. And you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Jeff Sessions, who was Trump's original attorney general, eventually resigned. Trump was furious at him for letting the Russia investigation get underway. And he was ultimately replaced by Bill Barr. And, you know, as you describe it, Bill Barr's term as attorney general was one in which he really followed Trump's practice of kind of shattering the norms of operation for the department that had been in

place since the Watergate scandal of the 70s. You cite a lot of examples. You want to maybe focus on one or two? Yeah. And Barr, to be fair, he really believed that the Watergate reforms had weakened the presidency too much. He gave a speech when he was attorney general about the United States was this big country. And when it really is in crisis during the Civil War, when there's a national disaster, the only way to hold the country together is to have a strong president. And, you know, this is a widely held belief among many conservatives. And then Barr thought it was also appropriate for an attorney general to sort of be political. He felt that the Trump-Russia investigation was very unfair. So he was very open about saying that this was, you know, he felt it was an outrage that the Trump-Russia investigation was one of the biggest scandals in the history of the Justice Department.

And when – in the summer of 2020 when there's protests after the killing of George Floyd, he's frequently echoing Trump in terms of their Antifa activists who are out there causing this violence. And then in the lead up to the 2020 election, he's criticizing mail-in voting. He's warning that there will be large-scale fraud going on in the vote. That's unprecedented. Attorneys general, again, are not supposed to be overtly political according to the post-Watergate model, but Barr was. Right. And then there were cases of actual prosecutions, for example, when it was time for, if I'm remembering correctly, the sentencing of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally, and he intervened to reduce the recommendation for the jail term that he would get, right? Yes, he did. Barr did that because he felt the sentence was excessive given Stone's age, and he also generally felt the Trump-Russia investigation was just illegitimate. And it was, again, he felt that was the right thing for him to do as the president's appointee. And if, you know, voters disagreed with his decision to reduce the sentence, then the ultimate arbiter should be voters, that it's okay for an attorney general to sort of

be overtly political because they'll be held accountable every four years through the presidential election. But it infuriated many career Justice Department officials. Several resigned when that happened. And it made many liberals see Barr as there was a real danger. People felt that if you basically don't cooperate, Roger Stone did not cooperate with prosecutors. It showed that the president himself or the attorney general would pay you back for remaining silent because before Trump did leave office, he pardoned Roger Stone. I want to talk about Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland was appointed attorney general by Joe Biden after Biden was elected in 2020, very close election. Merrick Garland had almost become appointed to the Supreme Court. That didn't happen. But he had been an appellate judge for many years and he inherited a bunch of really politically sensitive cases, right? I mean they were investigating Rudy Giuliani and the Republican response to the Arizona vote recount and the Hunter Biden investigation. What kind of temperament and approach to handling these matters did Garland bring?

If there was a true believer in the post-Watergate Justice Department, it's Merrick Garland. It's the idea of the attorney general being completely apolitical. He served under Janet Reno who frustrated Bill Clinton many times because she appointed multiple special counsels, independent counsels as well that led to Whitewater and other investigations of Clinton. But Garland's core belief was that by acting in an apolitical manner was the best way to regain the trust of the American public and to counter all the partisan criticism and some of the conspiracy theories about what was happening. And I think, unfortunately, that proved to not be true. Today, different polls show different things, but 75% of voters don't trust the, have very little to no confidence in the Justice Department. So Merrick Garland has spent three years trying to do things by the book and it hasn't had any impact. It seems any significant impact on our deep partisan divide.

So had he not followed the book in a way, I mean should he have publicly responded more often when the department was attacked as being motivated by a witch hunt and political vendettas? It's a catch-22. He did respond publicly after the Mar-a-Lago raid when there was this incident of an armed individual trying to get into the Cincinnati FBI office. And he stood up and said, I ordered this raid. This was a legal raid. A judge signed off on this search warrant. But there was a sense in the FBI, there's one former senior FBI official I talked to who was very frustrated that there wasn't more communication from the department and the Justice Department in those days and in general. Basically, this former FBI official said that in the digital age and in an age of hyper-partisanship, trust me, doesn't cut it.

That you can't sort of say, well, we'll file all this, you know, all these documents and things later that will explain in court why we were searching Mar-a-Lago, you actually – there is a way to get some information out to explain to the public, to be more transparent to the public about how the FBI works, how the DOJ works to counter some of the conspiracy theories. You know, as a reporter, I covered a lot of federal investigations of local politicians accused of corruption. And I mean, try as I might, I could never get, you know, assistant U.S. attorneys, federal prosecutors to tell me anything that was not in the public record. Defense attorneys, they would talk, but not the prosecutors. And I think they were bound by this tradition that is, you know, you do your talking in court. And part of that was that I think they

felt they would jeopardize cases if judges found they were out there providing confidential information. Is that what was going on here? It was. And I want to talk again quickly about Stephen D'Antuano, the head of the Washington field office, who delayed the search of Mar-a-Lago, which in many ways you would think, oh, this guy is like in the tank for Trump or likes Trump. He was actually trying to defend the FBI. He was worried that if they did the search, it would play into all these conspiracy theories about the FBI. Ironically, after the search is carried out, after the deputy head of the FBI orders it to happen, Don Tuono is like the focus of a Fox News monologue by Tucker Carlson. And Tucker Carlson accuses Don Tuono, who he previously

worked for the FBI in Michigan, that Don Tuono was somehow part of a plot of men being accused of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. And he did have a peripheral role in that case. Then Tucker Carlson pointed out that Stephen D'Antuono was the head of the Washington field office on January 6th. And essentially, you know, Carlson accused him, D'Antuono, of being some sort of deep state agent. And D'Antuono told me how he was sort of heartbroken about this. He was a public corruption investigator for over 20 years. He told me, God and country for 27 years, and then you get blasted by Tucker Carlson and called corrupt. And my parents have been forced to see that, and my kids, and that's not right. And Don Tuono

said he felt like his job as an FBI was sort of akin to that of a baseball umpire trying to enforce the rules of a game fairly and prevent chaos. And he told me, all I was trying to do was call a good game. He said, all I was trying to do was to keep both teams from killing each other. We need to take one more break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with David Rode. He is the national security editor for NBC News. His new book is Where Tyranny Begins, The Justice Department, the FBI and the War on Democracy. We'll be back after this short break. This is Fresh Air. Hey, it's Aisha Roscoe from NPR's Up First podcast. I'm one of thousands of NPR Network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country. We bring all Americans closer together through free and independent journalism, music, politics, culture, and so much more.

The NPR Network, what you hear changes everything. Learn more at npr.org slash network. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. You know, a central theme of the book is that the norms and practices of the Justice Department intended to keep it fair and impartial. Things like you don't talk about ongoing investigations so you don't, you know, taint the reputations of people who may never be charged. That those norms are simply no match for a president who would attack law enforcement publicly with great abandon, often with disinformation, messages reinforced by an aggressive conservative media and members of his political party.

I mean it's a persuasive case that those things do kind of handcuff – well, I don't want to say handcuff but it does make the department vulnerable. And I'm wondering what should be done about it. Should the Justice Department's rules be changed? I think it's more important than ever that the Justice Department be independent. There are some very basic reforms. There were some proposals in Congress to limit the powers of the presidency. A lot of them came from Jack Goldsmith. He worked in the George Bush administration, George W. Bush, you know, basic things. Right now, the president has the power to invoke emergency powers under the Constitution with no limit. And they can do that unilaterally.

He called for legislations that would prevent that. There are basic pardon reforms. It would make it a crime to use a pardon in exchange for someone cooperating in an effort to obstruct an investigation, that that would make it a felony to do that. And again, to deter a president from using the pardon power to stop criminal investigations. And even, you know, there's a very basic reform he made, he proposed, Jack Goldsmith, in terms of transparency that would require presidents to make their tax returns public. None of those very basic reforms, you know, were enacted by our very divided, you know, Congress. And so this is, again, what worries me the most is the hyper-partisanship sort of preventing us from enacting the reforms we need

to use the lessons of each presidency, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican who's abusing power to refine our laws. And instead, we just seem to be more and more divided, more and more name calling, more and more conspiracy theories from both sides. And again, I think the answer to stabilizing our democracy is more nonpartisan public service, not less of it. And I guess in a way, it means winning elections, right, for people who believe in those ideals. Congress has to do it. And one of the—it was interesting. One person I spoke with in the course of working on the book and writing different stories was Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, you know, firebrand. And he said that, you know, he was pushing forward with the January 6th committee, but he said it's very important that we win this battle politically. And he was saying, and a lot of Justice Department officials say this, that the legal system actually isn't the best way for us to resolve our political differences. If you look at what

happened to Trump's ratings, his popularity ratings, they soared after he was indicted by Jack Smith. You know, every indictment, every case, instead of discrediting him, they actually increased Republican support for him. And I had senior Justice Department officials say to me that the Justice Department, the court systems, you know, trials aren't the way, you know, they're not equipped to resolve our political differences, that elections are the ways we resolve our political differences every four years and two years. But the problem with this sort of moment is when, you know, honestly, like when former President Trump will not accept the results of the election, then you've got a problem. You don't, that core basic fact, if there's no

agreement on it, that's what, you know, puts us, I think, at great risk. And I just want to say there's many skeptics out there whose question what happened in 2020. Again, great example of nonpartisan public service. There was about 70 federal judges, including the Supreme Court, that considered the different challenges from Trump to the 2020 election results. He lost every time. It is not true that there was massive fraud in 2020. Joe Biden won the election. These were judges, some of them appointed by Trump himself, some appointed by George W. Bush, you know, by George H. W. Bush. And they did the right things. A conservative state Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin talked about the deep threat that

this represented to democracy to uphold a false claim of election fraud, how dangerous that was in the long term to our democracy. And he rejected Trump's claim of voter fraud in 2020. And I've long felt that whatever happens in court cases about the 2020 election, if tens of millions of people believe that you can steal tens of millions of votes without leaving any evidence, we're in big trouble. You know, it's interesting that some Republicans, Steve Bannon among others, have urged MAGA voters to get involved in elections more directly in party committee races and actually run for precinct election boards, volunteer at polling places. And this kind of terrifies a lot of folks who think that they're going to try and steal the election that way. In some ways, I think it actually might be a really good thing because, I mean, having covered a lot of elections, have been to a million polling places, having observed recounts. If you do that, if you see

it up close, you see that, you know, pollings are won in neighborhoods by people who were trying to follow the local election code and get it right. And when there's a dispute, they're handled by civil servants who, they're not going to risk their careers and pensions to like stuff ballots. I mean, this, you know, the election is always a little messy, but it's pretty much on the up and up. And I think if more people got involved and saw it firsthand, I actually think it might shake their belief in the stolen election theory. That's democracy. That's people getting out and running for office.

That's people coming out as volunteers. And there's a long tradition of a Republican observer and a Democratic observer sitting there and watching the votes get counted. And when you, and again, you know, I'm a mainstream journalist, obviously, and I've covered government officials and around the world and here, and I've seen that, you know, there's definitely corruption, there's definitely problems with what happens. But there's a lot of people who are trying to do the right things, whether it's counting votes or carrying out a policy by a democratically elected president. You know, my last book was about, you know, is there a deep state? And I found that the career civil servants are more biased towards their own organization. The FBI agents, I found, you know, were most interested in defending the FBI itself.

DOJ officials or the Department of Agriculture, they would leak information to get a higher budget, you know, from Congress or do something to help their, you know, their friends, you know, their colleagues, their department, their tribe, if you will. There are bad actors. I think, you know, we've got to divide power between three branches of government. You need transparency. As a journalist, I love to see transparency. But, you know, most conspiracy theories on the left and the right that I've looked into haven't proven to be true. Well, David Rhoad, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

Thank you. David Rhoad is a veteran investigative journalist and currently the national security editor for NBC News. His new book is Where Tyranny Begins, The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy. Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Paradise Bronx, the new book about the New York borough, from Ian Frazier. This is Fresh Air. Writer Ian Frazier started walking around the Bronx about 15 years ago. Those walks spurred Frazier's fascination with the Burrow's rough and resilient history, captured in his new book Paradise Bronx. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan

has this review. The Bronx? You gotta be kidding me. That's how I imagine a lot of people might react to the thought of reading a 500 plus page history of the Bronx, the only borough of New York City attached to the mainland of the United States, and therefore the drive-thru borough. The Bronx has been sliced and diced and almost destroyed by interstate highways, expressways, and parkways. But read the opening chapter of Ian Frazier's new book, Paradise Bronx, and I think it's a good bet that like a car stuck on the major Deegan expressway, you'll stay put for hours, except voluntarily. Frazier's signature voice, droll, ruminative, generous, draws readers in. His underlying subject here is even bigger than the Bronx. It's the way the past bleeds through the present. Here's Frazier at the end of that opening chapter

describing the thrill of looking at a white wampum bead that a friend of his unearthed. The truth of a place often is not hidden but can be seen in plain sight. Bulldoze enough dirt, slap down enough paving, and run enough traffic over the past. And you can sometimes eliminate it in one location, only to have it pop to the surface in another. I don't know, Frazier says, why this kind of survival fascinates me. I guess it's connected to the idea of eternity, to the way the world might be in the mind of God or in the non-existent mind of the God who doesn't exist. In Paradise Bronx, Frazier embarks on a roughly chronological ramble through Bronx history and places. He begins with the native peoples whose mounds of left-behind oyster shells

can still be discerned on the shore of the East River and ends with the current revitalization slash gentrification of the Bronx. In between, Fraser vacuum packs over five centuries of facts and stories about the Bronx. He devotes an extended section to the crucial role the Bronx played in the American Revolution and especially revels in the borough's boom era of the early 20th century when immigrants fled the jam-packed Lower East Side to Paradise Bronx. Streets were filled with kids playing stickball, and on every corner stood a candy store spouting forth egg creams. During this time, Leon Trotsky, W.E.B. Du Bois, and eugenicist Madison Grant, whose racist bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race, garnered a fan

letter from Adolf Hitler, were all simultaneous residents of the borough. And Frazier explores how, after World War II, the Bronx would be, as he says, the victim of planned destruction, aided and aggravated by indifference. But let's not skip over hip-hop, born in 1970s Bronx during the very same time when arson fires were raging and the borough was crumbling. Frazier digs deep into hip-hop's origins, as many other historians and critics have done, but it's passages like this one that make Paradise Bronx the vibrant ode to the borough that it is. Here's Frazier describing the moment in 1974 when one of hip-hop's creators, Grandmaster Flash, heard the music of another creator, Cool Herc, for the first time at a party in the Cedar Playground in the Bronx. Every violence that could be visited on a place

short of carpet bombing had been visited on the Bronx. It had been burned and raised and bulldozed and run over by highways and blasted with dynamite. It had been disrespected and unbenignly neglected. Now the Bronx was answering back. Huge machines had assaulted it. Now huge speakers blasted a response. What Herc was playing was not only the loudest music Flash had ever heard, it was the loudest sound he had ever heard. When I stop by Cedar Playground, as I do from time to time, Frazier says, there are never a lot of people there. The traffic on the Major Deegan speeds or crawls. The site of Fort

Number Eight, the Revolutionary War Fort taken over by the British, is on a cliff above. What did the fort's cannon sound like long ago? How did those cannons sound, echoing and re-echoing in this canyon. Only a poet-historian like Frazier could make me resolve to open my window and listen the next time I'm stuck on the deegan. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier. On tomorrow's show, foreign policy analyst Daniel Byman offers insight on two critical conflict zones. He looks at the impact of Ukraine's incursion into Russian territory and whether it can change the dynamics of a long and bloody war. And he'll explore options for the future of Gaza when

the Israeli military operation ends. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thaya Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seward. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davis. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College?

All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.