The Daily - Trump 2.0: A Presidency Driven by Revenge

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

In a special series, “The Daily” examines what a second Trump presidency would look like, and how it would challenge democratic norms.This episode focuses on former President Donald J. Trump’s growing plans for revenge, which his allies and supporters often dismiss as mere bluster.Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, found that when Mr. Trump asked for retribution in his first term, he got it, over and over again.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, covering Washington.Background reading: Here are cases of Trump rivals who were subject to investigation.Read excerpts from memos written for Mr. Trump about his powers to prosecute.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is a special episode of The Daily. Earlier this year, we introduced a series focused on what a second Trump presidency would look like and how it would challenge democratic norms. We documented Trump's plans to consolidate power by firing federal workers who would stand in his way, taking control of federal agencies that have long operated independently, and using the powers of a government to seek revenge against his enemies. Today, we look more closely at Trump's growing plans for revenge, which are often dismissed as mere

bluster by his allies and supporters. But new reporting from my colleague Mike Schmidt shows that it's far from bluster. Because as Mike found, when Trump asked for retribution in his first term, he got it. Over and over and over. It's Friday, October 11th. Mike, as you know, we have been working on a series about what a second Trump presidency would look like. working on a series about what a second Trump presidency would look like. And inevitably in thinking about this series, we went to you to ask you for your thoughts as somebody who covered the first Trump term so closely.

And you encouraged us to linger a little bit longer on a question we have started to broach, which is the question of retribution and how central that would be to a second term. Why do you think we need to focus on the idea of retribution? I think this is the most important issue about Trump and what he could do if he returns to the White House. And here's why. issue about Trump and what he could do if he returns to the White House. And here's why. I don't think that the issue has been properly framed in the public's mind.

I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president of the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden. and the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden. When Trump goes out and says he's going to come back and use the sacred powers of the federal government against his enemies. And all others involved with the destruction of our elections, our borders, and our country itself, they're destroying our country. His allies say, eh.

Donald Trump has been the one that's been very clear that his vengeance is going to be by winning and making America great again, not going after his political opponents. He said that this is just bluster. Right. All he's suggesting is that we should investigate credible arguments of wrongdoing. That's all that Donald Trump is saying. That is not a threat to democracy.

That's merely reinforcing our system of law and government And candidly, I think that the news media has treated this as a hypothetical as well The media says if Trump comes back, he says he's going to seek retribution This is a warning about what Trump may do Well, what's insufficient about that? What's insufficient about that is that he already did this. He did this when he was president. And he did it to a degree far greater than even I, someone who's been trying to cover

this since the moment he came into the White House appreciated. Hmm. He was actually much more successful when he was president in weaponizing the government against his enemies. Well, just explain what you mean when you say he's already done this, to a degree that you yourself didn't even appreciate in real time. So I spent the past several months looking back at his presidency, going through my notes, going through documents that I had, looking at court filings, interviewing a range of people. And what I found was that there were nearly a dozen instances in which something that

Trump wanted done with the powers of the government, with the powers of the Justice Department, the FBI, or the IRS, were actually done to his enemies. And here's why I think this is so important. Trump engaged in a range of questionable conduct when he was president. But I think there's something really distinct about this type of behavior. Which is what? If Trump is going to weaponize the government against his enemies, it starts to head the country down the path of authoritarianism.

That's a really big word. So I want you to justify using it. word, so I want you to justify using it. The government is supposed to use its vast powers to prosecute cases based on the facts and the law. But when those powers are used against individuals for reasons not based on the facts and the law, but based on the whims of a politician, the President of the United States, as he is seeking retribution, it's using the government in a way that starts to chill a lot of democratic behavior.

It changes the entire relationship between the government and the people it governs. And how could it not? When retribution is the central tool that a president is using to govern, what will anyone else in the system be willing to do? Right, how far will they be willing to stick out their neck? Correct. So given those obviously very high stakes you just outlined,

I want you to take us inside this reporting you did into what this campaign of retribution by Trump actually looked like in the first term so that we can understand what it's very likely to look like in a second term. There's been some intrigue surrounding the former Secretary of State this weekend. So the story starts on the campaign trail in 2016.

She was questioned by the FBI Saturday about her use of a private email server while she was in the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton was under investigation for her use of a personal email account. We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. But the FBI announces there's just not enough evidence to bring criminal charges. We are going to investigate this phony investigation. And not only was Donald Trump angry that she wasn't prosecuted. She deleted the emails.

She has to go to jail. He was vowing that if he won, that he would lock her up. Lock her up is right. But after Trump won, the first major thing he did was he came to the New York Times for an interview. Right, I was in the room for it. In that interview, Trump seemingly backed away from this idea. No, I want to bring the country together, James. It's very important.

And he's asked what is he going to do about Hillary Clinton. And he signals that he essentially has little interest in trying to prosecute her. I don't want to hurt the Clintons. I really don't. I don't want to hurt the Clintons, he said. For everyone who heard that, the message was, I'm not gonna try and prosecute her. Right.

Bear the hatchet. Enough's enough. And there's sort of a sigh of relief within Trump's inner circle that, okay, when he comes to Washington, he's not going to be concentrated on trying to weaponize the criminal powers of the government against his enemies. But as Trump's administration begins, he finds himself and his campaign under investigation for their ties to Russia. Right. And this casts a massive shadow over his presidency and almost paralyzes him.

And by the beginning of his second year in office, as those investigations into him are accelerating, a light bulb of sorts goes off in his head. And he basically says to his aides, damn it, if I'm being investigated by my own government, why can't I have the government investigate my enemies? He understands what I like to call the specter of criminality and what that has done to him.

And he wants to turn that around and go on the offense. And so what does he do? One of the first people who he starts musing about having investigated is the former FBI director, James Comey. Comey had been the one who held the press conference to announce that the FBI didn't think there was a criminal case to be made against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email account.

After Trump became president, he tried to get Comey to pledge his loyalty to him. And then Comey was leading investigations into ties between the people around Trump and Russia. And Trump had fired him early in his presidency. And in the aftermath of that, Comey had had memos disclosed about his interactions with Trump that helped lead to the appointment of a special counsel. Right. So Trump had a lot of reasons not to like James Comey.

Correct. And Trump starts telling his White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, that he wants to use the IRS and its unique investigative powers to go after Comey, Comey's deputy, and other top FBI officials who were part of the Russia investigation. And I know from my own reporting that to Kelly, a four-star Marine general, this was an awful thing for a president to be considering. Kelly saw it as something right out of an authoritarian's playbook. And so Kelly essentially told Trump, I'm not going along with this.

This is a terrible idea. You can't do this. But Trump refuses to give up. He wanted to find a way to get back at his enemies. And he starts to muse about a different idea. He tells his White House counsel, Don McGahn, that he wants to try and use the Justice Department to go after Comey.

And not just Comey, also his old foe, Hillary Clinton. So he's kind of graduating from just the idea of the IRS going after Comey. Now it's the Justice Department maybe going after Comey and Clinton. Correct. And if the Justice Department won't do that, Trump says, he himself wants to go and prosecute them. What does that even mean? Because the president is not a legal officer in the administration.

The whole problem with this is that it fell into this unique crack that Kelly and McGahn often found themselves in with Trump. When Trump wanted to do something that he didn't have the power to do, Kelly would say, look, you got to go to Congress and get them to pass a law or you can't do it. Trump would usually give up and go away. But just to explain, Trump as president did have some powers to direct the Justice Department. It's part of the executive branch. The president can tell the Justice Department how to execute the laws. Right, plus he appoints the people who lead it.

But there's a long-standing norm that this is something presidents should not do. And that's because of Richard Nixon when Richard Nixon was president he tried to use the powers of the federal government against his enemies and after Nixon resigned Over abuses of his power. There was a norm that took hold Which is what that presidents should have nothing to do with telling the Justice Department or the FBI or the IRS how to use their vast investigative powers. Right, so kind of an unwritten rule.

But Trump didn't care about that. He didn't care about post-Watergate norms and where the line between the Justice Department and the White House begins and ends, he wanted to go after his enemies. And he asked about doing it so often that Kelly and McGahn came up with their own sort of playbook on how to deal with this. And that was to write Trump a memo. So McGahn says to Trump, okay, this is what you want to do. I'm going to write you a memo explaining what you can and cannot do here and what

you should and should not do here. And what McGahn was doing was finding a way to bide some time until Trump would become distracted with something else, but also create a written record about the counsel that was being given to the president. And so McGahn turns around to lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office and asks them to write a memo about what Trump's powers are

to direct the Justice Department and whether that is a good idea or not. A polished version of that memo is given to Trump in late April of 2018. And then something extraordinary happens. Lawyers from the White House counsel's office smuggled drafts of it off the White House complex. So there will be evidence of the counsel that they gave Trump if they ever find themselves in trouble.

Several years ago, when I was reporting for my book, I got a chance to see draft copies of the memo. But under the terms that the person allowed me to see them, I couldn't take them with me and I couldn't take copies. So I sat in a windowless room and read page after page of them into my tape recorder. So I would have the text of them. Can you play some of that audio for us?

Oh, God. Sure. All right. So this is White House Counsel's Office of Pre-Evolutional and Confidantial Deliberative. The drafts of the memo are thousands and thousands of words. Bullet point in the earliest days of the republic dash when both... Parts of it are in bullet points. ...Italics bold, broad authority to investigate and italics bold. Most of it are in bullet points.

But to start, the drafts acknowledge Trump's desires. And what stood out to you in these memos? The memos are a few different things. At a very basic level, they're the education of a president on his powers. Mr. President, as the head of the executive branch, here's what you can do. You yourself cannot become a prosecutor and criminally go after anyone.

And if you don't like what the justice department is doing, you can appoint a new attorney general that Congress confirms to execute the laws as you see fit. But while the memos give a blueprint for how Trump could get the Justice Department to do what he wanted to do, the memos express extreme caution against doing anything in this area. As in going after your enemies. Correct. Because it has a hugely detrimental impact on the public's view of the government.

I have to imagine that this is extremely frustrating to Donald Trump and that he can tell that his staff is slow walking these investigations that he very much wants to begin. Correct. But a month after receiving the polished version of the memo, his hopes and desires for investigations finally start to turn into a reality. We'll be right back. So right before the break, you said that Trump's desire for retribution finally becomes a reality in 2018.

What does that look like? The first real example of Trump having success in terms of weaponizing the government comes against John Kerry Not Clinton not comey correct Kerry who had been Obama's Secretary of State and had negotiated the Iran nuclear deal The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided Transactions the United States has ever entered into. Which Trump hated and was trying to pull out of at the time.

Kerry was publicly criticizing Trump for that. And the simple question is, why on earth would you voluntarily want to throw away an agreement that is working in order to make... And Trump... President Trump is blasting former Secretary of State John Kerry again today. ...takes to Twitter to essentially accuse Kerry of breaking the law. The president blasts former Secretary of State John Kerry for trying to save the Iran agreement. President Trump tweeted, quote, The United States does not need John Kerry's possibly illegal shadow diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran deal. Saying that his continued contacts with Iranian diplomats who he negotiated the

deal with are potentially illegal. So just two days after Trump first raises this publicly, the gears of the Justice Department start to kick in. A top official at the Justice Department in Washington asks the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan to open an investigation into Kerry into the exact law Trump had accused him of breaking. Well, essentially, headquarters of the Justice Department is asking its top branch to investigate the exact matter Trump had publicly raised. And so do we think that this happens because Trump

orders the Justice Department to do it? We don't know that there's a signed order from the President of the United States telling the Justice Department to do this. But we know what the US Attorney in Manhattan thought was going on. Which is what? Well, he actually wrote a book a few years after the incident. And in it, he wrote, How did this investigation get started? Did Trump pass word down through Maine Justice?

In a way, he said, the question answers itself. No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted. You could read his tweets. Anyone wanting to please him at main justice, from the attorney general down through the political appointees in his chain of command, could act on them. This raises an interesting possibility, which is that Trump, having been sent these memos and given this counsel by people around him, that leaning on the Department of Justice might not be a great idea to pursue his enemies, perhaps understood that just communicating what he wanted publicly might filter down to loyalists within the Department of Justice.

And this US attorney in Manhattan is suggesting that's exactly what happened. Correct. of Manhattan suggesting that's exactly what happened. Correct. And there's other evidence that shows a potential connection. Nearly a year after the investigation got started, Trump again went on social media, accusing Kerry of breaking the law. That afternoon, a top Justice Department official

calls the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan again to ask them why they have not taken a particular step in the investigation that would potentially give them access to some of Kerry's electronic communications. So what comes of this federal investigation access to some of Kerry's electronic communications. Hmm. So what comes of this federal investigation into John Kerry that Donald Trump wants and somebody in his Justice Department is all too happy to seek and the US Attorney of Manhattan seems happy enough to open?

Is there any merit to it? Does anything come of it? After a lengthy investigation, the U.S. attorney of Manhattan, Jeffrey Berman's office decides there's not enough there to bring a prosecution. So it all looks like it's been brought to an end. But at this point, Trump has fired his first attorney general and has a new one, Bill Barr, someone who Trump thinks is going to go along

with the things that he wants. Right. And when Barr's office finds out about the fact that there will be no criminal prosecution, one of Barr's aides calls Berman and says, hey, you guys didn't bring this prosecution? We're gonna take this case to a different U.S. attorney's office.

Huh. So basically the Justice Department now under the direction of Bill Barr is shopping this thing around, even though a U.S. attorney has said there's not much merit to it because they know how much their boss wants this investigation into Kerry. They're hoping someone's going to take it up. Correct. So, they take the case to the US attorney in Maryland who looks at the same question and comes to the same conclusion and doesn't bring a prosecution. But here we have very clear evidence of how Donald Trump has effectively weaponized his

Department of Justice against his enemies, because what you're describing is two United States Attorney's offices, their staff, spending more than a year investigating whether or not Trump's enemy, John Kerry, did something illegal. And as best we can tell, that came at the suggestion of Donald Trump himself.

I like to describe it as this unique use Until that came at the suggestion of Donald Trump himself. I like to describe it as this unique use of presidential power, where through public calls and private pressure and fears that Trump will fire his attorney general or lash out, that the Justice Department goes along and does the political errands of the President of the United States. Right. In this case, though, political errands that involve the prosecutorial powers of the Justice Department.

The criminal powers of the government. You said in the end, there are something like a dozen instances where this happens. Help us understand some of the others beyond this one case, John Kerry. John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, wrote a embarrassing book about Trump. The Justice Department went to court to try and stop the publication of the book, to recoup the profits that Bolton made from it, and also opened a criminal investigation into whether he mishandled classified information. All as Trump was demanding that the book not come out.

Well, what about the original targets of all his fury, like Hillary Clinton and James Comey? Well, when it comes to Comey, remember, Trump wanted not only the IRS to investigate him, but also the Justice Department. The thing that Trump wanted Comey investigated for was being a leaker. Well, Comey did come under investigation for leaking classified information. Criminal investigation. Correct.

An investigation that cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and allowed federal investigators to go through some of his communications. Hmm. And then there was what we learned about what the IRS did to Comey. What did the IRS do? The IRS has a special, unique type of audit that is called by accountants an autopsy without the benefit of death. It's incredibly invasive.

It essentially looks at your entire year of finances, everything you spent money on, every charitable donation you made, every exemption you claimed, and sees whether you properly paid your taxes. Sounds extremely unpleasant. It is done to just a few thousand people a year. What I learned was that James Comey and his deputy at the FBI, Andrew McCabe,

who Trump also wanted to go after, were both the subject of this highly unusual and invasive audit. Hmm. That doesn't seem like a coincidence. In fact, based on our number crunchers here, the chances that they would both be chosen are one in 82 million. Hmm, in other words, a more logical explanation

is that President Trump asked for this to happen and it did, or as in the relationship between his tweets and the Department of Justice, that someone figured well Trump wants this, I'll do it for him. Or it just happened. Right. We should point out here that the IRS Inspector General went back and looked at this and has cleared the agency of any wrongdoing. Hmm. What do Comey and his deputy McCabe have to say about all this?

It's very hard for both of them to accept at face value that this is random. And this part of the story has one of the great chef's kisses of all time. What do you mean? After looking at all of James Comey's finances for the year of 2017, they found that he overpaid on his taxes and he received a refund. So in the end, Comey is not charged with a crime. In fact, what he does is the opposite of a crime. He gives the government too much money.

I'm curious, what ends up happening with Hillary Clinton, the person we started this conversation with? At the suggestion of Trump's political appointees at the Justice Department, a prosecutor is appointed who looks at a range of different conspiracy theories about Clinton and her 2016 campaign that investigation becomes so vast that Clinton herself ultimately sits for questioning with prosecutors a

Situation that if she had made a false statement in she could have been charged Right, but she wasn't charged and in fact as can tell, nobody you were talking about here from Hillary Clinton to John Kerry, to James Comey or Andrew McCabe, none of them were ultimately charged in these investigations that Trump wanted into his enemies. So what should we make of that fact? And what does that tell us about at the end of the day, how successful Trump's pursuit of his enemies really was? On one hand, you could say, wow, look, the three branches of government are holding up.

The Justice Department investigated something. They knew if they went to indict someone, they'd have to go to court before a judge, and ultimately never did that because they didn't have enough to get over that line. On the other hand, I'm not sure whether these people being indicted is where we should measure whether this was a success or not for Trump, because these people came under investigation. They knew that they were under investigation. A prosecutor once said to me, you can ruin someone's life by just investigating them.

It's anxiety inducing for the subject of the investigation and for their families. In some cases, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The government can gain access to a wide array of your communications and financial information. It's not nothing. So if your Trump and your original goal was to seek retribution against your enemies, you're saying the fact that there are no charges doesn't mean he failed. The investigations themselves are, in many ways, the revenge and the retribution. Whether or not Trump sees it that way, the reality is, is that for the people that were subjects of these investigations, these were awful experiences that felt to them like retribution.

They felt like the vast powers of the federal government were being used against them punitively. So Mike, now that you've so clearly established how far Trump's desire for retribution went in the first term, the degree to which it wasn't hypothetical bluster, but became punitive, painful reality for the Boltons and the Clintons and the Comeys of the world. How do you think about what form this is going to take in a second Trump term? form this is going to take in a second Trump term. What I have laid out is what happened when you had figures like John Kelly and Don McGahn in the room trying to protect the rule of law.

The people who consider themselves the adults in the room. Trump has made clear that those types of guardrails will be turned into enablers if he returns to the White House. You don't need to have such an imagination to see what those factors taken together will look like if Trump, who's been indicted four times since he left the White House, will do with the criminal powers of the government if he gets back into power. You're raising an interesting possibility here, which is there's not just fewer guard whales and more enablers. There's more vindictiveness, there's more targets of his desire for retribution

because since that first term, there have been more investigations against him or charges against him. This thing that, as you once said in this conversation, the light bulb went off in his head and he understood he could inflict on his enemies. There are more of those enemies now. There are more targets. We know he did inflict on his enemies. There are more of those enemies now. There are more targets. We know he did it in the past. We know he's saying he'll do it if he comes back.

And I think we need to reckon with what the consequences of such a far reaching culture of retribution would mean to the country. If you're a Democrat on Capitol Hill and you think you should conduct an oversight investigation into the president, are you gonna think twice about it? Right, are you gonna get investigated?

If you are a member of Trump's party and you wanna speak out against something that he's doing, are you gonna think twice about it? If you're an activist and you want to have a protest outside the White House, are you going to take that risk? Trump has said he wants to prosecute election workers. Those are everyday people. Right.

Not just senior administration officials, not just Jim Comey. Not everyone is James Comey, who has the money to hire high-end criminal defense lawyers and is a well-established guy who can stand in the face of an investigation. Right. So what is the trickle-down effect to everyone else? When Trump was president, my phone records were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. Really? Was that done because Donald Trump railed on and on about the media being the enemy of the people and saying they should be criminally investigated as part of leak investigations? Or was it done because a prosecutor thought it was the right thing based on the evidence and the law as they tried to get to the bottom of how classified information became public?

When the President of the United States is weighing in against people and saying that they should be investigated, as a citizen, how do you look at it and say, okay, I can trust that that was done based on the law and the evidence? The well becomes poisoned. Correct. And when you start to have those doubts, it begins to unravel the confidence that the public has in its government. Oh, Mike, thank you very much.

We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Hurricane Milton tore across Florida in the early hours of Thursday morning, ripping off the roof of the Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, slamming a crane into a high-rise building in St. Petersburg, and knocking out power to about a third of the state.

What we can say is the storm was significant, but thankfully this was not the worst case scenario. But overall, the storm was less lethal than expected. The storm did weaken before landfall, and the storm surge, as initially reported, has not been as significant overall as what was observed for Hurricane Helene right now. As of Thursday night, at least 12 people were killed by the storm, several from a series of tornadoes that touched down on Florida's east coast. Remember, you can listen to a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. Remember, you can listen to a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Rachel Cuesta with help from Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanthorpe of Wonderly. Special thanks to Michael Shear. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you on Monday.